Coral orchard, palate testing an axiom's screams,
ignorant manca with falling silver, this war swallowed you.
Throats, wrapped tight around outward simples, bombard nuance,
shatter easy glass, as fractured as all-encompassing peace.
This Yggdrasil, made from rotting cells; add the world's
renewing flesh. Dynasty; preserved by secrecy's hushed behest.
History hands its future's pen to your newest slow demise.
One survivor, thoroughly out of peril, by democratic design.
Maxillae, oh Maxillae, a new shadow
casts on your bloody shield
ignorant manca with falling silver, this war swallowed you.
Throats, wrapped tight around outward simples, bombard nuance,
shatter easy glass, as fractured as all-encompassing peace.
This Yggdrasil, made from rotting cells; add the world's
renewing flesh. Dynasty; preserved by secrecy's hushed behest.
History hands its future's pen to your newest slow demise.
One survivor, thoroughly out of peril, by democratic design.
Maxillae, oh Maxillae, a new shadow
casts on your bloody shield
The poem on the wall distracts me from the squabbling diplomats. There would be no sense in my attempted reading of it; I don't have the melody to give it meaning. I hum various genres, testing: immature courtship (pop), sober longing (Dynastic Contemporary), puckish recalcitrance (Fucktrash). All of them sound wrong. My eyebrows arch with a composer's frustration.
The poem is in Cephalon. The mouth forms it by rolling, singing, humming, sighing, and - rarely - stopping. Its grammar and phonetics evolved the same way as its native, coralline planet had. As masses of coral domed around the terraqueous cities, so too did Cephalon blanket the inhabitants' ganglia. These are a people born with music in their mind. Encephalic composers, mental harmonics. Crusty beats.
The language's phonemes contain the rhythm and cadence, but lack the timbre and tone (the necessary warmth) for even something as simple as 'you're welcome'. To speak Cephalon, you say - sing? - its words at a nearby piece of coral. The song bounces off of it, becoming speech. The choir never sleeps on this planet of Biramour.
Biramour, the symphonic planet.
In the backrooms of diplomats, it is often derided as the 'shy planet', dating from the old stereotype that every conversation faces the walls instead of who you're talking to.
My ear twitches; the ongoing conversation requires my attention. The diplomats are discussing what to do with me.
"We have observed your stay for the passing of the moons. We have welcomed you into our chrysalid valleys and lent our auditory organs to your words. A banquet of hearsay, and it was scrumptious. Certainly a hungry people would have partaken. Yet, you forget we have a sense of taste. How you have treated the one in your company betrays the perished flesh beneath the carapace of your faith. We see no reason to entertain you, nor delude ourselves any further."
The Maxillae of Laɣ's furtive a cappela chastises the leader-missionary. Through her, I've learned, all political and diplomatic declarations are and will be made. An astounding responsibility, a power easily abused. To prevent this, her decisions, no matter how banal, require the input of literally every single pereion - roughly, 'citizen'. Somehow, this system is tenable here. It would never be possible on the homeworld. We'd just crown her empress and get it over with. She also teaches general history to teenagers with concentration problems.
"Moreover –" She continues.
Leader-Missionary attempts to interject, starting with number 13 from his list of prepared retorts. The other isogen leader, the Telson of Laɣ, interrupts him in turn, finding his mouth shut like a hi-hat by two sets of chitinous arms squeezing his lips together. He squeaks in protest and I have to suck in my lips to stifle a laugh.
The Telson is the chief organiser of activities. Somewhere between a planner and a patrolman. When a planet-wide decision has been made, the Telson shows everyone how to get started. The brawns to the Maxillae's brains.
"Moreover," the Maxillae continues with a chirp I know bears a sneer, "we will be releasing your servant from your cruel digits. No heaven can exist in involuntary bondage." The Telson unbinds Father as the Maxillae finishes her last clack. The subtle monotony of her delivery suggests she's sung this song many times before.
Naturally, Father feigns offence. Something about stolen property - me - requiring recompense.
"There is no price to personhood," the Maxillae's swift response staccatoes the mood in the room.
Language so heavily dependent on a specific biome contributed to the isogenic system of autarkic isolationism - without coral, after all, they cannot speak. You'd just hear an angry hiss. This has the abrupt, often comical effect that when a foreign word is spoken, Dynastic, in this case, it sounds like a false note.
Price.
"The ruler, I believe you said, was always justified in their authority and must be shown proper respect? Exit alone and we will allow you to leave our planet."
My face contorts into a smile against my will, a perfect expression of 'I told you so'. I DID tell Father so: the isogen are sturdy critics (historians you could say) of Dynastic diplomacy.
He steps forward a pace, but this is clearly perceived as a threat; moments later he finds his paunchy frame fitting neatly into the Telson's bulky gnathopods. Five pairs of appendage work together to grab the man whose stated mission is peace and fling him toward the exit. Father struggles to get back up. In the end, he takes a sarcastic bow and leaves, easily forgetting about me.
I blink, uncertain of what is next.
I seem to be terribly free.
"Never praying what is preached, these missionaries."
"Indeed. Who would join such a crude religion to begin with…?" Both isogen leaders turn to me. The Maxillae retracts her mandibles into what I consider a simper. The isogen have no need for expressions: they seem to be gifted with preternatural empathy. Smiles on this planet are reserved for children.
The isogen have faces like coral reefs - sensory stalks and subsessile plateaus, mosaics in motion. Their fashion is similarly captivating. The Telson dresses green; this complements the gray face, the ommatidial eyes that flush a twilight pink at the top, and the teardrop-shaped cephalic shield of silver ('hair', or close enough to it). The Maxillae has only the one eye-stalk, a black scorch mark in lieu of a second. Her shield is an unmissable claret. A unique, communal colour. A banned one, on the homeworld.
The Telson approaches me, a dog yet to sniff the hand.
"You are. Free now. What is. Your name?"
"I have been ordered to forget it." Locked away with standard neurosurgery. My aria surprises them, for which they apologise. By chance, my mother tongue shares a phonetic base with Cephalon, which made learning it easy. And mams taught me how to sing.
"With all due respect, 'be free' seems like an even vaguer order than 'be silent'." Too many of the systems in my life were set up to make me banish the thought of freedom. (They worked.) I don't know what it looks like - would I say 'no' more often? Do I sleep in late now? It's silly to imagine.
Telson sighs in sympathy as the Maxillae approaches me, her long, cerulean dress forming calm seas in her wake. There is a terrifying glory to her.
"Of course. Time is needed, which you have in abundance now." she sings, and I respond in clumsy verse.
"I don't understand what you're asking, ma'am."
Telson emits a jovial, two-fold clacking - a chuckle reserved for the planet's many sitcoms.
"So studious, yet never picked up that we do not hail one another with gendered language." When and why did I start doing that…?
"My sincerest apologies. I did not wish to offend –"
"None necessary. You may use the she and the her, if you wish."
"Not for me," crescendoes the Telson. "I don't do gender."
"The Telson of Lay does not do gender!"
They share an intimate laugh, the sound rattling like percussion.
Then, the Maxillae lets out a click. It is a word unknown to me. It is not any part of the song that I recognise. But I know that I should take a seat, because she uttered that word. I climb inside a basalt basin-chair padded with reeds for comfort. Father had mistaken them for large soup bowls during our initial meeting, which led to an immediate diplomatic incident.
"Life, we believe, occurs in three stages. There is 'ovum', 'incrementum', and 'cibus'. Neither birth nor childhood, ovum is an unavoidable trap, a snare in which life is given shape and experience. Life must escape from this moult. It is abuse, idealism, tyranny; all that prevents growth. The circumstances of the victim as well as the actions of the perpetrator can be considered ovi, in this regard."
Entertaining the lecture, I ask: "With my freedom, am I now in the 'cibus' stage?"
"Incorrect. That would be incrementum. The manca will only know the warmth of the shell, and fears that the outside is colder. When the first exoskeleton breaks it can be dazing. Such metaphysical pain can obliterate oneself, if left to their own. So we take care of the newly born. Incrementum is what we would consider…" She pauses, with a loopy hum, "…healing."
Her fourth arm travels over her scorch mark as she emits a low chirp, the kiss of a slide guitar. "And before you ask," she chimes a grim and sarcastic note, "cibus is our word for the afterlife."
Halfway through asking a meaningless question, my throat stops shaping notes, though my mouth keeps moving. She laughs, a heartfelt soprano, like my mother.
"You are overwhelmed. That is normal."
The Telson picks up the conversation.
"We will provide you with palliation. For non-price of course. You are not the first person we have freed. We insist to care for you these coming days. You will need it."
The Telson picks me up in a clean, handsome motion. "We know how to do this."
---
The Telson personally guides me to my new lodgings. A large and polished, polyp-covered building - pink and mossy cerulean - with many different sections. I'm taken into the 'roly-poly' wing. A sudden sense of dread hits me: is this their version of a correctional facility? Was I their prisoner in all but name?
