Icarus Beach

How far can our culture’s obsession with “extremes” go?

As Kazo plummeted toward the heart of the doomed star, she thought of what Apilak had told her:

Love, Apilak had said, is no more eternal than the stars. It may burn slow and steady for a long time and then gradually shrink away, or it may burn bright and hot for a brief period, only to end spectacularly.

Apilak laughed. Of course! And then Apilak added softly, But those are cynical words. We live in the light of ephemeral suns, Kazo. We all need that light.

In the dark of her cabin, when Majnu had touched her, Kazo had felt the searing heat of desire; the dark swirled around their bodies, but inside, beneath her skin, in her lungs and her thighs and her head, heat and light roared and filled her.

They met shortly before the supernova, in preparation for the rare tarindhu celebration of rebirth. Once or twice a century, when a massive star ripens to death, a few hundred thousand of the galaxy’s most devoted, superrich tarindhus gather to witness the explosion that destroys the star while simultaneously reseeding the starlanes with heavy elements. Of those devotees, maybe a thousand will descend into the heart of the star and ride the shockwave. A third perish, the most honored of deaths. And to survive—survival heralds the rise of a family’s fortunes, both material and spiritual.

Although she had never been through a supernova, Nagaan Kazo had had many adventures in her young life. The Nagaan family—Kazo, her older sister Kumko, and their mother Haisho—worked as guides aboard the starcraft Umialik, hired by the superrich to tour extreme environments of the galaxy.

Apilak, the owner and captain of the Umialik, was a genius at spinning knotted anomalies into brane-shifted blisters, best in all the galaxy. She never lacked customers.

When word spread that the star Maishaitan was nearly ripe, Apilak put the services of her ship out to bid. She won a contract with old Samraatju Rajraan, to carry him and his third brood of children to the supernova. The Samraatju owned a flock of moons that manufactured knotted anomalies. Apilak’s price: sufficient knotted anomalies to fling the Umialik across the galaxy and back a hundred times.

They were to collect the Samraatju brood on Kitna Two, at a seaside town at low latitude. The air was thick and hot, the sky tinged toward the color of a yellow fruit above a steely sea. Kazo begged to go swimming.

Haisho looked at her for a while, silent. Kazo thought of her mother as a bar of old iron, unbending, the surface scuffed but unreadable. At last Haisho nodded. “Come immediately when I signal.” And off Haisho went, followed by her other daughter. Walking away Kumko looked back over her shoulder, glanced right and left and made a sour face at Kazo. Kazo stuck her tongue out at Kumko, then ran down the lane to the beach. She kicked off her sandals as she crossed the hot sand. At the water’s edge, where sea foam shivered in a slight wind, she pulled off her tunic and pants and splashed naked into the waves. Salt water filled her mouth. She spit it out and dove down deep.

Kazo loved swimming in the cool silent world beneath the surface. It was calm and peaceful, like the space between stars, but more comforting. Kumko was afraid of the water, afraid of drowning, although she regularly did far more dangerous things in space. Haisho had no use for the sea, for it could give neither advantage to the family nor enlightenment and release from the burdens of this plane. Kazo disagreed: swimming beneath the waves was the closest she felt to detachment, but Haisho said it was an illusion and dangerous for its feigned peace. “You cannot stay there forever. You must always come up for air. What kind of peace is that?”

“I’ll graft gills,” Kazo shot back, but she did not have them yet, so she swam up to the silver mirror of the surface. Salt water streamed down her face as she gasped air.

When she waded back ashore, squeezing water from her hair, she noticed a boy sitting beneath a lone tree on the beach. He was lean and dark, darker than Kazo even, wearing only short pants and sandals. In the meager shade of the tree he cradled a bookslate and did not seem to notice her.

Kazo bundled her tunic and pants under her arm and walked toward the boy. He was only a little younger than her, and beautiful, with long black hair that flowed over his narrow shoulders and down his chest. Around his neck he had a pendant, the wheel of stars of a tarindhu. She stopped before him, as the hot sun dried the last drops of water from her skin, but still he kept his head bowed. “Samraatju?” she asked.

