Scion by Thomas Ha

Unknown Compartment There is no door where there should be a door—no hall where there should be a hall. The house has reconfigured itself, again, and I find myself before […]

There is no door where there should be a door—no hall where there should be a hall. The house has reconfigured itself, again, and I find myself before an alcove instead of the outer calyx enceinte. The manifold shifting of concentric corridors and the dark disarray throughout the manor, it all reflects his mind and its worsening state. And I know, as I should have known well before this night, that my father is unraveling faster than anticipated.

One of the disembodied sculpture-heads affixed to the upper moldings shifts its eyes, and she speaks with marked distortion. “The Levinlord generates, so we anticipate sev/ere storms—Lee-Saffir-Simpson mark C-3 to C-4. I would recom/me/nd returning to your room, my lord.” There’s a crackle above the glass ceiling panes that illuminates the cloudbodies, and a brilliant serpentine pattern erupts crosswise through Rai’s churning stratosphere.

I imagine the light bursting beyond the edge of our island and over the swelling waves of the prasinous ocean, terminating somewhere at the darkening skyline, when a deep boom shakes the creaking walls and dusty fixtures beside me. But the sculpture is unwilling, or perhaps at this point unable, to formulate a response. I know, of course, the answer, and what I must do. Just as I well know that he will be furious if I seek him out within the heart of the house, at the stigma solar, where he’s undoubtedly engrossed in the developing throes of the storm.

But despite my father’s wishes and the years and distance he’s placed between us, I can’t leave him to his isolation—not with what I’ve now seen of the house in its present condition. Along the lower edge of my girdbelt, I feel for the shape of the flacon in one of the pouches and contemplate how best to proceed while listening to the rain pounding in sheets against the ceiling panes—a sound that frightened me in boyhood because I often imagined thousands of invisible hands banging urgently at the glass.

But the time for cowering in the solitude of my chambers is over. At the end of the corridor behind me, well-nestled in the darkness, something watches from the corner opposite the alcove, without the slightest movement. And the sconces, which should be bathing the bridging passageway with gentle light, sit in dull shadow while the walls rattle from the bluff winds. But the little thing does not answer and continues to stand like one of IZA’s sculptures.

Not with words, but in a way that makes certain this isn’t some serving person or sheltering inhabitant of the manse. It moves faster than I think something of that size should be able, racing low and along the floorboards, with the intensity of an animal preparing to overtake prey. The creature screams when I shut the alcove door between us—an unnerving sound like nothing I’ve heard before—and I lean with all my weight against the wood, feeling every jostle from the other side as I slide the inner bolt in place.

I draw back and take a moment to inspect the walls about me, and realize there are no meaningful passages from the compartment other than the one I’d just sealed. The whisper comes from one of the metal registers along the lower part of the room, and through the patterned grating, I see shimmering eyes. Outstretched fingers gently push the covering aside, and a hunched shape reaches out from within the cavity.

A hand, finned at the wrist, emerges from below to draw me in. I hear splintering grain behind me, with wails spilling in from the fractured doorway, just as I clasp the hand with trepidation and follow, somewhere, into the hollows of the house. I had heard stories of these throughways—old areas of our house that separated the inner and outer calyx that were designed mostly to remove moisture. The isle-manse is often damp given its proximity to the shorecliffs.

Still, it was something else to crawl on my hands and knees through what had only been a vague abstraction, through soot-clouds and curtains of web sticking to my cheeks and brow. When my father still oversaw my instruction, before he’d programmed IZA to act as an intermediary, he’d shown me charcoal renderings of the various areas of the manor, or, one possible configuration of it, I suppose.

The walls of the enceinte, then the inner rings in succession, comprised of hundreds of interchangeable and alterable rooms, and then my father’s solar, at the very center of the manor. I’d noticed strange lines between some of the edges of certain compartments and asked if, perhaps, those hash marks were to indicate areas that were somehow broken. “Not broken. Passages that, in their own way, allow the manse to respirate.

You see? Here, here, here.” His fingers, still separate from each other and functional in those days, moved across the salt-stained papers as he directed my attention. “So that means they must remain proximate to the exterior,” I reasoned. “Even as other parts of the house transition or realign . . . ” I only glanced slyly from the corner of my eye but could tell that my father was pleased with my induction; he hadn’t even noticed that I’d moved to sit on his lap to study the diagrams laid out upon the davenport.

I still remember because of how close he allowed me to be. Reliving the memory, I appreciate that I must still be close to the enceinte. And if I’m to reach the solar—which, like these stoma, remains fixed no matter how the house reconfigures—I’ll soon need to discern whether we’re traversing an inward shaft toward the center or being redirected to the periphery. But my companion, the one to pull me into the ventricular passages, will not stop shuffling into the darkness long enough to discuss.

“Safety is of preeminence,” she repeats whenever I try to broach the subject of our destination. And as my vision gradually acclimates to the dimness of the dust-layered shafts, I better see, when she turns to address me, the glint of eyes slightly brighter than my own and aqueous skin reflecting some of that ambient glow across high cheekbones. But it’s her garments, more than anything, that draw my attention—particularly the claret fabric of the robes, which indicates the retainer class of the su-folk of the house.

“Do I . . . know you?” I ask, more as a formality than a true question. With so few visitors to my compartments, I remember each in detail long after they’re gone. “No, my lord. I don’t believe so. Though you may have seen my sister-retainers from time to time.” She turns where the shaft splits and chooses a passage, less because she knows where it leads, I think, and more because she thinks it will take us farther from the alcove we’ve departed.

“We need to get our bearings. It’s very important that I access my father’s solar. Do you know the path to the center of the house with the current alignment of the compartments? Or your sisters? Would one of them know, perhaps?” The retainer speaks softly. “I’m not sure who . . . still remains, my lord.” She begins to describe the same disorder of the evening I’d experienced, but from a separate part of the manse: the failing lights, the beginnings of the storms, the absence of my father’s mind from the systemic routines—then that little creature.

She says many of the sister-retainers had been penned in one of the parlors when the thing came upon them, much as it did me, and I assume her pauses are attempts to suppress the memories of the violence that followed. I sense that she wants to know how this was allowed to occur, how something so hostile had penetrated the safeguards of my father’s home, and, above all, the question she dares not give words: What is happening to the Levinlord?

The longer she speaks, the more I suspect that she does not intend to lead me anywhere. That perhaps she means only to hide in these backshafts, to wait out the danger of the creature or the failures in the house systems. And as her unfocused panic grows palpable, I know what I do next is overly forceful, or from her perspective, cruel, but I also know I’ll need her attention if we’re to proceed.

I draw it up, its heat and its sparking field, out from where it resides deep within my abdominal ichor, where my Levinite hearts shudder and convulse. And the ghost currents surge, they pulse, and they expand, electrical energy bleeding amorphously from the surface of my muscle tissue, crackling into the surrounding ductwork and enveloping both our bodies and conducting through nearby metal. The retainer’s su-eyes—which calibrate within the light spectrum to see more detail of the ghost’s glare than I ever will—fill with tears as she prostrates herself, trembling, in either pain or fear.

And then, when I think her appropriately subdued and willing to assist, I withdraw the field around my body and seal it once again, in the Levinite organs made to contain its energies. “As I said, it’s very important that I access the solar. Do you understand?” The su-woman has difficulty breathing, but she confirms with the slightest nod. “Praise be his light, everlasting.” She wipes her eyes and doesn’t speak for several minutes.

But thereafter, when recovered, she approaches a nearby metal register, which leads back into the house’s interior. Much to my relief, when we go through it, we emerge in a connecting passage, with rooms to either side. “IZA,” I call out. “I need the shortest compartment route to the solar. Advise. Can you hear me, IZA? Advise, IZA.” But all I detect, or perhaps imagine, is the slight hum and snap of distortion under the din of wind and rain, and I do my best to conceal my concern.

I turn to one of the doors in the passage when my companion stops me, her face still tearstained. She points next to the doorframe and then raises a finger to her lips, and now I see a slight carving in the nearby panel of some kind of animal—perhaps a dog. Before I have the chance to ask about the meaning of the symbol, the retainer leads me to the opposite end of the passage and checks the other doorframe, where there are three rectangles scraped in the grain.

She then removes the claret capelet and hood from her shoulders and requests I wear it. “They may think you su-like when covered, given our resemblance,” she whispers, and that statement alone would stun me if not for the one that follows. “It may be better for you, in here, if you are not known to be a lord.” When I was growing up, I was permitted a few playmates in the house, now and again—su-children who, during the cold season on Rai, might come from the workers’ quarters to spend some time with me.

I remember, too, an elderly su-woman who visited when I was very young, then less and less often over the years. She was gentle and smelled of something familiar and floral. Sometimes I sat with phonographs imitating the accents and dialects from the house materials—in low voices and high, over and over again. Other times, I’d have IZA blare the recordings through her speakers, almost to the point of deafening everyone in the vicinity—with the simple command, “IZA, proem.” And if the su-children happened to be about, we would make a game of shouting back the words with strange cadence and emphasis.

My mind summons the words as a kind of familiar defense, I think, because the library market overwhelms me with crashes of movement and sound. Bodies of su-folk press, push, and group at makeshift stalls where study desks once were arranged. Other su-men and su-women stroll through aisles of reference books and atlases, casually touching some of the thicker spines. There are more than several small firepits burning throughout the dark, with dozens of figures encircling holes that are dug into the floorboards.

Hundreds upon hundreds of shimmering eyes in the shadows, all of the su-folk having evacuated the settlements across the island, now packed into this large compartment. I’ve never seen so many together like this, and I feel sweat on my brow, and a kind of burning and tightness in my chest. I look upward to the high-vaulted ceilings, the arches and panes, to distract myself. And with each lightning strike flashing across the black sky, I observe the ripples of su-folk, their crowds stopping in place, and their eyes brightening momentarily as they touch their foreheads in symbolic worship of my father and his storms.

