Present
The workers’ revolution began on the hive’s nine hundred and third day, when the Hero pulsar was above the horizon to the north. A pod of predatory shaghāl emerged from behind a small asteroid to the west. The exhaust of their thrust was shielded by their bodies, but the point shines of their souls were visible to those in the colony who had souls. The shine was just slightly blue-shifting.
The skates were not ready. Only half the princesses were fueled in the launch tubes of the hive. Indecision washed over the colony. Skates and souls yelled over each other. Then, a thousand tiny reactions bloomed. The colony panicked. The flat, triangular skates hopped along the regolith in different directions on steely fingers.
Diviya stood above the rising dust, on a mound of mine tailings. He had been meeting with a half-dozen revolutionaries in the slums past the worker shanties. None of his revolutionaries possessed souls, so they could not see the shaghāl, but the panicked radio bursts from the hive alarmed them. Some thought that a squad of hive drones had found them.
“Oh no,” Diviya said.
“Flee!” Diviya’s soul crackled to him in the radio static. “Save the princesses!”
“Diviya, the revolution isn’t ready!” Tejas said. Tejas was a soulless worker, made of carbon-reinforced ceramic. He was triangular and flat, with a single, lightly abraded lens on the vertex of the leading edges of his wide fins. “The workers are not assembled.”
Hours away yet, the shaghāl split into two pods. The first pod of predators continued toward the hive. The second angled to intercept the migration, before it had even launched.
“The whole colony is already late,” Diviya said. “The revolution must happen now.”
Nearby, three skates hopped between the dusty mounds of mine tailings toward the hive. Their radioactive souls shone hot behind their eyes: tax farmers, coming from the farms to join the migration.
“We have only minutes,” Diviya said in a radio discharge. He felt sick with doubt. He led his followers forward.
The revolutionaries leapt upon the three tax farmers. Diviya screamed out his own fears. The violence against kin was surreal, matching the strange panic that exploded all over the colony as its last hours played out.
The tax farmers struggled, stirring graphite fines in the vanishing gravity of the asteroid. The revolutionaries pinned the tax farmers upside down. Their steel fingers waved uselessly and their mouths were exposed. Diviya’s conspirators held tight to the frozen subsurface.
The tax collectors cried out with crackling radio noise that carried far on the great asteroid. But while the colony was launching the migration, no one would notice. Too many hurried to save the princesses, the princes, and themselves.
In this chaos, the workers’ revolution could become real.
One of the three tax farmers appeared to be a landlord by the brightness of his soul. He was the most dangerous. Beneath the hardened carapace of boron carbide, his soul spattered the hard, energetic radiation from uranium and thorium, and the soft, diffuse glow from tritium and potassium. The landlord’s soul spoke frantically. Diviya’s soul was strangely quiet; it feared Diviya.
The landlord’s rows of short legs waved helplessly and he was hot. His soul heated the landlord’s whole triangular body. Although it was a sin to waste reaction mass, Diviya did not put it past the landlord to pour the stored volatiles over his soul, launching himself, and everyone on him, into orbit. They could not hold him if that happened.
Diviya reached into the landlord’s mouth with the pry and pliers that doctors carried. Deep in the landlord’s mouth, Diviya pried back supporting metal bands made to hold the soul. The landlord understood what Diviya was doing and in his horror released a cool spray of thrust from the trailing edge of his fins.
But then Diviya had the soul free and he held the rectangular cake of radioactive isotopes in the shine of the pulsar. They all stared and listened in awe. Only Diviya had ever seen a naked soul. These revolutionaries were farm workers, ore processors, and haulers of regolith.
Diviya turned to Tejas. The skate turned onto his back, exposing fingers blunted from months of scratching frozen nitrogen and graphite from around hard chondrules. Charged regolith dust grimed his open mouth. Diviya set the still-screaming soul within Tejas’ mouth.
Any skate could have a soul. Souls gestated in the large ore plants within the queen, near the kilns where the skates themselves were fired. Diviya had been chosen to be a doctor and received a soul only by chance. The soulless could farm volatiles, but could never find radioactive isotopes in the regolith, or fly from the asteroid. Diviya fastened the bands, locking the soul into place. They turned over the newly ensouled skate.
The panic of the hive heightened. The throbbing radio signals from the queen signaled that she was preparing to launch the first wave of princesses. Diviya hurried to remove the souls from the other two tax farmers and place them into Barini and Ugra.
The souls beamed their fear and outrage in radio static. Once, hive drones would have come and arrested them all, but this was the end of the world the souls had preached.
Far off, above the great bulk of the queen, the leaders of the migration launched. Bursts of hot volatiles, briefly visible through the thickening dust, launched princesses at tremendous velocities. Six. Seven. Eight. Waves of princes and their courtiers threw themselves into space after the potential hive queens. Then, a wave of slower-moving, uncoordinated tax farmers and landlords. Diviya’s soul began speaking, at first in quiet, fearful tones, but then more strongly.
“Come,” Diviya said. “There is no more time!”
Dozens of revolutionaries had crowded them. The soulless. They had put their faith in Diviya. They retreated at his words, stunned. And Diviya’s heart cracked. Of everything that they had hoped for all of the workers, they only had time to save three.
Not even save. There was every chance that Diviya and his three ensouled revolutionaries would be killed by either the shaghāl or the migration itself. They were not princes, fed volatiles and radioactive dust by scores of workers. They had been given every nugget of frozen volatiles that could be smuggled out of the work camps, but it was probably not enough.
Diviya opened a valve. A trickle of the volatiles he had stored in his body passed over his soul, super-heating. A searing mix of water, methane, ammonia, and nitrogen shot from the spouts on Diviya’s trailing edge, launching him over the hive. The great, sintered ceramic bulk of the queen, dwarfing all the piles of mine tailings, and studded with the launch tubes of the princesses, lay beneath him, shrinking as he rose. The ordered lines of skates carrying ore and volatiles to her had dissolved. They fled into her now for protection she could not offer.
Beneath him, a new volley of princesses burst from the tubes, shooting past Diviya. Their steel fingers were tucked tightly beneath them and the spray of their thrust sent shivers of aching attraction through him. A squadron of princes and their servants followed. Their wide, dust-free fins turned gracefully, briefly reflecting starlight from smooth carapaces of boron carbide, beneath fine, tight nets of steel mesh. They turned the webs of steel to face the Hero pulsar, absorbing its microwaves as they thrust.
Breath-taking. Intimidating. Kin.
Diviya and his revolutionaries thrust hard after them. The horizon of the great asteroid fell away on all sides, revealing the clean dark of space. The colony, with the hive and its halo of slums became a dark, irregular shape, lit only by the bright points of the few souls still there. Then the third and last wave of princesses launched, with every soul that could, even those who could only thrust briefly.
Invisible were the workers left behind, colorless as the dirt. He’d fought for them, tended their hurts, and had wanted to bring them on migration. Those brother skates tugged at his heart, but eerily, less than he expected. Diviya was enlightened, rational, but the strength of instinct surprised him. Diviya felt the urge to protect the princes, clouded with his attraction for the princesses. He needed to control both feelings.
His soul whispered the navigational liturgy to him and he wanted to follow its lead. His soul had migrated before, in a successful prince of a generation past. His soul carried the wisdom of flight angles through the vastness of space and time, how to block the shaghāl from reaching the princesses and the princes. Each soul knew the same way to the same spawning ground waiting for them in the future. But to his soul, those workers left behind were no more important than the giant shell of the abandoned queen after the princesses had launched.
The smaller pod of shaghāl proceeded to the hive. They were radio-reflective, not thrusting, but riding the Hero’s Voice with mesh sails catching the powerful microwaves shouting out each second. The dying queen served by soulless skates would feed the predators. The larger pod’s course would intercept the migration.
Past
Diviya hopped over the regolith, arriving at Work Farm Number Seven. Several days of bribing low-level officials with frozen nitrogen had gotten him a permit. A big skate with a sleek carapace patrolled the edge of the farm. Under a thin layer of dust, the grand prince’s insignia was visible, scored in the ceramic on both leading edges of his wide horizontal fins. The lens at the front of his head showed the hot radioactive light of his soul behind it.
“What do you want?” the tax farmer said.
“Someone called for a doctor,” Diviya said. He tilted his leading edges lower, showing less of his own soul. The landlord’s thugs were not worth antagonizing. From his gullet, Diviya pulled a thin sheet of beaten aluminum inscribed with his permit.
“Go back to the hive,” the tax farmer said. “We got the lazy skate back to work.”
“I’ve come all this way. I may as well check on the other workers,” Diviya said.
The tax farmer threw the permit. “Waste your time if you want.”
“Thank you,” Diviya said, retrieving the permit. Rows of steel fingers undulated beneath him and he hopped onto the work farm.
The farm was so large that the curvature of the asteroid nearly hid the great mounds of debris at the far end. The flat, triangular bodies of the skates moved over the regolith, digging and sifting with sharp fingers. Their radio sails were pulled tight across the tops of their wide horizontal fins, to feed on the radio and microwaves of the Hero’s Voice.
The workers were almost all soulless. Some few were given weak souls to find radioactive grains during their sifting. Diviya had received a respectable soul. Doctors needed keen, penetrating sight. The tiniest injuries and earliest-stage material stresses could only be detected with radiation reflected back from ceramic carapaces.
