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Mothwing

One

The single-seater air-car hummed through the lavender skies of dusk, trailed by a curious entourage of iridescent dragonflies half its size. Young Myla Rhodes sat in an open cockpit and drank in the unearthly beauty of the setting sun flashing rainbow colors through their translucent wings.

She tried not to think of where this random journey was taking her. The worry lurked among her thoughts like a tenacious predator. Just as tenaciously, she lived but one moment at a time, the only moment in all of eternity she had any hope of altering to her advantage.

The setting sun was a star called Alexus. It shone a fog of orange light through a lavender haze on the horizon and cast a golden glow across the feral jungles spread below. The gas giant Immamat about which her own moon-world revolved loomed in the darkening sky behind her like a ghostly figment of a deranged imagination. Bolts of powerful lightning flickered across its banded face filling one quarter of the evening sky.

Her thoughts wandered. Despite the beauty of her surroundings, she had been born to this place, and it was far from paradise.

She should not face Overlord Khalin Nome alone, she was thinking. Her father had warned her so long ago. He had warned that someday he would be gone, and that day had long since passed. Her life would be steered by others if she could not steer it herself, he had warned her.

Reliving the death of her parents in her mind’s eye, she jammed her eyes closed. "No, I don't want to think about that now," she said aloud. When the pounding of her heart subsided, she looked to the evening skies for distraction.

The dragonflies had left her, but the moon Jamian hung directly overheard, a silver coin tossed among the stars.

"Pretty, pretty..." she cooed.

Ice-bound Walmar shimmered blue-white closer to the setting sun. Her father and mother had been killed on Walmar in a flash of fire and then an implosion of the deathly cold of the vacuum.

She again pushed the memory from her thoughts and glanced over her shoulder to eye tiny Naphal peeking from behind Immamat's horizon, completing her inventory of visible moons of Immamat. Naphal glowed green like her own Covonia, the only two living moons of the thirteen circling the banded gas giant. She had never visited Naphal. Nobody lived on poisonous Naphal where living things employed horrible toxins in their biochemistry.

The journey through the quiet evening skies failed to hold her pervasive dread at bay. As she turned her thoughts persistently inward, her awareness of her surroundings ebbed even further.

She had been at her parent's side as a child when Overlord Khalin Nome had raged over the foolishness of going naked in the world in their own flesh-and-blood bodies. Her parents would be alive now had they heeded his advice and taken avatars, tucking their own bodies safely away in the Ark embedded in the mantel of the planet.  This second time around, she would be the sole focal point of Khalin's persuasive argument and unbridled anger should she defy his wishes. She did not know for certain what would happen if that happened, if he would honor her decision, or force her to do his bidding. She did not understand the vehemence behind his demands. Perhaps he was, as he claimed, expressing only his love and concern for her.

She would defy him nevertheless. The Naturalist argument was too much a part of her heritage to dismiss at Khalin's whim. The inexorable cycle of life and death reigned supreme in the universe. Men fought desperate battles to stave off death, futile battles in the end. They won token reprieves from time to time, as with the avatars, or using mechanical enhancements. Overlord Nome, as old as modern technology allowed, was one such example, except that he was himself blind to the monster he was becoming.

"I understand now, father," she whispered to the passing breeze. Her father had anticipated this day, knowing the reality of his own mortality and the difficulty she would experience coping with her own.

Her thoughts were far more peaceful when the air-car found its own way to the landing pad alongside the Ark access portal partially hidden among the feather trees turning and stretching out their fronds to take in the last warmth of daylight. The car set down on the landing pad between a man, mostly machine standing twice her height, and Boris, an artificial intelligence and combat robot one third larger still made of transparent and mirror-finished material of no natural origin.

The air-car rocked entering the Boris’ self-defensive subatomic field, but set down gently. Behind her, a few straggler dragonflies fluttered off into the underbrush in an alarmed flash of sparkling wings.

