Fideicide

Fideicide I

In those days, there was a great birth of adventure among the Awoken. Hunters and pioneers sought the shape of the world, sailors charted the skein of rivers and the perimeter of seas, and astronomers plotted the motion of the crowded heavens. Over this age ruled Queen Alis Li, whose work was the creation of agriculture and the preservation of the eutechnology that she deciphered from the Shipspire.

But there remained in the forests many tribes of huntresses who preferred their lightfooted freedom-from-comfort-and-duty to the painstaking surplus of the city. Among these tribes, Mara lived with her brother—whose name had returned as Uldren—and with Osana, their mother. It is said that Osana lived as a negotiator and that her son brought her news from other tribes, for he was a scout and hunter of renown. Mara dwelt alone on a mountaintop.

In the tribes of the forests and the sea, there was the belief that the Awoken had been made out of a friction between contesting forces and that one day this conflict would need to be resolved. These were the Eccaleists who preached that Awoken owed a debt to the cosmos.

In the cities, however, they lived by the Seventh Verdict under their Queen, and they said the Awoken had been created by cosmic gift and carried neither responsibility nor eschaton. These were the Sanguine, who preached that the Awoken were as stable as an atom of carbon.

Now there arose among the Eccaleists a woman out of the eight hundred ninety one who called herself the Diasyrm. She went into the cities, calling out, "I accuse the Queen of deicide!" When she was questioned, she spoke of a foundational crime.

"Alis Li was the first to awaken in this world," the Diasyrm preached. "She set the terms of our existence. We could have been gods free of want or suffering. Instead, Alis Li chose our mortal form. Our Queen is complicit in all the pain we experience! The Queen murdered all our unborn godheads!"

At the thought that the Queen Without Secrets had kept this most appalling secret to herself, the Sanguine cityfolk were deeply troubled. Thus began the Theodicy War.

Fideicide II

"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Alis Li whispers as, far below the Shipspire, the funeral barges on the Lake of Leaves burst up into magnesium-white fire. The voices of the Paladins rise on summer wind, first choral, then the single keening strains of grief-paeans sung by lovers and close friends. They are singing their lost comrades into death. One of the 891 fell today, shot down by a matter laser, a coherent boson weapon: There was almost nothing left to burn. Matter lasers are the kind of appalling maltech weapon Alis thought she'd locked up in the Shipspire's vaults. She'd armed a few of her Paladins with them, just a few—women she couldn't bear to lose…

The thought that one might have defected to the Diasyrm breaks her heart.

"It wasn't supposed to go this way," Alis repeats. She has not had a confidante in nigh on fifty years: There is no one to whom she can show any doubt. "I promise you it wasn't."

"I know," Mara says. The eutechs found her and plucked her from her mountaintop with one of the Shipspire's VTOL aircraft, which Alis had, until the war, only ever used as an ambulance.

"The mission was to carry on the Human journey in a new world." Alis paces the wooden deck that clings to the Shipspire airlock, nearly a kilometer above the lake. "To build a better society, on the principles of equality, knowledge, and peace. I have the charter, Mara. It remembers what I cannot. We were never meant to give up our bodies or shine like stars or—or—" She groans in frustration and clutches the railing. "Or whatever it is that the Diasyrm thinks I denied them."

"She thinks you denied them even the capability to imagine godhood."

Alis looks sharply back at the other woman. "Did you start this, Mara?"

"Nothing has one beginning," Mara says.

"Did she come to you on your mountaintop and ask you what I did? Did you answer her? Is that why she's so convinced I," she swallows against the bitter taste of her enemy's words, "enslaved her in mere Humanity?"

"I didn't have to tell her." Mara's white hair stirs in the hot wind. A herd of black horses crosses the northern horizon, all born of Shipspire's wombs: chased by a long-legged huntress and her collie. "You don't keep enough secrets, your Majesty. The Diasyrm might have opened any one of your texts and read the story you tell. "We were born when a great ship fell into a pearl of shattered space. I awoke first, and in my awakening I collapsed the potential of the void into a form I understood…" Who can read that truth and not hear arrogance?"

Alis thought Mara might say that. Alis also thought Mara might try to push her off the balcony, but she now knows that was a petty fear. Mara is not the Diasyrm: Mara knows the unthinkable value of even a single Awoken life.

"Why do you love lies so much?" she asks Mara.

"Not lies." The pale radiance of Mara's eyes; the flush of violet stain around them. "Secrets. Even if everyone shared a single truth, all our minds would produce different versions of the truth. We speak these subtruths, and like flowers of different seed, the subtruths compete for the light of our attention. In time, only the fiercest and most provocative strains remain. They are not always the truest. Better to keep secrets, your Majesty. Better to tend a great mystery, and so starve the flowers before they can grow. That is how I would be Queen."

Below, the Lake of Leaves shimmers in the crater carved by Shipspire's mushroom prow. One by one, the funeral boats are going out.

"I want to end this war," Alis Li tells the second Awoken. "I want to negotiate peace. I need your mother's help. What would you ask in exchange?"

Mara smiles graciously and bows her head. "Nothing but a future boon."

Fideicide III

To end a world with a shot or pin eternity on a blade; to see your sisters lost to rot and their undone works decayed—the death of an immortal wastes the infinite potential of all they might become. An immortal's grief and murder-guilt, left untended, will never fade. Thus it became known to those who fought in the Theodicy War that they had committed an incomparable evil. However, they could not confront their own responsibility, so they rose up in wrath against those who had given them cause, whether by caging them in flesh bodies or by drawing blood over grievance. The war continued by spear and bow, by knife and scalpel, by old machine and new invention. Ever did the Diasyrm's faithful call for the unawaring of Queen Alis Li.

Now there entered into the Diasyrm's camp Osana, mother of Mara, famed for her skill in negotiating contested land. She had come with her son Uldren, who could win a place in any camp for his beauty and for the regal crow-eagle that alighted on his shoulder.

"I come from Mara," said Osana, "whose heart has frozen in her chest. If you will end the killing, she will tell you any secret that you desire."

For his part, Uldren went among the Diasyrm's warriors and spread ill tidings of Mara's knowledge, saying, "Mara remembers how the Queen led us here out of chaos and saved us from the twin blindness of darkness and light. Mara knows what the Queen keeps secret. Mara has seen the strife in our souls, the clash from which we were made. We could not ever have been gods with this flaw in us! Rather, we were made from this schism. For as all life is born from energy gradient, as life in the World Before was born from the gradient between hot proton-rich ventwater and cold seawater, we were born of the shadowline at the edge of Light and Dark. We are tremors in that fault. Forever will that schism lead us."

Hearing this new heresy, the Eccaleists were seized with rapture and scattered to the points of the compass, telling all they met, "We are the yield of a mighty engine! We could never have been gods! Like diamonds, we were crushed into being. Like diamonds, we hold flaws."

Meanwhile Osana spoke to the Diasyrm, who was also heartsick from the killing, and who longed to withdraw from the world and seek transcendence within. "There is no weregild for the murder of an immortal," Osana counseled her. "You must become a teacher or a midwife and devote yourself to the enrichment of new lives."

But the Diasyrm craved secret knowledge, and she sought Mara upon the mountaintop. Here, she vanished. If she was ever known again, it was not by the name Diasyrm.

When there was peace, Queen Li ruled the Awoken for a time; however, the guilt of the war lay heavy upon her, and after an age of peace and progress, she abdicated to a new Queen.