The Firmament of Flame, page 21
“For all we know, not even those were all protected,” Javier added. “The worlds where other species were evolving, I mean. Just because there were fifteen organic species that survived doesn’t mean there were only fifteen to start with. The forerunners might have been nurturing dozens of other species, hundreds, maybe, only to have those wiped out as well. The hate that must have taken…” He shook his head. “The forerunners killed off the Cyn in a single stroke—or at least forced them into some kind of hibernation—and they killed themselves to do it. Because of what the Cyn had done.”
“Until we woke them up again,” JackDoes agreed. “The Cyn, I mean. Until we found them. During the Golden Age. We must have. And we just assumed they were … new, were like us. Because just like the Barious, whatever it was that the forerunners had done to them … they did not remember. The wars, the forerunners … not any of it.” His tail lashed uncomfortably at the thought; species memory, cultural memory, was important to the Reint, the thing that kept them from descending to the savagery that had defined the world where they were born.
A world, just like the others, changed by the forerunners. While the Reint had been evolving into the dominant predators of their world, the forerunners had been watching, changing that same world, raising the oxygen content, changing the gravity, the rotational forces, the atmospheric pressure; it must have taken millennia, longer, to do so without threatening the fragile life already manifesting. But they’d thought they’d had the time.
“Somehow, though, they must have learned,” Sahluk said. “The Cyn, I mean. They must have—maybe they found another monolith, another place like this; maybe it was even this place that they found, if they somehow traced the Vyriat’s path back here.”
“And maybe that explains what happened to the Vyriat,” Sho added darkly, echoing my thought from earlier. “Why nobody ever learned about this place. We’ve seen pyres like those outside before. When a Cyn wants to destroy all traces of its carnage.”
“But either way, they learned what they were,” Sahluk continued, “that they were … manifested, whatever the hell that means … as the enemy of organic life, as the enemy of the forerunners who had been protecting the rest of us.”
“The schism,” Jane nodded, seeing where he was going. “The first great division of the Golden Age, the division that marked the end of the Golden Age. The Cyn learned what they were, and so they viewed the rest of us as … weak. Interlopers, defilers, unworthy of the worlds we were settling. A plague on the very stars, the children of gods they had wiped out. We were treating them as equals, and suddenly they learned their origins were completely different from ours. You don’t negotiate with beings you believe are beneath you, yet still might pose a threat—you annihilate them. The same way we would a particularly infectious virus.”
“Except they weren’t strong enough—not yet,” Sahluk agreed. “There were never as many Cyn as there were the other species; we know that much. So they withdrew—hid. Building their strength; biding their time. And then the pulse. It makes them stronger; they feed upon it. And it weakened the rest of us.” He turned toward Jane, his crystalline eyebrows furrowed so deep I could barely see his one good eye. “We did this. Us. The Justified. We created the circumstances where they could strike back.”
“But why … why seek out the gifted? Why hunt us?” Sho asked. “How does that … how do we fit into all of this?”
“Why are you and Esa the only ones who can read the writing—can see it at all?” Javier asked him in return. “The only common thread between the two of you—between you, and none of the rest of us … is your gifts. Esa’s not Wulf; she’s not the only human; the common denominator must be your gifts. Somehow, the next generation are attuned to the forerunners. It’s as if they foresaw your coming somehow—”
Jane shook her head. “But that doesn’t make sense—it’s pulse radiation that creates the gifted, that makes their abilities manifest, and how could the forerunners know anything about pulse radiation when all of this happened thousands upon thousands of years before the pulse?”
“We were taught that the pulse bomb had forerunner tech at the center of it,” JackDoes said with a hiss. Unlike Jane, Sahluk, and Marus, he hadn’t been alive when the pulse was set off, but every Justified knew of the role we had played—the weight we bore. “Whatever the pulse was, beneath all the tech: it came from the forerunners—maybe it was the same weapon they used against the Cyn.”
“Except if it had been, we would have all been born into a pulsed universe,” Javier shook his head. “Pulse radiation doesn’t decay, not at all. So that doesn’t track.”
“Well, there’s some connection between the gifted and the forerunners,” Sho insisted. “There has to be; Javier’s right, that’s why Esa and I are the only—”
“We need to focus,” Jane insisted. “We came down here to learn where the direct rift leads, what these Dead Furnaces have to do with the Cyn, have to do with the gifted. Somehow, the Vyriat who found this place found that location—that has to be what’s on the other end of the rift, why the Bright Wanderers call this ‘the Furnace’s Gate.’ The Vyriat explorers, before they were wiped out, built the rift to lead there with knowledge they acquired here.”
“Maybe … maybe this place told them,” I offered slowly. “The writing … it changed, to answer the Preacher, remember?” I looked to Sho for confirmation, who nodded. “Maybe it told them something different entirely.”
“But it’s gone now,” Sho shook his head, still staring upward, at the space where the light had been. “I think … it’s like an oracle, maybe. It can only answer a few questions, and then it has to … that’s all we get.”
“Not a great deal of help, all in all,” Sahluk grunted. “You’d think if the forerunners wanted us to have answers, they would have left behind an AI—or whatever the hell that was—that could actually tell us something useful, rather than riddles only some of us can even read.”
“They knew the Cyn would be just as likely to find this place as we were,” JackDoes shook his head, disagreeing with the big Mahren—a relatively rare thing. “There may well have been secrets—deeper, darker secrets—they were trying to protect.”
Javier nodded. “The words that manifested for us—for Sho and Esa—might have been entirely different from what was shown to the Vyriat, the map that led them to the Dead Furnaces. They couldn’t have had gifted among their number, after all: that was well before the pulse. So maybe it told them something else, gave them some … other lead, some other piece of the puzzle.”
“It pointed them somewhere it doesn’t want us to go,” I nodded.
“Thankfully, we can anyway,” Jane replied. “The direct rift is still built, still functioning. We can power it up with a flick of a switch, in the facility above.”
“You’re saying we should follow in the Vyriat’s footsteps,” JackDoes said.
She nodded. “The Vyriat; the Cyn who came after; the Bright Wanderers. They all went through the rift—I don’t think any of us have any question about that.” She looked around for any kind of dissent; got nothing but stone faces, an acknowledgment that what she was saying tracked, made sense. “The Cyn were once bent on annihilation, domination, yet now they’re building this … cult, these Bright Wanderers. What changed? What are their goals now?”
“Whatever it is, I doubt it’s good for anyone else in the universe,” Sahluk rumbled. “Not with the dreadnaughts their followers are building. You’re right,” he nodded at Jane. “The only way to find out what they’re planning now—regardless of, you know, all this ‘What is life? Why are we here?’ stuff—is to follow in their footsteps. And those lead through the rift.”
“But if there are answers to those other questions, I, for one, would not mind knowing them,” JackDoes murmured. “What we find on the other side—”
“We’ll find a fight,” Jane answered him. “We always do.” She was patting at her pocket; withdrew a cigarette, and a lighter, and tucked the former in her mouth before sparking a flame with the latter. It seemed almost … profane, her smoking in this place, but I think, in a way, that was why she was doing it—not just to deal with the stress and the strangeness of this place, but as a rejection of the notion that we were all the forerunners’ creations, beholden to their long-dead will.
Jane had never been much for religion, nor any kind of worship. Whatever we were meant to have been, whatever their plans for us might have demanded, we weren’t that thing any longer—and, as far as she was concerned, we never would be. It was what lay ahead of us that mattered, not what lay behind.
The other pilot had said something, over the comm: that Jane always looked to the horizon, spent all her time looking forward, rather than back. My mentor was doubling down on that impulse now, and I couldn’t blame her—the wars of the Cyn and the forerunners were in the distant past. The threat of the Bright Wanderers, of the Cyn in the present—those were still ahead of us, and whatever the forerunners had meant us to know, we didn’t: we could only deal with the dangers that lay ahead.
Then again, of course I agreed with her: she was my mentor, after all. Full thrust and load the torpedoes, shift the shields forward and go full tilt at your enemy—find the fight before the fight finds you. Hit them before they can hit first.
It had been Mo’s way; it was Jane’s way; now it was mine, too. We needed to follow the Cyn, to find the war they were building—because I had no doubt that was exactly what they were planning; their long-delayed vengeance for the forerunners’ last, desperate act—and we needed to hit them first. Any other questions could wait.
And that would mean heading deeper into the unknown; it would mean opening the direct rift, and following it wherever it might lead.
CHAPTER 15
Esa
It was time to go. The desire to stay, to investigate more, to learn everything we possibly could about this place: we all felt it, but the truth was, that was a job for scientists, for historians, for people with tools and knowledge that we lacked. When we finally returned to Sanctum, we could send a team back here to do a full study, but that wasn’t us—that wasn’t the mission. We were operatives: our job was to identify, analyze, and dismantle threats to the Justified, and one such threat was looming over the metaphorical horizon like a storm front in the distance, ready to break and drown us all.
Whatever the forerunners had been doing when they created the Cyn, whatever it might mean that they’d terraformed the worlds of the species evolving toward sentience during their eons-long dominion over the galaxy; those were questions that had gone unanswered for hundreds of thousands of years. They could wait, just a while longer. Whatever it was the Bright Wanderers were planning, by contrast, could not.
I went to find the Preacher.
Jane offered to go; I told her I would handle it. The bond the Preacher and I shared was a strange one, all wrapped up in guilt and grief and sadness, but it was a strong one, too. The hurt she was feeling right now—it would take that strength to reach through it.
I found her standing on a series of long steps, descending toward what might have once been a canal—assuming running water was something the forerunners had needed, the same as we did—but now was just … empty, a long stretch of nothing that cut through the broken city, once an artery for its populace, now lacking any purpose at all, given that the populace it had once been meant to serve was long since dust.
That might have been what had drawn the Preacher there to begin with: a thing without function, its purpose long since lost.
