The Human Experience

Half P (I’m pretty sure), day (whatever), 3418.

I just thought of something: if Kaed trapped all the Helms on this ship so that no new Voices would be born, why the fuck did he evacuate? He’s a Helm, too.

Hypocrite bastard.

It was a perfect day. Desert hawks glided overhead, carried by the momentum of extended brown wings. Sun-kissed dunes glittered on the horizon. The day’s heat baked the red stone desert, steam wafting from the larger fissures that scarred the land encircling Lady’s Fist.

Yes, it was a perfect day to die.

Kaed grappled for the next rocky knob with sweating fingers. He hoisted himself higher up the ledge, bare toes curling around the makeshift footholds he was depending on to support him. He stopped to rest, pressing himself flat against the warm, comforting rock. It almost felt like a hug. A hug of death, that was.

He cackled at the thought, clutching the wall tighter. I love you, too, death. Coming to you will be the best thing I’ve ever done on this miserable earth.

Insane. He was insane. Kaed blinked the sweat from his brow, hiking his pants farther up with one hand. Well, he hoped he was insane. It wasn’t nice to think he could kill two thousand people and be sane. A sane person wouldn’t kill his father. Insanity was his pretext.

Though without his Voice feeding hatred into his soul, poisoning him, it was hard to see what he’d done as anything but evil.

Kaed continued scaling the wall. His stupid pants slid down again, taking his underwear with them. The spectators below in the Basin were probably getting eyefuls of his butt-crack. But the wall here was flatter and he needed both hands to keep from falling.

Can’t fall yet. This height won’t kill. Not yet.

Sharp points gouged into his fingertips as he clutched whatever handles he could find. Helms were bred for pain. They swatted it away, dispersed it like a cloud of fruit-flies. Kaed was a Helm. He remembered the way his father’s mouth puckered each time pain desensitization training had left him curled into a fetal position, weeping. Stop exaggerating, Kaed. Don’t make a show of it, Kaed. Does crying help, Kaed? Do you feel better now that you’ve humiliated yourself?

Orcadis had never understood the functionality of crying. Kaed licked his dry lips, salty from the tears he’d shed over the hours. “It’s a distress call,” he told the wall pressed against his cheek. “It lets others know you’re in trouble. That’s how it helps. Those who love you recognize your pain and come to save you.”

Not his father. To him, cries were annoying things that needed to be covered up with iron helmets.

Now Kaed was using his Iron Helm training to kill himself. Proud, Father?

He laughed again. Stone crumbled in his fingers and he gasped, left swinging by one arm, feet scrambling for new grooves to cram his toes into. His clawing fingers finally caught and he clung to the wall again, pebbles clinking off bumps around him, spraying down into the Basin.

Kaed glanced down over his shoulder. Hundreds of white canvas tents sat in the depression below the curving wall. People were still pushing aside flaps, emerging from tents, throwing their heads back to watch him climb the wall like a human spider.

He looked to his destination: an outcrop several paces higher, a kind of overhang that he could use as the ultimate diving platform.

If he regretted anything, it was – no, wait, he regretted everything. Bad phrasing. One of the things he regretted most was being unable to see his mother a final time. He’d have liked to explain in person why he had thrown away everything she’d worked for.

Maybe he shouldn’t have left her a note. A note was so impersonal. After a decade of communicating with her only via phones and letters, a personal explanation of his betrayal would have been preferable. But he’d planned on going down with the ship he’d condemned. Being too craven to watch his father die hadn’t factored into his equations.

When he’d returned to the Fist, he’d wound through half the caves and tunnels in the ledge screaming her name before somebody told him the Liberator had taken a jet to find the king’s evacuation vessel.

Damn, he’d thought. I’ve killed my mother, too.

Kaed inched closer to the outcrop, moving into its shadow to avoid the sweltering suns that beat down on his head mercilessly. He hated himself for being too cowardly to die alongside his father. He hated himself for dooming his mother. Without Jesreal, who would continue shepherding the Infected to Lady’s Fist? Sure, Kaed’s death would ensure that no new Voices would form, but there were still the old ones to consider, those freshly-Infected people who’d go catatonic in a turn or two, who hadn’t made it to the Fist before Alignment. Who’d be the new Liberator? Who’d transport the remaining Voices to Amaris?

I’ve sacrificed two thousand people, including my father and Hector, my only friend, for nothing.

