Empress of Shadow

"Godlike Aliens"

It happened that in the sixteenth year of the reign of the House of Amu¨r, in a form most improbable, the Fifth Declan found peril come unto her reign. The Empire of Shadow, under the protection of the House of Amu¨r, was experiencing the longest stretch of prosperity in memory, due both to the enduring equilibrium established between the Shadow Empire of the Western continents and the Empire of Light in the East, and, most profitably, the riches that were now pouring in from distant solar systems by the gift of the Ihmetti drive. The pressures toward outward expansion had grown larger than even they were in the Age of Exploration in the historical epochs, when nations founded colonies in search of gold, spices, and fruits unknown in the heartland of the West. Once more, the Empress in the West leveraged as much capital and expertise as she could spare, only now, instead of sailing in ships to far off lands in search of returns, the treasure of nations was spent to support the Empire’s rapid expanse into the cosmos, just as her counterpart in the East was compelled to do. For fear of being overtaken and overrun by the tireless ingenuity and industriousness of their expansive and eternal rivals was ever the driving force of empires. Such was the nature of the peace.

The most closely guarded but poorly-hidden information in that era were the locations of commissioned starships, for movement revealed strategy—allocated resources betrayed intention, which was almost always discovered by the other. What was found in the dark was brought to the light, and so too of lightness to dark. The most lucrative secret of all, though, yet discovered, was evidence of alien life, for if relationships could be forged early with a powerful and supportive ally, the House of Amu¨r, Declans of the Empire of Shadow, could definitively tip the balance of power and rule the planet in perpetuity.

This was the news the Declan was prepared to receive on the morning the ´Etto¨r and her crew arrived unexpectedly in orbit, surprising both the Empress of Shadow, whose seat commanded that formidable vessel, and the Declan on the other side of the world, whose spies knew nothing of the ´Etto¨r’s return. The Empress closed the House to all visitors, and all but the most trusted staff were dismissed. There was no direct communication between the ground and ´Etto¨r’s commander, who sent word through the military’s back channels to expect himself and several members of their expedition. All the proper and furtive signs were given that what must be said must be said in strictest secrecy, thus few eyes were present to bear witness to the news of alien life in the cosmos arriving at the foot of the Fifth Declan of the House of Amu¨r in the Empire of Shadow.

The Empress of Shadow was donned in her most impressive regalia, for it was not lost on her that such a moment would be recorded by the House Archivist and captured for all time, a moment that could not be repeated in the history of the human race. Her face would be studied for generations unknowable. All preparations were made at her empty seat. The Declan was then sat, and the Declan’s retinue, with the strictest adherence to highest ceremony, escorted in the commander of the ´Etto¨r along with a small group of his cosmonauts and a lone female civilian, whose unkempt appearance shocked the small audience in the Declan’s chamber on such a monumental occasion.

“What news have you for the House of Amu¨r, Commander?” the Declan demanded in her regal, well-practiced tone.

“I cannot entirely say, Excellency. For our expedition’s Archaeologist has informed myself and my command staff that she now has definitive proof of life beyond our world. But she swore that the gravity of the information she must convey is of such import that it should be revealed to thyself first, most honorable Declan, from her lips to your ears, and that the knowledge she bears would shake the foundations of our very world, light and dark, to the core of our being. Before she speaks, I would mention, Excellency, that despite her unsettling appearance, Maha Djech´n has always been regarded as among the most highly respected scientists in the rite of scholars. Though some on my crew have openly expressed concerns of her sanity to me. I do not hold that same concern, for I witnessed with my own eyes the structure wherein she and her group obtained this information. It was among the most wondrous sights I have beheld, and I but peered inside from the arch of the entryway. Maha Djech´n and but one other, her most trusted assistant, were the only people to enter the basilica, and neither has been quite the same since. My opinion, should your Excellency forgive my boldness in offering such, is that you consider Maha Djech´n’s account with due consideration despite the distraction her disturbing appearance may impress on you, Excellency.”

“This is the archeologist?” the Declan stated, facing Maha Djech´n.

“Yes, Excellency,” she said, kneeling to reflect her station, for her origin was a base one, contrasting her lofty position, which she’d achieved through sheer force of will and a peerless record of competence.

“Is it true what the Commander stated? You have witnessed proof of alien life?”

“What I have witnessed, Excellency, is beyond the realm of belief—a set of circumstances none of our scholars could have predicted or accepted as true. But this truth will be neither easy to believe nor desirable, so be sure that in uttering it, I understand that one of my station takes considerable risks. When you understand what I now know, and what I now am, if you do anything but believe and heed what it is I say, you will understand that the Declan’s wrath is a trifling matter in the face of what looms in our very galaxy, for the worst that you could do to me for my honesty, if you mistake such honesty for insolence, pales in comparison to what has already been done unto me and to my assistant Maha Az´hriin who has fared less well than myself in the ordeal. Furthermore, whether the Declan wishes it or likes it, what I must tell must be heard.”

“Excellency,” the commander said, sensing considerable tension at the Declan’s seat, “please forgive Maha Djech´n her impudence, for we are led to believe she and her assistant have undergone considerable anguish of the mind by what happened on that distant planet. Such outlandish exhortations as these are what prompted my crew to fear for her sanity.”

