Welcome back to our Serial Sunday, featuring Superluminary, a wonderful science fiction tale by John C. Wright that we’re pleased to present as a serial each Sunday here on Fandom Pulse.
Episode 11: The Abomination of Desolation
Lord Mars stood over the body of Aeneas, sword drawn. Aeneas closed his eyes, waiting for death. He heard a stir of uneasy motion, and gasp or hiss of surprise and fear.
His eyes popped upon.
Lord Mars was not poised to behead him. He was standing over his body to defend him.
Thucydides Tell, Lord of Mars, was a thin and quiet man with weatherbeaten features and deep-set unwinking eyes. He had shoulder-length crimson hair and skin of vivid scarlet, bright as a woodpecker’s head, bright as new blood.
He was a nudist, wearing only black sandals, a hair clasp, a richly jeweled war belt, baldric, and harness to sheath and coil and holster his radium longsword, energy whip, surface-to-orbit pistol.
These arms were toys. His blood and his sweat, his skin, his spit, even his scent contained antimatter, which he, by means unknown and starkly impossible, could touch, produce, handle, and ignite, all without harm to himself. He could destroy a city with a hair plucked from his head, or burn a worldlet with breath from his mouth.
Now he said, “Release the boy.”
Lord Neptune did not argue. The gravity on Aeneas returned to earth-normal.
Aeneas started to rise, but Lord Mars placed his bright red foot on his back, forcing him down.
Lord Jupiter nudged Lady Venus, whose face was hid behind her hands. Now she looked up, and saw Aeneas still alive. She laughed for sheer delight.
Aeneas overheard a silent message beamed from Lord Jupiter’s ring to hers, “You are the only one in the family he likes, Nephelethea! Ask him!”
Lady Venus smiled warmly at Lord Mars, and said, “Ah, Thucydides, dear brother… my son has had a harsh day today, and lying on the floor may not be best thing for his disposition…”
Lord Mars said in a flat, colorless voice. “It might be best for now.”
She said, “For now? And what is going on, that makes it best? Everyone else wants the poor lad dead. They are afraid of him. You’re not afraid.”
Lord Mars did not smile at the flattery, but the vertical lines framing his mouth grew deeper, showing he was pleased. “Father did not outlaw weapons after he outlawed war. Why not? Why are there the spaceships six kilometers long, or batteries of interplanetary-strength particle beam weapons? He was afraid,” he continued. He looked from face to face. “As we should be. After Dad left, I looked for whatever enemy Father feared. Searched the whole solar system. Finally I found it. Found… something.”
Lady Venus said, “What did you find?”
“Death. Ours. Everyone’s. I found a bomb, larger than Jupiter, in the sun.”
Lord Uranus said, “Describe it.” His mask hid his expression, but there was a sharp note in his voice.
“It is a black hole wrapped in a hollow antigravity shell,” said Lord Mars. “The shell prevents the black hole’s gravity gradient from changing the inner shape of the sun. But break the shell, all the sun’s mass topples into a bottomless pit. The agitation of the matter falling into over the lip breaks it apart, releases x-rays, heats up the uneaten part of Sol. A supernova level event. All the planets wiped out. Man gone.”
Lord Saturn said, “A device left by the Forerunners?”
Lord Mars shook his head. “No. It is recent.”
Lord Saturn said, “Sol is not massive enough to go supernova.”
Lord Mars said sardonically, “Without the gas-giant sized hyperdense primer rigged to blow, Sol is too dinky. But with it, the energy released is comparable. Not technically a supernova. Merely all the mass of the sun exploding outward at the speed of light in a shockwave of superhot plasma. But not a supernova. Don’t believe me? Ask Lord Uranus.”
He removed his foot, and gestured toward the couch with his swordpoint. “You!” he said to Aeneas. “Lie down. Take a load off. You look like crud.”
Lord Mars turned to the rest of them. “I am not his bodyguard. You can find some way around me, even if I took him to Mons Olympos.” That was where Lord Mars had his main camp. “But ask yourself. Who here can disarm a black hole? Who can reach into a black hole and come out again?”
Lady Luna said, “Only someone who can bypass the speed of light.”
He said. “Nope. Close. Guess again.”
Lady Luna pouted. “My answer was good! So who can disarm a black hole?”
Lord Mars put his sword back in his sheath. “That kid on the couch. No one else. Kill him, we die.”
Silence gripped the room. Aeneas sat up, and put his feet on the floor, waiting to see what his fate would be.
Lord Uranus turned his mask toward Aeneas, “So Lord Tellus himself is your patron! He is willing to slay everyone everywhere merely to keep you alive. Feel smug now, if you like. But now you understand how unbalanced he is.”
Lord Mercury had drained his winecup and was using it to toss and catch a small golden ball in the air. With his eyes on the golden ball, he said casually, “I suppose we should make sure Lord Mars is telling the truth?”
Lady Ceres rolled her eyes and spoke. “Mars has no interest in family squabbles. He could have made himself Emperor by sheer brute force, had he wished it. Had he wanted to save Venus’ youngest child, he could have simply demanded it.”
Lord Mercury did not look at her. “But one of us could assassinate Aeneas without Mars being the wiser. Do try to keep up! What say you, Lord Uranus? What does your peculiar superscience tell you?”
Lord Uranus spoke bitter words, but in a toneless, matter-of-fact way, “It tells me Father cheated me. You all know that. Well—I suppose our niece Penthesilia does not know, does she? And I suppose I have to get used to calling her Lady Luna. She does not know about me.”
Lady Luna said, “I don’t understand. Lady Venus told me your field of study was astrology.”
The mask raised one eyebrow. “One of her little jokes. But stars issue psychic waves which I can read. Psychometry of the stars. I can read their dispositions, but not their minds. They have none.”