He bashed his head against the ledge. Stars popped before his eyes and he wavered on the spot, lightheaded. He kept a white-knuckled hold on the rock, shaking his head to revive himself. Bad idea. Can’t fall. Not yet.

The rocky lip stuck out two hand-breadths over his head. Gritting his teeth, Kaed transferred his weight to his toes and jumped to catch the edge. Blood pounded in his head, throbbing from terror and what very possibly was a heat-stroke. His fingers felt cold, the protrusion’s sharp edge cutting off his circulation.

He began swinging his body. One swing, two, three, and he threw his leg up over the side.

Crap. Didn’t account for the pants. With a long shearing noise his pants ripped in the crotch, the stiff material restricting his movement. His big toe fumbled over the edge for a moment before his leg swung back down.

The motion almost wrenched his shoulders out of their sockets. Kaed cried out, fingers slipping.

He dangled there, gasping, looking at the little outcrops below him that would break his fall to leave him a hapless cripple, polluting the world with angry, griping, childish Voices.

He laughed. I can’t even die properly. How ridiculous.

Then he tightened his grip on the edge. No. He was Orkaedis Durant. He had will. It was the one thing he was good at: keeping quiet and resolute.

One swing, two, three. Resistance from his pants, the rip expanding down one leg, and his heel slamming down on stone.

Kaed pushed up with quivering elbows, his effort a strangled grunt in his throat. He shifted his foot farther on the rock, wriggled one knee over the side, and with a final push rolled over the lip, panting.

The overhead suns blotted everything out in a white haze. Kaed clapped his hands over his eyes, lying on his back trying to catch his breath.

Catch my breath? Why? So I can be refreshed when I plunge to my doom?

It was stupid, so Kaed scrambled to his knees, wiping dust off his bruised hands. He climbed to unsteady feet and stepped to the front of the platform, feeling the rock’s heat infuse into his soles.

“My son, please, don’t.”

Son? No, he didn’t have parents. He’d killed them both. Kaed wheeled toward the cliff face, where the voice had come from.

A woman stood some paces behind him. The most breathtaking woman he’d ever seen. Her pale blue dress was a criss-cross of expert drapery over her lean body, silk-gauze sleeves fluttering in the wind. Her hair was pure silver, scintillating, an ocean of spun spider threads, though she looked to be in her thirties.

And she glowed. Harsh sunlight painted red by walls of iron stone didn’t touch her. Her glow was silvery-blue, and it cooled the very heat that permeated the air.

Kaed grew ridiculously aware of his torn pants. And were his–? He looked down. Yes, his underwear had ripped, too. Awesome.

He tugged his shirt lower to cover it, ears burning, and glanced behind her at the rock face. “Is that a cave? Did I seriously just climb this cliff when there’s a cave that leads here?”

The woman moved sideways, exposing nothing but a flat rocky wall behind her. It was official, then. He’d lost it. Kaed felt relieved. Just crazy, not evil.

“Sorry, subconscious, can’t talk me out of this,” Kaed said. He frowned, looking her up and down freely now that he knew she wasn’t real. “Though I must say, my subconscious is hot.”

The phantom glided forward. “Your thoughts are troubled. I sensed them from deep within the Basin’s caves. It’s been turns since I’ve encountered someone whose thoughts I can add to my being. But yours are poison. They do not suit me.”

Kaed squinted at her. “What are you, some sort of Helm?”

“Your people call me Delmira.”

“Like the goddess?”

She chuckled. “I am no god. I did not create mankind. If anything, mankind created me.” Kaed gave her a blank look, and she elaborated. “I was born some hundred turns after the last Alignment. The asteroid that hit the Amaris moon on that day sent moonstone debris down to earth. Back then, this debris contained a hundred times the radiation they do now. It stretched across the globe, settled in the minds of humans and opened their eyes to their own existence. Settlers in the closest habitable regions to the Basin were exposed to so much that they became like you – their thoughts came alive. I am those thoughts, billions and billions twined so tightly over the centuries that they can no longer be dissociated, like threads woven together into a single cloth.”

How about that? The most interesting – and only – mirage Kaed had ever experienced, and he couldn’t fully let himself be awed by it because all he kept thinking about was himself smeared on the rocks below. “Well, Delmira, call your son Pyrrhus to take me to his Pits, because that’s where I’m headed.”