But: there were no guards. No beds with straps. The room had no doors. It was nice. There is a video display and a radio with various channels divided by genre - exohop, waves-and-coasts, umbraskeleton, etc. A circular anemone bed with leafy cushions and off-putting stuffed animals, uncanny approximations of animals the average Dynastic citizen would have seen in their lifetimes - I haven't. I ask if they could replace them with Biramouran wildlife: levitating molluscs, mimic algae, fish that moved between walls… but that's not how this goes, they reply. Caretakers of various genotypes visit me throughout the day, both to wash my body - ritually and necessarily - and to help me fill out the consent-of-stay forms. The questions lack the cruel apathy of a bored bureaucrat. Instead, it reads like a libretto. When I arrive at the final question, the caretakers leave the room so I can answer it in privacy, something I didn't think possible in a doorless room.
WERE YOU A VOLUNTARY MEMBER OF THE DYNASTIC CHURCH?
IF YES: IS THERE LOVE IN OBLIGATION?
IF NO: WHAT REGRET IS THERE TO BEING RELIEVED FROM MURDER?
The caretakers return to show me how to eat caelose, the most popular dish on Biramour. It has two ingredients: a mineral straw mined from the subaqueous parts of the planet that is chewy, salty, and edible (although not digestible); and a bowl filled with a sweet juice called response. It collects on almost every piece of Biramour's unique coral dome; the oldest of isogen myths describe how this substance is the coral's teary reaction to Cephalon's beauty.
Through the planet's stone, I suck up its saccharine reply. The reaction between rocky crunch and soupy liquid in my mouth fizz into a tingly nostalgia. I miss the past, any past, before today. It tastes like mams' mopé juice.
Then, the video display flashes on. Through a live camera feed, the entire planet's population has gathered around a massive structure at the base of a gigantic, spine-like coral tree. Its boughs hold up the sky, and by poetic extension, Biramouran mutualism. This is where every pereion comes to give their input on the matters of the day, the city, the planet. It is apparent that the millions on screen gathered today to vote on me - whether or not I was allowed to stay. It's over within seconds. All of them voted "yes", save for a single "no".
I felt truly welcomed. And, for a moment, forgiven.
The next day, I stopped wanting to talk, or move, or live. I felt guilty.
---
Someone knocks on the doorframe.
"Hi-ya. Anyone there?" It's Dynastic. It misses any treble, fails to resonate with these walls. Tone deaf. I don't answer.
"Alright, coooming in!" Without a door to bar his entrance, I'm powerless to stop this bull. I burrow deeper, hugging a pupa. Pretending I am it.
"Please leave," I sing, badly.
"Can't. I drew the short stick." He laughs, too hard.
"I'm the trouble case, then?"
"I'd tell you to lighten up, buuut –" no follow-up. I think he shrugs at me.
"No jokes, then. Here's the quick and fast of it. I'm Agassiz, and I'm here to tell you what it's like to be a roly-poly."
I peek my head out from under the sheets.
"Roly-poly?"
"It's a term for immigrants. Officially, for non-Biramouran pereia. But why make it more difficult, right?"
Agassiz's voice is full of piercing feedback, a theremin set to scream no matter the distance. He's only vaguely similar to my body plan: pale, much too tall, and sporting a wide grin with rounded teeth. Humanoid…ish? Him scraping against the ceiling doesn't do much in the way of comforting me.
"I was in your shoes, you know. Years ago, the isogen took me in. Fed and dressed me all nice, and still all I felt was homesick. Took me years to accept that my life in the Dynasty was behind me."
"Really? Tell me, you have to tell me… who were you before this?" I make eye-contact, skittish but curious, desperate for an analogy.
His single eye swirls like a gathering storm. Three hours later, I wish I hadn't asked.
He is Dynast Agassiz of crusade vessel The Second Scripture, a 'Throat'. The crusade vessel became stranded in space after the wiring of a bathtub hairdryer short-circuited the whole thing, leaving the entire ship immobilised. Following the church's strict honour preservation customs, he had to order 372 of his 374-member crew to commit ritual suicide one by one. With military pride in his voice, he narrated how he was full hours into glory-bound starvation before a Biramouran mailing ship picked up his SOS and rescued him.
"Did you ever tell them about the sacrificial order?"
"Haha, oh no, that would have raised questions. What I needed to do was survive, not organise 370 funerals."
"372," I correct him. He pays it no mind.
Those who belong to the Dynastic faith must fight for it as soldiers. Those who haven't been drafted yet, are 'converted'. Two strategies exist to achieve this. First, missionaries are sent to negotiate the terms of conversion. In general these involve seizure of assets, integration into the galactic market, erosion of intra-planetary communal or kinship structures, and the construction of give or take eight religious facilities. If negotiations fail - they often do - a crusade is invoked. Embargoes, bombardments, planetfall. Missionaries or missiles, the result is always the same.
"To this day, I really am grateful to the isogen for taking me in. They showed me how good life outside the Dynasty can be. And," he smacks liplessly, "that can be the case for you, too. You toiled for the Dynasty, same as me, but now you can just do whatever you want. No routines, no orders. It's lovely once you get over yourself."
"Get… over myself?" I snarl at that. "I am not merely feeling sorry for myself!"
"Sure you aren't. You don't have a starship, though, so leaving is a pipe dream. And daydreaming about your life in the Dynasty won't do you favours here. You know by now that conversion has failed. You know what comes next. All we can do is enjoy ourselves till the time comes. Make sure we're not bordered to bits by a Dynastic special."
His body shifts like a cannon.
"Look, they've given you a bed, music, stuffed animals. How stubborn do you gotta be to reject that? You've got nothing to return to."
"I have the Father," I let slip. Pure reaction.
"Uh huh. Does he have you? You know, I talked to him before he left. He didn't seem bothered. In fact, he said it was quaint. That with a click of the Maxillae's mandibles, you started thinking for yourself? An order for freedom and you follow it to the letter! We were both part of something grand and now we're not. It was cushy enough for us to ignore what we did. But here, we're villains with a second chance. Act like it - like a redemption arc. They love that."
The shape of his teeth cannot hide a hungry tongue lapping behind them.
"Heaven will come. It'll be one for the history books."
---
I haven't seen Agassiz for two weeks. Short straw, indeed. When I told the Maxillae, she wasn't surprised. As a pereion, he can do what he wants. Not helping me includes that. So instead of waiting around for counseling, I started attending her history classes. All the formative spaces in Biramour are outside, from schools to voting booths; one big continuum. Outside, underneath their eternal tree.
Biramour is not the sunniest planet in the sector. Starlight is blotted out by the coral structure that shields it - a natural Dyson sphere. Like a dense egg, with airholes here and there, consisting of the remains of a million dead animals. Clearly, something very bad happened at one point to create something of this size, but the history is vague. For the isogen, it's too important - too convenient - to question.
A stray starbeam strikes my face, sizzling like a bullet on my skin. I recoil, dropping my tomeshell. The lecture stops, and I can hear everyone shifting to face me. I quickly pick up the book, heavy as it is for me, and hide my face.
"I'm sorry," I falsetto. "It was the light. It won't happen again. I'll be brave, I won't make a sound, I won't be a bother, I won't –"
The isogen besides me sings like the upward sweep of a violin, stringing out a question.
"Like, the roly-poly is sorry? But, like, what's to be sorry for? I'm confused?"
Their friend chugs back like distorted electric guitar, tossing an insult.
"You totally did something wrong. You always breathe on people with your fat arms."
"No, I don't! Shut up, my arm-breathing isn't bothering anyone."
"Explain the crying and shaking, then! Breathing on people is weird! I'd cry too if I could!"
The two teenagers stop teasing each other the precise moment they hear one of Maxillae's clicks - that note I don't recognise. The lesson continues, but my classmate whispers: "I'm, like, sorry for not being considerate of your personal space."
It's quite pleasing to hear Cephalon sung as a whisper, a six-limbed scalp massage transcribed into sound. I pop up from behind the book, a cowardly hermit crab.
"You're sorry?"
Their ommatidia grow wide.
"Your faAaAce…!" Their shock has a melisma to it.
"My face?"
"Y-your, your fAaAcE!"
"My face!"
My hand brushes over the patch of grilled skin on my cheek and I scream along. Maxillae clicks again, and the whole classroom scatters like cockroaches after the lights switch on. They return, variously, with bandages, cold compresses, a mortar of pungent salve, a freshwater-soaked rag, a stretcher, a glass cup of water, and (hopefully not necessarily!) a Biramouran grave marker.
Emergency triage tactics - I'd seen it a couple of times during my stay here pre-pereion.
They scurry me to a lean-to shell to prevent further sun damage. I am whisked into a comfortable bed.
"You didn't do anything wrong, by the way." I tell the teenager. "I just got hit with a sunbeam."
"Oh damn, that sucks? Especially with, like, that kind of body?"
"…what do you mean?"
"Your surface, all stretched out like that? Like, all soft and leathery? No offence, but you, like, look like a jellyfish?"