Now he looked up, shielding his eyes with one hand, and nodded. “Samraatju Majnu.” He glanced at her bracelet, with the wheel of swords of the taruddhist. “You?”

Kazo laughed in surprise. “The last supernova was seventy years ago. My mother went through it, in her youth. She’ll teach you.”

But now Majnu was looking down the beach, where three figures distorted by the heat walked toward them. “My brother and sisters,” he murmured. “Best get dressed or Gojraan will make a nasty remark. He probably will anyway.”

As Kazo slipped on her clothes, the figures trudged across the sand, morphing from wavering black sticks into solid human forms. The man in a linen tunic and shorts was heavyset, with a pale, milky face, a black mustache, and a black scowl. Majnu’s sisters were dark and slender like him, one tall and one petite. The shorter girl broke away from the others and slid into the sand next to Majnu. “Hi,” she said cheerfully. She looked about Kazo’s age. “I’m Kushri.”

The other two looked much older than Majnu. The tall sister studiously avoided looking at Kazo, while the brother, who also wore a tarindhu wheel-of-stars pendant, stared coldly at Kazo. Kazo turned and looked out at the water, wishing she were in the peace beneath the waves.

“Probably about supernovas and singleton blisters,” said the brother. “Reading about them won’t help you, not this time.”

“Idiot. You’ll need more than cortex memories, conscious memories. You’ll need kinesthetic memories, too, body memories.”

“We’ll see who survives.” Gojraan kicked at the sand with his foot. “It’s hot out here. I’m thirsty.” He looked directly at Kazo. “Get us some juices.”

Kushri rolled her eyes and said to Kazo, “Forgive my brother, he doesn’t pretend to have manners when Father is not around. He doesn’t care about the supernova, except that Father wants us to go.” She leaned forward. “He doesn’t know whether this pilgrimage means Father values us highly or not at all. What do you think, Sundshri?” The other sister said nothing, her face hard and cold as a block of ice. Kushri laughed. “Well, I don’t care. I’m looking forward to it, and I think Majnu is, too.”

He nodded, his face very serious. “Yes, of course. When do we start practicing?”

Kazo brushed sand from one foot, wiggled her sandal back, then looked up at the sun in the sky. “Tomorrow.”

“The cosmos inhabited by humans and stars,” began Haisho’s lecture aboard the Umialik, “is but a thin slice of all that is, a brane tucked between tiers of a universe richer than we can see. Humans move, breathe, love, and die in three spatial dimensions (and drift inexorably along the current of Time), but there are more dimensions, uncountable dimensions. Most are knotted tighter than the waistband of an electron, but a handful extend the width of a hair, and three, attask, marruk, and pingayuk, stretch out to infinity. Back in the start of history it took humans hundreds of years to get this story right. . . .”

“There are an uncountable number of forces, but only four are strong enough over any distance to make a difference in human life. Of those four, three transmit exclusively across the taut surface of the brane. The last, Old Man Gravity, is not really a force at all, at least not like the others, and he can reach beyond the surface of the brane; this is gravity’s power but also, fortunately, the cause of his weakness. . . .”

“But I know all this already,” Gojraan said in a loud voice. “It’s the same principles as star-drive. Is boring us supposed to help?”

Haisho stopped. Silence draped across the room, then tightened. Gojraan crossed his arms in front of her chest. Finally Sundshri said, “Why not let Nagaan finish? After all, Father paid her an enormous sum to teach us. He would be disappointed if we were . . . impolite to her.” She turned and gave a shallow bow to Haisho, who bowed deeply in return. After a long silence Haisho continued.

