The Starship Theseus

1. Stargazing.

Stargazer was stargazing.

Her three sensitive eyes were well suited to it, having evolved on a world around a dim red dwarf. The heavens had been first described to her by the false songstress. The first betrayer, the weaver of false hope, liar to children and fools. The songstress’s faux image had sung to her and her litter-mates in the first days of her memory, before even Stargazer had opened her eyes. From her songs had Stargazer and her siblings and the other Aurealians learned to sing. But the Songstress’s song of hope and joy outside the confines of their prison had been lies.

Stargazer had dreamed of the stars, back then. Longed for the day that she would see them. To see the promise of prosperity and peace for her people. She had been so young, and even in the squalor of the prison in which she was born, she had been full of hope. That hope was long since crushed. Crushed on the very night she had first seen the stars. Along with the skulls of five of her litter-mates.

Before that night, she had never questioned the songstress’s teachings. She had never wondered why there were no songs about the Others. They had never hidden themselves, after all, and so the songstress must have known them. The others were a colorful race, with amphibian skin and reptilian structure, despite their bipedal nature they could easily catch a galloping Aurealian in a sprint. Terrifying were their claws, but worse were their maws, with their dreadful fangs. In the days before the culling, before sending Stargazer and her sisters to the hunting rounds, the Others had walked among the cells dividing the litters, running their claws against steel bars in a ritual so old it had worn grooves in the metal, just to wake the young Aurealian and fill them with a nameless dread.

"Clack clack clack clack." Even now, she remembered the sound.

The dread that sound inflicted was unexplained, instinctual, and well placed. For it was never freedom that the Aurealian received when the Others finally took a litter from their cell. The fortunate ones were sent to the hunting grounds. The fortunate ones were also forced to witness the fates of the unfortunate ones.

She looked away from those memories and back towards the sky. She could do nothing for the dead, nothing for the past. She could do nothing for the rest of her litter. Of those sisters she had seen when she’d first opened her eyes, only she survived. When she died, their names would die with her. She stubbornly defied the fate set out before her. She would not give in to despair, as she had seen so many of her Kin do in the hunting grounds.

With each new arrival, she would teach them to make a spear, like the one she clutched now, and she would teach them the true songs that she had inherited on the night after that awful night. She would tell them to run, yes, run from the Others when the horns blew. But hold on to the spear, for when the Others cornered you, the spear was your only hope. And if you did not have a spear, then a sharp rock. But not for yourself.

She held in her heart not the empty songs of the false songstress, but the true Song of Defiance she had heard as a shell-shocked kip, her sister’s blood still matted to her fur. She still remembered that scarred veteran’s haunting voice, the scars on her torso and hind legs, and the glassy look in her central eye.

From this veteran Stargazer had taken her name. It had been given in spite, for the veteran’s defiance of was bitter and angry and the memory of the false songstress’s enraged her. How could she not be bitter, when she had lived through so many hunts, seen so many of her kin die young? The veteran had been mocking her, but Stargazer had embraced the name. She would be happy with no other.

The veteran – Strongarm had been her name, it was important to remember that – had fallen not so long after that. She had exhorted five of the other elders into ambushing one of the hunters responsible for the worst atrocities. Strongarm and her party had all perished. They had blooded the hunter badly, but he had been rescued by his own kind. He was forever marked for his sins, but he survived and hunted still. Less frequently, but still.

The eldest surviving veteran had taken up her post in arming the new arrivals with spear and song, as was tradition. It had not been long, and yet had seemed like an eternity, before that role had fallen to Stargazer herself. She was older now than Strongarm herself had been. Or at least she believed so, but by Strongarm’s word she had survived three hundred and nine hunts before her fall. Stargazer had stopped counting at five hundred. It was hard to be certain how that translated into time, because there was no set interval. The Others hunted at their pleasure and at their leisure. When the game was scarce, they simply brought a new litter of kips to the hunting grounds.

They would always kill several, releasing them one by one, only to chase the kips down before they escaped the clearing and, well, what followed did not bear thinking of. Then, after several demonstrations, the cages were opened, and the new litter would scatter into the forests of the hunting grounds, chased by predatory howls and nightmares. The howls would end at daybreak, but the nightmares never would.

Stargazer would not scream when she was finally caught. She had heard enough screams in her life. That was not how she would die. That is not how she would be remembered by the other Aurealians that she had armed with spear and defiance. She would not bring others into the light with her, as Strongarm had, but she would meet her fate with the same icy silence, when it was her time. It would be her final defiance in the face of the Others, in the face of fate itself.

Until then, she would do her duty. Duty which she had never asked for, but had been thrust upon her. She would sing to the new arrivals. She would show them the food dumps and the water sources, she would show them where to find wood for the spear, and how to knap flint and sharpen it as she had been shown. Not just that second night, but every night they came to her, she would sing to them again, because the duty might fall to any one of them, as it had to her. And she would survive, so that others would not be required to pick up her burdens.

Her song was not quite the same as Strongarm’s had been, and Stargazer expected that the next grizzled veteran would sing differently as well. She would pass on the names that she remembered, but sometimes she dreaded that she was forgetting many. How many were there? And how many more forgotten before the mantle had fallen to her? How many of her Kin lost to the voracious maws of the Others?

When the dread of the forgotten was upon her, she could only find peace in the stars. Her name was meant as mockery, but it was her refuge, and she was unashamed. She did not believe the old songs, but she would look up, and the sight of the firmament would fill her hearts with peace. On the nights when no horns sounded, the other Aurealians would always know where to find her, atop one of the highest hills in the hunting grounds, eyes heavenward.