Myla leaped from the cockpit and approached Overlord Nome just close enough for her own soft voice to carry. Boris visibly reacted to her every movement as the machine did when anyone approached too closely to the Overlord. It did not seem fair that Dikki, her own little AI guardian and counselor, should have been ordered by Khalin to stay behind.

Overlord Khalin Nome had shoulders impossibly broad and legs like tree stumps. Dark eyes peering from a face chiseled in hard planes tried to hypnotize her with their intensity. He had engineered his mechanical avatar to be an icon of his authority, although he had accomplished little more than to reveal the intensity of his deepest and most profound insecurity, fear of his own approaching death. What was left of his flesh and blood tucked away in the Ark had lingered for centuries, but could not live forever.

"My child," he murmured, his voice like subdued thunder.

And hers, the sigh of a breeze: "My Lord."

"I feared you would not come."

She hadn't wanted to come. The temptation to run and hide was still close to overpowering.

"I have something I must show you,” he told her. “Will you join me?"

His arguments to convince her to take an avatar had failed in the past. What terrible secret hidden in the bowls of the Ark might succeed in their stead?

Her trepidation apparently showed. "I promise you have nothing to fear," he rumbled gently. "What would it gain me to frighten you? You would shun me forever afterward."

"My Lord, I have never been inside the Ark," she said, although it was Khalin’s presence and not the thought of entering the Ark that unsettled her so badly.

"A short visit, I promise, and then you will be free to leave, and free as always to make your own decisions regarding your own personal life. It is law, is it not?"

It was, and she wanted to make him promise that he would abide by it. She dared not.

"Yes, my Lord," she said with fists clenched at her side.

"Are you ready?"

She would never be ready.

He used a mental key, a secret thought or a visual image, to set machinery into motion. Transparent fingers of an ellipsoid shield rose from about their feet, joined together around them, and turned opaque with a warm luminescent glow on the interior surface. Myla felt no sensation of movement, but she knew they plunged swiftly downward through the crust of the planet.

"Do you remember anything of the accident that killed your parents, child?" Khalin said in the stifling silence.

The question caught her by surprise.  At the time, she had been only four standard years of age. She remembered sunlit peaks of glaring ice standing against a black sky filled with stars, then a burning light and a pounding roar that had seeded a thousand nightmares during the course of her childhood. There had been terrible cold so intense it hurt. Her next memory was of a hospital in Bolphan.

She had never been told why her parents had visited the ice-moon Walmar. A single MI, machine intelligence, warcraft belonging to the rogue Chineen Hive, had attacked and destroyed the unarmed skiff. The original executive programming of the Hive had been corrupted in a mining accident centuries ago. Lost as well had been the Hive's instructions to allow its creators access to its collective processing center to facilitate repairs. Knowing human kind to be the only power in the universe capable of tampering with its sacrosanct executive program, the Chineen Hive had rendered it creators a unique kind of enemy. Even random encounters between rogue Hive forces and human technology justified a blind attack and a battle to the death, although what a Hive patrol had been doing in the inconsequential Covonian system had never been answered to anyone's satisfaction.

The elevator reached bottom. The shroud withdrew and left them standing on a black deck of stone within a dark cavern without visible walls or ceiling. Only two of the half million crypts Myla knew to be hidden in the darkness stood nearby in bright circles of light.

Overlord Nome anticipated her confusion. "This is a visitation area. It is common to wish to view one's natural body from time to time. After all, our brains and minds still function within them. It isn't as if we become the avatars we live within. They are only physical extensions of our true selves."

Highlights glimmered along the gleaming black sides of the two crypts. One turned milky white as she watched and glowed with internal lighting. A control pedestal rose from the floor alongside the device.

"That crypt is for storage only," Khalin said. "It contains a badly damaged avatar that hasn't been used for many years. It is, however, of particular significance to you. You may view as little or as much of it as you desire, if you are at all curious."