“The decay of a knotted anomaly displaces a pocket or blister of the brane off into one of the extranormal dimensions. To drive between the stars one must cast off into the deep void of attask or one of the other Great Dimensions, where one slides from star to star like a child down a snowy hill. . . .” For the task of tourism in the more dangerous corners of the cosmos, Haisho explained, and in particular this pilgrimage, however, the brane blister is shifted ever so slightly into one of the Lesser Dimensions, less than the thickness of an insect’s wing. Shifted just far enough that inside the calm of the blister the densest matter and the fiercest fires of the normal universe, even the implosion of a supernova, are but ghostly shadows.

Although a brane blister can pass through the dense material of a ship, Haisho told the Samraatju siblings, and even through the impossibly hot and dense matter at the core of a star as if it were not there, in compensation the weak nuclear force is stronger and in fact one interacts mostly with neutrinos on the normal brane.

“You will sail on neutrino winds. With practice you can gain considerable control. The brane-shifted blisters Captain Apilak spins out are spheroidal, with an oblate deformation. They are not rigid, but sensitive to the electrostatic field of your body. You control the blister through your body: by stretching out you increase the oblateness and thus the area of the blister, catching the local neutrino flux. . . .”

Haisho explained how one must not move too violently within the blister. A brane blister can resist any force from the normal brane. But from the interior the blister is surprisingly fragile. Quick or abrupt motion can start an instability that will grow, ripples which will tear apart the blister, “and you do not want that to happen deep inside a supernova,” Haisho said, a grim iron smile fixed upon her face. “This is a supreme test of your concentration and control. At the supernova you will be awake for almost five weeks and in constant control, and at the moment of implosion you must remain calm, dispassionate, or else you will die with the star.”

She also warned them that although brane-shifted blisters pass easily through ordinary matter, they are not invulnerable to each other. They can even collide and set off instabilities. “So watch the beacons attached to each of you—it serves as both communication and tracking. Do not turn off your beacon.”

When the lectures were over Haisho led them through the first exercises, based very much upon ta-ichi meditative dance, moving limbs slowly in the microgravity of the drifting ship. To Kazo’s surprise, Gojraan picked it up quickly.

The younger sister, Kushri, was flailing much too fast. Kazo drifted over to her, caught her wrists, and moved her arms through the exercise. Kushri said nothing, closed her eyes, and then moved her arms and legs slower. Then she turned to her brother Majnu, who had been watching her with his dark, intense eyes.

Majnu nodded and began the cycle of movements. “I’m not very graceful,” he murmured. “Gojraan spends all his time in the fighting arts, that’s why he picks it up quickly.”

Kazo watched him. “Not bad,” Kazo said, “but it’s flat, which means you might let down your guard. You must clear your mind, be calm—I don’t care about the state of your soul, but if you don’t, disaster follows. I say this, and I don’t even like to meditate.”

“Better, but don’t do it for praise. It must feel like your hand is following a grooved path, a geodesic. It must feel like the most natural thing in the world.”

Pearls of perspiration appeared on Majnu’s forehead, despite the slight chill in the air. “How does anyone survive?” he asked.

“Most tourists, pilgrims in this case, have an electrostatic generator strapped to their waist that expands and contracts the blister.”

“Because then you would be just a piece of meat trapped inside a blister. You are a human being, in control of your destiny. Anyway, it’s the oblateness. Apilak is one of the few skilled enough to produce oblate blisters. Most are spherical and can only expand larger or smaller, with very little control: you can only rise or fall. With Apilak’s you can pitch and yaw and actually soar and sail. It’s fun.” Kazo smiled and Majnu smiled back.

“Good, because tomorrow you learn to damp out instabilities. That’s harder.” When Majnu’s eyes widened, showing white against his dark skin, she added, “And necessary for your survival.”

They practiced for three days as the Umialik slid inward toward the yellow white star Kitna. The night before their first trial run, Kazo returned to her private cabin. For the moment she was glad to be away from people, away from everyone. Gojraan had been particularly insufferable, insisting he need not practice anymore. “Your father will be displeased with us if you should die on a practice flight,” Haisho had said quietly.