A troubled look crossed her face. “My children are dead. Centuries after the crash we’d used up most of the radiation. It grew scarce. My children fought amongst themselves for it. Amaris convinced Pyrrhus to lead Tychon into a trap. He trapped them both in a place devoid of radiation. They died of starvation.”

That certainly didn’t fit the ‘dagger held between the teeth’ version theology offered, though it did account for the conjoint twins’ deaths. Kaed shook his head. “How the hell did you have children, if you’re just a collection of Voices – erm, thoughts?”

“Similar thoughts stick together,” Delmira said. “I was the first thought-being, created from all sorts of thought-strings. Then my children broke away from me. Tychon and Pyrrhus broke first; they were lust for power and vengeance, respectively. They didn’t break completely from one another, because these things are intertwined for humans. Amaris broke next, and she was slyness, deceit. That left me to consist of thoughts centering on protection and love.”

If old crimes repeat, old wounds made to bleed,

Then men will recall what they did not heed,

And when twin murders twin they will face their last deed.

Was that what the old scripture meant? Perhaps if people were less self-oriented their thoughts would make more beings like Delmira and fewer like her abominable children. Thoughts wouldn’t be only about self-preservation. Maybe humans could transfer selfless ideals to the Voice-people they created. Maybe Tychon, Pyrrhus, and Amaris were only reflections of the society that had created them.

Kaed shook his head. He shouldn’t be indulging this. How could the Star-Gods be thought amalgamations? Wouldn’t that mean Swarms were just baby thought-people that hadn’t yet found enough similar thoughts to adopt a unified identity? How stupid.

“You still don’t believe me,” Delmira noticed.

“My mind’s not that far gone,” Kaed shot back.

Delmira smiled. “If my daughter Amaris still lived, your thoughts would have been perfectly suited to her. She felt every bit the overlooked child, too.”

“Amaris died?”

“In a way, she was the only one of us to ever live. She discovered that if one of our kind occupies a human body long enough – staying somewhere with ample radiation, of course, like Lady’s Fist – we can learn how to make the brain produce its own radiation again. Once Amaris learned to do that, she left Akkút. She asked me to come with her, but I was never willing to occupy an innocent person’s body in order to make myself human. So I remained, and I’ve been dwelling in these caves ever since. Amaris went on to form the grand Vangardian Empire – she was ambitious, my daughter, and so the brain she chose to occupy was none other than the Akkútian princess Neoma’s. Amaris was composed of thoughts all the way from Üfta to Inaultis; it so happened that some of her component thought-strings had information about traversing the Inaulti mountain ranges. She used this knowledge to forge a new empire in the unexplored west.”

Now it was too much. The Vangardian royal line was descended from...Voices?

“Look,” Kaed said, “this was very...nice and all, but if I may, I’d like to kill myself before I wet my pants. Die with dignity, you know?” Not to mention the degree to which he was buying into this madness was growing alarming.

“You don’t have to do this, my son.”

“Every second I live, more crazy Voices are in danger of being born.” He turned to the precipice, then something hit him. Kaed spun around again. “Why don’t you take my body? Er, I’m scrawny, I know, but you won’t need to be confined to the Basin anymore. I’m only going to kill myself, anyways! Isn’t it a shame to waste a good, uh, vehicle?”

He grinned crazily, but Delmira only shrank back. “I can’t,” she whispered. “Your mind is too tortured. Your negativity would corrupt me. I’m born of loving Voices.”

Looks like your existence has to be futile after all. Kaed felt his hopes draining like air from a balloon. “But you’ll die here, eventually. When you consume all of the Basin’s radiation. You’ll starve.”

She gave a nod of acknowledgement. Desperation welled in where there once had been hope. “Please,” he begged. He blinked and tears splashed to his cheeks. “The remaining Voices will listen to you. You could be the new Liberator, guide the Voices to the Basin and continue my mother’s mission!” You could make the deaths of two thousand innocents mean something.

“I watched your mother work here for turns, Orkaedis Durant. She is a formidable woman. I wish I could help her, but the kind of being I am has no place in a mind like yours.”

Kaed turned back to his doom. Numbness opened in his chest like a yawning pit, tingling. “Will you do one thing for me, then?”

“What, son?”

“Take my love for my father. Take those thoughts, at least. Add them to yourself, make them eternal. Keep the only good part of me alive.”

He looked over his shoulder at her. Delmira dipped her head, her smile sorrowful and beautiful.

Cheeks slick with tears, Kaed let himself fall forward to his death.