The Younger Horus
How it began
Here is your very first Paschat story. I was meaning to write something like this for a while, and then found myself happily prompted into it by Brian Reindel’s Lunar Awards Prompt Quest #3. I’ll give you the details about that afterwards, as the prompt, as usual, would be a little spoilery, and I wouldn’t want you having too many preconceptions. As per Brian’s rules, to also claim my prize of entering it for this current season’s Lunar Awards I have managed to edit this down to some three words shy of 2,500. Oh those poor three words!
And I thought this would be a timely opportunity to quote some highly appropriate and evocative lyrics from one of my favourite bands, VNV Nation. Because I can, you know. The link beneath the quote takes you to the song in question (on YouTube), which would probably go quite well with all this. It certainly gets me going, anyhow.
At the end of days, at the end of time,
When the sun burns out will any of this matter?
Who will be there to remember who we were?
Who will be there to know that any of this had meaning for us?
And in retrospect, I'll say we've done no wrong…
Ronan Harris, Further (VNV Nation – 2000)
The Younger Horus
“Shari’ana? What’s the matter?”
Ishnaans are telepathic, of course. She already knew what the matter was.
At the same time, they understand that we Paetri still prefer to use our mouths and our vocal cords to communicate. We love all the myriad sounds we can make and have made an art of it. From an intense, warming purr to something resembling a little scowl of disapproval.
And everything in between.
You wouldn’t understand our language, I don’t think. Too many vowels. You might get the gist, now and again, if you listen with your heart, like you often do when your little domesticated companions want you to do something for them. Those are our feline cousins too, and yes, some of them are even us, reincarnated through time just to get to know you a little, on what became our second home.
You want to know how that happened, don’t you? Perhaps you will only think it a cute little story, with a touch of pathos, for sure, but on the other paw, now many of you have come to genuinely believe your own home is in danger of some climatic cataclysm, perhaps it shall mean something else to you.
Climatic cataclysm. Shnee-el’shach’se! From where we are watching, your sun, Heliona, seems perfectly stable to us.
It’s not as if she’s fulsome and pregnant in her subgiant phase now, is it?
I looked up at her, here in our little everglade village at the edge of the red forest. As if to tell her without words and without telepathy I turned my gaze into the trees, then back towards her with the unhappy look she, and all the other Ishnaans had come to recognise easily by now.
“I don’t want to leave my home,” is my obvious, unnecessary response. “It’s fine for the Karidel. They don’t care anymore about our culture or our furry bodies or anything.”
“You know that’s not true, Shari’ana,” she said, but without admonishment. I still felt guilty for saying it but I had to say it because I was upset and when you’re upset you have to tell everyone, don’t you?
“It is true. Kind of. I mean, they’re coming to the end of their physical existence, aren’t they? Another few thousand summers and there won’t be any Karidel anymore. Half of them have already moved on into Outer Time, or whatever they call it. The rest of them, flying around this galaxy and the next one and the next one and the previous one and all of them in their timeships, or your timeships, I don’t know.”
She smiled inwardly and let me know she found my thoughtforms amusing. “Our timeships, Shari’ana. Powered and guided by quasi-crystals. Or were you not paying attention that lesson?”
“I’m not interested in technology. I just want to stay here. This is our home!” And that’s when I started to cry.
We can cry, you know. Our eyes aren’t that different from yours. It’s not difficult to understand, if you think about it. We have the same kind of atmospheric composition you do. Well, at least the same composition you used to have when your world was ruled by those terrible lizards. So we have the same senses and the same adaptations and, well, the same feelings, you know?
“I don’t want to go to Ishna,” I told her. For the I don’t know how many-eth time. “And I’m not the only one. Mother understands. We Paetri love our culture and our nature and the forests and our music and our, our everything! We’ll be nothing but somebody else’s memory in the Galactic Archive. It won’t be us anymore! No one will ever really know that all of this mattered. That we mattered. Of course we’re sort of grateful to you for saying we can come and live on your planet but it’s not compatible, is it? It’s too hot and the atmosphere is too dense and it would be poison to us anyway. And the gravity’s too heavy. And I don’t want to have to live in those enclosed habitats you’ve built for us and I don’t want to be biologically modified so we can walk around on your planet. Because it’s not the same home. We wouldn’t be us anymore. It doesn’t have forests and warm lakes we can swim in.”
“We do have lakes, Shari’ana.”
“They’re not water, though, are they?”
“Granted. But you can’t stay here. You know this. In three summers’ from now the subgiant’s flickering will create climatic fluctuations which will render everything uninhabitable. Everything you love will die.”
That’s one thing I always hated about the Ishnaans. They may look like what you would call angelic, but sometimes they would get brutally honest even though they knew perfectly well how it would make us feel. They probably thought we needed to know, that they were teaching us some important lesson but we never needed to have important lessons because life is fair! Of course life is fair. Our social decision-makers in the Karidel Council made sure our lives would be fair.