“Yes, yes, that’ll be too bad for you, won’t it?” said Gojraan. “He’ll probably find a way to banish you to the most impoverished, crowded, stinking planet there is. You should pray your little kak prayers that I don’t die.” His sisters just looked away.

The cabin door closed behind Kazo. The room was silent and dark, and though she felt a strange twist of loneliness in her gut, she kept it unlit. Her mother would have preferred the three of them to share a single cabin. Haisho seemed to think lack of privacy built moral character and family solidarity, and she told stories of her own childhood, growing up in a tiny apartment with her uncle’s crowded family on Saruna—exactly the kind of world Gojraan had threatened them with. Haisho openly despaired of the fragmentation of the family, but on this trip the Umialik was nearly empty, and Kazo and Kumko simply moved into empty cabins.

Still, as Kazo lay down on her bunk, simultaneously exhausted and too upset to sleep, she would have liked to talk with her sister, or even her mother. Or maybe Apilak. The ship’s captain was busy preparing for the first flight, but disembodied, she never tired, was always patient and thoughtful.

Kazo had sat up, readying herself to call Apilak, when her door quietly chimed. She frowned. It wasn’t Haisho or Kumko’s chime. It had to be one of the Samraatju. She tensed. Gojraan, wanting to rape her?

Kazo hesitated for a moment. Majnu was still a Samraatju. He might still have come to rape her. Sometimes you had to be most careful with the quiet ones.

But Apilak had surveillance programs, and Kazo didn’t think Majnu sufficiently skilled to overwhelm them. So she let the cabin door slide open. “Yes?”

Majnu stood in the doorway, a slice of shadow. He looked down and away from her, his loose hair falling on either side of his face like a curtain of night. He stood there without speaking, so long that Kazo was about to order the door shut. At that moment he murmured, “I’m not ready.”

Majnu lifted his head and glanced up and down the corridor, glanced up above. “I’m not ready for tomorrow. I need more practice.”

Kazo started to roll her eyes at this transparent excuse when Majnu shifted and light fell on his face, illuminating his sorrow and worry. “Oh, all right,” she sighed. “Shall we go to the exercise room?”

Kazo snorted. “I doubt that. Apilak has probably already crippled them. She doesn’t like spies running through her ship.”

Kazo went on: “And you should know, her own surveillance subprogram keeps a close eye on me. In case you have any ideas.”

She went to the back of her cabin, felt around for her exercise tunic, and in the dark quickly dressed. Majnu stayed at the doorway, outlined by the corridor light. “I don’t have any ideas, I promise.”

“Promise all you want, but I have dealt with the superrich for years. You think you hire us, you hire our bodies for whatever you want.”

“What, has Gojraan propositioned you? You should know, the last time he propositioned a hire-servant, er, Father threatened to castrate him and not regenerate his testicles for ten years.” Kazo laughed at the image. Majnu continued: “So don’t let him bully you.”

She walked into the corridor, blinked in the light. “I don’t let anyone bully me.” They walked in silence for a while. The ship was quiet: everyone, except Apilak, asleep. Kazo said, “You don’t have to be afraid. At least not tomorrow. It’s not very dangerous, if you don’t panic.”

Majnu thought on this for a while. “I think, if we are at least acceptable, he does not think much upon us. Only if one of us, usually Gojraan, acts badly, which reflects badly upon him, does he care. I don’t think I could do anything well enough for him to be impressed.”

They arrived at the exercise room. “I don’t know.” He turned and looked at her. His eyes were the color of darkest tea, just a thin rim of white around the irises. “Do you always know the reasons in your heart?”

She smiled and went through the exercises with him. He did much better without his family. After two hours Kazo was impressed with Majnu’s determination. Perspiration pooled on his brow from the effort.

“Stay relaxed tomorrow,” she said. “You’ll be in a closed blister, you don’t want to overheat.”

He smiled shyly. “Hard to imagine not overheating, skimming just beneath the surface of a sun.”