The sister-retainer must sense my discomfort with the masses moving about, because she takes my arm and leads me around the outer edge of the crowd, where all kinds of conversation swell in the air. “Sixth in as many months withou’ announcemen’ before rainfall. Somethin’ must be—” The sister-retainer leaves me at a bench and goes looking for someone who can help locate the solar. I struggle in the meantime, without success, to limit my senses and narrow my focus where possible.

“—and so the Antiquator, the Greatest of the Levinlords, returned from Rai’s hells with endless fusillades to stoke the celestial pyres. His vengeance sprang, immolating the heaveners, and riving their wings and limbs and bloodied bodies. And so, we offer thanks for the light.” “For the light,” the congregation repeats, barely audible over the tumult of market talk. At some point, I failed to notice an old su-man with a wisp of a beard take a seat at the bench beside me.

He tries to hand me a bowl of seaweed broth, heavily encrusted with roasted salt, but I decline politely and lower my head. The elderly su-man tries to give me the heel of a saltbread loaf as well, but I thank him and decline a second time. From his weathered xanthous capote, it’s evident that he’s with the harvesters—su-folk I’ve watched from the windows of the outer enceinte, laboring down at the shifting shore.

Hours each day, they’re there, raking the salt ponds where spillover from the tides collects, eventually evaporating and leaving heaps of crystalline dregs. I’d marvel at the body-sized baskets they’d haul up the cliffs, over to our house’s processing repositories, where the loads would be cleaned of salt fleas and made comestible by our filters—again and again each day until sundown, without pause.

“They don’t usually pray this way durin’ the storms.” The su-man acts as though we’re continuing some casual conversation that I’m not aware we’ve started. “Growin’ nervous though, because everyone’s sayin’ the Levinlord’s gettin’ sicker. Forgettin’. Himself. Us. Comin’ apart slowly, like his father did before him.” “Yes, well. He has had bouts of illness like this before,” I reply.

“He’ll come through.” The su-man drinks the broth and chews the soft blades. “And if he doesn’?” He seems to wait and then gives me a strange and kindly smile. And so I look at the elder again, at least, as directly as I dare without leaning out from the hood, but nothing about the su-man strikes me as particularly familiar. It’s possible he served in my compartments for a time, but my father always made sure to change retainers regularly, supposedly to keep me from getting attached to any one companion, so it’s difficult to say.

I suppose it makes no difference whether I, in fact, know the su-man or whether he’s mistaken, because we’re interrupted by someone, a harvester who says he’s spoken with the sister-retainer, and that I should follow him if I intend to find the solar. So I thank the elder for his generosity and depart for the nearby stairwell with my escort. The old one shouts something to me then, something that I can’t clearly discern with the passing crowd.

It sounds like your work is of great value to us—almost exactly in the cadence and tone I remember from the old phonograph when I was younger, I think. But the only people I shared the recording with were the su-children, so I have no idea how this old man would know anything about it. I must have been mistaken about what he said, or otherwise have confused the sounds, I decide. The upstairs library room, situated just above the far side of the main gallery, seems unusual to me at first glance.

The desks and shelves have been emptied of books, and in their place, a variety of machinery lies assembled about the furniture and clustered toward the back wall. The workers have lit dozens of flickering votives and tapers to make things visible, albeit barely. With the weak candlelight, I observe an odd-looking apparatus I’ve never seen before, like a centrifuge with mechanized appendages, and nearby, an unusual octagonal box that a su-man quickly covers with a ragged sheet.

My attention is drawn more, however, to a portrait on one of the walls—a digital oilwork of a su-woman in a silken ceremonial dress that seems almost matrimonial. Her expression, which seems vaguely familiar, is strangely calming to me, and in her hands she holds a species of cosmid lotus. Four su-men in xanthous cloaks invite me to settle at a central table, and the man who escorted me here notes that the sister-retainer will be with us shortly, though I realize they have shut the door.

The tallest among them appears to have been leading a discussion of some sort. Trun, they call him—his shimmering eyes noticeably more alert than the others. “We’re honored to have you with us,” Trun says to me. “And we know, of course, of your intent to reach the Levinlord in the heart of the manor.” I can’t help but notice an unusual cadence and strength in his voice that I’ve not often encountered in the saltworkers.

His accent, too, is closer to the retainers’, with some hallmarks of formal education. “There is, we believe, a terminal very close by that we may be able to operate with the house’s latent power, and it well may show the current alignment of the manor at this point in time, including a viable path to the solar at its center. But if we may be so impetuous as to inquire: what will the young lord do if he’s able to access the Levinlord’s compartment?” I’m reluctant to give an answer, but I suspect that being forthright might gain me some advantage.

There is an old trick I remember, one the Levinites occasionally use, a slight manipulation of the ghost within my body to alter the shape of the tissue surrounding my vocal cords, that makes my voice slightly fuller, more imperative. So I rely on it here, just barely bringing a hum up from my abdomen and to my throat, to give me the confidence to speak. “It’s . . . no secret, I realize, that the Levinlord . . .

that my father . . . is ailing. This all, it’s all, as you know, been going on for a time.” I exhale the words with an almost superstitious fear of inviting further catastrophe. “However . . . I’ve helped with my father’s treatment for some years, and my family has methods of abating the degradation that comes with these storms. I think I can help him—help him restore some modicum of order to the house again, if given the opportunity to see him.” I touch my girdbelt and grip the flacon within the closest pouch, the one that contains the saline decoction I’ve brought from my workrooms.

As heir, I had been entrusted with returning the weekly allotments of cleansed salt to the su-folk and removing a discrete portion for our family therapeutics. My father had been the one to explain each step of the procedure—how in every harvest there were “salt fleas,” as they were called by the su-men, a kind of halotolerant bacteria unique to the oceans of Rai. The house processors, he had said, would disrupt the bacteria’s binary fission and prevent the replication that tended to make us “salt sick” when eaten raw.

But a critical amount of living bacteria would remain for a period of time, either to be eaten by the su-folk or utilized by us. And while the bacteria lived, it allowed our bodies, both su-folk and Levinite, to absorb some of the harsh energies of Rai’s environment. “Do you see?” my father had once asked, allowing me my first view through a hyperscope. “How they create a conduit in their outer membrane to accept electrons, giving them these characteristic luxophilic properties.” I pretended to understand, but in those early days, each time I failed to separate or collect the bacteria, I mostly remember the disappointment in my father’s face—and later, when he communicated only through IZA’s speakers, monitoring me from the solar—in his voice.

“No. How will you ever get this right? How will you take care of yourself if you can’t even do this? What is wrong with you? Why can’t you do this?” And something about my plan to treat my father with the saline decoction similarly seems to disappoint the su-folk in the reading room, even with the glints of ghost in my voice giving me an added edge of command. Trun looks to his fellows, whom I notice now are wearing gloves of unrecognizable material, like stone, but upon closer inspection, more flexible.

And they each put something on their faces, like a darkened pince-nez. Their hands are on me next, without any warning. Together, they throw me flat and against the floor. And it happens so quickly, so intentionally, that I can’t meaningfully conceive of what they’re doing, what they’re daring to do—to me. I see now, I’ve perceived them, all of the su-folk, as being as much a part of the manor as IZA’s background operations.

But I recognize now, in this coordination, something I should fear, should always have feared. Because in the end, what is my father, what is my family, and what am I, if the su-folk of the house, in their collective entirety, decide otherwise? I soon feel the light and heat I contain in my ichor pouring from my skin without restraint, then the glare of the ghost, as it envelops the reading room, and a few of the machines on the shelves spark and burst.

Yet somehow, the su-folk atop me are unaffected, with an unsettling calm in their eyes behind the darkened glass on their faces. And those gloves, gripping my limbs, whatever substance they’ve used, it seems to prevent my ghost from passing from the air and into their flesh. I shout curses, commands, even warnings that they will suffer. But they speak with each other, not me, which is when I notice the painted su-woman again, the digital portrait.

Her eyes shift, just slightly, indicating that IZA’s program has resumed functioning within this room. “There.” Trun raises a knife to my abdomen. “In the abdicator’s renderings. Their Levinite hearts. They would be somewhere in there. If we can get them intact, then we’ll have what we need.” Panicked shouts rise from outside, from the main library. For a moment, I think someone—perhaps some remaining loyal su-man or retainer—might be aware of this treason and, upon following a late-conceived plan, be coming herein to afford me rescue.

But instead, shadows hurry past the tinted glaze of the reading room—dozens of su-folk moving from one end of the library in a panic, for reasons none of us inside the room understand. Still, this gives the moment I need to shout to IZA, who I hope will remember and interpret my directions. Feedback screeches when IZA plays the old colony recording in incoherent fragments, and it’s sudden enough to startle several of the su-folk holding me.

“—come to the research colony of Rai. Your work is of great value to us. Welcome to the research colony of Rai. Your work is of great value to us. Welcome to the research colony of Rai. Your work is of great value to us. Wel—” The saltworker nearest my shoulder loses his balance, so I’m able to grasp him above the glove, my fingers wrapping about his exposed, finned flesh so that the current of the ghost can flood his nervous system.

And he looks down, aghast—a flicker of consciousness of the impending consequence, before his eyes and mouth ignite like suns. The concussion from his sternum upon discharge causes Trun and the others to scatter, some tumbling into the shelves and machines, others to the side walls. And in the confusion and noise, now that I’m free of their weight, I manage well enough to stagger away. But the commotion when I make my way downstairs to the main gallery is greater than what I’ve left in the reading room.

Su-folk trample over one another in a furor to find another exit from the library market. Beside the shelves and the stalls, motionless bodies litter the floor, including a xanthous mound with a wisp of a beard. And across the stamped and smoldering firepits I can barely see a shape, which I do not recognize until it looses a scream. A unique sound I’ve heard but once—in the alcove, when I was told of the storm.

