Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (2 page)

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 micro-gravity. 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.

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.

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."

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."