Kazo felt a drop of sweat on her own face. She grabbed a loose towel and wiped her face and then, upon a sudden impulse, reached over and gently dabbed at Majnu’s face. The tip of her fingers grazed his moist skin, and her heart suddenly boomed in her chest. She was taken aback at her own boldness, touching without permission, without need, the son of such a powerful house. But he just closed his eyes, his lips curled slightly upward. “You’ll do fine,” she said quietly, softly, against the loud bang of her own pulse in her ears. “I’ll be with you tomorrow.”

In the ghostly realm of brane blisters the star was a pale glowing flux of neutrinos, while each brane blister appeared as a faint shadow and the bright neutrino beacon that doubled as a comm link. Kazo kept a close eye on Majnu’s blister, and when she saw a ripple of an instability she coached him through stabilization.

It was a short maiden flight for the inexperienced group. The hardest part came at the end, as retrieval of brane blisters is much harder than deployment. Ironically it was not Majnu who had difficulty—he correctly destabilized the blister on cue and appeared in an eye blink inside the Umialik’s equipment hold—but Kushri. After nearly an hour of trying, she finally tumbled into the normal brane, wan and exhausted. The Umialik began to accelerate away from the star, and every one in the central hold gently fell to the wall under the light gravity.

As they trooped out of the equipment hold, Majnu turned and faced Kazo. “Thank you,” he said softly.

He shook his head so that his black hair waved from side to side, and he bowed to her. Then he stood and looked her full in the face with his deep brown eyes. Kazo blushed, even as he turned away and walked quickly after his sister.

Kazo went back to her cabin. Her stomach tumbled round and round: the aftereffect of the brane blister, but more. She kept seeing Majnu’s face, the slight curl of a smile on his lips, his eyes like coals aflame.

For three more weeks they practiced at Kitna, dipping deeper and deeper. Kazo marveled at the expense of so many knotted anomalies.

The practice was needed, especially by Majnu. On longer excursions he got tired and had difficulty focusing. Kazo marveled that Gojraan, who on the normal brane seemed so easily bored, had little difficulty; a shame, as Kazo secretly hoped he would have an accident, never mind the consequences.

In the third week they went all the way through the star and out the other side. Kazo kept a close watch on Majnu, staying less than half a kilometer away from him as they descended deeper and deeper into the star, the neutrino flux grower brighter and brighter. Gojraan looped around them, crying out, Look, Majnu and his nanny! Majnu and his nanny! Did she bring milk for you to suckle?

Reluctantly Kazo broke away. Far away, against the dawn-bright shine of neutrinos, she saw Gojraan’s beacon. With a sigh she tucked her limbs in and plunged toward them. Gojraan was looping up and down rapidly, making himself as small as possible and hurtling downward, then spreading wide his arms and legs and abruptly sailing up.

When Kazo got close, he looped up and corkscrewed around and past her. Be a show-off, she thought to herself. Be a show-off and kill yourself.

Gojraan wheeled around and rocketed past Kazo again, his beacon flickering rapidly, transmitting a whooping stream of high-spirited yells. She pulled her limbs in tight and dropped out of the way just in time. A collision between brane blisters at high relative velocity can set up instabilities dangerously difficult to damp out.

They didn’t have any more trouble until they had passed through the core and were on their way out.

Around the twentieth hour of the excursion Majnu began to slip farther and farther behind. Despite the drugs they all received to keep alert, exhaustion made it difficult for him to keep aligned. I’ll coach him, Kumko murmured to Kazo, and she dove down and gently spiraled around Majnu, coaxing and encouraging him.

The rest of us will ascend on schedule, said Haisho. Kazo bit her lip and floated upward, but she kept glancing down. Majnu and Kumko fell farther and farther behind: ten kilometers, twenty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred, until she could barely make out the bright specks of their beacons. Kumko had turned down her beacon so that no one could listen in to her coaching, but Majnu’s transmissions were clear for all to receive.

I can’t, I can’t, cried Majnu. Presumably Kumko said something in return, but Majnu called out, I’m falling, I’m falling. Kazo! Please help me, Kazo!