Diviya passed a mound of regolith scraped from the surface of the asteroid, sifted for icy clays, hard nuggets of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and iron-nickel granules for the foundries and kilns within the queen. The tailing mounds were chondrules of silicates and magnetites. Atop the hill was one of the grand prince’s landlords.
The landlord preached a droning liturgy from the apex of the mound, but the words were not his. The soul behind his eye recited the sagas for him to repeat. The metronomic rhythms of electrical buzzing and snapping carried some distance before they were drowned by the inscrutable mystery of the Hero’s Voice. Tax farmers and other landlords heard the liturgy, and retransmitted it, complete with its numbing, repetitive rhythms.
Diviya had become adept at ignoring his soul. Otherwise he would spend his days in sagas and parables that froze the class struggle into hardened clay. He moved among the workers. He knew many of them by name, from protests and rallies.
“Good morning, Esha,” Diviya said to a dusty skate. Esha’s fingers moved in a blur beneath him, scrabbling at the hard regolith, creating a cloud of dust in the microgravity. Esha was a good worker. Several nuggets of nitrogen and carbon dioxide shone in dusty pride beside him. A respectable meal for a prince or even one of the princesses.
“Good morning, Diviya. What brings you out here?”
“I heard a doctor was needed.”
“That was days ago. Dwani was beaten.”
“Where is he?”
“They’re supervising him close to the west mound.”
A tax farmer approached.
“Get back to work!” he said. “Hey! Who are you?”
Diviya turned to show the mark of a doctor that had been scored onto both leading edges of his fins. The tax farmer grunted derisively. Diviya was a doctor to workers. If he’d had a patron, he would have been the doctor to princes and perhaps even the princesses. Tax farmers did not consider country doctors like Diviya anything more than workers reaching above their station, although they themselves happily came to him with their aches.
“Hoy!” the tax farmer said. “You didn’t call me to pick this up,” he said, pushing both Diviya and Esha aside to grab the nuggets of frozen gasses.
“I just found them,” Esha said.
“That’s what they all say! Get back to work. And you, doctor, get done whatever you were doing before I revoke your permit.” The tax farmer hopped towards the next worker.
“Go see the skates after you see Dwani,” Esha said. “They’ll want news of him. The workers look up to you. You received a soul, but you haven’t forgotten them.”
The droning of the liturgy resumed. Like the Hero’s Voice, the meaning of the words had decayed.
Present
The hive vanished behind him. The minuteness of their former home was spiritually humbling. Stippled stars on black night, close companions since birth, now wrapped him in their vastness. His struggle for the workers, all his words to free his brothers, seemed hollow here. And the migration might still die stillborn, like a drone without a soul. No future. Not even a present.
His soul was silent, perhaps hoping that Diviya had resolved himself to his duty. He fell behind the thrusting princes, still so far that they were just tiny points of hot breath. Perspective placed them near the unknowable voice of the pulsar. The thought of approaching the Hero terrified him.
Diviya’s soul began, in staccato radio crackles, the liturgy of migration: vectors and star sightings, landmarks, and flight speeds drawn from the sagas. The souls had done this before. They adjusted the liturgy each migration, to account for the drift of the asteroids, but the mythic arc of the Hero and the Maw was unchanging.
Diviya knew the migration route. He’d studied it, perhaps in a way unseemly for a country doctor. He eased his thrust, contrary to the liturgy. His soul repeated the timings of the thrusts, and their strengths. Diviya ignored his soul. He needed to be trailing the princes and princesses for what he wanted to try. And he needed his thrust later.
The pulsar became a fat dot. Its gravity drew him onward and its voice had become a deafening, constant shout. Diviya unfurled his radio sail. It bloomed outward, bound to him by many fine steel wires. He angled his sail so that the microwaves pushed him off a collision with the collapsed star. The force would grow as he approached, compensating for the rising gravity.
The pulsar had bloated into a fat disk. The Hero’s Voice was too pure and loud to be audible. Microwaves seared tiny arcs of electricity across Diviya twice each second, filling him with life for what must come. He was sick with overcharging. His soul recited the prayer of brushing against divinity. When that finished, his soul told the parable of the prince fleeing before waves of the shaghāl. The Hero made Diviya large and small. Diviya could not turn to look how close the shaghāl might be, nor even if his fellow revolutionaries had kept pace with him. One approached divinity alone.
Past
Diviya hopped to find Dwani. The strip-mined regolith fields were uneven; layers of frozen dust revealed blocks of immovable iron-nickel. Such large masses of exposed iron-nickel did strange things to the Hero’s Voice. Where they could, workers dumped mine tailings upon them. But sometimes all the fingers in the colony could not cover them and the odd protrusions sparked and crackled, interpreting the Hero’s Voice in their own way, like the mad.
Diviya reached the west mound, an immense pile of mine tailings looking over the entirety of the plain. It had been here long before the queen and her grand prince had arrived.
“Poor workers,” Diviya said. “How long had they toiled to make that mound?”
“Long enough to launch generations of princesses and princes onto the migration,” his soul said, “fully fueled, with discerning souls to guide the foundation of new colonies.”
“At remarkable cost,” Diviya said.
“Remarkable that we survive at all,” the soul said.
The tax farmers inspected his permit. His soul shone as brightly as theirs, although these skates had likely been extorting bribes of volatiles from the workers for months. They might have enough breath to migrate with the princes and courtiers. The work of tax farmer and landlord was difficult, but could be lucrative.
Difficult skates worked the fields around the west mound. Fewer breaks, harsher discipline. Not that workers had many privileges. The workers here were slower, and the digging was hard. A tax farmer indicated a lone worker close by the base of the mound.
“Dwani?” Diviya asked when he had neared.
The skate turned and Diviya recoiled. The worker’s carapace had been smashed where the clean lines of the leading edge came to a point. Near the vertex was a jagged hole, dusted with regolith attracted by the electricity within Dwani. The lens of the eye was so scratched that no part of its surface was smooth.
“Who is it?” Dwani said.
“Diviya.”
“The doctor?”
“What happened, Dwani?”
“The tax farmers went after a few organizers. Reinforced ceramic doesn’t stand up well to iron rods.”
A horrified sadness crept over Diviya as he neared Dwani. The radioactive shine of Diviya’s soul scattered back from Dwani’s carapace, revealing many microscopic fractures. Some of the cracks were so large that Diviya would not have even needed a soul to see them. They reached far along Dwani’s fins, one nearly to the trailing edge. Dust, especially the static-charged graphite fines of the regolith, infected the cracks. To say nothing of the dust entering through the hole near Dwani’s damaged eye. The dust would soon interfere with the neural wiring.
“Whoever did this didn’t mean for you to live long,” Diviya said.
“I can’t move some of my fingers, but I can still work.” As if to make light of it, Dwani moved his fingers. Only a half-dozen of the steel limbs moved. The rest dangled.
“I hope you didn’t come all this way just for me. Unless you have some cure.”
“One of the committee members got word out. I came as soon as I could.”
“It won’t do any good,” Dwani said. “The tax farmers know their job.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Do something. More than just writing little manifestos and three-point plans on committee broadsheets.”
“Violence isn’t getting us anywhere, Dwani.”
“Coward.”
“There’s no end in what you’re doing. You and a school of other committee leaders make it sound as if a total upset of the hive will somehow make us free.”
“We’ll be free when we are not oppressed.”
“Half of us will be dead, win or lose,” Diviya said. “And the chaos will do nothing except cripple the hive. We’ll be easy pickings for the shaghāl.”
“We already are.”
“The princesses too?” Diviya said. “What is the point of all our work if even the princesses do not get away? Extinction is not social change.”
“You never resist,” Dwani said. “That’s why they gave you a soul.”
Present
Diviya’s cry of suffering mixed with the tireless booming of the Hero’s Voice. His soul had begun crying long ago. Weight crushed them. Diviya felt as heavy as an asteroid or a star, important to the world, possessing meaning. And yet, he was tiny. The Hero was now an angry blue and purple sphere. A beam of burning microwaves ripped across its face twice a second, throwing Diviya back by his radio sail. Strange radiations he’d never seen swirled in sickly oranges and reds on the pulsar’s surface.
Diviya reached perigee, the closest approach to the Hero, and he thrust. It ached. His thrust burned. The Hero’s Voice stung. The pull of his radio sail creaked his whole carapace. He was going to snap.
And then the Hero was behind him, His Voice throwing Diviya forward. His soul, between bouts of terror, repeated the correct speeds and distances of the migration. The temptation to relent to the soul was strong, but Diviya followed the migration at a distance with his co-revolutionaries in clumsy formation around him.
The lighthouse beams of the Hero’s Voice propelled them faster and faster. On this course, the radio waves would accelerate and charge them continuously as they flew straight and true towards the black hole called the Maw.
It was a long way between the Hero and the Maw. Sometimes half or more of a migration could fall to the shaghāl before the Maw had a chance to destroy them. And that was when the courtiers distracted the shaghāl and led them away.
And the shaghāl certainly followed. Diviya held his terror in check. The shaghāl were big, strong and fast, riding under enormous radio sails, leading with maws large enough to crush a skate.
