Starquest: Dark Suns Rising (Part 3)
Requests have come from more than one quarter to turn the imaginary movie review I recently wrote of a non-existent STAR WARS sequel into a real novel. If good fortune favors the project, and it does well, I will be happy to sell the movie rights, bringing the irony full circle.
As a very premature sneak peek — since the manuscript is not yet written, much less sold, edited, and published — I here give the third installment. The first is here. The second is here.
Chapter 03: Mischief of the Shrine Maiden
Planet Hamal, Galactic Year 7828
1. Dark Dreams, Red Wrath
Lyra Centauri was age eighteen when the nightmares returned. It had been three or four years since the last one. They came suddenly, one night, without warning.
She came awake, her voice hoarse from screaming, her throat dry, shivering with the cold drops of sweat cloaking her body.
Her face was flushed. Her dark hair was wild. Red sparks of psychic light jerked and spurted in her eyes. Little crawling flares of red energy crawled up and down between her fingers like crooked insect legs.
She sat up on her sleeping mat, which rested on a plain wood floor. Each inch floorboard had been diligently scrubbed to a glossy polish, not by a bot, but by her. No automatic lights came on as she sat up. There were none.
There were candles set in mirrored racks to her left and right. At this hour, none were lit, though a hint of beeswax perfume still loitered in the shadowy air.
A beautiful meditation screen, traced with a deceptively simple design of glyphs in gold, stood in the center of the chamber with a biofeedback crystal set slumbering at its foot. A pair of stately urns, in which delicate ferns were growing, stood to either side of the tall screen.
A chest for her clothing, a box for her sandals, a rack to hold her bow and quiver, and a jeweler’s bench for her arrowheads were against the walls. There was no other furnishings in the sparse chamber.
Sliding wall panel hid the doors, or, to be precise, any wall could slide aside and be a door. With all wall panels entirely retracted, the sleeping chambers of the other novice girls were visible, and the whole row took on the aspect of a dormitory. Other wall panels opened onto porches overlooking the inner and outer gardens of the Sanctuary.
Hanging low on the wall was an octagonal aura-glass. This strange amber substance absorbed light; but the Kirlian energy field shed by living things was visible, reflected in the surface. The shelf below the looking glass where ancestral heroes and forebears were supposed to stand was blank: she did not know hers.
From where she knelt she could see the reflection of the ferns in the Kirlian glass. Like the butterflies, this breed was specially sought and bred for its sensitivity to human emotion. In the glass, the delicate leaves were dark and blotchy with sign of distress.
In the air above the Kirlian glass hovered a hoop-shaped gong of non-gravity alloy.
Lyra closed her fiery-red eyes. She folded her hands in a solemn position in her lap, ignoring the sparks still clinging to her fingernails, which stung her thighs. She drew a deep breath, and uttered a calm note of sound from her nose and throat, a lingering syllable, and began to chant.
The gong had been attuned to her: it hummed in response to the pitch of her voice. She breathed again, falling silent. The gong continued a murmuring echo, just on the edge of hearing, a pure sound, for many moments. The voice of the gong soothed her. Lyra now focused her thoughts into a stillness deeper than herself.
A strange, terrible, hidden truth came to her then.
The sensation boiling in her breast was not fear. This was not some nightmare memory of a child’s terror and trauma. It was rage. It was the desire to kill. She wanted the murderer of her parents murdered, and wanted him to die looking her in the eye, so that he knew who slew him and why.
Her training now came to her aid. She did not fight the strangling sensation of anger, but she let her thoughts grow still as a pond which no wind touches.
Calm came in. For a time, she only breathed.
A slight breeze touched her cheek, and moved a strand of hair.
Alarmed, she opened one eye narrowly, so she could see through her lashes while her eyes still appeared closed. Her gaze darted left and right nervously. One of her sliding wall panels had been left open, to let the garden air into the chamber. Any earlier riser walking by might have seen a suspicious glow.
She then jumped to her feet, her embarrassment forgotten. A haunted looked was in her eye. It hardened into a look of determination.
The Empire has put out the sun.
“It was not a natural disaster! It was not a nova. I heard him say it. I heard him!”
But then a little red spark began to appear in her pupil once again, and ruby glints and energy trembled at her fingertips. She took a deep breath once more. Calm returned. The dangerous energy, dangerously visible, faded.
