Rituals of Sacrifice, page 32
All. We. Desire.
“Now, everyone! Please, now! The tiles!”
I make Yoonra stand fast and take in the enormous hologram which the tiles begin to inaugurate around us. Centered on my viewpoint, Yoonra and I float within a celestial sphere mapping out the positions of nineteen Dar stations.
While this style of projection is new to him, it is entirely ordinary for Sirsa minds. As Yoonra looks on in wonder and takes the bait, the Sirsas chase the path I have opened and burn deep into his mind.
I watch him stagger while I wake the full muster of my Delasi fragments.
“Hurry!” I scream at my distant friends. “If you haven’t fully secured your tile, now’s the time!”
One star system glows. Now, another. The Sirsas, it seems, are having an epiphany.
Yes! Yes! They remember!
The Vrin drive their mosaic tile home. Tegwin submerges amidst a stand of broken cattails and does the same.
That’s five out of six. And it is vital to have matched each race to the minor details and hints of their history within each mosaic. Six races. Six tiles. Six mosaics. I send out my real-time sense of Yoonra along with my memories of Yoonan to better support Yoodan at the first mosaic. Kitosh rushes to join Kurile and the other Dhyda. The small portion I have of Asja’s Moorad awareness moves to aid Tegwin. I once paired with several Cleve, and these slivers of essence fly toward mosaic four. Riskin stands with Symons and with me here while I draw on Yasa’s memories of his own grandfather to best support the Vrin.
“Sarika! Hurry with that damned tile!”
“We can’t! There’s no way! One of the shimmer portals is standing right on top of where we need to be!”
“Dammit! Just get there! Without that tile in place, we’re at a stalemate here!”
Yoodan grabs the tile. Rushing away from Sarika, he bulldozes a dozen Davao and leaps through the first shimmer portal in his path.
From Sarika: “What the hell?”
“What is it?”
“Yoodan took our tile, but then ran the wrong damn way!”
I can’t help smiling. Five seconds pass. Another five. Ten more.
When Yoodan edges from the correct shimmer portal and … reaching, reaching, slams the tile home, I nearly cheer.
But I can’t.
As our new, reinforced hologram blossoms and lifts from the surface of the planet and up, up into space, one of the heavy lifters throws out a phase-shielded, coherent beam of brilliant light.
Sarika channels a flood of terror.
Yoodan explodes in a fountain of viscera and fizzing gasses. A sharp jab of radiant heat knocks his tile free.
Within its vast, quantum-entangled radius, the hologram had already enveloped our Sirsas and much of Yoonra’s surrounding armadas.
But now it falls back.
Six mosaics. Only five races. One tile out of place.
Yoonra shakes my float gurney like a cat hoping to snap a rodent’s neck. Screaming in rage, he casts it at the ground. Ejected, I roll free but only so far as the first rank of his ground troops. Yoonra is on the verge of dominating this region of space. Not only that, but I have inadvertently shown him the location of all the Dar stations left by the ancient Dhyda and Strehl.
And what about the Millerites? How long will Tasya’s kind wait to punish Earth and her many wayward colonies?
Even as Yoonra’s fleets consolidate positions around each Sirsa and I taste defeat far below, I ask each crew to do all they can to prevent boarding and capture.
A trickle of quizzical disbelief runs through Sarika’s thoughts. “Um, Janek?”
I know she’s not been injured, but her tone snaps my attention away from Yoonra.
Dizzy has the last mosaic tile. Wrapped in his caudal webbing, it throws back reflections as he tugs and drags it into the crater left by Yoodan’s passing. Dizzy, I sometimes forget, is a male Cass. A denizen of the planet Tenyafren.
Six tiles. Six races.
Cass females live in their star’s lower corona. Between mating seasons, males hibernate on terrestrial moons and planets. Cass may be the last living descendants of the Soo’tak, otherwise known as the Tassera or Strehl.
Dizzy heaves the tile into place.
The hologram swells around us. Nineteen dazzling points flair.
“Nice job, Dizzy!”
