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[[File:LoreMara.png|300px|thumb]] | |||
'''Marasenna''' is a [[Lore]] book introduced in ''[[Forsaken]]'' that | '''Marasenna''' is a [[Lore]] book introduced in ''[[Forsaken]]'' that tells the story of the [[Awoken]]'s birth and [[Mara Sov]]'s rise to power. Entries are unlocked by collecting [[Ahamkara]] bones and breaking Corrupted Eggs with [[Wish-Ender]] in the [[Dreaming City]]. | ||
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==Brephos I== | ==Brephos I== | ||
The | The woman sits on a ledge that overhangs infinity. She looks down and kicks her legs. | ||
The stars shine brilliant here, because the sun is only fractionally brighter than the rest of them. Sol lies almost perfectly below her. Of course up and down are defined only by the thrust axis of [[Yang Liwei]]. Upward, the black umbrella of the shield and the matter storage, and the docked ships which make Yang Liwei not just a mothership, but an entire traveling fleet. Down below, along the slim spine of the ship, the shielded bulb of the engine glows invisibly infrared. If she slips off this ledge, she will fall down the ship's length at one-third of an Earth gravity, not because there is anything pulling her, but because the ship is pulling away. | The stars shine brilliant here, because the sun is only fractionally brighter than the rest of them. Sol lies almost perfectly below her. Of course up and down are defined only by the thrust axis of [[Yang Liwei]]. Upward, the black umbrella of the shield and the matter storage, and the docked ships which make Yang Liwei not just a mothership, but an entire traveling fleet. Down below, along the slim spine of the ship, the shielded bulb of the engine glows invisibly infrared. If she slips off this ledge, she will fall down the ship's length at one-third of an Earth gravity, not because there is anything pulling her, but because the ship is pulling away. | ||
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She is going with Yang Liwei and the rest of [[Project Amrita]] to make new worlds. | She is going with Yang Liwei and the rest of [[Project Amrita]] to make new worlds. | ||
She came because she saw an omen in a man's death. She was on EVA with him, repairing a jammed radiator fin on an uncrewed circum-Jovian platform. They worked in companionable silence, listening to the howl of the Jovian magnetosphere when it happened. A frozen rabbit embryo came out of deep space at forty kilometers per second and went through his faceplate. The rabbit must have been spilled in a biocontainer accident far from the sun to plunge back inward like a comet. | She came because she saw an omen in a man's death. She was on EVA with him, repairing a jammed radiator fin on an uncrewed circum-[[Jupiter|Jovian]] platform. They worked in companionable silence, listening to the howl of the Jovian magnetosphere when it happened. A frozen rabbit embryo came out of deep space at forty kilometers per second and went through his faceplate. The rabbit must have been spilled in a biocontainer accident far from the sun to plunge back inward like a comet. | ||
Immediately afterward—for reasons very clear to her because she has always had a sense for the meaning of things, reasons very difficult to explain to others because she has always felt this sense was secret—she asked her mother if the family could travel with Project Amrita. | Immediately afterward—for reasons very clear to her because she has always had a sense for the meaning of things, reasons very difficult to explain to others because she has always felt this sense was secret—she asked her mother if the family could travel with Project Amrita. | ||
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She recorded all of it at the neural level. The exquisite darkness. The sense of fatal independence from all things. There are those who will give anything to feel that void. | She recorded all of it at the neural level. The exquisite darkness. The sense of fatal independence from all things. There are those who will give anything to feel that void. | ||
"You can't keep doing this," Uldwyn complains, as the big woman stares at Mara in awe. "Mom is going to die of worry." | "You can't keep doing this," Uldwyn complains, as the big woman stares at Mara in awe. "[[Osana Sov|Mom]] is going to die of worry." | ||
==Brephos III== | ==Brephos III== | ||
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"My discarded tube of sealant, my sweet little fleck of paint—" | "My discarded tube of sealant, my sweet little fleck of paint—" | ||
