Absent from thee, I languish still:
Then ask me not, ‘When I return?’
The straying fool ‘twill plainly kill
To wish all day, all night to mourn
- John Wilmot (1647–1680)
“High Receiver Suì reporting, 0100 SET, E04, sector C01, Admin.”
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People on Oura are fucking stupid, thought Erelah Behrmann, staring into its brilliant void.
She shook herself, banished the site to the recesses of her mind, lifted her head to stare at the darkened shelves.
I should read more.
Her notes sat before her. Five lines of the most important stuff she had found on the Minute War; implications, accusations, not that dumb, theoretical, textbook shit. The rest sat in the diamond drive sitting innocuously by her mug of coffee. The green light ringing its hemline flashed in time to her heartbeat.
Why must the world be so bright?
A notification flashed over her eyes.
“Fucks’ sake!” she cried. “Damn it! Has the world gone mad? I disabled…,” she trailed off, winked at the sender’s address. “Hell does she want?”
That Proxima Centauri archivist – she had the Great Archives in her address, and that, really, was the reason Erelah was able to make a connection between whatever this was and the archivist’s face – quietly curious, as she remembered, a little startled, intelligent. Prominent nose. Hair stuck somewhere between curls and waves. Shades of brown.
The space for visual representation – an avatar, a photo, a projection, something – was blank, occupied by a default grey. Erelah made a face, steadied herself, opened the message.
To Erelah Behrmann, (– Marya Novotná started –) or anyone else who may be manning the Anchor’s ornithology centre’s archives at the time of this communication’s reception:
You were correct in your misgivings towards Doctor Chaplinski. His actions, compounded and enforced by the actions of others, have caused a chemical imbalance that has driven the Eye make-up off kilter. At 2:30 this morning, the alarms will sound, and mass evacuation will commence. The time before now and then is being used to gather resources and thin the population that will have to be crammed onto general ships. As we speak, people are boarding private crafts and leaving the Eye for nearby sanctuary stations.
(Erelah blinked. Something cold and dense was climbing up from her gut, settling in the space between her throat and her face.)
I believe your love of your archives is as potent as my concern for the preservation of knowledge. I have no contacts in other archives around the sphere and rely upon you to make use of your connections.
(Last Friday’s trivia night shot through Erelah’s mind, and she released an involuntary giggle. Some connections.)
Please use the time I have given you to gather as many physical artifacts as you can. Avoid trying to take up virtual memory. The information might not survive the lines’ current instability and will only hinder the crew’s ability to steer us out of the blast zone. There are three ships in Tienvan’s port, each currently has capacity for one more tonne of physical luggage. Three quarters of that will be used for non-perishables, medical equipment, and extra machinery. I managed to convince all three civil captains in Tienvan to leave us the last quarter, along with captains Kidane and Tran in the Lantern underside cities of Shansen and At Tajuk respectively, and captain Luik in Undersea’s Aleva. Archive workers with access to other ports will have to fight their own battles.
(With what? came a thought. Our great big muscles? Our social skills?)
I will leave the decision of what information is most important to keep up to you. Please remember that numbers are useful and can be used for future analysis and planning.
Thank you, I am sorry, and good luck.
Yours,
Marya E. Novotná
Erelah Behrmann closed the window of communication. She breathed in, breathed out, listened for the tick of the old clock hanging somewhere on the opposite side of the room.
Luck. Heaven knows we all need it.
She gave herself twenty seconds, then stood up, grabbed her flashlight, and, already drafting mails in her mind, got to work.
><
“High Receiver Nergal reporting, 0200 SET, E03, sector U02, Hranow.”
><
It was two in the morning when Marya barged through Duy’s front door.
“Heavens, Marya,” he grumbled, closing the door behind her, “do you have any idea what time it is?”
“The sun’s already rising.”
“What? No, it –” he squinted out the window – “what the fuck. What… what?”
Throwing open cupboards, Marya let up a mumble of agreement. She saw Duy shake his head in shock behind her, wide-eyed, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.
He turned to her, thrust a finger in the direction of the light. When he spoke, his voice was an octave squeakier. “You know something about this?”
“Are suitcases a common target of theft in these parts or something?” grumbled she, cracking open a wardrobe door to a series of light, long-sleeved coats, a rice cooker peeking out from between their vibrant hems.
“Marya!”
“Why do you keep your rice cooker in a wardrobe?”
