Dead Star

2. A Slow Cruelty-2

Was he testing her? She was suddenly past caring; she had already lost everything. “The ship you rescued me in, it's capable of FTL travel?”

“I've made metaspace jumps in the Radiant Dragon many, many times. And now you've made several, too. As you'll be aware, your mind is still your own, your soul hasn't been ripped screaming from your body.”

Did she know that? She felt like a very different person from the young woman who'd lived on Maes Far just a few months earlier. The thoughts that dripped through her mind in quiet moments often seemed unfamiliar, alien, like they were intruding from outside. Was she the same? Of course, she didn't believe any of the stories about bodies and souls separating if forced to travel at speeds above the light barrier, but that didn't mean she was still herself. She no longer knew what that meant.

“You're telling me we're not in the Maes Far system anymore.”

Ondo nodded his agreement. “The Refuge is a long way from any system, a long way from any place that Concordance might think to come looking for me.”

“Can't they follow your trail?”

“They try; I take steps to make sure they don't succeed. Multiple metaspace hops to be certain no one is following before I come anywhere near and very careful quarantining before I approach. It's kept me safe for the thirty years I've lived here.”

She'd assumed he'd wanted to show her Maes Far, images of how it now was. The solar shroud would be complete: an opaque, orbiting disk that moved with finely-calculated exactness to stay precisely in front of the sun relative to the planet's surface, cutting off all heat, all light except for the flaring corona. A dark sun to replace the light. But that wasn't it.

“Show me what you brought me up here to see.”

He made no movement, some control fleck of his own sending instructions to the Refuge. In an instant, the walls and domed ceiling of the little room turned transparent. There, above and around her, filling one half of the sky, lay the sparkling mass of the galaxy.

It was a familiar-enough sight, of course. On dark nights on Maes Far it stretched overhead, a shimmering and meandering pathway. Her ancestors had called it the Diamond Road, imagined it as a path you could walk to reach the gods. She knew well the truth of what it was, but still, as a girl, she'd liked to stare up at it and dream about taking that journey.

The galaxy seen from Maes Far was nothing compared to its appearance from the Refuge. Her planet lay in the galactic plane, as almost all systems did, making the stars appear as the shimmering, dust-occluded line across the night sky that she knew so well. The Refuge, however, clearly lay far outside the plane. The entire disc of the galaxy lay tilted before Selene's eyes, with very few stars nearby and its structure clear: the spiralling arms and the bright glow of the central mass.

The sight of it sparkled on her retinas. She studied it for long moments with both her natural right eye, and then with her enhanced left eye, picking out different wavelengths of radiation, the different spectra of the stars, the glowing clouds of nebulae. From the angle they were at, the whole thing looked curiously like an eye itself: the ovoid shape, the rainbow hues and the glowing central mass as the pupil.

“Where is Maes Far?”

Part-way along one of the spiral arms, towards the central mass, a star began to flash. There was nothing remarkable or special about it. Her homeworld's sun was insignificant: one star among billions. She knew well the scale of the galaxy, but the sight of the whole thing laid out before her took her breath away. When you were inside it you couldn't see the entirety.

Her life had been so small. Briefly, she felt the tug of an unfamiliar emotion: a wonder at what all those stars were, at who and what was to be found there.

“And Sintorus?”

Another insignificant light flashed, farther out along the same arm.

Turning away for a moment, she saw that on the opposite side of the dome, away from the galactic mass, there was only darkness. There was the deep void of intergalactic space, with only other galaxies, other islands in the emptiness, to provide any illumination. In its own way that was beautiful, too. Light and dark. With her left eye, she could peer farther and farther into the void, deeper and deeper into time. Wherever she looked there were more galaxies, and more, and more. Distant places she would never and could never visit.

Ondo was still looking at the swirl of their galaxy. “Concordance control almost all of it, their Cathedral ships in orbit around every technologically-advanced planet. Somewhere in that central mass lives Omn, if they are to be believed. The God Star; the Light at the Heart of the Galaxy, attended and served by Primo Carious and Secundus Godel and the rest of the Augurs. Of course, it is a place no one can go, a being no one may approach. No one can go anywhere without the Cathedral ships and the Void Walkers intervening to stop them. They cannot allow truth to trouble their mystique. You grasp the scale of what they are, now? How they dominate and belittle us?”

She didn't need his patronising words. He thought she was ignorant of galactic affairs, brought up on her backwater world, but that wasn't how it was. “I've always known what they are; I was raised to understand exactly that. What can you do in the face of such power? The galaxy is beautiful, but the sight of it changes nothing. Concordance are all-powerful and I'm a broken cripple despite all your efforts. You thought showing me this would somehow change my mind? Fill me with some zeal to fight back? I'm f*****g exhausted just coming up here, and I'm in a chair that does all the moving for me. My bones hurt.”

He held up his hands as if to fend off her fury. “I wanted you to see this because it's a glorious sight, that's all. I often come up here myself to think; I find it gives me a welcome sense of perspective. I'm sorry if my words offended you.”

He wasn't being intentionally condescending. He wasn't used to talking to people.