Osana likes to compare Mara to small pestilent items that drift near spacecraft, like crystals of frozen urine. As far as Mara can tell, Osana is the apex of a centuries-long project to create the ultimate embarrassing mom. She is also very blunt: "Mara, even when you were little, you wanted me to treat you like an adult. So I have. But you remember what I told you, don't you? If you don't want to be my daughter, I can't watch over you like a mother would. I can't put you first, like a mother would. I will always be your friend, but I have to make my own choices too." | |||
"That doesn't mean you had to tell the Captain!" | "That doesn't mean you had to tell the Captain!" | ||
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==Cosmogyre I== | ==Cosmogyre I== | ||
"Exodus Green to unknown maneuvering object. Please squawk your transponder and ident. Over." | "Exodus Green to [[Black Fleet|unknown maneuvering object]]. Please squawk your transponder and ident. Over." | ||
Another silent quarter-hour passes in Flight. No response comes from the transient contact twelve and a half light minutes away. The ghost has stalked Yang Liwei for eighteen hours now, closing in each time it appears, and Captain Alice Li is wary of it. Other colony missions have vanished during their outward burns—victims of mishap or hostility—and because of these disappearances, Project Amrita did not hurl itself fearless into the void. Rather, they came armed to the molars. | Another silent quarter-hour passes in Flight. No response comes from the transient contact twelve and a half light minutes away. The ghost has stalked Yang Liwei for eighteen hours now, closing in each time it appears, and Captain Alice Li is wary of it. Other colony missions have vanished during their outward burns—victims of mishap or hostility—and because of these disappearances, Project Amrita did not hurl itself fearless into the void. Rather, they came armed to the molars. | ||
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Mara thinks that if she looked him in the eye he would see the truth, the turmoil, the half-formed yes. | Mara thinks that if she looked him in the eye he would see the truth, the turmoil, the half-formed yes. | ||
"Mara. You don't have to tell me how…" He swallows the hitch in his voice. "I've seen how bad it is. I've watched it long enough to know that it's not going to get better. They're gambling everything on | "Mara. You don't have to tell me how…" He swallows the hitch in his voice. "I've seen how bad it is. I've watched it long enough to know that it's not going to get better. They're gambling everything on [[the Traveler]]. We came out here to get away from it. To step off the easy path. Why would we go back?" | ||
Because I asked us to leave, Mara thinks. Because something came out of deep space and killed the man next to me, and I saw the omen, and I said we should go. And now I feel like a coward. | Because I asked us to leave, Mara thinks. Because something came out of deep space and killed the man next to me, and I saw the omen, and I said we should go. And now I feel like a coward. | ||
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"I have no idea!" GEOD says, exultantly. "None of this makes any sense at all! Wow!" | "I have no idea!" GEOD says, exultantly. "None of this makes any sense at all! Wow!" | ||
Alice Li has the distinct sense that something ancient and malevolent is operating upon them: a trillion-fingered hand reaching in to caress the very atoms of their being, setting protons a-spin, strumming nerves like guitar strings. A tongue with ten billion slithering forks tasting the surface of their brains. The sense of imminent doom crescendos. She knows, absolutely and utterly, that what is about to happen to her and to her crew is far worse than death. The darkness knows them now. The thing that has come to kill Humanity has their taste. | Alice Li has the distinct sense that [[The Witness|something]] ancient and malevolent is operating upon them: a trillion-fingered hand reaching in to caress the very atoms of their being, setting protons a-spin, strumming nerves like guitar strings. A tongue with ten billion slithering forks tasting the surface of their brains. The sense of imminent doom crescendos. She knows, absolutely and utterly, that what is about to happen to her and to her crew is far worse than death. The darkness knows them now. The thing that has come to kill Humanity has their taste. | ||