“Marya!” The wardrobe door snapped close in front of her nose, and she flinched back, met Duy’s confused, fearful face. “For love’s sake, will you tell me what’s happening?”
Marya’s eyes, those right under her right ear, winked at the window. Searchlights zipped across the sky like lightning bugs. The night was oily, streaked through with rainbow ink. The air smelled electric.
Deep breath in. Duy’s eyes reflected the red copper nightlights spilling in from the kitchen. Somewhere in the apartment, a door creaked, buffeted by wind slammed in through one window and out another.
“I promise, I’ll explain.” She held up a hand to quiet him. “I will. Soon. But we have –” she checked the time – “twenty minutes to get to port, Duy.” She saw the question in his eyes and checked the window again, before sighing. “The Eye is collapsing. They’re gonna sound the alarms in quarter a standard hour. You’re family – I wanted to get to you first.”
“Good old nepotism,” breathed Duy. His eyes were wide.
“The Captain’s ship has fifteen spaces, officially. We’re stretching it to… it was twenty, I think. She’s headed straight for Proxima Centauri.”
Duy closed his eyes. “Yura.”
She stretched out her hand. “Bags, Duy.”
><
“High Receiver Selene reporting, 0215 SET, E02, sector A03, Tiếnvan.”
><
Scrubs billowing in the wailing wind, Doctor Balachandra hurried through Shivaji South like her life depended on it. Which it did. To an extent.
She had about a gazillion slips in her pocket, all warrants with forged signatures because stars knew they didn’t have time to go hounding after any of the three ministers of agriculture and trades at this hour.
The streets were misty with droplets carried by the currents from the cities below, and – unnatural though it was at this time of year… or nearly ever, really, Lantern was never meant to be so stupidly damp – Doctor Balachandra felt bizarrely grateful for the unease it amplified, the invisible fingers that it set brushing against her skin and raising her follicles. She felt, embarrassingly, like a character in a horror movie, and so didn’t have to work as hard to motivate her sleep deprived body to keep a pace appropriate to the event of being chased by a malignant spectre.
A man on a hoverbike rose above the edge of the street’s sloping horizon. Food delivery.
He slowed when she flagged him down.
“What is it, missy?” he took in her clothes. “Shouldn’t you lot be on 5th?”
She yelled over the howling sky. “I need to talk to you! Pull over, please!”
“Nah, nah, honey,” cried back he, mask distorting as he smiled. “I gotta run, but I can leave you my number!”
He pulled out something small and square and silver: a business card.
Cheeky, thought the doctor, amused. Then she shook her head, steeling herself, and jumped into his way.
The bike swerved, aquaplaned a little on the damp of the air before the delivery guy managed to right it, leaning the bike back and braking on the gravel just in time to avoid hitting a lamppost. “What the fuck!” he squawked. “Have you lost your absolute shit, woman?”
“Stop here! One minute!” she waved a warrant in his face. It wasn’t for him, or relevant to situation at all, really, but she reckoned it was the simplest way to establish authority.
“Well, you’ve certainly got me stopped,” he gestured around himself, stumbling off the bike. “What, they need doctors to do their arresting now? You pulling organs off pedestrians for some greater-good-sacrifice farse? My kidneys are shot to shit, lady, you really don’t want those.”
“No –”
“My lungs aren’t anything to boast about, either. Or my blood. Or anything, really. I’m held together by masking tape and spare wires, you wanna see?”
She gave up, marched over to where the driver had started to pull his shirt up, waved his hands away. “Star’s sake, sir, are you trying to get poisoned?”
He shot her a sceptical look. “Wouldn’t be any deader than we both would’ve been if I’d braked a bit later.”
Fair. “I’m sorry, I had to stop you.” Recovering grace enough to dip her head in apology, she pulled out the warrants. “I need you to deliver something for me.”
His arm waved at the carrier secured to the back of the bike. “Yeah, a lot of people do. You’ll have to place an order.”
The sun blazed above them. Doctor Balachandra could feel it burning into her hair, could see it work the air like a bow works the strings on a violin. It sent the light fluttering like ocean waves above the street tiles.
“Are you the nervous type?
The delivery guy frowned. “Nah, I wouldn’t say so. Hey, is this like one of those random inspections or –”
“Do you have family here?”
“Oy, don’t you think that’s kinda personal –”
Eye contact. She took of her mask, leaving just the flimsy type that covered her nose and mouth, so he could see her staring at him.
