Princess of the Void
3.27. It’s Real

Oorta’s team picks up on Grant’s jittery fervor; the Taiikari researchers work double-time to map the xhurr leaf into its chemical components. The results are back from the lab within the hour.

As Grant requested, they’ve cross-referenced it with Eqtoran blood samples, controlled against standard Taiikari blood and the synthesized stuff that the Pike carries for Maekyonite transfusions, just in case. They pull samples for every member of the village, whether they chew the leaf or not. Grant finds what he’s looking for, highlighted in neon green above the elemental building blocks.

Grant knew it. It was fated. It was preordained. Everything is so laden with meaning now. Everyone is very preoccupied with how hydrated he is, for which he’s grateful. But there is so much work to be done. So much.

“It’s a serotonergic hallucinogen.” Grant paces in front of an awed Tymar, a bemused Ajax, and a deeply concerned Oorta, running his hands through his hair. “Like the DMT you naturally find in Maekyonite pineal glands. But specialized and at strong concentrations. The dose I had was modest, apparently, and if the Eqtoran mind has even a fraction of that—” he cackles. “I mean I get it. I’ve been resisting this being the answer. I haven’t told Sykora and I’ve been sitting on my hands and I’ve been resisting it because—” Grant laughs. “Because it’s so dumb. It’s dumb. But it’s real. God dammit, it’s the answer.”

Tymar pinches his nose. “Uh. What’s the answer?”

“The leaf. The altered state of consciousness it put me in. That’s—” He taps the page urgently. “The hallucinogen is naturally in their blood. At a far lower concentration, but—”

Ajax raises his gloved hand. “Are you telling me the Eqtorans are high? All the time?”

“No. Sort of. It’s not an altered state, to them. It’s just—reality. A different reality than the one you and I have. And you’ve seen them. They’re reasonable people. They can handle it far better than I could. It blew my head open; it just gets them a little mellow. But all the prayer they do, all the talking they do to their gods all the time. All the singing. The music.” Grant’s hands flex and ball into triumphant fists. “They’re playing it constantly. It’s like—it’s like food or light or heat. It’s fundamental to them. It’s the voices of their pantheon. How did we miss it?”

"We’ve had a lot of research done on their musical traditions,” Oorta says. “It’s a key part—”

“No. No, no. I don’t mean to tell you your business, administrator. But it goes deeper than that. It’s fundamental. It’s sacred.”

“Majesty,” Tymar says. “Everyone has sacred music.”

“Not like this. Oh I mean sure we say music is the universal language, music is holy, music soothes the savage beast, blah blah blah but—” Grant forces himself to take a breath. “Not like how the Eqtorans experience it. It’s not lip service to them. Not just words. We thought the temples came first, and the music came second, but we got it backward.”

“I need to try this to understand what you’re saying,” Tymar decides. “I need some xhurr.”

“I really must insist that we not take any additional illegal actions,” Oorta says.

“I’m the Prince and I say it’s legal,” Grant says.

“Okay. Damn it all.” Oorta throws her hands up. “I want to try some too, then.”

“While you do that.” Grant shoulders his parka on. “I need to call my wife. I’m taking conference room B.”

Oorta’s shoulders tense upward. “Are you sure that’s advisable? This seems… hasty.”

“No. No, it’s fine. No. I’ve figured it out. I’m going to be home soon. Just one more call and then I’ll be out of your hair, Oorta.” Grant wipes his hand across his whiskers. “I have what I need.”

He strides for the threshold and pauses, lit by the stark fluorescence of the listening post. He steps back into the lab and sweeps both the Taiikari into a quick hug.

“It’s real!” he cries.

He hurries from the lab.

***

“I really am trying to understand what you mean by real, Majesty,” Vora says.

Behind her, on the video feed, Sykora sits frozen on her throne. She’s been in pensive silence since Grant started his spiel.

