The Star Whorl (The Totality Cycles Book 1) (2 page)

    
Well, she won’t find us
here,
he mused.
Not unless she has the same sort of tracking glyph we’re
using, on one of us, but so subtle that I can’t detect it!
The thought
amused him, then disturbed him. He looked over the members of his group that he
could see, then engaged his vuu’erio tennae to his secondary retinas, bringing
most of the glyphs around him that were not apparent to normal sight into sharp
definition. And there, following not him but Ro-Becilo’Ran, was a faint, second
glyph of recognition/tracking, set by an unfamiliar subjective creator. Well,
not totally unfamiliar. None of his other friends were so double-marked. It was
not quite veiled, not quite contravening the Unveiling Laws, just very, very
slight.

     Annoyed, he gently took hold
of the extra glyph, and changed it ever so slightly with his Nil’Gu’ua, so that
it wandered around before catching hold of a random person within the crowd.

     Ro-Becilo’Ran turned his
head at the brush of Kreceno’Tiv’s Nil’Gu’ua. “What was that?” he asked,
raising a vuu-brow.

     “A little pest was hanging
onto you,” Kreceno’Tiv answered, shrugging. “I sent it away.”

     Ro-Becilo’Ran raised the
other brow, not taking his meaning. Then his friend’s gaze centered past him,
and comprehension came clear. Kreceno’Tiv turned to see a familiar purple and
orange head bob in the crush, as if seeking.

     Gesturing annoyance rather
than projecting its glyph, and clacking his elytra-pace, he turned back to his
friend.

     “I’m tired,” he stated, “and
it’ll take the rest of the dark-turn just to get through this morass. I’ll see
you in the light-turn.”

     Ro-Becilo’Ran gestured understanding.
Kreceno’Tiv turned and began to make his way to the boulevard where he could
apply Nil’Gu’vua to his personal transport glyph. A pair of incredulous magenta
Gotra eyes locked onto him and watched him walk away.

Whorl Four

     He almost began to regret
his decision to leave as soon as he glyph-conjured his transport and set it to
take him back home. There was nothing there to really amuse him, nothing to
fully distract or absorb his mind. Other than skimming the interlinked
dataSpheres, there was really little of interest to do.

     So, as he rode home, descending
from Algna Suprum to the Segela Miridum landform through one of the via-Ways,
and through a short-travel terminus, he began to browse his favorite discussion
forums, looking for personal accounts on interesting events around the world.
Since the Industrial Collapse, there were no formal, public information sharing
outlets, but the populace had taken to communicating any and all events even a
little bit out of the ordinary themselves, and it was all available through the
world’s dataSphere interlinks. Finding what he wanted required some elaborate
search parameters, however, with over a trillion Gu’Anin citizens in the
Totality to sift through. He delved into the local Gu’Anin Spheres without
fully engaging his dataSphere interlink, however – he was reluctant to use it
outside of the residence, over an insecure link. Instead he used the mobile
glyph-sphere of the transport as his data identification Sphere, one that would
disappear without a trace when the transport glyph was de-Nil-ized.

     First he checked the Sweeper,
who kept current on efforts by the Solidarim and the Gu’Anin Magistrate Council
that attempted to re-engage the population in industrial, trade, or managerial
employment. The Sweeper had posted a new discussion thread, and he brought it
up on his view-glyphographic.

    
:The Sweeper

     :The Employment Resolve
is in full effect, everyone! Hurry, go to your new rewards offering recruitment
site, and get what most of us can obtain with a flick of our Nil’Gu’ua! Unless
you are one of the absolute lowest of the low, of course, still living barely
above the tops of the Ground Trees, here with the rest of us mfanya! Go ahead,
it’s fun, something to do besides sit around all turn watching our elytra-paces
silver over! Will it give you a sense of purpose? Will it fill your empty
little lives? No, only a position in the Solidarim could do that, or so I’m
told! Imagine, being in control of whole Worlds, with the native populations
under your vuu’erio tennae! I can only imagine such usefulness! You can, too,
with the new Employment Resolve. Or, like the rest of us, you can just accept
the despair, the quiet, choking, despair, and revel in it!:

    
Am I giving in to the
despair?
he wondered, scowling and clacking his elytra-pace as his short-travel
translation ended with him still far above the boulevard that led home.
Why
should I? I have Secondus in a turn to worry about, and then hopefully Tertius.
That should be enough to mitigate it, shouldn’t it?
But the truth was that
he was not worried about his lectures in the coming term of Secondus – he had
already voraciously consumed all the information in his new texts, and most of
the information he understood. It had been thrilling, learning new things, but
once learned, the thrill had gone, sunk back into the greyish-blue fog of
listlessness. And Tertius was only a possibility, not a certainty.