Except now it’s all going to end.
Our beautiful village, with our garden patches. Our forests and our lakes and our songs. And all the other creatures too. Will they come with us? Our violets, I think you call them. Violets…
Did you know your flowers first evolved in your Cretaceous?
The Karidel timeship arrived during sleep time. No one stirred.
But we heard about it soon enough.
Only one summer to go before the end. I am older now. Almost ready for my first mating season. I so wanted to have my first Oestrus Festival before, well, you know.
There’s one from the Orotheta, our protector tribe, whose name is Kashi, and he has wonderful golden eyes and a golden mane. And he loves music, like I do. He’s going to be a composer.
And he watches over me all the time.
But that’s not going to happen.
The Karidel and the Ishnaans had a little meeting to decide our fate and they didn’t tell us about it. Not straight away, anyhow.
They often took their time to decide stuff.
You know, one of the strangest things I remember is how I never used to care at all for technology. You seem to be obsessed with it in your present age. Except now, I love it too. I love knowing stuff. Science, you call it. I’m not obsessed with it like you are, but I do love it.
I didn’t get that from my Atlantean lives. No, that came so much later. Like, now I know, it was one hundred and twenty millions of your orbits later. After the final collapse of the star we knew as Isar.
No, I didn’t get this discovered love of knowing and understanding from Atlantis. It was from the Capellans, who were studying your world as it was then. Danuih, that is her name. Although you’ve only forgotten.
We didn’t know about the Capellans until the Karidel, finally, decided to call a grand meeting and tell us what they’d seen.
Except they didn’t tell us everything. I mean, they didn’t tell us what was going to happen in your present, our future. One possible future. Maybe that’s why I didn’t much care for science and technology and all that stuff, because they weren’t allowed to tell us what was going to happen. That’s kind of obvious if you think about it, isn’t it?
You have to be really, really old, spiritually-speaking, I mean, before you can be entrusted to know about the future. Your species is quite young, still, so you couldn’t be trusted.
But I’m not being patronising you know. We were young once too. Every species is young once. When we had to leave our world behind, I think, now that I look back, that just maybe we were about the same age as you are now.
Different, sure. Much fewer of us, definitely. But the same age, I think.
You would maybe recognise our way of lives. You have similar customs, at least some of you do. You don’t seem to have an Oestrus Festival though. Not like we do, anyway. It must be horrid, having such a short mating cycle. What is it, twelve or thirteen every orbit! I don’t know how you cope. We have ours maybe every four or five summers.
The Capellans – you know that star, by the way – I’m using your name for it here – were a reptilian species long-since given to spacefaring. They’d been doing it for, what was it the Ishnaans said, half a million orbits? I don’t remember and it’s a bit too much to contemplate, you know? But they’d definitely been all around the galactic core. There’s something called ‘the Circuit’, or some name like that, which is like a kind of hypergate tunnel which means normal spaceships – not timeships, normal ones – can go at more than five thousand times the fundamental velocity.
You call that the speed of light, apparently. That’s not really an explanation. The Capellans told me later, when one of them was my teacher again in a future life, that the fundamental limit on velocity was all to do with the limit of elasticity of the fundamental particle when in motion. That’s to say, the material or substance out of which the fundamental particle is made. Your physicists don’t seem to understand that somewhat obvious point yet. The fundamental particle has to be made out of something, right? So what is that something and what are its physical properties?
I’ll leave that question open to you. We wouldn’t want to spoil your joy of learning and discovery. Because I know how lovely that joy can be.
Timeships, by the way, they use a different quantum. I mean, one that’s made from a different substance with a different elasticity, which means it has a different velocity limit.
I’ve been in a timeship, you should know. Of course I was totally nervous the first time. You would be too, I think. I heard scary stories about timeships getting lost, or stuck in a loop in the circuits of time.
But one thing I will tell you. Outer Time is the most lucid and spectacular and perfect vision in the multiverse. What everything looks like beyond the speed of light.
You would love it, I’m sure.
And, hah! And knowing you as I do now, maybe get just a little addicted, I think.
The Capellans aren’t scary, you know. I can imagine in your present age you would find them scary. Huge great bipedal reptiles as they are. Except they’re not scary. They are our wonderful friends and they welcomed us and helped us in our Great Becoming. They may have been given to, I don’t know, tribal conflict or whatever you call it half a million orbits ago but species mature, you know? Might take a while, but it happens.
It's the whole purpose of living. Of the universe herself. The universe herself is the Great Becoming. And we are a part of all that. Just as the Capellans are, and our own Karidel, and the Ishnaans. And, yes, you too. Just that you don’t understand any of that yet.
And of course they would come to your planet to study and observe and maybe do a little genetic engineering with those Dromaeosaurids during your Cretaceous.
Of course they would.
You have no idea what’s out there, do you?