“The gods,” Grant says. “Their experience and perception of them. It’s linked inextricably to their music. The secret to an interplanetary theocratic republic. Based on a religion that holds individual choice sacred. I was scratching my head, because how do you manage that? It seems so improbable. How do you bind that so tight?”

He laces his fingers together demonstratively.

“They program themselves with it,” he says. “The same way you might listen to sad songs when we need a good cry or concentration songs when you really need to focus. It’s that but it’s supercharged. Their religious songs—they instill the same unity-feeling you get at a concert. They’re unified because of it. Tymar’s been giving himself a crash course in recognizing the songs they keep broadcasting. Let’s, uh—” He fiddles with the console that’s built into the conference hall lectern. “I’m gonna play this Book of Thorns broadcast the post intercepted and translated.”

He finds the control to turn the screen on and steps aside. The spindly keeper ecclesiast in-frame speaks above a fiery-timbered march. Subtitles appear below them, in Taiikari.

The tyrant invaders tainting our deep sky imagine themselves untouchable. They tell us that we must surrender or burn. They imagine that this scares us. That by killing us they will snuff out the fire of freedom that is immortal and immanent in our people.

“Oh yeah, this one,” Waian says. “We’ve been getting this one a lot.”

Burn us, then. See what splendid kindling we make. Burn us and we’ll burn higher and brighter than you dare to think. Bright enough to show the entire galaxy your true face. High enough to reach you in your floating fortress. Burn us and we’ll see just how untouchable you are.

“That translation is much more vivid than the one we’ve seen,” Vora says.

“Tymar did it,” Grant says. “I trust him on getting the gist down.”

“We’ve been watching these broadcasts, too, Majesty,” Hyax says. “The evacuation has slowed to a trickle at roughly halfway. There were intermittent flurries for the first tenday out of the urban centers—they’ve stopped. And the airwaves are full of messages like this. What are you showing us?”

“That song in the background,” Grant says. “It’s called the Mantle Song, from the Book of Thorns. It’s a bravery song, a defiance song. Do you recognize it?”

The command group shares a volley of uncertain glances. “Should we?” Vora asks.

“Tektnal was playing it,” Grant says. “When we first arrived. When that old flinty bastard Uqan stood up and accosted me. I’ve seen a whole room of Eqtorans reduced to tears by my playing. We’ve been talking to them wrong. We’ve been using our words too much. Our appeals to emotion—they’re not landing because that’s not how Eqtorans do it. They do it with music. We’re talking to them but we’re not talking to them.”

“I don’t see how much clearer we can be,” Hyax says. “Those people down there understand us perfectly well. They’re prepared to martyr themselves.”

“That’s the thing, Brigadier,” Grant says. “They’re not wrong. They say that they’ll burn to light the fires of resistance. That by their deaths, they’ll defy us. And they will. We’re creating millions of martyrs. We’re slowing harmonious integration by a hectocycle at least; we’re creating a new permanent mythology, a fresh, massive scar on the psyche of Eqtora. If they want to hurt us, they can. And they will. And maybe we can counter-program it in the future but we can counter-program it now, too. Right now. The way they are.”

He takes a fortifying inhale.

“With song,” he says.

“Ah,” Vora says.

“We sing the right song at the right time with the right message.” Grant plows on. “We can get that evacuation started up again.”

Sykora coughs. “Dove, that’s—”

“I know,” Grant says. “It’s crazy. I know it is. So is dying in a firestorm while the ships that could ferry you to safety are sitting in harbor. We are not dealing with a parallel level of logic. The people who remain down there are doing it because of a narrative. We can hijack that narrative. We can reach a whole swathe of people we haven’t reached. And for the rest of them, the ones we’re not talking directly to, they’ll see what we’re doing and understand the kind of woman they’re surrendering to. The care we’re taking. It won’t change everyone’s minds, but it doesn’t need to. It’s a republic. They go with the majority vote.”

