home salon writing writers University of Adelaide contact Sean Williams An excerpt from Saturn Returns (2007) by Sean Williams He had no plan of attack. Who had ever been in such a situation before? Not him, if the incomplete reminiscences at his disposal were anything to go by. There were uncountable such fractions, each needing to be lifted out of obscurity, examined, and then re-written in both neurological and narrative senses back into his mind. He chose to let instinct be his sole guide, taking him where it willed throughout the Noh vessel, and beyond, to the Drum itself, where someone--his former self, presumably--had gone to painstaking effort to preserve him for posterity, only to see it blown to smithereens. Moving around the Drum was easier than expected. The Jinc gave him a cowl and robe identical to the ones worn by its mouthpieces. A translucent microfilm provided him with air and maintained a comfortable temperature. It also adjusted the magnetic properties of the soles of his feet, enabling them to stick to the iron of the Drum's curving wall. It was easily thirty meters across and well over one hundred long. He walked for hours along the thin spirals decorating its wide interior. Less than a millimetre wide, they formed the single line that had preserved the data comprising him and his body. The magnitude of the venture startled and shocked him. This was information engineering on a massive, hubristic scale. The Drum had been built to withstand everything the void threw at it. Only intelligence, deliberate and malicious, had ultimately done it in. He could see places where the Jinc had failed to reassemble the Drum from its multitudinous bits. Tiny black dots marred its metallic, grey surface where a resinous material filled in for the missing parts, offending a deep-seated need in him for neatness and order. He felt as though he were walking across a starscape in negative, one that arced up and around him in a powerful representation of curved space. The real stars shone down either end of the Drum, where the Jinc had left open the construct's massive caps. Naked vacuum bathed the cylinder and its contents. The sound of his magnetic footsteps propagated through the metal in silent waves. When he was done, he walked to where the short-range shuttle scoop waited to take him back to the Noh vessel. The Jinc's home looked like a giant neuron, all curves and distended spines with a semi-transparent outer hull that gleamed liquidly in the light of the Milky Way. Imre could discern no front or rear. Similarly with the shuttle scoop, which was a large, seed-shaped vessel pockmarked with thirteen mouths that could, at will, distend vast magnetic vanes. The purpose of the vanes was simple: to suck up the dust and debris the Jinc encountered in its long, destinationless voyage. The remains of the Drum had been gathered in just such a fashion, the mouthpiece of the Jinc had told him. What the Jinc did with its normal harvest, Imre hadn't yet ascertained. The mouthpiece awaited him in the scoop, as lifeless as ever. Perhaps it was the same one who had greeted him on his awakening, perhaps not. The distinction was meaningless. He told himself to stop thinking about it as an individual and treat it, in both his mind and every aspect of his behaviour, as the Jinc itself. "Did that trigger any memories?" the Jinc asked him as he reached the edge of the Drum and prepared to cross. "I'm afraid not. I've never seen anything like it before." He stepped carefully into the belly of the scoop, disengaging his magnetic feet with relief. Fleeting g-forces gripped him as the scoop accelerated away. "I suppose it was worth a try." "You sound disappointed." He was, but saw no point in dwelling on the fact. Although the data had been encoded in the Drum with a fair degree of redundancy, nuclear blasts and wide dispersal were huge hurdles to overcome. The Jinc had done an amazing job to recover anything. "The way I see it, I'm lucky to be here at all. Wherever we are, exactly." The hunched figure beside him made no move to offer any information on that score, so he took it upon himself to ask. "Show me where you've come from." A series of three-dimensional maps appeared around him. He waved them away. "No. Pointing will be fine, while we're out here." The mouthpiece looked up at him. Was that a gleam of puzzlement in its dark eye? A long, wrinkled finger pointed through the transparent hull of the scoop at the splendid starscape ahead of them, tracing a line around the extremities of the galaxy. There was no clear purpose to the Jinc's past movements just as there was no obvious "captain" aboard the ship. It was driven by collective will in directions unknown. Imre's gaze slid from the outstretched finger outward to the