“Shayuri was expelled for less!” she said to herself. “Stay focused, stay alert, stay on target.”
Threw the narrow opening in the wall panel, where a little bit of the garden was visible, she became aware of the twitter of the prayer-thrush and the mock-robin, soft and clear. These were earliest birds to call. At this hour the topiary bushes were but hints of rustling shadows. Sunrise was almost here. Lyra was short on time.
She leaped across the chamber in one graceful motion that was strangely weightless and silent. Levitation was a part of her training she had almost mastered. Not quite. To her, the power of floating seemed better suited to dancing than to sitting motionless in mid-air in the middle of the Meditation Hall, as the Matrons did.
She landed on her knees before the Kirlian mirror. The red energy was no longer seen, but the Kirlian glass reflected the unseen. Her invisible anger was like fire around her brows; it dripped from her hands like blood; her hate was a smoky shadow writhing in her heart and lungs.
Her hand went below the shelf where no ancestral statuettes rested. Her fingers touched an ivory tube, a foot long, capped with pearl knobs.
This held an ancient writing entitled Extant Analects of Extinct Spacefaring Races.
It was a type of scroll called an opuscule. Technically speaking, opuscules were not sacrosanct, not forbidden, but in this case, the sheer antiquity of the Analects required the scroll be treated with utmost respect. Novices were not to read it without supervision. No electronic versions could be made, no robots nor cyborgs with neural appliances were allowed to read it.
Lyra had taken it from locked wing of the library, replacing the scrollcase in it rack with a wooden dowel she had carefully carved and painted as a lookalike.
She brought it out. In the Kirlian mirror, the scrollcase had an aura like a living thing: it gleamed with the sunlight-yellow of serenity, with the rich, deep, metallic patina of venerable and long-honored antiques. The respect with which this scroll had always been handled had seeped into case and fabric, and was visible in the special amber glass reflection.
But the touch of her fingers tainted the aura. In the mirror, it looked like some child with black grease on her fingers had touched it.
She dropped the scrollcase on the shelf, startled. Her eye jumped to the open wall-pane again. She had heard the dawn chorus every morning for the past five years, so she knew the order. The song of the thrush and robin was joined by the chirruping of red-vested wrens, the next bird to stir. That was bad. The first birds had been singing for a while without waking her.
Lyra had only a limited window of time before she, and the other novices, were called to morning rites. The borrowed scroll had to be back in its place before then. The window was shrinking.
But there was no help for it. She had to call upon her training and clear her mind, inwardly as well as outwardly, to regain the calmness expected of a Shrine Maiden. The Matrons in the Sanctuary, and young Templars guarding it (there were no old Templars, obviously), had an uncanny ability to sense any inner disquiet, no matter how well hidden.
Lyra kept a watch on her face in the mirror as she went calmly but quickly through her morning rituals of dress and grooming. It seemed so strange to see that face so clean of dirt, tear-streaks, bruises. It was no longer a child’s face. Her eyes seemed so still, so serene. They were not forever darting nervously back and forth, scanning for police, looking for unwatched knickknacks, measuring the number of paces to the nearest escape exit or hiding hole.
She combed and brushed her hair, forcing herself to make the strokes patient and smooth, humming the slow, solemn notes of the Cleansing Chant as he did so.
For ceremonial dances or rites, a Shrine Maiden might wear a floral hairpiece or diadem set with aura-sensitive crystal. Otherwise, they did not braid or adorn their hair, but wore a simple low ponytail tied back by a white ribbon, or else wrapped in a sleeve of tapa-paper and bound with a red chord.
Lyra tied her hair. She had no other grooming to do. The Matrons said that nail polish, bright lipstick, earrings, wristphones or other accessories made energy flows unwilling to pass threw the Shrine Maiden’s body, and so they were not allowed. Lyra’s extensive collection of switch-blades, gimlet-knives, and easily-concealed shock-needles she had accumulated as a twelve-year-old, when she first came here, had all been locked in a puzzle-box somewhere in the apartment of Dame Nashira, who was headmistress of the academy attached to the Sanctuary here. Those accessories were not allowed even more so.
Lyra took her garb from a lacquered chest, where a first year girl, an aspirant, nightly had cleaned and folded them. (It was a duty girls her age no longer pulled.)