The little creature, no longer as little, I observe, has changed much since our recent encounter. Last, it resembled something of a child. Now it’s at least the height of a grown Levinite, and its appearance, somewhat lengthened and finned, mirrors the su-folk from my perspective, yet drained of all color, like a bleached shore shell or ceremonial bone. The ferine intruder lifts the limp, lifeless su-bodies to itself as it advances, feeding them into a large, second mouth across its distended belly.

All in the horde around me burst from the library market in that pressure of limbs and bone. And we share in this, together—whatever else may or may not separate me from them—an unmistakable terror and the desperation that erupts from within it. By the time the crowd disperses through adjacent compartments, giving enough room so that I no longer need to guard my chest and keep my head high, I can see many of their dead surround us—dozens crushed against passage walls to the point of suffocation.

Their slack bodies pile, many fallen beneath our feet, with no one able to bend to carry them. Crying, shouting, and gasping continue as we spread apart, and I’m still gathering my breath when my eyes meet another’s across the mob. I recognize the sister-retainer, my claret-robed companion, and she climbs up on a cart, knocking aside ceramic servingware to make room for others to get above the throng.

I try calling to her, but my words are swallowed by other voices and thunder booming about the house. Then, under the beating of rain against glass, under the panting and the feet crunching, under all of the tumult, somehow, I feel it. The sensation in my abdomen, the Levinite hearts quivering at the sudden chill passing through the house. And I have only a second’s awareness before the su-folk and begin to shout at the others in the doorway.

The sister-retainer, perhaps because of her familiarity with my family and how they operate the manor, understands, and she begins desperately pulling at everyone at the threshold of the compartment. Perhaps because he’s finally sensing the violent creature in the library market and the threat it poses. Or the chaos of the crowd, all of that heat and sound, agitates whatever subliminal operations of his mind see to the house’s configuration.

But the connecting passageway we’ve come through, still full of su-folk pressing into the next room, shudders. And a bright line forms at its center—first at the ceiling, then down the sides of the passage, then across the middle of the floor. I wade through arms and elbows to the edge of this compartment, joining the sister-retainer and grabbing whomever I am able to reach. Children, harvesters, merchants, artisans, builders, any su-folk I can get through from the hallway and onto this side.

But the panels of the connecting passage begin to retract, detaching from one another, and many are still left when the movement begins. Those unfortunates drop into the glowing heat of the cavernous bowels of the manse, the brilliant churning of the Bel-Seebeck pulse generator beneath the island, which powers my father’s stormcraft and everything within the Levinite house. I can’t hear their voices above the whirring of the generator, and their bodies disappear into light.

No one hears my warnings when the room turns, and several more su-folk fall to the interstices, screaming from below as my father dreams of the next configuration of the house. And I look to the lightning and cloud crags through the glass above us—while all around, metal clangs and crashes into metal, gears tick feverishly, and pistons fire in an overwhelming cacophony. Each compartment rotates, slides along electromagnetic tracks around its sibling chambers, resizes, and rebuilds paneling where necessary, or enclosures, where he deems fit.

My father points to the skyline through glass, water, and fractured light. And where he gestures, a bolt explodes onto the lunarscape, blasting a blackened rock face well above a su-folk settlement near the shore. My child’s mind believes he summons the lightning at first, but I notice the previous scorch marks in the cliffs and understand that he’s showing me the way to anticipate repetition in the chaos of countless colliding particles.

I remember all of his and IZA’s lessons—how, when Rai was founded by the electrogenitors hundreds of years ago, well before we allied with the other moons against the homeworld to win our freedom, we were charged to be the caretakers of this primordial atmosphere. And I understand how, after we beat back the invasion, the storms became crucial in keeping the heaveners at bay—a warning in perpetuity should they ever decide to return for our subjugation.

Thus, the first of us, the Antiquator, sat the solar and, at the appointed times that were maximally calculated to rebuff approaching visitors, would stoke the pyres of the generator and rekindle the turbulent storms around our world. As did the next Levinlord. Then the next. Then on and on, until my father, and, one day, me. It’s the gray along my father’s temples that does it, I think. And the radiation scarring of his skin down his throat and collar is pronounced, like weeping leather, hanging loose from his body.

One of his arms, too, has ceased being capable of flexion or extension, but he keeps that side farther from me when he can. How long—I think to myself—must he bear this burden of generating these storms? There’s disorientation, confusion, in the timing of this moment, and I sense the presence of something unnatural working, somewhere between my thoughts. “Has IZA given you full access to the family works?” My father does not turn from the skies.

“In his journals, Yom took great interest in endosymbiotic theory—the idea that simple prokaryotic bacteria might absorb others, combine to form more complex eukaryotes. He focused particularly on Rai’s salt fleas and their potential evolutionary paths. But that cooperative symbiosis might be emblematic of more here, I think. Different organisms coming together for mutual, collective progress.” I’ve been through Yom’s writings, and I know the journals and passages to which my father refers, but when he has these moods, when it feels like he’s speaking to, and not through, me, I’m worried that the smallest interruption will ruin it, like a clumsy movement crushing a fragile butterfly.

“Whatever else you learn, I want you to remember, we are the stewards of Rai, not masters. That’s why the original colonists created the Levinite bloodline. Do you understand? When it comes to the colony, there are some things that no one—Levinite or otherwise—will ever, or should ever, control. I want you to remember that.” Outside the observatory, as if on cue, a brilliant explosion ignites in the cloud cover near the horizon, and a crooked spear of lazulite lightning plummets to the swelling ocean, turning waves and surrounding depths white with electricity.

A kind of anarchic discharge that is rarer, more unpredictable, and much more dangerous than ordinary lightning. Sometimes drawn to the negative charge of certain terrain. One strike could destroy any one of us, even the Levinlord, without any notice but a flash. And upon seeing the lazulite, my father smiles at me as if to underscore his point, and it is in the smile I understand the falsehood of the moment, that this is some conjuration, despite its seeming reality.

And I begin to feel another presence in my mind, permeating from elsewhere. But I continue to study the flurry of lightning and formation and reformation of the clouds like this, with him, for as long as it lasts. Illusion though this may be, I want to enjoy sharing this time with my father just the same. It feels strange to be in the observatory one moment, then slowly to wake to shapes and colors that are difficult to decipher the next.

It’s actually a melody, strummed in the distance, that my consciousness fully grasps first, followed by a voice, tittering and warbly, almost as though it’s amplified by a horn. “So sorry, little agnate,” the voice says as I begin to stir. “What a strange commotion out there. Had I known you were among the rabble, I’d never have induced delta. But you were within range, and so . . .

Hm.” A face comes into relief, much larger than any of the su-folk, so that even before I appreciate the features, I know it to be a fellow Levinite. And gradually I begin to recognize my demi-cousin, much older than I’d last seen her, though hiding it expertly with paint and powder. Seeing Dian here comes with more than some surprise. She and I had not been in contact since my naming ceremony, at least—that quiet afternoon in the Keep of Remembrance when I had been formally elevated to heir apparent, years ago.

My father had filled the pews with our su-folk retainers, I remember, and the other Levinites had also been in attendance. Biku, too large to enter the connecting passages, watched via screen, and I’m told Beautiful Yom monitored the proceedings from wherever it is he secrets himself. Dian, though, had been visible at the very foremost seat of honor in a gown that took a dozen retainers to carry, as I recall.

Even in our limited interactions, I sensed she did not miss opportunities to make appearances, an air she still very much has about her now. “There, there.” Dian pats my cheek dramatically and wrinkles her face. “You’ll be woolly for a while, of course. Hm. The thalamus and basal gang will be sore, and your hippocamp will need a minute to recover. Hm. But it’ll come.” “You . . . ” I’m still having difficulty extrapolating her individual words to their natural conclusion.

“You used your ghost against me, my mind. That’s why I was imagining . . . seeing those strange things.” Dian laughs, but her eyes widen, as though she is offended and concealing it. “Spending too much time with those superstitious oceanids, I think.” She points with the end of a cockade fan. “Here, have some of the hippocras. The spices in this fabrication are delightful! Some cinnamon, I believe.

Hm. Yes. Go on. Go on. Try.” I see now, on a trestle table before us, a series of tiered cakes and smoked meat dishes, which she’s carefully arranged. And through the nausea and fogginess, I do manage bits of the food and drink, and it does seem to help my body through some residual effects of the illusions. It also gives me time to study Dian’s large compartment, which I’ve never encountered in my wanderings—a gilded room, still powered and brightly lit despite the outages, it seems, at least for the time being, with rows of marble pillars and a balcony slightly above us.

It’s there at the upper stage that I notice the source of the music that held my attention earlier: some kind of plastic manuaton, shaped like an elongated sphere, with four implements strumming away at a modified gittern. “I know what you’re thinking, but its robotics are of the First Order. Less than a thousand commands. Not even mapped from a living model like you-know-who, your father’s favorite, in the sculptures.” She gestures with the fan at the stone faces molded near the rafters.

“Anyway, do you like it? Hm?” “He’s very expressive with this third movement. Pre-homeworld music, you know. Practically prim-space. Have you heard Hyun-Richter before?” “You see, this is why I tell your father you should have family around. Exactly for things like this. Hm. But you know him, always so secretive with you. For years, we didn’t know you’d been cloned, even. Hm. Poor thing, hidden away from us.

But then, however are you to learn? Who schools you, then, in the important things, like finery and culture? The oceanids? Hah.” “Ugh. Well done, Mr. Egglesby. Just beautiful. Hm. Hold on. Hm. I need another drink.” At the snap of her fingers, a su-woman appears with head low, and it takes a moment to recognize her face. It’s her, the sister-retainer from earlier—my companion through the storm.

