Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 Read online

  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."

  Present

  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 t
he 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."

  "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.

  Past

  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."

  Present

  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.