It was dull work. An argument could be made that Kalaman’s part in the Asterine Alliance had come about by virtue of his imagining some activity that might combine these assorted bits of trivia. Population figures, maps of armories, numerical equations whose final sum was a new type of bomb: you add them all, and the answer is revolution. One should never underestimate the effects of stupefying boredom upon a bright young student.
During those eternal sunless days he had first seen the heliotype in use. It was a strategic aid, a type of virtual map. By giving it the proper coordinates, you could create a symbolic visual referent for any celestial object you could imagine, in colors so pure and vivid, they made you want to pop them into your mouth. The sun was a fist-sized ball, a scintillating ruby; the Earth (Kalaman called it the Element) a sea-blue eye; and there were any number of iridescent stars, planets, moons, meteors, comets, aerolites, space stations, and nebulae, as well as enhanced projections of killer asteroids aimed at the moon, satellites poised to implode into glittering dust, quasars like flattened gumdrops, spiky floating remnants of celestial ships, and of course those fanciful efforts to picture ExtraSolar Transports, dubbed asters by the Ascendants; nothing necessarily to scale.
Kalaman sat there now, an entire galaxy of these images spinning around his head like so many colossal bees. Every now and then he would stop one of the whirling eidolons and draw it to him for inspection, then release it to carom through the air once more. Now his huge black eyes were fixed on a golden torus that spun lazily a few inches from his nose. It was the heliotype’s vision of Quirinus, filtered of course through Kalaman’s own projection of what he wanted the station to look like. So the torus had tiny windows like the hexagonal cells of honeybees, and through them Kalaman could see even tinier figures, black and red and ivory, moving purposefully through their golden hive.
If he had wanted to—if Kalaman’s vision could somehow have stretched beyond the peeling outer walls of Helena Aulis to encompass the rest of the universe he was so anxious to strike against—he might have seen an elÿon like a fuchsine bubble, trailing quicksilver streamers as it rose to bump against the languidly turning torus. He might have squinted approvingly into the emerald heart of the Element to see a radiant grid, the shimmering perimeters of which encompassed both the City of Trees and the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains; and within that grid a block of white like a cube of sugar, a cube meant to be a building. A house, an inn in fact, where still more livid specks plotted determinedly the overthrow of the Autocracy. He might have glimpsed a peculiar glowing body, half-star and half-moon, shimmering ominously at the perimeter of the heliotype’s range.
And finally, he might have seen a heavy shining object tumbling languorously against the gleaming white walls of the Architect’s chamber: a space station shaped like an hourglass, and inside it a tiny brick-red form like a crooked finger, surrounded by brilliant sparks, whirling atoms: the dream of Kalaman himself, planning a war within a web of dancing worlds.
“They are dying, O my brothers! They hardly resist us at all!”
Kalaman’s voice rang out through the Third Assembly Hall of Helena Aulis. He blinked, smiling, so that his tattooed eyes fluttered coquettishly. Beneath him shone the faces of his eighteen surviving siblings, as though his own face were reflected in myriad mirrors, jet and silver and cinnabar. He was suspended in the air by means of an invisible pensile net—a cheap trick, but effective nonetheless, as the Ascendants had found when using it to welcome prisoners of war or dignitaries from enemy colonies. Beside him floated his brother Ratnayaka. Like Kalaman he was smiling, his hands resting on his knees. Both wore knee-length skirts of linen dyed yellow and green, hitched up now to show their powerful legs, hairless and so heavily muscled, they seemed to be entwined with serpents. They were like twin apsaras, those supernatural concubines with which the Indus deities reward their fallen heroes. Their immense faces serene, their lips parted to show the tip of their tongues, pink and crimson, and their carefully filed teeth.
“It is time we moved on to the next stage,” Kalaman was saying in his reedy tenor. The other energumens nodded, silent; they could sense what was to come. “The Oracle has spoken to me, and I have done as he commands. Our beloved brother Ratnayaka has prepared the aviettes for our departure tomorrow, Solar Time 0770 hours. We will go to Quirinus. We have sisters there whom we are to welcome into our Alliance. They will join us, and from Quirinus we will journey to the Element.”
A murmur, a trembling as of wind shaking the limbs of a small forest.
“The Element, O my brother Kalaman?”
The question came from Riatu, whose black eyes were fairly invisible in his ebony face. Like most of the others, he had been born on Helena Aulis, where he had toiled in the station’s media center. His only memories of Earth belonged to Cybele Burdock, and had been garishly enhanced by ’file transmissions showing the destruction of Commonwealth bases by Ascendant janissaries and Aviators. For all that he could sense Kalaman’s inarguable will, like strong fingers brushing up and down his spine, his voice was tinged with unease.
“The Element.” Kalaman nodded, glanced aside at Ratnayaka. His ivory-skinned brother was suspended next to him, his one eye half-closed, the other shrouded by its crimson band beneath its adornment of thin gold rings. Still exhausted by the aftermath of their harrowing of Sindhi, Kalaman imagined, and he smiled before continuing.
“The Oracle spoke to me this morning. I have several transmissions to share with you, from Hotei and Totma 3 and Vancouver….”
Within his invisible net Ratnayaka yawned. His brother’s voice became a sonic blur. He was not exhausted, as Kalaman thought. Rather, last night’s harrowing had made him feel immensely huge and powerfuclass="underline" as though he had somehow absorbed Sindhi’s body mass, rather than his soul. But it had left him with an overwhelming hunger, a desire that nearly drove him mad. Sitting there with the taut cords of the pensile web cutting into his legs, Ratnayaka closed his eye because he was afraid it would betray him to his brothers, afraid they would see the hunger there. This was why it was unwise to perform the ritual harrowing by oneself, or with only two participants. The experience had strengthened the psychic bond between himself and Kalaman, and Sindhi too of course—even now he could sense him, like a gathering warmth inside his skull. But the immediate rapture had faded, leaving Ratnayaka with that gnawing hunger. Not a physical craving—the harrowing depleted one of the base need for food, which was fortunate since the stores on Helena Aulis were growing low—but the desire to repeat the sublime experience. To devour a brother’s very essence, so similar to his own, and taste the rich pulp that would release shreds of their shared memory into Ratnayaka’s own mind. Kalaman believed the process somehow helped extend their lives. Perhaps by just a few weeks; but when one’s life span extended only three years, that could be a significant amount of time.
Of course, one couldn’t go on devouring one’s brothers and sisters forever. Fortunately, there were humans. Although the harrowing of their tyrant masters had been nothing like this, only a confusing jolt of fear and horror before their trepanned bodies were cast into the void. But the process could be refined, of course. Ratnayaka had already begun researching it in the station laboratories. And the Oracle had assured him that upon the Element everything was in place for such a project—it would be a simple matter of occupying the hydrofarms and other bioengineering centers, and exchanging geneslaves for Tyrants….
“This transmission is from Porto Alegre.”