Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Lastly, they made a big one together, rotating in opposite directions and bumping together where the circle closed upon itself.

What this one for? Arrou asked as the dust settled.

New friends, Kitrika said coyly.

Karr stepped up to the iris-portal. He turned back, looking around, but no one was there besides Tlalok and the Judges. Jenette was watching, hiding in a copse of distant jungle plants, but she did not wave or otherwise give away her position. She hated drawn-out good-byes. Squaring his shoulders, Karr stepped into his ship and out of her life.

PART SEVEN:

BALANCE

LVI

When wind blows through scattered farfalla grasses, they do not hold its whispers after it has gone. When wild clouds dance over ocean, the water does not retain shadows after clouds have passed. So too our hearts must be full only when an event occurs and rest, void, when the matter ends.

? Feral Wisdom

Prime Consul Jenette Tesla stepped out of the heavy lifter's passenger module and drew an apprehensive breath of night air. She felt like a different person.

Twenty years of hard choices had done it.

How many of those choices had been good? More than half, she hoped.... She moved to the side railing, gripping its cool ceramite. Certainly rebuilding the heavy lifter counted as one of the good choices; and then using it to recover the robotic factory from the remains of Coffin Island. Those, in turn had lead to the glittering sprawl of streetglobes, hab complexes, and industrial nodes that the lifter now flew over.

After the escape of the Burning Heart, there had been less than three thousand human colonists. Now, two decades later, there were more than twenty thousand, co-mingled with countless Khafra, living and working symbiotically. There were a few individualistic humans and Ferals who refused to participate, but that was their choice? and everyone lived with the consequence of their choice, as Jenette knew all too well.

Was decision possible without regret, she wondered?

A pneumatic door shushed open. Footfalls approached. Jenette caught the reflection of radiant words in the lifter's handrail.

There is always

Time to reconsider

Right up to

The very end, four voices flashed.

Jenette turned to face four bipeds, Kayli, Shona, Soren, and Gall Hedren. They were Pact humans; their hair had fallen out and their follicles turned into glowbuds. And they were special Pact-humans.

These quadruplets, who had cemented the peace between humans and Khafra, were also heirs to the wisdom of Balance, trained by the four Khafra Judges whom Jenette had come to know so well. Where the old Judges had blocked their earpits to block out the impure verbal language of secrets, one each of the four Pact-human Judges blocked a different sense: sight, sound, taste, or smell. That way at least one of their number was always immune to an imBalancing influence, no matter what sense it originated from;

they also meditated upon the voids caused by the loss of those senses, hoping to become wise.

The old Judges were gone. A very old Tlalok had dispatched these Pact humans, their successors, to serve as witness for him this night when the air felt expectant, as if awaiting the coming of an electrical storm. But the only storm was within Jenette.

Jenette said to them, "Changing one's mind is a woman's prerogative." Kayli and Shona smiled, faintly.

"And a Prime Consul's," Jenette continued. "But I will not change mine tonight. I will make my choice.

The only unknown is how it will be received."

All four Pact-human Judges nodded and tallied their beads.

In many ways, Jenette reflected, New Ascension humans were becoming more Khafra than the Khafra were becoming human. Two-thirds of the newest human generation had made Pact. The rest survived on fugue and had not made the mutation, but even they cold not avoid the alien influence around them. Within the next generation, New Ascension science and technology would be predominantly human, as it was now, but the culture... that would be something altogether different. A fusion of human, Pact-human, and Khafra. It was the fourth and final prophesied gift: the Gift of Gamut. The future that grew out of it would be a just future, Jenette knew. Balanced. Better. Jenette had fought for it at every opportunity.

But, after this night, would she have a part to play in it?

Jenette's hand went to a breast pocket, feeling through the fabric to a vial secreted within. It held one-half of the answer to her question. The lifter's destination held the other. Apart of Jenette feared to reach that destination; Kayli, Shona, Soren, and Gall were not the only ones who had changed.

What would he think of what she had become?

Time passed, brooding. Settled areas dropped behind. The continent grew dark beneath the lifter as it plunged toward the heart of Gnosis. That heart appeared, lit by four spectral crescent moons in the sky, a great somber mass of bone and hide, pallid and undead looking, rising from the wild preserves surrounding it. At its foot, was a single, tiny mourner.

Jenette's heart leapt into her throat. The reports were true!

The lifter set down. Automated boarding stairs unfolded.

Before she could change her mind, Jenette climbed to the ground. She adjusted her close-fitting burgundy jumpsuit, which she had picked out especially for this night, and walked the fifty paces to the mourning figure. Its head shifted at the patter of her approaching boots.

"Hello," said a voice from long ago.

The sound swept Jenette into the past; into a tumultuous time, a formative time, perhaps a best-of-times. Many of the twists and turns of her life were anchored in that brief period. She would have liked to savor the reverie, but all too quick, she was back firmly in the present, staring at the white-uniformed back. Please don't turn around. Don't look. Jenette resisted the urge to flee.

She cleared her throat. "I heard a rumor you might be here."

"I have always been here...."

For twenty years Jenette and all non-Pact humans had depended on the fugueship, every six months

making a pilgrimage to breathe fugue- thick air in chambers just inside its hull, to fall into fugue- coma and then be carried back out by Khafra. Long Reach had always been there to keep them alive. And Pilot Lindal Karr had always been there, too. No one saw him, even the slowtime Khafra, but they knew he was there. Jenette felt it keenly at each visit, so near and yet so far. But now that was changing. The vast cosmosaurus planetos was still, its heartbeats quieted.

Long Reach was dead.

Karr's head hung low. A Gattler lay on the turf beside him, its life-prolonging barrels and spheres untouched.

"No more tricks," he said. "No more cheats. The suffering ends here."

Age.

Great age.

Many feelings,

More sweet than bitter,

It feels as it slips away.

The new parts of itself are long gone,

To float and fly in diamonds of light,

As it once did.

As is right.

It is weary, so weary.

There is pain,

As ending settles upon it.

It has already ended, it senses, long ago.

It is just catching up.

It is not afraid.

The tiny good has not gone.

The tiny good makes the emptiness less.

But the tiny good does not make the hurting less.

Soon, it hopes, the pain will go.

Soon the all-pressing-down weight will go.