Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (6 page)

"Yes, we will."

His words felt false. If they overshot their home, deep, deep space was a different kind of death than being crushed by the Maw.

"I will try to shadow the shaghāl," Diviya said.

"That will bring it to us faster!"

"Yes," Diviya said. Diviya adjusted his path, spotting the shaghāl's soul, as it shone in faintly blue-shifted hunger, far distant. "It will be ravenous now, and desperate."

Far behind, but still close enough to chill Diviya's marrow, a great radio sail unfurled. Diviya would make a poor shadow. The shaghāl was close and closing, decelerating at a furious rate.

Diviya slipped into the path of the pulsar's beam, cutting a shadow in the center of the shaghāl's sail. The shadow grew as the shaghāl neared. The shaghāl seemed to realize what was happening and angled its sail to escape the shadowing. Diviya followed. The shaghāl jerked its sail the other way. It had no experience in avoiding a shadow. It hurtled closer, unable to do more than edge slowly sideways. The shaghāl tilted its sail wildly, trying to get around Diviya.

Diviya jerked his sail opposite to the shaghāl's tilt. The Hero's Voice veered Diviya aside, but not fast enough. The shaghāl's wing tip struck Diviya. The knock was tremendous, accompanied by a snap.

Diviya spun. Pain. Sharp pain. And fear and screaming. The second soul nearly flew from Diviya's mouth. Diviya righted his sail, catching the Hero's Voice, slowing his spin. Finally, he controlled his spin.

The shaghāl plunged far ahead, toward the asteroid field. It was slowing, but Diviya had robbed it of time. Now it would need every bit of effort to avoid overshooting the asteroid field.

The ragged princess neared. Diviya felt strange. His sail still pulled oddly, producing an ache under him.

"Your soul is glowing through a long crack beneath you," she said. The rhythms of her sparking speech were quick, fearful. He feared, too.

Cracked. He was cracked. Dwani's broken face haunted his thoughts. Dust would get into his carapace and would scour his wiring and joints. Soon, he would only be good for resting on mounds.

"You will survive," she said. "We will survive. You will make a magnificent grand prince."

His soul, and the stolen one, made sounds of relief. The princess had accepted him as her mate. Despite his crimes and the hardships of the migration, the souls sounded guardedly elated. A new hive. His hive. Grand prince. Diviya would be the father of a new generation, one that, due to the separation of time dilation, would never see any skates from another colony. And his colony would have no landlords, no tax collectors, and no beatings.

Furtively, workers came to Diviya in the slums, atop his mound. Most had never been unionists. Diviya recognized his old fear in them. They came to speak to Diviya about the massacre. Few had been there, but they knew the workers who had been killed, and the workers who had been exiled to the work farms. They came as cowards might, shamefully, weighed by the guilt that they were happy not to have been there.

The idea of sacrifice in them was strong, as it was in Diviya. The Hero had built them to sacrifice for each other, for kin. They were pressed of the same clay. The success of a brother worker or a prince felt like a success for all of them. Demanding something for themselves was difficult. The newly ensouled like Diviya had to be taught selfishness, acquisitiveness by the souls. Yet these skates, who had not been brave enough to attend a union rally to help all of them, now slinked to the last committee leader, a skate who shared their guilt. They formed new committees.

"Tell them what to do," his soul said. "You are better than this rabble. Leverage your influence here for patronage. Deliver the malcontents to the hive. Give bribes."

Diviya had bribes. The workers smuggled innumerable tiny nuggets of frozen volatiles to him. This struggle with his soul could not go on.

And then, he saw it again.

In the distance, the brief, hot shine of a soul, looking this way. The sleet of radioactive particles stilled his soul.

Diviya shut his eye, shuttering the emissions of his own soul.

"Open your eye!" his soul said.

"You can guess as well as I what that was," Diviya whispered.

Diviya's soul laughed. "More unionists have been picked up by hive drones," the soul guessed. "The rascals must have spoken of an ensouled committee member dispensing fratricidal treason from a mound in the slums."