“If I wish for your opinion further Commander, I shall ask it. Do not think your Declan so fragile as to be wounded by the mere words of a single archaeologist, well respected as she may be in the rite of scholars.”

“My apologies, Excellency.”

“You may continue, Maha Djech´n,” the Empress said. “What evidence did you discover in the course of the expedition?”

“As Excellency knows,” Maha Djech´n began, “I was dispatched to evaluate the nature of an artificial structure discovered in the caverns on the second planet orbiting i´Alsioun 18, a body quite similar in mass to our own world. And what I found there, initially, was a welcome sight.”

“Rise,” the Declan stated, accepting that Maha Djech´n’s testimony would be heard with the consideration of the House of Amu¨r.

“Thank you, Excellency,” Maha Djech´n continued. “Deep in the caverns where the forward party had discovered a structure of architectural regularity, they held a perimeter, per protocol, and I was told that none had entered before my team’s arrival. It seemed a nondescript corridor. But as I entered, I found that, to my surprise, the architecture seemed more familiar than alien. The walls, for lack of a better way of saying it, seemed to have been carved out of the rock with human sensibility.”

“Human you say?”

“It seemed so in the moment, Excellency. And we were able to confirm as much when we came to the threshold of the basilica—the room at the lowest extreme of the corridor, which we named as such, because it seemed to take on the architectural significance of a sacred space. The eyes perceived it as such on first sight, and nothing disabused us of that initial impression.

“Yet on our first approach to the threshold, we did not enter. For there were pictographs carved in the stone that communicated to us in rather universal ways that we would be wise to pay heed to the markings on the wall before proceeding in haste.

“Just beyond the pictographs, on the two walls, the floor, and the ceiling there were carvings in four different scripts, all four of which seemed both unfamiliar and familiar at once to the eyes. Not one of the symbols save for the odd circle and cross was of any known script in the human lexicon. However, when we scanned the surfaces of the rock, we were quickly able to discern that on the ceiling was a script of a ten-digit numerical system inscribing the first hundred prime numbers, indicating the architect’s numerical system, which they’d used to assign a digital reference for each letter in the three scripts on the walls and the floor. Our algorithmic intelligences, within hours, because of the cleverness of the carvers, was able to teach itself the three distinct languages, each of which conformed to universal principles embedded in our understanding of human linguistics: expressions of past, present, and future; verbs; subjects of actions; descriptors and compliments of those descriptors; pronouns; syntactical consistency. The carvings were human, yet of no human language known, and carved therein the walls conveyed a single message in these three unknown tongues: that this temple’s flame must burn for all time; for, so soon as the flame was extinguished, soon after, too, would the human race’s flame be extinguished. The three scripts exhorted all who enter to prepare and take heed, for the temple held visceral pain, but, through that pain, would we come to know the price of our continued survival. It was both an exciting discovery and a terrifying one, for it seemed that the flame burned no longer, and no sign remained of the creators of the wonderous room we beheld.

“By this time, Excellency, we could see from the threshold the majesty of the basilica therein. We, my assistant Maha Az´hriin and I, entered the room together. And truly the sight was one to behold.

Running along the entire length of the basilica floor was a pool of stars, a map of the cosmos that looked to the naked eye indistinguishable from the night sky itself. This star map shone with stars as truly as the stars of our night sky, and wondrously, the blackness of the pool seemed to have depth to it as infinite as the depths of the eternal cosmos. And floating in the space above this star map were cubes of a colorful translucent material that seemed to reflect the starlight and also generate such a pleasant glow as to be welcoming to the eye.

This miracle of ingenuity suggested a race technologically advanced enough that we already revered their brilliance. In and of themselves the cubes portrayed no symbolic significance. Yet as Maha Az´hriin and I stood marveling at the first cube, hovering above the night sky, we learned that the cubes were not symbolic themselves but were a mode of communication unlike any we have ever encountered, for we were swept into the consciousness of another, of a human woman who was of the people who had carved that temple out of the stone, and that each of the five cubes told a piece of the story that I will relate to you now, for as then, it holds significance for our survival, just as it did for them.

“But I must first warn you, Excellency, that as our consciousness was taken in by these mysterious cubes, we became this other person, both retaining our own identity and simultaneously possessing hers as faithfully as she did herself. The star map became familiar to us, presenting the locations of thousands of planets hosting an empire of trillions of human souls, an empire of which both the House of Shadow and the House of Light would be but footnotes in a history that would overwrite our own a thousand-fold.

“Excellency, we are but children to these people, our elders. You must understand this.”

“I believe I understand this point, Maha Djech´n,” the Empress of Shadow said. “Now convey to me the message these cubes conveyed unto you as faithfully as you can report it.”

