Chapter 24 - See the Sky
Proxis 3 - Before Integration:
My hands clung tight to the tarnished chrome railing of the maglev as the train took a sharp turn, and my stomach did that thing where it went one way while the rest of me stayed where it was.
I loved that feeling. It was even better when it was a surprise. When Mom and Dad took me on rides in the rover, they always went down the hills faster than they should have, because they knew I loved it. I was getting old enough that it didn’t surprise me as much anymore, but I still acted like it did to make them laugh.
Bright holo signs whipped by my window, so close I could probably reach out and touch one to feel that tickling sensation again if only the train’s glass wasn’t there. Of course, holos were made of light, so I couldn’t really ‘touch’ one.
I knew that… now.
Before our train ride, Mom had taken me to a kids’ arcade where the holos were interactive, and the whole place was a fireworks show of color and sound so overwhelmingly fantastic it hurt. If I listened hard, I could pick out five different songs I’d never heard playing from different parts of the room. Explosions, whistles, monster roars, shrieking thrusters, staccato beats of machine gun fire, the smell of popcorn and sticky sweet candy all swirled together and amplified one another until the atmosphere positively crackled.
When we got there, I just kind of froze in the doorway.
What was a kid from the Outers supposed to make of a place like that? Back home, I threw rocks into a sinkhole for fun.
Like Mom always did, she held my hand and slowly walked me into the middle of the room, through all the barking insanity that loudly demanded my attention until we reached the center of the storm.
Then she got down on her knees to look me in the eyes, leaning in to say: “Now go play. I’ll be right behind you.” She did that thing where she brushed my hair out of my eyes then ruffled it all out of place again.
I tried to smile bravely as I reluctantly let go of her hand, and, with a tingle of fear and anticipation, let the arcade swallow me up.
It was all too much… but in a good way. I felt wind-blasted and floaty when we left.
It was something I’d remember for the rest of my life, I already knew. She didn’t believe me when I said the holograms tickled. She’d called it “sickosem-” No. “Psychosomatic.”
It was in my head. That was okay, though. There were lots of things in my head that were plenty real, so that didn’t matter.
Dad cleared his throat loudly behind me. He and Mom were holding onto the overhead railing, probably watching me like they did when they thought I wasn’t looking. Mom would have that little smile on her face, and Dad would look worried but a little happy too.
The giant man that was my father wasn’t comfortable in the city. He’d said as much a bunch of times in passing, always with a little laugh like it was a problem he’d never really have to deal with since we lived in the Outers among the clan. He was dealing with it now, though. Poorly.
“Next stop: Plymouth Station,” chimed a gentle, vaguely male voice from the speakers overhead. I could already feel the train starting to slow, and the blur of passing holos gave way to darkened windows and the occasional glimpse of Proxis 1 up in the sky.
“That’s our stop, boys.” Mom sounded… I couldn’t really place it. Happy? Excited? Nervous? “Are you ready to meet grandma and grandpa, Ryan?” She asked as she pried my face away from the glass and went to work straightening my hair and brushing crumbs off my shirt. I sat down on the bench and let my legs dangle, allowing the changing speed of the train to drag them toward the front of the car.
“So, this is your mom and dad, mom?” I asked. It was weird thinking about them like that.
“That’s right. I grew up here,” she replied as she picked a candy crumb from the leg of my pants only to flick it onto the floor. I wished I’d known it was there. The cherry flavor was my favorite.
My mind went to work making connections. “Did you ride the train and go to the arcade too?”
“Mmhmm. I sure did. Your grandpa worked for the transportation authority. He helped run all the trains like this one, and I spent a lot of time in the stations.”
“What about Dad? Where was he?” I asked.
“I grew up in the Outers, like you,” Dad rumbled overhead as he loomed protectively over Mom’s back. He didn’t look at me as he spoke. Instead, he was always peeking around like something was going to pop out and scare him if he let his guard down.
“These aren’t your mom and dad, Dad?”
Mom snorted but tried to hide it by covering her mouth.
Dad noticed though. He frowned playfully at the both of us. “No, son. No, they are not. If they were, they’d probably have disowned me by now.”
Mom turned to slap Dad on the stomach. “They like you just fine, you big weirdo.”
“They could at least pretend to be less surprised when I use words with more than one syllable,” Dad grumbled. I knew he was kidding though. Everyone liked Dad. He was due to be Headman soon.
We were losing speed fast now, and the white lights of the train station grew brighter and larger by the second.
“They would be far less surprised if you didn’t pretend to sound like a bumpkin for the entire visit,” Mom scolded, but her eyes never stopped smiling. “Your accent gets twice as thick as soon as we enter the city limits, Myron. Don’t, for one second, think that slips by me.”