“Woah, there,” he recoiled a bit, startled, then blinked. “I ain’t a doctor, I ain’t putting anyone else in danger, but you –”
“Sir, this is a matter of life or death. Do you have a family and are you willing to sacrifice some time with them to ensure that they have a better chance to survive?”
Again, he blinked. “Well, I guess I dug that hole for myself when I started on moral principles, eh?”
Silent, Doctor Balachandra felt one of her eyebrows rise.
He made an abbreviated motion to the left, and, tilting his head, said, “I do. I am.” A look down, at her hands. At the slips. He met her eyes. “What do you need from me, doctor?”
The mist was glowing, now, like the surface of an ocean at dawn, like dust particles caught in the sunrays streaming through some bedroom window. There was a silence to it, one that the two of them, Doctor Balachandra and the poor delivery guy who she was handing the warrants to, writing up a script for, showing pinned points of a map to – delivery points – storage points – felt like an island. The only one in a sea of nothing else.
Parting ways, Doctor Balachandra’s thoughts shifted to Luyten b, to the blind, white-garbed priestess, her skin embroidered with a thousand and one stars and nebulas and clusters and galaxies, all with different-coloured thread that she had claimed to feel the varying vibrations of.
Silence is a tangible thing, the priestess had said. It has a weight. It has a volume. It interacts with itself, and it interacts with other silences. It isn’t broken by sound, merely hidden. Sound, she had smiled, black-toothed, in Doctor Balachandra’s direction, is the universe’s sleight of hand.
Smoke and mirrors. The doctor came to a stop.
The door was nothing like she remembered it being.
She rolled her eyes and knocked. Show off.
The peep hole slid open.
“Goodday, dear lady,” clever brown eyes grinned at her. “How may I serve you?”
“Open up, Severus.” She checked her watch. Twenty-three minutes past two.
“Password?”
The doctor pursed her lips, drew her eyebrows together. “Hm. Give me a second, would you, I think I’ve written it down somewhere.”
As she rummaged through her bag, the eyes named Severus broke out in empty bluster. You know you’re not supposed to write it down, she heard them groan. How am I supposed to maintain my integrity this way?? they complained to the empty air above her bowed head.
Fingers touching what she had been looking for, Doctor Balachandra righted herself and levelled the gun at the opening.
“Open the door, Severus.”
Twenty-four minutes past two.
Narrowed and flinty, Severus’ eyes let her in.
The shop’s common area was nothing like she remembered it. “Show off.”
Offended, keeping one eye on the arm that held the doctor’s gun, Severus shrugged one shoulder. “There are reputations to be maintained here, Usha.”
“To every truth there is a darkness, to every lie there is a light.”
They scoffed. “Who’re you quoting?”
“Myself.” She kept Severus in her line of sight, swept the room over, watched the curtains separating the shop from the rest of the apartment sway in the breeze she had let in. The fog was creeping in behind her; Severus eyed it with disgust.
“Well?” they gestured at the gun. “What’s that for? We’re not the best of friends, but I’d say we’re past the point of threatening each other with death.” They blinked, computing, then smirked. “Don’t tell me this is about the goat milk?”
Absentmindedly, gaze shifting from one crack in the wall to the next, Doctor Balachandra said, “Goat milk?”
A chuckle. “Yeah, I restocked since you chewed me out for that one, don’t worry. Come, see!”
“Oh.” She cocked her head at the sofa.
“What’re you looking at… hey!” They planted themselves between her and the packing box, raised a finger to her face. “That’s private property, Balachandra! Business secrets. And you have no business nosing around in there.” Another flighty glance at the gun.
She hefted it.
Severus furrowed their brows, raised their hands. Something calculating crossed their face. “Come on, Usha… you know how it goes here…”
“Aren’t we friends, Severus?”
Twenty-six minutes past two.
“Well –”
“Move.”
Their gaze hardened. Hands dropping, they shifted to Doctor Balachandra’s left, kept themselves at arms-length.
“Here are scissors,” she handed them the ones she used to clip her nails.
They raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Okay…?”
“Open it.”
For a moment it looked like they might protest, but then they clamped their jaw shut and, looking more pissed off than she’d seen them since they’d gotten the lease on this place, tore the top of the packing box open.