“Forget it,” she said.

After a moment, Ondo continued. “We barely know each other, but I knew your father and I see some of him in you. You're still so ill and weak and you've been through a terrible ordeal. You've lost everything you knew and loved, and you've barely survived. It's natural you feel beaten down, defeated. I understand that, truly. But I wanted you also to know that after the sunset comes always the sunrise. One day you will be stronger, and you will be yourself again. Changed, yes, but you. Maybe you won't want to join me in my struggle – I'm not asking that – but I believe that, eventually, you will be glad you survived. That there will be good days.”

“You're saying you won't give me the release I asked for?”

He turned to consider her, frowns wrinkling his face. “I've done everything I can to save you, mend your body, keep you alive. But if you die on the operating table once more, I will let you go if that is truly what you want.”

Was it what she wanted? The thought of release was tempting. All her loss and physical agony would be over. And yet, and yet. That small voice inside her did want to fight Concordance, however ridiculous that notion was. Perhaps it didn't matter that you couldn't possibly win; perhaps there was sense and reason in simply trying. The swirl of the galaxy hung before her, promising countless worlds she could visit, marvels and wonders she could explore. Ondo had given her that possibility. She'd assumed she'd spend the rest of her life on Maes Far but now there was all that waiting for her.

The galaxy, and the Concordance ships that would pursue her relentlessly.

“It's hopeless,” she said. “They're so powerful and you're old and weak and powerless. What can you do?”

He looked amused rather than offended. “There are days when I despair, it is true. Days when continuing to fight seems ridiculous. But I pull myself together and tell myself the darkest hour is before the dawn, and other such platitudes, and I carry on with it, because what else is there? The physicist in me wonders whether Concordance rule is something like a chaotic system: superficially stable, but prone to violent transformations with relatively little input.”

“They don't seem very vulnerable to me.”

Ondo nodded his head in agreement. “The question is, how much is that a façade and how much the reality? I think we can agree, at least, that Omn and his church are not all-powerful, or else we wouldn't be here having this conversation. Godel's brand of madness is one thing, but I genuinely think there's a secret, a reason for everything that's happened. Or at least, something that makes sense of it. I see hope in that.”

“You sound delusional to me.”

“I like to think of it as optimistic.”

She asked her next question quietly. “And how many more operations do I have to go through? If that's what I want to do.”

“At most, four or five. Your skeletal structure, your musculature and your nervous systems are complete, as is your blood circulation. Your lymphatic system, your endocrine glands and your digestive tract are nearing a normal operational profile. Your reproductive organs are fully functional. There are some brain fleck enhancements that still need to be made and then, of course, there is your skin: once I have grown sufficient amount of dermis from your cells, I'll have to graft it across your left half. That will be raw for a time, and sore, but the worst of it is over, I promise you.”

“And what right did you have to do any of it? What right did you have to shape me as you saw fit? Maybe I wanted to stay as I was. Broken.”

He nodded, conceding it was a fair question. “I remade you in your own image, as much as I could. I strove for symmetry in the reconstruction of your body, and where that didn't help, I aimed as far as possible for some sort of body form norm. I'm aware that is a cultural construction as much as anything. You may have preferred some radically different biology. I may have got everything very wrong. I reconstructed you to be biologically female, capable of bearing new life, as that is how you were. I may have got that wrong, too; you may prefer to be reproductively male, or asexual, or some other arrangement. I had no access to your self-perceptions, of how you understand yourself. I did what I could, and in truth a lot of it could be undone or reconfigured or added to if you wish, although that would mean a much greater number of procedures. I did give you considerable artificial augmentation: you are capable of much greater feats of strength, speed, dexterity and computational prowess than you once were. Again, I may have done that mistakenly. You may prefer to be as close as possible to your former level of function.”

In his own flawed way, he had tried. Maybe that was all anyone could do. The anger that had flared through her subsided, a little. She would think about the options he'd given her. “If I did live, where would I go? What would I do?”

“You'd be able to fit in with the populations of many worlds. We can invent you an identity, go there in secret, just as your father did. I can alter your appearance within a wide set of parameters, and you can live your life. You get to choose your existence; which world will be your home. It is a possibility few are granted these days.”

She didn't take her eyes off the galaxy as she considered his words, trying to make sense of them.

“There is one more thing I would like you to see, if you have the strength,” he said. “Something smaller. There are wonders in the galaxy as well as horrors. Or there could be.”

“What wonders?”

He looked a little uncomfortable, as if he wasn't sure how she'd react. “You've heard of Coronade?”

His words threw her. Her mind was spinning; she needed to think about everything he'd said, and suddenly he was talking about fairy tales. Had he quietly lost his grip on sanity at some point over the years?

She answered warily. “Who hasn't? Every child grows up with stories of it. The golden planet where all is peace and happiness. What of it?”

“That is what I wish to show you. I've discovered Coronade isn't just a child's story. It's a planet in the galaxy. I know it is real.”

“That's nonsense. How can you know such a thing?”

He couldn't keep the delight from his features. “Because three years ago, I found the proof. I recovered images of the mythical planet of Coronade.”