I want to say something, to tell her I’m relieved that she survived the realignment, but she acts strangely distant, as if she doesn’t know me. Instead, the sister-retainer proceeds to an octagonal box in the corner, pressing various inputs before a small screen flashes. She retrieves from the box another glass of hippocras, identical to the one Dian holds. “You see this? A perfect fabrication of the underlying organic material based on stored energy patterns.

Exceedingly rare, these devices, since we lost touch with the duplicator colony, you know.” Dian preens a bit in the reflection of a copper pitcher. “Your father doesn’t care for synthesized food or other such delights, so it’s to my own benefit, I suppose. Hm.” “They had one too,” I mutter absently, remembering the device in the reading room. “A replica, maybe.” Dian gulps at the synthesized wine once handed to her.

“They don’t have the intelligence or resources for something like this. Hm. Hm.” But the more I study the box, the more I insist, and I describe the strange arrangement within the reading room where the machinery was kept, as well as the unexpected assault by the salt harvesters that followed—almost reliving the experience as I recount it to her. “I believe they—some of them, that is—intend to rebel against the Levinites or are already rebelling.” And the more I rethink the event, the machinery, their foreknowledge of how to inoculate themselves from the effects of my ghost, I wonder if perhaps they aren’t receiving assistance and begin to form vague suspicions as to its source.

My thoughts return again to the creature in the library market: its destructiveness, but also its seeming arrival at the moment the su seemed ready to overtake members of the family. I can’t believe they are wholly unrelated. Dian, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to like the implications, like a foul cloud’s beginning to drift over this perpetual party of hers. “Oh, the oceanids agitate every generation or two, that’s true, but it never really lasts.

Does it, Ni?” She waves the cockade at the sister-retainer, then clears her throat. “Their comparative lifespans are so short as to be effectively meaningless. In a handful of years, this generation of oceanids will age, sicken, and wither away to be replaced by the next. And it’s the Levinlord and his kinsmen who will continue on and proceed with the productive work. Protecting the house. Generating the storms above.

Hm. One of the many advantages the colonists of Rai accidentally engineered in the Levinites—our longevity. We remember. Other shorter-lived beings forget. You’ll see, obviously, when you sit the solar soon.” “Well, I assume that’s why you’re here. You have my confidence, of course. And whatever you may need for your impending ascension.” “My father . . . He just needs assistance.

That’s why I’m here—to administer his aid. Nothing more.” And to clarify, I remove the flacon of saline decoction from my girdbelt and place it on the table, to show her that, with appropriate attention and treatment, he’ll be fine. That’s the only reason I’m seeking the solar. But instead, Dian looks at the bottle and then to the sister-retainer, who continues to avoid eye contact with either of us.

“Ni, could you be a dear, please, and, well . . . you know. Hm.” The su-woman retrieves something from a side table drawer and places it next to Dian—a flacon, identical to my own, celadon-glazed, with markings I alone make on the materials from my workrooms. My mind races, at first, with conspiracies and accusations. Thoughts of Dian stealing from my compartments or perhaps using that synthesizer of hers to copy the decoction, to upset or unnerve me, as outlandish as I know that seems.

But, given more time to study the identical flacons before me, a deeper understanding of the situation, or rather, a long-held fear of mine that I’d periodically buried, begins to surface again. All that time apart from my father, with the visits to the solar becoming fewer and fewer, and his insistence that I deliver the decoctions through IZA’s dumbwaiters and pneumatic tubes. Part of me had already suspected.

And he hadn’t told me. Either because of some willfulness or, more likely, because his condition was at a point where the decoctions were having less and less effect. “You know how this goes.” Dian clucks her tongue. “I’ve seen it myself when your father ascended and became the Levinlord—the way things were with his father, how things . . . degenerated, at the very end.” The manuaton’s metallic implements slide across the wooden neck and brush against the strings.

I sit awash in disbelief at the notion, long anticipated but seemingly ever-distant. The idea that he would not share this in confidence with his son, or deign to warn me what the house would have to endure with his impairment, frightens and perhaps even angers me the more I consider it. There’s a shortsightedness, a foolishness, a selfishness, in hiding something so significant—both unthinkable and very much what I know he would do.

“This is terrible for you to appreciate fully, of course. This point you—that we all—have reached, it seems. Hm. So I’d be remiss not to mention, there are various ways one might proceed with something like this. One could certainly wait for the natural way to take its course with your father.” Dian leans closer, and I feel a strange sensation behind my eyes. And the sound of her voice, I realize, strikes me as slightly changed, almost as though she’s altered the tissue around her vocal cords to give herself a more persuasive tenor.

“But as the Levinlord’s infirmities advance, the modified adipose tissue around the organs, the brain, they deteriorate. It’s dangerous, taxing work, operating the solar and generating the storms. And the more your father degrades like this, the more the dangers to the house, to us all, increase. Hm. So one might consider, in such extreme and urgent circumstances, accelerating the transition to its inevitable . . .

termination.” At this point, I don’t know whether it’s my discontent with the message that makes me critical of the messenger, but I turn from Dian and notice the sister-retainer for the first time glancing at me, then toward the food at the table, with a wary expression. And the more I focus, I perceive a bitterness on my tongue that feels coated, unnatural, and numb, and cannot help but wonder.

I notice then, too, that my demi-cousin’s face is not exactly what she presents. That, under the pores of the skin and along what should have been her cheekbones, are whorls of carved grain, and around the neck and collarbone, the slightest hint of metal and micro synthetics—the signs of a falsely constructed shell of a body. Dian is somewhere close by, I realize, but she is not at the table, within this constructed Levinite proxy.

And when I concentrate on the sensations within my ichor, I perceive her ghost, the field of its energy, still permeating the room, giving my mind the suggestion that things are perhaps brighter, sharper than they really are. There can be no way of knowing where she’s watching me from—one of the cupboards, the stairway, up in the rafters. But she’s somewhere else, out of reach. My own ghost rushes to the surface of my skin, crackling and burning through the detritus of whatever’s infiltrated my blood and sparking against the air around me, pushing back slightly against the field of Dian’s influence.

And my demi-cousin appears to receive the message, because she leans away in her chair and raises the cockade, as though someone has slapped her hand away from one of the dishes. “We will see . . . ” I gather my thoughts, my head beginning to clear as my ghost has purified my blood of whatever she’s put inside me, and I square myself firmly, intently, before rising from the table, “what the storm brings, I suppose.” “But of course, of course, yes.

That is wisest.” Dian lowers her head. “Praise be his light, everlasting. Hm. Of course.” I repeat the word and let it linger, meaningfully, so there can be no confusion between us. I would be lying, though, if I said I didn’t think about it—not just the prospect of my father’s death but having to hasten it. IZA says it’s a sociocultural phenomenon that predates the colonies, the homeworld, even prim-space.

We imagine the deaths of our predecessors to prepare for certain entropic realities. And in placing ourselves as the executor, we give ourselves the feeling of agency, control. I have memories of my father grieving, mixing ash and salt to cast into the ocean for an end-of-life ritual. I once believed the ceremony had been for my grandfather, though I now know that timing does not align—that it must have been someone else we were grieving that day.

In the memory of the ritual, whoever it was for, my father is wearing funerary robes and allowing the sea to froth around him, then withdraw, to spread past him again, then withdraw again, completely unaware of the frigid seawater swirling at his ankles. And with each wave, I realize his feet are sinking into the sand, while he stares out at the prasinous tide, bringing him lower and lower into the ground.

So I pull at his large hand, gently at first, then with desperation—afraid that he will be swallowed by the sand, eventually. That image stays with me, even as we leave Dian’s compartment, the claret-robed sister and I, to continue the journey to the stigma solar. My demi-cousin objected, of course, when I asked for the accompaniment of her retainer, but Dian’s desire to ingratiate herself outweighed her need for the attendant.

And the retainer, who I now know is called Ni, seemed neither eager to stay with Dian nor leave with me. But in walking the passageways, I think I’ve determined the reason for her distant demeanor, and in particular, her stunned expression when Dian and I discussed the goings-on in the house. I catch Ni’s shimmering eyes, and I can see she well comprehends my meaning—Trun and his co-conspirators, the revolutionary su-men who had some intent to harm the Levinites, or me specifically.

She’d effectively delivered me to them in the library market before conveniently disappearing. And it was her tenseness when I described the events to Dian that convinced me. The sister-retainer can’t speak, but she holds her head level, intentionally. And I do my best to reassure her that I’m not angry, but I can see that years of serving my family have taught her better than to believe me.

Still, I ask: Her answer is that she has no reason, nothing she thinks meaningful, at least. “I’m not with them. Not in that way,” she says. “I don’t comprehend their ends or intentions. I only know that they believe it is the right of the su to claim the manse, that the Levinites stole something from us, once, long ago.” “I don’t know. I’m not sure they even know. But some ability or knowledge or way of life.

Something that was once ours but no longer is.” I would never say this aloud, but I wonder if there isn’t a germ of truth in this belief. It’s known that on Rai, each generation of Levinites is artificially created by the Levinlord of the last, using vats from the geneticists of Protea, from a time when the lunar colonies still openly shared their research with one another. He clones them and splices the characteristics needed to operate the household and its compartments—electrocytic cells that comprise our Levinite hearts, adipose insulation to mitigate energies without and within—all to breed a series, one of whom would succeed him as the head of the household.

But, even as a boy, I had pondered the contrasting position of the su-folk—those who lived and died naturally in Rai’s ecosystem across various settlements on our little island. It seemed they were adapted, maybe even better adapted, to live on Rai, without constant and excessive artificial intervention. And if that were true, their adaptation could have preceded ours, meaning our elevated position, authority, our divinity, might have derived from them in some way.

Whenever I had explored these ideas, these curiosities I’d had about the su and their relation to the Levinites, I found only assertions at every level—from the retainers to IZA to the accessible archives—that we are all as we are because of what we always were, like an ouroboric riddle without any end. So, I feel a modicum of sympathy for Trun and his ilk, who I assume must be grasping for the same answers about their origins on Rai, whatever those may be.

