A Heaven Round the Stars

This is the opening to a novel that I started some years ago: A Heaven Round the Stars

Sunrise

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Dylan Thomas, THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER, 18 Poems

The world is very quiet in the hour before dawn. Across the valley floor, a scattering of lights pick out a vague outline of streets, the gossamer night-web of the hamlet that has nestled there for half a thousand years. Soon, the rising from sleep noises of the small community will wake the valley from its own slumber, but for now, the silence is almost complete, only the tiny, snuffling grunts of a female mouse pig in the underbrush breaking its perfection.

Across the western rim of the valley, down the wide dusty road that is its only link with the outer world, a tall figure comes walking, its stride loose and confident. The mouse pig freezes immediately, but her presence has already been registered; her nature identified; the fact that she is nearing oestrus noted; and the delicate hormonal trail she has left during her night’s quest for food traced and mapped. All this takes a moment, and is not even consciously apprehended. The information is unimportant, except as an indicator that the valley is at peace and normality still reigns, as it has for 500 years.

Another, shorter shape steps out of the shadow of a nearby beyab tree and holds up its hand in welcome. Neither is surprised – if the presence of a mouse pig was so obvious, the life signs of another Neos are a beacon to those with the eyes to see. The shapes draw near each other, still vague in the dark before dawn.

“Well. You took your time.” The voice is ageless and sibilant, as caressing as the night breeze. “Was there trouble this time?”

“No, the plains are peaceful, now the Trader rivalry has been resolved. Peacefully, for once. No intervention was necessary. I walked as far as the Threshold to see what the Shriekers have made of themselves.” This voice is deeper, but shares the other’s sibilant quality. To ordinary human ears, both voices would have sounded like the wind hissing through tall grass. Such ears would not be able to distinguish the words that had just passed in the night.

“And what have the Shriekers made?” There is a touch of impatience now, though this is an old game between these two, and the other will not be rushed.

“More than I would ever have expected, which proves that we aren’t omniscient.” There is humour in the deeper voice now. “The Shriekers have reached a point of stabilization, at a bronze age level. They show no sign of moving further, and may have reached the natural limit of their social cohesion. I counted a dozen petty kingdoms and almost twice that many independent warrens. None achieves dominance for very long, and even in the smaller communities life for the individual is still very precarious. The fact that they even have something that can be called civilisation is a miracle.”

There is a pause for a moment, and then, nonchalantly: “I headed off a Termagant swarm while I was there. Only a small one, with a young queen, so it wasn’t hard to handle, but where there is one, there are bound to be more, and greater. Philemon has promised to watch over the situation until one of us passes by again. I told him it might be decades or longer, but he was content enough. I think he and Andases have argued again. I didn’t see him this time, anyway.”

“So that’s what you’ve been doing all this time, collecting gossip?” The words are warm and not meant to wound. The shorter figure sighs. “I wish those two would either separate or resolve their conflict. Simeas has been gone for 300 years and will never be coming back, but his shadow lies between them still.”

“I know, but that is not your choice to make, or mine. Our gifts can’t mend a broken heart, or in this case two.”

“And what of you, my love. What have our charges been up to in my absence”? There is eagerness in the deep voice now. A grey light is starting to displace the gloom and the forms of the speakers are becoming clearer. The taller one seems to be male; at least there is an angularity to its form that the other lacks. Both are slender and poised, as if they have nothing to fear and no need to hurry. Which is true, for these are two with few peers and no masters.

“Much. The plant produced its first electrical current a few months ago, and now there are plans for street lighting, a communal food locker and a radio station. We had a trader in a year ago who took note of the changes and promised to facilitate radio links with some of the larger villes down along the Tinder. She was as good as her word, and our little ones should be on the comnet in a few weeks. The excitement is intense. They did it all themselves, too. I was present, but they didn’t want my help, or need it.” The tone is wistful but proud.


“Ah, growing up so quickly. It is what we work for, but it is never easy. Still there is much work for us elsewhere once we are finished here. Which, if I’m any judge, will be sometime in the next decade. Most of the main threats in this region have been diverted, the only real dangers left are the residual lithovores, and they are more of a slow-moving natural disaster than a military threat. Soon enough, we’ll be able to leave it to their native ingenuity.” This statement is accompanied by a sweeping gesture that takes in the sleeping town.