Cube 1:

The new setting, a large planet, came first to me as a feeling. And in this feeling, I must first express that as I relate this, I, Maha Djech´n, no longer exist in this tale. Nor does Maha Az´hriin, for even as I felt her there with me, present in those moments, we had both become this other, an explorer, a human female, Veral Kathon, she who would become the prophet, and it was Veral Kathon’s feeling I felt as my own and now relate as my own. For her actions were my own as I experienced them, even to the extent that as she chose her actions, I was made to feel the agent of those actions, as though I had chosen them myself in the moment, just as such was it too with Maha Az´hriin in her experience. And Veral Kathon’s feelings I felt with her depth. The first was aching, most prominently in my knees where the long bones of the legs met, and I knew from my depth of memory that it was the price of such an extended stay in such heavy gravity. Even with exoskeletal support and conditioning to the planet, my bones ached. I also felt as though I was drowning in the fetid odor of sulfur and doubly detested the stench, for I was there in service not of humanity but of the hideous others.

This vast community of human colonies in the stars, to which I – Veral Kathon – belonged, counted planetary colonies numbering in the thousands, each with tens of billions of inhabitants belonging to an empire in the midst of an age of prosperity and genius such as our wildest storytellers would not even dare to imagine. Their technology and understanding of the nature of both themselves and the universe outstripped ours by millennia, yet they seemed all too familiar, for just as we have struggled for centuries with the Empire of Light, these humans had met other races in the stars and had endured wars that lasted for tens of thousands of years.

Their chief rival were a race of monstrous creatures they knew as the Taul-al-ghal, an insect-like species whose genetic imperative was expansion. They bred at alarming rates and were short-lived compared to us, and they were asexual, living lives of ten to twenty years in service of their collective and then dying in the act of giving birth to their offspring, which often numbered in the teens, who were then left to the collective to be raised in compassionless, loveless servitude of the progression of the group.

The Taul-al-ghal plagued humanity at every opportunity, so much so, that our history was not of ships or cities destroyed in battles but of entire planets annihilated in conflagrations at scales that cannot be imagined if not witnessed first-hand. Such desperate exposure to the Taul left those people at the outer reaches of our empire so battle-hardened that they became much more warlike and compassionless than the more peaceful peoples of the inner planets.

The Taul, though a persistent menace, could never make meaningful gains against us, for they had but one strategy—overwhelm with numbers. Meanwhile, the humans, who won nearly every battle in the Endless War, ingenious as our commanders were, could never definitively push the Taul back, for a million would appear to take the place of each million destroyed.

Then, several hundred years before my birth on the planet of Madiera, one of the most beautiful of the inner worlds of the empire, the Taul-al-ghal, reeling from a string of terrible defeats, shocked our empire by suing for peace, something thought impossible by all human experience. We were cautious but pressed forward to negotiation, for any possibility of peace needed to be investigated. The Taul demanded terms. We presented counterdemands. The negotiations, through intermittent returns to battle, lasted a generation. Territory was distinguished, as were strict rules. The Taul would push forward no more into human systems, and in exchange, the humans, masters of technologies the Taul lacked, would terraform planets for the Taul-al-ghal at the far extremes of their empire, removing the need for them to expand into human space. We agreed but only if human terms were followed, which meant all life-bearing planets were off-limits, just as we humans forbade the destruction of alien ecosystems for our own benefit. And strict measures were put in place, just as with human exploration of new bodies, that rigorous tests must show no potential for natural life on worlds where the Taul hoped to terraform.

This was my task on that heavy planet at the far end of Taul territory, running tests in obscure pools of chemicals, searching for branching chains of proteins and peptides that could, given millions of years, spring to life. For days upon days, with aching knees and weary hands, exhausted by the monotony of the labor, the loneliness of my isolation, and the relentless presence of the sulfuric odor, I performed my duty faithfully.

Gifted with all this new knowledge, and settled as I had become in my new body, it came as the harshest shock of my lifetime when I was suddenly released and returned to the Basilica of the Prophet Veral Kathon. I found myself back in the darkness, staring absently at the floating cube, standing once more in my own body beside Maha Az´hriin, whose shock was as pronounced as my own. And as we reflected on the wonder of the experience and knowledge bestowed to us in what we learned was but a mere moment of absence, we both turned instinctually toward the second cube.

Cube 2:

I was settled aboard my cruiser when I returned to that awful sulfuric planet. I had just divested of my eternally noxious suit after the second ten-hour spell outside testing plots in grid 4271 in the northern hemisphere, one of many thousands of locations selected for closer scrutiny by the geospatial profiling program for its potential to host proteins. I had long been established on that nameless rock, nearly fifteen hundred days, and I refused to name the planet, for it would never be my home. We—I and my artificial assistant Trieste—hadn’t found so much as a complex protein, and then on that day, we discovered after all that time, in a single obscure pool, peptides that seemed so far out of place we immediately suspected contamination by either myself or Trieste. We tested three times, and to our dismay, found the initial readings, improbable as they were, to be accurate. Peptides. On this day of all days.

The Taul overseer, who seemed a domineering and spiteful creature, was scheduled for a quarterly visit per treaty bylaws. I detested its presence in my ship even more than I resented the stench of my helmet and suit, and I feared its presence in ideal circumstances, when I could report that the survey was ahead of schedule. I knew immediately that I would need to deceive the creature, for to tell it of our findings would certainly send it into a violent paroxysm. The only question would be how dangerous its fury would be for Trieste and me.