Inside was exactly what Doctor Balachandra had been expecting – the types of rations that lasted ages and had the nutritional value of five meals each – new stuff, mildly hallucinogenic, not really approved, experimental, but she’d taken most of them before, and they weren’t hard drugs by any means. They’d be good emergency food, at the very least. Good for keeping the sicklier ones alive.
Synthetic stuff that could double as multi-functional material.
Herb combinations not really thoroughly tested by official facilities, traded on underground markets.
Cosmetics. Hygiene products.
Most of them with frivolous side effects, yes, but that was the kind of shop they came from.
A puff of something blue flew up her nose, and Doctor Balachandra coughed, jerked her head up with a vicious glare. Severus’ pipe blocked her view. They removed it, raised an eyebrow at her, then apparently thinking better of blowing it into her face, blew a column of smoke to the side. The smoke darkened and crackled with lightning, before dissipating, caught on the creeping fog.
Severus curled their lip at it. “No fun.”
“Show me all of it.”
“Why?” they challenged.
They had a packing box in their living room. “Stars, Severus,” she raised an eyebrow at them. “You know why.”
They cocked their head, searched her face. She held herself level until they found what they were looking for, crossing their arms, tapping their chin with the end of the pipe’s carved mouthpiece. “And what will you give me in return?”
“Your life.”
“Kill me now and you’ll never find any of it.”
“Kill you now and I can tear this place apart.”
A curt laugh made its way out their throat. “Gods, Ushakiran,” Severus snarled. “Your naiveté is heartwarming.”
The clock behind the counter, the one that kept time two minutes ahead of SET, struck half past two.
It hadn’t even stopped chiming when Doctor Balachandra swallowed her pride, looked Severus dead in their cold eyes, and only mildly reluctant said, “I’ll get you the permit, Severus.”
Their eyes widened. But their face, their closed torso…
More. “And a patent.”
“You’ll testify for me?” they raised a bewildered eyebrow. “Really?”
“If –” in lieu of a finger, she lifted the gun to point at the ceiling – “and only if, you follow everything that I say right now.”
Finally, the storm retreated back to its designated corners.
With a bow and a shrewd smile, Severus gestured to the curtains. “Shall we?”
It turned out that they had been right, Doctor Balachandra wouldn’t have found their goods. Hurrying them along whenever they showed signs of slowing, peeking anxiously at the minute and second hands on her watch (she had always preferred analogues, they didn’t strain her eyes as much), she tried not to feel robbed when they led her behind a wall – its cracks still pulsed dimly yellow, so Shappa must have been by recently, perhaps Doctor Balachandra was right and she’d been the one to tip Severus off – and down into tunnels she hadn’t even known to exist. Wide, well-worn, expansive, branching off every few metres to disappear into earthen darkness.
The deeper they ran – yes, they were running now, they had less than a minute, she was certain – the stonier the world around them became. Her breath echoed off the stone, questions burned the back of her mind, still she forced herself into silence, time enough for questions later, out there, among the glitter-smear stars, when all of this would be gone –
“Stop.”
She did. A cluster of glowworms hung wiggled in the ceiling. In their light, Severus had taken on the appearance of a malnourished ghost.
“Look away.”
She snapped, “The world’s ending and you want me to close my eyes like a kid on the playground?”
Silence, only the dark space beneath their brows.
Scoffing, she turned around, kept a hand on her gun, pricked her ears up, listened carefully to the shuffling and slamming and cursing behind her. A glow worm worked on its nest above her. She watched its body, its little mouth and thought about how if they killed each other down here nobody would ever find them. Their bodies wouldn’t even burn in the brilliance of the sun – the muscle and bone and blood and water would simply come apart in a couple billion unrelated particles and cease to exist.
“Where?”
She turned. The dark pits of Severus’ eyes stared back at her. “What?”
“Where do I send it?”
A chute had opened up in the wall, a screen and a couple of buttons set into its shallows.
No questions. “The port. Chute 3E.” She checked her watch – thirty-one minutes past two. “Should we be able to here the alarms down here?”
One box after another, Severus’ goods whooshed off to be useful, and though they looked mournfully after each one, they clearly weren’t grieving enough to forget to repay her with a derisive sound. “We’re ten metres underground.”
“That’s not an answer.”
They shrugged. “It’s a bit weird if you can’t hear anything at all. These things channel sound pretty well.”
