Be

Author: Ayara Itris

Original post: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HsxMHfF4fhuGs89eYni9f7RV_mNPaK7LxXxigPejUjQ/edit

Entry for the YC120 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the Eight Thousand Suns in New Eden category.

Two dark-matter palms split the void. The sphere of their coupling is a hundred million miles across and the passing of their compression spends nameless insensate eons. In the vast black a miniscule mote is born between them, an infant sun conceived by immaculate physics, shining on their gravitational marriage. Silt and rock and cosmic winds gather and twirl around the candle and they are soundless, senseless, beyond senseless, merely flowing. They twist and father a skipping stone. It carries the velocities of its parentage and then between the filtered gradient of the dust trailing off of the solid world a year passes for the first time. Then six billion more. Cycles of unconscious humming into the night, a wordless melody without tone. The world turns. The light turns upon it and day and night and-- Lightning. Rain and there follows the first breath of a truer light which flickers in the aether beyond this plane, not yet caught by the whirlwind of consciousness nor the starved glances of the leviathan in the deep. Then ten thousand years and the aether breaks before the rock-ball and deposits chittering ants of soil-tone flesh upon it, chanting over the hum with their bright metal songs and more and more slip through the shattered veil of the planes and sing and crescendo in the truth of their life. The weaver takes note. It stitches the wounds in the veil with soft fingers and the leviathan whines against the cloth shield and the world strides off the cliff into falling night and the song of those tiny creatures slips into shrieking chaos. Ten thousand years of insanity and order, war and peace, conquest and reconquest, the insects writhing in caustic schizophrenic spasms to vomit out heralds of new ages, new emperors and new gods until at last the hives have crumbled and the queens have slain each other and hornet and ant and spider songs slip away. All over the silt, the rock, the cosmic wind--and the humming in the dark.

--

This is a holy place.

A sigh of the earth yawns through the arch and broken walls of the tower. It’s just the bottom floor and one wall now leaning on the hill over the empty plain. Not lonely, but it’s got that sense--

Solitude.

She leans against the side of the arch and listens to the words hiding in the wind passing down to the fields below. Her hand rolls over the hilt of her sword. She hits the switch and the nova field hums the song of its life against the wind and she listens. Fields of low scrub leaves dance.

I am the only one on this whole world.

Why is that?

I guess there’s a lot of places like these.

Left behind after the collapse. Struggled for a few millennia in idle futility and burned out in a dark age. A bad solar flare, climate disruption, momentary disaster--and the whole fragile thing exhales and dies. Archaeologists come every few years, poke at the remnants of long lost aunts and uncles. It should be a gold mine, a whole medieval civilization waiting to be uncovered. It’s null security space but it’s a backwater. Safe enough. Not worth it for sharks to prowl or immortals to wander.

Except me.

Oh, she thinks she’s special?

Have we just stopped caring? Did I not care, for so long?

The stone is coarse against her cheek. She has no idea how old it is. She imagines the kings and queens and lords and peasants who moved beside it.

She kisses it.

Then she laughs at her own absurdity astride the joy of the wind and she keeps walking, down, down through the arch down through the valley into the chasms where the alien grass and long leaves turn to dust and ash and the night rolls over her, the whole cluster a sacred Garden above the world where the river runs under lightning and stars between canyon walls thundering light against the strata. She goes down and down through the dark and sleeps in a crevice where the wind does not touch and she dreams.

--

YC 110

The Dramiel was water and the void had no shape so it moved where she willed it. She was master of the night, praetor of her pack of sharks descending on the lumbering foe. They slipped around their geometric gunfire and twirled past their rocketry to trap them, snare them, gun them down and impale them artfully on bloody hooks.

In those days she loved war.

She and her sharks tore the last battleship to pieces. The orbital defences had been snagged, shaken and ripped into silver gore bleeding towards the sun. They wanted to lunge after the trail but she held them for just a moment so the rest of the fleet could remove the final dangers. When it was done she gave the order and they plunged down past the wrecks into the atmosphere.

She felt the heat brush against her skin--the ship’s skin--no, her skin, even in the dream she could still feel it right there touching her heart.

But the touch turned to a claw and the dream to a nightmare.

They sundered the sky with man-made thunder and the earth ruptured beneath command posts and armories and strategic targets and while the landers came down they moved on to the cities and snapped skyscraping hives in twain just for fun. Strategic demoralization, they called it.

And they called their payment “ISK” but that was just a word, wasn’t it, for an idea of wealth which they disposed of with flagrant disregard. Yes. In her infomorphic dream the data said that the aesthetic value of half a million dead was currency enough, food enough.

