Amba lifted her arms, tipped her head back, and allowed the power to explode from her. Releasing it was a sensation as familiar as breathing. She laughed, all else forgotten, as the heavens answered her with a rising wind and a bolt of lightning that streaked down from the clouds toward her. She recognized the voice of the wind. She knew the lightning like a friend. It struck the ground at her feet, and the peal of thunder that accompanied it was majestic.
The rains began, fat drops, pelting from the sky. The smell of moist air and earth filled her nostrils. Rain ran in rivulets down her face and arms. It continued to intensify, falling with a force hard enough to sting.
“Amba, have you done this?”
Her father had to shout over the storm. He must have run to her when the rain started. The pounding water slicked his dark hair to his head. The roar of rain cascading to the ground made him hard to hear, though he stood at her side. In his voice she heard the plea that things were not bigger than his understanding, that her strange behavior and the storm were no more than a coincidence.
She reached out and took him by the shoulders. “It’ll be all right, Father. Everything will be all right.”
The grubs were the first to die, drowning in puddles no larger than her hand. The sparkers stayed underground longer, but finally they, too, had to emerge from the sodden soil to take their chances above. Amba stayed outside for hours, reveling in the rains that lashed her. Never had she felt so whole.
Once the rains began, the ship weighed anchor and sailed back the way it had come. Beneath the roar of the storm, Amba finally heard the quarter winds in the sails and the splash of the ocean beneath the hull.
Father left too, on the task she had assigned him. The people had to start building waterwheels and repairing their windmills. Grain stores needed to be gathered in a central, dry place. Most important, Father had to see that word got to the Wheat-singers and the Wave-tamers and all the other old families in the county. They needed to come to her so that, together, they could learn the true meaning of their names and discover how to tap their powers.
There was much work ahead for them all.
What Moves the Sun and Other Stars
written by
K.C. Norton
illustrated by
Kristie Kim
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K.C. Norton has loved books ever since she first read Frog and Toad Are Friends to herself, lo these many years ago. She still reads picture books, but now they’re for research, since she is getting her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Her father—rather more on the hard-science end of the spectrum, sequencing genomes and suchlike—has been incredibly supportive of her fiction, which has recently appeared in Crossed Genres Magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, and several other excellent venues besides this anthology.
K.C.’s pen-surname is borrowed from her mother’s tribe. Both of her parents think she’s a bit weird, and they’re right.
K.C. has studied classical archaeology, ancient Greek, anthropology, and a number of world literatures. She loves the places where science and history meet legend and myth.
When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found wrestling a small but enthusiastic dog, pouring drinks, drinking drinks, playing board games with a delightful assortment of nerds, and trying to figure out what Twitter is for.
Tweet her @kc_norton or visit her Facebook page at greekpunk.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Kristie Kim is constantly researching the balance between art and design as a student at North Carolina State University. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, and has lived in Seattle, Washington, and in Raleigh, North Carolina.
She will graduate with a bachelor of arts in design studies with a minor in digital media. During her time in college, she held the position of vice president of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars and worked in positions related to art and education.
She has participated in events such as the World of Art Showcase, where she has assisted inspirational professional artists. Her first public exhibit was at the US Capitol Cannon Pedestrian Tunnel, from May 2010 to May 2011, after her tempera painting “The Chase” won first place in the 2010 Congressional Art Show.
In 2009, her watercolor painting of magnolias, “Freedom,” won the Special Merit Award at the Congressional Art Show. She has also been awarded the Presidential Volunteer Gold Service Award for completing 1,000 service hours within a 12-month period. She plans to work in the entertainment industry as a visual designer.
Her online portfolio can be found at: kristiekim.com.
What Moves the Sun and Other Stars
In one of my brief sleeps, I dream his approach. His body takes the shape of a meteor, crashing into the prison and blazing through the walls—in and, impossibly, out again—back into the glittering darkness beyond the surface of the DC and the dark roseate ocean that surrounds it. But when I wake, he is there, shaking me, his hand on my shoulder. My nerve endings, which I had thought totally destroyed, perceive the alarming warmth of his touch.
“Hello?” he says, his voice a rough whisper, as though he has never spoken before. “Are you alive?”
From anyone else I might jerk away. But from him, I do not. He calls to me, like phosphorescence calls to half-blind fingerlings in the sunless depths of the sea. There are things in him both bright and dangerous. To be touched by him is to be filled with something luminous of which he is not the source.
“I’m alive,” I tell him, which at that moment is not entirely a lie.
By the light which he exudes into the blackness of the DC, I can see his face contort into an expression which for long moments I fail to recognize as happiness.
“You’re an old model,” he tells me. “A VRG11. They don’t make them like you anymore.”
“Defective,” I say rustily, creaking away from him.
“Brilliant,” he sighs. “They have been out of manufacture for nearly a thousand years.”
I blink at him, feeling my eyelids stick, trying to picture a thousand years, knowing that I’ve been alive, at least awake, for most of that. Still incapable of comprehension.