Lady Luna said, “How can a ball of nuclear plasma have a disposition?”
Uranus answered, “How can numbers be rational, or musical chords be passionate? Neuropsionic particles radiate from each sun in particular waveforms that carry meaning: the light of our sun is holy.”
Lady Luna said skeptically, “Your science can measure holiness?”
“I am using a human word to express a concept of nonhuman Forerunner science. Certain symbol-forms embedded in the information layer of the cosmos are equal in data-radius to the entire sidereal universe. Those in rational proportion with the universe are holy; unharmonious are unholy. Forcing the sun to kill all of her children would register as unholy, since it is against her nature.”
Lady Luna was bewildered. “But what does it all mean?”
Lord Uranus said, “It means the universe is stranger than we know. Also, it means my superscience has no useful technical applications. Dad gave it to me because he hated me.”
Lord Mars said, “Your science is useful to me, now. Can you confirm my report?”
Lord Uranus held up his signet ring. Aeneas sensed activity on several bands radiating from small instruments in the buttons of Lord Uranus’ uniform. This activity was mated to matching signals issuing from a certain machine with a metallic radar-shadow sitting half a mile away in the wing of the palace complex occupied by Lord Uranus and his staff.
After a time, he lowered his ring. Lord Uranus said, “No alien enemy left a nova bomb in the Sun.”
Only Lady Luna breathed a sigh of relief. The others knew Uranus too well.
Venus said sweetly, “Yes, brother? We’re waiting…”
Lord Uranus said, “It is not alien handiwork. Sol recognizes it as our father’s. He means to obliterate everything in the solar system. An observer standing on a planet one hundred light years away a century from now will see their night sky turn bright as day. The purity of the sun is offended by the abomination of desolation inside her.” The mask of Lord Uranus was expressionless, but he shook his head in wry amusement. “Father never ceases to surprise me!”
Ceres said, “This time, we must find Father and kill him!”
Lord Mars said, “And put a bell on the cat while we are at it. What about the lad? I want you all to agree to keep him alive, so he can save us.”
Neptune said, “I don’t agree. He will make us slaves.”
Mars gave him a withering look. “Life is short and full of pain but death is full of nothing, and lasts a hell of a lot longer. Pick one.”
Lady Venus suddenly brightened up and laughed. “I can save him, and you, and all of us!”
Lord Mars said, “Now you are keeping us in suspense, sister. Out with it.”
She smiled sweetly and horror came out of her mouth. “I can lobotomize his free will, leaving the rest of his intellect and memory intact. The warptech will be known to him, not to us. We order him to defuse the nova bomb.”
Lady Luna was looking at her with revulsion. Lord Neptune looked on with newfound respect.
“It saves his life, doesn’t it?” Venus spread her hands, and shrugged, “And I can reinstall a new personality later, one less willful. Will you all agree to spare his life on these terms?”
Lord Jupiter said, “All in favor, say aye…?”
There were no objections. Not even Lady Luna disagreed.
Aeneas, lying supine with his eyes shut, heard all this. He was too weary even to feel disgust or despair. He was prepared to die fighting. Despite the lethal damage it would do to his wounded organs, Aeneas charged his internal weapons.
Or tried to. He could not. He tried to rise, to move, and could not. He could not open his eyes.
His echolocation detected the silhouette of a tall man standing silently by the windows. Magnetic resonance showed he wore a helm.
His was the heat signature and energy aura of Lord Pluto. Between eluding the lunar beam weapon, the flight aboard the aerospace plane, the talk in the garden and trial in the library, hours had passed. It was enough time for a space contortion wave to have arrived here from Pluto. He had been standing in the room, undetectable, unseen, perhaps for a long time.
“You are careless, brothers. I have suspended the voluntary motions of the lad, who was preparing to flood the room with lethal radiation,” Lord Pluto said in his cool, dispassionate voice.
Lord Jupiter said, “I would have been safe!” And he laughed.
Lord Pluto said, “He used a spacewarp to travel here from my sanctum on Pluto, in excess of lightspeed. Any report that he lacks memory of the warptech implant is false.”
Lady Venus said, “Then he is more dangerous than I thought, for apparently he found a way to use the warp science to distort my readings.”
“Did he?” said Lord Pluto coldly. “Did he indeed?”
“Come!” she said sweetly, “One of you move the couch under the isolation cage, so I can establish the thought-surgery field. We are a suspicious lot: would any of you care to synchronize your ring with mine, and watch what I am doing? I would hate anyone to think me so sentimental that I would put the good of a disobedient child above the good of the family. Who wants to watch?”
Brother Beast said, “Such arts are an abomination. I will not watch.”
Lord Mercury said, “If sister is going to warm up her thought-control gear, I want to be well outside of its range. Who knows who will end up as a puppet of hers, if you stay and watch? You must excuse me.”
Mars said nothing, but he left the library with Mercury and Brother Beast.
Aeneas felt the mind-destroying cap settle over his scalp.
Support John C. Wright’s current work, Starquest by picking up the first book in his new series, The Space Pirates of Andromeda.
Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose!
This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost!
Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun?
Now new hope is here!
If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended!
Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old -- here you will hear wonders told!
Of course there is a Space Princess, and Space Pirates galore, and an Evil Galactic Empire.
Of course there is a super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness!
Here meet Athos Lone, Ace of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance!
The Ancient Mariner, like an iron ghost, when slain, seems to rise again!
The mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow walks in dark worlds but serves the light!
An Imperial Deathtrooper must reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers!
Fate has set these unlikely heroes against the Four Dark Overlords
An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead!
Can Darkness fail and Light prevail?
Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater!
So.
This is what the fucking Nazi is doing now.