The Human Experience

Half P, day something, 3418.

The fulfilment of the Alignment-apocalypse prophecy seems to have made soldiers and aristocrats more religious. Yesterday, I saw shrines to Tychon and Delmira set up in the north wing. Star-King Serasta only shakes his head at them. Prophecies are excuses, he says. Excuses for not being better, not doing better. Was it prophecy that almost had me killed? No, it was my brother’s greed and jealousy, Orcadis’s fear – human weakness, made excusable by some writings in some holy book that say they had no choice. But men always have choices. The problem is that they are too afraid of making the wrong ones, and too unwilling to take the blame when they do.

“Tho we’re godth? We’re godth!”

“You’re not gods,” Lykus said with a snort. “The Star-Gods are only Voices. You and your brother, my friend, are just the descendents of soulless, emotionless abominations. Kind of like me.” He grinned broadly, lending it the unnerving wolfish quality that made most people squirm.

But Enver didn’t squirm. His face, a roadmap of scars and shining pink patches, twisted hideously. “I’m going to kill you when we land, Wolf. You and your thtupid thlut. If what you thay ith true, I probably have hidden powerth I haven’t dithcovered, you know!”

Lykus snorted again. Enver was fun. Why hadn’t Lykus thought about torturing him earlier? He looked back to the crimped, yellowing pages of “Supernovae,” open at the chapter entitled “Origins of Celestial Worship.” The picture there had caught his attention as he’d been flipping listlessly through the text during one of his fits of boredom. It was a human shadow, features indistinct, silhouette fuzzy and basking in silver light. Below the drawing, a subtitle read: “Artist’s rendition of the beings that, in scripture, rose from Amaris’s Basin.”

It was the distinctive silver glow that had interested him. Fake-Del had glowed like that. As had the silver veins threaded through the rocks hauled from Lady’s Fist. So he’d read the entire chapter, then shown Jesreal.

The tome claimed the suns and moons were named for mythical glowing figures first observed after the last Alignment near the Amaris asteroid’s impact site – Lady’s Fist. Apparently the resulting dust cloud had altered the environment enough to change the human brain. Lack of vitamins, inhaled fumes, eyesight not evolutionarily equipped to handle the permanent dust clouds – all that had “contributed to the hallucinations that gripped our ancestors, resulting in a mass hysteria.”

But there was something to give this new religion credence. Lykus’s forefinger travelled down the page, to the paragraph he’d previously asterisked. “The inhabitants of the settlements bordering the Golden Flat – where today the countries of Akkút, Yarda, and Üfta reside – were acclaimed as great seers,” it read. “Their prophetic insights struck foreigners as bordering on supernatural. Ancient Lukhrese texts accuse Irhaap the Conqueror, the Akkh who founded the Akkútian Empire, of building his empire on foul play and even sorcery. Irhaap, himself revered as a prophet, denied accusations of stealing the Lukhrese generals’ battle plans. He claimed his God-given right to rule manifested itself in his inherent understanding of human thoughts. He simply knew, he said, what his enemies were going to do before they did it. And thus he conquered Lukhra as his last dependency.”

So Irhaap the Conqueror had been a Helm. The Orcadis of yore, Lykus thought with amusement.

“Of course, it makes sense!” Jesreal had said. “When the asteroid first crashed, there would’ve been way more radiation coming from it. Over the centuries it must have been consumed by humans, turning those closest to the crash-site into Iron Helms. I suppose people didn’t get Infected because there were larger, stronger sources of radiation around. The Voices created probably went to Amaris’s Basin, staying there until there were enough of them to create...well, things like the one we saw yesterday. Over time they consumed most of the radiation, Helms stopped being born, and that was it. Now that Orcadis re-introduced Helms to the world, there isn’t enough radiation around to feed the new Voices and they implant themselves in the human brain.”

Lykus still wondered where the supposed Star-Gods had gone, though. If they were at the Basin, why hadn’t the chirurgeon seen any of them before? She’d worked there for turns. Could she have mistaken them for regular people? In the glaring Akkútian sun, maybe their glow wouldn’t have been as obvious. But at night...

Jesreal didn’t have an answer for that. It was the first time Lykus had managed to stump her. And with four Star-Gods all crammed in the Basin, wouldn’t they have bled it of radiation by now? Unless...unless scripture was right and Amaris really did get her brothers to kill one another.

“Scripture claims the Vangardian royal line was chosen by the Gods themselves,” the tome continued, at the next asterisked point. “Star-Queen Neoma, founder of the Vangardian Empire, strong advocate of celestial worship, was canonized shortly after her death and named the only human member of the Holy Quintet. Her people considered her the link between the Star-Gods and humanity, many believing she was born of Amaris herself.”

Though how the hell a group of Voices could birth a human being, Lykus hadn’t the slightest. He wouldn’t go into that. Right now, it sufficed to know there was a connection between the Voices and the royal line. Perhaps it was the secret behind why Serasta – and presumably Enver, if the theory was correct – could physically manipulate the Voice-being.

