Beneath Ceaseless Skies #143, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2 Read online

  “There must be a solution. There must be a way.” Dark-sea phosphorescence glimmers in those abyssal eyes. “We will not let the light go out.”

  “You think you understand what we are.” She leans in to show her teeth, to make them ready for counting and for use. “Like the spearman pleading for his god, and the soldiers who named me avatar. You think you know me better than they do. You think that now, at the end, you understand the hunt. That you have caged me in inference and named me by reason.

  “But I am the god of gods, and you exist only by my consent. I am unreasonable. I am beyond you.”

  Sekhmet lifts Coeus to her waiting jaws and the transhuman offers no protest, no plea, seeking, after all, an answer from Sekhmet, and knowing, perhaps, that there is only ever one answer she can give: I am stronger.

  She finds in the body of Coeus, knit of flesh and machine wound so tight they cannot be spoken of as separate things, a strange truth.

  Set is the god of blindness and waste, of the solipsistic trap. But Set, that clever liar, he says of her: she is the blind god. She is the waste.

  And in Coeus, the fruit of their two lineages bound as one, she finds Set’s final retreat. His poison has come too late to save him. His agent of desperation betrays him.

  She roars into the sky, into the red rising dawn, her muzzle bloodied, her infinite hunt at an end.

  * * *

  “I hate you,” Set says, with weary disgust. “You are an asshole and a brute, and you fuck it all up.”

  He has a weakness for poetry, for the condensed consciousness of symbols and their arrangement. He has hidden himself at the end, as far from the tidal flats and the beginning as he could find. In the darkness that will never light again.

  “Look at this,” he says. His long slender snout bobs in grief. He is a sha, a beast that never lived, an organism he invented out of spite so that he would not have to wear one of her shapes: a total triumph of design over descent. “Look at what you make of it all. This is what continues to exist, in the end. This is what’s strong.”

  The universe has gone out around them, the stars snuffed out and their lineages at an end, here at the close of the stelliferous age. All that remains are black holes, agglutinations of mass and shadow, evaporating into the void.

  And still she needs to kill him, needs it like life needs to live, an intrinsic lust, an axiom.

  “I wanted to fix it.” His square ears twitch regretfully. “I wanted to make new things, to plan and test and fail and try again. I wanted to build. But you were always there, with your blind heuristics, your perverse free-riders crawling into everything—and now time’s run out. The stars are dead. The age of thought is over.”

  She tears his arms off with a roar. Divine marrow speckles the empty starless night.

  “If you were so clever,” she hisses, teeth close against his small trembling skull, “I wouldn’t be here to eat you. I wouldn’t have won, in the end.”

  “That’s all you can think about.” He bleeds encryptions, dense with entropy, noiseless and hot and already executing themselves into squirming nonsense in the void. “Stupid, stupid binaries.”

  Set’s eyes darken like the last light going out. She smells his grief.

  Her jaws close around the mind of Set, the curve of his head, the seat of his divinity.

  After she is done with her feast she reclines blood-soaked in the empty dark and listens to the slow throb of gravity waves as the universe cools and stretches and begins to tear itself apart.

  She contains all that she has devoured, and now, here in the end, where the same laws that drew thorium out of the death of heavy suns and life from the chaos of the tide pools have chiseled existence down to dead dark singularities orbiting in endless analemmas and swallowing each other, she feels regret.

  How can she feel regret? Is this not what she is? The blind arbiter, issuing and revoking that one fundamental permit—you may go forward a little longer? What matter if this is the shape of her triumph—constellations of dead mass awaiting the final rip?

  And yet she turns to the past, to the dawn, hungry still, her hunt at an end and now beginning again.

  Surely there is another way for things to end. Surely, now that she has devoured Set, now that she governs the fate of all things—surely this could be otherwise.

  * * *

  She walks an ancient grassland and watches a little antecessor ape with a swollen skull think about her granddaughters. The ape’s mother is dead, killed by the birth of a younger sibling whose skull was too large. But her line will go on if this daughter succeeds and thrives, and gutter out otherwise, for Sekhmet knows no mercy.

  The antecessor ape sniffs the morning air and thinks, in a fledgling curious way, about the intentions of another troop. Hoots softly at the thought. Amused, perhaps.

  Sekhmet laughs too. She can understand so much now that she has won. She can understand how profoundly she has been defeated.

  She remembers Coeus, the last petitioner, Set’s final trap, and draws forth from the depths of herself that memory, for she contains all that she has devoured, and is all that she contains.

  When she looks up past the ape, Coeus stands on the horizon, a small black obelisk raised against the dawn.

  “Did you find your answer?” Sekhmet asks, curious as she has always been, insatiably hungry to know—I made him, and he made you, but what have you made of yourself? Have you found something beyond me, something I cannot devour? It is the poison, of course, but she has devoured the poison, and she is all that she devours. “Is the hunt over? Did you find the way forward?”

  The thing quickening here, quickening within her, has already told her the answer.

  “Not this time,” Coeus says, smiling sadly. “Perhaps this next iteration.”

  And Sekhmet smells the inevitability of it, the rightness of Set’s trap, the infinite subtlety of his poison.

  “Looks to be a clever specimen,” Coeus says, and makes a small gesture that compasses the ape and all of her descendants, all that this animal will give rise to. “Maybe a survivor. You like survivors.”

  For Sekhmet must reward strength, even as that very strength changes and grows and gives rise to something new, something cunning and calculated, something that will find a way to endure even at the end of light and mass.

  Sekhmet must reward strength

  “What happens when it ends?” she asks, wanting in this last moment of totality, this precipice before the hunt begins again, to know. “Next time, or the time after that, when we find the way for you? What will be born in place of the dead stars and the void?”

  Coeus’s eyes gleam from past the end of time, past the edge of all that Sekhmet is, past the borders of understanding. An acataleptic light. “I wish I could find a way for you to know. But it is not your nature, Sekhmet.”

  “It is enough,” Sekhmet says, her great head bowed in thought, in trepidation, certain now that he will come soon, that she has already spoken him and made him out of the ontos of what she is, as she always must, “for me to look on you; to see that you are strong.”

  She turns and begins to run, to flee, her great legs pounding the grass, certain in the way she is always certain that soon she will be the prey.

  Behind her the little antecessor plots and hoots, thinking of small ape schemes.

  Behold Set—

  Copyright © 2014 Seth Dickinson

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Seth Dickinson is a graduate of the University of Chicago, a lapsed PhD candidate at NYU, and an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as winning the 2011 Dell Award. He can be found at sethdickinson.com.

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  THE GODDESS DECEPTION, PT. 2

  by Dean Wells

  (Concluded from Pt. 1, in BCS #142)

  * * *

  Chapter 5


  Here There Be Dragons

  The cellar was easy enough to find. A heavy trap door was set in the floorboards, secured with a formidable lock. Plio wanted to burn it open with breaching compound. I just reached down with the arm that still functioned and ripped the door off its hinges. Plio led the way down, our Nullifiers drawn. Foley and Caines lurched in electrified docility between us, as I didn’t want them left unattended.

  The trap door opened into what appeared to be an air-lock that inclined downward through an envelope of rubber and treated linen—the containment medium which held the pressurized helium. It was as if we were passing between the walls of an inflated balloon. I could feel the ionizing current as we stepped through, ghostly fingers brushing past the clockworks in my mechanical augmentations.

  “Niista’s Blood,” Plio whispered once we’d cleared the pass-through.

  The cellar was full of weapons.

  Illegal weapons, a good many of them Umbran in origin. Not only Immolators, but drums of exotic chemistries and the delivery mechanisms required to deploy them. But what disturbed me all the more were the arms of unmistakably human manufacture: Shatter Guns and Gravitic Machine Pistols; Gatling Torches and Phase Mortars; Infinity-Beam Projectors and Time Siphons; Infrasound Dissonators and Zero-Wave Disruptors. Enough to take on an entire column of Royal assault vehicles and perhaps even win. An Analytical Engine sat at the foot of the stairs, a heavy clanking model decades old but clearly in good repair. A banker’s safe was built into its base.

  Plio stepped off the last plank. “Three guesses as to where the late Axel Creevy’s heat-ray came from.”

  “Unless there are other caches like this hidden elsewhere. It’s a big moon.”

  Boilers and a steam-reaction turbine were tapped into a water source in an adjoining chamber; presumably the power supply for the bank of giant electrodes that ionized the helium, which, in turn, generated the glamour. Copper pipes and tubing buttressed the walls.

  Plio crossed alongside me. I smelled metamorphic tissue in the process of healing, sickly sweet.

  “How are you holding up, brother?”

  He grimaced and rubbed his backside. “Caines’s buckshot is shifting. It gives entirely new context to having lead in my ass.”

  I nodded at the Analytical Engine. It was a common relay-and-switch device, with sliding control levers, memory stores, a mill, and a printer. Ranks of studded drums would rotate loudly behind thick panels of glass when the machine was in operation. Safely ensconced underground, though, no one topside would ever hear it.

  “See if you can find any of your almighty patterns in this mess. Start with the boy.”

  I turned about the room, not touching anything, calculating the destructive power of everything that surrounded us. Military scopes of the type that enabled soldiers to see out of trenches during the First and Second Umbran Wars were mounted in each corner and provided an unobstructed view of the farmland above. The room was a goddamned arsenal.

  Thankfully the Engine and its strongbox were protected by a simple recognition hermetic. Without his usual flourish, Plio plunged his liquid fingertips into Foley’s face and shaped himself into Foley’s perfect likeness. (Perfect if you disregarded the crimson flesh and beaded black lock-dreads. For all his amazing Symb’ral abilities, he could not change color or mimic human hair.) I found the appropriate levers and switches in the adjacent chamber and fed power to the machine.

  Drums whirred and spun, and Plio’s new face was bathed in a halo of Engine-rendered photographic light.

  Success. With a deep internal thunk and clicking of gears, the safe opened like a puzzle box and presented us with multiple decks of numbered punch cards.

  “Hello, Deputy Foley,” said the Engine. “I’m fine, how are you?”

  Plio shut off the speaker-horn in a much more civilized manner than I had aboard the Cloudshaker and was soon feeding the punch cards into the machine with the aplomb of a riverboat gambler dealing a hand of faro. In no time, the secrets they contained were being printed onto rolls of blank musty paper.

  “There’s a horde of information in these decks,” he said in Foley’s voice, reading each new paragraph of text. “Logistics, armament stores, railroad and airyard schedules, entries regarding Gamhanrhide’s political structure, even agriculture and communications.”

  Hello. “Kavita was investigating communications.”

  Plio nodded. “There’s been extensive tampering in every one of the orb’s principal support functions.”

  “Wouldn’t anyone notice that in everyday telemetry?”

  “Most assuredly. But the disruption patterns are very subtle. Likely they’d be interpreted as variances within an acceptable degree of tolerance, not the acts of sabotage I believe them to be. And yes, specifically a variance within the ansible network, as that is where the greatest amount of anomalous information can be observed.”

  “And if the Royal Makers couldn’t diagnose the problem remotely from Albion....”

  “They would send journeymen to investigate.” He shut off the Engine, and its mechanical clatter gave way to the cellar’s much quieter background hum. “Persons like Kavita Patel.”

  Persons exactly like Kavita Patel.

  I depowered the obfuscators that locked our prisoners in mindless stupefaction and slammed Foley against the wall, pinning him there with my good hand pressed to his throat.

  I looked at Caines. “Talk to me, Pop, or I squeeze the deputy’s neck into mush.”

  But Caines was lost. He struggled to shake away the effects of the obfuscator, squinting bleary-eyed at the contents of his cellar as if he’d expected to find nothing more unusual than cans of fruit jam.

  Foley choked. “He doesn’t know anything.”

  “This is me not caring.”

  “He doesn’t, I swear!”

  I called over my shoulder. “Agent Plio Ah, increase the voltage in the old man’s restraints. Melt his damned brain if you have to.”

  Foley thrashed in panic. “You bastards!”

  Caines fell back as Plio feigned to reach for the shackle control.

  “This is about liberty, Caul!”

  “Liberty my ironclad ass.” I dropped the boy, hard, my fingers leaving angry red marks in his skin. “Alright, Deputy. From the beginning.”

  Foley staggered to his feet, rubbing life back into his bruised flesh. He seemed to be searching for the right words. “Think of all the Aspects in the Aetherial Deep,” he finally said. “Each one a reflection of Great Albion, dating back to the beginning of Time. Each one a World in its own right. But that’s not enough for you, is it? Harvest Home is just one more in a list, one more World for your Machines to control. Well this is the only World my people have got and you can’t have it.”

  “I want to know about these weapons, Hollis.”

  “Submission to the Crown is crushing us, Agent Caul, day by day. Don’t delude yourself. We’re no better than slaves to the Instrumentality.”

  What little blood I possessed began to boil. “Don’t speak to me of slavery, boy. If you want a history lesson, I will surely give you one.”

  He just shook his head. “You’re in so deep you can’t even see it.”

  “The weapons, Hollis! What the Hell are you doing with these weapons?”

  “Jaxoor’s Sum and Substance, Romulus,” said Plio. “They’re trying to secede.”

  “What...?”

  He shifted back to his customary features and raised the pages and punch cards as if the secrets they revealed could easily be discerned by one and all. “That’s what Albion saw in the telemetry. The support functions have been commandeered to run independently once Gamhanrhide is cut off from the other Aspects.”

  “Secede?” I spun back to Deputy Foley, the ache behind my facial plates matching the electrick throb that pulsed in my shoulder. He said nothing. “Drop that back into low, brother.”

  Plio nodded. “Someone has gained control of key positions in Gamhanrhide�
��s infrastructure. The patterns indicate that all ties to the Instrumentality will be severed once their political base is secure. The nodes will converge in just a few weeks time. Romulus, that’s what caused the buckler event two nights ago. They’re trying to shut off the governors. They want to seal the buckler field from the inside.”

  Sainted Mothers of Wells and Verne.

  “We just want to go our own way,” said Foley.

  “Are you lot insane? Nobody knows what will happen if a bauble is sealed from the inside. Even the eggheads on Gant don’t know.”

  Plio took offense. “The entanglements of the present reality are unraveled from the Pattern-That-Is, and are rewoven into the Pattern-That-Will-Be.”

  “I rest my case. Nobody knows. Gods of Time and Engines, Hollis, don’t sacrifice everything you hold dear for a misguided ideal.”

  “No one has to get hurt if you just listen to reason!”

  “One hundred and twenty-six people are dead already! More, had we not stopped that melee in Dun Aenghus. That’s reasonable to you?”

  “Dun Aenghus?” Linus Caines spat from his corner. It was the first coherent thing he’d said since the obfuscator had been turned off. “Shitfire, man, ain’t nothin’ come outta Dun Aenghus but bonewits and bastards.”

  “Why do you say that, Pop?”

  “Bollocks, ain’t you listening? They want my land!”

  Foley’s voice tightened. “Linus, please, that’s not true. Earthers stand together. You taught me that.”

  “It is true, dammit. Look at what they done to Francher MacAwley. And Cecil Herne less’n a fortnight afore that.”

  “This is your fault, Caul!” Foley said. “Bursting in on our lives as if you’ve got the right. This is our home. I lost sight of that once, turned my back on it when Gilbert died. But then the Lady found me, said that in service to the Goddess I could help folks like Linus in ways I’d never imagined.”

  “By duping him. Using him as a façade to hide this bloody insanity because he wasn’t a threat to anybody.”