"INCO." She clings to her restraint harness as the ship growls through another wave. Her bones creak as they stretch. "Last report on the Traveler? Any sign of an intervention?" | "INCO." She clings to her restraint harness as the ship growls through another wave. Her bones creak as they stretch. "Last report on the Traveler? Any sign of an intervention?" | ||
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It is not quite enough. It cannot vanquish the shadow. | It is not quite enough. It cannot vanquish the shadow. | ||
Thus Mara finds herself drifting on the edge of the Light and the Darkness, on the dusk-and-dawn gradient between the two. | Thus Mara finds herself drifting on the edge of the [[Light]] and the Darkness, on the dusk-and-dawn gradient between the two. | ||
She feels a contest. A battle fought, an equilibrium reached: not a truce, but an infinite limit, like an equation dividing by zero, a collision of two violent eternities. Mara queries Yang Liwei for telemetry and her sensorium fills with the terrified scream of gravitational instruments. She howls too, a feral sound, ecstatic and lost: a wolf baying at the stars. She knows what's happening. Too much power has gathered here. The universe is appalled by the paradox. Nothing that has glimpsed this collision of infinitudes can be allowed to escape. The cosmos must censor its embarrassment. It must sequester the anomaly. | She feels a contest. A battle fought, an equilibrium reached: not a truce, but an infinite limit, like an equation dividing by zero, a collision of two violent eternities. Mara queries Yang Liwei for telemetry and her sensorium fills with the terrified scream of gravitational instruments. She howls too, a feral sound, ecstatic and lost: a wolf baying at the stars. She knows what's happening. Too much power has gathered here. The universe is appalled by the paradox. Nothing that has glimpsed this collision of infinitudes can be allowed to escape. The cosmos must censor its embarrassment. It must sequester the anomaly. | ||
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From this council, there arose eight verdicts and a ninth. | From this council, there arose eight verdicts and a ninth. | ||
First, that the people were | First, that the people were Awoken, and they were immortal. | ||
Second, that this world was Tributary of another, but that it was forbidden to seek any way to rejoin the mother stream. For this reason, it would be called the [[Distributary]], for that was the proper name for a river that branches from the mother and does not return. | Second, that this world was Tributary of another, but that it was forbidden to seek any way to rejoin the mother stream. For this reason, it would be called the [[Distributary]], for that was the proper name for a river that branches from the mother and does not return. | ||
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Sixth, that the purpose of the Awoken should be to know and love the cosmos. | Sixth, that the purpose of the Awoken should be to know and love the cosmos. | ||
Seventh, that the Awoken were created out of covenant with | Seventh, that the Awoken were created out of covenant with Light and Darkness, but the covenant was complete, and no further debt would ever be called, except the duty of the Second Verdict to remain on the Distributary. | ||
Eighth, that the Awoken were whole in themselves, and they existed in balance. | Eighth, that the Awoken were whole in themselves, and they existed in balance. | ||
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==Fideicide II== | ==Fideicide II== | ||
"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Alis Li whispers as, far below the Shipspire, the funeral barges on the | "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 [[Paladin]]s 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. | The thought that one might have defected to the Diasyrm breaks her heart. | ||
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==Heresiology== | ==Heresiology== | ||
A woman lives alone on the forest hills above the | A woman lives alone on the forest hills above the Feather Barrens. North of her, in a chaos of ravines and clear but fiercely radioactive streams, the hills surrender to high imperial mountains engaged in brutal seismic warfare, for the Distributary is a young world and has not settled its grudges. To the south are the dry lands where the birds of the forest, especially the parrots, go to die. She lives here because one day she will no longer be immortal, and she wants to observe the dignity of death. | ||
Up these hills comes a man and his mother. The man moves with practiced wariness. But his mother is tired of walking, so she sits down on a giant melon and bellows, "MARAAA!" | Up these hills comes a man and his mother. The man moves with practiced wariness. But his mother is tired of walking, so she sits down on a giant melon and bellows, "MARAAA!" | ||
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In later days, the power of the Queen waned, and the Distributary was ruled by scholars who sent their knights on mad quests to test the consistence of reality. These were the [[Gensym Scribes]], who traced their origin to Kelda Wadj, the Allteacher, but who were in fact descendants of a band of roving storytellers who traveled across the immense salt glades in a hollering convoy of airboats. Here was their praise of the world: | In later days, the power of the Queen waned, and the Distributary was ruled by scholars who sent their knights on mad quests to test the consistence of reality. These were the [[Gensym Scribes]], who traced their origin to Kelda Wadj, the Allteacher, but who were in fact descendants of a band of roving storytellers who traveled across the immense salt glades in a hollering convoy of airboats. Here was their praise of the world: | ||
It is sweet-watered, and there are no poisons upon it. The temper of the climate is even. Great broad-pawed cats stalk the shallow glades, and brilliant blue flamingos promenade upon the flats. The air is thick and warm, suited for flight, and the wind tastes of forest. No dawn has ever been as glorious as the salt glade dawn, and no dusk has ever moved women to weep as deeply as sunset in the | It is sweet-watered, and there are no poisons upon it. The temper of the climate is even. Great broad-pawed cats stalk the shallow glades, and brilliant blue flamingos promenade upon the flats. The air is thick and warm, suited for flight, and the wind tastes of forest. No dawn has ever been as glorious as the salt glade dawn, and no dusk has ever moved women to weep as deeply as sunset in the Chriseiads. [[Corsair]]s sport upon the open seas, and where they waylay freighters rather than each other, they give rumor and assistance to their prey in proportion to the quality of the chase. Beloved are the stories of young lads and lasses who leap across to the corsair ship for a life of adventure! Beloved also are the terraced farms of the [[Andalayas]], mountains so mighty and so dense with radioactives that they subside year by year into the crust. Most beloved are the fissioneers, who vaulted us to power on a world without petrochemicals. May they forgive the many stories of horror we have told in their memory. May they in particular forgive the lurid stories of the molten lead reactor, and the twelve who were impaled to the ceiling by their control rods, and the Core That Stalked. | ||
It is the Sanguine Truth that we were granted this world by the unconditional mercy of the powers, and that we will never again know fear. | It is the Sanguine Truth that we were granted this world by the unconditional mercy of the powers, and that we will never again know fear. | ||
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"Still burning for the Lagrange point. What have you done to Nguya?" | "Still burning for the Lagrange point. What have you done to Nguya?" | ||
"Given her too much perspective, I'm afraid." Just as this observatory satellite should help the Awoken see things from Mara's point of view. She smiles as she helps her bodyguard up the ramp, Sjur indulgently pretending that she needs Mara's hand. "Uldren should be on the ground in | "Given her too much perspective, I'm afraid." Just as this observatory satellite should help the Awoken see things from Mara's point of view. She smiles as she helps her bodyguard up the ramp, Sjur indulgently pretending that she needs Mara's hand. "Uldren should be on the ground in Kamarina by now. We'll have a go-ahead on that interferometer buyout when he's done." | ||
There are new stars in the sky. Mara put them there. Huge distributed-array telescopes orbit the Distributary's cool sun; gravity wave sensors and cold primordial neutrino detectors spider the crust. Out of shell corporations and seed investments, she has opened her world as an enormous eye and focused it heavenward. Sjur Eido was her smiling public avatar these past decades, while her brother handled enforcement. The days of covert speed chess in the Queen's court are over: Sjur Eido's open endorsement made Mara the face of Eccaleism and armed Mara with blackmail over all the Gensym Scribes still in power. | There are new stars in the sky. Mara put them there. Huge distributed-array telescopes orbit the Distributary's cool sun; gravity wave sensors and cold primordial neutrino detectors spider the crust. Out of shell corporations and seed investments, she has opened her world as an enormous eye and focused it heavenward. Sjur Eido was her smiling public avatar these past decades, while her brother handled enforcement. The days of covert speed chess in the Queen's court are over: Sjur Eido's open endorsement made Mara the face of Eccaleism and armed Mara with blackmail over all the Gensym Scribes still in power. | ||
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"You're the devil," Alis Li whispers. "I remember… in one of the old tongues, Mara means death." | "You're the devil," Alis Li whispers. "I remember… in one of the old tongues, Mara means death." | ||
An hour before. Mara's ship touches down a polite two kilometers from the | An hour before. Mara's ship touches down a polite two kilometers from the Pearl Groves, and she looks out across mazes of channel and tidal pond to the compounds of ancient silver-white stone beyond. Two-ton oysters glitter in the shallows, their shells jeweled with mineral inclusions. Seabirds peck and fret along narrow white beaches. Mara lifts up her black formal skirts and begins her long walk into Alis Li's retreat, the sanctuary of former Queens. | ||
"Mara," Uldren whispers, through her throat mic. "Don't do this. Take Sjur with you, at least." | "Mara," Uldren whispers, through her throat mic. "Don't do this. Take Sjur with you, at least." | ||
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There are an uncountable number of ways to be between zero and two. | There are an uncountable number of ways to be between zero and two. | ||
==Palingenesis III== | |||
The first hulk they colonized was a one-kilometer habitat tender, reactors still burning, gravity still steady at three-quarters of Earth's. Driven by an AI long ago reduced to basic subroutines, the tender had completed its final mission to wrangle an Oort-cloud comet down into the asteroid belt. When no orders came for the comet's disposition, it had set about gardening. The comet's surface was domed and soiled, and tethered mirrors kept taut by photon pressure focused starlight into a silvery radiance, which fed the oxygen forest well enough. It would have been a marvel of greenery and ancient ice, but the surface had caught fire recently. Oxygen-fueled flame killed nearly everything except insects and rats. But Mara judged it would be a good fixer-upper, the rats the first intelligent life they had met since their return, the insects edible. | |||
The Hulls had not survived the unpocketing as well as their passengers. The microsingularity wormhole, propped open by a precipitous spike of dark energy, pulled alloy and ceramic armor like taffy. Missiles mauled five of the Hulls. Worst of all, the passage through the nightmare limen between worlds had devastated onboard AI and logic systems. | |||
It was time to abandon their cocoons. Uldren's survey located a reef of derelict spacecraft, apparently convoyed together for mutual aid in the Asteroid Belt. The Gensym Scribes who'd joined Mara on her journey were even now giddily cataloguing cultural markers and ancient records. | |||
"We'll salvage the Hulls," Mara told Sjur Eido. "Pull out the raw materials and the systems we can still use, and bring the biosystems of these hulks back online. Once we have reliable gravity, we can start having babies." | |||
"We'll need weapons," Sjur said, cheerfully. "We don't have enough spare chemistry for firearms right now, and the maltech we brought with us would blow right through the hull. Also line-throwing tools and devices for launching satellites off the surfaces of asteroids, hulks, et cetera. You know what I'm thinking?" | |||
"I cannot say I can imagine," Mara said, sarcastically. She imagined the sight of Sjur Eido stringing her woman-tall bow and passed the thought away like a card trick: Dwelling on such pleasantries would not do. "Will it involve archery?" | |||
"Big old compound bows with all sorts of tactical knickknacks." Sjur paced in delighted thought. "I'll be the first woman in the universe to place a comsat in heliocentric orbit with a longbow." | |||
"You're absurd," Mara said, and at Sjur's uninhibited grin of delight, at the thought of exploring and rebuilding this entire reef with her, even at the terrible flinch-thrill idea of sending Sjur into violence and danger, Mara felt a tingle of worrisome warmth and gladness. | |||
"So," Sjur said, lunging into that moment of weakness to get what she wanted. "When will you tell everyone what's happened to Earth?" | |||
At first they had thought Earth a ruin world, but there were signs otherwise. At least it had not turned into a machine-gnawed corpse like Mercury. "When Uldren's back from deploying his drones." She narrowed her eyes. "Sjur, can you hear what I'm thinking?" | |||
"What, as in telepathically?" The Queen's bodyguard closed her eyes. "Everyone's been feeling spooky, but I'm not sure that extends to transmitting—Mara! Good grief!" | |||
==Revanche I== | |||
Uldren returned to the Reef during the Long Unquiet Night, when the Awoken people huddled in their beds and hammocks, gathered in ice caves and half-lit habitat cylinders, haunted by visions and portents. Faces appeared to them in the sublimating swirl of cometary ice: images and portraits became impossible to distinguish from their real counterparts. All statues were shrouded, lest they appear to passers-by as corpses. | |||
Something had changed in them after their return to the outer cosmos. A live-wire hum passed through the tendons in their hands, their jaws popped when they swallowed, and flashes of light like the impact of cosmic rays obscured their vision. It felt to Mara as if they had lowered their feet into an ocean of charge and raised their hand to some invisible cable overhead: as if they were now again in contact with immense and opposing forces that had left an ancient mark. | |||
"It feels like I've got scurvy," Sjur Eido snarled, having never had scurvy in her life. "As if all these old wounds in my soul are opening up again." | |||
"People keep sending me notes," Mara said. Her sensorium had died in the transit, so the notes came to her through whispers and scraps of precious paper. "They say… I saw your face in my dream. I saw your eyes. I heard your voice." | |||
"So it's not just me." | |||
Uldren was the second person to bring her revelations on that day. First was Kelda Wadj, the Allteacher, one of Mara's most joyful recruits to the expedition: She was a master of pedagogy, able to mold any mind into a shape ready to learn, able to melt any fact into a fluid that could be poured. "I'm in from the Gensym labs," she said, "and they've learned something wonderful. We're all a bit magic now." | |||
"Tell me more." Mara poured her a snifter of icy cometary water. "What does magic mean?" | |||
"Some sort of weak acausality." Kelda lowered her flowerbulb build into a hammock of tangled plastic. "They've been firing encoded neutrino beams through volunteers, and it looks as if the resulting patterns of scatter depend on the cognitive and emotional state of the target. It's a very reliable detection, at least four sigma, but the effect size is terribly small." | |||
Mara digested this with a shot of ancient ice, slushy against her tongue. "Acausality. You mean that whatever's happening—whatever influence we have on, say, neutrino beams—it's not accounted for by physics?" | |||
"Not by any physics we know. At face, it seems to violate some conservation laws, which would make Emmy Noether's head spin." Kelda remembers the names of her ancient physicist heroes even when she cannot tell which way is sunward. | |||
"Secret physics." Mara thought of the Traveler and its works. "We've all felt it, haven't we? We know we're…" How to say "trapped in the clinch between light and dark," she wondered, without quite so much portent? "We're in contact with certain numinous elements." | |||
Kelda held out her cup for more water. "The question is, your Majesty—" | |||
"Don't call me that. We're operating on a direct democracy here." | |||
Kelda rolled her eyes. "The question is, do we continue to think of this as science? Do we teach it as physics? Causal closure says that everything that happens in a material system has a material cause. However, if symbolic structures in the mind are triggering material effect… shouldn't we call that what it is?" | |||
"Death had no dominion," Mara whispered. | |||
"Pardon?" | |||
"We're in Death's dominion now. We're all dying again. We were immortal in the Distributary, weren't we? Some part of us was… attuned to the universe. And now that we're no longer receiving the Distributary's signal, we're attuned to something new." | |||
That was when the hatch slammed open and Uldren stumbled in, grinning ferociously, clutching a scummy fistful of cytogel to a slash across his neck. | |||
"[[Fallen|Aliens]]!" he rasped. "I found aliens, and one of them cut my throat!" | |||
[[Category:Lore]] | [[Category:Lore]] | ||