Maxillae enters my makeshift hospital room as if summoned.
"Small one. There was no prior consent to you insulting them. Recall your personal lesson."
"Like, 'even a playful attitude must abide by the rules?'" The melody is rehearsed, a bored droning. "Sorry. I should have, like, asked before calling you a jellyfish?"
"Yes, so I could have told you not to."
"Aw, like, bummer?"
"Shoo, now." They all leave. Maxillae and I remain, seated on the muddy bed.
She towers over me by what must be at least a full four feet. She is beautiful in a way I'm unfamiliar with. There is no strength here. No batons, no shaming, no yelling - can you even yell in Cephalon? There is just wisdom and vulnerability. And people - teenagers, even, the worst version of any person - listen to that. But, my inner voice has since shifted from the toneless droll of Dynastic, a language that sounds like a ten-year-old rehearsing for a play. I think, sing, dream, in Cephalon - my range broader than ever, what were contrasting keys before now belonging the composition of my cognition. With Cephalon as a sounding board, so much more makes sense. In hindsight, so much more about the Dynasty… clicks.
"Did you learn from our past?" Her voice drops an octave out of respect for historical subjects.
"It's interesting! None of this was in the books I read for my visit. Then again, it was mostly propaganda brochures. I find the part about the warring tribes especially interesting - I mean, you seem such peaceful peoples."
"The most violent era in our history appeals to you the most?" The chords that form her pity frustrate me, and I snap back.
"Oh, I get it. This was a test? I picked the wrong thing to be interested in and now I can't be salvaged."
"Your interest, and so is everyone's, is formed by what is presented as righteous. The Dynasty is a warlike nation; I find it unperplexing such matters would appeal to its denizens the most."
"You still consider me Dynastic, then?" My voice doesn't rise, but the genre enters punk, sharp and sour.
"Yes, I do consider that. Because you do as well." Her words sound intentional, but the song is one of patience. Downtempo.
"Tell me, incrementala, what was your ovum like?"
"As in, what, my past?"
"Indeed."
---
I was born in the Breezes - wooden towers of ill-maintained apartments, swaying in the planet's topwinds and afterdrafts of spaceships. My mother was just 'mams'. The man who was my father fought all over the galaxy for the Dynasty, when it was still an empire. We had a phonograph and many, so many records. It was the man's way of telling us where he had been, as letters weren't allowed. Chimer, Dynastic Contemporary, exohop, even Fucktrash, - I was surrounded by genres recorded in places far, far from mine. The music let me believe I wasn't stuck, that the Dynasty had a use for me. There was a soundtrack for the overhead starships that I believed set out for greater, more exciting things. I taught myself how to sing every song, how to pronounce the words, and how to set my mouth to another language as if it were a lever in my neurons.
The first weeks went poorly. So Mams, either taking pity on my dream or unable to bear it any longer, taught me how to take control of my excitement for the sake of the performance.
Then the man was home again. He said he would go by 'Victor' now - a name given to him as the sole reward for his service. He was proud to have fought, but confused that it led neither him nor his family to vaunted places. That disillusionment was given a name, quiet, grumpy, frightful. He didn't like the music he had gifted us, so he took away the phonograph. He'd yell at the starships, at the wind, at anyone who made a sound. One night, I stole the music player back. Shielded by an upside-down laundry basket, wrapped up tightly in a shell of blankets, I listened to the songs again. I would sing again. In all my excitement, I hit a shrill and false note. Victor found out - that I failed to follow the bedtime order? That I thought to follow my own choices in the house? That I made him help mams with the laundry because the basket was missing? In any case, he smashed the device.
Victor then sold me to Father. It was right around the time the Dynastic Church was founded. My education was better than I could have hoped. I loved studying all the texts. I was even permitted to translate some of them. My familiarity with alien languages and mastery of the nascent scripture - all thanks to the music - granted me the special position of ensign.
Then I helped move along about 23 crusades.
---
"Thank you for sharing." Her shield casts a claret glow, a false sunset on the beach.
"Yeah, well, I'm really not proud of it. I helped the Church do awful things." My voice cracks and I have to catch my breath.
"Yes, you did."
"Glad we agree. So you see, I'm not salvageable."
"That is not for you to decide. We welcome all those seeking to heal."
"Like you welcome Agassiz? The proud war criminal? That's something I don't understand. Why do you help people like him? He was there to wage war on you. And you've granted him an equal place within the song."
Air escapes from her body, a shifting modality, a new set of sounds available.
"By your view, are you not a war criminal yourself? Unless you force a distinction between conversion and crusade, but we both know better than that."
"I don't, but –" Familiar frustration ceases my throat.
"What would you rather we do?" - a chide - "We have forsaken war and all forms of punishment out of historical necessity. We are isolated within the Dynasty's hegemony, so we must trust everyone to contribute to our continued survival. As we perfect the craft of peace, we may one day export it to your shores, and liberate those who are not even aware of their ovi."
"Are you that merciful? What do you do if a murder takes place?"
"Your question reminds me of the hysteria of a courthouse. Such a mistake constitutes a failure of the song, not of the singer. We do not punish, we prevent. Through the ardour of pacifism. All here envision, all here build, all here vote - this is inveterate responsibility."
Following her melody, my synapses fire into the first forays of what she actually means. I've memorised the melodies, but now I see the genre to which they belong. Pity. It does not rattle like anxiety, or deprave like paranoia, but chimes as true as the caelose's sweetness: The matter of your execution was voted on. We are now burdened with you.
"Besides," she chuckles, the most ticklish sound I've ever heard, "sending war criminals to court only sanitises them. It is better for the galaxy to keep them here in constant, boring self-reflection. Until they break and agree to our way of doing." I frown, although I'm sure I don't even need to. The isogen can read human emotion like the waves of the ocean - they have to, dealing with the Dynasty - and my face is an unpolluted lake.
"Have you ever declined to take someone in? Even if they were a really tragic case?"
"We let your former master leave for a reason."
"Which is?"
"He had something to return to."
That answer chills me, despite the burn on my cheek. Colour drains from my face as I already know the answer before I ask: "…am I free to leave?"
"No."
---
The months pass quickly.
"Where are we going, Telson?"
"You only ask that when we leave the facilities. Live a little!"
"I have, you bully. I've been watching sitcoms, listening to radio shows, reading cookbooks…"
"Ah, our fine cuisine. Caelose and then whatever sticks to our buildings. I dunno how we manage to write entire books on that."
Biramouran pickled seaweed-and-foam soup is a staple dish in some crusade cafeterias. I avoid mentioning this to the Telson - like bringing up a lost skirmish in a victorious war.
Instead, I mention: "Oh, but there's stir-fried jellyquad, flutterclam roti, skyhound taro pom…"
The hulking silhouette that Telson makes is slow and deliberate. With their lower harmonies, deep like a twelve-string bass, everything about them inspires attention and gravity. It's impossible not to consider what they say, because it thrums all the way down to the nervous system. Even their crassness feels like it has import.
"Look at our tiny-ass mouths. We can't eat that shit."
I feel really stupid. I subconsciously size up my mouth with my tongue.
"I, uh, forgot. Sorry. But, you know, this is all known as Biramouran cuisine. So that's confusing."
"That's what all you tongue-having roly-polies came up with. Sometimes… well, all the time actually, we feel outmatched when it comes to food."
"So," I mentally tap one of the cookbooks in mind, "this is all fusion cuisine?"
"We've never needed any of it, because our digestive tracts just aren't that complex. Maxillae and I have discussed that exotic mentality, of the drive to experiment with a planet's resources for the base sake of discovering some new-fangled taste. No, Caelose does the trick, any more ingredients than that is just colonialism."
"Forgive me, but having ideas about food seems plenty harmless."
They suddenly stop. The planet's pull drenches deep into me; my heart beats terribly.
"That is not the way it goes around here."
Even sung, their statement sounds discordant. We resume walking in scariest silence.
"Oh, I never answered your question!" They remember now. "You'll be attending your first community meeting. It's a light show." We stop, and once again as with my voting, millions have gathered around the coral tree. All of us sharing borderless ground as we stare. On the crystal bark, it appears.
Poetry: the hidden plateau on which Cephalon rests. Light bounces around its porous interiors, forming language beyond words. A dry fish dropped back into the ocean. A moon's reflection gilded by fire. An elegy with its words though not its purpose forgotten. The last voice in the stars. A collage of word-sounds appears, portraying this very planet's destruction. The poem I read in the Maxillae's chambers, but its melody is present now. A Dynastic Contemporary classic. A marching song turned into funeral dirge.
---
My synapses speak up like a trillion-fold choir. An epiphany contained within the loudest note. I came here as an ensign, and kept as an experiment in education, and still… I know that I belong. A warmonger, safely withheld from those intelligent systems. Incarcerated from disaffected genocides.
"Why's your face wet?" Telson's cello twang inquires, interrupting the tree's dream to me.
"I wouldn't know what's happening to me right now. But that might be crying." My tears, flowing over my scorch mark, are the only thing I feel, the rest of my face frozen.
