Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (3 page)

"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.

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."

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 sacrif ice, 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 sacrif ice, 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.

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.