“Trun and his group . . . they never asked me for much,” Ni continues. “Information about rooms or the location of the Levinites at particular times. Where certain machines or books or resources were kept. How the Levinlord operated the splicers and the breeding vats to create others in the family line. And . . . I’m honestly not sure why I went along with the requests at first. But I suppose . . .

I suppose I did it because I thought . . . this can’t be all that there is.” Something about the way she says this makes me think of my time alone in my chambers, or the workrooms, or the halls around the enceinte, if they were accessible to me. Playing with the phonograph or discussing lessons with IZA. Watching the settlements and folk gathering on the sands and shorecliffs at the edge of the island.

Questioning if that was all I would ever know. And after a moment of silence, I tell Ni that she’s free to return to the other compartments, whatever she wishes, though I ask for her aid one last time, if she will grant it. I inspect the doorframe before the next compartment until I find another carving, again, of a dog or something similar. Ni used these symbols before we entered the library, and I want to know their significance.

Codes, perhaps, or some method that the revolutionaries use to communicate with one another. “No. Those marks are from well before our lifetime,” she says. “There was a lady in this house, who once cared for the su-folk, more than—excuse me—more than any of the Levinites. Loving, compassionate. And clever, above all. We called her Ami. “She learned the house, in its realignments, had aspects that could be carefully studied.

She was the first to find that between the tracks of the rooms, there were pivotal nodes, such that four rooms tend to shift in quartets—rotating and resizing as needed depending on the concentric ring. “She also understood the Levinlord had preferences, keeping certain relatives apart or together, and each Levinite frequented specific chambers more than others. So in leaving these symbols, Ami taught the su-folk which areas to traverse and which to avoid.” I search my recollections of the Levinite histories, wondering who this Ami woman might be.

But I’m unable to think of anyone matching these descriptions and consider whether there may be the slant of some su legend at play. I am also unsure when this woman would have lived, since the su’s comparative perception of time would be different, given their lifespans, at least according to Dian, anyway. Would it have been all that long ago for me, I wonder? “And this.” I point to the dog-shaped carving.

“You warned me of it earlier. What is its meaning?” It makes perfect sense—that fear I had seen in the sister-retainer outside the library now clicking into place like a tumbler. Even when my father was freer in providing me access to other parts of the house now and again, he still never allowed me through Biku’s rooms. And I knew enough to understand why I was meant to keep my distance from my uncle.

“But . . . ” Ni seems unsure of whether to share the following thoughts. “No one lightly crosses paths with Lord Biku, which your father knows. So, keeping his brother in the innermost rings is the Levinlord’s way of creating a buffer, for his own privacy.” And just as she understood my implied questions about the revolutionaries without my having to voice them in full, I grasp what she’s trying to convey in turn.

If Biku’s compartments lie this way, then, in all likelihood, the center of the house, the stigma solar, and my father do as well. “If I may—what will you do, even if you reach him, your father?” Ni asks. “You know now that you can’t help him, with his condition.” “And Dian’s proposal, of . . . quickening things, that doesn’t seem your intention either.” “So then venturing out there tonight seems more than an unnecessary risk.

The retainers . . . we know that you and your father are not—” She stops herself just short of finishing the thought. Not in contact, she might have said, or not close, or any one of the ways to describe the dissociation brought about by my father’s design. “Yes, that’s correct. Everything you’re saying, everything you’re thinking about him, about me. All of it is correct. But I don’t know.

This still seems something . . . with him . . . that ought to be done. Sons should see their fathers when this happens, near the end. I think. Even if they’re not seen in return.” And as I say this, Ni seems startled, maybe by the simplicity, the puerility of it, and I hear it too. But this is all I have, this sense that I can’t turn away—that there may still be something to be sorted between me and him.

I thank Ni for her help, for what she was willing to share. And, for a moment, I very nearly cross the edge of an apology for the way I had been with her. But I can’t bring myself to the words, so I let them, and her, go. Once she disappears, her absence hits so keenly that I have to anchor myself to the rumble of Rai’s thunder, the timpani of the rain, and the familiar echoes of the hallways to prevent myself from following after her.

But there’s no time to dwell on Ni once I’ve entered Lord Biku’s grounds. Within the first few steps, there is a peculiar and unsettling smell of stifling mildew, seaweed, and other things left to molder. IZA does not respond to my whispers, and with the paintings and sculptures unmoving, I can only assume her program is further damaged or no longer operable in this part of the manse. Warped metal lines the entry corridor like a defensive barrier or makeshift cheval-de-frise, so I’m forced to crawl along the bent bars and towers of scrap racks, until I reach a larger compartment behind it, which is when I shrink from a beam of light.

There’s something there, high above the scrap, that appears to be a su-man based on the finned body, but his limbs seem strapped to angular pieces of metal. The light beam emanates from a fixture above his head, and he walks like some unusual, long-legged animal. “Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . ” the su-man moans as he lopes by, unaware that I’m watching from the dark. And as the light drops past his body, it reveals arms bloody and weeping, with metal and barb fusing his appendages to the elongated stakes he uses to hold himself upright.

The su-man’s cheeks, too, are worn ragged, such that the teeth within are visible through several holes, and I’m unsure how he remains living given the extent of his wounds. Further in the shadows, I see dozens more with long limbs, too—little beams of light swerving across the compartment—and I begin to feel sick to my stomach. Some of the su-folk had whispered rumors of this, of how Biku would take wanderers or otherwise lure su to his compartments, using them in strange and unnatural experimentation.

But whenever I had asked IZA or my father if there was any truth in the stories, they said, or perhaps conveniently pretended, that they did not know of such things. I suspected it was because Biku the Wolfshead was very close to being Levinlord once, according to the stories the su-folk told. After Beautiful Yom, the eldest of my father’s siblings, abdicated the title of heir apparent, Biku supposedly intended to take the place of their weakened father during one of the Levinlord’s last storms.

But, and the stories were always unclear, Biku was either too violent or too incompetent to find his way to the heart of the house when it was most critical. And instead, they say it was my father—sometimes with the help of a young su-woman, sometimes alone, depending on the version of the story—who found some kind of passage to the stigma solar. He was the one to receive my grandfather’s last blessing and ascended to become the next Levinlord to oversee the operation of the house.

Some of the su believed this failure at succession warped Biku beyond comprehension, while others maintained the disturbances in Biku long preceded these events. But, even now, I have never known my father or the Levinites to acknowledge any of this, as if they feared even speaking of his proclivities might substantiate them somehow. There can be no question now, though, of the nature of my uncle’s diversions.

But there’s nothing meaningful, in the moment, for me to do except progress past the su-men, trying not to disturb any of the shelves and barricades that fill the center of the compartment. I encounter other things I can’t identify; the farther I go, silhouettes of bodies with too many arms or legs hanging near the walls, or what could be several su-men strung about with bars and cords, but I’m too frightened to confirm what any of these may be.

The voice blends with the thunder above the house, and I stop at once, fearing my uncle has discovered my trespass. What I thought was yet another mountain of metal ahead in the compartment seems to form the outer curves of Biku’s shoulders. And near the peak of the ceiling, there’s a head covered in tangled white hair, lit by scattered flashes of stormlight. His hair drapes over his muscular chest and down over his seated, naked body.

And his fingers, calloused and bleeding, larger than the su-men themselves, scrape through the heaps of metal, like he’s a child pushing playfully through mounds of dirt. “CRUELTY IMPLIES SOME KIND OF EXCESS. BUT THIS—IT IS NECESSITY. YOU JUST DO NOT KEN. NOT YET.” Under the white hair, I barely glimpse a downturned mouth, but I don’t see his many eyes, so I suspect my uncle senses me somewhere in his domain but does not know exactly where I am within the mess he’s made.

“NO. BUT I CAN FIND YOU IF NEEDS BE,” he growls. “YOUR THOUGHTS, CACOPHONOUS, AND I KEN. JUST LIKE THESE VIOLATORS HERE. THEY KEN. NOW THAT I’VE FIXED THEM. YES. THEY KEN.” “Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . ” One of the altered su-men in the distance bends his arms in a painful, impossible position.And I can feel the Levinite hearts in me shifting, sensing Lord Biku’s ghost spreading.

Everywhere. I realize the field generated by his body is even within those su-bodies, spreading their limbs apart. I almost shout and reach for the nearest su-man, but I’m afraid of drawing my uncle’s attention to my location. “YOU STINK OF THEIR KIND, NEPHIL. STINK. JUST LIKE THEM.” Biku’s ghost releases the su-man, who shudders and proceeds to stalk the metal hills about the compartment mindlessly, and my uncle returns to casually pushing aside the scrap about his feet.

“TO THINK, THE NEXT LEVINLORD, RAISED BY SERVILE VIOLATORS INSTEAD OF HIS FLESH AND BLOOD. AND FOR WHAT?” There’s a bang somewhere that I mistake for more of the worldstorm above, but it’s too hollow and too close to be coming from the howling of the squall surrounding the house. “AH, YES. YOU HEAR THEM. COMING TO VISIT US. VERY SOON. AND I WELCOME IT, IN FACT.” Biku lifts an iron rod about the length of his upper torso and grips it with both hands as though testing its strength.

“YOU WILL SEE, I THINK, WHAT YOUR FATHER’S INDULGENCE HAS WROUGHT. AND WHY MY WORK, DESPITE WHAT YOU THINK, NEPHIL, IS NOT CRUEL. BECAUSE, LIKE INSECTS, THEY LIVE LITTLE LIVES AND DIE LITTLE DEATHS, AND QUICKLY, TOO QUICKLY, THEY FORGET THEIR PLACE AND OURS. SO WE NEEDS TEACH. WE NEEDS TEACH. THAT’S WHAT YOUR FATHER FAILS TO UNDERTAKE. TO TEACH THEM. THAT WE WILL NOT BE THEIR HELOTS AND SERVE THEIR KIND AS WE ONCE DID.