The Hero’s Voice already dimmed as they moved away. But Diviya listened for any drop in the Voice beyond that, which would be the first sign that the shaghāl had found him, had picked him as food. In all the sagas and the teachings of the souls, the pursuing shaghāl placed themselves between their prey and the Hero so that the creatures of appetite slowly crept up with their great mouths while the skates drifted helplessly in their silent shadow.
Yet sometimes the ways of the devil were instructive. Diviya settled behind a distant prince, cutting off the radio and microwaves with his sail. The prince tilted his sail, this way and that, trying to escape the shadow, but without the Voice, his sail was just wire mesh.
The prince retracted his sail, a prelude in the sagas to thrusting. He extended the sail indecisively. Breath was a hard object, sifted or picked from the regolith, but it possessed a holiness. It was the Hero’s gift for the migration. The taboo of its use was both spiritual and pragmatic. Any use of breath except in the approaches to the Hero and the Maw, in strict, soul-guided accelerations, could mean not having enough later.
“No!” Diviya’s soul said, suddenly realizing what he was doing. “Stop it, you monster!”
The shadowed prince chittered electrical static, passing alarm across the migration, but it did him no good. The formation spread out. Over long hours, it passed the prince and Diviya finally moved aside, choosing another target to shadow. He drifted past the prince, who, suddenly hearing the Hero’s Voice, began accelerating again. But it would not be enough.
The shaghāl had been accelerating all this time too. They were closing faster than the prince could accelerate. They would consume him, volatiles, radioisotopes, rare metals and all.
Diviya’s three revolutionaries shadowed other princes. They were not as nimble as Diviya. More often than not, the princes escaped, catching radio waves that the revolutionaries had not quite blocked with their sails. But the princes still lost precious moments or minutes of acceleration.
It was working. The satisfaction tasted bitter to Diviya. He hadn’t wanted this and was the first to regret it. He’d wanted some end to the suffering of the workers. The princes had forced this revolution on themselves.
One of the courtiers, trailing so far back that he perhaps sensed he would soon be shadowed, retracted his sail and gently spun in flight. Instead of an approaching shaghāl, he saw Diviya, Tejas, Barini, and Ugra. He transmitted a radio shout in anger, and unfurled his sail. He rode the microwaves expertly, sweeping close to Tejas.
Diviya cried a warning, but it was too late. The courtier crashed into Tejas and dug with sharp fingers at Tejas’ eye, at his mouth, and at the wires holding his radio sail. The fingers snapped two of Tejas’ four wires. Tejas pitched as his sail tilted. The courtier leapt away.
“Tejas!” Diviya yelled.
Tejas began to tumble slowly. He could not retract his sail, nor right it.
“Diviya!”Tejas called. Diviya slowly pulled ahead as all of Tejas’ acceleration spun into his wild careening. “Fix my sail! Help!”
Diviya’s heart cracked. There was nothing to be done. On the migration, Diviya hadn’t the materials to replace snapped wires. And the shaghāl approached.
“Leave!” his soul said. “Fly on! Protect the princes and the princesses now.”
“I’m sorry, Tejas!” Diviya said.
“Please!” Tejas called.
Diviya slipped behind Tejas’ attacker before he could spread news of their betrayal. The courtier, suddenly without the Hero’s Voice, tilted his sail, to no effect. The migration crept away from him. He shrieked warnings, but he was too far for anyone to hear, except Diviya. The migration had dispersed widely, a scripturally pure defense against shadowing by shaghāl.
“No, do not do this!” his soul said. Perhaps it had overcome its fear of Diviya.
“Please.”
“Do you know how many workers have suffered because of the princes?” Diviya asked. “Do you know how many have been beaten and killed?”
“You are angry,” his soul said. “You do not completely understand the way the Hero has organized the hives so that the finest and strongest of skates are sent upon migration.”
“They are not the best,” Diviya said disgustedly. “They are the skates who have been given a soul, and then use that soul to enslave workers.”
“You are wrong. You are special.”
“I am not. A doctor wore out. Another was needed. I was the easiest to train. That is all. We are all the same. Souls create divisions for their own benefit.”
“The hereditary information you carry in clays are all the same. Circumstances and accidents of feeding and luck have their roles, but you are all kin. We are one colony. The success of a prince is your success. We make sure our kin succeed.”
“We are more than schools of clay,” Diviya said. “And if we truly are all the same kin, you won’t mind if it is I instead of the princes who make the final journey with the princess.”
The Hero’s thinning Voice pushed Diviya toward the courtier he shadowed. When they were almost touching, Diviya tilted his sail, veered aside, and passed him. The courtier’s radio sail caught the pulsar’s beam and started accelerating, but the shaghāl would finish what Diviya had started.
Past
The founding queen and her grand prince had located the hive on an asteroid with a lazy rotation around an axis that pointed almost directly at the pulsar. At the pole, the queen heard the Hero’s Voice tirelessly, but in the piled rubble fields near the worker slums, the low ensouled lived with short nights of quiet starvation and lethargy. The pulsar had set an hour ago and Diviya should have been resting, but he’d been invited to a workers’ rally. He entered the slums.
“These are not elements of society you should be associating with,” his soul said. “You and I may have a future. There may yet be time to show your talents and come into a more lucrative position, like a tax farmer, a minor landlord, or even the personal physician to a courtier. Imagine the resources you would have then for the migration.”
“My future will hardly be determined by a meeting,” Diviya said. A group of skates congregated ahead of them. “Look, other souls are here.”
“Ensouled workers!” his soul said dismissively. “Workers are where they put souls that are incapable of memorizing the migratory routes. No one here can help you.”
“Diviya!” Abhisri said. “You made it.” His friend Abhisri edged from the crowd, the flat ceramic triangle of his carapace worn by months of hard building. A soul winked behind the lens of his eye. Like Diviya, he had received his soul late in life, and had become an engineer. He often spoke at rallies.
“I heard you went to the work farms? You saw Dwani?” Abhisri asked.
“The drones were thorough,” Diviya said. “They cracked him.”
Abhisri made a sound.
“Change is slow,” Diviya said.
“Not just slow,” Abhisri said, not for Diviya, but for the others. “There is no change!”
Around them, workers sparked loudly in their heads, casting radio waves. Yelling. Cheering. They knew Diviya here, but he felt trapped in the center of attention as Abhisri spoke. Diviya was not a leader. Although they read his manifestos, Diviya didn’t agree with their methods.
“We cannot have slow change,” Abhisri said, warming to his oration. “We cannot hop or crawl toward freedom!”
More cheers. Diviya felt like cheering, too. The gaping hole in Dwani’s face would not leave his thoughts.
“We must go!” his soul said. “Now!”
“All of us are wiped out at every migration,” Abhisri said.”We never migrate. Only nobles. Their hangers-on. Their enforcers.”
“Revolution now!” someone yelled in the darkness.
“Overthrow the hive!”
Diviya’s soul shrieked in panic. So loud that surely others around them heard it. Diviya was also alarmed. He cared about these workers. Many were his friends. He was one of them. Revolution would get them killed. A terrible nervousness crept over him as he realized that he was going to speak.
“We cannot overthrow the hive,” Diviya said. “Violence will not free us.”
They hissed at him in electrical static.
“The princes and their courtiers are big, well-fed, and ensouled,” Diviya said. “They can fly while most of us cannot. The hive is built to repel us.”
“Excellent,” Diviya’s soul said.
“Defeatist!” someone yelled.
“Collaborator!” someone yelled.
“Leave!” Diviya’s soul said.
“This is Diviya!” Abhisri said. “Let him say his piece.”
“How much time is left, do you suppose?” Diviya asked. He was nervous with all eyes upon him. “A few months? The nobles fear that they haven’t enough volatiles to migrate. Courtiers fear they will not have the fuel to follow. Princes know that without the courtiers, the shaghāl will pursue them.”
No one spoke. No one moved. “And we fear being left behind.”
Diviya felt dizzy. He never threw himself into the middle. “What if we ask for souls for some workers?” Diviya said. “Would they give them?”
“No!” someone yelled from the darkness. “They’d beat us ’til we crack.”
“Yes, they would,” Abhisri said.
“So what do we do?” someone demanded.
“Offer them something,” Diviya said.
A chorus of protests rose all about him.
“Offer them more than what you are producing, in exchange for souls.”
“We can’t do that!” someone said.
“We ask for souls? For some of us? To go on the migration?”
“Yes,” Abhisri said, sounding intrigued.
“That won’t work for everyone!” someone said.
“But if a dozen workers survive the migration, they become the princes of the next generation,” Diviya said. “They can change the colonies that follow. Fewer tax farmers. Fewer nobles. More souls for the workers.”
“It isn’t enough!” someone yelled. A chorus supported him.
“Of course it isn’t enough,” Diviya said. “But it is the best we can get right now. As long as all the workers are wiped out every generation, the workers of the next must restart the struggle as if it were the first time. We must be in solidarity with the brothers of tomorrow whose clay has not yet been fired.”
The crowd silenced. A shade of the immensity of their task, of a sense of history and time slipped over them.
“Abhisri!” they cried. And some yelled “Diviya.”
“No!” his soul said. “This is against the will of the Hero.”
“Some will say this is against the will of the Hero,” Diviya said to the workers.
“The Hero made the princesses and their suitors and the migration, but where in the sagas did the Hero make tax farmers?”
