The Firmament of Flame, page 20
“Stop,” Javier said to all of us, a sharp note of command in his usually agreeable voice. “Everybody stop. Raise your hand if you’re seeing a star map, in the air above the … church.”
I did turn away from the words at that: they hadn’t changed so far, and besides, I needed to know if Sho and I were the only ones who could see them, if it was some sort of shared delusion and both of us had lost our grip on reality, like the very strangeness of this place had infected us somehow.
We were. All the rest had raised their hands; only Sho and I kept them down.
“Sho,” I said to the young Wulf, my voice tight. “Read the first line.”
He swallowed, and nodded; if it was some kind of delusion, he’d be seeing something other than what I was, would read something different. “‘We thought we were angels, when we first took to the stars,’” he spoke softly, and something inside me unclenched, at least a little; if it was a hallucination, at least we were seeing the same thing, something this place wanted us to see.
He looked over at me, his expression worried, and I nodded to confirm, picking up where he’d stopped as I read the flowing script for the benefit of the others: “We thought we could ride the currents of every sky, tide to tide, horizon to horizon. Thought we could better every world we touched.” That was it, that was all that was written in the light—but even as we spoke the words, that wasn’t true, because they shifted, changed; I’d been right.
A new script replaced the old stanzas, as if reading them aloud had given the light permission to display more of the ancient … whatever it was, sacred text or tombstone monument or last will and testament of the final forerunner who’d survived in this abandoned place.
“It was here we created the shepherds,” Sho continued, reading the new words now, “a new form of life designed by our hands, for our purpose.” The Barious. The designs, the schematics, in the Verisson arch: the script was talking about the Barious. “We created them to protect, to nurture, to guide those who would come after, those who were already becoming—for we knew, even as we faced the infinite, that our fall was inevitable.”
“Shepherds,” the Preacher said softly, as if the word was a new thing, some concept she wasn’t able to grasp. “Shepherds. That can’t—”
“Let them finish,” Sahluk rumbled; I didn’t turn to look at the others again—I was still staring at the script floating in midair—but the Preacher fell silent, and Sho continued reading the same script I saw:
“Because angels,” he read, “by their very essence, require devils. Or create them.”
The writing shimmered again, changing as Sho read the final stanza, and again, new words. “Evil is not merely the absence of good,” I picked up the thread, “it is a thing apart, in opposition. And everything in nature has its nemesis, called to balance the scales. In our desire to do great good, in building the shepherds, in clawing back the chaos, we had shifted the weight too far, and the universe…” I swallowed, had to stop to lick my lips; there was something horribly final about the next line: “the universe made an answer.”
“What does that mean?” Javier whispered. “What does any of that—”
“Let them finish,” Sahluk said again, and like the Preacher, Javier lapsed into silence.
“Simply by being,” Sho read after the next verse had unveiled itself, “by manifesting new sentience, by unifying the chaos into harmony, we willed our own executioners into existence as well. Beings that turned the very sky to fire in their plunge from the heavens; beings descending from a firmament of flame, one that swept low over our worlds, to consume.” The words Sho was reading were the same that I saw, but I had a terrible desire, at that moment, for that not to be true, because I thought I knew what they meant, and I wanted, more than anything, for the words of the forerunners to be something—anything—else.
They weren’t: they shimmered again, the story continuing, and it was my turn to read. “A byproduct of our passage; an infestation, an infection, that we could not fight. Our punishment; our reckoning; our…” My voice choked on the last word, caught, just a bit, as I said, “our sin.”
Except that’s not what the word spelled—it was a homophone, a matching inflection in the language those who wrote the stanzas couldn’t have known:
The word was written “Cyn.”
“No … no. No.” The Preacher shook her head, firmly. “The forerunners created the Barious—they created my people. We were their children, we were meant to…” She lapsed into silence, then, without any prompting by Sahluk, but it didn’t matter—no new words had replaced the old. The story—the testament—was done, its implications clear:
The forerunners had created the Barious, then they’d created the Cyn, and then the Cyn had murdered them all.