Using all my remaining strength, I channel all I have become through Yasa and his Sirsa and, outward from there, to every other Sirsa mind within reach. Stabilizing every action with what’s left of my fragments, I also connect with each individual standing with the confines of Dar Chetyr’s mosaics. This includes Yoonra and all his troops, as well as Sarika, Tegwin and even the Vrin. Everybody.
Standing at six locations at once, seemingly free of all physical encumbrance, I select six specific Dar stations. I touch our conjoined minds to the Sirsa-class starships or their equivalents which I find there. Generating a summons, I dilate a spiked, stellate radiance of deep-space transfer corridors.
Flex points swell and glitter all across Raishan space. High-density projectiles spray. Invisible energy beams radiate. Hunter-seeker groups jink in and out of real space. Shields swell. They coruscate along the spectrum, red to white to blue-white hot. Some fade. Some flare.
How many thousands have I summoned? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand ships?
And might I require more?
As Yoonra’s fleet units wheel and run, I stop considering probabilities and all the balance points between failure and success. Taking in all that is transpiring via the vantage point of so many perspectives, I wander outside the stream of time and trace each event path through and beyond their usual conclusions.
No matter what, my actions here will spawn … repercussions. And aftereffect after aftereffect, ad infinitum.
I’m sure Asja and Riskin, and perhaps even the Millerites, want me to destroy the opposing fleets.
Yet, no thank you.
Would the galaxy be better off after a Raishan/Davao genocide? Perhaps.
But not at my hands.
Yasa’s voice comes back at me from so long ago.
“Just think, Janek. If you could heal whatever’s holding you back, you ought to be able to do something amazing. While you’re not at fault for falling victim to trauma, you are completely accountable for mending your own wounds.”
“Wounds,” I think. “Mending.”
Where to start?
Well, why not?
But even as I look back across the ages to best find a means of healing whatever dysfunction separated Raishan from Davao from Seyu, Yoonra attacks. He sees me as soon being able to (and I now lift these words directly from his thoughts) “steer the timeline.”
He does not wish to kill me, but merely possess and learn from me.
Too bad the guy doesn’t know his own strength. How unfortunate that he has no faculty for apprehending any human being’s true, physical fragility.
This time he does not engage me as he might some ordinary adversary. He sweeps no striking baton my way. His barbed tail fluke barely twitches. Instead, he lifts a slim projectile weapon from the limbs of one of his lieutenants. He has seen me absorb a tranquilizer dart. He must know that I will see this next full salvo coming.
But I may be a tad overextended at present.
And how long has it been since Yoonra fired an automatic weapon? Could he have forgotten such concepts as recoil and windage?
As I turn my revitalized Sirsa armada, I sense a shift in Yoonra’s autonomic nervous system. Hormones and plasma neurotransmitters gush. Breathing ducts feather wide. As his metabolism jumps, I read his intentions. Exceedingly aware of my sternum, rib cage and heart, he tickles a trigger pad. Haptic feedback creates the salient features of touch through vibration. Inbound at a thousand meters per second, the stream of diamond-fiber beads should saw across my chest while leaving my heart exposed and beating.
He can already picture clutching at my heart and raising it in triumph.
As time seems to slow, a similar image leaps from the dark edge of a distant mosaic. When I wonder, “Is that guy supposed to be me?” the mosaic also forces a vision of universal consciousness, emergence, and Unity.
Thus, I am also suddenly and uniquely aware that all such things come at a cost. Until now, what I thought of as me, wasn’t really me. I need to be able to function in other dimensions. I have to let myself die so I can live. All along, I needed to add more moments without conscious thinking. And I still need to gather energy.
I let Yoonra witness the most likely outcomes of his current defeat in the same instant I encounter them. His fleets will run and hide. His officers will turn on him. This region of space will find peace for the first time in millennia.
The Millerites? Well, who can know?
Yoonra is not impressed. And it isn’t that he’s a lousy shot. Or ignorant of opportunities to vary muzzle velocity. He simply isn’t familiar with the weapons his field units carry on a day-to-day basis.