Laughter greeted his joke, but sparking anger, too. “Nowhere!”
“And we have a leader,” Diviya said. “Abhisri can take our ideas to the princes.”
“Diviya!” some said, including Abhisri.
“Abhisri!” Diviya said, and was relieved when that cry was taken up.
Then other skates spoke. They hadn’t the rhetoric to speak at a prince’s reception, but their strength as orators lay in the visceral reality of their wanting. These workers scratched and scrubbed the regolith each day for nuggets of gasses to launch princesses and their suitors into the future. They had more right to their words than Diviya had to his. They deserved to migrate. As the speeches went on, workers gave Diviya gentle double-knocks of approval with the tips of their fins.
“Leave!” his soul said. “You endanger yourself and me!”
“Hive drones won’t come here,” Diviya whispered to his soul. “Drones are lazy and greedy and spend their time on the hills.”
“They employ informants.”
“Among the workers?”
“The soulless will die when the shaghāl come, but many seek to ease their time with easier work.”
A worker neared, leaning the whole leading edge of his fin against Diviya’s, until their faces were close.
“Will you migrate, Diviya?” the worker asked.
“I have no patron. I have not been given any breath either.”
“You will not be given any,” the worker said. “This is a bad year and a bad site for the hive. Many of the landlords will be here with us in the end.”
“Famine,” Diviya said.
“Take this.” Beneath them, the worker’s fingers passed Diviya a half-dozen large nuggets of frozen gases. Nitrogen. Carbon dioxide. Methane. “Eat it!” the worker whispered, so close that only the two of them could hear.
“I can’t,” Diviya said.
“You must! You are one of us, Diviya.”
Diviya stared at the gift. The worker might have done any number of things with this much raw reaction mass. He could have bribed tax counters, or even a low-status prince if he could get close enough.
“Hide them, quick!” the worker said.
Diviya put them in his mouth and deep into his gullet, past his soul, so as to not melt them. Over time, he could melt and refreeze the gases to purify them.
The worker melted into the crowd, as if suddenly shy. Diviya retreated, too. This was enormous. When he’d been apprenticed to a doctor, he’d expected to die in terror when the shaghāl came. Even when the hive had given him a soul, elevating him into the lowest of the privileged, he’d not changed his thinking. Without volatiles, there was no point in dreaming wishes. But now, this stranger, from nowhere, had given him a gift, one that separated him from the workers as irrevocably as a soul could.
“We will migrate!” said Diviya’s soul. “Although this is not nearly enough breath for such a journey, it is a start. Let us leave.”
“The meeting is not finished,” Diviya said.
“Everyone here is a revolutionary!” the soul said. “Someone will denounce them all to the hive drones and the princes.”
Present
The migration had broken into three streams, each with at least one princess and a dozen or so attendant princes and courtiers. Diviya followed the fastest princess, the one farthest ahead. She was the least likely to be targeted by the shaghāl.
Barini and Ugra followed. He did not know either one well. Barini was a hauler of regolith who participated in rallies. Ugra had tilled the soil and his musical talent produced electrical melodies, into which others fit political rhymes and slogans. Neither seemed a likely revolutionary, but perhaps he wasn’t either. Dwani, Abhisri, and all the real leaders were dead, with all the workers of their generation except for three.
The three of them became methodical and pitiless. Their targets tried to evade the sudden silencing of the Hero’s Voice, with only some success. Hours passed. Then days. Then weeks. The Hero’s Voice attenuated. The best acceleration from the pulsar was in the past. Now, speed grew in slow increments. The princess was a point far ahead, but the courtiers and the princes had fallen behind.
Diviya retracted his sail, and exhaled a puff of volatiles. He slowly pivoted, until he faced the pulsar. The Hero was a sad, cool point in the blackness, flashing thin radio and microwaves twice a second, lower in tone and quieter. Diviya felt dislocated. His class struggle felt minuscule. This cold vastness offered neither light, nor asteroids upon which to shelter. Far behind, the shaghāl appeared tiny, but their radioactive souls shone hard and point-like. Seven of them followed. Diviya exhaled another puff to stop his rotation, and unfurled his radio sail.
They were close to the princes and courtiers. Weeks of slow work had made each of them adept at stealing the microwaves destined for the sails of the princes. The pulsar’s beam was so distant now that its push was faint. Diviya and his companions were tiring.
A lone princess sailed ahead of the princes and the revolutionaries. The sounds of the souls far in front of them were frantic. The princess ought to be protected at all times.
Diviya felt the Voice of the Hero abruptly thin. A moment of panic stole over him. His soul shrieked. Diviya had been preparing for this for weeks, imagining the angles, the time he would have. He was not completely shadowed, not yet. Some of the distant Voice reached him still. He tilted his sail hard, catching the few microwaves reaching him, accelerating sideways. At first, nothing seemed to be happening. His soul recited the litany of the sacrifice, for both of them. But it was working. Slowly. After long minutes, the Hero’s Voice became louder, and he emerged from the shadow.
Diviya sailed wide to stay away from the shaghāl who had found him, and then snapped his sail back to accelerate again. He felt weak. The sagas called the starvation from the Hero’s Voice the small death. His soul quieted for a long time.
“It is not what we wanted,” his soul whispered. “We dream of being at the front of the school, with the princess. But we are not. We too must serve. We will not escape again, but we may atone for our crimes by leading the shaghāl away. I was weak. I should have opposed you more. Morality is the responsibility of the soul. I have failed, but we now may seek redemption.”
“I never wanted to be a prince,” Diviya whispered back.
“Come!” Diviya cried to Barini and Ugra. “Let us create a new hive where workers are free!” Diviya slowly slipped into place to shadow another prince.
In the fourth month of the migration, a shadow fell over Barini. It was sudden and complete. The shaghāl was close and Barini had no hope of sailing free.
“Barini!” Diviya cried in radio static. “Thrust! Exhale!”
“No!” Diviya’s soul said. “On the migration, only a princess may exhale. All breath must be saved for the Maw.”
“Barini!” Diviya said. “Thrust!”
“Everyone has a place. He too who is caught serves the hive,” Diviya’s soul said.
The soul was not wrong. Every courtier and prince lost kept a shaghāl occupied long enough for time dilation to mean they would never be seen again.
But the soul was also wrong. The calculation was grimly mathematical and religious, weighted to favor the nobility. The princess was indispensable, but the princes and courtiers were more than interchangeable. Barini had tilled the soil, given the princesses breath, given flesh and life to new souls. He had as much right as any to be among the fathers of a new generation.
Diviya’s words did nothing for Barini. Diviya’s soul recited a litany of complacency and sacrifice, as Barini’s soul probably whispered to him. The soul seduced, by pulling on instinct.
Barini retracted his radio sail against his back. He began to silently rotate, his mouth and eye shut, hiding the hard radiation of his soul. Instinct was stronger.
Past
Diviya moved in the low circles of the hive itself, with ensouled skates whose skills were too valuable to be spent on farming. Accountants and building engineers worked around the queen and hive, erecting the nets of fine wire on high scaffolds, capturing the constantly beamed Voice for the queen, weighing workers bearing regolith and frozen volatiles into the hive, scheduling work.
The low ensouled had some leisure with which to imitate the princes and courtiers. They did not have the opera house in which to put on the sagas, but they performed for each other in the hollows between mounds. They did not have libraries, but they retold legends and parables, refining their manners, so that someday, if the chance came, they might mingle successfully with the princes and their courtiers.
Although he mostly tended workers, Diviya was also physician to clerks and petty functionaries who could not get higher-status physicians. It was always difficult for a cold skate, living at the temperature of the surrounding regolith, to carry a hot soul. Even the ceramics of boron carbide sintered and fired in the kilns of the queen creaked with distortions of temperature. In the worst cases, carapaces could even crack.
Diviya’s hive patients possessed souls, and jockeyed for patronage. They guarded their own opportunities and blocked skates like Diviya from the princes. This, from what Diviya understood, suited the princes, who received gifts constantly from these petty clerks.
They were all taught to sacrifice, and for a while the idea of sacrifice could be romantic and ennobling. Freshly kilned skates were reared on the parables of the good worker, and especially the sacrifices of Narah the courtier. Narah had led away some of the shaghāl and the saga spoke lovingly of his last moments. It felt heroic, its romance layered by generations of retelling.
Yet it ran deeper than sacrifice. The males of the hive carried the same hereditary clays from the queen. The contributions of the few grand princes who had survived the migration accounted for limited variation in the hive. Diviya was brother to the princes, the tax farmers, the landlords, and the workers.
But privilege and status did not creep into a hive. Inequity stormed in, like hive drones breaking up a protest. The queen produced new souls with the radioisotopes sifted out of the regolith. Those who received souls no longer depended on capacitors to work and move through the night. The spiritual wealth became the power to see the radioisotopes of other souls or find more in the regolith. Most importantly, radioactive souls turned frozen gases into hot thrust.
Diviya met with Abhisri in the camps of the low ensouled outside the hive. Abhisri had bribed a courtier for a meeting with Prince Lasiya. Diviya was nervous. He had never met a prince. He doubted his ability to persuade. He had channeled debate among like-minded skates, but this was his own idea now and a high audience. It had been easy to speak in the dark to workers, deep in the slums. This was the hive, vast and monumental.