"It is rich that you would call me fratricidal, when I have never hurt another skate, while the hive beats, imprisons, and kills my brothers," Diviya said. "Your disloyalty endangers every skate and princess in the hive. Open your eye." Diviya descended the mound with his eye closed. Tejas was with him, as were Barini and Ugra. They did not have souls and were accustomed to Diviya's silences while he communed with his own. With his eye closed, the world was dark, but loud, filled with the Hero's Voice and the scraping vibration of his own movement. But in this way, he was invisible to the other ensouled skate in the slums. "What are you doing, Diviya?" Tejas asked. "An ensouled skate has been moving at the edge of the slums," Diviya said to Tejas.

"I have seen him several times today. He is looking for something." "Or someone," Tejas said.

"I saw only one skate. Perhaps an ambitious tax farmer seeks favor by catching a union leader."

"Hide!" Tejas said. "We must get you away." "Me?" Diviya said.

"You're the key to the revolution," Tejas said. His voice was charged, tense. He believed what he was saying. And Diviya felt as he had when he'd first spoken at the rally. Exposed. Undeserving.

"Tejas, Barini, and Ugra," Diviya said, "lead me closer, so that we can see, but not be seen. You will need to be my eye."

"What are you doing?" his soul demanded.

Tejas walked Diviya on a winding, blind way around the tailing mounds.

The Hero was high in the sky, so none of the mounds cast shadows. Diviya heard the Hero's Voice change tone when they turned. Catching the subtleties in the polarization of the radio waves was a different way of experiencing the Hero, one perhaps more primal, and it calmed Diviya, as much as his new resolve.

Diviya was built for peace, but the princes, and those who spoke in their name, had taken matters too far for Diviya to stay still.

They were kin, pressed from the same clays, made to launch princesses and some males into the migration. Their success was his success, in the flat equations of biology, but skates had grown. They were no longer the primitives of the sagas. They reasoned. They were more than their instincts. They had grown past the need for souls to tell them how to treat each other. Souls created and perpetuated divisions in the hive. Princes. Landlords. Workers. But the skates carried their own blame for taking what was given to them, as blindly as Diviya was being led through the slums. The souls had their own interests. Not least Diviya's soul.

Brother and enemy. Family and opponent.

Diviya's steel fingers sunk into the thick regolith. Pebbles and larger fragments of iron-nickel and hard, volatile-dry silicates were so numerous and uneven as to be stumbled over, especially blind. The four of them walked and hopped. From a distance, they would just be four soulless workers.

"He is to our left now," Tejas whispered.

"Take me onto a mound," Diviya said. Tejas led Diviya scrabbling to the top of the hillock.

"What are you doing? Open your eye!" his soul said.

"Is he facing us?" Diviya asked.

"No," Tejas said. "We are facing north. He is facing west."

The revolution needed to happen. Working with the souls as they had was no longer possible. Diviya lifted a large chunk of iron-nickel in his fingers. He snapped his eye open and thrust, hurling himself toward the ensouled skate.

"You are wasting breath!" his soul shrieked. "Stop! Stop!"

Diviya released the iron-nickel chunk as he flew past, as a hive drone would have. It crashed into the other skate with such force that ceramic chips rattled against Diviya's underside.

"Murderer," his soul whispered.

Diviya puffed breath sideways to spin, and then thrust to a stop and landed. He hopped to the ensouled skate. His three fellows were already there.

Diviya's attack had struck the skate's left leading edge, near the eye. A gaping hole exposed the hot soul beneath.

"You are beyond redemption," his soul said. "I will not rest until justice is done." "I know," Diviya said.

Diviya removed medical pliers and a small pry from his gullet. Dust caked them. He had been ensouled to help skates, to mend their minor wounds, to make them well enough to get back to the mines and farms. The hive had taught him anatomy and science for a skill he hadn't practiced in weeks.

"Do not touch that soul!" his soul said. Both Diviya and his soul could plainly hear the electrical panic of the soul in the fallen skate. "Report this to the hive! No one may touch a soul without the authorization of the princes."

Diviya reached into the corpse, prying away the bands around the soul. He lifted it gently, leaving the inside of the carcass warm and hollow.

"No!" his soul said.

"You must be destroyed, Diviya!" the soul said. "You are the most vile criminal ever fired in the hive."