“We were meant for something else,” the Preacher whispered. No one else had spoken; we were all trying to just … process … what we’d learned. So was the Preacher, but this was so much more to her—an answer to the question the Barious had asked since they were awoken, millennia ago. An answer to the question every species asked—“Why are we here?”—but unlike the rest of us, it was never a rhetorical curiosity for the Barious, because something had made them; not gods, not evolution, not celestial forces, but another species, one long since dust.
Made into dust, we knew now, by the Cyn.
“We were meant for something…” Except she didn’t know what they’d been meant for—or hadn’t, not until this moment. “We were not meant to serve,” she said finally, a Barious refutation from centuries ago, a rallying cry from their species when some of the sects decided that’s exactly what they were created for: that they were AIs, and AIs existed to serve organics, so that’s what the Barious should do, sentience or no, free will or no. They’d tried to make the Barious into slaves.
“That’s not what it says,” JackDoes added quietly. “Not what they said.” He nodded in our direction, toward Sho and I. “It said ‘guide’; it said to ‘nurture.’ It said—”
“We were not meant to be defined by you at all!” She almost screamed the words, more anger, more raw pain in her voice than I’d ever heard. This was her entire life—her hundreds upon hundreds of years—being made a lie. “We were created by better beings, by beings that knew more, had answers, had compassion, had … had … had…”
“They had all those things,” Javier agreed with her, though nobody was stepping close to her, nobody was touching her—the sheer desperation radiating off of her skin was like heat, you could almost feel it, like she might lash out at whomever was close, just to have something to hit. “They had them for their children—the Barious. And they had them for the other forms of life evolving around the galaxy, the other species—”
“Our gods are a lie,” she whispered; the first time I’d ever heard any Barious refer to the forerunners in that way, her voice bitter around the word, speaking it like a curse.
I reached out, and took her hand; she let me. But she still wouldn’t look at me—wouldn’t look at any of us.
“The implications of this … they go beyond the Barious, beyond even the Cyn,” JackDoes hissed, though he looked nervously at the Preacher as he said it, to make sure she wouldn’t take offense. She didn’t move—didn’t react at all, just continued to stare at the floor, her expression completely blank, like she’d turned off the synthetic “muscles” behind her face. Only the light shining through her eyes showed that there was still someone in there at all.
“How do you mean?” Sahluk asked the Reint.
“He means exactly what he said,” Javier replied. “The forerunners created the Cyn—or at least, created the conditions for them to manifest—and they created the Barious, to … guide … the organic life developing across the universe. And that may not have been all.”
“And what does that mean?” Sahluk asked again, the soldier scowling openly now with his one good eye; he didn’t like any of this, and I couldn’t blame him.
“‘Unifying the chaos into harmony,’” Sho repeated the words he and I had read, picking up Javier’s argument. “We’ve always wondered why the lost homeworlds were so similar, in terms of gravity, atmosphere, pressure, that sort of thing: this is why. The forerunners were … terraformers, making certain the worlds giving rise to new life would have that uniformity—so that when we inevitably came together, we’d have those conditions in common, making it easier for us to—to cooperate, to…”
“They set the stage for … for the Golden Age.” I couldn’t help the awe in my voice as I said it.
“They must have been alone,” JackDoes whispered—the great fear of all Reint. “The only space-faring species in the galaxy at the time of their existence. They wanted to make sure we wouldn’t face that same loneliness.”
“They wanted to make sure we would come together—and they built the Barious to … to teach us, I suppose,” Javier agreed.
“And that’s all we were,” the Preacher had come back to us, and the bitterness in her words was so deep I could almost see it, tearing her apart from the inside. “Created to serve you. Created to … beholden to…”
The light flared back to life; more words now, appearing in the center of the cathedral, as if the Preacher’s very anger had willed them into being. “There’s … more,” I said, turning back toward the brilliance.