LET’S MAKE THEM KEN, NEPHIL. YOU AND I.” Then another, more deafening noise in the distance reverberates and is soon overtaken by a great and continuous rumbling. The rumbling evolves into what must be hundreds of voices rising together, and I realize now what my uncle warned was coming, just as a massive crowd of su-folk in xanthous cloaks rushes into the compartment and at my uncle from every direction.

From my vantage, I can see each of the su-harvesters carrying some kind of pointed, pike-type weapon, mass-produced, I suspect, by the co-opted duplication device they kept in the library market. The first of their armed vanguard very nearly crashes into my uncle’s legs, then, but his giant hand drops suddenly, crushing many of their small bodies between his fingers as he giggles. I feel his ghost at work, too, through every corner of the chamber, as a multitude of his long-limbed partial su-creatures gambol forth, slicing through Trun’s men and pinning their bodies into the metal stacks.

“WHY DO YOU NOT TEACH, NEPHIL? YOUR PITY AND SYMPATHIES, UNEARNED. THEY DO NOT WISH US WELL.” And in my hearts, I can feel Biku’s revulsion and bewilderment that I take no enjoyment in their suffering—even though he is correct, that these su-men intend only to harm me, as they’ve previously shown. Still, it is not in my nature to hate them in this, his way, and it never will be, I’m almost certain.

But the thought vanishes as I’m very nearly trampled by one of Biku’s metal playthings as it runs into a group of the su, and, to my surprise, someone pulls me narrowly out of harm’s way. It takes several seconds for me to realize from the shimmering eyes, the claret robes, that the sister-retainer, Ni, is with me, here, again. I grab ahold of Ni’s hand gratefully. I can scarcely believe she’s returned, and I wonder, did she discover the revolutionaries’ assault and come to warn me of the danger?

Or did she, perhaps, have misgivings about leaving me to cross Biku’s compartments alone? There is, of course, no time to ask the sister-retainer what caused her change of heart, but we hurry now, together, to the other side of the compartment, past Biku swinging one of his metal bars and crushing the salt harvesters into the wet floorboards. I notice my uncle’s laughter only stops when something else drops in on him from the ceiling, something I recognize from the distinct and unusual scream it releases—the bizarre creature from the alcove and the library market, I see, has found its way here, again.

This thing, this house intruder, lunges at Biku’s neck, and with the flashes of the storm, I observe that it’s larger, faster, than it appeared when I’d last encountered it. The part of the creature that I had thought su-like—the finned and elongated upper body I remembered from the library—is now flaccid and shriveled like a vestigial appendage. Instead, the second mouth on its distended belly protrudes into a long mandible, which rips into my uncle’s muscular shoulder, and his bellowing nearly ruptures the eardrums of everyone below.

The creature skitters out of the way of his huge hand, which rakes at his collarbone, and I see that the entity has newly barbed legs below its abdomen, puncturing deep into Biku’s skin as it crawls about his expansive back. I consider, momentarily, that the creature may be allied with the revolutionaries, aiding them in this armed assault, but the assumption is undermined immediately when it leaps and then tackles several of the harvesters, ripping and swallowing their limbs with its larger mouth.

Their group pulls back in abject terror, shouting and pointing their pikes in hopes of directing the thing away from their ranks, and it leaps higher up onto metal stacks and scampers up the wall as quickly as it dropped into the fray. Meanwhile, my uncle, still writhing this way and that, bashes the back of his head into the panes above, causing glass shards to fall and torrents of rain and wind to buffet the chamber.

Several jagged pieces crash into the flooring, bisecting many of the su-folk and altered su-men below. The sister-retainer and I take cover, and Biku continues twisting in desperation while the storm howls all around us. I turn just in time to see Ni falter, and before I can help her to her feet, a giant metal structure next to us tips. The weight of the stack makes its fall swift and definite. And I hear it crush her chest when it thuds to the floorboards with unforgiving force.

Darkness surrounds me such that I’m not certain of my sight, and the raging frenzy of Biku’s compartment that had just enveloped me has been replaced by a silence so complete and definite that it feels like its own kind of impenetrable sound. <I had perceived your father’s indifference toward you as a flaw. But I now believe the separation between you two is to your benefit. Yes. You’ve been allowed to form your own opinions of the house, and this, I think, is key.> Instinctually, I bring my ghost to my defense, outward from my body, to rush forth in a flash of heat from my skin and out into the surrounding air.

And with its glare, I observe some combination of flesh and metal where there should be walls and ceiling—arrays of churning, tentacular cirri drape as far as I can see, and there is a strange pale face I barely glimpse before my ghost flickers and withdraws, like something has snuffed it out to return the darkness. <Your bioelectric field will not incapacitate my nervous system, I’m afraid. Down in these pipes, which cool the Bel-Seebeck generators beneath the house, chemosynthesis is more effective a method of survival, so I’ve learned to splice and reform my body without the assistance of house machinery.

But, to my earlier point, I was mistaken about you. So please. Just give me a moment and allow me to elaborate further, if you will.> I’ve read its rhythms and phrases many a time during my hours of study. And I have no desire to remain with it any longer than necessary, so I move along the pipe, on hands and knees, trying to find any edge or break that would indicate the paneling through which I had been brought.

<If you wish to proceed, you will need to go this way instead.> A series of lights collect, and they seem to be free-floating, at first, but I soon realize they are generated and projected by dripping nodules on the ends of the closest cirri. The glowing lights lead to the end of a passage that remains obstructed by interlocked roots of flesh that do not seem ready to separate. The voice, which had at one point belonged to the abdicator, my father’s eldest brother, Beautiful Yom, hesitates.

He must realize that if I know him, I must be aware of what he’s been doing, down here in this darkness—that I had already suspected that the revolutionaries had advanced their knowledge with the help of one of the Levinites, that they couldn’t have reached this point, with these tools and abilities, entirely on their own. And, as if anticipating my accusations, Yom’s guilty mind makes itself readily apparent.

<You know that I vowed that I would not intervene in any of the house affairs when I relinquished my claims as Levinlord, that I chose to walk away from the Levinite family all those years ago. And you may not believe me, but I have very closely adhered to those vows. <These su . . . they appear to have accessed my abandoned compartments and whatever I may have left there. My research and works, they use them as if they are their own, that is true.

I’m sure you’ve observed. But, even so, what these revolutionaries do now tonight, against your father, against the house, goes beyond me. This is the result of numerous, incalculable causes that preexist anything I could have done—that preexist our bloodline altogether. That is why I have brought you here. <I would like to speak, now, about everything that is underway. And I want to do so, in part, because of the su-woman you were with, the sister-retainer who accompanied you.

What she did for you, and more importantly, what I saw within you when you were with her. It has caused me to reassess my perception of your position in all of this.> When he mentions Ni, I remember it again: her motionless body, crushed under the stack in Biku’s compartment, somewhere above us. Those empty eyes and arms stretching forth from claret fabric toward me as Yom drew me into the dark.

And I’m not ashamed but perhaps confused by what I feel then, thinking of her. I know I should not be so affected by the loss of her, given how briefly we knew each other, and yet I am. Ni chose to return to Biku’s compartments—I never requested it of her. And there was nothing I could do about the falling metal, or the fighting, or any of what happened around us. Yes. Much as Yom said, numerous, incalculable causes were at play, and I, only a small part of them.

<You know the su familiarly because of your unique upbringing—the way your father made certain that you associated more with them than you did with us. You befriend them, trust them, I’ve observed it now, firsthand.> Yom’s voice interrupts my thoughts and reverberates around the piping, his lights drifting much too close for comfort. <So you must realize, our groups, the Levinite, the su, are not as distinct from one another as we might think—similar genetic alterations meant to help us all survive and adapt to the harsh environments of Rai.

<But . . . one has to wonder about the original colonists, the electrogenitors. The ones who created the Levinites to serve them and operate the house, to generate the protective storms that surround us. What happened to those people? There are no records after the Nine Moon War. And once the invasion of the heaveners from our homeworld was repelled, we used our protective storms to cut ourselves off from our fellow-moons and from the greater planetary system.

But why? Was it really only for our protection? Or was it to conceal what happened to the people here after the invasion? <I wouldn’t be so certain the Levinites were ever the true scions of the original colonists. Those people were too afraid to bear the burden of operating the house systems and the bioelectric degradation that came with it, and that’s why they cloned and spliced us, the Levinites, to do this painful and dirty work for them.

<But perhaps in coming to Rai, and in exploring and colonizing and conquering this place, in making us strong and leaving themselves weak, they inadvertently forgot what they did. They forgot who they were and why they were here to begin with. Accidentally colonizing and conquering and imprisoning themselves within their own systems . . . without ever fully knowing what they had done. You see, I have a theory that the su were once our creato—> I respond involuntarily and almost certainly, unwisely.

But the thought of Ni still churns at the surface, making it difficult to listen to such self-involved ramblings, about the su, about the Levinites, about all these things long past. Some of Yom’s cirri nearby in the reflected light recoil and undulate, as though processing my response, attempting to remember what these emotions of mine mean. <Of course. Yes. You are upset. That would be . . .

something you would feel, of course. Then . . . to the more pressing point. I would like to help you navigate your way to the solar, or at least give you an equalizing advantage against your competitor, if you will accept it.> I had considered that the su might be seeking the solar, much as I was, and it does seem, the more I think about it, a natural advancement of their efforts to overtake the house.

In looking back at their attempts to vivisect me in the reading room, talking about cutting out my Levinite hearts, I assume their ambitions must include trying to splice Levinite properties into their own kind, and, eventually, learning to operate the house systems independently from us. But Yom’s lights pulse and merge and within the shadows reform into a different shape, something that does not quite seem su or Levinite when I study the imitation.