“This is bad,” whispered his soul. “Once you speak with this prince, we are marked, you and I. The accountants will look in their records to see what soul you have and they will put marks there against both of us.”
Diviya and Abhisri approached a side entrance guarded by two big drones. Prince Lasiya’s secretary emerged from behind the drones. The brightness of his soul was stabbing. The lines of his ceramic shell were sleek and clean. The leading edges bore the emblems of his patron. Abhisri pulled a lump of distilled and refrozen breath from his gullet. Possessing it was a crime. So much breath ought to have been destined for the princes and princesses. The secretary took the bribe without otherwise moving. It vanished into his gullet. The hive drones studiously ignored the transaction.
“I am listening,” the secretary said.
“We were told we would be speaking with Prince Lasiya,” Diviya said.
“The prince is not available.”
“My words are for him alone,” Diviya said.
The hot circle of radiation from the secretary’s soul shone full on Diviya. A submissive reverence stole over Diviya’s soul. A fearful thought crept into Diviya’s mind. Might the souls have some secret language, mediated perhaps by particle decay? It was an eerie, paranoid thought, and yet, something of substance passed between these souls and Diviya imagined his whole life being reported.
“I will bring any message to Prince Lasiya.”
Diviya and Abhisri backed away and spoke in low tones, in the rough dialect of the workers.
“He won’t bring the message anywhere,” Abhisri said.
“We have no other choice.”
“Do what he says!” Diviya’s soul whispered. “There is danger here.”
“A prince would have listened on his own authority,” Abhisri said. “This courtier will report what we say in the worst light if you tell him your offer.”
“The workers held back a riot so we could make this offer. We must try.” Diviya turned to the courtier. “Tell Prince Lasiya that there may be a way for the workers and the princes to come to an understanding to increase farm yields.”
“Go on.”
“This is a message for Prince Lasiya.”
“Something as important as farm yields should not be toyed with. Where are your loyalties, Doctor?”
“My loyalties are with the hive.”
“Would your soul say the same?” the secretary asked. The shine of his soul was a beam, like the Voice of the Hero itself, focused through the smooth lens of his eye, in through Diviya’s eye. Diviya felt hot.
“Of course,” Diviya said.
“If your loyalties are correct, then speak of increasing farm yields, Doctor.”
Diviya hesitated. “The workers dig hard, but the regolith is poor. Additional incentives could make them eager to work even harder.”
“Any worker who is not working as hard as he can is guilty of a crime,” the secretary said.
“The treatment of the workers makes them less effective,” Diviya said. “Beatings make them resentful. I have seen skates broken and killed by tax farmers. Broken skates produce nothing.”
“Slack workers must be forced to do their duty. Examples inspire others.”
Diviya’s quick words were difficult to contain. He had urged restraint on workers on so many occasions, so that they could bring forward something of substance. Only the thought that he was representing many workers held his anger back.
“There is a better way to inspire workers,” Diviya said.
“Odd that centuries of experience did not find it, yet a country doctor has,” the secretary said.
Diviya controlled his fear. Abhisri edged backward.
“Workers move regolith, find the volatiles and radioisotopes, yet know they will never migrate. If a few workers could receive souls, the additional radioisotopes found would soon repay the gift.”
“Souls for the workers?” the secretary scoffed. “The apportionment of souls is a sober process. There are not enough volatiles now for the court. If breath were further thinned, instead of a quarter of the migration outrunning the shaghāl and the Maw, no one would.”
“More skates on migration will draw away more shaghāl from the princesses,” Diviya said, “especially if they are slower.”
“You consign them to die? Do they know this?”
“They are already dead. We all are. When the migration flees, every worker will sit waiting with the empty hive for the shaghāl to come.”
“You are naïve, doctor,” the secretary said. “Every additional migrating skate takes breath from the princesses and princes. The sagas are filled with cautionary tales of migrants falling into the Maw, or even the Hero, when they lack breath. Your reckless ideas would jeopardize the whole migration.”
“Not if we could find more volatiles,” Diviya said.
“Ah,” the secretary said, and Diviya felt as if he’d stepped into a trap. “Let us explore your thoughts on farming. How much more could workers do?”
“That would be based on how much incentive was offered.”
“Treason,” the secretary said, with the tone of someone commenting on the procession of the stars. “Do you know the punishment for treason? For withholding breath or radioisotopes?”
“I know it,” Diviya said. He was cold beneath that hot stare.
“Then let us pick a strategy to get those additional volatiles.”
“Incentives?” Diviya asked.
“I do not trust incentives. Even among the princes, not every skate can be trusted. Fear and disincentives are the most consistently effective methods.”
Present
The flashes of radiation from near the black hole resolved into searing weaves of curtained light. Oranges. Reds. Whites. Sharp rays leapt from infalling gas, heating Diviya’s soul, even though they were still days away. And the Maw was loud. It endlessly consumed the breath of the world. The infalling volatiles crackled with electrical panic. Loud, frightening snaps.
The enormity of what they approached dwarfed even Diviya’s imagination. The rain of hot particles traced a line around the Maw, outlining a monster large enough to swallow even the Hero.
Weeks of careful work by Diviya and Ugra had pulled four more princes from the school. Soon, the princess would be unguided. Her soul carried other liturgies, secrets of growing a hive and waves and waves of little skates, but not navigational liturgies. Diviya had caught up to the trailing edge of the school. Ugra was close.
The Maw’s own kin, the shaghāl, followed and Diviya imagined their enthusiasm as they neared the hive of their master. They shadowed the princes and courtiers, creeping closer and closer hour by hour. Diviya retracted his sail and exhaled the faintest of breaths to rotate slowly. His insides went cold.
He’d never seen a shaghāl. Three of them followed, one closely. He’d pieced his imaginings from the liturgies and sagas. Reality outstripped his nightmares. The shaghāl were big, reflecting light from hard ceramic and metal. Their bodies, triangular and flattened like a skate’s, had long steel fingers for sharp grasping. It was as if a school of grand princes had been transformed by the Maw itself into engines of appetite.
The leading shaghāl thrust powerfully, leaping forward to hug Ugra in great fingers. It stuck a tube into Ugra’s mouth and sucked away his breath. Ugra’s fingers waved wildly, scratching at the carapace of his captor, until the shaghāl cracked Ugra open around the mouth, exposing the soul. Diviya did not see the rest. The shaghāl held Ugra and thrust outward, onto an orbit to carry it far around the black hole and back to the archipelago of asteroids where new hives would be founded.
And then Diviya was alone. There was no more revolution. There was only he, a princess, a prince, and a pair of pursuing shaghāl. Between Diviya and the prince, Diviya would always be second. The prince’s soul was larger, hotter, making his thrust more powerful than anything Diviya could make. The shaghāl would reach Diviya first.
Then Diviya too fell into shadow.
“He too who is caught serves the hive,” his soul whispered. That was the role the princes had for him. And the priesthood of souls. The poor brother must die for the rich brother to live.
He too who is caught serves the hive.
Diviya thrust.
“No!” his soul said. Diviya blasted precious volatiles behind him, emerging from the shadow of the shaghāl and even accelerating closer to the lead prince, the one closest to the princess.
“Monster!” the prince said. “I saw you waste your breath on yourself!”
Diviya rode his exhalation, coming close to the prince. Both souls protested, shrieking, warning the prince with panicked static, but the prince did not understand. Diviya clamped onto him, undersurface to undersurface where his fingers could reach the prince’s mouth. Belatedly, the prince scored Diviya’s carapace with sharp fingers.
The prince’s violence almost shook Diviya away. Diviya dug into the prince’s mouth, for the hot radioactive soul. Recriminations were loud in Diviya’s head, difficult to block out.
The prince’s soul was enormous. He had taken the best radioisotopes. And many ices to be sure, enough to become the next Grand Prince, if Diviya had not caught up to him.
Diviya had learned from Dwani. He would rather end the next generation than let this prince recreate the colony they had left.
Diviya’s fingers scrabbled at the fine bands holding the prince’s soul. The souls screamed. Diviya’s with memory. The prince’s with terror. Princely fingers broke off some of Diviya’s. Diviya snapped one of the bands, then another, then another.
The prince’s soul drifted free.
The four of them shared a moment of disembodied terror. They screamed. And the prince went perfectly still.
Diviya held the screaming soul, its radioactive shine lighting the tireless night, as he pushed away the stunned prince. Diviya slipped the soul into his gullet, unfurled his radio sail and drifted clear.
The prince wobbled and drifted. What were his thoughts now as justice was given to him? Did he blame Diviya, blind to his own role? Perhaps this was not even justice. They approached the Maw, where death became victorious over life, darkness over light. They raced so quickly that the red stars stippling the darkness had brightened to blue. Only Diviya, the princess, and the shaghāl following them remained and they lived a quiescent fugue. Time became meaningless and long. The great sail of the shaghāl was furled. The Hero was so far, his Voice so quiet, that sails were decorations of brighter lives while they entered the mythic land of the dead.
Before them, the Maw cloaked itself in vast fields of hot clouds, but the breath of a thousand migrations was a poor shroud for the monstrosity of the Maw’s hunger. Light burned from beneath the clouds as warning. Speeding blues, falling greens, and throbbing reds each marked some particle falling into the Maw.