The garb was simple: a wide-sleeved white tunic tucked into a pleated and split-legged skirt of bright red. There were no buttons, hooks, or metal fastenings. The tunic was folded shut and held with neat bowknots, and the split-skirt was tied with a red bow at the back.
Despite herself, the flush of anger released by her nightmare into the bloodstream was still present. Her fingers trembled as she tied the knots of her vesture.
She had heard his voice. For many years, the memory had been buried, forgotten. The nightmare had brought it all back to her.
“I am not crazy,” she said to herself in the mirror. Her voice held icy determination. But the look of herself looking so serious brought an impish smile to her face, and showed her dimples. “For one thing, crazy people talk to themselves!”
But time was up. The chant-thrush was beginning to chirp.
Next would be the willow warbler, greenfinch, then brightfinch, then the chiffchaff. Finally, the dawnlarks would sing, at the same time the gardener’s ill-tempered old rooster would crow. The first ray of sun would pass through the oriel window of the Great Hall, and touch the highest leaf of the gilded and painted icon of the Tree of Enlightenment adorning the altar screen.
She would have to be in the Great Hall, before then, kneeling on the fifth row of woven floormats, unlit shell lamp in one hand, pine bough in the other.
There was time. Barely.
Fortunately, the pants-legs of her Shrine Maiden skirts were blousy and wide enough to hide nearly anything she could tape to her upper thigh. It had taken only a week or two of patient work, late at night, with a stolen carpenter’s needle-ray and wood-glue to install a convincing false bottom.
Hidden in that false bottom, neatly folded in a leather wallet, was her kit. It included a lockout tool called a slip-jack, her skeleton keys, tension wrench, lockpicks and rakes short and long. She had fashioned these from blade scraps during surreptitious and unauthorized visits to the weaponsmith’s workbench in the armory. The needle-nosed pliers and hacksaw blade were merely pilfered. A stethoscope mouth no larger than a coin had been taken from the infirmary. The slot-card and positronic jack needed to hoax smart locks open had come from an unwary squire’s repair-bot. There were no smart locks anywhere in the Sanctuary itself. But some of the outbuildings and tool-sheds had them, including the spaceship hangars.
Next to the leather pouch holding her kit was a spool of carbon-nanotube ribbon thin as piano wire and able to bear her weight.
If things went wrong now, the trouble would be more. Much more.
Lyra thought she should look worried, but the mirror told her that her eyes were shining mischievously. It also told her that, at last, her aura of anger was gone.
But she also heard the note of the willow warbler. Now she would have to rush or take shortcuts. The library tower stood at one end of the East Wing. She could save time by cutting through the boy’s dormitory. Which was also forbidden.
With her kit beneath her blousy red skirt leggings, and with her sandals in her pockets, Lyra inched open her wall panel door, glanced quickly up and down the corridor beyond. It was a spartan reach of white walls, with unadorned roofbeams above and uncarpeted wooden floor below. It was also, as she hoped, empty. She leaped lightly, with hardly a rustle from her skirts, pony tail flying, from one side of the corridor to the other.
A great many of the boards in this corridor had to be replaced after a practical joke Lyra once arranged went badly out of control. The joke involved an agreeable but easily led squire named Medon, who owned a contraband card of fun-bot tap dance routines originally meant for a children’s restaurant run by his uncle; the improperly stored bass drum, bagpipes and other musical instruments of a wandering mountebank who did a one-man band show; and a big-treaded farm-tractor bot named Backhoe smuggled uphill from the local village. That had been four years ago, but the new floorboards in the ancient building still squeaked. But there was a strip of wainscoting, an inch high and an inch wide, running along the base of the wall, which did not squeak.
The most rapid way to pass down the corridor while touching nothing but the wainscoting, Lyra had found, was to do a rapid series of heel-and-toe turns like some mad ballerina, with nose to the wall, then spine, the nose again, as fast as she could flip.
The door to the vestry at the end of the corridor was not locked very seriously. The needle-nosed pliers were thin enough to fit into the crack between door and doorjamb, and wedge it wide enough to admit her slip-jack. This was two-foot long strip made of spring steel, hooked at one end to catch the levers or interconnecting pins directly and avoid the stubborn puzzles of the lock mechanism itself.
She entered and relocked the vestry door behind her.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