galaxy, truly grasping its immensity for the first time. It filled one half of his view, a titled, glowing waterfall looming over the shuttle scoop and its passengers. Every speck was a star--one of a hundred thousand million, large and small, dead and alive, and none of them overlooked by humanity. The Continuum connected them all, whether by arcane quantum loops, stately webs of electromagnetic radiation, or sluggish bullets of matter. The minds inhabiting the Milky Way ranged from as small as his, via gestalts as complex as the Jinc, to intelligences as large as the galaxy itself. Layer upon layer of sentience and civilisation stretched upward from the individual to heights he could barely imagine, and all of it had originated in one remarkable system, on one tiny world. He staggered, not under the influence of acceleration or the immensity of the view, but from a flashback that burst in his skull like a firework. "What about the individual?" said Alphin Freer, an angular, high-cheeked man with iron-grey eyes and neat black hair. "Are we supposed to forget everything you told us--that we fought for?" "The Forts are the big players in the galaxy now." His own voice again, ringing in his ears. The disorientation was profound. He was undoubtedly in the scoop but at the same time he was on the bridge of a burning ship. "They may have had the Aces all along." "Bullshit," said a big, scar-pitted soldier looming like a small mountain to one side, combat suit open to the waist. The green-eyed blonde beside him looked about to cry. "If you do this," said Freer, "you're as much a traitor to the human race as they are." "Listen to me." Imre's reminiscence was full of anger, resentment, and frustration but his voice conveyed nothing but entreaty. "Whatever it takes to get us out of this--isn't that worth pursuing?" "You really think we're getting out of this?" The new voice came from behind him, silky and subtle like a stiletto blade. Imre turned--or remembered turning--and the recollection suddenly dissolved, leaving him with fleeting impressions of snakeskins and stab wounds. He shook his head. The stars were making him feel light-headed. "Are you unwell?" asked the Jinc. One cool, skeletal hand fell on his shoulder. "I don't know," Imre said. "I think I'd like to lie down." "That can easily be arranged. You have been assigned a private berth. We will show you there now." "Thank you." The Jinc's statement took a moment to sink in. "A private berth, really?" "We made it especially for you." It was, he supposed, somewhat less involved than plucking his pieces out of the void and putting them together again, but the thought still made him uncomfortable. "I'd be happy enough in the sickbay." The Jinc didn't reply. As the scoop rolled into a new course, Imre held on and kept his eyes averted from the view. The quarters assigned to him were as cramped as the sickbay, containing a coffin-like bunk identical to the one in which he had awoken, and barely large enough to crouch in. At least the door locked behind him. From the other side of the bulkhead came the sound of machinery and people moving about. Never voices. The Jinc ship was empty of language, unless he was part of the conversation. Sleep was a long time coming. Getting undressed and slipping into the elastic coverlet didn't help. His body felt both pleasantly and unpleasantly unfamiliar. It was in perfect condition, but the differences between it and the one he remembered irked him, making him irritable and suspicious of his hosts when on the face of it he had no good reason to be either. His skin was healthy, pliable and soft, even where body hair was making its presence newly felt. There were no visible scars. Nerve endings responded as he ran his slender fingers down both arms and across his stomach. His eyelids blinked smoothly in the eternal gloom of the Noh vessel. He wondered if he was being watched--and, then, whether he should pursue a faint and not entirely erotic impulse to masturbate. That would help him sleep, if nothing else. It always had in his old body. His nipples hardened at the thought, but fear of failing stayed his hand. He told himself that he was unwilling to embrace this body that he had not chosen. It would be like screwing a stranger. There was a time and a place. Earlier, the Jinc had asked him, "What is the last date you remember?" He had considered the question a long time before answering. Little linear sense came with the memories assembling in his mind. The feeling that some were more recent than others was therefore hard to justify. "What date is it now?" he had asked in return. "We are nearing the end of the nine hundredth millennium." That had told him nothing. "Is the war over?" "Which war?" "People were calling it the Mad Times even