"Oh, is this crying? What a waste of fluids. But I guess that's what your kind does. Waste." Their jovial clacking lets me know they stole that joke from a sitcom. "Anyway. Impressive, yeah?"
"Tell me. What, what is this?"
"Phytostoria. The story of light. It's different for everyone, like most art is, but its meaning is the same. Coral is the greatest structure living organisms can build - can become. The tree is a testament to that, having formed Biramour's shell. History's crystals. Real, yet ongoing. No military parade or pledge of allegiance, no aesthetic persuasion. All we need is a reminder. The love is already there, without obligation."
I make the motion of wiping my tears, I miss completely and poke myself in the eyes.
"Is that how you stop this 'crying'?" Their voice lilts in genuine curiosity.
"No," I smile. "No, it's, not."
"What did you see, by the way?"
"I think I saw the end of Biramour. And Maxillae was its only survivor, chosen to carry on the language but to take it into a different meaning."
"Indeed," Telson chimes. "Apparently, we were at war with the Dynasty once."
A horrible theremin of a voice appears.
"Hi-ya Telson, I see you got the sad sod out of bed."
"Agassiz. Haven't seen you in… at all, actually. By the way, the Maxillae rejected your new cookbook proposal. Such a shame."
"It's not my greatest work, I'll admit. But that's beside the point. So," he lurches toward me, eye unblinking like an interrogation lamp, "I want to know what you think of all this." He gestures towards the manifest crowd.
"It's, it's quite perfect," I stammer.
"Ha-HA! It's a trick of the light, is what it is. Starlight becomes circularly polarised when bouncing around the tree. There's only a handful of organisms with the optical nerves equipped to register what that truly looks like - no one here has the brain or ganglion capacity for anything but linear polarisation. It's a quasi-religious hallucination triggered by an external proxy. What a nonsense thing to build a nation around."
I look at Telson, looking forward to see Agassiz's soon-to-be ragdoll fly all across the sky. Nothing of the sort happens. "I'll remind you that we are not a nation, pereion." Their sigh is a rumble.
"No, no it's not," his voice slides through the chromatic scale, his body plays in the breeze like a kite. "This place is too tribal, singing happy songs around the special nature thing." The white snake stares at them, so confidently.
"A crusade is happening soon, Telson. And the Dynastic Church extends its most gracious gratitude to one of its valuable ensigns for the assistance. That burn on your face? That sunbeam? That let me calculate a perfect angle of attack to crack this damned shell right open. It fell on your face like a brick and it gave me the last bit of data I needed to send back home."
His spindly body suddenly leaves the ground as five sets of arms, three gripping his long neck, lift him up. Red tears form in the corona of his eye. "WHA… YOU CAN'T… I'm, I'm a pereion…!"
"Yeah. The Maxillae would rather have me call for a planetary vote. Infuriating rule. Nothing wrong with a bit of direct action from time to time. But… c'mon. You just admitted to treason and tried to pin it on someone else." They pause. "Another pereion, even."
"We haven't educated you properly, if you believe we pacifists wouldn't sanitise the failed projects." A crowd is forming around the one-sided fight. Many sets of arms cross in a sentiment I can only describe as 'he's getting what's coming to him'. Agassiz's fear relaxes into a wide smile. He, too, realises that this is just theatre: an outcome determined and soon to be a treasured memory. "Finally… Finally figured… it out, did you?" A snap ends him.
"About fucking time, Telson."
"Bite me, citizen. I've waited twenty years to do that."
The Telson paces around the room, destroying as many objects as they can as the Maxillae watches without courage.
"It's too late."
"You can say that again."
"It's too late."
"That… I wasn't… You're not being helpful."
"I'm not trying to help."
From the aromatic basin, whelmed and bewildered, I watch the two isogen leaders have their argument - their obituary? The Maxillae has no words left. (Mams' voice, the song that dawned in Maxillae's morning, is completely silent. Dead. Cowardly.)
To take further action, she must call on her people. To do so, she must inform them of their imminent demise. I know she has lived through it once before.
"You let the Dynast stay. You pleaded for Agassiz to become part of us. And we all voted yes, because we trusted your guidance. It was your choice emerging over the wisdom of the people's tree that day. Tell me what it was for? How did we benefit from storing that one? What was your project supposed to achieve?"
"We did not benefit, for we failed to heal Agassiz."
"Twenty years, Maxillae. Twenty. Years. Agassiz's life was completely embryonic! It was someone who liked the shell. Both your eyes must have been lost that day."
"You killed a pereion foregoing the approval of the very people you swore to inspire. Are we raising a planet of indiscriminate killers?"
"Agassiz just indiscriminately killed all of us. I don't know if you picked up on it, but there's a crusade coming."
The duet cascades with the body's rhythm, tachycardia, panic at 100 beats per minute… 102… 106… 111… My panic attack cannot escape my silence, mouth mummified, velum tearing, amphitheatre crumbling. The inner song speeds up, rapid eye movements fixating on the coral that begs for its lyrics. Lyrics. I gaze at the wall behind them. With a smile of delighted relief, the song is finally complete.
"You harboured a mass murderer." They turn to me.
Faces rattling like chitinous machinery, clocks working overtime. If the Maxillae had tear ducts, they would have opened. If the Telson had eyebrows, they would raise exactly one.
"What are you, a broken record?"
"No, no, I'm not talking about Agassiz. I'm talking about me."
"Roly-poly, what use are your highly developed ocular organs if you don't use them to see what's clear as day. The actions of Agassiz and your former master are entirely removed from your power. You were not as complicit as you condemn yourself for. The Dynasty did not consider you that important, either –"
My mind is hazy and my nostrils are nauseous with therapeutic incense. Drugged after a breakdown, cogency feels as far away as lethologica. But, I interject:
"Oh, chill out, Maxillae."
She blinks, slowly. Telson's ommatidia stand upright in surprise.
"I wasn't playing the victim. I'm talking about what I'm about to do next. The planet has use for me yet. I am the invited prisoner bringing on history's next increment."
Maxillae nods uncomfortably; Telson shrugs and takes a seat in a therapy bowl, dress ruffled in the drama of it all. War is what Biramour shies away from - but no pacifism survives the gun. In the language of the Dynastic faith, the current lingua franca, there is no grammar against culling the weak. "What I saw, no, experienced, in the phytostoria, were the ghost notes of Biramour's destruction. And that history is about to repeat itself. But I don't want your elegy to have a chorus, Maxillae. I was educated in conquest. A month has not been enough to forsake that, maybe I never would have learned. But I have learned enough, just enough before we're all blown to pieces. I know how crusades work, and, I've been shown how this tree works. I can excise the Dynasty in me yet."
My last words to the Maxillae: "I beg you: after this is over, put up a leadership vote. You suck at it. Telson's got mine."
"This must be admitted, then: I was your only no vote, pereion."
"I figured. But what regret to serving a more hopeful cause?"
My last words to the Telson: "Try the roti I made, it's good."
"I still don't have a tongue."
On the bridge of an inbound starship, Father's faint eyes reflect a dreadful palette of colours - the stars, the Dynastic burden as big as a planet, the hull of the crusade vessel Strawberries-in-White. Eyes cracked like asteroids, proud to have destroyed them.
"Missioner Goldenlove, a report, SIR!" He does not turn towards the messenger. "What is it, faithful?" "Our borders are fast encroaching Biramour, should have territorialised the sector in circa 15 minutes. Mapped reality of incalcitrant resistance: 0 parsecs, 0 miles, 0 hectares, 0 feet, 0 inches. Not a nanometre of dissent in sight."
A toothless smile brims Father's old face, age drooling from his mouth. On conversions, he wears his cassock. On crusades, he dusts off his military uniform, ranked marshal-of-stars. Agassiz, he thinks slyly, you arrogant sod, you proved your twenty-year usefulness. It took that long to figure out for him where to aim the cannons at - something about a former slave. He grimaces at the sight of Biramour, a forbidden claret marble against the Dynasty's silver linings. For two decades, it had eluded confederation through some pagan ritual. This is a planet of traitors, foam-licking pop singers, and, worse even, shellfish hippies. In summary, children hiding under an upturned laundry basket, believing themselves undetectable from the knowing parent. But, any egg can be cracked. And then it does.
"Goldenlove to bridge command. Nice penmanship. Did the cartographers draft early?"
"Bridge command to Goldenlove. That's a negative. Boundaries still being drafted, sir. Berlin Conference still in probation."