I come to see that the glowing shape is of the creature—the little thing that stalked the manse from the alcove all the way to the inner ring of Biku’s chambers. <This Stochast. The hybrid creature. You’ve encountered it several times in the house. Its form seems to be changing rapidly as it adapts and moves tonight. I cannot say with certainty where it came from initially. But I believe Trun and his fellow oceanids have been experimenting with the genetic vats, attempting to learn how to create artificial life of their own, with properties of the halotolerant bacteria, as well as from su and Levinite genetic material.

This is but one manifestation of their work thus far. <With your father weakening . . . the house systems have been failing, as you have no doubt seen. So whatever means the Stochast’s creators were using to contain the organism before this, it likely failed sometime earlier this evening when the house systems malfunctioned—leaving the organism to wreak its havoc on everything in its path, su and Levinite alike.

This allowed it to move, advance steadily, toward the center of the house, where it seems to be drawn to the generator compartments. Meaning . . . you will have great difficulty ahead unless you have some way to protect yourself.> Yom’s cirri beyond the light-image he’s generated begin to spread like parting curtains and reveal a ruptured path that leads upward through splintered bedrock. <This service shaft crosses the colonial armories, where you may find equipment that will be of use.

You’ll need it, up there, with the active stormfront. Because there is only one way to the solar. It will be up, above the glass canopy.> The lights gather along one edge of the pipework, and the face I had seen earlier floats to the surface, like a kind of mask. And I recognize, from the portraiture and house collections, Yom’s face, the old face, he now presents. Serene and not much older than I am, and seemingly unaffected by the intervening years.

<The last time there was a succession, when it was my father who had taken ill, he’d long ceased being the man we’d known. He had, in his frailty, grown churlish, temperamental, and even rageful at the suggestion that his faculties had been compromised. And so he sealed the compartments that led to his solar, except for one or two that held personal importance to him, and to which he wanted to retain internal access.

<Your father, on a night much like this, found his own way to the Levinlord. Not for power or for self-interest. But because he feared what would happen if others, like Biku, reached the solar first. <Eventually, your father learned from a friend he trusted, a young su-woman who had studied the secrets of the house, what I am telling you—that by scaling the glass-scape, he could find an entrance to key rooms used by our father, and through those, enter the solar.

That su-woman, she was . . . very important to him, you understand.> I had no idea what Yom was implying, but something about the way my uncle paused, regretfully, made me believe that he wanted to say more about this su-woman and my father, the relationship between them, but felt he couldn’t or shouldn’t tell me. Almost as though he believed it wasn’t his place to explain these things to me.

<And so . . . with this information and access—the armory, the path to the canopy, and the center of the house, you are armed with everything your father was that night, the night he ascended. You have what you need, I think, to see your objectives met.> The face of the old Yom twitches about the mouth, less like a true expression and more an errant response of his former body. <I am admittedly . . .

agnostic as to whether you, the Stochast, or others succeed. I’m not . . . supposed to care anymore what happens to the house . . . as I promised. But . . . I want the imbalances created by my works, the information being misused by the su, I want that to be redressed. I want you, nephil, to have an opportunity to see this through, to get you what . . . what you need. So I do hope this, however late, proves enough for what you intend.> And when Yom finishes, with the remnant of his face drifting among the cirri, I can almost picture the young man from the stories my father once told me, of the older brother he so clearly revered.

The one who’d sit at the shoreline with my father and Biku, teaching them, always teaching from the archives and books he’d discovered. The one who, when he decided he could not bear the burden of the solar, left his place in the house and ignored his brothers’ cries to stay. How different things could have been for the family if he’d confronted the problems he’d had with the Levinites. This misshapen thing they once called Beautiful Yom.

I forced her assistance when I could have let her be in the stoma shafts, not long after she found me. And even when she could have seen to her own safety after we parted ways, she returned because of the danger I foolishly sought in Biku’s compartments. I will likely try, repeatedly, in moments to come, to redirect the fault or reimagine the inalterable in what happened. But I also know the fault attributable to me, I must accept now—I must, or else be like Yom.

So I do, if just in my thoughts, accept, then turn and begin to drag my body up and through the riven passageway, moving from that damp darkness, where I can hear Yom speaking, still, though less and less, it would seem, to me. <We suffer this house, these systems, without real reason, without knowing why we’ve put ourselves in these positions with respect to each other. I wanted to have no part, except to witness all of this dismantled.

And I thought perhaps . . . perhaps I was alone in this.> The echo of Yom’s words weakens as I squint at a blinking light, something creeping its way through cracks in the rock, indicating which way I should drag myself next. <But I see now, what he was doing, your father. How he loved and wanted to do right by the people here. How, in his own way, he was trying to change things with you. I wonder what the oceanids would think if they knew . . .

their goals were already met. Bringing together the groups, collapsing our distinctions, that might be the key . . . He and I . . . my little brother and I . . . just . . . just different ways of trying to change the world we were given. I see now. My error. The armory, much like the rocky entry through its flooring, is ransacked by time and salt—rifle stocks and ship components and supply crates molded or dismantled into unworkable pieces.

So much for Yom’s hopes for usable equipment, I think to myself, pushing through the remainders and fragments in my way. It’s only as I clatter by an archway that I notice an ensconced figurine lean its miniature body toward me. “My lord,” IZA speaks with a warped but distinguishable voice. “I was unable to lo/cate your sig/na/ture in the manse and fear/ed some/thing happened.” “Yes, well.

Something did,” I set aside various circuit boards and ration boxes, old colonial memo pads, likely too damaged to operate. “I could have used your help, IZA. And I’d ask where you were, but I’m not even sure you have the ability to explain.” The figurine stops moving, and an identical one at the other side of the archway, closer to me, animates. “Forgive me. I was in/dis/posed. And given tonight’s strain, my processes have been limit/ed.

He is . . . limit/ed. But prot/ocols have been trans/ferred. I am with you now.” “The Levinlord put in place the protocols in ad/vance. Pre/conditions have been met. So he’s giv/en author/iz/ation to you.” “Your father’s vi/tals are be/low pre/scribed thresholds, and he has lost conscious/ness. I fear he will not survive the night.” Somehow, hearing the words aloud from IZA makes things clearer.

And my hands begin moving faster, pushing aside the equipment as I look for some service way to the upper glass-scape. I feel sweat, my breath skipping, and my ghost sparking from my fingers. A blackened silhouette, observably shorter than a su-man, and wider-built for a smaller and denser entity, meant to endure the heavier gravity of the homeworld. The darkness of it is some kind of dubh-alloy, and the shape and angular bent of its limbs, unsettling, designed supposedly to put enemies at a psychological imbalance.

Heavener plate armor, a suit, just as Yom said there would be. From the invasion of the colony, during the Antiquator’s time. Constructed to temper, at least partially, the effects of electromechanical disintegration. Nearly all of the heaveners died in the stratosphere during their invasion, their ships from the homeworld incinerated in the turbulence of the Levinite storms. But the few that escaped the celestial destruction, the ones that managed, despite the odds, to drop down on the scattered islands, supposedly killed Rai’s colonists, thousands to a man.

So many colonists killed that the first of the Levinites, the Antiquator, came to assume operational control of the colony. That was how we, the artificial beings who were once created to suffer the pain and degradation of operating the solar, came to rule the house. I touch the chest plate, which separates, and, despite being of metal, seems to peel away like the skin of a fruit, reactive and organic.

The interior is lined with translucent biomaterial, and I back into the shell of it, feeling the lining and outer carapace close in around me, expanding to fit my taller form. “IZA,” my voice echoes through the helm. “Can you patch yourself to this? I will need you both in the house and with me above the glass-scape.” “It would be in/ad/visable, my lord. Op/er/ating pro/to/cols of Intrasystem Consortium equipment—the heaveners—are Second Order, and I am not per/mitt/ed to have such a level of function.” “It’s inadvisable but not impermissible,” I reply, understanding IZA’s hesitations.

The original colonists of Rai feared higher autonomy in their machinery. They had concerns, supposedly, with one of our fellow-moons, and changes undergone by the master roboteers there. It was in part the reason for the breeding of the Levinites, and their operation of the solar, which ensured some form of manual management of the electrogeneration. But I have no interest in such ancient concerns.

“I’m requesting that you do so, IZA. And I now have the authority, so . . . please.” The figurine pauses, then extends a stone arm to touch the dubh gauntlet, and within the helm, I start to see her program combining with the embedded protocols. IZA reads my pupils, my facial expressions, then, rapidly, she interprets them before I even articulate my next commands—in the visual interface of the visor, she draws my attention to a service ladder that leads to the rafters and beyond, toward the upper hatchways of the house.

But before I leave, I touch the helm, which separates along invisible seams around my mouth with IZA’s prompting. And then, another panel separates near my girdbelt, where I grab the flacon, the little celadon container I’d been carrying. Looking at it now, I think of how foolish it was to have believed this was ever going to help my father. But I consider it may still have its uses, and I drink, feeling the chill of the decoction working its way within and attracting and metabolizing the excess energies of my hearts—an extra safeguard for what awaits.

Chaotic swirls roil in the nakedness of the unrestrained Levinite storm all around me. Along the rooftop, everything at my eyeline is sheeted, whipped about with opaque rainfall. But above, there are streaks and ruptures—columniform sprites puncturing the ocean like cerise pillars. In frozen stretches higher still, verdant cracks spread like stellar forests, and beyond those, cerulean jets rip to space like beacons of vertical fire.

Almost immediately, I stumble, beaten about by the walls of wind, and it’s only with IZA’s assistance that I’m able to balance enough to advance on my knees, one stretch of glass, then another, holding out a dark gauntlet to feel through the cascading water. A spire—one of hundreds spaced about the canopy and connected to the house’s grounding system—burns for seconds before the electricity dissipates.