Myla looked up at the giant at her side. "Who did it belong to?"

"It belonged to your friend Jeremy Kael."

Myla came alive at the sound of Jeremy's name. Fearing Khalin would see her joy and use it against her, she scowled. How had he known of her feelings for her adopted brother?

"I have seen the way you look at him," he said, as if reading her very thoughts. "The attraction between male and female is part of that cycle of life and death you hold so reverently, is it not?"

Myla refused to meet his gaze. She would not deny it. Jeremy had been an ache in her heart for as long as she could remember, but he would never be anything more. Her mother had warned her. She could never hope to compete for Jeremy's affections as someone other than a little sister. She was just too young for the older boy.

When, though, had Jeremy ever been killed? Even if it had only been an avatar, it must have been a horrible experience. She looked to Overlord Nome for an explanation, knowing she was being lured into a trap, but helpless to resist her overpowering curiosity.

"Jeremy Kael rescued you when your parents were attacked," Khalin said gently. "He saved your life, child."

Myla stared at him blankly.

"He followed your parents to Walmar. He had been investigating the death of his own parents and thought perhaps they were in the same kind of danger. They wouldn't heed his warning to take along an armed escort. Your parents heeded far too few warnings. Do you remember how Jeremy's parents died?"

Nothing could penetrate the Ark where the Techs conducted their vicarious lives through their avatars. Only Naturalists were vulnerable to a crime so hideous and cowardly as murder. Jeremy's parents had been killed during an outing in the forest near Bolphan. Only their charred remains had been found.

She understood the point Khalin was trying to make. Jeremy had been free to choose his own path in life and embrace Tech philosophies and accept the safeguards and augmentations that made humanity smart and powerful enough to populate the universe.

So, too, was she free to make the same choice.

Her gaze fell upon Jeremy's casket. Her curiosity intensified moment by moment.

"It is enough for you to understand that the boy followed your parents to Walmar thinking there was a danger," Khalin said, continuing to lavishly bait the trap. "He would have died himself had it not been for this avatar standing in place of his real self, the avatar you see before you. I had it preserved and I saved it for this moment. I knew it would come to this. It is the only argument which may sever your blind loyalty to your parents' old ways."

Khalin was hoping to overpower her with her own ignorance, to disorient and disarm her with it. She refrained from lashing out at him in futile rage, but only by a hairs' breadth.

"See for yourself, child. Kael had no way to express his true feelings for you. His actions, though, spoke for themselves. He misfiled a flight plan and took an armed fighter into restricted space to protect you when your parents denied his request that you be left safely behind in his custody. He acted upon his own initiative, without your parent's knowledge. You were his only concern."

Myla trembled. If only it were true. If only he truly loved her so much. She glanced up at her guardian and benefactor feeling like a helpless child. "Tell me what happened."

"Jeremy was not capable of defending against a Hive warcraft," Khalin said. "He did, however, survive long enough on the airless surface of Walmar to reach the wreckage of your ship and place your body in a suspension crypt. His avatar failed before he could do the same for your parents, although they would not have survived their injuries in any case."

Myla was beside herself with conflicting emotion, and a budding, secret rapture.

"Even today, the boy thinks his secret safe," Khalin said.

"But he is my brother," Myla whispered in Jeremy's defense. "He only protected his family."

"You know he is not your biological kin. Your bond with that young man is of another nature altogether."

Her parents, too, had known that the bond between them had gone beyond friendship. Perhaps it had been the source of the tension that had finally driven the boy away, that and his disdain for the simple Naturalist lifestyle.

Still, she could not believe that Jeremy had risked so much for her. She had always thought her love for him of the unrequited variety.