Diviya’s spiritual terror, for all that he had set aside the sermons and sagas, was visceral. He trembled. The souls within him, his own and the stolen one, quaked. His soul’s whispers had become hypnotic and he wanted to surrender. To believe.
He was falling, accelerating. The Maw had noticed him and it summoned him. It was dangerous to be seen by the Maw, yet only here could the migration be completed. Here, any differences in speed would be multiplied. The princess was still ahead of him. No one had been showing her the way. Diviya’s soul, between bouts of confession and recriminations, recited coordinates he would not follow. Diviya thrust forward, using up more of his precious volatiles, until he was beside her.
She was a sleek, flat skate, larger than he, but built more toughly. Her soul was incoherent with fear, but she was brave. Within her she carried flat matrices of clay, stacked one upon the other, containing the hereditary secrets for the next generation encoded in the atomic gaps in the lattice of the clay crystals themselves. These leaves, paired with the ones he carried, would create the next generation.
“Are you ready, my prince?” she asked. Diviya shivered with excitement. My Prince. To be beside a princess, near the eerie strangeness of the Maw, was like being in a saga.
“I will lead you past the Maw,” Diviya said.
“We are only two.”
He found her suddenly young, although they were pressed and kilned in the same queen. She’d surely never questioned the powers who had cosseted her. She’d never had friends starved or beaten to death. Of course she was young.
“We must go,” Diviya said, taking a star fix and comparing it to what he’d been taught by the souls. He was not taking their path.
Diviya understood the role of time dilation in the migration. Skates launched themselves into the future, leaping over generations of shaghāl whose population collapsed when bereft of prey. And when the skates established a new colony, few shaghāl were left to hunt them.
To the skates migrating around the Maw and back to the archipelago of asteroids, the trip lasted a single year. To the unmoving world, they were gone for seventeen. The skates coordinated their leap. Those who survived reunited not only in space, but also in time. Every acceleration and angle was perfectly calculated. The smallest error might leave a skate weeks, months, or even years from the rest of the migration.
But Diviya was not leading the princess seventeen years into the future. Their culture was bankrupt, built upon the broken carapaces of workers. No matter what happened, neither Diviya nor the princess would ever see anyone from their hive again. Shorter migrations were more dangerous, taking paths closer to the Maw and harder accelerations at perigee. Diviya had worked out the trajectories, without the help of his soul. He was leaping thirteen years into the future.
“Follow!” Diviya cried, over the protest of his soul. Diviya aimed into the hot clouds around the Maw and thrust.
Past
Diviya and Abhisri had left the secretary, shaken in themselves. The secretary had issued remarkably detailed instructions to them on who he wanted watched among the workers. There was little doubt that should Diviya or Abhisri fail to report to him, their souls would be removed, and the two of them killed.
“Disincentive,” the secretary had said, “is more reliable.”
Diviya and Abhisri had no intention of reporting on the workers, but they had a little time before they had to give something to the secretary. They passed messages to Esha and other work farm unionists. They struck secret committees, to plan a true strike, to grind the industry of the hive to a halt. They met in the worst of the shanties, where hive drones seldom passed.
The Hero precessed auspiciously from the Constellation of the Good Courtier to the Constellation of the Farmer, signaling the arrival of the longest night of the year. Workers could not move regolith without the shine of the Hero. Even the tax collectors were reluctant to push workers on the longest night, which became a time for singing and performing the snippets of the sagas in the regolith fields and the slums.
Diviya was with the workers’ committee when the hive drones thrust in, carrying metal weights. They threw the weights just before landing, cracking workers. Diviya barely leapt out of the way. Workers scattered in terror as drones landed on them, striking ceramic with steel, tearing out wires that absorbed microwaves. Rows of hive drones ringed them.
Abhisri pushed Diviya into an alley filled with panicking workers. “Fly!” Abhisri said.
“I can’t!”
“You’re the only one who can! This is big! They don’t know you carry breath.”
A hive drone fell upon Abhisri, striking with a pick in its hard fingers. Diviya leapt on the drone, scratching and hitting. Diviya had never fought anything, and the drone was trained for this. The drone jerked, sending Diviya tumbling high in the microgravity. Below, the workers were awash in hive drones. They were lost.
Diviya exhaled a breath to correct his tumble as his trajectory carried him out of the slums. He thrust gently, turning, and settled to the regolith. A few skates, too weak or worn to work, saw him land, but did not move. They surely took him for some wayward tax farmer.
Even this far away, Diviya heard the panicked electrical sputtering of terrified skates. Friends and brothers. But the commands of the hive drones were louder, more calm, angry, and organized. Crackles of electrical static shot orders, some encoded. Abhisri was right. This was big.
“Flee!” his soul said stridently. “Flee!”
Diviya rocked back and forth on his fingers. He itched to run. To help. To run. His thoughts were jumbled. He feared he would only think of the right thing to do when it was too late. And he feared the sure beating. The work farms. The amputation of his soul. The true darkness of being a worker again, detached from a whole world he could only perceive through his soul.
Present
They thrust hard. The princess flew close. Hot violet radiation bathed them as the hunger of the Maw’s gravity sped them faster. They fell from heaven, like the Hero himself. The whole world shifted into the blue. The sounds of static came tight and high-pitched. Tense. Near the Maw, space itself feared, releasing ghostly sounds and strange discharges.
The searing cloud abraded Diviya. The keening of his soul heightened in pitch. Radiation and particle strikes corroded the little soul. It was not made to fly this close to the Maw. It was composed of so many different radioisotopes that no matter what struck it, some part of it changed to something inert or something inappropriately active. The soul was going mad.
They neared perigee. Their speed was terrifying. Stars multiplied, filling the sky. Their haunting chorus blended with the relentless screams of the souls.
“Pray!” Diviya yelled to the souls. “Pray!” They did. In warbling tones of panic, the souls recited the metronomic cadences of the liturgy. Diviya listened to the prayers as he never had before.
Diviya’s carapace creaked. He was so close to the edge of the Maw that the difference in gravity from his ventral side to his dorsal threatened to crack him. And still the Maw accelerated him.
No sounds of the living world remained, except for the chanting of his soul, a simple prayer to a hero who had no authority here. A new, eerie ocean of slow echoes filled his senses. His stars, radiant microwave stars, were all gone. New stars appeared. They were dead, their glows constant and unblinking as the sleet of passing clouds flayed and scorched him. He counted time by the cadences of the souls’ prayers.
The intensity of the radioactive hail burned his soul, making Diviya’s exhaust so hot that it felt like riding a star. And the clay wafers that he carried, his gametic contribution to the future, hardened in the heat and pressure, forming the crystalline structures that could be laid over the wafers carried by the princess. The possibility of new life quickened in this crushing furnace. Diviya counted the prayers and then, at a precise moment, he redoubled his thrust.
Diviya could not hear the princess. He stayed fixed on the strange stars. If he looked back for her, they would both be lost. Among these ghost stars, he could only trust. If she had not been able to follow, everything they had suffered at home was for naught.
The Maw grasped at him, to crush, stretch, and snap him. The heat of Diviya’s thrust burned his own carapace. The clouds of hot gas brightened. He became so fast that even the ghost stars became too blue to see. The acidic particles shooting at the Maw crowded out the darkness, filling Diviya’s world.
Then the Maw flung Diviya away.
The clouds thinned, but did not cool. Each grain floating in his path zipped into his carapace at nearly the speed of light. The world was eerie. He had left the Maw, but not the land of the dead. Strange purple colors and warped, fluid sounds drifted past him. He was a ghost and the living world had closed itself to him.
Yet amidst this dislocation, far away, faint, a point pulsed, frenetically like a young pulsar. Its microwaves were blue-shifted to a pitch that was visible instead of audible. The world was covered in a cloak of strangeness, yet he had to have faith that this was the Hero, summoning him back from death.
He was far from home, and had only whispers of breath left. He had used everything in the slingshot passage around the Maw and he did not even know if he had succeeded in leading the princess.
He exhaled the tiniest gasp of breath. Achingly slow, he pivoted. And his heart grew, in a primal way. A few body lengths from him was the princess. He had led her into the land of death and past the Maw. They could see the world of life, even if they were still fast-moving ghosts. It would take weeks to slow down. Her sleek carapace was striped and pitted with fine burns. Her soul was bright, but quiet and reverent.
Beyond her, the great bulk of the Maw had begun to shroud itself again under layers of bright, doomed clouds. The gases in palliative spirals spit hard radiation, but now that they had passed the Maw, their spite was thin and reddened and sepulchral.
The king of the underworld receded majestically. In the last moments of that hypnotic view, Diviya saw a tiny, distant silhouette, carrying a point of hard, hot radioisotopes.
No.
No. No. No.
The Maw had scarred them as they passed, and had not let them truly escape. The Maw let through one of its own, an engine of death, a famished monster that had nothing to eat but Diviya and the princess.
Past
Diviya had ceased to sympathize with his soul. In the beginning, he understood it as a gift from the Hero and the queen, as a guide for the migration. The soul was, in some ways, an alien presence, but partly comprehensible within its role as the voice of eternity. But it was pitiless. Petty. Commitment became inflexibility. Resolve turned to stubbornness. Morality deafened reason. Diviya’s soul argued, becoming more shrill. It was difficult to ignore the voice in his head.