The sky rippling around her shields, static from EMP shells and the startling glare of rocket bursts, yes, this is--

The transmission appeared in her dream just like it had when it really happened, a picture overlaid on the drone, a crystal vision of a young Brutor woman who was not on her records as a member of the planetary government or defence force but nevertheless shot out her signal from the crippled anti-aircraft targeting relay and she said I KNOW YOU, AMMATAR, BETRAYER, and it was silly because she was really half Ammatar and half Gallentean or something like that and she was working for an independent group and this had nothing to do with freedom or the Minmatar, it was just business my dear but then the railgun cracked through the microwarpdrive housing and her pod thunked into the side of the targeting station without killing her.

Oh shit.
Oh shit.

Did comms still work? FTL neural transmission beacon still online.

Self-destruct. Override timer.

Invalid override code.

Invalid--! I’m the fucking pilot! Kill me!

Invalid override code.

INIT://FLEET_BROADCAST _ _ WING_REGROUP

Hjalmar’s closest. But that’s one minute away.

Hjalmar. Hjalmar. Target my pod. Kill me right now. NOW!

He took too long.

The pod’s skin cracked open and she rolled out sputtering and choking on the amniotic fluid and naked into the dirt, raw earth sticking to her pallid flesh, contaminating it. She was still hooked to the neural cables and the scanner.

She was standing over her. How’d she get outside so quickly? She had a pistol in her hand. She was not even a young woman but a girl, a little girl maybe thirteen or fourteen years old but anger aged her face.

She reached to pull the scanner and the infomorph on the ground flailed about and tried to stand and hold her off but her muscles were limp. She spasmed and twitched and a rush of static filled her eyes when the scanner was torn off and she looked down the barrel of the pistol and realized that she had already been dead for a decade and only now, only now did God slap her in the face and bring her life back at the moment of true obliteration.

Hjalmar dropped an EMP shell on them and they went into cardiac arrest. The little girl gasped and slumped beside her onto the earth and her face was pain and shock and tears burned out into the soil and it’ll be branded into the datastream of the infomorph, behind it, back onto her distant humanity, that last look of sorrow and misplaced defiance.

--

YC 120

She wakes when the white dwarf is pushed up over the horizon. She eats provisions she’s brought with her. It’s not time yet. She keeps walking, looking for the place.

Poor girl.

She remembers the faceless medic crouched above her, stabilizing her. She looked for the girl, tried to push the medic out of the way; she saw her eyes lifeless and stained with dry tears and she reached over with a bloody hand and held her cheek and cried when they took her away.

Poor stupid brave girl. Why did you do that. I know why you did it. You were alive, that’s

why. You were.

She remembers the conquered world months later. The girl's home beneath the towers, broken by bombardment. No one had bothered to clean or loot it, or no one was left. It was the home of a savant. Her name was Seri.

She remembers reams and reams of paper, mathematical formulae and elegant proofs resolving decades-old quandaries that even infomorph researchers had failed to understand. She remembers the drones, still flitting about, asking after their master and creator. Maps of the planet’s communications grid and optimization paths. An award from the governor for meritorious service.

And paintings.

Beautiful, forceful paintings that were the emptying of a young soul onto canvas. When the campaign was done she’d returned to that world and gathered all that remained but she'd destroyed so much.

She’d seen the attack coming. She was too smart not to. She could’ve escaped. But her parents had been killed in the previous weeks so she stayed and duped them into thinking the guns were already offline and she planned it all with startling precision.

Stupid courageous human. Why’d you do that? I should’ve died with you. I could've given you that. I would have.

She leans her forehead against the side of the canyon and weeps, quiet sobs taken up by the river, buoyed away. She almost draws the sword, but it’s not time yet. Not yet. Keep going.

She doesn't wipe her tears. Down and down and down she goes with the river into the sunrise and God lifts the sacred orb to heat the forge of the earth and shape the day.

Ammatar.

Dust picks up off the plain and sifts through the hands of an invisible giant.

Gallente.

She remembers going to church with her mom.

Names don’t mean a thing anymore.

The image of the heads all bowed in the church and she looks up at the high altar and silent choir and wonders why they hide their faces from God and she looks up now into the soaring star foreign to her but not foreign to here. Plants are rare beneath its light in this region and packed together and they surge and struggle for life on the river's edge.

There's a town here.

It's a few chunks of stone above ground and all the rest surely buried and she notes the imperfect square of a building block how it has one chipped corner and the surface of layers and layers uneven over each other glittering in the glare off the river. It only twinkles when she moves.

She drinks from perfect clear water in the Garden underneath which rivers flow, Eden, the land promised to her and her people and she looks out at it and looks up where it is hidden behind the blue heaven of day and she sees flitting in the clouds all the spirits and deities of her myriad ancestors eternally separate from one another eternally bound together by being in itself; and a lone avian way up there, soaring, sunlight caught against its wings. She keeps calling it God.

It all slides back now into the datastream, bits and bits and bits.

There’s the mountain.

It’s a ways off. She could make it by sunset.

Alright.