Or had he risked anything at all for her? Avatars, after all, were expendable. The real Jeremy was down here in the Ark somewhere, along with all the other Techs, tucked away in their crypts and safe from even the destruction of the world. She had spoken with Jeremy only hours ago, and he was none the worse for his pseudo death. Only the Nats went naked in the world in their own flesh and blood, although in both cases, Techs and Nats replaced themselves with natural children. Again, the Nats did it the old fashioned way. The Techs used artificial insemination and nobody ever saw the resulting pregnancy until the newborn was tucked away in its own crypt in the Ark and brought forth into the light of day as an avatar.

Myla went to the casket glowing in a circle of light and used the controls on the pedestal to turn the opaque cover transparent. She backed hastily away when she saw that the torn body within was not intact. It was not even complete.

"He died for you," Khalin said.

"He was in no danger of dying," Myla said bitterly. "He was using an avatar."

But the comment had been a trap, and she had blindly walked into its stunning subtlety.

"Perhaps I have the situation reversed in my mind," Khalin said with mock sincerity. "It was you who nearly died, was it not?"

Myla defiantly crossed her arms against her breasts, but fought a chill as deep as the grave.

"You would have perished with your parents, Myla. Because of Jeremy's love, you will blossom into womanhood. And now that you know that your young passions are not unrequited, will they be denied? I would guess that you and your Jeremy will defy the stargods themselves to express your true feelings for one another."

Khalin let the silence gather. Myla stood rigid with anticipation, knowing what was coming next.

"Except that your time together will be short. The bloom of Naturalist youth passes with frightful swiftness, does it not? You will age relentlessly, as the natural body is wont to do. Your exalted cycle of life and death will grind you beneath its heels as it passes. And when you die, Jeremy Kael, always young, whose avatar will have been replaced many times, will remember you with unrelenting bitterness for having thrown away the many additional decades, centuries even, that you and your children could have shared together."

"Why are you doing this to me?" she whispered harshly and then gulped hard to hold her foolish tears at bay. She did not want him to see her cry.

He only sighed in his quiet despair. His feelings for her coursed unnaturally deep and strong. Their intensity had always made her uncomfortable, and she had never understood the reason for it.

"Myla, I know about your family nickname."

Myla glanced up at him in utter shock. She clutched at the data coin that hung about her neck on a golden chain, her father's coin. Khalin stared at it. There was a tremor in his voice when he spoke. "It's a word in old Tenesian that means the gentle brush of a moth's wing, or something equally foolish. Mothwing."

"You don't know the Tenesian word for it, do you?" she cried stridently.

"Then you know that your father was not your real, biological father, nor was he Tenesian. Your real father was Tenesian, a native to the inner worlds of the Alliance."

"Yes, I know that!"

"Your father was, or is, if he is still alive, one of very few who knows your childhood name," her mother had told her.  "It will be the means by which he identifies himself to you. I can't promise that will ever happen."

She had checked the DNA banks. Overlord Nome was not her biological father. She had once suspected it the reason for his constant attention, his veritable obsession with her welfare.

Khalin shook his head sadly, anticipating her train of thought. "No, I am not your father. Had I been, my enemies would have destroyed you to punish me, child. But the tale of the mothwing is an age-old Tenesian story, is it not, a story that alludes to the power of life?"

Myla gave him a reluctant nod of agreement.

"The wing of a moth is a force as weak as the pressure of sunlight," Khalin said, "and yet it drives the moth tenaciously toward the light. In its unknowing innocence, it will drive the moth to its destruction in the flames of a fire, but one moth's wing follows another and exemplifies the drive of the life-force of an entire biosphere of a world. Not only do moths survive, they seek blind self-destruction in even greater flames, and still they survive and multiply. Many centuries ago, humanity didn't realize that planetary life is like a cocoon, that the life of a planet yearns for the freedom of the stars. It didn't need to know. The gentle brush of a moth's wing took them there despite their ignorance.

"That was how I saw you when you were born, my child, a creature as helpless and innocent as a moth, but representing the greatest power the universe has yet to manifest."

