Disquiet Gods (Sun Eater Book 6)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Your ancestors did not worship the Earth until they burned her.

On the mountain, the Quiet had shown them to me. The Watchers. The Monumentals. Those vile gods of night.

Plagues were always falling out of heaven, carried by some poor unfortunate from some far-off world. They ravaged the plebeians mostly, for they had weaker immune systems than those of more exalted blood, and at any rate had no exposure to the animalcules of other worlds. Such a monster had claimed poor Cat when I was just a boy. This was something far worse, a demon hatched in glass cradles by arts black as hell.

I’ve heard it called many names. The Red Sleep. The Gasping Death. The Fleshing Plague. To many of the poorest beneath our stars it is simply the Rot. To the nobiles, it is Lethe’s Sickness. To the scholiasts, the lethovirus. I will call it what it is, what I called it when I discovered it in the Ganelon fortress. Cancer as plague. The bodies of the afflicted quickly developed tumorous growths. New organs formed, or half formed, beside the old. New bone—brittle and spongey—sprouted from joints until the human form was twisted half beyond recognition.

As we reached the foot of the stair, the blossoms all opened their faces to us—as if in greeting—and a twittering as of birdsong filled the air about us both. I did my best to hide my discomfort. The flowers were unnatural, and though they were beautiful, they disquieted me. Flora should not sing as fauna might.

“Better that we be old men, Hadrian,” said Prince Aldia, “so that they might remain children awhile longer.”

We held each other’s gaze a moment. Art and artist. Only the artist blinked, and when he did, it was to blink away fresh-forming tears.

Annaz pulled me closer and, placing his beak near my ear, he whispered—such as he could, “It is for you we have come. We wish to fight for you. For Marlowe.” He released me, and drew back, saying, “Udax slew demons for you. We will slay false gods.”

What I had taken as a boy for bars were only the mountains and forests that verged the green pastures of our home. The men I had thought gaolers, wardens, and rangers. If the Cielcin, then, were wolves, then the Watchers were like plagues. Famines. Death itself.

“Much of the truth has ever been believed myth by most people, and much myth truth.”

Have I said that we live in stories? We do, and so those two coins Oberlin offered me were the very toll price of hell. But which of us was the ferryman? And which the corpse?

If you have drunk of too much wine, Reader, you will perhaps have seen one man become two. I have seen such many a time myself. Know then, that the body of the twinned man—which moments before held so much horror for me—appeared to me as nothing more than the body of an ordinary man, half-mummified and cold, seen with double vision. I laid my hands upon either side of the doubled head, and gently pressed the two together. Four eyes became three. Became two. Two heads became one.

Better he remain director of the dig, and only that. Better he remain in the dark. The light—as I have had uncounted occasions to learn—is forever blinding.

They were dead men—every one—though Death had yet to find them.

“Why do they look like crabs, Abba?” I laughed. “You’ve touched on one of the great questions, girl. Do you know how many lifeforms there are in the galaxy that look like crabs?” She was silent. Ahead of us and on our left, the tether of one of the camp’s balloons swayed, red warning flags tied to its length. We were right above the camp then. “More or less everywhere there’s water, life finds a way to make itself crablike. Even on old Earth, life evolved crab shapes at least four or five different times. As we got out among the stars, we kept finding more of them, even in life not based on the same nucleic acids as you and me. The galaxy is full of imitation crabs! It was only a matter of time before one turned out smart enough to build an empire.”

“Phanamhara Ground Control, this is Spotter N . . . ” I checked the plate on the console, forgetting which of the aircraft we’d commandeered for the day’s adventure. “N7. We’ve found what looks like a skiff crash northwest of the camp. Bearing thirty-eight point two-two south, seventeen point nine-one-eight west. Do you copy?”

The way was straight and broad, as is every road to perdition.

I turned, found Neema standing just inside the door to the hold, doing his best to appear a part of the furniture. “I have dinner with Captain Ghoshal in half an hour.” “In fifteen minutes, domi,” Neema interjected, ever the lord of time.

It is not power that builds empires, that asserts order on the stars. It is vision. Vision and the heroic will to act. Where there is that vision, all else follows. Where it is not, there is decadence, desperation, and decay.

“I am six hundred twenty-two myself, though I was born more than a thousand years ago now . . . ” I looked sadly at the mural of Mars and her sister planet—our mother. “Sometimes I think the galaxy I set out to save doesn’t even exist anymore.” “I know what you mean, Lord Marlowe,” Albé said. “What is that old saying about planting trees though you’ll not live

I snarled at her, saying, “I have seen the Howling Dark that awaits us all hereafter, priest. Your goddess was not there.”

I imagined Watchers then, without number, a legion and horde of formless beasts roiling from the unpastured Dark, taking forms huge and hideous and terrible in majesty—disquiet gods of night, demons without number.

It should not have surprised me, and yet it did. The occasion of my first death had not been met with such suspicion.

I do not think I had ever had occasion to meet one of the Chantry Sentinels before. They were the guardians of Earth, the watchmen who protected the homeworld and system, as well as watched over the graveworlds—the sites they had themselves destroyed. They were mostly seen by the dead.

“That’s Kipling,” I said. “It is,” said he. “You have been learning your poetry since our first meeting, I see.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “We are storming Eden,” he said. “My Eden, so it is fitting that I have brought the devil with me.”

standardization of the alphasyllabary by Artemon. “Grissom was one of their archaenauts, the first sailors,” Harendotes said. I had never heard of him, though I knew the names of Armstrong and of Shepard.

“Pain teaches mercy,” I said. “You suffer so that you understand suffering, so that you do not inflict it without need. Pain makes us human, teaches us to be . . . human.”

Our fear of pain is the foundation of all morality. It is that fear that shapes our world, orders civilization. We pass laws, build walls and fortresses, fight wars and forge empires all to minimize our people’s pain. That is why it is the lowest form of obedience, not because it is basest—as I once answered when asked by Tor Gibson—but because it is foundational. Our experiences of pain teach us the nature of suffering, and so we are moved to minimize that suffering in others. Pain grounds our reality, is the cornerstone of our interactions with the objective world.

To fly in space is to be exposed. There is nothing between you and any observer but distance, but space itself. There is nowhere to hide, and nothing to guard you from the enemy. To fly in space is to be naked before the whole, uncaring universe.