14
EVERYONE knew the origin of the Helionic faith. Sarolvana was an ardent follower of an old religion, and she chose to seek out Earth on a pilgrimage. Most who made the attempt did not return.
Sarolvana did, but she hadn’t found Earth.
Instead she happened upon the Transaturnine System and a place like no other, a wondrous starlight realm. Her devotion to the old faith shifted as the Living Cosmos itself instructed her anew in her time of solitude, and she returned to the young colonies from where she’d come—only to find that all she’d left behind were long dead, and she’d become ageless. She was over three hundred years old, yet appeared all of twenty-five.
She spoke of the Living Cosmos and at first gathered only a few followers. So Sarolvana sought to prove herself, and vowed to her followers that she would leave them and return when they were of great age. In the decades that passed after Sarolvana again disappeared into the starlight realm, many lost faith.
Then she returned, as young as she’d been upon her departure. . . . And they were all old.
It was not false-youth. It was true youth. She’d been blessed by the divine Cosmos, and her followers grew in number as they saw with their own eyes how she’d been made immortal. But some asked questions that Sarolvana could not answer in a way they understood, so she began to share chemicals with them to open their minds, to give them the insight bestowed on her by the starlight realm. Coupled with her beautiful, resonant voice, a chemically influenced mind could be enlightened.
Contemporaries sneered at this “cult of the stars.” They wrote it off as a pretense for young people to use drugs; they devised “scientific” explanations for Sarolvana’s immortality. Laws were created just to limit this cult’s spread, so Sarolvana gathered the most devoted of her followers and took them to the starlight realm. Then, blessed with her immortality, disciples returned still young to find themselves the same age as their great-grandchildren. They spread the faith even further.
Still, there were doubters. So many doubters that upon Sarolvana’s final, fateful visit to the colonies, an angry group seized her, this speaker for the Living Cosmos. They proclaimed that a true ally of a thinking, conscious, feeling Cosmos would surely never be killed by it. They launched her into a star to burn to death.
Yet Sarolvana did not die—not truly. The man who became the first Interdict roused from his despair and heard her speaking to him, for she had joined the pulse of the Living Cosmos with her death as all good Helionics must do, and in her name, this Interdict moved to dwell full-time at the Sacred City, training more and more vicars to send to all corners of the galaxy and spread the true faith. The Helionics had an advantage no others did: immortality, the ability to exist over lifetimes when others aged and died. And so Sarolvana’s truth spread, and now the faith of the stars truly dominated the stars.
Centuries passed before that Interdict met a star himself, but his successor followed, and then her successor. Now it was Orthanion whose massive crystalline statue had towered over my head in the Penumbra, and if it was to be believed, he’d presided over the Helionics for a half an eon from within the Sacred City.
It wasn’t humanly possible.
And yet—Tyrus and I would soon see the truth for ourselves. One way or the other.
• • •
Since there was a chance this gamble could backfire spectacularly, Tyrus and I considered our options. There was only one person who had no involvement in the Chrysanthemum’s politics, who had enough personal enmity toward Pasus to serve as an objective observer.
“What is it?” Neveni said when I gave her the electronic document.
“It’s just insurance. If a month passes and we haven’t returned,” I told her, “it will unlock itself so you may see what it says about where Tyrus and I have gone, what we’ve meant to do. I can’t tell you more than that.”
She would only see it if something went spectacularly wrong and we perished. In that case, the Luminars would have the knowledge to use to their advantage first.
In the meantime, the rest of the galaxy wouldn’t miss Tyrus and me the fleeting few days we were gone, and the closest advisers would just think he was taking an inappropriate interlude in the serene wilderness of Lumina, far too casual about the developing firestorm in the Empire.
He was hardly the first Domitrian Emperor prone to such eccentricities. “Such is the consequence of rule by bloodline rather than merit,” Tyrus sometimes said. If all went to plan, we would return well before Devineé perished, holding just the trump card we needed to force the vicars to give us the scepter. Then it wouldn’t matter if Devineé died and Pasus’s back was to the wall, and he lashed out wildly, desperately. Tyrus would have overwhelming force supporting him.
If all did not go to plan, Devineé would still perish. We would be lost in the Transaturnine System, as so many pilgrims had been before us, and there would no longer be a Domitrian to claim the scepter—forcing an entire systemic change in the Empire that might or might not work out for the best.
And of course, there was also that doubtful third possibility: that we’d end up the first people outside the body of vicars to encounter the Sacred City and the Interdict in centuries.
It remained to be seen.
There was no blissful time basking in the five days of hyperspace to the Transaturnine System. We gathered up tribute for the Interdict—just in case Tyrus was wrong and we did somehow end up in the Sacred City. It was paltry. Spices, jewels (some broken right off the wall of the Hera), artwork, and even some of Tyrus’s books.