The plain takes her in and time along with her and the mountain does not move, only the heat and the wind and dust. She’s got a pilgrim’s outfit because she’s sentimental and a bodyglove underneath but the environmental compensation is nothing like a dropsuit. It hurts.

Good.

The sun moves and the earth moves with it and she stays still, the mountain slipping toward her and its shadow reaching over to hold her close.

She’s at the base when a beast rises up out of the ash.

A great coyote like the legends of the Matar twice her height and loping towards her. Its strides are noiseless pulling across the earth. Something makes her draw the sword but she’s just going to let it kill her anyways. Her heart beats slowly and it breathes like a dream. She closes her eyes.

Her death doesn't come.

In its place a child's scream rips her out of tranquility and there on the ground running away is a tiny boy.

Oh. Does it matter? No. You'll die anyway. Yes. It must matter. No.

She remembers the girl standing over her.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Not alone. Can’t die yet.

She turns on the nova field. She doesn’t know where he came from and he’s never seen anyone like her but he’s got black hair and pale skin like her father and he ran past her so she better keep him alive. Something about the arc and frame of his face stands out to her.

She begins to move although it’s been a while since she’s fought anything on the ground and she’s slow without a dropsuit but she keeps going because she can look outside herself and witness the image:

The knight of old and his blade leveled against the monster of the night and there is something in it.

The beast dives to bite.

She sidesteps and slashes its nose but she doesn’t move far enough so its foreleg kicks her feet out from under her and the dust it stirred up swallows her sight. Blood caresses her face the ash clogs her breathing and she coughs and feels all of it, the image and the blood and the sun’s heat and its jaws rip at her cloak and God forging the day out of fire, hammer sundering impurities into truths and they remain marked against Creation by the flaws that made them.

The cloak tears into shreds. She slashes its face and the nova field burns it but it tramples her and its knee slams her head into the ground. It begins to step back and it breathes on her but she can’t perceive anything.

She rolls and swings and she catches it in the neck. Black blood blinds her again. It’s still up and it goes for her leg. The jaw closes and she squeals when the bone snaps. It shakes her. Her hand slips on the blade but she catches it again, only she grabbed it on the edge and the field makes her cry, a ferocious burst of sorrow like when Mom died but she thinks about the girl who tried to kill her and the little boy she’s trying to save and thrusts into the beast’s eye.

It quivers.

The legs give out and it slumps to the earth.

--

She has another dream.

There are no images. She is lost in color, a pale blue suffusing swirls of all shades. It shifts around her.

Blue brightens to the sky of the conquered world but the forest beneath the heavens and the lake splitting the trees and the girl standing by the bank all reject the concept of defeat because they’re standing here in her mind. She can smell something like the pines on Gallente Prime and the bundles of sharp needles are each picked out in her vision and she watches the girl turn and look at her and smile.

My name is Seri.

I know. I know. I’m sorry.

Seri hugs her.

What’s your name?

--

She awakens into night on the mountain.

Missed the sunset. Missed my time.

Fire slakes away on a miniscule fuel beside her, dying of thirst. A man she has never seen before holds her head in his lap. He's serene. He smiles at her opening her eyes but she can't hold them open so she closes them and breathes. He strokes her hair.

He waves at someone. Come hither.

When the child holds her hand she opens her eyes and looks at him and he is not terrified. He bows his head and touches her palm to his cheek.

Thank you.

She can't tell if his words are being translated. They sound against the summit and the shattered walls of the old monastery they've got her in and the leaves of of the oak shudder at their weight in the twilight breeze and they click in her head with a music that is neither Gallentean nor translator-modulated speech.

Her hand is covered and her leg is bandaged and splinted. She shifts it and she can feel pain still. The man speaks.

You did not come here to save anyone, goddess-aspirant.

No.

What has brought you to this place?

I think it would be a good place to end my life.

That is not why.


You came here for the same reason We are here.

He looks out past the broken wall past the tree standing on the highest peak in the range at the night slipping away while the promise of the stars remains firm and extant behind the shield of coming day.

Yes.

Rise.

She stands.

She leans on the man and then he lets go.

She leans on the blade and she walks over the cracked stone which was uttered into life and shaped by Creators again and again from hydrogen to carbon to multifaced strata into stones which could never be refused built into castles and temples and homes which remain even now and will always be. She leans on the tree.

Sunlight, the sun, progeny of late parents still casting everlasting light across infinity-- She lets go and stumbles forward and her knee hits the stone but she rises, she rises again and Sunlight rises up over the horizon and blesses the mountains and the tree and the great beast and New Eden dances to the surging rhythm of its life the stars shining and fading and the void unconquered but guarded by light, by light and out there the clouds form and exhale over the earth sheets of rain and thunder in the morning suffused by vermillion, what can it be called and out there the promise never broken and Seri and freedom not dreamed of but realized in being.