I was wrestling more substantively with how deep the deception would go. I was duty bound, under the letter of the treaty, to report our findings to the human oversight board, but here was a single pool with a single chain of peptides on an enormous planetary body, perhaps a billion years before any possibility of evolutionary progression.

When the Taul overseer arrived, per usual, I instructed Trieste what to relate in their disgusting guttural, clicky language. And though they were unfamiliar with human emotion and behavior, it was somehow able to distinguish that there was a difference between our usual behavior and our behavior that day—a hesitation on Trieste’s part to relate faithfully the words I conveyed to him to translate to the creature.

The beast kicked Trieste across the room and seemed to threaten to crush his head in its claw-like hand. It accused us of deception because of our irregular behavior.

I told the creature that it must not harm Trieste, for if he was damaged and could not communicate with the Taul, I would need to return to human territory to find a replacement, which would delay the project much further than any previous complication we’d encountered.

It set its eyes on me and released Trieste. It now glared at me menacingly.

“If you kill me,” I told Trieste to tell it, “that may end the project altogether, perhaps even the treaty.”

This was the ultimate threat, for in the centuries since the treaty was struck, the Taul came to rely on the letter of treaty law almost as though it was an instinctive rule written into the behavior of the species.

“Human would never destroy the law for the body of one,” it said.

“That is the difference between us,” I had Trieste convey. “We value the one.”

“You value nothing,” it said. “Disgusting, deceitful creatures.”

But it seemed to forget what had sent it into the violent outburst to begin with. I told it everything was on schedule, and that it was welcome to collect our data for review, as was their right under law, and I hadn’t yet transferred the day’s files into the permanent record, so the Taul would have no knowledge of the peptides we’d found.

When it finally departed and I had composed myself from the fear and the trauma Trieste and I had endured, we discussed our way forward, for Trieste was insistent that the peptides be reported to the human oversight commission, yet I had a powerful sense of temptation governing my actions. For it was not only my duty to humanity and to our empire that I was out on that planet. There was a motivation beyond all others that drove me to that horrible place.

Servants of the empire who did this field work, the jobs least desired of all humankind, were rewarded highest. The highest reward of all was citizenship on the home world, Ashtu. Even Madiera, my home planet, one of the inner worlds revered for its beauty, was no comparison for Ashtu, the seat of our empire, a world whose natural beauty was unsurpassed and unsurpassable, according to any human who’d set foot there. Few humans had, for in the generations of war with the Taul, all information about Ashtu became a tightly guarded secret, especially its location. It was our most precious gem, and we guarded it as such with wartime protocols, and in the thousands of years of conflict, Ashtu remained untouched. But the impact of this on humanity through the generations was that humans in the outer worlds lost any sense of their home world. And because pictures of Ashtu were forbidden, lest they somehow fall into the Taul’s possession, stories of her beauty were all that spread, until the world itself became but a legend for the trillions of people on the worlds outside Ashtu, including myself Veral Kathon. From the earliest age, my mind had been captured by the legend of Ashtu’s beauty. It was the sole reason for my servitude—the hope that one day, I might witness it with my own eyes.

It was this I struggled to convey to Trieste, whose programming was conflicted between loyalty to me after so long and loyalty to the letter of the treaty. Over several days, we discussed our way forward, for Trieste was troubled by my equivocation, and he could not understand my hesitation to report our findings exactly as we recorded them. But my mind was equally troubled, for I knew that for all the powers superior to us, both human and Taul-al ghal, it was clearly in their interest to find nothing on the planet, no hindrances, no threats to the peace, no conflicts, and certainly in the case of my direct superiors—whose authority shaped my future—no peptides.

Ultimately, after many days of discussion, we decided to file a formal complaint to the human oversight committee over the mis-treatment the Taul inspector was guilty of toward myself and Trieste. This would give me an opportunity to report both the abuse and, if I so chose, our true findings to a human board, even though it likely meant an end to my hopes to one day see Ashtu.

And after this long time embodied as Veral Kathon in my tiny ship on this putrid world with my only friend an artificial being, I found myself returned again to the basilica in the darkness beside Maha Az´hriin. Thus engrossed in the life of Veral Kathon then, far more than even our own lives, which now felt foreign and distant to us, I and Maha Az´hriin both made for the third cube.

Cube 3:

I returned to the universe of Veral Kathon, still abord my cruiser, only instead of sitting parked on the hideous yellow planet of the Taul’s expansion, Trieste and I were in hyperspace, on the way to the planet we called Acchi, one of the border worlds of the Taul-al-ghal. It was there the treaty outlined safe haven to meet with our human oversight, and even though I felt the experience of the months that had elapsed, the tireless hours of internal debate with my own mind, the external debate I continued with Trieste, the periods of certainty and wavering, still, I had yet to decide whether I would report the peptides.

Trieste brought the cruiser out of hyperspace outside the Acchi system, or at least where the Acchi system was supposed to be. Yet it wasn’t. Not the planets, not the moons, not even the star.

Trieste checked the star charts and rechecked navigational data. It seemed an anomaly, but all our readings were consistent with us being where we were supposed to be. Acchi wasn’t.