before it had finished." "Yes, that war finished one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Is this the last thing you remember?" That figure still bothered him hours later, as he lay on his bunk and contemplated the arousal states of his new body. So many years--yet they had passed in the blink of a cosmic eye, as they might have for one of his enemies in the Mad Times. Humanity had gone from a savage to the stars in such a time. His right moved down to cup his pubic mound. The lack of penis and testes gave him no comfort at all. "I don't know," he had said. "Why the interrogation? I'll tell you when I remember something important." The Jinc mouthpiece had bowed in apology. "Perhaps you would like to know who won." "I can guess. It was a stupid war fought over meaningless ideals. Sol Invictus was never going to come out the other side. The only question was how many of the Forts we took down with us." The intensity with which he spoke surprised him. Clearly, this had once mattered deeply to him. "Am I right?" "You are," the Jinc had told him. "Sol Invictus did fall in the end." "Could that have been when my record was destroyed? The Drum, I mean." "No. Over such a long time, your remains would have dispersed too far for us to gather. You would have become one with the Holy Background." He had immediately thought of the cosmic microwave background radiation, on which were imprinted the ripples of creation. Was that what the Jinc worshipped? The fiery Original State from which the universe had emerged? "Well, that'd be some funeral pyre." "You misunderstand us. We pursue the ExoGenesis, the ultimate source of life in the galaxy--perhaps the universe. Life on one world can seed life on another, but science cannot tell us where life started in the first place. We seek that place on the galactic outskirts, where expeditions only infrequently come and where your remains might have been lost forever." "Mixed up with anything else you found," he said, remembering the Jinc telling him that it had been looking for the nature of God. "Now I understand why you went to so much trouble. I was a contaminant. My DNA would've screwed up the Background." "This is undoubtedly true. Our motives are not entirely self-serving, however. We are curious. We wanted to give you the possibility of rescue, if you desired it." "I would never commit suicide, if that's what you're suggesting." "We did not know that then. We take your word for it now." There was moisture under his fingertips. He moved his hand experimentally, remembering times he had touched Helwise the same way. Was this how she had felt? Was this? "Have you found anything else apart from me?" he had asked the Jinc, feeling the stirrings of curiosity. Nebulous notions of God meant far less to him than the possibility of artefacts of ancient human or possibly even alien origin. "Our discoveries have been few but significant. We will show you when you have rested." Almost, then, he had changed his mind about wanting to lie down. Sleep was a luxury, not a necessity; he really only wanted a moment in which to process everything he had learned. Couldn't that wait for him to see what the Jinc had discovered? Wasn't that potentially more important than himself? He didn't know. Over 150,000 years had passed in the galaxy since he had last gazed upon it. Even for those accompanying the Forts on their slow journey through time, much could have happened. Aliens might have been discovered and exhaustively catalogued, and more besides. What he considered a mystery might now be common knowledge. His own mental and physical state bothered him more, at that moment. His pulse began to race as it did when panicked. He was sweating under the synthetic coverlet. The hand between his legs moved more confidently now, without his conscious direction. A flush spread up his chest to his throat. He could feel the blood surging through all the tissues of his body--his muscles, his organs, his skin. His back arched. It wasn't his. None of it was. The hand, the body, even the orgasm that rose up like an invisible wave and crashed over him in the darkness. It was longer and deeper than any he had experienced before, that he could remember, but even in the midst of it he felt untouched. Nerve endings dutifully conveyed their message to mind but the message didn't connect to the essence of him. The homunculus in the seat of his skull remained determinedly male and unmoved. Dispassionate and dispossessed, he buried his new face into the mattress when it was over, and thrust his legs straight and closed towards the far end of the bed. Saturn Returns (to be publuished in 2007) - Sean Williams For more on Sean Williams click here and/or visit his website by clicking this link; www.seanwilliams.com Top