Jaqi
I BACK UP, TRYING not to trip. Those intense blue eyes are like shards burning me. I remember all the folk he’s killed, and know I won’t be but one more piece of meat on a sword.
“Whirr, you got any information on swordfighting?”
“Please state the style of swordfighting you prefer.”
“The kind where you kill the other fella.”
“The Earth-Mars Alliance forbids death in the process of a duel.”
“Shame, that,” John Starfire says as he walks toward me. “I’m going to take my memories back now.”
“Whirr, I need you to shoot him. This man is dangerous,” I say.
“That is not a proper command for my model,” Whirr replies.
Worth a try.
I back up, between the pillars, and he comes for me. I hold Taltus’s sword out like an idiot, like it’s going to stop anything, and he holds his own sword up, in that way that tells me he really knows how to use it.
Being some Oogie of Stars won’t help you, Jaqi. Got to use your head for one time in your life.
I’ve got this fella’s memories, but none of the ones running through my head seem to relate to swordfighting.
“I know the secrets,” I say. “I heard it here. It was humans done it to themselves. There weren’t no Jorians. They was just humans what had special powers of the mind, and the devil was the creatures in pure space.” I say it. “Shir—that just means Starfire. You can’t kill all humans. We are all humans.”
When I say it, the music flares up inside me, a distant song of the stars, moving through my blood. It feels true. We look at what the Jorians made—nodes and relay-towers and we figure it had to be some kind of miracle by a super-race, but it en’t, it’s just folk getting clever.
His face twists, and he laughs. “You believe that old lie?”
“That automaton done told me,” I say. I’m trying to move faster, and my body reminds me of how much pain it’s in as I do so. “Read it right from the records.”
“A lot of old lies here,” he says. “I’d like to go through them all, but I think we’re better off without those ideas.” He waves his sword. “It was a blessing in disguise when the Shir destroyed the library worlds. Think of how we’ll start afresh.”
This is a big room, but I’m still going to come up on a wall eventually, as I keep backing up. And there’s no way out of here. Nothing. Unless I can pull yet another miracle.
The last miracle weren’t nothing but a node. Nodes. What did I do back at Shadow Sun Seven? I was thinking about how I didn’t want no one else to die—well, en’t no one here but me, and I suspect I might be too foolish to live.
I was thinking about when I shot gray girl, Araskar’s old lover, when this all started on Swiney Niney. Reached out for a node. Can I reach out for this one?
I try, but that’s when John Starfire moves in and thrusts with his sword, and I try to bang it away, and he’s strong and presses the attack and I stumble backward, and fetch up against one of the pillars, and he’s slashed my leg open now—
Help me! I think of that thing I saw earlier. What appeared as my parents, then as a devil, but made of music.
I try to think of music. Try to think of my folks. But John Starfire’s memories crowd it, full of fighting and blood—no, I need my mother’s music, come on, where’s the song—
I barely knock his sword aside, and he twists and punches me in the face, knocking me against the pillar.
But with that pain comes the hint of a song.
Bend, pull, bend, pull . . . till the wheelbarrow’s full.
My mother’s voice.
And then an answering voice, from the Starfire itself. Bend, pull, bend, pull . . . till the wheelbarrow’s full.
A torrent of music pours into me from the universe around, drenches me, drowns me—
John Starfire leaps suddenly, his blade coming for me.
But I en’t there no more.
With a scream and a yank, I go flying across untold pure space. A rush like I never felt, a feeling like my body’s spread across the eternities.
And I’m back, standing on the bridge on the temple of the planet in the center of the Dark Zone.
I fall on my knees, clutch the railing. I feel like my insides all been wrung out. Aw hell. Aw hell. I just went between galaxies like it weren’t no thing.
This business of doing miracles is wearing me out.
The temple walls stretch high around me. Now that I’ve seen it, I reckon this place was supposed to be a mate to that Archives Tower back in orbit around Earth. If they was going to fill it with archived information filling up the pillars, they never built no pillars.
Far as I can tell, down below this bridge there’s only seawater.
All that information’s still back there, in orbit around Earth. With John Starfire wanting to smash it. I don’t read none, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned today, it’s that we could all use more stories about what happened when the First Empire went out the airlock.