As we soared through hyperspace, I kept noticing Tyrus’s face. He had that expression like he was questioning, questioning himself, over and over.
“Stop that,” I ordered him.
His brow furrowed. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You are thinking too hard,” I said. “I can tell. Stop. We made our decision. Let’s see it through and worry later.”
“Worry later? You ask something quite impossible there,” he said. Then he reached out and drew me onto his lap, leaned his chin on my shoulder. “Distract me.”
I’d never spoken just for the sake of speaking, but with the Interdict on my mind, I shared Sidonia’s old words about how we were all stardust formed into conscious beings. And then, as soon as I spoke of her, so many things poured out, all in a great torrent, and Tyrus just listened.
“The vicar told her I didn’t have a divine spark, but she believed him in everything else, yet not that. She never accepted it. I told her I wasn’t like her. So many times, I told her.”
Tyrus leaned over to press his lips to my bared shoulder. “She was a remarkable person.”
My vision blurred. A knot lodged in my throat. She had been.
“I think I will seek a higher price from the vicars than just the scepter,” Tyrus decided. “I want you granted personhood.”
The words took my breath. I stared at him, astounded. “That can be done?”
“It’s a legal and spiritual status. I am the law, so we need only fix the latter. I’ve no doubt you are a person, Sidonia had no doubt of it, and you must know the truth of yourself.” He reached over tenderly, smoothed my hair from my eyes. “At least, you should. We’ll do this.”
It didn’t seem possible to me. It didn’t.
Yet everything about us had been impossible, had always been impossible—and who knew what else there was to come?
• • •
When we dropped out of hyperspace, Tyrus took a place by the window in the Hera’s command nexus. We saw it in the distance, a great mass of pure blinding light—stars gathered so close to each other as though something more powerful than even a hypergiant star tugged them together.
Then space changed about us, and rather than darkness, we were drawing toward bright, vibrant light strewn in currents that almost resembled raging rivers flowing through space. Then the Hera’s steady shaking turned to violent jolts as the gravity ripped at us.
Tyrus rushed over to the navigation panel. The Hera was designed to steer itself, but the gravity here . . . It felt wrong. “What are those stringy lights?” I said.
“I . . . I have no idea. Let’s pause here a moment.”
I nodded, but he’d already ordered the Hera to a stop. . . .
The ship continued forward, shaking harder. Tyrus ordered the ship to pull back . . . and it still didn’t stop. He surged to his feet, stepped toward the window, rubbing his hand over his chin, thinking quickly, pondering those glowing ribbons of light.
Then he froze.
“Nova blast me,” he breathed. “Stars. Nemesis, these are stars!”
“What? Stars . . . ?”
“They’ve been torn apart. These are burning streams of hydrogen. It’s this gravity. The gravity . . . And we’re going right into this. We have to turn around!” He threw himself back to the navigation console, faster than I’d ever seen him move, even at full sprint. My heart thumped wildly as he pounded at the console, ordering the Hera to apply its full power to driving us backward.
But the starship wasn’t responding as it should. The jolting mounted until I could hear it, could hear the strain of stone tempted to fissure.
Ice filled my stomach.
Tearing away from this will kill us, came a cold and terrible voice in my head.
Tyrus had taken navigational control from the ship now. And I fought for my balance as I stared at his back where he was leaning over the console. The ship hadn’t done as he ordered it on his own, so he was circumventing it. . . . Those commands written into the computer long before many of his ancestors had been born, by people with more understanding of space and technology and science than anyone alive.
Tyrus was so incredibly sharp and inventive and perhaps that was also his weakness—because he had too much faith in his own competence at times. Like right now. And through the rattling, straining chaos about us as the ship hurtled forward and he tried to steer us back, I knew we were about to be destroyed. He couldn’t drag us out of this, but this ship was a magnificently clever machine and we had to trust it.
So I didn’t think on it further. I didn’t explain myself.
I charged forward, seized him, and ripped him away from the console, knocking him back. I slammed my hand on the autonavigation, then whipped around and blocked him when he shot back toward the panel. A jostle of the ship and we both plunged to the floor, and I couldn’t hear what he was shouting at me, but I pinned him there in the heaving, dimming light. . . .
Outside the window a brilliant twine of burning light was whipping toward us, and just as it was about to hit, Tyrus abruptly stopped struggling and suddenly rolled himself atop me. . . . Then the deafening roaring about us receded and the jostling became vibration, and his blue eyes opened, fixed upon mine.
See? I thought, reaching up to stroke his cheek, seeing the beads of sweat on his forehead.