Then she turned to me and grinned. “Dad feels the need to stand apart from the crowd here, but you’re fitting in fine. Grandma and grandpa are going to love you.”
“Welcome to Plymouth Station,” the robotic voice called from overhead. “Next stop: Round Rock Station.”
“You ready, Ryan?” Mom asked, holding out both of her hands for me to take. Then she catapulted me up and out of the seat. “Just be yourself, and you’ll be fine.”
—----------
Now:
“Care to explain what that was all about?” Jassin’s voice cut through the fog of my daydreams. I’d done my best to stay alert for as much of the ride as I could, but after a couple hours of the steady swaying of the car, the rhythmic clops of hooves, and the lack of immediate danger, the razor tension of constant fight or flight I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying around with me seemed to ebb. Its absence left me groggy, disconnected, and more introspective than I was comfortable with.
The gnarled black shapes of the endless swamp flora drifted past my window. Evening had robbed most of the world of color and definition, but it wasn’t pitch black as of yet. It was cold though. The air ran icy fingers over my cheeks when the wind blew just right, and with it came the soft croaks and trills of nocturnal swamp life. The stagnant puddles just off the road were fast becoming smoky charcoal mirrors, whose smooth faces were marred with floating debris and rotting skeletal deadwood that bobbed in time with a song I couldn’t hear. Tiny clusters of luminescent dots floated lazily just above the surface of the water for seconds at a time only to gutter and die then instantly reform over a completely different pool.
The guards didn’t carry any light, at least not yet. They relied on sharp eyes and training to keep danger at bay apparently. Jassin and I enjoyed the luxury of a small modicum of light, a thin filament of some kind of luminous material wrapped around the roof of the carriage. It was a dim, pale form of illumination, bright enough to read by but only just. It made Jassin’s face look eerily like a bleached skull, which I wasn’t a big fan of.
No one should have cheekbones that sharp.
Oh, yes. He’d asked me something.
Jassin wore a curious look, his mouth turned down and his eyebrows showing just a hint of coming together. His pronounced features made every expression he used more severe and immediate like every moment of his life held potentially dire consequences.
I shook my head to clear my mental cobwebs away and focused on the gaunt noble, recalling his question and turning it over in my head for examination. The man loved to ask his open ended questions with precious little buildup, like he was asking multiple questions at once, and the question I assumed he was asking told him just as much as my answer in itself.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The goblins. You speak their language, and you said you knew one of them.”
I shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah. I guess I do. I have a thing for languages,” I replied, not really trying to delve into what that ‘thing’ was.
Apparently, the System was helping me out with communication and not just a little. On an intellectual level, I had theorized that something like that was happening with the Stone Hearts, but I thought it was something like a magical filter or a translation dub over old movies.
But switching between two languages like that without thinking, vocalizing sounds I’d never practiced in my life… Hell, I’m pretty sure some of the words I said in goblin weren’t possible to pronounce with a human mouth. It drove home just how different I was now that the System chose me and remade my body. So much of what I did now was involuntary, like I’d been given a brand new set of instincts entirely outside the evolutionary paradigm. I wasn’t, at all, the same person I’d been before integration.
At what point would I cease to be human anymore? Had I already passed that point?
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We called them Exotics back home.
No, wait.
They called us Exotics back home. I was a part of that little club now.
Biologists came up with the term on old Earth, a rare planet in the green zone with an extreme diversity of life, to describe invasive species that upset the natural order of an environment, sometimes edging out the original, native species.
It was an apt descriptor for us, if I were being truly honest.
Back during Exodus II, sometime between my ancestors’ departure from Earth and arrival on Proxis 3, something or someone activated the System, and it set about choosing its first Exotics. At least that’s the theory. On our colony ship, only a handful of people went through Integration. Most of them died. Some disappeared entirely.
That’s the funny thing about being snatched out of your cryochamber, remade, then tossed back inside with superhuman resistances to cold and injury. Suddenly, you’re stuck in an insulated metal tube that’s doing its level best to keep your internal temperature at or near absolute zero, but your new System powered body says ‘no.’
The lone known survivor, a maintenance tech named Gregory Marshal, escaped his pod only to find himself alone on a ship full of popsicles.
He was kind enough to record a series of video logs for posterity’s sake, detailing what had happened to him and how, but he couldn’t stay with the ship. We were still about 500 years short of our expected landfall, and Marshal could no longer be put in cryosleep. The day he left, he recorded a tearful goodbye to his family, saying that he was leaving, but if he was still alive by the time they landed, he’d find them. He didn’t actually get to Proxis 3 in time to reunite with his family, but, after he remarried, the Marshals became a formidable Exotic line, formidable enough to nip at the heels of the big five at one time.
I was an Exotic now. My children, if I ever had any, would be Exotics. Their children would be Exotics. It would go on like that until the heat death of the universe. That’s how it worked. It’s how the Marshals and the Five Families rose to prominence back in the day. Would I need to start my own Family, or would I need to join another? The thought made my head spin.