The first impact insinuates as a skewering, needle-fine puncture in my chest over and through an arc of costal cartilage. Traversing my left coronary artery, this tiny piece of spun carbon generates a cavitating shock wave which pulps every vital tissue in its path. Zipping along, the bead strikes my spinal column at an angle. As it ricochets, fragments jet from my back and punch deep in the surrounding soil.
This is difficult to keep pace with. Yoonra only holds his aim for an instant, but with impacts zinging in at several hundred rounds per second, I can’t keep up.
Yoonra stalks forward.
Adrenaline surges. My flailing heart races. With hemorrhaging so profuse and blood pressure diving, I worry about losing consciousness.
Blood pours from my mouth and nose. I can barely breathe.
Most of all holding Sarika in my thoughts, I reach out to my many attendant Sirsas. If I can’t find a way out of this, irreversible brain damage will set in. Three, maybe four minutes after that: brain death.
Yoonra glances down at me.
“Pathetic.”
I can only spit blood.
He centers the weapon’s muzzle on the tear duct of my right eye. Cool against the bridge of my nose, it smells like charred toast. I can’t even blink.
“While it goes against my better judgment,” says Yoonra, “why not let me put you out of your misery?”
Playing for time, I trigger all the right muscle neurons to form an uneven grin. Why does there have to be so much blood?
“Damn you!” booms Yoonra. “Damn whatever you have become all to hell!”
I discern a jolting, deep vibration that comes first as a buzz and then as a—
Epilogue
I wake inhaling the cool pre-dawn breeze. Tinctured with the flinty scent of crushed stone, it also carries the expected assortment of odors and hushed sounds I’ve grown accustomed to when traveling with exotics. How many days has it been?
Wind generators thrum. Scrub vegetation creaks. The stretched-canvas roof shivers and luffs. Gathered dew trickles through ceramic pipes before drip drop dripping into a buried cistern. Even adjusting for differences in planetary rotation, I have a hard time resting once the most essential tasks of the coming day bubble to the surface. The thought that I may have to compete for food or a shower makes things worse. Growing up, I had to fight for every meal. Bathing water was often in scant supply. Though it is still dark, I roll out, smooth an imagined ruana, spoon brave Dizzy from his nest and go in search of sustenance.
Supposing that Dizz will catch up with me in his own good time, I catch a whiff of musk and wet fur.
Stepping from a shower stall, careful not to slip, Kurile shakes off a vast amount of water. I sense a symmetry of capillary and centripetal forces. Although her full-body oscillation lasts mere seconds, she is better than seventy percent dry. Even so, she nevertheless leaps high and pounces on a stack of towels.
She does not see me.
I draw energy from a wall-mounted moisture condenser. I am a work in progress. Although I’m still aware from within the confines of so many connected minds and maintained by anyone willing to so much as tangentially involve themselves with my story, I don’t know if I will ever get the hang of this.
Tegwin arrives. She gathers several long-handled combs. Unlike Kurile, she is not a morning person. Circulatory system not yet pumping at full capacity, her tentacles have yet to warm to full color. Looking to perhaps maintain some distant, soft-spoken quarrel, she circles Kurile and braces against a stand of shelves. Veering toward Kurile, she annoys the Dhydan by first complementing her dazzling fur but then—combs blurring—styling several fresh parts behind the Dhydan’s ear nubs as if for better presentation.
Five paces later, she discovers one of the room’s wash basins. Pirouetting up and into it, kicking off a multitude of slippers, she forms a high arch and vigorously combs the glassy strands of her undercarriage.
Raking a clump of fuzz from the shower drain, Kurile studies the room.
Blame the close quarters. Blame the unspeakable workings, the rumble and reek of one another’s digestive plumbing. Blame the look of weakness we share when wet and stripped of our clothing or accustomed furry fluff. I do not want these two knowing I have been watching.
Of course, it would be different if they had walked in on me. It’s hard to avoid a natural sense of courtesy when someone’s hair is matted, they’ve knotted a towel around their scrawny waist and someone else’s borrowed, B-grade toothpaste is foaming from their lips.
Just one glance at the mirror forces a penitent grin. Another missed opportunity.