"What? Then explain redrawn Biramouran frontiers. That's an Otto Scramble event, isn't it?" The Throat's crew gawk out the viewport, words escaping them. The rote of their war, the banality of conquest, the boredom on bunks wishing for some adventure. All are hailed with a single, miraculous sight. They are shown the concept of cibus, though they will never learn what it means. Biramour's coralline carapace ruptures, as if on the rim of a frying pan. The shell breaks open, but nothing emerges. No vulnerable larva reveals, ripe for the picking. The dome loosens its structures, its filaments, its calcified corpses. Bursting open like beetle wings, entering the state of vibrant, living memory. History is the speech of shared time, most direct when translated into the universal language of fear. Father's broken eyes only reflect the wine-coloured death. Biramour's shell, reformed into a galactic hand with a nebula-tall middle finger extended. It lurches for the Strawberries-in-White. Actinic sound fills the dead space of the galaxy, ferocious melodies that break the starship. It flops, endlessly, like a mute whale into the water. The planet has broken its shell with an oppressor's tune. His last thought is not about the traitor.
Never speak: it will give its dying response
From the people's tree
The last voice in the stars.
The poem is in Cephalon. The mouth forms it by rolling, singing, humming, sighing, and - rarely - stopping. Its grammar and phonetics evolved the same way as its native, coralline planet had. As masses of coral domed around the terraqueous cities, so too did Cephalon blanket the inhabitants' ganglia. These are a people born with music in their mind. Encephalic composers, mental harmonics. Crusty beats.
The language's phonemes contain the rhythm and cadence, but lack the timbre and tone (the necessary warmth) for even something as simple as 'you're welcome'. To speak Cephalon, you say - sing? - its words at a nearby piece of coral. The song bounces off of it, becoming speech. The choir never sleeps on this planet of Biramour.
Biramour, the symphonic planet.
In the backrooms of diplomats, it is often derided as the 'shy planet', dating from the old stereotype that every conversation faces the walls instead of who you're talking to.
My ear twitches; the ongoing conversation requires my attention. The diplomats are discussing what to do with me.
"We have observed your stay for the passing of the moons. We have welcomed you into our chrysalid valleys and lent our auditory organs to your words. A banquet of hearsay, and it was scrumptious. Certainly a hungry people would have partaken. Yet, you forget we have a sense of taste. How you have treated the one in your company betrays the perished flesh beneath the carapace of your faith. We see no reason to entertain you, nor delude ourselves any further."
The Maxillae of Laɣ's furtive a cappela chastises the leader-missionary. Through her, I've learned, all political and diplomatic declarations are and will be made. An astounding responsibility, a power easily abused. To prevent this, her decisions, no matter how banal, require the input of literally every single pereion - roughly, 'citizen'. Somehow, this system is tenable here. It would never be possible on the homeworld. We'd just crown her empress and get it over with. She also teaches general history to teenagers with concentration problems.
"Moreover –" She continues.
Leader-Missionary attempts to interject, starting with number 13 from his list of prepared retorts. The other isogen leader, the Telson of Laɣ, interrupts him in turn, finding his mouth shut like a hi-hat by two sets of chitinous arms squeezing his lips together. He squeaks in protest and I have to suck in my lips to stifle a laugh.
The Telson is the chief organiser of activities. Somewhere between a planner and a patrolman. When a planet-wide decision has been made, the Telson shows everyone how to get started. The brawns to the Maxillae's brains.
"Moreover," the Maxillae continues with a chirp I know bears a sneer, "we will be releasing your servant from your cruel digits. No heaven can exist in involuntary bondage." The Telson unbinds Father as the Maxillae finishes her last clack. The subtle monotony of her delivery suggests she's sung this song many times before.
Naturally, Father feigns offence. Something about stolen property - me - requiring recompense.
"There is no price to personhood," the Maxillae's swift response staccatoes the mood in the room.
Language so heavily dependent on a specific biome contributed to the isogenic system of autarkic isolationism - without coral, after all, they cannot speak. You'd just hear an angry hiss. This has the abrupt, often comical effect that when a foreign word is spoken, Dynastic, in this case, it sounds like a false note.
Price.
"The ruler, I believe you said, was always justified in their authority and must be shown proper respect? Exit alone and we will allow you to leave our planet."
My face contorts into a smile against my will, a perfect expression of 'I told you so'. I DID tell Father so: the isogen are sturdy critics (historians you could say) of Dynastic diplomacy.
He steps forward a pace, but this is clearly perceived as a threat; moments later he finds his paunchy frame fitting neatly into the Telson's bulky gnathopods. Five pairs of appendage work together to grab the man whose stated mission is peace and fling him toward the exit. Father struggles to get back up. In the end, he takes a sarcastic bow and leaves, easily forgetting about me.
I blink, uncertain of what is next.
I seem to be terribly free.
"Never praying what is preached, these missionaries."
"Indeed. Who would join such a crude religion to begin with…?" Both isogen leaders turn to me. The Maxillae retracts her mandibles into what I consider a simper. The isogen have no need for expressions: they seem to be gifted with preternatural empathy. Smiles on this planet are reserved for children.
The isogen have faces like coral reefs - sensory stalks and subsessile plateaus, mosaics in motion. Their fashion is similarly captivating. The Telson dresses green; this complements the gray face, the ommatidial eyes that flush a twilight pink at the top, and the teardrop-shaped cephalic shield of silver ('hair', or close enough to it). The Maxillae has only the one eye-stalk, a black scorch mark in lieu of a second. Her shield is an unmissable claret. A unique, communal colour. A banned one, on the homeworld.
The Telson approaches me, a dog yet to sniff the hand.
"You are. Free now. What is. Your name?"
"I have been ordered to forget it." Locked away with standard neurosurgery. My aria surprises them, for which they apologise. By chance, my mother tongue shares a phonetic base with Cephalon, which made learning it easy. And mams taught me how to sing.
"With all due respect, 'be free' seems like an even vaguer order than 'be silent'." Too many of the systems in my life were set up to make me banish the thought of freedom. (They worked.) I don't know what it looks like - would I say 'no' more often? Do I sleep in late now? It's silly to imagine.
Telson sighs in sympathy as the Maxillae approaches me, her long, cerulean dress forming calm seas in her wake. There is a terrifying glory to her.
"Of course. Time is needed, which you have in abundance now." she sings, and I respond in clumsy verse.
"I don't understand what you're asking, ma'am."
Telson emits a jovial, two-fold clacking - a chuckle reserved for the planet's many sitcoms.
"So studious, yet never picked up that we do not hail one another with gendered language." When and why did I start doing that…?
"My sincerest apologies. I did not wish to offend –"
"None necessary. You may use the she and the her, if you wish."
"Not for me," crescendoes the Telson. "I don't do gender."
"The Telson of Lay does not do gender!"
They share an intimate laugh, the sound rattling like percussion.
Then, the Maxillae lets out a click. It is a word unknown to me. It is not any part of the song that I recognise. But I know that I should take a seat, because she uttered that word. I climb inside a basalt basin-chair padded with reeds for comfort. Father had mistaken them for large soup bowls during our initial meeting, which led to an immediate diplomatic incident.
"Life, we believe, occurs in three stages. There is 'ovum', 'incrementum', and 'cibus'. Neither birth nor childhood, ovum is an unavoidable trap, a snare in which life is given shape and experience. Life must escape from this moult. It is abuse, idealism, tyranny; all that prevents growth. The circumstances of the victim as well as the actions of the perpetrator can be considered ovi, in this regard."
Entertaining the lecture, I ask: "With my freedom, am I now in the 'cibus' stage?"
"Incorrect. That would be incrementum. The manca will only know the warmth of the shell, and fears that the outside is colder. When the first exoskeleton breaks it can be dazing. Such metaphysical pain can obliterate oneself, if left to their own. So we take care of the newly born. Incrementum is what we would consider…" She pauses, with a loopy hum, "…healing."
Her fourth arm travels over her scorch mark as she emits a low chirp, the kiss of a slide guitar. "And before you ask," she chimes a grim and sarcastic note, "cibus is our word for the afterlife."
Halfway through asking a meaningless question, my throat stops shaping notes, though my mouth keeps moving. She laughs, a heartfelt soprano, like my mother.
"You are overwhelmed. That is normal."
The Telson picks up the conversation.
"We will provide you with palliation. For non-price of course. You are not the first person we have freed. We insist to care for you these coming days. You will need it."
The Telson picks me up in a clean, handsome motion. "We know how to do this."
---
The Telson personally guides me to my new lodgings. A large and polished, polyp-covered building - pink and mossy cerulean - with many different sections. I'm taken into the 'roly-poly' wing. A sudden sense of dread hits me: is this their version of a correctional facility? Was I their prisoner in all but name?
But: there were no guards. No beds with straps. The room had no doors. It was nice. There is a video display and a radio with various channels divided by genre - exohop, waves-and-coasts, umbraskeleton, etc. A circular anemone bed with leafy cushions and off-putting stuffed animals, uncanny approximations of animals the average Dynastic citizen would have seen in their lifetimes - I haven't. I ask if they could replace them with Biramouran wildlife: levitating molluscs, mimic algae, fish that moved between walls… but that's not how this goes, they reply. Caretakers of various genotypes visit me throughout the day, both to wash my body - ritually and necessarily - and to help me fill out the consent-of-stay forms. The questions lack the cruel apathy of a bored bureaucrat. Instead, it reads like a libretto. When I arrive at the final question, the caretakers leave the room so I can answer it in privacy, something I didn't think possible in a doorless room.