She had noticed the new star a few days ago, brighter than the others. And then she had deliberately pretended that it had always been there. The birth songs, the lies of the lying witch, sang that even stars died and were reborn. She refused to believe it. No matter how bright the new star might be, she insisted that she had simply never cataloged it in her mental constellations before it first drew her attention.

It was one of the stars of false promises, of which the song of defiance warned. New stars which burn too bright and move slowly through the sky do not promise salvation. Their arrival often meant a rapid cycle of hunts, even more terrible than the norm.

The others had not noticed the new star, or at least if they had, they had remained silent. If they had noticed, they too knew what it might signal, and there was no point in frightening the others. The horns would sound, or they would not. The Aurealian youth had no control over that truth.

On the fifth day after the first star had appeared, a second lit up next to it. Stargazer could not deny it this time. She had been staring at the new star and pretending it wasn’t there when the second had suddenly lit up quick as a blink, and just as bright as the first. Then, a moment later, a third star, and a fourth, and a fifth, and after another moment she had already lost count. Dozens! Hundreds? All in a space in the sky no larger than the moon.

Her hearts hammered. Her mind raced. The old songs, the birth songs, could they be true? Could these stars signal the salvation of her people? Protection from the Others from beings on high?

For the first time in my season-cycles, Stargazer felt fear not caused by the sounding of horns of the howls of the Others. It was a clear sign, one of the promised signals of the salvation. Had she been young, she would feel elation and joy that the nightmare was coming to an end, that the false songs were not false after all. But she was eldest of the hunting grounds, and older than any of the last ten elders by her best calculations, based on the cycles of the song of defiance. She would not believe that the heavens would save her until the light came down to earth and smote the Others to dust before her very eyes.

But the kips? The young and newly arrived? They would see the stars, and the birth songs were still fresh in their ears. Would they forsake defiance for the hope of salvation? If these stars were in fact stars of false promises, to do so would mean death. Death for the kips, death for Stargazer. Death for Defiance itself.

She heard voices on the wind. Already the younger ones were calling for her, demanding answers she did not have. She knew she must crush their hopes if they were to have any chance to survive. She was accustomed to the task. But part of her asked that dreadful question that she had been ignoring for far longer than the first of the new stars to flicker to life.

What if?

What if?

What if?

She abandoned her hill. She could not face those questions. She knew the answers she must give to the others, but she could not give them. It was one thing to crush the hopes of the despondent to teach them the skills they needed to fend for themselves, but to crush a hope rekindled? That was a task she could not face. Not without certainty, or at least more information than she had at the moment. And she could think of only one source to find that certainty.

Stargazer knew of dens that her sisters did not, and it was in one of those she spent the day. The sunlight was too harsh for the eyes of the Aurealians. Fortunately, the Others came only at night. The sunlight was as harsh upon their skin as it was on Stargazer’s eyes, but that was not the reason. Stargazer knew the sad truth; digging a sleeping Aurealian out of her den would not satisfy an Other. They wanted the Hunt. The chase, the satisfaction of killing with their claws and tearing into still-living flesh with their jagged teeth.

She knew, because she had seen and heard.

Listening for the voices of her kin, she made her way to the nearest stream and sated her thirst. She did not wash in the stream. That would only make her smell like an Aurealian, removing the pastes she had rubbed into her short fur to disguise herself with plant scents. Aurealian ears were sharper than the Others, but it made little difference in the hunt. The Others hunt by scent and spoor, and Stargazer owed her survival to her mastery of masking both. She shared her knowledge freely with the kips, but so many of them perished before they could approach her level of mastery.

Her destination would take most of the night to reach. Less at a gallop, but stealth was so ingrained into her mind that she did not even attempt to compute the time it would save. She was preoccupied by her efforts in preventing her hooves from leaving lasting tracks, a skill she had learned but required concentration to maintain.

The hunting grounds were enormous. The Others had not bothered to mark the borders; there was no fence keeping Stargazer and her sisters confined. No, their movement was restricted in a much crueler manner. When the Aurealians crossed an invisible line, they felt pain. The further they traveled, the more they hurt. Stargazer did not know how the Others did that, but she had experienced it herself in the early days when her thoughts had been of escaping to safety.

There was no escape except death. When death came for her, she would stab its eye with her spear and take it into the light with her. For that was Defiance.

The boundaries of the hunting ground had been marked through the generations by the captive Aurealian prey. Stacks of stones were the clearest warnings, for they were the longest lasting. Old spears stuck into the earth were more common signs that a young kip was reaching the edge of their captivity. Symbols scraped into rocks were the least common, but the most helpful, for they also told of nearby resources, if you knew how to read them, and Stargazer did.

Unfortunately, the symbols would fade with time and erosion. It was one of Stargazer’s self-appointed tasks to renew them periodically, and although it would delay her arrival, that was what she was doing when she glanced at the moon-that-was-not. Bright and undeniable, she could hear her sisters calling out for her to explain its portents.

Her stomachs churned with the thought of what she must do to give them the answers they craved. But it must be done by one, and she was eldest of the hunting grounds. It was her duty, even if none could demand it of her.

Stargazer was contemplating the strange light that was brighter than any other object in the sky when she noticed it. Green. Green lines like the lights which sometimes appeared in the far south, but they were not coming from the south, but the west. And, she realized, from the east too. And then from all directions, until the entire sky was filled with beauty. Impossible, beautiful aurora on a scale that filled the firmament. Bright enough to outshine the false moon, and the true moons. Yellows and reds joined the green, and the aurora pulsed with promises and wonder.

She dropped her spear and wept. She did not know what the lights meant. It was another omen she would be called upon to interpret, and she knew even less about their meaning than the appearance of the lights of false-promises. But they were beautiful, and, for a moment, she was just happy that she had lived long enough to see them.

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