I suggested to Trieste that we approach the space where Acchi itself should have been, and we could discern no reason not to investigate further, so we proceeded to that location with caution.

As we arrived in the planet’s space, it was just as we had observed before, empty space. An entire star system had vanished without a trace. Both Trieste and I doubted what we saw, but all our instrumentation and the stars themselves confirmed and reconfirmed.

Then, I observed with the naked eye, a tiny, odd refraction of light in the darkness, and as Trieste brought us closer to investigate, I Maha Djech´n saw something I recognized, only I realized, quite separately from the consciousness of Veral Kathon, that she had never seen the odd cube before. She instructed Trieste to bring the cruiser close to the object, and just as I and Maha Az´hriin had been drawn to its alluring light in the basilica, Veral Kathon stared deeply into the cube’s glow and I was suddenly back in a place I very much recognized—the Tzokin pine forest outside my home city of Annoris on Madiera.

After five long years on that sulfuric rock, the smell of the air and the pines and the moisture in the air overtook my senses. I skipped right through the shock of being transported home in this sudden unaccountable way and my emotions overcame all. I wept. I dropped to my knees and touched the dirt. I took up pine needles in my hands and inhaled their heavenly scent. It was only after several minutes of relishing my homecoming before I began to question how it was I had come to be there. That’s when I noticed the observer.

“You enjoyed that far more than I had anticipated,” he said, or at least he seemed a he, for he appeared to me as a pleasant young man.

I somehow knew he was responsible for all of it.

“How?” I said, and then, “Who?”

“There will be more questions than I can answer, and truly more to the answers than you can possibly understand.”

“Why have you brought me here?” I asked him.

“You brought you here, Veral Kathon. All your choices, your actions, those were yours. I’d like to know what you’ve decided.”

And I somehow knew he was asking me about the planet, about the peptides, and I also knew I could not lie to him, for he knew my mind, my memories, had forged the world of Madiera for me from the fabric of my mind and brought me there. To lie to him would have been folly.

“I do not truly know,” I said. “I suppose I came to see, and I was prepared to make the decision in the moment.”

“That moment is now, Veral Kathon.”

“I feel deeply that it is wrong to work with these creatures, to create for them, and even worse to destroy—even the dumb rocks they occupy are corrupted by their very presence. But to ignore the treaty is to ignore the peace, to welcome a perpetual state of war to the human experience. Everything I learned from my earliest childhood of the cost of the Endless War, though, leads me to believe almost any action that could prevent it from happening again should be taken. If the cost of preventing such unspeakable carnage is a pool of peptides, I struggle to do what I feel and know to be right.”

“Yet you know what is right, for you understand the essence of it. I ask you now to tell me why.”

“The proteins,” I said, still kneeling in the dirt. I breathed in deep, bathing in the glory of Madiera’s fresh air. “What I do today may stop a billion years of evolution that I have no right to halt.”

“This is so,” he said. “We have been watching, and you are very much like the rest of your kind. You understand today, forget tomorrow, and remember again if it suits your purpose. I am here to tell you that you are not to forget again. In ages long past, your ancestors understood what was important. They knew what you were and what you were not, and they lived their lives by edicts. We give you this one final edict now and exhort you to heed it, for we do not caution you lightly, and we shall not warn you again.”

And his kind eyes grew very grave. He stepped forward and stood above me there as I knelt on the forest floor.

“Thou shalt not take that which is not yours.”

And I knew exactly what he meant. He meant everything. Not another planet, not another moon, not another asteroid. Not for us. Not to keep the peace with the Taul. Nothing.

“Return and tell them all, even at the cost of all you hold dear,” he said.

And in that moment, I made the costliest mistake of my life. I feared what others would think when I told them this story. I thought of the ridicule and doubt, the cost of my reputation, my chances of seeing Ashtu.

He glared at me, and simply said, “You have heard what I said. Behave, monkey.”

I cannot describe what happened then except to say that far beyond the cells of my body, through the last fiber of my existence, every ounce of my essence was scorched with the most excruciating and inexhaustible pain I imagined could exist, and I felt myself being held there in the clutches of this other eternal being’s consciousness. I was made to feel the extent of its power and wrath. And I hung there in that moment for an eternity, for longer than I had been on that sulfuric rock, for every day I’d spent on Madiera dreaming of Ashtu, for the weeks in hyperspace. It was longer than my life. Pure agony, deeper than the reaches of space itself. And then, long after a time when I had forgotten anything but hopelessness and despair, there was I, Maha Djech´n, returned to the temple of Veral Kathon, reeling in the darkness with Maha Az´hriin, who shrank back from the starlit pool in horror. And we two collapsed into a heap in the dark shadows of the temple, holding each other to be certain our deliverance was real, that we had been released from damnation by the being that had never had us but had taken Veral Kathon. Yet it haunts us both still, for we experienced it as surely and as deeply as if it had been us, for it was our experience, just as it was hers. And looming there, as horrible as the experience had been, were the two final cubes.

“No, mistress, I beg you, please. Do not make me go back,” Maha Az´hriin said to me, for she noticed that after some time I had begun to look at the star pool in the direction of the fourth cube.