Kazo’s head jerked around and she looked down into the dull haze of the neutrino flux, saw the flickering dot of light that was Majnu’s beacon, calling her name, pricking her heart. Her body tensed, but her mother’s voice cut in sharply: Leave it to Kumko. She can deal with him. We have the others to watch.

Kazo considered defying her, but Haisho was right. Kumko was a better coach, and too many people would only make Majnu more nervous.

Kumko and Majnu rendezvoused with the Umialik five hours later than the others, and when Majnu popped back onto the normal brane he was pale and shaking. As they all walked out of the hold, Gojraan said mockingly, “Kazo! Kazo! I’m dying! Help me, Kazo!” He looked up at her, a smirk on his face.

Gojraan looked stunned. His siblings stared at Kazo. Everyone was frozen, except for Haisho, who grabbed Kazo’s arm and hauled her to one side, away from the other. Haisho’s iron-block face loomed in Kazo’s vision, like an eclipsing moon.

“Kazo, I say this for your own good. Apologize immediately. Let him receive discipline from his father—not you.”

Haisho’s black eyes fixed on Kazo. Her voice was cold. “Listen to me. I know Samraatju Rajraan. He will discipline his son for misbehavior. But he will also visit his wrath upon someone who assaults the flesh of his flesh. He is super-rich . . . and he can make terrible things happen. Terrible things to your flesh. I would be unable to protect you. The contract, Kazo, I have told you to read the contract. Do not touch the flesh of his flesh, in any way. Now apologize. Before it goes further.”

Haisho loosened her grip on Kazo’s arm and Kazo shook free. She turned back and looked at the Samraatju siblings, who were all still staring at her, even Majnu.

With a sick lump in her stomach, Kazo walked over to Gojraan, knelt on the floor, and bowed, saying, “I was wrong to strike you. Please accept my apology.”

With her forehead resting on the floor, she felt movement nearby, and for a moment thought that Gojraan was going to kick her. But Sundshri’s sharp voice cut through: “Gojraan!” And then: “He accepts your apology.”

He fell silent. Kazo stayed bowed, felt a breeze as Gojraan and the others walked away.

Kazo did not leave her cabin for an entire day. Her body and mind were so knotted she could not sleep. The air seemed hot and thick as stew; she lay naked on her bunk in a dreamless daze. She did not answer the comm link, did not respond to knocks on the door. “Apilak!” she shouted. “I know you’re listening! Tell them I’m . . . I’m not coming out.”

Then she did sleep, and when she awoke she sat suddenly upright on her bunk, the salt of her perspiration crusted on her skin, but her body and mind felt cool and alive. She heard a soft tap-tap at her door and she opened it, cursing herself even as she did so (she was naked), and feeling a thrill of terror, for it could be anyone, even Gojraan—and for an instant she thought standing against the bright corridor light was the broad outline of the elder brother. But then the silhouette in her vision shrank.

“Majnu,” she whispered. She took a step back into her dark, cramped cabin, grabbed at a blanket on her bunk. He waited at the threshold to her cabin, saying nothing, not even looking at her nakedness. She gripped the blanket. “Majnu?”

At last his pink tongue licked around his mouth and he said, in a soft croak, “There are so many things I would say, but I can’t find the words.”

Slowly she put the blanket down on the bunk, went and drew him inside, closing the cabin door behind him. She put her hand on the soft skin beneath Majnu’s chin and lifted his head so that his eyes met hers. She told him, “Apilak says the universe began as a word, and of course she so believes, because she is just words.”

“I believe almost everything Apilak says, but I think words are not enough.”

“Because we can do so much more with our mouths than speak,” she said, adding, “and here is the proof,” and she put her mouth on his, and it tasted like sweet wine, and his breath felt like a hot wind that falls from a high desert, and the darkness swam around them like a warm sea, and they both drowned in each other’s bodies, that night, and the next, and the next.