    
Is the need to strive so
important?
He looked out at the stars between the double horizon, a
brilliant slash across the dark-time sky, brightest at the Whorl-hub. Having
come from a pre-sentient race that had had to fight and contend and strive to flourish,
was aimlessness as deadly to the spirit as poison was to the body?

     :Criers

     :We cry out. What about?

     :About the industries
that consume our children, about the unbridled authoritarianism, that saps our
souls and sucks the marrow from our bones.

     :But these industries are
dead, you say. These shackles lie broken at our feet. We freed ourselves, with
the Unification and the Great Unveiling, we broke the chains of exploitation
and now we are truly free, free to do nothing all dark-turn and light, if we so
choose. But are we? Are we truly free?

     :We cry that we are not.
For if even one of us is bound, then we are all bound. If even one of us is
exploited, even for what those above us feel is the good of all, then we are
living a lie, and we despair in vain. Must we cry it again? That to which we
aspire is just another mill of blood and souls, and no one questions, no one
believes. When will we awaken to the falsehoods of our suzerains? When will we
no longer cry?:

     The Criers, as usual, were
vague in their ominous warning. They always spoke in such a vein, implying that
there were people being exploited, and that the masses were being deceived.

    
But if they won’t be more
specific, what are we to do about it?
He wanted to believe, but where was
the proof, the evidence? How to free those bound when they were not to be seen
or even known about?
Give us something more, and then we can act.

    
:The Happy Hedonist

     :I am happy. Of course I
am.

     :I have everything I
could ever want, I can make anything I would ever need. I have the largest
domicive I can dream up. I have jewels, pretty things, time and resources to do
anything. So I’m happy. Right?

     :I have all the things
around me to do everything I’ve ever wanted to do. I have all the time to
become everything I want to become.

     :So why am I – stagnated?
Why do I just sit here with all my useless treasures around me, as if I’m
waiting for something?

     :Am I happy?

     The morose tone of the forums
did nothing to lighten Kreceno’Tiv’s disposition, and there was only more of
the same once he got back to the domicive.

    
Perhaps I should go back.
She’s surely lost interest for the dark-turn, thinking that I left,
he
rationalized.
And why should I have to leave because of her? She doesn’t own
the Mji’Hives!
But standing around with his friends was only a palliative, and
did not really alleviate the ennui, just spread it a little thinner. But he did
not turn back – once set on a course of action, it was difficult for him to
change, and especially to backtrack. He looked out as he descended, but this
time he did not see the strip of stars left by the double horizon made by Algna
Suprum above and Segela Miridum below. Nor did he see the false constellations
made by glyph-lights on the underside of the Algna landform. All he saw was his
own morose thoughts and the despair that was almost a concrete glyph that he
could apply Nil’Gu’vua to.

     Shaking himself, he turned
back to his skimming of the Spheres. But none of his other discussion forums
had anything new, high or low. He shut down his connection to the interlinks, leaned
back and closed his eyes, but it was almost painful to not have something to
think about, something to stimulate his mind.

     Sighing heavily, he called
up an old glyph-puzzle game that had amused him when he was younger. It was no
longer amusing, but it would pass the time until he arrived home.     

     Once I’m there, I’ll
worry about finding something else to do,
he thought. It was just a delay
in the inevitable, but any delay was better than none.