Jassin inadvertently saved me from spiraling down into an existential crisis. He wasn’t satisfied with my previous answer. “When did you learn that? Why?”
I cleared my throat, preparing to hedge. “Uh- Why do I need to have a reason to learn something?” I asked.
Deception is now level 3.
After a heartbeat of hesitation, Jassin gave a slight nod in conciliation. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, Ryan, but the barrier between our cultures, Goblin and Miur, has proven difficult for anthropologists to breach. Even on the rare occasions where a scholar found success, goblinoids are a tribal people, and their dialects tend to vary wildly. How did it come to be that they accepted you?”
I shrugged. “They saved my life when we met.”
“Really?” Jassin gaped. “A rare thing, indeed, goblin charity.”
“And then they enslaved me.”
“Ah. Yes. That does sound more typical of goblins.” Jassin cleared his throat, and something like pity briefly played across his features. “These are the goblins that held you captive, I take it? That makes it more strange that you had an interest in their safety. I hope you don’t think me callous that I declined to bring them with us. They would slow us down too much, and we could not trust them.”
I nodded and drew in a deep breath, summoning the safer, less complicated portions of my feelings on the matter to lend me some credibility. The rest of it I buried deep where I could deal with it later.
“It’s fine. Thanks for considering it at least. As for the captivity thing... Honestly, when they found me, they thought I was dying, so they brought me back to their home to see their chief. He’s the one that had the idea to keep me as a slave. He was a real piece of work, and if I ever see him again, we’re going to have words. The others, though, they treated me decently, so long as it didn’t go against Kuul’s orders. They fed me, clothed me, and housed me during a time where I had no idea what I was doing, and I hadn’t figured out the whole… uh practitioner thing yet. I guess they gave me some time to figure things out even if that’s not what they intended. I’m not saying I’m ready to invite them over for tea, but I don’t see them as necessarily evil.”
“True. I wouldn’t call goblinkind evil, per se, but they are a brutal, contentious folk. Incompatible with the civilized collective. Next question. Did this Kuul teach you to control your dominion?” Jassin probed.
I blinked. “Uh. No. No, definitely not.” Even thinking of Kuul as a benevolent figure was so far out of my imagination, the notion hit me between the eyes and blasted my train of thought off the tracks.
“Hmm.” Was Jassin’s reply to that. Then he slowly leaned back in his seat and began to stare out of the window, that pensive frown back on his face.
Was that another test? Did I pass or fail? I had to admit, the man’s poker face was fantastic. Sure, he showed emotion at appropriate times, but they felt almost too appropriate, as if even his candid moments were calculated to an extent, like he was allowing himself to be candid instead of it happening naturally.
What was Jassin’s deal?
He came off like a university professor well enough except when he didn’t, and I hadn’t forgotten how his guards reacted when the noble proposed we ride together in the same car. That is to say, they didn’t seem worried at all. They’d found me hiding next to a big pile of corpses, covered in blood. Yet, they were more than willing to let me get next to their VIP.
Why? Other than one brief display of magic when he stripped all the grime off my body, Jassin hadn’t really shown much mojo. Was he particularly powerful or tricky? Was I riding around with Merlin or Harry Houdini?
After a soft rap on the wall of the carriage, Garret poked his head in. “My lord, we’re about to enter the glade.”
“Thank you, Garret. Steady on until the spot, then.”
“Yes, my lord,” Garret replied with a grin, and then he was gone again.
“You’re going to like this.” Jassin said with a smile that drew back his skin until his cheekbones looked like they wanted to burst from his face like alien parasites.
“Like what?” I asked.
“How would you like to see the sky, my boy?”
The last time I’d done that, it almost killed me. My feelings on the matter were appropriately mixed. “Uh. Well-”
“No need to worry,” Jassin assured me as he held up his hands to forestall my answer. “You won’t need to take any precautions. It’s perfectly safe. Well, more safe than the company you’ve kept as of late.”
I shrugged. “Sure then. I guess so.”
The nobleman scoffed. “You guess so. You’re far too young to be so jaded, Ryan. You’re incredibly lucky to get this opportunity. Perhaps a look at the naked cosmos will change your outlook somewhat.”
Jassin reached over and closed the curtains where I’d been looking out, then did the same on the other side.
I looked at him and tilted my head questioningly, but he just smiled and used a pen to write in the little notebook he liked to pull out from time to time. I got the distinct impression he was taking notes about me, but then again he probably wanted me to think that too.
After a while, the carriage slowed to a stop, and there was a call to halt outside. Jassin peeked out of his side of the curtains, nodding to himself satisfactorily. The guards barked a couple terse orders to one another and took positions up around the carriage, then sounded the ‘all clear.’