WERE YOU A VOLUNTARY MEMBER OF THE DYNASTIC CHURCH?
IF YES: IS THERE LOVE IN OBLIGATION?
IF NO: WHAT REGRET IS THERE TO BEING RELIEVED FROM MURDER?
The caretakers return to show me how to eat caelose, the most popular dish on Biramour. It has two ingredients: a mineral straw mined from the subaqueous parts of the planet that is chewy, salty, and edible (although not digestible); and a bowl filled with a sweet juice called response. It collects on almost every piece of Biramour's unique coral dome; the oldest of isogen myths describe how this substance is the coral's teary reaction to Cephalon's beauty.
Through the planet's stone, I suck up its saccharine reply. The reaction between rocky crunch and soupy liquid in my mouth fizz into a tingly nostalgia. I miss the past, any past, before today. It tastes like mams' mopé juice.
Then, the video display flashes on. Through a live camera feed, the entire planet's population has gathered around a massive structure at the base of a gigantic, spine-like coral tree. Its boughs hold up the sky, and by poetic extension, Biramouran mutualism. This is where every pereion comes to give their input on the matters of the day, the city, the planet. It is apparent that the millions on screen gathered today to vote on me - whether or not I was allowed to stay. It's over within seconds. All of them voted "yes", save for a single "no".
I felt truly welcomed. And, for a moment, forgiven.
The next day, I stopped wanting to talk, or move, or live. I felt guilty.
---
Someone knocks on the doorframe.
"Hi-ya. Anyone there?" It's Dynastic. It misses any treble, fails to resonate with these walls. Tone deaf. I don't answer.
"Alright, coooming in!" Without a door to bar his entrance, I'm powerless to stop this bull. I burrow deeper, hugging a pupa. Pretending I am it.
"Please leave," I sing, badly.
"Can't. I drew the short stick." He laughs, too hard.
"I'm the trouble case, then?"
"I'd tell you to lighten up, buuut –" no follow-up. I think he shrugs at me.
"No jokes, then. Here's the quick and fast of it. I'm Agassiz, and I'm here to tell you what it's like to be a roly-poly."
I peek my head out from under the sheets.
"Roly-poly?"
"It's a term for immigrants. Officially, for non-Biramouran pereia. But why make it more difficult, right?"
Agassiz's voice is full of piercing feedback, a theremin set to scream no matter the distance. He's only vaguely similar to my body plan: pale, much too tall, and sporting a wide grin with rounded teeth. Humanoid…ish? Him scraping against the ceiling doesn't do much in the way of comforting me.
"I was in your shoes, you know. Years ago, the isogen took me in. Fed and dressed me all nice, and still all I felt was homesick. Took me years to accept that my life in the Dynasty was behind me."
"Really? Tell me, you have to tell me… who were you before this?" I make eye-contact, skittish but curious, desperate for an analogy.
His single eye swirls like a gathering storm. Three hours later, I wish I hadn't asked.
He is Dynast Agassiz of crusade vessel The Second Scripture, a 'Throat'. The crusade vessel became stranded in space after the wiring of a bathtub hairdryer short-circuited the whole thing, leaving the entire ship immobilised. Following the church's strict honour preservation customs, he had to order 372 of his 374-member crew to commit ritual suicide one by one. With military pride in his voice, he narrated how he was full hours into glory-bound starvation before a Biramouran mailing ship picked up his SOS and rescued him.
"Did you ever tell them about the sacrificial order?"
"Haha, oh no, that would have raised questions. What I needed to do was survive, not organise 370 funerals."
"372," I correct him. He pays it no mind.
Those who belong to the Dynastic faith must fight for it as soldiers. Those who haven't been drafted yet, are 'converted'. Two strategies exist to achieve this. First, missionaries are sent to negotiate the terms of conversion. In general these involve seizure of assets, integration into the galactic market, erosion of intra-planetary communal or kinship structures, and the construction of give or take eight religious facilities. If negotiations fail - they often do - a crusade is invoked. Embargoes, bombardments, planetfall. Missionaries or missiles, the result is always the same.
"To this day, I really am grateful to the isogen for taking me in. They showed me how good life outside the Dynasty can be. And," he smacks liplessly, "that can be the case for you, too. You toiled for the Dynasty, same as me, but now you can just do whatever you want. No routines, no orders. It's lovely once you get over yourself."
"Get… over myself?" I snarl at that. "I am not merely feeling sorry for myself!"
"Sure you aren't. You don't have a starship, though, so leaving is a pipe dream. And daydreaming about your life in the Dynasty won't do you favours here. You know by now that conversion has failed. You know what comes next. All we can do is enjoy ourselves till the time comes. Make sure we're not bordered to bits by a Dynastic special."
His body shifts like a cannon.
"Look, they've given you a bed, music, stuffed animals. How stubborn do you gotta be to reject that? You've got nothing to return to."
"I have the Father," I let slip. Pure reaction.
"Uh huh. Does he have you? You know, I talked to him before he left. He didn't seem bothered. In fact, he said it was quaint. That with a click of the Maxillae's mandibles, you started thinking for yourself? An order for freedom and you follow it to the letter! We were both part of something grand and now we're not. It was cushy enough for us to ignore what we did. But here, we're villains with a second chance. Act like it - like a redemption arc. They love that."
The shape of his teeth cannot hide a hungry tongue lapping behind them.
"Heaven will come. It'll be one for the history books."
---
I haven't seen Agassiz for two weeks. Short straw, indeed. When I told the Maxillae, she wasn't surprised. As a pereion, he can do what he wants. Not helping me includes that. So instead of waiting around for counseling, I started attending her history classes. All the formative spaces in Biramour are outside, from schools to voting booths; one big continuum. Outside, underneath their eternal tree.
Biramour is not the sunniest planet in the sector. Starlight is blotted out by the coral structure that shields it - a natural Dyson sphere. Like a dense egg, with airholes here and there, consisting of the remains of a million dead animals. Clearly, something very bad happened at one point to create something of this size, but the history is vague. For the isogen, it's too important - too convenient - to question.
A stray starbeam strikes my face, sizzling like a bullet on my skin. I recoil, dropping my tomeshell. The lecture stops, and I can hear everyone shifting to face me. I quickly pick up the book, heavy as it is for me, and hide my face.
"I'm sorry," I falsetto. "It was the light. It won't happen again. I'll be brave, I won't make a sound, I won't be a bother, I won't –"
The isogen besides me sings like the upward sweep of a violin, stringing out a question.
"Like, the roly-poly is sorry? But, like, what's to be sorry for? I'm confused?"
Their friend chugs back like distorted electric guitar, tossing an insult.
"You totally did something wrong. You always breathe on people with your fat arms."
"No, I don't! Shut up, my arm-breathing isn't bothering anyone."
"Explain the crying and shaking, then! Breathing on people is weird! I'd cry too if I could!"
The two teenagers stop teasing each other the precise moment they hear one of Maxillae's clicks - that note I don't recognise. The lesson continues, but my classmate whispers: "I'm, like, sorry for not being considerate of your personal space."
It's quite pleasing to hear Cephalon sung as a whisper, a six-limbed scalp massage transcribed into sound. I pop up from behind the book, a cowardly hermit crab.
"You're sorry?"
Their ommatidia grow wide.
"Your faAaAce…!" Their shock has a melisma to it.
"My face?"
"Y-your, your fAaAcE!"
"My face!"
My hand brushes over the patch of grilled skin on my cheek and I scream along. Maxillae clicks again, and the whole classroom scatters like cockroaches after the lights switch on. They return, variously, with bandages, cold compresses, a mortar of pungent salve, a freshwater-soaked rag, a stretcher, a glass cup of water, and (hopefully not necessarily!) a Biramouran grave marker.
Emergency triage tactics - I'd seen it a couple of times during my stay here pre-pereion.
They scurry me to a lean-to shell to prevent further sun damage. I am whisked into a comfortable bed.
"You didn't do anything wrong, by the way." I tell the teenager. "I just got hit with a sunbeam."
"Oh damn, that sucks? Especially with, like, that kind of body?"
"…what do you mean?"
"Your surface, all stretched out like that? Like, all soft and leathery? No offence, but you, like, look like a jellyfish?"
Maxillae enters my makeshift hospital room as if summoned.
"Small one. There was no prior consent to you insulting them. Recall your personal lesson."
"Like, 'even a playful attitude must abide by the rules?'" The melody is rehearsed, a bored droning. "Sorry. I should have, like, asked before calling you a jellyfish?"
"Yes, so I could have told you not to."
"Aw, like, bummer?"
"Shoo, now." They all leave. Maxillae and I remain, seated on the muddy bed.