Diviya reached into his own gullet with his pliers. Diviya's own soul screamed as he pried it loose and pulled it from his mouth.

And then, Diviya was a worker again, for the first time in a long time. He had no sensitivity to most of the wavelengths of radiation and energetic particles. The world was quiet and cold. The stars were colorless. The souls before him were gray lumps, hotter than the regolith, but otherwise unremarkable.

Diviya set his soul in the cold, dry dirt. The temperature stresses crackled in the radio bands. He put the other soul carefully in his mouth and onto the mounting. As Diviya lowered the bands to hold it into place and clipped it tight, the beauty of the spiritual world washed back in. And he was himself.

The new soul spoke immediately, more timidly than Diviya's soul. "What are you doing?" it whispered.

"Do not leave me here!" his old soul cried from the cold regolith. "Summon the hive!"

Diviya took his own soul in his fingers and inserted it into his gullet where its shine would not show.

"Bury the body," Diviya said to his co-conspirators. "When it is completely frozen, we will take whatever volatiles it may have."

Diviya launched himself from the surface of the asteroid. It did not take much breath. The microgravity of the asteroid barely pulled the dust back to the surface. As the hive receded, he exhaled again and sailed away from his home and from the Hero.

His former soul was apoplectic.

"I might have migrated with you," Diviya said to his soul. "I had even thought of putting you into another worker, for the revolution, for more workers to migrate." Diviya removed the soul from his mouth. "But you are too dangerous, too intransigent, too willing to stamp upon workers with my fingers."

His soul was incandescent in its anger, fear, and hate. Diviya released it. For a time, they drifted away from the asteroid, traveling the same path. Then Diviya turned back to the Hero and thrust back toward the hive. His soul continued out into the cold of space.

Their new hive would need an asteroid in the gravitational stillness behind the Hero's Voice, preferably a slow-turning one, so that they could walk around it, always under the radiance of the pulsar, and one that was freshly cracked by an impact or one whose radioisotopes and volatiles had not been harvested in centuries. There were thousands of asteroids in the archipelago, but not so many that a single, determined shaghāl could not find a hive eventually.

In some sagas, princes and princesses made a second migration, right after the first, to escape from shaghāl following too closely. But Diviya and the princess were exhausted. Little breath remained to them and with his cracks, Diviya could never again survive the crush of the Maw.

Diviya and the princess retracted their sails from time to time to drift silently and listen for the shaghāl. They could not hear him, but he could not be that far. He might already have ended his careening deceleration and be waiting even now in the archipelago of asteroids. Diviya spread his sail, and the Hero's Voice pushed him outward.

"How much breath do you suppose you have left?" Diviya asked.

"I did not use all of it."

Diviya explained his plan as he turned away from the Hero. He disgorged the soul he'd taken from the murdered prince and held it in his shadow. It shrieked. His own soul cried out. The princess' soul made a sound of revulsion. A soul was an ugly thing, a complex, layered brick of radioisotopes, humming with its own heat and shining with hard radiation. That light would draw the shaghāl as soon as Diviya revealed the soul to the asteroid field.

"This will not work!" the princess said. What Diviya asked was dangerous, perhaps impossible, but it was their only chance. "I do not even have the strength you want!"

"It is this or nothing, Princess! This is all we have. A strong, fast, hungry shaghāl lurks somewhere in the archipelago. While he is here, no hive is safe."

They moved farther and farther from the Hero, into an orbit where they would intersect the archipelago of asteroids at its outer edge, far from the best fields. They slowed over hours, risking creating radio reflections with their sails. The shaghāl would be closer to the pulsar, where the voice of the Hero would feed it and drown out their echoes. Every so often, Diviya turned toward the Hero, exposing the second soul. The soul's sharp, multi-rayed brightness would be very visible from far away. Then Diviya would turn back, hiding it again for a while, before exposing it once more.

Bait.

Finally, an angry glare answered. The hot harsh light of the shaghāl's soul was much closer to the pulsar. It made for them. Diviya held the second soul visible, letting the shaghāl see their trajectory. Then, he hid the soul from the shaghāl's sight.

The asteroids neared, including a large, uneven ovoid, pocked with craters.