All we could do was leave this to fate and technology. There’d been no time to explain, and I knew it would be anathema to Tyrus to do such a thing . . . to take a backseat. Then he would have killed us both.
For a while, we remained there gripping each other and waiting for the moment my decision backfired terribly. But the Hera adjusted itself as the currents of the gravity buffeted us this way, weaving among the ribbons of obliterated stars, but never straight into the heart of the vast clouds of burning hydrogen, stringing the system like entrails.
“This must be what happens,” Tyrus murmured. “This is why so many don’t return. A weaker ship than this one, manned by one less decisive than you are . . .”
It would already be in pieces. The Tigris in all its beauty, opulence, would be fragments of debris in this system.
“How did you think to do that?” he said to me.
“You don’t tense your muscles to receive a punch,” I said. “You roll with the momentum.”
A strangeness settled between us. We gazed at each other amid the rattling starship. There were certain things I’d come to understand about Tyrus without ever consciously thinking on it, and one was this: he needed a sense of power over a situation. I knew it could be termed a neurosis—only natural in someone inclined to be a control freak, trapped in a life where survival depended upon adjusting to the whims of his dangerous relatives.
That was simply Tyrus.
I was far and away his physical superior and capable of taking decisions out of his hands at will. . . . It was something that only grew glaringly obvious when we were in danger, and usually we didn’t have a quiet moment immediately afterward. But I’d just made this decision for him, and now the moment was over. He pulled himself up, gripping the back of a chair.
“There was no time to explain,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You saved our lives, Nemesis. Excellent thinking.”
And like that, any potential strangeness was simply gone. We turned our attention to the window and gazed out at space for the hours as we buffeted through the hydrogen currents. Then at last we were delivered beyond the currents of light. We saw what was so ferociously causing those gravity eddies in the Transaturnine System: a curve of pitch black. The light all about it was made of stars, or the remains of stars, and they were being twisted into an unending darkness.
A deep shiver from within my soul. I knew what I was seeing.
“It’s a black hole,” said Tyrus.
A chill raced down my spine. A black hole had such intense gravity, light could not even escape its event horizon. That’s what accounted for the stars all so close to one another. The black hole was drawing them in.
Tyrus splayed his palm over the window. The rounded, unfathomable black grew larger and larger.
“Tyrus, are we being pulled into it?”
“We’re nowhere near the event horizon. We seem to be entering a wide orbit.” His gaze flickered toward me. “That’s where Amon died.”
I looked at his profile. “After his excommunication?”
Tyrus nodded. “That’s the penalty. One is cast alive into a black hole to be torn apart.”
A proper Helionic death meant disposal in a star. The dead were thus reunited with the pulse of the Living Cosmos and would assume a new form as the Cosmos willed it. A black hole, though, was very different.
Tyrus drummed his fingers one-by-one on the window. “If Amon was launched into this black hole, then someone launched him. The Interdict. I think we have found our answer. The Sacred City is real.”
A flash drew my eye. A bright, vibrant light pulsed over our view, and again. Tyrus leaned against the window to stare with some wonder as it illuminated his pale lashes, his burnished red hair, and then he leaned back so I could see. “I think . . . I think that’s called a pulsar? One of the stars being drawn into the black hole is giving it off. . . .” He fell silent.
For the pulsar’s light caught upon an asteroid, which then cast lights all about it like netting, and the closer we drew, the more we saw that it formed a vast webbing through space, an artificial webbing. And the asteroids were not pure asteroids, but shards of glittering diamond, and on them perched machines like scorpions poised to sting.
I grew rigid, and Tyrus drew a sharp breath. . . . Yet no weapons were unleashed on us.
“We must be close,” he managed, as we moved through the gauntlet of so many weapons, they outnumbered the Chrysanthemum’s, that webbing of light continually flaring between them. . . . A power source, I realized.
Suddenly, a sharp lurch.
My heart bounded into a frantic beat, but Tyrus just stroked my arm, gazing upward. “Towing cables?”
I listened, heard the familiar thump of them, and smiled at him. “Yes.”’
Excitement, terror leaped into his eyes, and he gripped my shoulders soundlessly, just staring at me intently as though to say, We made it! And I reached up and squeezed his hands so tightly in my excitement that he winced, and then I loosened my grip.
“So we’re not going to be able to blackmail the vicars with this.”
“No. We can do something better,” Tyrus said, his gaze snapping with anticipation. “We can go over their heads and appeal directly to the Interdict.”
I grinned at him.
And in that moment, I knew we were about to forge our destinies. Tyrus hauled me up and pulled me into a searing kiss, like a man who’d just surfaced from drowning, drawing in life. I returned it with the same frantic energy, for in that moment, I was certain: nothing lay beyond our reach.