Whorl Five

     Kreceno’Tiv brooded as he
took a seat and dug into his carry-pack. This was the first turn of his last
term in Secondus, his and Ro-Becilo’Ran’s and all those in who had come to
Secondus in the same term-level as they. And this was the third to last lecture
before the end of the Secondus attendance time. The previous turn had been
whiled away with only semi-interesting pursuits at Ro-Becilo’Ran’s domicive,
and then they had begun discussing their return to Secondus. Fortunately, the
despair of the Mji’Hive seemed to not quite invade the graceful building-complex
that encompassed the Secondus sub-Hives, where he had spent five previous orbises.
During that time he had learned rudimentary and intermediate glyphs and other,
associated subjects, mathematics and sciences, herstory and lost arts,
sociology and the study of xenthropology. The despair was held at bay, for
there was purpose and the need to strive in the academic institute, the goal
being to reach Tertius. He watched as those around him took out their
view-glyphographics and readied themselves to learn. The Proctor came in, and
the pupils about him quieted, turning their attention forward.

     “This is Intermediate
Physiology,” the Proctor said, a Pavtalar-marked male with silvering on his
wing-nets that did not quite fit into his elytra-pace anymore, as happened with
age. “I am Proctor Pavtalar Gib’Zal. We will focus first on the female Genii
and the neutral male, then the physiological changes males undergo for each
feminine Genus.”

     Kreceno’Tiv took glyph-notes
on his view-glyphographic, watching his scrawl turn into neat columns of
glyphs.

     “At the beginning of our
recorded herstory, there were forty-one distinctly identifiable Genii in
existence. Presently, we have seventeen known Genii. Five are the descendants
of the Malkia. The twelve others are here on Gu’Anin and Gu’Ushad, our first
colony. Can anyone tell us what these twelve non-Malkia Genii are?”

     Many indicator glyphs
appeared, and he chose one pupil. “The present Genii are the Polista, the
Vespa, the Ropali, the Gotra, the Lisso, the Xantho, the Abispa, the Pavtala,
the Scelipo, the Diamma, the Tiphi and the Thynnu,” the male pupil, unknown to
him, answered.

     Proctor Gib’Zal indicated
assent. “Yes, that is correct. There are others, of course, as we all know. But
the remnants of the Malkia Genii, which includes the five Genii who subscribed
to their ranks, do not count themselves among the rest of us, and live in
isolation.”

     This was all common
knowledge, and many did not take glyph-notes on this, but Kreceno’Tiv did, just
for completeness. It would be easier to cross-reference later. He always felt a
little sad knowing that entire Genii had been wiped out throughout their
herstory, that unknown potentials of his people were lost forever. Then he
began to wonder. Though he knew of all the current non-Malkia Genii, there were
certain ones he had never seen. The Tiphi, the Diamma, the Xantho, the Abispa,
the Scelipo. Why had he never seen anyone of those Genii anywhere? Were those
omissions just in An’Siija, or on all of Gu’Anin? Were they all on Gu’Ushad? And
why had he never noticed before?

     “There are many families
within each Genus,” Proctor Gib’Zal continued. “Girl children, as you know, are
born with the Genus of their mothers, though variations can give rise to new
families, and if the differences are great and breed true, new Genii.”

     The Proctor began detailing
the characteristics and colors of each Genus, and Kreceno’Tiv found himself
absorbed, though the lingering sadness was not forgotten. Nor the nagging
question of Genii.

Whorl Six

     Kreceno’Tiv was dismayed to
find that Gotra Pelani’Dun was somehow in most of his lectures, while Ro-Becilo’Ran
was in less than half. Turning his mind resolutely from her annoying presence,
he became aware of the feeling of eyes on him as he and Ro-Becilo’Ran left the
lecture hall. Many eyes, along with the faint, sweet allure of feminine
chemi-scents, making his vuu’erio twitch. He ignored them – it had been that
way since he had emerged from his seclusion during his growth-spurt, but he
assumed that all the attention on him was because he had been passed on by
Gotra Pelani’Dun – very publicly. And now she was doing her best to entice him
back, thus piquing their curiosity. He was determined not to be a source of
amusement and public spectacle for those around him, so he ignored the stares
and glyphs of interest, keeping his vuu’erio tennae tucked away. And the
chemi-scents that seemed to be directed at him – he assumed that the girls
around him were going through their second stage of maturity, as he was, forming
pre-mating attachments and gaining stronger Genus-colors, and that releasing
the chemi-scents was just a part of that. So he remained a little removed from
most of those around him, keeping his vuu’erio tucked away and his face stolid,
and he went about his studies without letting on that he knew he was being
observed. Ro-Becilo’Ran walked beside him, glancing around in bemusement.