Well, maybe that’s one of the other reasons I’m here with you now, one hundred and twenty million orbits after we had to leave our home and find somewhere new, if we wanted our culture to survive. If we wanted to keep growing and evolving and learning everything and then, I mean now, after two hundred and fifty thousand orbits’ worth of lives, lived to their brimful in a multiplicity of timezones and starry places, we’re the same as the Karidel were. And the Ishnaans. Our souls are now ancient. Just like them.
They knew, of course. I didn’t understand that at the time. I was far too young. We all were.
That’s why they let us get so upset and agitated and all the rest of it. They wanted us to feel the very impending end of our culture and our home and everything we loved in the whole universe. We already did love all of that, of course we did. But not with true understanding. Not so acutely as we did after.
There is nothing in the universe can stop us from loving anymore. From knowing just how precious every timezone really is, and every species, however shortlived. And you never lose that, when you grow up and you’re allowed to go spacefaring and zoom through the Hypergate Network at fifty-something times the fundamental velocity. Or five hundred times, if you want to see the next Sector.
Maybe you’ll be allowed to see all that soon enough.
I guess it depends.
Do you think you can learn, I mean truly learn, the same lessons as us?
I don’t know.
But what I do know, is that the very first time we emerged back into Inner Time and saw your beautiful blue world all shining and hazy wisps of white clouds and gigantic red forests and warm misty lakes and heard the cries of all those terrible lizards and the screeches of our very own Narga who were just one of the species we brought with us, like the violets, for that very first time, we felt your world, Danuih, smiling back at us.
Our new home. With love.
And we knew that whatever happened, we were going to love her back until the very end of days.
Maybe you want to know what happened next in the very first of my thousands of lives since. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter.
It’s all in the Galactic Archive anyway.
But more important, it’s all in me too. And our species, being perfectly telepathic now, is no longer some discordant selection of individuals, but a family of souls. A family, who will always be together and will shortly take just one last flight into Outer Time, from whence we shall leave you on your own, to your own primitive electronic devices, and we shall never return.
But that’s another story.
Oh, sha’keeka-ka! I never told you the name of our home, did I?
Her name was Nebthwt.
One hundred and twenty million orbits ago, as you count the summers, she was swallowed up by the star who was once even more brilliant blue-white than Iset, his binary companion and the mother-star of Ishna, who is still there, the star you see today as the very brightest in your heavens.
Perhaps we’ll allow you to visit one day. In a timeship.
If you behave well.
Oh, and one more thing, for the way. What we call Narga, you call Pterodactyls…
I do like the way the Great Image Generator does pterodactyls with feathers. Some palaeontologists might have issues with that one.
Anyway, here is the Prompt Quest prompt:
Write a science fiction short story that takes place on a floating academy orbiting a dying star. A professor is tasked with preparing the students for evacuation, but strange anomalies are causing disturbances in time and reality. Will everyone escape in time, become trapped in an alternate reality or something worse?
Level Up!
(Optional) The professor is not human.
Well, given there aren’t any humans in the story whatsoever I think I got the levelling up thing!
I was probably admittedly somewhat loose with my use of the prompt though, given I didn’t really specify any floating academy or sense of impending dread or suchlike. And the timeships aren’t causing any problems.
But then, if you think about it, if you had the technology to evacuate your planet which was orbiting a star at the end of its main sequence, then you wouldn’t exactly be pressed for time, now, would you? You’d know about the star’s impending collapse for a very long time before everything became urgent. Except, on the other paw, you’d want to stay till the end, really.
This, as it happens, is what generates the emotional aspects of having to leave your homeworld, which, really, is what this story is all about, somewhat obviously. This kind of experience, as you can imagine, would be foundational for such a species. And that will emerge later in the Paschat story. It’s why they care so much about the welfare of this planet.
With regards to the floating academy thing, though - I think of Paschat space stations like snow globe or spinning top-shape affairs with a natural, forested internal landscape, with a lake in the centre for swimming. Home, and nature, after all, is very precious to them…
Finally, a little astronomical history for the sticklers. This will be humorously addressed in the first Unofficial Katy story coming soon, but just to briefly mention, the Sirius system, originally comprising two brilliant blue-white stars, is around 240-odd million years’ old. The larger star ended its main sequence around 120 million years’ ago, which puts you in the Cretaceous period. Some might dispute the possibility that advanced, intelligent life can evolve on planets in such a relatively young system in only 120 million years. Well, we’ll see about that later, eh…
For now, just suspend your scepticism and enjoy the thought of it. At this stage of human history, there is still so much more to discover about life, the galaxy, and, well, everything else too for that matter.
And it does all matter. It really does. All of it.
And so do you…
Wow, Evelyn, this is a mind trip in a great way! It has the feel of mythology or an ancient text, even though it refers to advanced technology. But then again, we're talking about unfathomable time spans and time travel, so maybe ancient doesn't really mean anything in this context! Also I like the idea of having a cycle every four or five summers. That sounds ideal!
I love all the threads you wove into this. And I think I have a Paetri living in my house.