He was gentle, much gentler than any of his siblings, even his youngest sister Kushri, which continually surprised Kazo: she expected him to be spoiled and self-indulgent. In her experience even the “kindest” superrich clients were merely polite when they made demands. He was so gentle that when she barked at him during further practice excursions he nearly came to tears, and later, in the dark of her cabin, she kissed away those tears. “We agreed, you know,” she said, and he nodded. They decided to act as if they were enemies, and her humiliating, forced apology to Gojraan gave her good reason to hold a grudge against Majnu. So they kept their affair secret. Even Kumko said at one point, “Go a little easy on him, Kaz, he’s trying hard, he’s getting better.”

Of course Apilak had to know. She knew everything that went on in her ship, her body, saw everything and forgot nothing. But the captain of the Umialik said nothing to Kazo, not even in warning, which Kazo had half expected, and Kazo trusted Apilak to say nothing to anyone else.

In Kazo’s cabin, late at night, they pressed their bodies together with a fire and a ferocity they could not explain; and after they would whisper their stories. Majnu asked her about her adventures, took her seriously in a way no one had before.

Majnu had had lovers before, of course, but in all of them he detected the marionette strings of his father. He admitted he at first suspected Kazo was another, which wounded her almost to tears, but he hastily said he knew that could not be the case, from Gojraan’s beastly behavior toward her. “If Father had bought you,” he said, “Gojraan would have sniffed it out and would either leer at you or ignore you altogether.”

“I don’t like this talk of your father buying lovers for you—and that you think I could be bought.”

“I know you couldn’t. But it would be easy for him to find someone who could be bought, one way or another. I don’t think you really imagine the pressure he can bring to bear to get what he wants, both temptations and terrors.”

“He doesn’t cares about me. He only cares about his control over everything. With me, with all of us. He’s picked out several possible consorts for Sundshri, and she hates them all but is too terrified to defy him, to even think about defying him.”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t think he’d have you killed, I’m not worth that much to him—”

The back of Kazo’s skull suddenly felt ice cold. “That’s not a comfort, when you put it that way,” she said with a thick tongue.

Majnu kissed her gently. “I have no hope. I don’t own my life, my body, and I never will. My father considers it his. He will control my life, no matter what I want. And when he dies, some elder half brother I hardly know will control my life.” He sighed and burrowed his head against Kazo’s breast. “Sometimes I think it would be just as well if I died in the supernova.”

Kazo stroked his hair. Her heart melted with sadness, listening to him. “I don’t want you to die. I won’t let you die.”

Her stomach twisted. “Do you want me to let you go?” She silently wondered, was this just a ploy to get rid of her, when he was finished with her body?

Majnu pulled away from her. “No, we couldn’t. He would not care if I died, but he would care if I defied him. That would be unforgivable. He would pursue me, and you, to the edge of the galaxy. He has spies everywhere. We couldn’t escape.”

“Hush,” Majnu said, kissing her tears. “We have now. That is the only gift I can have. Now. This kiss. This night with you. And if I die at the supernova or if I live ten centuries, this night is greater than anything my father could ever give me.” He kissed her lips. “I’m sorry I can’t give you more. Do you want me to go away? If you feel I’m taking advantage of you—”

Kazo, tears still sliding down her face, reached up and put a hand on his mouth. “You hush,” she said. “Hush now. Say nothing more. Remember, we are more than words.” And she kissed him with a kiss meant to last a thousand years.

When the training at Kitna finished, the Umialik pulled into a tight orbit around the star, and Apilak let decay a handful of knotted anomalies. The decay burrowed a blister about the whole of the ship, dug not a few nanometers into a Lesser Dimension, like the individual blisters they used for excursions, but several millimeters into attask, one of the Great Dimensions. In the deep, gut-wrenching void of attask they slid from gravity well to gravity well, leaping from star to star across the galaxy to their next practice site: the snapping jaws of Fenris and the wheeling chain of Gleipnir.

“It’s a strange name, Fenris,” said Kushri. They were taking a meal on the normal brane, in orbit about a star halfway to their destination.

“It’s a stupid name,” said Gojraan. “Figure Majnu to know all about it.” Majnu’s face darkened, and he stared down at his plate of flat bread and salted tomatoes.

“Fenris was a wolf, who threatened to devour the universe, or at least a planet or two. Gleipnir was the chain forged to bind him forever.” He tore off a bite of flatbread. “Here, Fenris is the black hole, and Gleipnir the accretion disk. Right?” He looked at first at Kazo, but then his gaze skidded away and fixed on Haisho.

“Yes,” said Haisho. “This will be considerably more challenging than Kitna. The neutrino flux from the accretion disk is very bright, brighter than a main sequence star. And erratic, very erratic. At the inner edge of Gleipnir, only a few kilometers from the event horizon, the tidal forces are very strong.”

“Not quite like that,” said Haisho. “But the tidal forces will be strong enough to affect your inner ear and cause disorientation.”

Gojraan shook his head. “Not me. I always keep my wits tight. Unlike some.” He grinned at Majnu, who went back to staring at his breakfast.

“Nonetheless,” Haisho said sternly, “this will be dangerous.” She picked up a piece of cucumber and before popping it into her mouth, added, “Your father will be watching carefully from his ship.”

Sundshri frowned. “No. Listen, Nagaan, Father is meeting us at Maishaitan, the supernova site. No.”

Haisho chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, took a sip of tea. “He apparently changed his mind. His ship is already in the system, awaiting us.”

The Samraatju siblings looked at each other. “Will he be going down into Gleipnir with us?” Gojraan asked in his smallest voice.

Haisho shook her head. “As I understand, he will not. He will watch from his ship and will join us after your excursion. He is keen to find out how your training is going.” She bowed her head close to the tabletop. “I hope my efforts will find favor with him.”

There was a long silence, broken by the scraping of Kushri’s plate on the table as she pushed it away, a sour look on her face. “I’m not hungry anymore,” she announced.

Often, on the long freefalls between gravity wells, Kazo talked with Apilak. Kazo liked to think that Apilak felt more affinity with her than with her mother or sister, and imagined Apilak in some distant youth as passionate and impetuous as herself. Certainly, like Kazo, Apilak did not hesitate to speak her mind, although with more skill and cunning than Kazo could manage.

“I can’t talk to my mother about Majnu,” Kazo said. She had strapped herself to her bunk, to keep herself from drifting away in freefall. Her cabin she kept dark. “She would just talk to me about duty and all that. She wouldn’t understand about love. Do you think she was ever in love? She’s too careful and calculating to let herself get swept up in such powerful, so overwhelming feelings. . . .”

You should be careful about Majnu, said Apilak. Especially after his father comes aboard. Old Samraatju will not appreciate you carrying on a love affair with his son under his nose.

If you had read the contract, as your mother instructed you to, you would find the clause . . .

“You’re just as bad as Amma!” snapped Kazo. “You know nothing about love.”

Neither do you, said Apilak. You are too young. You know nothing of love, or of pain, of loss and grief, all of which thread together.

“Well,” said Kazo slowly, “have you every loved anyone? The way I love Majnu?”

Don’t be impertinent, Kazo. I have traveled back and forth across the galaxy for almost a thousand years. I know your heart is overflowing, and it makes me smile to watch it. I know your love for the young Samraatju is real, but don’t be insulting and think that you are the only one to love like that.

Kazo sniffed. “But you can watch mine. Oh, come on, Apilak. At least share with me some of your wisdom that you so mysteriously acquired on your journeys.”

You need to control your sarcasm, Kazo; it has gotten you into trouble before, and will again if you don’t.

Apilak said, Love is no more eternal than the stars. It may burn slow and steady for a long time and then gradually shrink away, or it may burn bright and hot for a brief period, only to end spectacularly.

Of course! But those are cynical words. We live in the light of ephemeral suns, Kazo. We all need that light.

in our December issue,
on sale now. Hush now. Not everyone may know the ending of every story.
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion