The Firmament of Flame, page 31
“Hoo-fucking-rah,” I agreed, and started forward, into the depths of the Dead Furnaces—and toward whatever trap awaited us.
CHAPTER 12
Esa
“This doesn’t mean … it can’t mean…” Meridian was stammering as she worked through the implications of the forerunner’s testament—what they’d built the Dead Furnaces for, what they’d done—but I shook my head.
Pretending the truth is something other than what it is will get you killed as quick as almost anything: another one of Jane’s maxims. “It does,” I told her shortly.
“‘When we rose to the stars, we found ourselves … alone,’” Sho read out loud, either unable to come to the same conclusion Meridian and I had without sounding the words out for himself, or just unwilling to. “‘Surrounded by a galaxy where the elements that might give rise to life were predicated by a simple lottery, a lottery of random chance that would decide whether any newly evolved sentience would touch the stars, or scrounge forever in the dirt.
“‘Our own rise was predicated on winning that same lottery, not just once, but over and over again, every single time the chaos returned from the nothing: and with our every victory, we found ourselves even more apart. We hadn’t deserved our own successes, any more than the earlier forms of life we’d found, doomed to an ending they could not escape, had deserved that fate—and that meant we were indebted, indebted to the very beings who had remained behind, locked on their homeworlds even as we raced past.
“‘So we decided to take that chance into our own hands; to become those who dictated the path later life would take. We decided to make better worlds, freer worlds, for those who would rise after. We did everything we could to aid the planets and moons already bearing early life; adjusted axial tilt, orbit, atmosphere—made those cradle worlds as close to our own beginnings as we possibly could, so that the life already springing forth might share our own origins, might understand our purposes, our gifts. We built them shepherds, to guide them after we passed on, for we knew even we were not immortal, and what truer bequeathment could we give than the legacy of ensuring that later species could reach the stars, just as we had?’”
Sho turned to us, stopping his recitation for a moment: “That tracks with what we found in the Furnace’s Gate,” he said simply. “They … shifted the atmospheres of our homeworlds, built the Barious, all so that we would become more like them. This much we knew already.”
“That’s not the part that…” Meridian shook her head again, her hands trembling by her sides. “Sho, don’t you understand what it says, what it means?”
Sho didn’t respond; he had already turned back to the writing, reaching the part of the testament that laid bare the enormity of the forerunners’ claim, the truth that changed the fundamental nature of how we understood the galaxy. “‘But there is still a barricade to the evolution of those lives,’” he read, “‘even blessed with fertile worlds, even guided by our shepherds, there remains a barricade they cannot surpass, and one that will not arise until we are long dust. The very same lottery we won, over and over, without even realizing it: the great veil of chaos that will grind their progress to a halt, just before they can reach beyond their limited horizons. Impossible to predict, impossible to control, inherently random, yet with that veil in place, they cannot move forward, and their beginnings will be where they will stay, their worlds choked by the chaotic radiation that makes order an impossibility.
“‘And so we have built this place—a place to strip away the veil entirely from certain worlds, a test, directed toward the cradles of the new species. Once successful, the light shining forth from these furnaces will illuminate a palace, the dream of what the universe can become, and once we reach those gates, we can spread that light outward, ever outward, until every sky over every world is free of the chaos. This place is the first step toward that palace, toward where our dream will become manifest, and once there, we will finally have earned our place among the stars.’” That was the end of the words on the plaque, but just below them, carved into the wall itself in jagged, uneven lines: “‘Forgive us—we knew not what we would unleash.’”
Sho shook his head, an act of negation; even hearing the words out loud, spoken from his own mouth, didn’t make him believe the forerunners’ claim. It was just too big, too impossible. “It’s not true,” he said, his voice insistent. “It’s not … how can it be?”
“All the same—it is,” I said. “It was the pulse. The pulse was what was holding the other worlds back—the ‘lottery’ the forerunners won, their homeworld unaffected. The pulse existed, then. Even then.”
“But it can’t have, that doesn’t … the Justified set off the pulse! They set it off during the sect wars, not … not eons and eons ago, not … how does that even…”
“It makes sense, Sho,” I insisted. “It makes a terrible kind of sense. The pulse bomb the Justified set off was meant to be contained, meant to be limited to a specific area on a specific world. That was how it was built, what it was meant to do. Instead, it spread all across the cosmos. They—we—never knew why. This is why.”
“Because the pulse wasn’t created by the bomb,” Meridian whispered; she’d connected those pieces as well, maybe even faster than me, though her voice was still awed—more than a little terrified, in fact. “It was already there, just waiting. Before the forerunners, it was part of the natural order of the universe—the ‘veil of chaos’ holding sentient species back from the stars. Then they stripped it away, somehow, stripped it away from the ‘cradles’—the worlds where our species were evolving. But they didn’t stop there. The Furnaces showed them a path to this … this…”
I nodded grimly. “‘Palace,’” I said, not liking how the word even sounded out loud. The Cyn had mentioned a ‘Palace,’ on the shipyard, and again on the world beyond the Dead Furnaces. There was something else out there, some creation—or discovery—of the forerunners, hidden away somewhere: something that let the forerunners protect not just a few dozen cradle worlds—or even a few hundred; we still didn’t know how many there had been—but the entire universe, a tool that had let them lock the pulse away entirely.
The power of the Dead Furnaces was frightening enough—the ability to shield entire worlds from pulse radiation—but if this Palace could fundamentally alter the reality of the entire universe like that … what else could it do?
Meridian was still trying to make sense of it all—where the pulse had gone, why it had returned. “When the Justified set off their weapon,” she said, “it started a cascade—a chain reaction, a reversion. This whole … the galaxy, the way it is now, that’s the way the universe is … it’s not an aberration, it’s not something we did. It’s the opposite. The universe after the pulse is the way the universe was meant to be, the way it started.”
“The forerunners wanted to protect us,” I said tonelessly. “For the same reason they built the Barious—the same reason they were guiding our worlds, our evolution. To give us the best possible chance at the same glory they’d reached.” Like a parent, willing and able to move mountains to provide a better future for their child; like the Preacher, deciding—before I had any choice in the matter—that a childhood in an orphanage on a backwater world would give me the best chance at a better life, a life she thought she owed me. “They did it so our species didn’t hit some random point on the scale of technological evolution and find we could move no further, so that we weren’t defined simply by whatever level of pulse radiation had collected over our homeworld. That was their … gift … to us.”
“Freedom,” Meridian breathed. “Freedom from the chaotic tyranny of the pulse.” She was crying; the only reason I could see the tracks of the tears on her jet-black face was because the light of the very damning words we’d read made them shimmer against her skin. “God, we were never meant to … we were never even meant to be. My people were meant to remain trapped, between the depths of the caverns and the heat of the surface … forever. That was what we were supposed to be, what we would have remained, if the forerunners hadn’t … Our world—our ‘cradle’—it must have been one of their later experiments, and they didn’t have time to adjust its rotation to match their own—”
“Or else your people were already evolving, underground, and they didn’t want to interfere with that process,” I said, reaching out to touch her face; she pushed her cheek into my hand, my palm wet with her tears, which made me hate what I had to say next even more. “But the rest … I don’t think you’re wrong, no. Tearing the pulse radiation from the atmosphere of your world—from all our worlds, in one fell swoop, using this place,” I looked around me at the walls, at the insane machinery the forerunners had built, at the Dead Furnaces that had protected what the forerunners called the “cradles.” “That’s what let you develop the technology to survive on the surface, then, later, to reach the stars.
“Same with Wulf.” I turned to Sho, who still looked like he didn’t want to believe it, any of it. “Your people had the opposite problem, your homeworld almost too verdant, overabundant with life: filled with predators, some larger, hungrier, than you. What would have happened if the pulse had been around then? If it had been returning, again and again, century after century?”
Sho shook his head, focusing on the theoretical question so he didn’t have to think about the insane truth the forerunners’ testament had raised. “Almost every leap in technological ability in ancient Wulf society was predicated on inventing something to fight off the other predators that filled our world, to enlarge the borders of our villages, the patches we carved out of the wilds. If we’d never discovered gunpowder—or internal combustion, or electricity—if pulse radiation had meant we couldn’t … It’s entirely probable we would have stayed the way we were. Trapped. Just another predator species on a world full of them.”
“And humanity?” Meridian asked me.
I shrugged; honestly, I’d never felt much of a connection to my own species—the world I’d grown up on had been equal parts human, Wulf, and Tyll, and one of the reasons it had survived the pulse was that its inhabitants had thrown over sect war–era thinking very early on. Species identification had been strongly discouraged, even shunned. One of the reasons the Preacher had chosen it, I suppose.
Still, I knew human history as well as anyone, thanks to my studies with the Justified. “The story of mankind contains significantly more intercultural conflict than most species,” I said. “The human homeworld was the setting of the original sect wars, in that way. Without forward leaps in technology, in communication—without the ability to reach out to other groups and realize the commonalities between us all—we likely would have stayed as we were for thousands and thousands of years: feudal, violent, fractured. No. My species would have been nearly as bad off, I promise you—we would have just been killing each other, rather than succumbing to the elements or different species of life.”
“So … they were right.” Meridian turned back to the plaque, something between fear and awe on her face. “The forerunners knew the pulse radiation would stymie all of our attempts to move beyond what we were, our attempts to better ourselves. And so they … got rid of it, somehow. With this Palace. This place, the Dead Furnaces—it was their first attempt, a sort of … theoretical trial, aimed at just a handful of worlds rather than the galaxy at large. And it must have worked—they must have moved forward from there, to this Palace—or else we would have discovered pulse radiation when we first took to the stars, would have discovered that only our worlds were defended from the pulse. So this place was only the first step; their … dream … came true.”
“And their nightmare,” I added, nodding at the last lines of the testament carved into the wall. “‘Forgive us, for we knew not what we would unleash.’”
“Something went wrong,” Sho agreed, finally beginning to believe in what the writing had spelled out: that the pulse was meant to be. And we were not. “Somewhere along the way, something went very, very wrong. Something about their radiation-stripping process, about what they found or did at this Palace to cleanse the whole galaxy of the pulse … it created their enemy. Created the Cyn.”
“But it also succeeded,” Meridian insisted. “We inherited a universe free of the pulse—a gift we never knew we’d been given, one that lasted, sustained itself, long after the forerunners had lost their last war.”
“Until the Justified came along,” I said. “Until we tore a hole in that protection—unraveled a single thread, cut the tension in the lattice, and the whole thing collapsed. This entire time, we thought the pulse was some new thing, but it never was: freedom from the pulse was the gift the forerunners had left for us, to ensure our species’ survival. And its creation cost them their own.”
“But why are the Bright Wanderers here, then?” Sho asked. “They’re looking for this ‘Palace,’ we’ve heard them say so—but that doesn’t make sense; they’re fronted by Cyn, after all, and the Cyn were the enemies of the forerunners. They wouldn’t have any interest in stopping the pulse, they feed on it.”
“And why bring the gifted here?” Meridian added. “How does that—do we—fit in?”
“As to Sho’s question—I’ve got no idea,” I admitted to her. “Yours, though: that, I can answer. Think about it: the forerunners’ writings respond to us, the Cyn are kidnapping gifted kids, seeking ‘martyrs’ to ‘open the way to the Palace.’” They must have learned that word here, studying the same writings we were—hence the altar the cultists had been worshipping at, beneath the plaque. “The barricades of light, the forerunners’ defenses—they let us through, because we were what we are: pulse-born, soaked in radiation. There’s only one thing that tracks with all of that: that this place, these places—the Dead Furnaces and this Palace both, whatever it is—were designed for the gifted, designed that way because the forerunners were gifted. Every single one of them.”
I stopped, swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. The enormity of that idea … But it was the only thing that made sense.
Sho had been watching me as I spoke; he nodded, almost carefully, following the thread of the idea. “Their world wasn’t heavily pulsed,” he said slowly. “That was the ‘lottery’ they won—pure cosmic chance dictating that even as the pulse returned, again and again, their homeworld remained relatively unaffected. But pulse radiation is still present, even in the atmosphere of worlds where the rads don’t choke away all tech. Look at you.” He turned toward Meridian. “The world you grew up on wasn’t nearly as heavily pulsed as Esa’s, or mine, and yet you still wound up gifted. And a people who evolved on a world like that—evolved in a stew of pulse radiation, all the way from single-cell organisms on up…”
“They’d evolve to be gifted,” Meridian said, awe in her voice as she put it together as well. “Of course they would: if nothing else, natural selection would heavily favor those with gifts over those without, especially in the early eons of a species’ evolution.”
I nodded. “The Dead Furnaces, the relics: they responded to the gifted because the forerunners were an entire species of gifted. Whatever genetic sequence or DNA pattern that allows a person to become so, whatever markers there are that set us apart … those markers must have hardened into the basic makeup of their species before they even discovered fire. All their technology, their culture—it all would have been predicated on that commonality.
“The next generation, the gifted, whatever you want to call us—that’s what we are, the creations of the pulse, the same thing as what they evolved into. The forerunners weren’t just an alien species; the forerunners were us.”
CHAPTER 13
Jane
We made hot contact with the enemy very shortly after we passed through the lowered force field.
It wasn’t the ambush I’d expected: instead, the Bright Wanderers we found seemed just as surprised to see us as we were to see them. We turned the corner and the room just opened up, spilling us out into a kind of atrium filled with metallic lattices that dripped down from the ceiling in patterns I wasn’t sure were functional, or just art.
Underneath those strange webs of wire, there they were, a handful of cultists staring at us in surprise and shock—it was like they truly hadn’t known their drones had launched, that their tower had gone silent. Most of them didn’t even have intention shields. They were all armed, though, and not a one of them didn’t go for a gun: a cult was a cult, no matter what else you called it, and every single member of their “faith” was ready to die for the beliefs they’d used to replace their own personalities.
We cut them down, the vibrations of the gunfire making the intricate cords of metal above tremble and resonate with a kind of low hum: ambush or not, a firefight was a loud thing, and that meant we’d have more company, sooner or later. Where there was one clutch of cultists, there would be more, and the next batch wouldn’t be surprised to see us, not with the sounds of gunfire ringing down the emptied halls.
At least now we knew the Dead Furnaces hadn’t just eaten them, I suppose.
“We can’t just … stumble around in here forever,” Javier grunted as he rolled over one of the bodies, checking for anything of use—a little ghoulish, perhaps, but necessary, if we were going to find our way through this maze. For all that my sweetheart usually played the role of the good-natured, light-hearted explorer—and usually, that’s what he was—the world he’d come from, and the years he’d spent outside the Justified’s protection, had also left their mark. “Is there a … Marus, I know you can’t see through the walls or anything, but is there power flowing through the cables above us? Some sort of reactor, independent of the solar collection array?”
JackDoes nodded. “A good point. This station must have some kind of independent generator—the air we’re breathing, the gravity, it has to come from somewhere, and since the ‘furnaces’ remain ‘dead,’ that power is not coming from the solar collectors on the inside of the ring.”