“Read them,” the Preacher said, the words halfway between a command and a plea.
The words of her creators—those who had touched the evolution not just of the Barious, but of all of our species, apparently. All the indignities, the atrocities, visited upon the Barious during their species’ troubled coexistence with organic life, and they’d comforted themselves with the notion that at least they had that: that they were the chosen people of their creators, creators long since vanished from the universe. And now the long-dead forerunners had taken that from her.
“We built the shepherds to protect the new children,” Sho read, turning back to face the light, “those that would arise after we were gone, into the more perfect galaxy we were creating. We built the shepherds to be guides, to pass on what we had learned, even as we decayed.” It was as if the forerunner script had heard the Preacher’s misery, had responded to it; it was answering her question, somehow.
I kept reading, following the lines of bright writing where Sho had left off. “But when the enemy came, the shepherds were even more vulnerable to their depredations than we, for we had built them in the hope of that better galaxy, one cleansed of the chaos the enemy twisted to their own ends.”
“So we hid them away, far from the place of our … our dying,” Sho stumbled on that bit, just a little, stumbled on the final, stark acknowledgment that the forerunners hadn’t just vanished, hadn’t ascended to a higher form of being or crossed over the threshold of the galaxy in search of new horizons: they’d fallen, just like everything, everyone, eventually did. “We hid them away where the enemy could not find them—where the new children might.”
Silence, then, in the cathedral, as everyone waited for Sho and me to speak again, but there was nothing: the words faded, and nothing replaced them, nothing but that shimmering light.
“We failed,” the Preacher said softly, something still broken in her voice, broken and brittle and just lost. “Before we ever awoke, we failed. We’ve always wondered why we were built, what our purpose was, how we could achieve it … What could you have been?” She looked up, taking in all of us, in turn; the various species—four different organic races, represented there, with her—that the Barious had been meant to guide, to nurture, to teach. “What could you have been, if we’d been there? What could we have taught you? How much better could you have become?”
“Preacher, that’s not—” I reached for her, but she shook her head, pushed my hand away—not roughly, as gently as she possibly could, but she didn’t want the comfort I was offering, all the same.
“They created us for a purpose, and then they took that purpose from us, and they just … left us. Sleeping. Useless. Abandoned. Tools for a project they never intended to finish. And they were the ones that took our memories. Took our purpose away. Why wouldn’t they have let us … Why didn’t we know? Why couldn’t we remember?” Her first words had been quiet, almost whispered, but the last were a shriek, aimed directly into the light, the anguished cry echoing, rebounding off of the high ceilings of the cathedral, the echoes filling the emptied city until they faded away into nothing.
No answer to her pain was forthcoming; whatever had prompted the new writing, it was dormant again now. There was no balm for her suffering; not in this place.
She sank to her knees, slowly, haloed in that brightness—it reflected and shone off her metal skin like she herself was the source of the diffuse glow. “We were supposed to be ‘shepherds,’” she said once more. “Instead, we were simply lambs. For the shearing. For the slaughter. And there was no one to protect us from the wolves. Any of us.” She looked up at the rest of us then, her eyes wide, her photoreceptors almost overloading in all that light.
I sank down beside her, and held her, and I wept with her, for her.
Because she hadn’t been built to.
CHAPTER 14
Esa
The Preacher stood, after a while; walked off, without a word. I let her go. Whatever it was that had happened here—had killed the Vyriat explorers—it was long done; this place still felt alien, hostile, to me, but those were just echoes, ghosts, of what had come before.
The Barious had been built—maybe even designed—here, and then their creators had hidden them away, because that same design had made them vulnerable to the Cyn, to the enemy that had somehow manifested from the massive changes the forerunners were visiting upon the galaxy in the course of their attempts to “improve” it. The Cyn could manipulate energy, the very same energy that coursed through the Barious’ mechanical bodies; I didn’t know exactly what the writing the forerunners left had meant when it said they “manifested” the Cyn—whether that was poetic license, fact turning to legend turning to myth even before the ancient testament was laid down, or some literal cosmic agency we just didn’t understand—but it was true that, if the Cyn had known where the Barious were, they could have wiped them out as easily as breathing.
