Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

When Gibson spoke, his lips did not move. The actor knows he is on stage. The character knows there is no stage.

It was like dying, I thought, for in fugue the processes of my life were suspended as in formaldehyde, and that was as good as being dead. I was little different than a corpse, or a side of meat in a freezer. I was wrong, of course. It is nothing like dying. Nothing at all.

Do you know how many colonies the Cielcin have razed since we started off on this ridiculous adventure of yours?”

“Thirteen.” Bassander cut me off. “Thirteen,

“If we can secure a peace with even one Cielcin clan, we’ll have changed the face of this war more than any battle has.”

I had written their names on each: Etanitari, Oanatoro, Svatarom, Tanaran.

It was normal, Doctor Okoyo had said, for people to experience visions when they came out of fugue. Something about the way the brain’s sub-cortical structures came back before the heavy apparatus of consciousness. Amygdala. Hypothalamus. The machinery of memory and motivation. Of fear.

They’d evolved another sort of warfare where she came from: detente. An old form of war, and an insane one. The Tavrosi clans each held an arsenal capable of destroying the others, so that any act of violence might destroy their entire confederacy. And it was we who were the mad ones . . .

Jubala smells like coffee tastes: bitter, dark, and unpleasant.

Like Dante, I was thirty-five—the midpoint of life to primordial man. Like Dante, I stood upon the edge of a dark forest, where the true path was lost . . . and here was the wolf, slavering, on the hunt, and ready to drive me into darkness. Where the leopard and the lion were then I did not know.

I read once that our ancestors had evolved whites in their eyes for precisely that reason: that the rest of us might know where the other looked. It was no wonder those humanish creatures with the lying eyes had been stamped out.

The poets say that one’s fears grow less with trial, that we become men without fear if tried enough. I have not found it to be so. Rather, on each occasion we are tested, we become stronger than our fears. It is all we can do. Must do. Lest we perish for our failings.

“Civilization’s on the wane, you know? They say the Imperial Sun is red because it’s grown supergiant. And supergiants burn out. The xenobites burn cities, take millions . . . and here’s a nobleman of the blood of old King William himself, asking after daimons. What a time to be alive.”

“You still don’t seem to understand, though. There are no Extrasolarians. Not the way there’s an Empire. We don’t organize. That’s why I don’t have any masters. No gods or emperors. No hierarchy.”

it is a planet without a sun, and those are not easy to find.

There are few things in the universe that highmatter cannot cut. Adamant, or the long-chain molecules of nanocarbon, or the energy curtains of high-class static fields. Or highmatter itself. Anywhere the atom-fine edge could find a chink—a gap between molecules—it could cut. Not stone, nor steel, nor ablative ceramic could slow a knight’s highmatter sword. It never dulled or broke or wanted oiling.

“Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but you are solitary and abhorred.”

“Are you always like this?” The Painted Man sneered. “Melodramatic? Oh yes,” I said with my customary lopsided grin. “Ask anyone who knows me.”

Regret is stronger than fury, and is comparably immortal.

The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

“It’s all right to be sad,” he said in that serious way of his; all eyebrows. “It’s all right to be angry or sick or scared, or whatever it is you’re feeling. But you can’t let it crush you, all right?”

“Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.

True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

But the ugliness of the world does not fade, and fear and grief are not made less by time. We are only made stronger. We can only float together on their tides, as otters do, hand in hand. Before it ends. Before it has to end.

I think it was Orodes who said the first act of civilization—the moment culture was born—was when those ancient pygmies, our forefathers, held the first funeral. The bright line, he writes, between man and what was before man is drawn by that dignity with which we honor the dead. Man does not leave her dead to rot, but burns or buries or builds, protecting the body and the memory of the fallen. There is civilization: its cornerstone a grave.

We have little control over our ends, and none over what passes beyond them. But if we live well and truly, those who follow on may remember us for our lives and not our deaths.

Better the reassuring fable than the clinical truth. Fables are more real than reality. Such are your stories about me—many of which I began, knowing the power of stories as I do. I could not have made peace at the Battle of Aptucca years later if my legend were not more true than myself. By this fact of human nature and belief, we are made larger than ourselves: some better, some worse, some only more complicated. Thus two and two is made five, and so we grow beyond ourselves.

Man’s inhumanity. What could be more human?

“I know I can’t stop war, Jinan. But if I can make this war just a little bit better, than maybe—maybe—a few good men can stay at home, and maybe we can go home when it’s done. You and I.”

Critics of the oldest stories used to say that men believe women to be goals, prizes to be won or bought. They did not understand. No man could think such a thing and remain a man, for to love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.

They say the ancients believed that one day the universe would contract. That time would run backward and all the world would shrink again to its native form and angels dance on the head of that pin. For a moment, I say it did, for all the worlds beyond our bed and that little room were banished, and all Creation made to house just her. And me.

For what I have done, there is no respite. Even in Death, you would pile scorn upon my grave.

There was a way forward after all. Always forward, always down, and never left or right. We were in the labyrinth again—or

We’re not dealing with people, Hadrian. They’re monsters.”

“They are not people!” Bassander growled. “They’re as good as!” I said. How little I knew.

know this: every thought had by every philosopher and scholiast, every scientist and priest, is framed by the human mind.

Our logic, our reason, and most especially our morality—grounded as it is in the Uncreated Gods of old—have little in common with those creatures evolved on other worlds than Earth.

But the inhuman? No. They are outside our comprehension, our trust and faith. And so Bassander’s zeal was justified.

I did not know this yet, to my shame. And I would suffer for it, and others would suffer for it. And worlds and peoples burn.

Reader, I have seen things you cannot imagine. Things the Cielcin have done. Children—human and Cielcin alike—plated and served at table. I have seen slaves mutilated for the sake of art, partners maimed because it is a mark of status that one be made dependent on another, and the Black Feast to mark the coronation of their dark lord. The banality of that which we might consider monstrous writ casually as a night at the opera. Not because they are evil—though that is also true. But because they are not us.

War is chaos, and between our people and the Cielcin—though I knew it not, then—there could be no peace.

“Obedience out of fear of pain. Obedience out of fear of the other. Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch. Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch. Obedience out of respect for the laws of men and of heaven. Obedience out of piety. Obedience out of compassion. Obedience out of devotion.”

There are two sorts of men. One hears an order from his better and obeys. The other sees order in himself and obeys that. All men obey something, even if it is only themselves.

Strange what the mind abridges, strange what it retains, and stranger still what it invents. Mythologizes.

Rarely does the universe match my capacity for drama. Rarely is not never.

I decided—as youth so often decides—that the ends justified the means . . . that my path was righteous because the place it led was righteous. That calculus has led to darker places than Brevon’s office in human history, and for worse reasons.

All was quiet on the bridge; even our breathing was stilled. Space travel, I’ve often found, is a hushed experience. Not only for the great quiet of the endless Dark, but in the way that quiet oppresses you, impresses you to silence. To stand beneath the bottomless sky and above and among its stars is like standing amidst the pillars of a great cathedral—afraid to speak, lest God may hear. Or devils.

Perhaps the ancient spacefarers were right—perhaps the Chantry was right—perhaps hell was in the deep of space.

Deep truths there may be, but none is deeper than this: Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs. Thus ghosts are real, and we never escape them.

“He has drunk of the Deeps on Apas. The Deeps changed him. Their waters contain a xenobite, an animalcule that changes the blood. Breaks the helix and remakes it. Jari came away changed.”