She towers over me by what must be at least a full four feet. She is beautiful in a way I'm unfamiliar with. There is no strength here. No batons, no shaming, no yelling - can you even yell in Cephalon? There is just wisdom and vulnerability. And people - teenagers, even, the worst version of any person - listen to that. But, my inner voice has since shifted from the toneless droll of Dynastic, a language that sounds like a ten-year-old rehearsing for a play. I think, sing, dream, in Cephalon - my range broader than ever, what were contrasting keys before now belonging the composition of my cognition. With Cephalon as a sounding board, so much more makes sense. In hindsight, so much more about the Dynasty… clicks.
"Did you learn from our past?" Her voice drops an octave out of respect for historical subjects.
"It's interesting! None of this was in the books I read for my visit. Then again, it was mostly propaganda brochures. I find the part about the warring tribes especially interesting - I mean, you seem such peaceful peoples."
"The most violent era in our history appeals to you the most?" The chords that form her pity frustrate me, and I snap back.
"Oh, I get it. This was a test? I picked the wrong thing to be interested in and now I can't be salvaged."
"Your interest, and so is everyone's, is formed by what is presented as righteous. The Dynasty is a warlike nation; I find it unperplexing such matters would appeal to its denizens the most."
"You still consider me Dynastic, then?" My voice doesn't rise, but the genre enters punk, sharp and sour.
"Yes, I do consider that. Because you do as well." Her words sound intentional, but the song is one of patience. Downtempo.
"Tell me, incrementala, what was your ovum like?"
"As in, what, my past?"
"Indeed."
---
I was born in the Breezes - wooden towers of ill-maintained apartments, swaying in the planet's topwinds and afterdrafts of spaceships. My mother was just 'mams'. The man who was my father fought all over the galaxy for the Dynasty, when it was still an empire. We had a phonograph and many, so many records. It was the man's way of telling us where he had been, as letters weren't allowed. Chimer, Dynastic Contemporary, exohop, even Fucktrash, - I was surrounded by genres recorded in places far, far from mine. The music let me believe I wasn't stuck, that the Dynasty had a use for me. There was a soundtrack for the overhead starships that I believed set out for greater, more exciting things. I taught myself how to sing every song, how to pronounce the words, and how to set my mouth to another language as if it were a lever in my neurons.
The first weeks went poorly. So Mams, either taking pity on my dream or unable to bear it any longer, taught me how to take control of my excitement for the sake of the performance.
Then the man was home again. He said he would go by 'Victor' now - a name given to him as the sole reward for his service. He was proud to have fought, but confused that it led neither him nor his family to vaunted places. That disillusionment was given a name, quiet, grumpy, frightful. He didn't like the music he had gifted us, so he took away the phonograph. He'd yell at the starships, at the wind, at anyone who made a sound. One night, I stole the music player back. Shielded by an upside-down laundry basket, wrapped up tightly in a shell of blankets, I listened to the songs again. I would sing again. In all my excitement, I hit a shrill and false note. Victor found out - that I failed to follow the bedtime order? That I thought to follow my own choices in the house? That I made him help mams with the laundry because the basket was missing? In any case, he smashed the device.
Victor then sold me to Father. It was right around the time the Dynastic Church was founded. My education was better than I could have hoped. I loved studying all the texts. I was even permitted to translate some of them. My familiarity with alien languages and mastery of the nascent scripture - all thanks to the music - granted me the special position of ensign.
Then I helped move along about 23 crusades.
---
"Thank you for sharing." Her shield casts a claret glow, a false sunset on the beach.
"Yeah, well, I'm really not proud of it. I helped the Church do awful things." My voice cracks and I have to catch my breath.
"Yes, you did."
"Glad we agree. So you see, I'm not salvageable."
"That is not for you to decide. We welcome all those seeking to heal."
"Like you welcome Agassiz? The proud war criminal? That's something I don't understand. Why do you help people like him? He was there to wage war on you. And you've granted him an equal place within the song."
Air escapes from her body, a shifting modality, a new set of sounds available.
"By your view, are you not a war criminal yourself? Unless you force a distinction between conversion and crusade, but we both know better than that."
"I don't, but –" Familiar frustration ceases my throat.
"What would you rather we do?" - a chide - "We have forsaken war and all forms of punishment out of historical necessity. We are isolated within the Dynasty's hegemony, so we must trust everyone to contribute to our continued survival. As we perfect the craft of peace, we may one day export it to your shores, and liberate those who are not even aware of their ovi."
"Are you that merciful? What do you do if a murder takes place?"
"Your question reminds me of the hysteria of a courthouse. Such a mistake constitutes a failure of the song, not of the singer. We do not punish, we prevent. Through the ardour of pacifism. All here envision, all here build, all here vote - this is inveterate responsibility."
Following her melody, my synapses fire into the first forays of what she actually means. I've memorised the melodies, but now I see the genre to which they belong. Pity. It does not rattle like anxiety, or deprave like paranoia, but chimes as true as the caelose's sweetness: The matter of your execution was voted on. We are now burdened with you.
"Besides," she chuckles, the most ticklish sound I've ever heard, "sending war criminals to court only sanitises them. It is better for the galaxy to keep them here in constant, boring self-reflection. Until they break and agree to our way of doing." I frown, although I'm sure I don't even need to. The isogen can read human emotion like the waves of the ocean - they have to, dealing with the Dynasty - and my face is an unpolluted lake.
"Have you ever declined to take someone in? Even if they were a really tragic case?"
"We let your former master leave for a reason."
"Which is?"
"He had something to return to."
That answer chills me, despite the burn on my cheek. Colour drains from my face as I already know the answer before I ask: "…am I free to leave?"
"No."
---
The months pass quickly.
"Where are we going, Telson?"
"You only ask that when we leave the facilities. Live a little!"
"I have, you bully. I've been watching sitcoms, listening to radio shows, reading cookbooks…"
"Ah, our fine cuisine. Caelose and then whatever sticks to our buildings. I dunno how we manage to write entire books on that."
Biramouran pickled seaweed-and-foam soup is a staple dish in some crusade cafeterias. I avoid mentioning this to the Telson - like bringing up a lost skirmish in a victorious war.
Instead, I mention: "Oh, but there's stir-fried jellyquad, flutterclam roti, skyhound taro pom…"
The hulking silhouette that Telson makes is slow and deliberate. With their lower harmonies, deep like a twelve-string bass, everything about them inspires attention and gravity. It's impossible not to consider what they say, because it thrums all the way down to the nervous system. Even their crassness feels like it has import.
"Look at our tiny-ass mouths. We can't eat that shit."
I feel really stupid. I subconsciously size up my mouth with my tongue.
"I, uh, forgot. Sorry. But, you know, this is all known as Biramouran cuisine. So that's confusing."
"That's what all you tongue-having roly-polies came up with. Sometimes… well, all the time actually, we feel outmatched when it comes to food."
"So," I mentally tap one of the cookbooks in mind, "this is all fusion cuisine?"
"We've never needed any of it, because our digestive tracts just aren't that complex. Maxillae and I have discussed that exotic mentality, of the drive to experiment with a planet's resources for the base sake of discovering some new-fangled taste. No, Caelose does the trick, any more ingredients than that is just colonialism."
"Forgive me, but having ideas about food seems plenty harmless."
They suddenly stop. The planet's pull drenches deep into me; my heart beats terribly.
"That is not the way it goes around here."
Even sung, their statement sounds discordant. We resume walking in scariest silence.
"Oh, I never answered your question!" They remember now. "You'll be attending your first community meeting. It's a light show." We stop, and once again as with my voting, millions have gathered around the coral tree. All of us sharing borderless ground as we stare. On the crystal bark, it appears.
Poetry: the hidden plateau on which Cephalon rests. Light bounces around its porous interiors, forming language beyond words. A dry fish dropped back into the ocean. A moon's reflection gilded by fire. An elegy with its words though not its purpose forgotten. The last voice in the stars. A collage of word-sounds appears, portraying this very planet's destruction. The poem I read in the Maxillae's chambers, but its melody is present now. A Dynastic Contemporary classic. A marching song turned into funeral dirge.
---
My synapses speak up like a trillion-fold choir. An epiphany contained within the loudest note. I came here as an ensign, and kept as an experiment in education, and still… I know that I belong. A warmonger, safely withheld from those intelligent systems. Incarcerated from disaffected genocides.
"Why's your face wet?" Telson's cello twang inquires, interrupting the tree's dream to me.
"I wouldn't know what's happening to me right now. But that might be crying." My tears, flowing over my scorch mark, are the only thing I feel, the rest of my face frozen.
"Oh, is this crying? What a waste of fluids. But I guess that's what your kind does. Waste." Their jovial clacking lets me know they stole that joke from a sitcom. "Anyway. Impressive, yeah?"
"Tell me. What, what is this?"
"Phytostoria. The story of light. It's different for everyone, like most art is, but its meaning is the same. Coral is the greatest structure living organisms can build - can become. The tree is a testament to that, having formed Biramour's shell. History's crystals. Real, yet ongoing. No military parade or pledge of allegiance, no aesthetic persuasion. All we need is a reminder. The love is already there, without obligation."