I felt, though, a powerful pull toward the cubes, not just for the knowledge of what became of Veral Kathon, nor for the remainder of the story, but because I knew that just as much as the being had commanded her, he had commanded all of us: “Thou shalt not!” And we needed to know. The etchings at the mouth of the basilica had told us as much. The flame must be kept burning, and extinguished as it had been, it was our duty to once again light the flame, or I knew we would meet him in the darkness. So, I alone went forth to the rim of the star pool and gazed into the fourth cube.

Cube 4:

I was then returned, in body and in consciousness, to the existence of Veral Kathon in the moment she too was returned to her body in the cruiser. I found myself seated beside Trieste, for whom the near eternity of hellish suffering I, Veral Kathon, had endured seemed but a brief moment of absence while I stared at the cube. This was one of the few moments in the entire experience that I, Maha Djech´n, felt somewhat disconnected from Veral Kathon, for I had spent considerable time in the basilica in the arms of Maha Az´hriin, where we two had held each other for comfort, reclaiming our sanity as best we could from the terrors of hell. I returned to Veral Kathon’s consciousness at the selfsame moment as she, who was justifiably hysterical, physically agitated, and mentally tormented to the same degree as myself and Maha Az´hriin had been. Having gone through this anguish once before, I now had to endure it again but, unlike Veral Kathon, I had the benefit of the knowledge that the terror would eventually pass, and I’d had the comfort of Maha Az´hriin’s commiseration to quell my spirit. Veral Kathon had no such comfort, only an artificial being who was quite perplexed by his mistress’s inexplicable exhortations of horror. I was made to feel her terror as I had felt my own, and there was nothing I could do to explain it to Trieste or Veral Kathon herself. I writhed in her skin for hours. I wept till my chest and my cheeks ached. I mourned. And then I breathed deep the release from damnation, as I had done once already, and then I began to process the experience.

Through the moments of terror, I noticed that the cube, which had previously been floating in the depths of space was now beside me on the floor of the cruiser, the sudden appearance of which Trieste, having no understanding of my true experience, mistook as the source of my sudden insanity. I recoiled from it out of instinct, for I recalled it as the source of that horror, but as I began to regain my senses, I knew it was not bestowed on me as a source of torment, but a sign, and something much deeper, but I knew not what yet.

After several hours of quiet reflection once the hysteria had passed, I instructed Trieste to set a course for Madiera. I knew not the exact course I was to set for my life with my new knowledge, but I knew the bearing. I prepared myself to endure the ridicule. I prepared to be ignored, outcast, reviled. I prepared for my voice to grow hoarse from shouting the new truth of human existence, and to do it with the urgency of a civilization whose foundation was imperiled existentially. I prepared to be seen as the maddest woman who had ever beheld the depths of space and had the abyss reach back into her soul, for if there had been one true thing that had ever happened to me, Veral Kathon, it had been that.

I arrived at Madiera to the shock of my friends, family, and even the conveyors of the news of the empire, for I was thought to have perished in the depths of space, either by some horrific accident or, what was seen as more likely, some treachery of the Taul-al-ghal. I had expected some moment of quiet reflection with my family before my mission began, but no such grace blessed me. I was given a pulpit immediately, not just to the people of Madiera but to the surrounding worlds as well. Everyone wanted to know what I had experienced in that lost time. And to the horror of my family, I told the tale as truly as I could recount. I exhorted all people to repress every instinct to expand, to shun the Taul-al-ghal and make no further effort to help their empire expand as well. I told them there were beings powerful enough to destroy star systems, just as they had made Acchi to vanish from the realm of existence. And I was immediately accounted a madwoman, for unbeknownst to me it had been Acchi that had reported my disappearance. To everyone but myself and Trieste, Acchi hadn’t disappeared at all. We were the ones who’d gone missing.

The powerful force of disbelief, bolstered by the faces of all who beheld me, the whispers, the depth of concern from my family, from Trieste even—all this made me doubt my own sanity. But then, there was the cube.

My family wanted to place me in a hospital against my own wishes, and indeed, for a time, they prevailed upon the state to make this happen. But before they took me away, I gave Trieste one final mission as his charge—to bring the cube to a professor of mine at the academy—a peerless scientific mind—for I knew it would pique his curiosity enough to investigate its powers and purposes, and indeed we came to know them well.

I spent nearly a year in the hospital learning the story I needed to tell for them to believe me sane once more. I spat out their medicine furtively. I mouthed their words as a forced non-believer. I falsely worshipped in the cult of conformity, yet through it, I saw the wave of hellfire rolling across the stars toward us. And then one day, when I had recited the words convincingly enough, I was released.

My colleague, the professor, had made some startling discoveries about the cube’s properties. It transmitted signals by the trillions so precisely that he determined it could have only been tuned precisely for the human mind. And by his own genius, he was able to design a process whereby we could replicate the advanced materials composing the cube.

When I was reunited with him, his work progressed far more rapidly, for he was able to determine the answer to many questions he’d had about the device—that it captured consciousness, transferred memories, conveyed experiences. And though I feared the cube terribly, he prevailed upon me to approach it again, to see if it might react to my presence.