"I don't remember you when I was little," Myla said tearfully, afraid to ask why Khalin had overshadowed her life. What had been his relationship with her parents? Her mother had admonished her not to talk to others of their friendship with the Overlord. Even now, Khalin's role as her guardian was not well known within Bolphan, and certainly not within the other nine cities scattered across the surface of Covonia.

"As the decades passed, it occurred to me that the analogy of the moth's wing can be taken further than the old story intended," Khalin continued.

Myla stared at the deck at her feet and endured the moment of measured silence.

"How does the moth tolerate darkness when the last light is gone?"

Myla looked up at the Overlord.

"We all face the darkness sooner or later. We defy it as best we can. Why do you not?”

Myla couldn’t answer the question. Her parents had tried to explain their philosophy to her, something having to do with the nature of life and death and unwarranted assumptions. That part of the explanation had been too complex. She had not understood it. But she had understood all too clearly the desperation with which they tried. She would understand someday, they had told her. She would never understand if she succumbed to Lord Nome’s temptation. “You can't live forever, my Lord,” was all she could say, sounding even to her own ears like a child. “I don't want to try, and you can't make me."

His expression hardened to a grim look Myla knew to be dangerous. Khalin was not accustomed to defiance. He would find some way to force her to comply with his wishes.

"If Jeremy's sacrifice does not impress you," Khalin said, "nor the technology that allowed a loyal friend to survive it, then I have only one final item to show you. If it has gone to waste, then you may as well know of its existence before I am forced to dispose of it."

Myla's eyes flew to the second casket. She knew with absolute certainty what it contained.

"I won't force you to look," he said. "But if you don't look now, I'll destroy its contents and you'll never know. If I sound cruel, it's all I have left to convince you of the wisdom of my request."

The surface of the second casket turned white and misty. Another pedestal rose alongside it. Myla had no control over her own curiosity. She stepped close enough to see what lay within, then adjusted the controls to afford herself a clear view.

Clear blue eyes in a tanned face framed by hair the color of platinum stared up at her. Myla gasped in surprise. She clutched at her stomach and stepped back. But she could not tear her eyes away.

"I do not mean to make you suffer," he murmured.

A confession spilled forth from her lips. "She's beautiful."

"You know who she is, of course."

Myla glanced up at him with a wane smile. "Of course. It's me. It's the avatar you want me to wear."

"I designed it myself. Do you approve?"

Some avatars, like Khalin’s mechanical one, were highly stylized, his designed for battle, and a far cry from their real selves. She imagined that Khalin's real body hadn't seen the light of day in centuries and would be tiny and shriveled by now. Other avatars, like Jeremy’s were copies of his real self. The avatar lying before her looked almost exactly like herself, except that it was prettier and a little taller and better proportioned than herself. Myla felt uncomfortable knowing that the Overlord knew her physical body so intimately, although avatar's were never confused for the real thing and were similar to a human body only in outward appearance. Inside, they carried devices that linked to the biological brain of those within the Ark. They had no brain of their own.

Avatar brains were possible, but illegal. Minds could not be transferred from one brain to another regardless. At best, they could only be copied, giving birth to an entirely new individual with no real connection to the original. It was the one inescapable fact that kept humanity mortal. Immortality, endless repetition, stifled the creativity and vibrancy of the variety provided by the ordinary evolutionary processes of natural selection. It had seemed once that all that could be seen of the universe could be understood by the human mind, but much of the quantum universe was not seen by human senses, and not at all understood. Nor would it ever be. The deepest mysteries of human consciousness fell within that realm of the unseen and the unknowable.

"You can live through that body as well as your own," Khalin said. "You would not be able to tell it was not your own."

"I know how it works."

"You can return to your own body from time to time to bear your children in the Naturalist way, if you wish. Otherwise, you would be safer down here with the rest of us. We cannot be harmed in this place, Myla. Not even the destruction of Covonia would threaten us. Avatars can be replaced. You, however, are one of a kind and can never be replaced."