A rap came at the door to Enver’s apartments. Enver jumped, his eye goggling. “Don’t!” he whispered as Lykus moved to answer it.

“The Voices don’t care about you that much,” Lykus informed him. “Besides, they don’t knock.” He opened the door on Star-King Serasta.

“I hear you summoned me,” the Star-King said, shouldering past Lykus and hobbling into the room. Someone had found a jewel-encrusted staff to replace his cane, with a cloudy opal knob as a head. He leaned on it heavily. “Is there a particular reason you couldn’t come to me? You know I’m on permanent guard outside Orcadis’s chambers.” Serasta gave a dry grin. “How about that? I’m no more than a glorified bodyguard. And I can barely walk.”

Lykus eyed the staff. He’d steal that, if they ever returned to a society where jewels meant anything. “Enver won’t leave his quarters for the life of him, and I needed to talk to you both.”

He turned, but Enver was gone. Fucking man. Did this every time somebody opened the doors to his apartments. Lykus strode to the back closet, opened it, and dragged Enver out. “It’s just your brother, not the Voices,” he said when Enver thrashed like some animal snatched from its hiding hole.

“Thath even worth, damn you!”

Lykus tossed Enver in front of his brother. He watched to see Serasta’s expression warp at the mangled creature before him, but hardly one muscle twitched in the king’s face.

Enver half-heartedly lifted his claw-hands over his face only to drop them, shoulders sagging, probably deciding he was too damned ugly to bother hiding. Neither brother spoke.

“Uncomfortable?” Lykus clapped both their shoulders. “Here, I’ll start. I’m good at this sort of thing. Enver, you say ‘thorry I tried to kill you and took your playth.’ Serasta, you say ‘that’s alright; our brotherly bond is stronger than treason and assassination attempts and twenty-turn-long comas.’ Then you hug it out.”

“I don’t thound like that!” Enver roared. Serasta gave Lykus a blunt look.

“You are hereby exiled to the Delmira lunar base,” Serasta said coldly. “Consider yourself fortunate. You and Orcadis have slaughtered thousands in your little Voice-crusade.”

Enver’s made a face, making him look like a hissing snake. “That’s what I get? You gave Orcadith protection from the Voitheth!”

“And a slap.”

Enver lunged as if to shove him, but Serasta drove him back with the staff. He tapped him lightly on the forehead with the opal knob. “I’m exiling Orcadis, too. You both seemed willing enough to relocate to Delmira, anyways. But, if you want a hug, by all means.” He opened his arms mockingly.

Enver spat at him. Globs of spittle, not driven very far by his stub of a tongue, clung to his chin.

Lykus stared between them with the glee of a child frying ants with a magnifying glass. He hoped they’d fight, but prudish old Serasta didn’t indulge him. He withdrew an embroidered kerchief from his vest pocket and dabbed at his face, sighing.

“Well, now that your reunion fell flat, maybe you can hear my proposal,” Lykus said. “I suggest, since you two are the only ones who can touch the Voice-person, you work together to trap it again. Easy enough, right?”

He hadn’t expected them to agree. Serasta’s overgrown black beard drooped beneath the weight of his frown. “Jes hypothesizes the Voice-person can blast waves of energy by releasing thought strings at very high speeds and then sucking them back into its body. It’s the only way she can explain how it seems to manipulate energy. Even if we can touch it, it can break itself down into its component Voices and escape like sand through fingers.”

Damn it. Did Jesreal make her theories deliberately more confusing when he was Lykus, or was it really the attention thing?

“It doethen’t matter!” Enver spat. “I’m not rithking my life for you and your thtupid kingdom! If I’m going to be ecthiled, may ath well ecthile mythelf right here!” He turned briskly and disappeared into the next sector of his apartments, slamming the door behind him. Serasta limped out the other way, shaking his head.

Well. That went well. Lykus snapped the tome closed, blowing up a cloud of dust. He sneezed and the tome tumbled to the ground, splayed on crinkled pages. As Lykus stooped to retrieve it, he noticed a folded note that had been crammed into its appendix.

Mother never told you how it works. How H.E.C.T.O.R. works, that is. The chip in your brain creates its own radiation. On your own, your brain doesn’t produce as much as normal people’s. She confirmed that with the brain scans she took when you first met. It’s why Voices don’t invade you. Even Infected, even with a Voice sucking radiation out of your brain, you would never have gone catatonic. Your chip would always make more. That’s why you noticed your Voice becoming more human, why you never became absent-minded like the rest of the Infected.

When everyone on this ship is catatonic and dying, you will remain standing, whether you stand as Hector or Lykus. Sorry I trapped you with thousands of rotting corpses. And trust me, that sounded better in my head than it looks on paper.

I will kill myself. But know I never meant for you to die.

Know I’m sorry.

Please give my father a proper funeral.

See, it was things like this that made Lykus miss that miserable bastard, Hector. Hector would find this sad. He’d mourn for Kaed and take bitter solace in the knowledge that the kid had tried to save him in the end.

Lykus just wanted to throttle the little shit.