“You there?” I ask the empty space. Looking for that thing—that creature made of music.
It hits me like some planet-sized echo of my mother’s song. I can feel her so close in the music I can almost taste it. Tapping her hips against the counter, and singing while she cuts a tomato.
And I see that thing. Well, see en’t the right word for it, but I know it’s there.
“So you’s what the devil was originally.”
Again, I’m translating from the thoughts that come into my head with a rush of music, so forgive me, cuz this en’t quite it, just the closest it can be in words. We are not like you. We are not part of time, part of fixed space. Those who came before . . . they were in pain and they sought to exist in fixed space, to aid those they loved. It . . . changed them. They tried to go into the corrupted space, and they were themselves corrupted. There is a sadness to the music, a kind of bad feeling running through it. They saw the ones they loved being hurt, changed. They themselves were hurt, changed. They feel only hunger now.
“So your . . . ancestors? They were in pain?”
The music strikes a couple of quirky notes. It don’t know the word ancestors. Okay, worth a try.
“Them . . .” I make myself say it. “Them . . . Shir that lived in pure space, back before they was—monster-ized.” Okay, that en’t a word, but for someone who en’t a book bug, I’m doing the best I can. “Why was they in pain?”
It comes to me, like it’s a story being told through song.
A virus, John Starfire was right. Only, he was half right. He thinks it was a virus humans made to kill Jorians, but I know that en’t right now. It was a nasty thing, a microbe that got turned fearsome during terraforming. I’ve seen plenty of that, out in the spaceways—you hear tell of planets that should support sentient life just fine, but something is wrong in the soil, in the air, some bug kills everything that comes down there.
I almost see it.
An empire that spread across galaxies died. All them folk, their skin turning red from broken blood vessels, hacking blood into their hands. It was a long, painful death, and the music, representing it, turns chaotic, mad, like an orchestra sawing away at their instruments fit to smash them. I see the First Empire falling. Whole star systems just stopped talking on the node-relays. Whole galaxies. With trade so connected by the nodes, the virus could get anywhere. Planets only survived by cutting off their nodes, when they could.
In those days each ship had a navigator, a person who could follow the nodes, connected to a creature of pure space. These things that existed in a different dimension, but they was as connected, surely as Scurv is connected to vir guns. They was—what’s that word—symbionts.
And so the Shir in pure space felt every single death from that disease, and it drove them into some kind of madness. I sense it, as much as anyone can. A whole host of them as became the devil, mad from the pain, the music turned into splintering, jigsawing roars. So they threw themselves against the nodes they had made, and they shifted dimensions, came into our space, where they was never meant to be.
And they changed.
Went from being creatures of pure space to being the devils.
And, I reckon, the only piece of alien life in the universe that en’t crossed with humans.
I need to get to my feet. Need to get out there, outside this temple, find Scurv, bring vim back and send vim through the node to shoot John Starfire for good.
The music presses on me of a sudden. I’m not sure what it’s saying, but this thing don’t want me to leave. I must bond, it “says.” It en’t quite bond, either—it’s almost a combination of bond and become and a bunch of other feelings what relate to changing.
“What you talking about?”
Someone with a better brain could say this in a way that makes sense, but this is mostly what it tells me: I am adult. I must bond. I reached for you, but the other was here first, and I cannot bond if he is strong. He bent me to his will, to make him travel. He can again.
“So . . . you want to bond with me, the way you done with the ancients . . .” Whatever you call them. “But John Starfire is in the way?”
His reach is strong. His call is strong. I do not feel the bond—becoming, growing, it’s more than bond, but that’s the best my puny brain can do when it’s told something through music—with he as I do with you, but he seeks it. You must stop him from reaching out, or we will not unify.
Even this thing reckons I’m some Chosen Oogie. “How am I supposed to beat a fella took down the entire galaxy?”
The music swells, rises up around me, as if it’s telling me I am with you.
Well, I reckon that’s almost a vote of confidence. Course, as much as it’s great to have the real living Starfire itself on my side, this is a fella who took down a galactic empire.
But a plan starts to form in my head. Guess my evil small brain has grown a few sizes lately.
“Send me back to Earth’s moon. Let’s kill John Starfire.”