“Alright, go ahead,” Jassin said, indicating the door with his head.
I gave him a sidelong glance, wondering what his game was, but I was already doing as he asked. I didn’t need to be told twice to get some air after hours of riding. As I worked the latch and popped the door open, I could see Jassin staring at me as if looking for a reaction, but I didn’t know what kind of reaction he wanted from me. So, I decided a quick exit was to my benefit, giving him less time to interrogate me without having to even use his words. I practically leaped out of the car.
Outside, it was night but not pitch black like my first night on Ralqir or in the caves. Everything was so… still. There was not a tree to be found for miles, no branches swaying overhead or leaves rustling in the wind. Nothing alive pressed down from above. Instead, there was sky.
For the first time in what had to have been months, a huge open sky spread out above me. The stars, however, were all wrong. Stars were supposed to be diffuse. They were supposed to spread out in all directions, a tapestry of light that was everywhere you looked, courtesy of the big bang. That wasn’t the case here.
All around me, twinkling, loosely clustered streams of luminous blobs snaked their way across the night sky like ribbons on a kite, their writhing forms only broken by shadow-cloaked heavenly bodies close enough to obscure but not high enough to reflect the sun’s rays from the other side of the planet. But the largest presence above took a huge chunk of the starscape for itself, dominating the night sky. It was a massive sphere of white and gray almost directly above our heads, and it bled green and pink auroras that palpated around its edges, throbbing bright enough to force me to squint.
Closer to hand, soft, dark grass, highlighted silver with dew twitched in the gentle breeze.
“I always make it a point to stop here before I get to the city,” Jassin said from behind me. I turned back to see him staring upward just as I did, a slight, knowing smile on his face.
The guards, however, were spread out around us, their eyes always on the swaying grass or on the treeline far away, now just a dark ripple on the horizon. The animals they rode didn’t share their sense of duty, taking little munches of grass now that they were finally off the road and standing still.
“Breathtaking,” I said, not daring to say what I really thought. ‘Impossible’ was more like it. I grew up on a moon orbiting a gas giant orbiting a supergiant star. Orbital Mechanics featured prominently in our education, and everything I knew… Ralqir’s situation flew in the face of even the most basic principles of what I was taught.
“The streams of stars you see there are just two arms of the maelstrom. You can see the edges of more of them if you look near the horizon. The shadows in the sky are the remains of our sister planet, Brella, and, of course, it would be impossible to miss the moon, not so close to the city. You’ll see it more clearly tomorrow.”
I opened and closed my mouth like a fish out of water. “It’s a very busy sky,” was all I could get out.
“Huh,” he grunted, very unscholarly. “Indeed, I suppose so, though no one has put it that way to me before. You have a strange perspective, young Ryan. Most react to their first open sky with some variation of joy or fear or religious awe. You, though, call it ‘busy.’ Unbelievable.”
I didn’t take my eyes off the sky, but I could feel Jassin staring at me, through me. What was he looking for?
After a long moment, Jassin seemed to give up on eliciting some kind of response. “All the same, I find that it teaches a sense of history and proportion. This view is what our ancestors learned to fear during the Purge, but now we study it with the naked eye, as long as we are here. The message is a bit more poignant now than during the day,” he said.
He’d said that before.
“During the day?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh yes. You can come out during the day, my boy. This is the only place left on our planet where you can do so. While the rest of our world belongs to the Mendau, this is the last glade: Skyglade.”
“Because of the moon?” I guessed.
“Correct. Perhaps they still teach some history in Lavistal afterall.”
I almost didn’t catch the trap, my mouth already opening to ask more questions, but I caught myself in time. “Vistia, you mean. I’m Vistian.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. Anyway, I thought you might want to see this. Some people go their entire lives without seeing the sky in such resplendence. You might be able to get away with looking at the stars in a tiny clearing with slight cloud cover, but here, you are safe to study this as long as you like, thanks to the moon’s proximity. In fact, many have dedicated their lives to doing so at the observatory. A little farther up the road, and you would be able to see the top of the tower there.”
“In Eclipse,” I said as one of the pieces of the puzzle that was Ralqir fell into place for me. Of course the city’s name was Eclipse. “The name is a little on the nose isn’t it?”
Jassin cleared his throat. “Yes. Quite so. I probably would have named it something sufficiently poetic if it were up to me, but the Crusaders that liberated this land were not known for their imagination. No matter the name, it is the Dark Lord’s parting gift to the people of our world after he set the Purge in motion.”
Switching gears, the nobleman sighed contentedly, twisting at the waist and extending his arms into a good stretch. “Alright, let’s get to the city. I have to check in before morning if I don’t want to be given a demerit, and the sooner I get to the university, the sooner I can examine your condition and send you on your way.”