The speakers are close together now, their soft voices almost inaudible. The taller is clearly male, the shorter female. She raises both hands to his face and cups it gently and lovingly.
“I have missed you. There is such silence here when you are not present.”


“I know.” The male’s voice seems almost to smile. “I have news that will heal that wound, I think.”


He pauses. With the fine judgement of love and long acquaintance, he speaks again an instant before she can protest.


“The Ark Stations are returning.”


The female steps back in shock. “No!”


“Yes. The signal was faint, and the null observer wasn’t able to capture the message completely, but it was definitely a Station call sign, along with what sounded like an eta. If it’s correct, the Corpus may be re-assembled in a few months. The information is only being passed by word of mouth, which is why you haven’t been informed until now. A drone sapper was destroyed near the old north wall shortly after the message was received. We don’t think it was able to get off a warning to its handlers – the counter-measures that have been established are ferocious – but the last thing we need is a drone incursion during the Homecoming.”

“To see them all again, all the lost ones… was it a single Station or the whole band!?”

“We don’t know – there was strong solar interference and the equipment has grown unreliable with disuse – an oversight that won’t be permitted again. New ears were being grown as I was leaving, and they should be on-station by now. There may be more news, surely there is, but I haven’t crossed paths with anyone since I parted from Philemon. But there is hope that they have all survived.”

“I wonder how they will find the world we have made. I wonder how they will find us?”

For this, the male has no answer, he simply gathers her in his arms and there they stand, dark no longer but golden and beautiful in the light of the rising sun.

»

Much later, they walk down the road hand in hand and quietly enter the town. The sun is well risen, and the bustle of midmorning fills the street with noise and a thin haze of dust.

Townspeople nod and move aside as the Neos walk among them, their golden, sigil inscribed skin a dazzle among the plain costumes of the baseform humans. There is deference, but it is almost perfunctory – Neos, singly and in couples have been present in the town since its establishment, an event that is both nearly mythical and quaintly dulled with the accreted layers of time. They are familiar and promise both wisdom and protection, and so, inevitably, they are taken for granted by the bulk of the population. Tall, inscrutable, seemingly detached, but capable of great kindness and possessed of seemingly endless knowledge of science, both natural and mechanical, history, and an endless parade of other subjects, the Neos are regarded almost as pets – clever guard dogs who have chosen, for whatever reason, to attach themselves to humanity’s cause. They are not regarded as alien – alien is a six-legged warp singer, capable of opening mini-portals in which to trap its prey, or a swift termagant swarm, that can strip a herd-beast to bone on the run in less time than it takes a man to walk across the single central street. Neos aren’t alien in that sense but neither are they completely human. Instinctively, perhaps, the humans recognize their own progeny, and find ways to turn away from the knowledge.

The progress made in this small community has been achingly slow – 500 years to move from ox-drawn ploughs to steam and rudimentary radio, but the deliberate pace has not been arbitrary. It mirrors the slow rate of development across the swathe of human territories known collectively as the Fan, grudgingly ceded to humankind by the main factions of both the Changed and the Arrived. The treaties are only as good as Neos enforcement can make them. As this is very good indeed, the pacts have held for half a millennium. Rogue Changeling septs make occasional incursions; thrall raiding or simply testing the borders. Such are always swiftly quelled with varying degrees of ferocity, depending on the meme then dominating the Neos Continuum. The current mood was diversionist, flavoured by southern contemplative pacifism, but a more militant and militaristic orientation had taken hold in the west and the balance between diversion and punitive action was beginning to tilt in the latter’s favour.

This lies unspoken between the Neos couple walking the dusty, familiar street. Their memetic orientations were not in direct opposition, but random emergents along the militarist axis were beginning to drag their thoughts and threat-reactions in different directions. They both knew and accepted this – it had happened often enough before and would no more hinder their partnership that would a human’s love of cocaflax. Secretly, the male admired his partner’s warrior plumage, and their lovemaking was always more passionate and extravagant when it possessed her – an amusing holdover from the ancient programming of the root species that could never – and should never, he thought – be erased.

The only real result of the re-alignment would be that intruders, like the small Termagant swarm so handily decoyed into uninhabited lands, would be annihilated rather than misdirected. The wiser among the non-humans would quickly recognize this and adjust their policies. The slower and more obtuse would pay evolution’s price. Perhaps their offspring would have better ears to hear with and surer noses to sniff the wind’s changing direction. The male viewed the matter with the objectivity of his kind, subjecting it to a swift but searching third level inquiry and analysis. It withstood the test and he allowed the matter to sink back into the semantic background of his mind.


His moment of abstraction was not lost on his mate, who stroked his hand suggestively with her index finger. Mock coy, she turned her head away, her neck a graceful ark upon which the sigil Roth was rippling with flawless elegance. He twitched their linked hands and she looked back up, her smile more dazzling than the morning sun.

“Getting ideas, old man?” Perhaps his secret admiration was not so great a secret after all. And perhaps the war meme had gained ground considerably. He hadn’t thought to check the emergent matrix that had encoded itself in him before he and Philemon parted – it was a persistent oversight of his - and he noted with some surprise that militancy was nearing ascendant, which it would hold for some time, such was its new-found potency.

“Yes.” He grins.  There was little point in denying it – he was starting to get ideas, and she could read him completely, could do so before their emergence from the Continuum over 1,000 years ago. Another inherited trait that could never be removed, which was as it should be.

They had come to the town’s central plaza, where small holders gathered every day to display wares, some hand-made, other produced in the increasingly important manufactories built as co-operative ventures by the various skin clans. The sight of the Neos interrupted the flow of commerce not at all.

The male wandered over to the nearest stall, a modest affair of several boxes. On the cloth-covered surface, the stallholder had displayed a handful of small crystalline sculptures, molded from slow-set glass. The shapes were mostly local animals – here a Snarl, decently captured in the act of pouncing, and over there a Loperhorn, its eponymous horn thrust ahead like a cataphract’s lance, and far more deadly. The central piece, though, caught his eye, and through it his never still, ever questing mind.

It was small, only half the size of the others, in the shape of a triple-horned head – perhaps a shrieker then. No, its detail was exquisite, and the features were human-looking despite the horns, fine and almost – no actually - dignified, even though clearly of Arrived or Changeling stock. It had been carved with such skill that for a moment he looked toward the stallholder, perching on a chair under a threadbare umbrella, and beginning to feel slightly nervous about the scrutiny his wares were receiving. No, not this man’s work, the Neos decided – his hands did not bear the micro-abrasions characteristic of slow glass. He was just a middleman, then. Satisfied, he turned back to his study the piece again, when his world exploded into darkness and flame.

A throne, haloed in fire. On it, a weary form slumped in acceptance of failure and defeat. In his hand – sigil-inscribed but otherwise human – he holds a triple-bladed dagger, with a thin line of blood dripping from one edge. Lines of black are beginning to pollute the golden filigree of sigils, and he is screaming as if all the pain of the world is his.

How does the past reach forward into the present? Is it only through memories and artefacts, or is there an inviolable threat that ties what has been to what now is? There, in the light and hubbub of the market, a spike of cold light from days long gone pierces the Neos to his core. The calm certainties of mission, strength and superiority are ripped away and his is flung back into the human wilderness from which he had been lifted a millennium ago.

He stumbles backward, a golden clockwork with its mechanism broken in pieces. Coil after coil of memory unwinds, rising from depths hidden from the finest perception like a Sea-Orm looming out of the deeps. His senses blur and he feels himself becoming unstuck in time, now here, now back there, in whatever hell it was that once held him. He clenches his left forearm convulsively, feeling the sigils writhe and dissolve – Aythk and Urt struggle to shape, to calm his violent nerve impulses – but the force that has him in its grip will not loosen for even a second. The purificant that could have returned him back to his sense lies in their sleeping quarters, untouched for over 300 years. His mate can only watch, horrified and helpless, as he crashes to his knees, body held in a tight ball as if to prevent it from scattering. Slow tears leak from his luminous eyes, and he stares up at the sun blindly.

The only words that he utters are these:

“I just wanted it to end...”