“It was always … such a comfort,” she said, staring down into the emptiness of the canal. She hadn’t even turned when I approached; didn’t need to, had sensors that could “see” me coming by changes in ambient temperature and pressure and air flow. The Barious walked through a very different world than the rest of us did: more vibrant, or simply more telling, perhaps.
I sat beside her; she kept standing. “Knowing you had a purpose?” I guessed, staring out at the metal ribbon of not-a-canal-any-longer as well. “Even if that purpose had been taken from you?” I understood, in my own way. “Sometimes not knowing a thing is better than knowing,” especially when it came to faith. Mo had taught me that.
The Preacher nodded. “For thousands of years, my species watched the other sentient races—the organics—struggle with those questions: why are we here, why were we born, what are we meant to do? It all seemed so pointless; inapplicable to us. We were alive because we’d been built, or built each other; we were born for a specific reason, just as we were meant to achieve something specific. The fact that it had been … taken … from us didn’t change the fact that it existed at all. Nihilism is a concept the Barious cannot apply to themselves. Even when the organics tried to enslave us, to treat us as lesser—we always knew that we were so much more than what they thought. That knowing was at the very heart of us, as a species, as a culture. We were built for a reason; the rest of you were not. It made us … different. Special.”
“You’re still special,” I told her.
“We’re the forgotten tools of a dead race, never allowed a chance to complete the duty we were built for. We were meant to guide you, to teach you, to shepherd you toward better angels than your base natures—sometimes violent, destructive, hateful—might allow. What do you think the universe would be like, Esa, if we’d been allowed to do so? Would the sect wars still have happened? Would the wars that roiled the human homeworld, the Wulf one, even before you discovered interstellar travel—could we have stopped those, as well? If we’d been where we were supposed to be, as opposed to locked away, like a frail, ailing child in a tower … what did our creators cost you, in their fear for us?”
“Preacher—do you really expect me to feel sorry for myself, in all this?” I couldn’t help it; I laughed, a little, as I asked. It was such a stupid thing to think—that, with as much pain as she was in at the moment, I’d only be thinking of what the forerunners’ revelations meant for humanity—that I had to laugh; a reminder that, for as much as the Barious could sense about the world around them, they sometimes had some massive blind spots as far as human—organic—nature went.
“The universe should have been better,” she said, something almost wistful in her tone—a grief for a thing that had never been.
“No,” I disagreed, as firmly as I could. “The universe should have been exactly what it is. If humanity had evolved on a world where the Barious just gave them all the answers—if that had been true for the other organic species as well—we wouldn’t be humanity anymore. We’d all just be … imitations of the forerunners, pale shadows of the beings that created your race. Which would mean we’d make their mistakes, too. At least this way, we get to be ourselves. For better or worse, we get to decide who we are, which paths we take.”
“Being ‘who you are’ means being sixteen separate peoples, peoples that have spent almost your entire history killing each other, with the brief exception of the Golden Age; it means never working toward a common goal, a common purpose. It means being creatures that have drowned all you know in blood, more than once. We were meant to prevent that.”
“Maybe. But maybe we learn something from that drowning. Every time. You’re looking at the Golden Age—that brief moment where everything worked—and seeing that as how things should have been all along. But the Golden Age only meant something because we collectively decided to exchange ideas, to trust one another, to love one another. We chose that, each of us, each species. If we’d been … guided there, told there was no other path—it wouldn’t have had the same meaning.”
“The galaxy would still be better.”
“The galaxy would be calmer—not the same thing. It would be more homogenous, too. We’d all be what the forerunners, what the Barious, wanted us to be: we would have had no choice. Now, we get to be different. And different is … just more interesting.”
A small smile in her voice, as she replied, “Are we still talking about my crisis of faith, Esa? Or are we talking about the fact that you’ve finally realized you’re attracted to Marus’s young ward?”
I groaned, making it a little more theatrical than it had to be, for her sake—though the groan itself was all me; had everyone realized this before I did? At least she felt up to making jokes at all: that seemed like progress.
“Still,” she continued, looking back down at the canal. “I … take your point. I could have told you, months ago, that you two were … suited … for each other. But you needed to discover it for yourself. With the Barious guiding the other species, you would not have discovered anything on your own. Could not have learned; could not have grown. The fact remains: what you grew toward was a collection of species that drowned the universe in war. That released the pulse. That damned my people.”
“A … mistake … we’re out here trying to fix,” I reminded her. “Yes, the Bright Wanderers—and the Cyn—represent a threat, to the Justified, to the galaxy at large. And we have to answer that. But we came looking because we wanted to help the Barious. Because you’re part of the galaxy—you’re one of us, one of the sentient races.”
“And we’re only now realizing just how true that is,” she murmured. “Just as lost as the rest of you.”
“Maybe. But getting lost is the only way you find something new. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, Preacher, but learning all this, it represents—can represent—a new chapter in Barious history. The first new chapter, really, since the Reetha woke you, millennia ago. A chapter you get to write for yourselves.”