“Um—Majesty.” Vora skitters into the center of the camera shot. “I don’t mean to diminish your research. But wading into the religious realm on such a wide and public scale, when we’re an extraterrestrial force. The potential to fail or backfire seems too strong.”

“It’s not just religious,” Grant says. “We can’t be reductive. This stuff isn’t siloed off for them; it’s a key ingredient to how they live. We can’t ignore it. Imagine a diplomat giving you stale bread and watered-down wine and bringing you to a sunless dungeon to treat with you. We’ve been ignoring a full half of what their population emotionally responds to. And in a representative republic that has consequences.”

“So you’re saying that because they all have alien drugs in their blood, threatening to blow them all up won’t work as well as singing a song at them,” Waian says.

“Yes, Chief engineer,” Grant says. “That is what I am saying. And I need more resources to find the right song. It’s just Tymar and I right now. I need a bigger team and more compute.”

“I don’t know, Majesty.” Waian bites the inside of her cheek. “I mean, I’d love it. But I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, either.” Sykora sighs. “I hate to say it—it kills me to say it, dove, but—”

“Majesty,” Hyax says. “I recognize the impropriety of interrupting you, but I cannot be silent.”

“Brigadier,” Sykora says. “I’m already—”

“Please, Sykora.” Hyax folds her hands tight behind her back. “There are three million Eqtorans remaining on Taiqan. When the time comes to deliver the order and burn them all alive, I am the one who will press the button. Across all the vessels my gun batteries have destroyed, I have killed perhaps a thousand people. In a tenday I increase that number three thousandfold. You may debate between one another whose responsibility that ultimately is. I am the one who presses the button. I don’t pretend this gives me the authority to make a decision, but I insist on being heard. I apologize for my presumptions.”

Sykora’s mouth was opening to reply. Hyax’s apology stills her words in her throat and leaves her slackjawed.

“With your permission,” Hyax says, “I’d like to begin the implementation of His Majesty’s plan immediately.”

Sykora’s eyelids flutter. “What?”

“We can review Brother Tymar and His Majesty’s data more fully and retreat to our original plan if needed,” Hyax says. “But if he’s correct, we can’t wait. Implementation will be crucial and we need to pivot quickly. The translation teams are being wasted decoding the media and communications. We aren’t going to see further changes. We can use them better on Grant’s plan.”

“This is—something of a shock, Brigadier,” Sykora says. “To hear you advocate for this.”

“I would like very much not to be a mass murderer, Majesty. If His Majesty thinks his ridiculous Maekyonite song can prevent it, I’m willing to try. It strikes me as pure madness, but perhaps it’s the same madness we’re dealing with below. Perhaps it’s the same madness that worked once already aboard that slavetaker outrunner, with Steefen the Maekyon captive. The Prince’s approach has my vouch and I humbly petition that we pursue it.”

She bows low. Her expression remains stoic and stony into the ensuing silence.

“Okay.” Waian’s face cracks into a sardonic grin. “If Hyax is on team magical mystery music, I’m getting onboard, too.”

“Likewise.” Sykora stands up. She’s framed in the golden expanse of Taiqan. “Majordomo, I’m putting you in command of our standard doctrinal procedure. Take all the authority you require with my full confidence. I’m refocusing my own efforts on Grantyde’s plan.”

If Vora had any reservations or rejoinders, she instantaneously bites them back. “As you command, Majesty.”

“Prince.” Sykora steps off her throne. “Return as soon as you can. If we’re undertaking this, I want you here to coordinate. No more of this remote site guff.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Grant says. “But I want to bring back Lady Ipqen-mek-Taqa. I know she’s an alien aboard a ZKZ, but—”

Sykora snorts. “Dove, we are far beyond caring about regulations as nattering as that one. Bring her. Bring Tymar. Bring whatever you need.”

She steps off her throne and approaches the camera until her eyes nearly fill the screen.

“Just come home to me, Grant,” she whispers. “Please.”