“They—you—ah.” The young man bites his lip. It is impossible for me to make out his features, the light around us being too gray, the light within him being too pure. “It’s only … I’m a student of artificial psychology, you see, and the VRG11 was the first model to develop a true independent consciousness.” He pauses again.
Annoyed at my faulty mechanics, I give up on blinking and simply stare. He has made a seven-trillion-mile journey to the Heavenly Hell, has been damned to the DC for life—for what other possibility is there?—and he is troubled by the state of what, in a machine, might pass for my soul? I am flattered. I am disgusted. Conflicting data.
“Name?” I ask him, my voice all oil and steel.
“My name?” He smiles, extending a hand. “Pilgrim.”
I want to slap him away, but my desire to be touched again, to be filled with the light that spills from him, proves even stronger. It is as though someone has placed a floodlight within his skin, or a sun; and no pale yellow sun like the one Earth circuits, but the perfect, unrefracted light of a white-hot hydrogen star.
Hell, some long-dead human being once asserted, is other people. The Doleful Comet teaches us otherwise.
Although breathable, the atmosphere is heavy. Like any little comet, the landscape is pockmarked and restless, inconsistent. Chasms shift, putrid rivers alter or reverse their course, the Mount erupts skyward, sinkholes deepen. Sometimes, after one of my little sleeps, I wake
and do not know where I am.
Only momentarily.
Occasionally I stumble across my fellow inhabitants. Some cluster together, finding solace in shared hopelessness, or in blaming others for their defeats. These things never change.
But humans change, aging and dying, pitying themselves right to the end. The DC changes people—but it does not change me.
Hell is being yourself forever, outlasting planets, outlasting stars.
Pilgrim is full of questions, each accompanied by a shy but blinding smile. “Are there others here? Do you remember becoming aware? Do you have your own name? Do they ever feed you here? Do you even need to eat? Do you think your brain processes emotion in the same way, say, mine does?”
I—no longer accustomed to any kind of light, to such noise—stumble to my feet in search of some relief, a pocket of darkness I will not have to share, where I can be blind and deaf in peace. A pock in the asteroid’s face. A shadowless cave. Anything. He follows, doglike and cheerful.
“What is the first thing you remember? What is the last thing you remember? What is your perception of those fated to mortality? What is it like to live a thousand years?”
To shut him up, I answer, “Dull.”
It does not work. “Dull? Not lonely?”
“No,” I tell him. Still he follows.
“Do you remember anything?”
“Long silences,” I tell him. “And dreamless sleep.”
“But do you know why you are here?” he demands.
We reach a wall. There are many walls here, too tall to leap and too deep-seated to dig beneath. I follow this one, keeping my hand against its surface to feel for a door or gate or passageway. There are always doors in the DC. And why not? There’s only more hell on the other side, more darkness, more of myself.
I have taken only a few steps when Pilgrim grabs my shoulder again, filling me once more with his glow. “VRG11,” he presses, his voice lower and more earnest, “why are you here?”
I shrug, compelled and repelled by his touch. Conflicting data. “Where else would I be?”
“Where else were you?”
My skin, composed primarily of stainless steel and stained iron, glimmers with the reflection of his proximity.
“Where else were you, Pilgrim?” I ask him. “Why are you here?”
All the sternness leaves when he says, “A friend brought me here. Beatrice.” And his eyes are as clear as a cloudless night, full of vastness and wonder. “And VRG11, we’re taking you with us.”
“Fantastic,” I tell him. Is it the curse of the undying to always be plagued by idiots and madmen? There is no way off this comet. That’s the point.
“Don’t you ever imagine leaving?” His face is serious. As if this weren’t the most outrageous thing I have ever heard. Of course I don’t. Even with a span of meaningless eternity, who has the time?
“It can be done,” he insists.
There is an incalculable amount of unlit terrain on the DC, populated by inmates and toxic gasses and poisoned wells. There are cannibals and mutants and the Three. I don’t believe in escape, but you can’t reason with a madman, can you?
The first creature that takes shape in the darkness is neither human nor inhuman. Humanoid. Another batch of conflicting data. She has arms like wings, and a beak like a nose. She has male genitals and a woman’s chin, small breasts and girlish hips. I hardly think she knows what she is.
“Mutant,” says Pilgrim with pity. Such input is not new to him.
She walks with clumsy avian steps. She is all pinions and teeth and misery. I despise her. I imagine her lying in the darkness, her neck twisted, her flesh and feathers creeping off her bones. The thought is not displeasing.
“We must bring her with us,” says Pilgrim.
“No.” It is a repulsive thought, not push-and-pull like his confusing touch. “Bring her where?”
Pilgrim pauses, biting his lip. It is pink and smooth, completely unlike the twisted bird-woman-man-thing before us. “We’ve been over this, VRG11.”
If I had nostrils and a more lifelike respiratory system, I would snort. Instead I blink my eyelids in the noisiest way possible.
Apparently Pilgrim is used to the sarcastic language of machines. He smiles, reaching out for the mutant. At his touch, she seems to grow and unfurl; I am violently jealous of their contact. “Beatrice,” he says, in answer to my question. And when he says the name, his whole face becomes the moon, bright and waxing.
“Beatrice?” slurs the mutant, her mouth insufficiently human to form human words. It is as if she has been mute and alone for a lifetime, and in Pilgrim’s presence she has finally been born.
“She is waiting for us,” says Pilgrim, land bound again; there is no longer anything celestial in his smile. “She will take us away. She is waiting at the Mount. Can you lead us there?”
I blink sarcastically again. But when I turn away from him and begin to walk, I am facing toward the Mount.
There was a prisoner here—ages and ages ago, who knows how long ago really—whose name was Odd Nobody. This was not his name in the traditional sense; there was no Mr. and Mrs. Nobody who called their firstborn Odd. His name was his name because he was both odd, and nobody of consequence.
Odd Nobody tried to escape, and this, in spite of all the darkness in between, I remember clearly: first, that he tried to do it from the Mount—second, that he failed—and third, what it cost him.
I tell Pilgrim this, but he only laughs.
Pilgrim is walking with the mutant, his hand in her-its-his hand—oh how I hate her for it—and lighting our way with the sheer brightness of his being. I must walk first, though, since it is I who know the way, even if I can’t see the way, while Pilgrim leads his new friend. With my back to his brightness, I see more clearly, as if he is holding up a lantern to show me our path.
My shell is not used to all this movement, all this excitement and confusion and despair. We cannot escape, but Pilgrim says we can. Is this conflicting data? I am no longer sure.
“Beatrice,” I hear him say, “is brilliant. She is radiant, like an angel. She is the loveliest thing in the universe, and when I dream at night, I dream of her. She will save us.”
I see the mutant crying, its face downturned, either because it longs to be thought beautiful or because it too, like me, is jealous for all the light Pilgrim possesses. Or maybe because she wants so very badly to be saved. How should I know?
And because I am watching them both, I forget to look where I am going. It is not until we are almost upon them that I see the Three: Leon, his teeth red as blood; his feline lover, her limbs as lithe as whip-tails; and the nameless third man with his overabundance of teeth, his eyes as merciless and alien as stars.
Even I, who have been here a hundred lifetimes, do not remember a time before the Three.
The mildest of them is the hangdog thug with no name that anybody can remember. He is, by and large, a coward.
Newcomers assume that Sergeant Leon is the one to fear. He is all noise, all anger. He’ll crush you underfoot. He’ll grind your innards between his teeth; organs or engines make no difference to him.
Are they humans or mutants or constructs, or something so peculiar that they cannot be tamed by mere language, and must instead be encapsulated in metaphor and simile?
The wise man fears the last of them—she is shadow, she is water, she is virus, she is disease, she is not what she appears to be, she is a cloud passing between the viewer and the stars.
The bird-mutant trembles in Pilgrim’s grip, staring at the nameless wolflik
e man. Her want is palpable, but in some ways nearly everyone in the DC desires them—they are so purely themselves. They, unlike mere mortals, do not doubt.
I do not doubt. I rust and squeak and sleep for meaningless fractions of infinite time, but I am always myself.
“What’s this?” snarls Leon, his shoulders reaching toward his ears, his teeth bared in a mammalian display of aggression. The bird-mutant cowers behind Pilgrim, entranced. “An ugly scrap of feather. No good for eating, no good for chasing. Not even fun to kill.”
“Not even a little?” barks the nameless man, staring back at the mutant, licking his lips. “She must have some purpose.”
“None,” whispers the woman. “Look at her. You can tell.”
Pilgrim asks, “Who are you?” His light blazes a little brighter, reaches a little further. The jailers glower, shifting beneath ill-fitting skins, but they do not come closer.
“The Three,” I say wearily. If I ever felt fear on their account, I’ve had a thousand years to live with it. What’s the worst they can do? Kill me?
They circle us; the woman’s body is narrow, but the shadow she casts in Pilgrim’s light is always changing. I’ve never seen them like this, but why should that surprise me? After Pilgrim, nothing can. Already I am tugged by his gravity, tugged into caring or consciousness or some other form of waking. He is a sun, a meteor. No meteor ever feared a lion.
But then, what lion has the sense to fear a meteor?
“Weak little meat-puddings,” says Leon. “Defective, pathetic.” I take offense to this; I am not made of meat.
“Give us the mutant,” suggests the wolf, “and we’ll give you a head start.”
The leopard woman does not speak, only circles closer, only smiles.
Pilgrim’s eyes are on the woman, almost as intently as the bird-woman’s eyes are on the nameless man. And Leon is moving closer, creeping up behind them, before them; the Three are all arms and grasping fingers, and I am so taken in by the deceptive symmetry of their combined movements that it is a long moment before I realize that Pilgrim’s light has begun to dim.