In part to draw the soul away from its recriminations, Diviya spoke to his soul about the migration. Skates were taught nothing of the migration. This was safer ground to till. His soul calmed while considering the migration. Perhaps it thought that Diviya was opening himself to redemption.
At first petulantly, then with increasing enthusiasm, the soul spoke to Diviya of what was to come. Even when Diviya probed at the mystery of time dilation itself, the speeds and accelerations needed to achieve the magical dilation of seventeen, his soul answered him. Some of the pieces were symbols, or worse yet, allegories Diviya had to suffer through to keep his soul talking. More useful were the liturgies containing mathematical proportions, and angles and curves. Diviya read meaning into the liturgies that perhaps his soul did not mean for him to understand.
On the third day, Diviya descended from the mound. He left the slums and hopped into the worker districts where tailing hills were evenly rowed and the workers were healthier, younger. The neighborhood seemed lonely. This was a rest period, so most workers should have been back. In the distance, he saw the shine of another soul and turned away, so as not to give himself away. Between dusty piles he recognized a worker.
“Tejas!” he said.
Tejas approached. He had new scratches on the tops of his fins. Chips were missing along his leading edges. “Diviya,” he whispered. “I thought you’d been arrested.”
“Abhisri got me out a back alley. What happened?”
Tejas had difficulty speaking. The sparks he made were mistimed and sometimes sputtering. “We were all beaten. Most were arrested. I thought they were going to crack me.”
Diviya’s strength left him. “What charges?”
“I don’t know,” Tejas whispered. “They’re all being sent to work farm number seven.”
Dwani’s broken face stared out of memory. Tejas sputtered and shorted over his words. “Abhisri got it bad, Diviya. They took out his soul right there. They weren’t careful. I don’t think he made it.”
Diviya sank into the packed regolith. Adding or removing a soul was dangerous. Diviya had done it many times, but had not always been successful. The radioactive souls heated the ceramics and metals of the carapace and the neural wiring, while the skates cooled the souls. Sometimes the stresses on the skate and on the soul were too much. Tejas neared.
“They told me he didn’t say nothing to the interrogators, but his soul did. They’re looking for you, Diviya. You’ve got to hide.”
“I told you!” Diviya’s soul said. “Turn yourself in! Name names!”
But Diviya’s soul had no hold on him anymore. The crushing pressure of the hive and his soul had crystallized a sense of mission in him. They had hardened his wavering resolve into the seed of something much more permanent. He was deathly frightened of being cracked open like Dwani, of having his soul torn away, but he heard the sagas through Dwani’s eyes now.
“I’ll hide in the slums, Tejas,” Diviya said, “where the broken workers lie. Send me the leaders, yourself included.”
“I’m no leader. I wasn’t even a committee member.”
“We’re all committee members now,” Diviya said. “The revolution must begin. Not the one Dwani and Abhisri wanted, but a larger one.”
Present
Diviya and the princess had little with which to escape the shaghāl. Diviya had intended to unfurl his sail to brake beyond the black hole, but that would do nothing more than bring the fast-moving shaghāl to them faster. They flew so quickly that the gulf between the Maw and the Hero, that had taken the migration many months to cross before, now took only days. Yet if they did not slow soon, they would overshoot their home.
They unfurled their sails together. Blue-shifted radio waves punched their sails and the shock of slowing dizzied. As the tremendous deceleration intensified and the Hero fed them, they became less ghostly. The world abandoned its frenetic blue-shift. Strange stars faded, their haunted voices quieting. Stars he knew began to shine as if just reborn and the Hero’s Voice aged centuries every minute, slowing finally to two flashes per second. Diviya and the princess were reborn.
“We will find a way to survive,” the princess said.
No. Not princess. She was the queen now. But no. Not that either. No queens after the revolution. No princes. No grand princes. Just skates, sharing what they had.
“Yes, we will.”
His words felt false. If they overshot their home, deep, deep space was a different kind of death than being crushed by the Maw.
“I will try to shadow the shaghāl,” Diviya said.
“That will bring it to us faster!”
“Yes,” Diviya said. Diviya adjusted his path, spotting the shaghāl’s soul, as it shone in faintly blue-shifted hunger, far distant. “It will be ravenous now, and desperate.”
Far behind, but still close enough to chill Diviya’s marrow, a great radio sail unfurled. Diviya would make a poor shadow. The shaghāl was close and closing, decelerating at a furious rate.
Diviya slipped into the path of the pulsar’s beam, cutting a shadow in the center of the shaghāl’s sail. The shadow grew as the shaghāl neared. The shaghāl seemed to realize what was happening and angled its sail to escape the shadowing. Diviya followed.
The shaghāl jerked its sail the other way. It had no experience in avoiding a shadow. It hurtled closer, unable to do more than edge slowly sideways. The shaghāl tilted its sail wildly, trying to get around Diviya.
Diviya jerked his sail opposite to the shaghāl’s tilt. The Hero’s Voice veered Diviya aside, but not fast enough. The shaghāl’s wing tip struck Diviya. The knock was tremendous, accompanied by a snap.
Diviya spun. Pain. Sharp pain. And fear and screaming. The second soul nearly flew from Diviya’s mouth. Diviya righted his sail, catching the Hero’s Voice, slowing his spin. Finally, he controlled his spin.
The shaghāl plunged far ahead, toward the asteroid field. It was slowing, but Diviya had robbed it of time. Now it would need every bit of effort to avoid overshooting the asteroid field.
The ragged princess neared. Diviya felt strange. His sail still pulled oddly, producing an ache under him.
“Your soul is glowing through a long crack beneath you,” she said. The rhythms of her sparking speech were quick, fearful. He feared, too.
Cracked. He was cracked. Dwani’s broken face haunted his thoughts. Dust would get into his carapace and would scour his wiring and joints. Soon, he would only be good for resting on mounds.
“You will survive,” she said. “We will survive. You will make a magnificent grand prince.”
His soul, and the stolen one, made sounds of relief. The princess had accepted him as her mate. Despite his crimes and the hardships of the migration, the souls sounded guardedly elated. A new hive. His hive. Grand prince. Diviya would be the father of a new generation, one that, due to the separation of time dilation, would never see any skates from another colony. And his colony would have no landlords, no tax collectors, and no beatings.
Past
Furtively, workers came to Diviya in the slums, atop his mound. Most had never been unionists. Diviya recognized his old fear in them. They came to speak to Diviya about the massacre. Few had been there, but they knew the workers who had been killed, and the workers who had been exiled to the work farms. They came as cowards might, shamefully, weighed by the guilt that they were happy not to have been there.
The idea of sacrifice in them was strong, as it was in Diviya. The Hero had built them to sacrifice for each other, for kin. They were pressed of the same clay. The success of a brother worker or a prince felt like a success for all of them. Demanding something for themselves was difficult. The newly ensouled like Diviya had to be taught selfishness, acquisitiveness by the souls. Yet these skates, who had not been brave enough to attend a union rally to help all of them, now slinked to the last committee leader, a skate who shared their guilt. They formed new committees.
“Tell them what to do,” his soul said. “You are better than this rabble. Leverage your influence here for patronage. Deliver the malcontents to the hive. Give bribes.”
Diviya had bribes. The workers smuggled innumerable tiny nuggets of frozen volatiles to him. This struggle with his soul could not go on.
And then, he saw it again.
In the distance, the brief, hot shine of a soul, looking this way. The sleet of radioactive particles stilled his soul. Diviya shut his eye, shuttering the emissions of his own soul.
“Open your eye!” his soul said.
“You can guess as well as I what that was,” Diviya whispered.
Diviya’s soul laughed. “More unionists have been picked up by hive drones,” the soul guessed. “The rascals must have spoken of an ensouled committee member dispensing fratricidal treason from a mound in the slums.”
“It is rich that you would call me fratricidal, when I have never hurt another skate, while the hive beats, imprisons, and kills my brothers,” Diviya said.
“Your disloyalty endangers every skate and princess in the hive. Open your eye.”
Diviya descended the mound with his eye closed. Tejas was with him, as were Barini and Ugra. They did not have souls and were accustomed to Diviya’s silences while he communed with his own. With his eye closed, the world was dark, but loud, filled with the Hero’s Voice and the scraping vibration of his own movement. But in this way, he was invisible to the other ensouled skate in the slums.
“What are you doing, Diviya?” Tejas asked.
“An ensouled skate has been moving at the edge of the slums,” Diviya said to Tejas.
“I have seen him several times today. He is looking for something.”
“Or someone,” Tejas said.
“I saw only one skate. Perhaps an ambitious tax farmer seeks favor by catching a union leader.”
“Hide!” Tejas said. “We must get you away.”
“Me?” Diviya said.
“You’re the key to the revolution,” Tejas said. His voice was charged, tense. He believed what he was saying. And Diviya felt as he had when he’d first spoken at the rally. Exposed. Undeserving.
“Tejas, Barini, and Ugra,” Diviya said, “lead me closer, so that we can see, but not be seen. You will need to be my eye.”
“What are you doing?” his soul demanded.
Tejas walked Diviya on a winding, blind way around the tailing mounds.
The Hero was high in the sky, so none of the mounds cast shadows. Diviya heard the Hero’s Voice change tone when they turned. Catching the subtleties in the polarization of the radio waves was a different way of experiencing the Hero, one perhaps more primal, and it calmed Diviya, as much as his new resolve.