“Only me?” She went to help them with the boxes. Those pits stared at her for a moment, again, stopped her in her tracks, before they were averted. She passed Severus a box.
They took it, shoved it in the chute, pressed a couple buttons. “Busted ears, remember?”
The box disappeared.
Doctor Balachandra shifted her weight, thought back, said finally, “No.”
“Ah, that’s right,” Severus chuckled. “Forgot I’d been careful not to tell your helicopter ass back then.”
“You hear me now?”
“Yeah, yeah. Only some frequencies, and sometimes it gets worse. Its fine, now, I guess.”
“Like bad knees.”
“Yeah, like your knees. Except I can’t tell the weather.”
The two of them worked in silence for a while.
“There’s nothing you can do about that alarm,” they said, finally. “Just forget it.”
Doctor Balachandra hummed, stretched up to start another row.
><
“High Receiver Makulu reporting, 0330 SET, E01, sector non-applicable, starship Nahomtima III.”
{A breath. Or a gasp? Certainty Unattainable.}
“Ira Noelani Makulu taking executive action. Cutting the line.”
><
Staring at it, really looking at it after all those years, Kieran felt strangely reprimanded.
See how long you’ve taken, it seemed to say, see how we’ve suffered.
He put a hand on its metal shell, traced the veins of its mechanic heart, watched the magnetic push and pull of the layer just outside paint long caresses on its sides.
“I see you,” he whispered. Don’t worry, little one.
Encased in the aquatic pretences of the creatures outside, it felt that they were suspended in the world, not the other way around, not the way it was, not that this little heart held within it the balance and power and life of everything around it – an unassuming, easily forgotten centerpoint.
“You would think that we would learn, wouldn’t you,” said Kieran softly, rubbing its carefully carved grooves. “I’m sorry that we couldn’t be better for you.”
The heart whirred on, silent. Its control lights glowed copper red – power-saving mode.
Giving it a final stroke, sure to focus on the beating vibrations beneath his fingertips until his hand was by his side and he couldn’t feel a thing, Kieran moved to the panel on its side, opened it up with a screwdriver. Old-school was Best-school, sometimes. The thought made him smile.
Somehow, now, at the end, he found smiling much easier.
There, he found the correct set of wires, traced the knobs and metal points in the heart’s innards until the right shapes took form beneath his fingers. Muscle memory grabbed the steering wheel and sang success when he rearranged them all so that the wires and tubes pressed on his muscles in the places he remembered from when he’d been sixteen, his grandfather’s guiding hand on his shoulder blades.
The switch was right there, uncovered, in front of his face.
“This is gonna hurt a little,” he told the heart. “You won’t like it. Cardio is always painful, you’re a lucky one, really. You get it with an added package of freedom, hm?”
He bumped the heart’s shell with his shoulder and flipped the switch.
The Eye lit up. For the first time since the few days after its creation, it was working at one hundred percent – even its communicator came online, the antennae picking up scratches and buzzes until they levelled out and distinct voices came out, tens, hundreds, all layered over one another in an amalgamated human hum. The heart shone blue, green, grey, the creatures of the layer around broke formation and scattered to the layer’s distant edges.
Kieran did his best to block out the vibrating world.
Like ignoring an angry bee, he told himself. The worst thing that could happen at this moment would be if he heard someone’s voice. (Even thinking their names was out of the question.) It wouldn’t be just him here, then, would it? And this was a matter between him and the heart.
He focused his attention on the shell’s veins, on the way they had started heating up, orange, then red, then white. Once again, even as the heart remained unmoved, they seemed to speak to him.
Good job, little one, they said, the hardest part will be over soon, don’t you worry.
Finally, first from its veins, then from its innards, then all over like a brilliant coal flung out of a crackling fire, the heart began to glow. Kieran climbed back into Sofia’s craft, steered out into the layer outside, watched as it cracked, the thing inside struggling to hatch, tearing through metal shell after metal shell like paper. It consumed them, collapsed them into itself, and though Kieran’s eyes burned in the light he couldn’t look away.
In the endless light, he found, instead of truth or joy or vengeance, time swam, complete and circular, apart from past or present or future, and where the communicator had vanished the time hidden inside him took its place.
There was once voice among the million that came not from before him but from behind, its hand steady on his back.
“Humans have an unfortunate tendency to go blind when they look into a star,” the memory joked. “So, you either board your eyes up, or you catch the stars in stone.”
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