Over several months, we learned that the cube could imprint an experience and bestow that experience on others just as the imprinter had endured it. It was the most powerful form of communication any human had ever beheld. But when I finally successfully imprinted on the device, we found that the amount of information was so voluminous, we would need to replicate the device at least three times over to share my experience with others. So, over several months, we perfected the process of replicating the device.

I was beginning to understand the wisdom of the being’s gift. For my words alone would never be enough to sway even my family and friends to believe the truth of my story. To strangers, I would never be more than a madwoman. But when the cubes finally enabled me to fully share my tribulations with my collaborator, who claimed previously to have believed me, all doubt vanished. He became my greatest adherent. We then knew the path forward, painful as it would be.

We set out across Madiera, spreading the word and exhorting any who would dare to share in my experiences. And those who did so gaze into the cubes, being so greatly affected, either became dedicated adherents and believers or vehement deniers of the truth they had seen, for such an awful truth was unpleasant to believe, and this life we had been living on Madiera, even in the darkest days of the Endless War, it was a pleasant dream. My truth was reality.

As our numbers grew, we became pariahs, for many were seen to be driven to madness instantaneously by simply gazing into the third cube. And we preached, as was the truth, that we should go no further out into the stars and take nothing that was not already ours. It countermanded the curiosity ingrained in our genetic imperative. It was a heresy against our very biology. Yet it was our only pathway to survival.

Pariahs all, we set out from Madiera, cubes in hand, to spread the word to the thousands of worlds of the empire in the hopes of reaching as many minds as we could before it was too late.

For years it went like this. We would arrive at a new world attempting to spread our message. Violence and strife would ensue. I was branded an enemy of the peace. A shaman terrorist. A lunatic. An apocalypticist. And of all the messages I spread the furthest and loudest it was this, if we did not heed the one edict, we would be wiped from existence, just as the Taul-al-ghal would be. And for those who had not seen, had not been in the grasp of the cubes, the message seemed absurd.

Nearly a decade passed thus for my followers, hiding our identities, sneaking the cubes in cargo, sleeping in back rooms and safehouses. All the while our doubters wondered how anyone could believe a truth so ridiculous, until one day, the skirmishes that had once again erupted between ourselves and the Taul suddenly stopped. The Taul-al-ghal simply were no more.

Against the howling of my adherents, the empire sent scouts to investigate. Ships ventured cautiously into space that for thousands of years no human had dared to tread. Yet as exhaustively as our starships searched, for months on end, not so much as the smallest artifact of their entire civilization—hundreds of thousands of years of empire across reaches of the galaxy that rivalled our own—in all that space, nothing was ever found.

I found myself, once more, back at the star pool, Maha Az´hriin still behind me in the shadows weeping, and I knew that Veral Kathon had decided, in the wisdom that had come with her many tribulations, to record that fourth cube to convey her whole story. For there was wisdom in it, and knowing what I knew now from that fourth piece of her trials, I stepped forward toward the fifth.

Cube 5:

The first thing I noticed when I returned to my body yet again was that I was suddenly now much older. My hands were the most prominent and shocking change. Wrinkles and creases, callouses, spots.

I was now, after many years, finally on my way to Ashtu. I and my closest circle of adherents had been summoned to advise the leaders of the home world on the perspective of the Evangelists, as my believers had come to be called. And it was as true a name as one could have chosen. For, as was now fully known to me, we had spread our message over the entire outer empire, and we had held the line, politically whenever possible, but, in extreme times when particularly bold expansionists challenged our hegemony, we were left no choice but to resort to forceful measures, first imprisonment and then, only when all else had failed, violence. The home world understood little of our motives, for the discussion to them was an abstract one. The residents of such a paradise had no cause or desire to travel elsewhere, nor could they understand the gravity of a threat on their border, because for generations immemorial there had been none.

I was asked to brief the leaders, because I, Veral Kathon, Prophet of the Evangelists, understood their motives and could predict their actions, and because, after so long—decades of struggle to be heard by the establishment, followed by decades of hegemonic political and cultural dominance—with the Taul a distant memory, the empire’s political environment had become entirely unaccountable to the leaders on Ashtu.

I believed I could explain it to them coherently, but I feared that no matter how well it was explained to them, they would not be able to understand, for the one special condition of my visa as dictated by the guardians of their world was that I was forbidden from bringing the cubes, now numbering four, onto the home world of Ashtu. It was even said, both there and in other wealthy inner worlds, that I possessed technology that could bewitch and twist the minds of any I wished to convert. Again, a certain limited kind of truth.

I prepared for many hours over many days during our journey. I rehearsed my speech for my acolytes. I explained that the problems erupting along the outer worlds were unavoidable, for the young could not themselves remember the Taul-al-ghal. For them, the Taul were a frightful bedtime story. And so too, for many in our society, whose lives knew no strife, just like the people of Ashtu had been for millennia, true peril itself became a fairy tale—a plotline we used to entertain ourselves when we tired of the regularity of our secure and happy homes and communities. The danger that had once been existential was now only mythological, and in my heart, as much as I wished to believe that vigilance, wisdom, and the power of the cubes would be enough, I knew that inevitably, over time, it must certainly fail. Of all the countless trillions, some contrarians would spring forth somewhere, defying the wisdom of the ages, pulled by the curiosity embedded in our cellular makeup. Someone would slip through.