Damned, early rising exotics.
The sky brightens. As dawn takes hold, shafts of brilliant light strafe the low, arched windows. Heated air currents probe the building’s sandstone façade. Eleven elements account for 99.85% of the human body. We are also more than 50% water. Thus, our bodies embrace more hydrogen by atom-fraction than any element, but more oxygen by mass. In order to fill my morning quota of 7.04×1027 atoms, I also need to gather carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and such things as phosphorus and magnesium in large quantities.
Do I really need to manufacture proteins, free radicals, and so many various nerve and connective tissues? Not really. Then again, who doesn’t enjoy a challenge?
Besides, even with all that, we are all close to 99.999 plus percent empty space. The binding energy of gluons, coupled with the kinetic energy of quarks, supplies a lot of additional mass. And all this “empty space” simply froths with wave functions and veiled quantum fields.
Of this, I have recently gained, let us say, a new appreciation.
Does that mean I want to tell Kurile she isn’t really sitting where she now thinks she’s sitting? That her fur and scent glands aren’t actually resting comfortably in the breakfast nook? That she’s hovering just the slightest extent as the electromagnetic force of her electrons push away from those of her chosen seat?
Nope.
Unlike yours truly, she doesn’t have the need to know.
While achieving the right balance in all this has yet to become wholly reflexive, I manage to settle into the breakfast nook alongside Kurile. I enjoy her body warmth. I even like the funk of her musk and lingering scent of shampoo.
“Oh,” she says. “There you are.”
“Good morning. I didn’t realize anyone else was up and awake.”
“I was unable to rest. Too many stray thoughts. Our many tasks ahead sometimes appear too great to comprehend.”
Claws twitching, she spears something ethnic from a shallow bowl. Sodden with clear gravy, the glob looks a lot like canned dog food. Perhaps mistaking my glance for something else, she adds, “Please try some cheen. While overripe, it should not offend less-discerning tongues
The wet morsel slides between glistening canines. She swallows without chewing. She rasps her dorsal ridges across the back of her chair. The heat waves lifting from her shoulders set the pantry walls aquiver.
Will I ever miss the debate and warnings of the various essences within me? Human, Dhydan, and Cleve? Moorad and even Strehl?
“I believe,” says Kurile, claws knitting
“No thanks,” I say, eyeballing the bowl and adopting a diplomatic tone. “If that’s all you have left, we’d best save it for Tegwin. She actually prefers her food near its expiration date. I wouldn’t want to disappoint a friend.”
Tegwin edges into the breakfast nook. “Pranks and games,” she says. “Always with you, there must be some absurdity to begin the day. I already have something else in mind for breakfast.”
While she prepares a batch of something rather like Terran coffee, I peruse her tray. Bleems and bark oysters. Yogurt with fruit. Last night’s chili macaroni. She kicks a chair cushion to the floor and sinks into a fluid pile. Setting aside a small portion for some invisible deity, she strokes muted thanks and settles in to dine.
“Janek?” says Kurile. “Cheen? Last chance?”
Desolation building in my chest, I clutch a fork and spear a lump. Sweet above tart. Gelatinous. Greasy. A bit of grit and coiling fiber. The first hints of decay. Aftertaste of sweet and sour chicken. Potassium. Sulfur. Touch of chlorine.
“Yummy.”
Grunting, Kurile rises to retrieve a carafe of narra. Slopping even parts juice and alcohol into our blender, cracking an egg, she hits “frappé” and stands back as though contemplating an oracle.
In addition to Kurile’s remaining cheen, breakfast choices include sticky seed rolls, protein waffles, and an assortment of regional fruits. Poking through a stasis bin, I also discover poached eggs in béarnaise and a tray of what look like tortellini except with small, beaded eyes. One hot pack. One cold. Loading plates and finding the appropriate utensils gives me the chance to make eye contact with both Kurile and Tegwin. Am I remembering things right? Or has my subconscious dredged the image of clashing armadas from some half-remembered fantasy? Does anyone else have misgivings? What right did I have to keep all those other Dar stations from the Davao?