She looked up at him and said on the verge of tears, "because I am mortal."

Khalin Nome brought his fists alongside his head and groaned in misery.

"And so are you."

He sighed again, heavily, in defeat.

She stared at him intently, hoping he would understand at long last. "We are all mortal," she said, "no matter how long we live, no matter how hard we try."

"You understand less than you can imagine of what is at stake," he spat back in ill-restrained anger, but sounding childlike himself, because he faltered and seemed unable or unwilling to explain explicitly what she failed to understand.

She stared at him with more defiance than was prudent. She wanted to throw his mortality into his face and hold it there for as long as she could. At eight hundred years, his brain was dying, neuron by neuron. His mind was lapsing into senility. No matter how young and vibrant his artificial bodies, the essence of himself could never be lifted free of the cycle of life and death.

"It is more important than you know that you abide by my request," he added in a dry monotone. "Please, child."

"I want to think about it some more," she said in a careful monotone of her own. Stalling for time was her only way out.

He seemed to diminish in stature, defeated by her simple refusal to make an immediate decision. He had no legal way to force one upon her. "Of course," he said grimly.

Except that Overlord Nome was never defeated. Contingency plans would be churning against the background of his anger even now.

Khalin did not speak to her on the ride back to the surface. He stood upon the lift platform like an abandoned gnome and watched her air-car hum into the evening sky. Myla did not glance back until she was certain she was out of sight. She then took manual control and banked the craft away from the city.

If Overlord Nome thought her a child, then she would behave like one. She would run away. He would surely panic and inadvertently alert Bolphan to their conflict of will. If he made that one tiny slip-up, and Myla suspected he would, then the city would unwittingly arbitrate their dispute, and Khalin would have to abide by the pressure public sentiment could bring to bear upon him. Despite Khalin's blustering, his days as Overlord were numbered. The city had the power to remove him from office, should he overstep his authority.

Somewhere beyond the horizon, she would find a row of low mountains. At the foot of the tallest of the trio stretched a park she had visited often with her parents, the very park where Jeremy's parents had been killed. The site had been used for botanical and zoological research and a section cleared of hazardous wildlife for recreational use. It would be a safe place to hide. She needed time to think and to plan for her self-defense.

But a stark bank of jagged peaks blocked her way, rising against the pastel sunset. And here the air-car faltered far short of her destination. "Authorization is needed before proceeding beyond this point," the gentle voice of the vehicle announced.

Myla quickly descended to treetop level and positioned herself above a glistening black sink hole. Only seconds remained within which to decide and act. She eyed Immamat and calculated the tides. Once Immamat fell below the horizon, the tides would fall, and the receding waters of the sink hole would suck her down into its fathomless depths. If she remained indecisive too much longer, the air-car would seal itself up and deliver her back to Bolphan.

She scanned the darkening terrain below. The sink hole posed no special hazard, but the forest would be a gloomy and dangerous place to spend the night. Humans were alien to this world and their respective biochemistries mutually toxic to some small degree. Most of the plants and animals would avoid her. A few, though, were bound to be too stupid to sense the danger before taking a bite.

"Do you have an alternate destination?" the air-car demanded softly.

The thought of spending a night alone in her tiny room in Bolphan frightened her. The safest place on Covonia was too likely to become a prison, and the dangerous wilderness was beginning to look more and more like a sanctuary.

The air-car sensed something amiss with its human operator and began to gain altitude of its own accord. "This machine has assumed automatic control and will return to its berth."

Even as she heard relays click, Myla leaped over the side of the cockpit with a cry of both despair and stubborn determination. The canopy snapped shut, covering the open cockpit and snipping at her toes.

Myla plummeted through a cool breeze. She knew the wildlife of Covonia better than most, but did she recognize that serpentine shape undulating in the water below?

She struck the cold surface and sank alone into darkness before she could answer her own question.

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