Of Ashtu, all I can say now, was that after all those years—pining, longing, imagining, hoping—her beauty surprised in ways I could never have predicted. The plants and the trees seemed to call out to my heart. The landscape embraced me with its familiarity and wonder. The colors brought tears to my eyes. It was, as had always been said, by far the most beautiful place I had ever been in the universe, which seemed fitting, because all of us out there, even arriving for the first time after a life lived in the stars, were returning home.

I delivered my speech to the leaders of Ashtu, word for word as I had practiced in transit. And, as I’d anticipated, for them the sentiments seemed peculiar. I felt the sensations deep within me, a hope because the leaders of Ashtu were trying to understand, and a deeper regret that it would take more; because always, beneath everything, there was a nagging terror at the bottom of my soul, that he was still out there in the darkness of the infinite, watching. “Thou shalt not take.” His words still haunted me in my bones, in my aching knees. “Behave, monkey.”

Then at last, I found myself returned to the Basilica of Veral Kathon.

“And now you have truly become her, Maha Djech´n,” the Empress of Shadow said unto the archaeologist, sensing that her tale was complete, “for your story is so peculiar as to make all who hear it question your sanity, just as the crew of my starship ´Etto¨r did. I am left with questions innumerable, and, as much as your tale is compelling and your telling of it powerful, Maha Djech´n, I freely admit I have doubts.”

“This too is familiar, Excellency,” Maha Djech´n said, “for I lived the whole life of Veral Kathon in the hours I and Maha Az´hriin beheld the cubes within the basilica. In that lifetime, I experienced the doubts of a thousand worlds as well as their scorn, contempt, and disdain. Doubt me you may, but believe me you must. For he is still out there, and the edict still stands.”

“Let’s say I believed you Maha Djech´n—that I trusted in your expertise and relied upon your honesty and bravery, and I staked the fate of the entire Empire on the truth of your tale—even if I did as such, I wonder, what would you have me do? Abandon the stars? Watch idly while the House of Light went forth to the richness of the cosmos and passed us by, subjugated us, denigrated our traditions, culture, and language until we were but a colony of theirs?”

“No, Excellency, you cannot do this, for the House of Light must be made to understand as well. The edict is not just for those who have heard it. It is for all.”

“The question stands, Maha Djech´n. What would you have me do with this information?”

“I would have you use every power at your disposal to bring the Empire of Light to the table, to convince them of this necessary truth, revealing it in every detail to the Eastern Declans. And as painful an experience as it has been for me, Excellency, I propose that you and your counterpart travel to the second planet orbiting the star we have designated i´Alsioun 18. I recommend that you descend together to the Basilica of Veral Kathon and you receive the truth together. For if you do not, all will be lost once more.”

“Once more you say, Maha Djech´n?”

“Yes, excellency, for Veral Kathon’s final truth was one she could not have known when she recorded her life. It was something only we could have known.”

“That her civilization was doomed?”

“Yes, true, Excellency,” Maha Djech´n said, and as she said this she knelt at the foot of the Empress of Shadow, and looking up into her monarch’s eyes she said, “I do not kneel as a supplicant, for surely, I am not that. I kneel as your ancestor, begging you to take heed, for all was as I said, Excellency.

“The final truth in the Basilica of Veral Kathon was in the stars, in the pool on the floor, when I was returned to my body, I knew them still from her knowledge, by name and by sight, star after star, constellation after constellation. And the one location I wondered about all that time ensconced in Veral Kathon’s consciousness was where, oh, where was my beloved home? Where was Madiera? And I knew it the moment I finally returned to the Basilica, in the same manner I knew all that I knew from the consciousness of Veral Kathon herself, I simply felt her knowledge as my own. And as I stooped to bring Maha Az´hriin with me, out from that room to the lifeless, barren rock of a planet above, suffused still in those final few moments with the wisdom of the ages, I knew in my soul that it was there. Planet two of i´Alsioun 18 was Madiera. I was finally home again, but it was home no longer.”

The Empress now beheld the sincerity of Maha Djech´n’s face. She pitied the poor woman for the depth of her sadness, her face now awash in tears. Yet the Empress stood first, as always, to her duty.

“Sad as that may be, Maha Djech´n,” the Empress of Shadow said. “I fail to see how this changes our understanding of the situation, for we all knew at the outset that their civilization had come to ruin. Such is the labor of an archeologist, is it not?”

“There is more, Excellency,” Maha Djech´n said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I knew the names of the stars and planets in the pool on the basilica’s star map just as surely as she did. I remembered those places. But I did not remember that which I did not know was there. Not until the end, for she never went there until the end. And its beauty, I thought, as Veral Kathon did, was in her familiarity. But that, Empress, was not Veral Kathon’s feeling but my own, for I had been there. She could not have known, and because she did not know, I did not know either, not until I left, that it was here. Home. They used another name than we use now, but the House of Light, the House of Shadow, all this, your very seat, our nation, this planet, Excellency; it is Ashtu.

“Ashtu is here.”