I make the motion of wiping my tears, I miss completely and poke myself in the eyes.
"Is that how you stop this 'crying'?" Their voice lilts in genuine curiosity.
"No," I smile. "No, it's, not."
"What did you see, by the way?"
"I think I saw the end of Biramour. And Maxillae was its only survivor, chosen to carry on the language but to take it into a different meaning."
"Indeed," Telson chimes. "Apparently, we were at war with the Dynasty once."
A horrible theremin of a voice appears.
"Hi-ya Telson, I see you got the sad sod out of bed."
"Agassiz. Haven't seen you in… at all, actually. By the way, the Maxillae rejected your new cookbook proposal. Such a shame."
"It's not my greatest work, I'll admit. But that's beside the point. So," he lurches toward me, eye unblinking like an interrogation lamp, "I want to know what you think of all this." He gestures towards the manifest crowd.
"It's, it's quite perfect," I stammer.
"Ha-HA! It's a trick of the light, is what it is. Starlight becomes circularly polarised when bouncing around the tree. There's only a handful of organisms with the optical nerves equipped to register what that truly looks like - no one here has the brain or ganglion capacity for anything but linear polarisation. It's a quasi-religious hallucination triggered by an external proxy. What a nonsense thing to build a nation around."
I look at Telson, looking forward to see Agassiz's soon-to-be ragdoll fly all across the sky. Nothing of the sort happens. "I'll remind you that we are not a nation, pereion." Their sigh is a rumble.
"No, no it's not," his voice slides through the chromatic scale, his body plays in the breeze like a kite. "This place is too tribal, singing happy songs around the special nature thing." The white snake stares at them, so confidently.
"A crusade is happening soon, Telson. And the Dynastic Church extends its most gracious gratitude to one of its valuable ensigns for the assistance. That burn on your face? That sunbeam? That let me calculate a perfect angle of attack to crack this damned shell right open. It fell on your face like a brick and it gave me the last bit of data I needed to send back home."
His spindly body suddenly leaves the ground as five sets of arms, three gripping his long neck, lift him up. Red tears form in the corona of his eye. "WHA… YOU CAN'T… I'm, I'm a pereion…!"
"Yeah. The Maxillae would rather have me call for a planetary vote. Infuriating rule. Nothing wrong with a bit of direct action from time to time. But… c'mon. You just admitted to treason and tried to pin it on someone else." They pause. "Another pereion, even."
"We haven't educated you properly, if you believe we pacifists wouldn't sanitise the failed projects." A crowd is forming around the one-sided fight. Many sets of arms cross in a sentiment I can only describe as 'he's getting what's coming to him'. Agassiz's fear relaxes into a wide smile. He, too, realises that this is just theatre: an outcome determined and soon to be a treasured memory. "Finally… Finally figured… it out, did you?" A snap ends him.
"About fucking time, Telson."
"Bite me, citizen. I've waited twenty years to do that."
The Telson paces around the room, destroying as many objects as they can as the Maxillae watches without courage.
"It's too late."
"You can say that again."
"It's too late."
"That… I wasn't… You're not being helpful."
"I'm not trying to help."
From the aromatic basin, whelmed and bewildered, I watch the two isogen leaders have their argument - their obituary? The Maxillae has no words left. (Mams' voice, the song that dawned in Maxillae's morning, is completely silent. Dead. Cowardly.)
To take further action, she must call on her people. To do so, she must inform them of their imminent demise. I know she has lived through it once before.
"You let the Dynast stay. You pleaded for Agassiz to become part of us. And we all voted yes, because we trusted your guidance. It was your choice emerging over the wisdom of the people's tree that day. Tell me what it was for? How did we benefit from storing that one? What was your project supposed to achieve?"
"We did not benefit, for we failed to heal Agassiz."
"Twenty years, Maxillae. Twenty. Years. Agassiz's life was completely embryonic! It was someone who liked the shell. Both your eyes must have been lost that day."
"You killed a pereion foregoing the approval of the very people you swore to inspire. Are we raising a planet of indiscriminate killers?"
"Agassiz just indiscriminately killed all of us. I don't know if you picked up on it, but there's a crusade coming."
The duet cascades with the body's rhythm, tachycardia, panic at 100 beats per minute… 102… 106… 111… My panic attack cannot escape my silence, mouth mummified, velum tearing, amphitheatre crumbling. The inner song speeds up, rapid eye movements fixating on the coral that begs for its lyrics. Lyrics. I gaze at the wall behind them. With a smile of delighted relief, the song is finally complete.
"You harboured a mass murderer." They turn to me.
Faces rattling like chitinous machinery, clocks working overtime. If the Maxillae had tear ducts, they would have opened. If the Telson had eyebrows, they would raise exactly one.
"What are you, a broken record?"
"No, no, I'm not talking about Agassiz. I'm talking about me."
"Roly-poly, what use are your highly developed ocular organs if you don't use them to see what's clear as day. The actions of Agassiz and your former master are entirely removed from your power. You were not as complicit as you condemn yourself for. The Dynasty did not consider you that important, either –"
My mind is hazy and my nostrils are nauseous with therapeutic incense. Drugged after a breakdown, cogency feels as far away as lethologica. But, I interject:
"Oh, chill out, Maxillae."
She blinks, slowly. Telson's ommatidia stand upright in surprise.
"I wasn't playing the victim. I'm talking about what I'm about to do next. The planet has use for me yet. I am the invited prisoner bringing on history's next increment."
Maxillae nods uncomfortably; Telson shrugs and takes a seat in a therapy bowl, dress ruffled in the drama of it all. War is what Biramour shies away from - but no pacifism survives the gun. In the language of the Dynastic faith, the current lingua franca, there is no grammar against culling the weak. "What I saw, no, experienced, in the phytostoria, were the ghost notes of Biramour's destruction. And that history is about to repeat itself. But I don't want your elegy to have a chorus, Maxillae. I was educated in conquest. A month has not been enough to forsake that, maybe I never would have learned. But I have learned enough, just enough before we're all blown to pieces. I know how crusades work, and, I've been shown how this tree works. I can excise the Dynasty in me yet."
My last words to the Maxillae: "I beg you: after this is over, put up a leadership vote. You suck at it. Telson's got mine."
"This must be admitted, then: I was your only no vote, pereion."
"I figured. But what regret to serving a more hopeful cause?"
My last words to the Telson: "Try the roti I made, it's good."
"I still don't have a tongue."
On the bridge of an inbound starship, Father's faint eyes reflect a dreadful palette of colours - the stars, the Dynastic burden as big as a planet, the hull of the crusade vessel Strawberries-in-White. Eyes cracked like asteroids, proud to have destroyed them.
"Missioner Goldenlove, a report, SIR!" He does not turn towards the messenger. "What is it, faithful?" "Our borders are fast encroaching Biramour, should have territorialised the sector in circa 15 minutes. Mapped reality of incalcitrant resistance: 0 parsecs, 0 miles, 0 hectares, 0 feet, 0 inches. Not a nanometre of dissent in sight."
A toothless smile brims Father's old face, age drooling from his mouth. On conversions, he wears his cassock. On crusades, he dusts off his military uniform, ranked marshal-of-stars. Agassiz, he thinks slyly, you arrogant sod, you proved your twenty-year usefulness. It took that long to figure out for him where to aim the cannons at - something about a former slave. He grimaces at the sight of Biramour, a forbidden claret marble against the Dynasty's silver linings. For two decades, it had eluded confederation through some pagan ritual. This is a planet of traitors, foam-licking pop singers, and, worse even, shellfish hippies. In summary, children hiding under an upturned laundry basket, believing themselves undetectable from the knowing parent. But, any egg can be cracked. And then it does.
"Goldenlove to bridge command. Nice penmanship. Did the cartographers draft early?"
"Bridge command to Goldenlove. That's a negative. Boundaries still being drafted, sir. Berlin Conference still in probation."
"What? Then explain redrawn Biramouran frontiers. That's an Otto Scramble event, isn't it?" The Throat's crew gawk out the viewport, words escaping them. The rote of their war, the banality of conquest, the boredom on bunks wishing for some adventure. All are hailed with a single, miraculous sight. They are shown the concept of cibus, though they will never learn what it means. Biramour's coralline carapace ruptures, as if on the rim of a frying pan. The shell breaks open, but nothing emerges. No vulnerable larva reveals, ripe for the picking. The dome loosens its structures, its filaments, its calcified corpses. Bursting open like beetle wings, entering the state of vibrant, living memory. History is the speech of shared time, most direct when translated into the universal language of fear. Father's broken eyes only reflect the wine-coloured death. Biramour's shell, reformed into a galactic hand with a nebula-tall middle finger extended. It lurches for the Strawberries-in-White. Actinic sound fills the dead space of the galaxy, ferocious melodies that break the starship. It flops, endlessly, like a mute whale into the water. The planet has broken its shell with an oppressor's tune. His last thought is not about the traitor.
Never speak: it will give its dying response
From the people's tree
The last voice in the stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment