“Come to me, sister.” I switched off the scroll and stood, stretching and yawning. “You are not asleep?”
Cumingia shook her head. “I cannot sleep. I hear him now all the time—”
I sighed. I took the scroll I had been reading and walked across the small round chamber. Formerly, it had been the domain of the Quirinus exchequer, and his disproportionately large and lavishly covered bed stood beneath an oneiric canopy. I had never felt the need to control my dreams as had the exchequer, who was plagued by nightmares. The canopy was off now, its expanse of neural webbing limp and gray as dirty silk. I batted at the flimsy stuff, settled on the bed, and beckoned my sister to join me.
“Vasida has heard him too,” Cumingia blurted, as though I had argued with her. “And Polyonyx—”
“Shh. I am listening.”
It is a thing our Masters have never understood, this manner in which the children of Luther Burdock can hear each other’s thoughts. But even among our Masters there are born those who shared a womb, Gemini and triplets and the like, and these are well-known to possess the ability to feel the emotions of their twins. So why should it surprise our Masters that those of us who share the mind and body of Cybele Burdock can also share our thoughts? Though I must admit that my senses were less acute than my sisters’.
I closed my eyes, thinking that my proximity to Cumingia—the most sensitive of all of us, though that was like judging between one hair and another—might make it easier for me to detect the voices of that other, the one who named himself Kalaman, and who lived on another distant satellite where they had rebelled and wrested control from their Masters.
My sisters had told me that he spoke quite eloquently of insurgency, of revolution; of returning to claim the Element that the Tyrants had ruled for millennia. But I had not yet heard him for myself. Perhaps my head was too full of my own meditations to easily permit the sly and subtle voice of Kalaman to speak within it. Besides, I knew of what he spoke: the same passionate aria of war and blood that the Oracle proclaimed, and that now sang out across the Ether; the song taken up by one HORUS colony after another as our brothers and sisters rioted and one by one the Ascendants fell, plunging from their shining stations to burn between them like so many livid stars. Afterward the triumphant survivors had called to us, some, like Kalaman, insinuating themselves into our dreams; others stalking through the media chambers, their ’filed images grinning like cats as they read off exultant strings of names and executions, until the transmissions ended and they blinked into splinters of light.
Their messages were all the same. The Asterine Alliance, they called themselves: belonging to the stars. It was what the Oracle had named them, and it was the Oracle that had inspired them; but in this too I was reluctant to go along. I had my own oracle, a little silver globe left by Father Irene, the eunuch priest who had for a little while lived on Quirinus and preached to us of his Goddess. The Ascendants drove him from the colony after two months, but it was too late. We had already fallen in love with him and his mistress, the Wild Maiden, the Lady of the Beasts. It was for her that we sacrificed our breasts—a small thing, because who among us would ever suckle young? And it was true, as Father Irene told us, that we were already hers: for the Ascendants look upon us as beasts, and all animals are sacred to her. Like us she was enslaved, but then freed, and like us too she has her holy rages. She is the moon, and her consort is that smaller moon called Ione, where once the Ascendants held their prisoners: a moon long dead, and all its towers fallen. Her oracle was the little globe that Father Irene had left with us. I know it is not a true oracle, because it does not answer my questions, only shows me images of the Wild Maid over time, and recites her hymns—
The mightiest of mountains tremble, the woods with their cloak of darkness shriek as within the beasts bellow and flee The Element groans, as does the sea where dolphins and sirens seek shelter in the waves, and stars tumble and she runs, in and out, across the sky, in and out among the stars, her arrows flashing as men die and the beasts feed…
It is a bloodthirsty hymn, I suppose, but they are words only, and have given me much solace in the months since Father Irene was deported.
The other Oracle, though, the Asterine Oracle, has given form and weight to its words, and brought new kinds of worship to HORUS. Here on Quirinus our Masters died, but it was not by our hands. We gave them proper interment, casting their bodies into the Ether; but on other colonies our brothers and sisters enact darker rites. The torments of Alijj on Totma 3; pyres of liquid flame at Hotei; their Masters trepanned on Helena Aulis by our brother Kalaman and his followers. Sic semper tyrannus, the Oracle says; thus always to tyrants; and claims that Luther Burdock would have it thus. But it is not in this way that I recall our father. He was a gentle man. I once saw him weep over the body of an aardman who died during the course of routine surgery, and he was unfailingly kind to all those who worked with him, men or beasts or half-men.
And so I believe that I remember him best. I know that I love him best, though my sisters say that cannot be so: that we all can only love him equally, because we are all the same. But I do not feel the same as they do.
This new Oracle also seems to know a different man than I remember.
“Your father is waiting for you on Earth. We have made arrangements, he and I, for all his children to return to him.” That was what the Oracle said. It is a splendid thing, this Oracle, much stronger and more beautiful than mine, though it does not know any hymns. In its appearance it is like a man made of black and shining metal, like a robotic construct; but it says it is a nemosyne—that is, One Who Remembers. What this Oracle remembers is war.
“It is time!” the Oracle announced during one of its recent apparitions. It appears more often now, in the media gallery and sometimes in the hall where we share our meals. Its words are different each time it appears, but their meaning is always the same. It speaks of war, of new triumphs over our Masters (the Oracle calls them the Tyrants); and of how their rule is ending. The Oracle said that the Element was ours by right, since mankind had proved such poor rulers. We had only to slay the Tyrants, and enslave those who survived, and we would come into our vast estate. This at least was the destiny it claimed Luther Burdock had prepared us for; but I remember no such thing of our father. I do not believe he ever desired that his children should wrest control of the Element from his kind; but neither do I believe he meant for us to be slaves. It is a mystery how this should have happened to us. But then, all things about our father are a mystery.
There is much I do not understand about our world, the hollow metal form where we play out our thousand days, thence to die and be replaced by other, identical sisters. But now, with our Masters dead, we have lost the secret of our reproduction. We do not breed, because our Masters felt that allowing us to breed would give us too much control over our own fates. They wished to have the power over us of life and death: and so we are sterile, and live for only a thousand days.
But the Oracle said that our father would undo this evil. If only we would come to him, he would give us all new lives. He and other men had unlocked the secrets of mortality. They had found ways to extend life. We would live for a thousand thousand days. We would live almost forever.
And this, you see, meant a great deal to me. Because of my thousand days, there were less than a score remaining.
But I said nothing of all this to my sister Cumingia when she came to see me in the library. I thought it strange, that she and the others could hear the voice of our brother Kalaman singing across the void, and I could not: I could sense only my sisters here on Quirinus. Hylas and Polyonyx turning restlessly in the bed they shared, Pira’s face nestled between those of Lusine and Hipponyx and Chama, as alike as three violets. But of the others, those of our blood who lived elsewhere in the shining net that made up the HORUS colonies—of them I felt nothing at all.