Diviya was built for peace, but the princes, and those who spoke in their name, had taken matters too far for Diviya to stay still.
They were kin, pressed from the same clays, made to launch princesses and some males into the migration. Their success was his success, in the flat equations of biology, but skates had grown. They were no longer the primitives of the sagas. They reasoned. They were more than their instincts. They had grown past the need for souls to tell them how to treat each other. Souls created and perpetuated divisions in the hive. Princes. Landlords. Workers. But the skates carried their own blame for taking what was given to them, as blindly as Diviya was being led through the slums. The souls had their own interests. Not least Diviya’s soul.
Brother and enemy. Family and opponent.
Diviya’s steel fingers sunk into the thick regolith. Pebbles and larger fragments of iron-nickel and hard, volatile-dry silicates were so numerous and uneven as to be stumbled over, especially blind. The four of them walked and hopped. From a distance, they would just be four soulless workers.
“He is to our left now,” Tejas whispered.
“Take me onto a mound,” Diviya said.
Tejas led Diviya scrabbling to the top of the hillock.
“What are you doing? Open your eye!” his soul said.
“Is he facing us?” Diviya asked.
“No,” Tejas said. “We are facing north. He is facing west.”
The revolution needed to happen. Working with the souls as they had was no longer possible. Diviya lifted a large chunk of iron-nickel in his fingers. He snapped his eye open and thrust, hurling himself toward the ensouled skate.
“You are wasting breath!” his soul shrieked. “Stop! Stop!”
Diviya released the iron-nickel chunk as he flew past, as a hive drone would have. It crashed into the other skate with such force that ceramic chips rattled against Diviya’s underside.
“Murderer,” his soul whispered.
Diviya puffed breath sideways to spin, and then thrust to a stop and landed. He hopped to the ensouled skate. His three fellows were already there.
Diviya’s attack had struck the skate’s left leading edge, near the eye. A gaping hole exposed the hot soul beneath.
“You are beyond redemption,” his soul said. “I will not rest until justice is done.”
“I know,” Diviya said.
Diviya removed medical pliers and a small pry from his gullet. Dust caked them. He had been ensouled to help skates, to mend their minor wounds, to make them well enough to get back to the mines and farms. The hive had taught him anatomy and science for a skill he hadn’t practiced in weeks.
“Do not touch that soul!” his soul said. Both Diviya and his soul could plainly hear the electrical panic of the soul in the fallen skate. “Report this to the hive! No one may touch a soul without the authorization of the princes.”
Diviya reached into the corpse, prying away the bands around the soul. He lifted it gently, leaving the inside of the carcass warm and hollow.
“No!” his soul said.
“You must be destroyed, Diviya!” the soul said. “You are the most vile criminal ever fired in the hive.”
Diviya reached into his own gullet with his pliers. Diviya’s own soul screamed as he pried it loose and pulled it from his mouth.
And then, Diviya was a worker again, for the first time in a long time. He had no sensitivity to most of the wavelengths of radiation and energetic particles. The world was quiet and cold. The stars were colorless. The souls before him were gray lumps, hotter than the regolith, but otherwise unremarkable.
Diviya set his soul in the cold, dry dirt. The temperature stresses crackled in the radio bands. He put the other soul carefully in his mouth and onto the mounting. As Diviya lowered the bands to hold it into place and clipped it tight, the beauty of the spiritual world washed back in. And he was himself.
The new soul spoke immediately, more timidly than Diviya’s soul. “What are you doing?” it whispered.
“Do not leave me here!” his old soul cried from the cold regolith. “Summon the hive!”
Diviya took his own soul in his fingers and inserted it into his gullet where its shine would not show.
“Bury the body,” Diviya said to his co-conspirators. “When it is completely frozen, we will take whatever volatiles it may have.”
Diviya launched himself from the surface of the asteroid. It did not take much breath. The microgravity of the asteroid barely pulled the dust back to the surface. As the hive receded, he exhaled again and sailed away from his home and from the Hero.
His former soul was apoplectic.
“I might have migrated with you,” Diviya said to his soul. “I had even thought of putting you into another worker, for the revolution, for more workers to migrate.”Diviya removed the soul from his mouth. “But you are too dangerous, too intransigent, too willing to stamp upon workers with my fingers.”
His soul was incandescent in its anger, fear, and hate. Diviya released it. For a time, they drifted away from the asteroid, traveling the same path. Then Diviya turned back to the Hero and thrust back toward the hive. His soul continued out into the cold of space.
Present
Their new hive would need an asteroid in the gravitational stillness behind the Hero’s Voice, preferably a slow-turning one, so that they could walk around it, always under the radiance of the pulsar, and one that was freshly cracked by an impact or one whose radioisotopes and volatiles had not been harvested in centuries. There were thousands of asteroids in the archipelago, but not so many that a single, determined shaghāl could not find a hive eventually.
In some sagas, princes and princesses made a second migration, right after the first, to escape from shaghāl following too closely. But Diviya and the princess were exhausted. Little breath remained to them and with his cracks, Diviya could never again survive the crush of the Maw.
Diviya and the princess retracted their sails from time to time to drift silently and listen for the shaghāl. They could not hear him, but he could not be that far. He might already have ended his careening deceleration and be waiting even now in the archipelago of asteroids. Diviya spread his sail, and the Hero’s Voice pushed him outward.
“How much breath do you suppose you have left?” Diviya asked.
“I did not use all of it.”
Diviya explained his plan as he turned away from the Hero. He disgorged the soul he’d taken from the murdered prince and held it in his shadow. It shrieked. His own soul cried out. The princess’ soul made a sound of revulsion. A soul was an ugly thing, a complex, layered brick of radioisotopes, humming with its own heat and shining with hard radiation. That light would draw the shaghāl as soon as Diviya revealed the soul to the asteroid field.
“This will not work!” the princess said. What Diviya asked was dangerous, perhaps impossible, but it was their only chance. “I do not even have the strength you want!”
“It is this or nothing, Princess! This is all we have. A strong, fast, hungry shaghāl lurks somewhere in the archipelago. While he is here, no hive is safe.”
They moved farther and farther from the Hero, into an orbit where they would intersect the archipelago of asteroids at its outer edge, far from the best fields. They slowed over hours, risking creating radio reflections with their sails. The shaghāl would be closer to the pulsar, where the voice of the Hero would feed it and drown out their echoes. Every so often, Diviya turned toward the Hero, exposing the second soul. The soul’s sharp, multi-rayed brightness would be very visible from far away. Then Diviya would turn back, hiding it again for a while, before exposing it once more.
Bait.
Finally, an angry glare answered. The hot harsh light of the shaghāl’s soul was much closer to the pulsar. It made for them. Diviya held the second soul visible, letting the shaghāl see their trajectory. Then, he hid the soul from the shaghāl’s sight. The asteroids neared, including a large, uneven ovoid, pocked with craters.
The princess took the wires of Diviya’s sail in her steel fingers. They passed into the shadow of the asteroid, and out of sight, and Diviya released the second soul. The princess thrust, decelerating them. The soul hurtled onward, screaming. The tremendous deceleration bent Diviya’s sail, and stabbed new pain into his underside. Diviya and the princess both groaned, sharing the pain of the unnatural maneuver.
Her thrust flagged.
She had almost no breath left and they would soon emerge from the shadow of the asteroid. But the soul was not far enough away.
“Don’t stop!” he said.
“There is nothing more!”
“Then turn!” he said. “Into the asteroid!”
“We’ll crash!”
They still traveled very fast. The regolith might be composed of deep powdered grains or it might hide nuggets and boulders of nickel-iron and hard ices that would shatter their carapaces.
“You are brave!” Diviya said. “It is the only way, Princess!” She did not turn. He waited. The thrust sputtered. “Please!”
The wires tightened and swung him as she aimed at the asteroid. They lurched as her breath expired. The regolith, even under microgravity, was frightening at their speed.
Diviya plunged deep in an explosion of dust, tumbling in the powder and pebbles, before being wrenched to the surface in a jarring, snapping stop.
He was on his back. His underside hurt. He could not feel his sail. Some of his fingers were bent. He wiggled them and began digging at the dust until he was right side up. A deep channel gouged the asteroid. Dust rose, swirling on its own static.
The princess had not let go of him. They had plowed the great furrow together before she herself had been driven by their speed into the regolith. She pulled herself free of the dirt. She had filled herself with dust, as had he. His insides. Her insides. Their souls were covered and, for once, silent. They spewed regolith, thickening the rising clouds.
“You did it, Princess,” he said. “You stopped us. You are a hero.”
She spat another gout of dirt from her gullet. Her anger and fear still crackled.
“Look!” Diviya said. The princess followed the line of his gaze.
Far in the distance, just a point now, the second soul sped onward, on a trajectory that would take it past the gravitational eddy and back toward the pulsar. From this distance, it looked like a tiny part of a distant migration.
On a course to intercept it, thrusting hot gas, was another sharp point of radiation: the shaghāl. By the time it realized what it was chasing, the shaghāl would be committed to a trajectory that would take it all the way around the black hole. It would be years before it returned. In that time, the new hive would have risen and matured and launched its own migration into the future.