So the Barious had slept, hidden away from their creators’ enemies, while their purpose—to teach the sentient beings who were gaining sapience across the galaxy, maturing on a scattered handful of worlds made similar by the forerunners—had slipped away. And the Preacher was left with nothing, the very sense of surety, of purpose, the thing that set the Barious apart from the other races—more than their mechanical bodies and industrial physiology—stripped away from her.
Meanwhile, the rest of us still had to deal with what all that meant for us.
“But … it doesn’t make any sense,” Sahluk was saying, shaking his head; I turned from watching the Preacher walk off, half hoping the writing would have returned to explicate some of the statements it had made, statements that shifted our entire concept of how life had evolved in the universe, but there was nothing: the forerunners’ last testament had said what it was going to say.
Miracles that came on command, I supposed, weren’t miracles at all.
“None of it does,” Sahluk continued, sitting heavily on one of the benches that crept across the cathedral floor in strange hexagonal formations—the thing creaked under his weight, but didn’t give. The forerunners had either been nearly as heavy as Mahren, or else they’d simply built to last. “If the Cyn were the enemies of the forerunners, bent on galactic annihilation—or at least galactic conquest—where did they go? Why didn’t our species evolve under their bootheel, under their control? An enemy doesn’t just stop because they’ve won; that’s the opposite of what happens.”
“Maybe they didn’t,” Jane said slowly, staring up at whatever she was seeing in the fading light—if she was seeing anything at all; the light was gone, for me, leaving nothing but the diffuse illumination that had filled the rest of the city, but clearly, Sho and I weren’t seeing what the others were. Still, even if she was still seeing the star map the others said they’d seen, that wasn’t what she was looking at: she was staring at nothing, turning over the words of the testament in her head, trying to make them fit into the universe as she knew it. “Win, I mean. You’re right—conquerors don’t stop once they’ve finished conquering. They built new empires, new civilizations, the sort of which we’ve never seen even the remnants of. Even if a new enemy had come along after, nearly wiped out the Cyn the way they wiped out the forerunners, the Cyn would have left something behind, just like the forerunners left the monoliths, the relics, the Barious.”
“Which means the Cyn didn’t ‘win’ at all,” Javier nodded.
“But neither did the forerunners,” Sahluk put in. “If they had, they would have woken the Barious up—set them to their original purpose once the fighting was done. And all of our races would have gone through a lot less pain before we made it to the stars.”
“A place of ‘dying,’” JackDoes hissed. “That’s what the words spoke of. But not, perhaps, a funeral pyre, an inevitable end—”
“A battle,” Sahluk nodded; that made sense to him. “A last stand, against the Cyn. How … desperate … they must have been, at that point. They thought they were angels, angels given dominion over all creation, and yet they were being dismantled by this unknowable enemy—they must have found a way to strike back. But only at great cost.”
“To free the universe from the grip of their enemy, they sacrificed themselves,” Sho whispered. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only way … the only way that…”
“It’s what the Justified always feared,” Jane said softly. “During the sect wars; before the pulse. That the weapons would just get … bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until someone built something capable of … this. Of that,” she nodded at the light. “Total galactic annihilation. Except for a few protected enclaves—the worlds where the organic species were evolving, evolving in the direction the forerunners wanted us to evolve. The worlds where the Barious were hidden away, and at least a few worlds still holding pockets of Cyn. Everything else…” She trailed off again. Everything else the forerunners had created, wiped away—perhaps the very devastation that had created the relics had ripped them from whatever terrestrial worlds they had begun on and flung them across the galaxy. All of it destroyed by a weapon—the last the forerunners had built. One that had ended the war, and the forerunners, and almost the Cyn.