An initial defense against the lightning strikes, but one that isn’t guaranteed to protect me, up here on the open glass. IZA highlights the observatory rising above the solar in the therm-visor display, barely visible at the center of the house, and in front of that, she flashes to indicate an area corresponding to a single compartment that must be unsealed, just as Yom had predicted. More spires burst and sizzle under the rain when I press onward, and then, suddenly, I’m forced to look away when there’s a blinding pulse from the observation tower, rising up and into the fiery clouds.

I suspect the Bel-Seebeck is pumping more of its dual beams into the sky, tearing the electrons from the atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen, with filamentation resulting in the plasma and instability above Rai. It’s at that moment, when stunned by the bursts between the house and heavens, that I’m rammed in the back with a force so great and precise that it would have snapped my spine had I not been wearing the armored plates.

My body flies across the wet glass, banging and tumbling before crashing into one of the spires, which stops me with an opposite force against my core. I gasp desperately for breath after the impact, and I hear screaming beyond the thunder, that strange and frightening noise, again. Caught in the pounding rainfall and heaving under the weight of its now enormous body—the creature, the Stochast, has returned.

Its mandible, in what was once a stomach, now juts outward and partially open like it’s tasting the stormwater, and above that, where there seemed to be a chest, I observe now half a dozen growths, like partial su-faces that never finished forming their bones. I count at least twelve segmented limbs with jagged points planted on the metal frames between the glass panes, and the legs begin rapidly tapping as the thing lunges ahead.

I barely register that the Stochast is charging at me again, and only just rise to plant my feet before it rams me once more, this time at an angle at my ribs, several of which I feel snap before I’m launched sideways across the canopy and slammed upon my back. The lights of burning spires and torn colors of the sky spin and double, and, in my daze, I feel something grip my leg, vicelike, with immense pressure that should have torn my flesh from the fibula.

The creature tries to snap through the plating and break off the longest, nearest extremity it can reach, and I fear that it may have the force to do so if given a few more seconds. Reflexively, my hearts convulse and react to the threat, and I feel the ghost-heat spilling from my eyes. IZA, quick to prevent internal damage to the heavener suit, opens micro-vents in the palms of the gauntlet, allowing small, sparking streams of the glare within me to burst into the face of the creature.

The Stochast recoils and drops me to the glass, like it’s been bitten by some insect, but does not seem overly concerned with the surge of energy. If anything, it seems intrigued, baited by it, and the large mouth at its lower body opens eagerly again to try to lock around my arms. But then the Stochast stumbles. Not because of anything I’ve done, I realize, but because a seam in the glass beneath us is pulling apart, and I come to see I’m moving from the creature in turn.

Metal creaks and bangs under the boom of the thunder as the Stochast slips and tries to engage its pointed legs with the surface. I regain my balance and, scanning through the rain for the observatory, watch carefully the sections of glass and metal rafters below. I remember Ni describing the quartets of compartments, the pivotal nodes between tracks somewhere beneath the house. If there are some sections that move together, I might be able to predict which will turn or slide on the tracks.

IZA seems to be interpreting my eye movements and assists with the analysis, indicating on the display one possible path over a stretch of glass between a compartment and an adjacent set of rooms about to revolve. Then she highlights a final quadrant that appears not to be moving, then a direction forward again to another sliding set that is almost to a halt. I hobble as best I can, across the glass, gripping my injured chest and breathing shallowly as I progress, vaguely aware that the Stochast behind me has been thrown off-balance yet again by another turning.

It screams differently then, an entirely new sound—one of desperation and unexpected pain—when several of its many legs are jammed between crossing sections and then torn to shreds by the pressure. I’m almost to the unsealed compartment, a hatchway visible near the glass, when I sense the Stochast beginning to run, unevenly, dragging itself against the wind. I look to the observatory, to the skies, to the moving synchrony of the pieces of the house like incomprehensible clockwork, and I’m struck with a kind of exhausted awe and sense of certainty.

If I run again, here, if I flee, the thing lurching closer will only follow. And it will come for me and others as it has before, advancing with that unmistakable destructiveness. It’s so clear to me now. Much like the dark shape near me, newly revealed in the bright blaze of the crackling storm—another spire that I begin to climb. “IZA, can you still access the grounding system? When I command, I want you to reverse the charge and direct it to this spire.” Predictably, she warns of the dangers, the shock that will come of running the house’s power in such a manner when I am still on the spire myself.

And at my ankles, I feel one of the Stochast’s pointed legs scraping my plated calf. Grasping at me as it yanks itself higher, higher, following me, rabidly, mindlessly. We rise, half-gripping each other, half-gripping the spire, almost at the peak point, still sizzling with heat from a recent strike, and as the giant mandible closes around my torso, its tightening teeth pressing against my cracked ribs, I manage to whisper.

There’s a small spark in the suit and a flash of light through the Stochast as the currents burn through us. And, as I suspected, the thing’s natural proclivities, whatever properties it shares with the halotolerant bacteria of Rai, seem to absorb, almost eagerly, the flow of power. It is not deterred or damaged by the reversed charge. But it also does not see or anticipate. Because, as I was once taught, what follows cannot ever, fully, be in any sense anticipated.

From the distant clouds, far above the lower churn—seeming to begin at the skyline and traveling at incomprehensible speed for miles across the swells of the prasinous tides, nearly horizontal with the lunarscape. Splitting, dividing, and snaking through paths of least resistance in all of that turbulence, toward the negative current in the spire, until that massive burst of energy pierces the metal structure, my body, and the Stochast’s shuddering mass, and everything explodes before we plunge, together.

The elderly su-woman who used to visit my compartments once nursed me through fever—a childhood sickness that I think nearly killed me, though no one would admit how close it came. It was always her, for some reason, no matter how many retainers my father rotated through and changed, she was one of the few who saw to me, always. I remember too, during a particularly bad bout of illness, in my bleary weakness, how she would pat my forehead with a wet cloth and distract me from the pain by telling me stories about the house, about my father, and all that came before.

She spoke once, I remember now, of the cosmid lotus, whose components formed a critical part of the splicing process in creating the Levinite bloodline, joining dissimilar genetic material between species. The beauty of its engineering, wrought from so many different living plants from prim-space, civ-space, the homeworld, the colonies. And within it, the sepal, the petals, the stamen, she’d note the uniquely connected structures, such that no matter the damage or method of recombination, the lotus knew to reform, to grow around itself and keep growing for its survival, always opening and reaching for light and for life.

“Like the manse,” I think I said, imagining the moving compartments and rings around the central compartments. “Our house.” And the su-woman touched my forehead, so softly and comfortingly, that it reminded me that she had done so, this way, many times before. And through the fog of that memory that clears to make way for the present moment, I painfully regain my senses within the cracked remnants of the heavener armor, rain falling softly down along the curves of my forehead and about my exposed chest.

IZA speaks, her voice echoing from somewhere above, telling me that the properties of the bio-gel within the suit and its extreme method of compensating for impact helped me survive the fall through the glass and along the beams, so that we slowed, barely, before we hit the lower level. The suit itself sloughs off me, the metal unfolding and crumpling, like deadened skin—already severely damaged by the lazulite lightning and then fully destroyed, no doubt, by the final impact.

The armor, the saline decoction, my Levinite blood, one or all may be the only reasons I’ve survived. I turn my head weakly to see the body of the Stochast—completely devoid of its ferocity and screams. Just pitiable quiet. The eyes of the su-faces above the mandible, open and sightless. I’m filled with an unidentifiable feeling, looking at the creature. When the lazulite burned through the spire, through my body, and this thing, in unison, I thought I almost felt something of the creature’s ghost, if it ever had such a thing.

A strange instant of understanding that there was a likeness . . . something similar between us. An inexplicable sense that but for various circumstances and events beyond our control, this hybrid being, this experiment, could somehow have been me, or perhaps, the other way around. It was a knowledge that our differences were ultimately meaningless. The flesh that held my being, that built itself around me, was just another housing.

The Levinites. The su-folk. The bacteria. The Stochast. Much as Yom said, we were closely aligned with one another, not so distinct, these groups, only slightly different encasements of our energies. I find myself weeping all of a sudden, without reason, and can only barely bring myself to sit. Beyond the smell of the creature’s burnt flesh and the singed machinery in ruins, there’s another scent, familiar, in the dampness of the rain, that no doubt brought those hazy thoughts of childhood fever and that elderly su-woman.

Hundreds of cosmid loti grow here, in recessed puddles and cracks in the wood about the ground, stretching to open toward the stormwater. And I see better that this room, the unsealed compartment where my father must have gone when he wasn’t in the solar, looks to be some kind of small chapel, with an altar, a raised pond of some sort, where the mass of the loti collect, some of them as large as bodies—a beautiful, quiet space where he must have gathered his thoughts when he wasn’t operating the house systems, a compartment that must have some tender emotional significance for him, though I’m not sure what.

I would stay here longer, among this, too, as my father must have done frequently. But there’s still more to do and little time to see it done. So, bringing myself, injured but intact, to the door, I review the compartment, the Stochast body surrounded by water and flowers under the light sheet of rain. Then with every painful breath, every step, I go finally where it is I need to be. Like so many unseen places, the solar before me feels less imposing than the shadow cast in my memory.

And smaller still, my father lies there, at the center of the domed compartment. There are similarities to the father I knew, in this man, in the eyes and the nose, but many of the features are nothing like what my mind expects—like some shrunken person who could be another one of his Levinite siblings. But the longer I stare, the surer I become that it’s him. It is my father’s frail form, there in the cradle of the solar’s operating hub, bent and disfigured—the burns along his chest, and his arms, fused wholly to his elongated torso now.

The adipose tissue that once shielded him from the Bel-Seebeck’s radiation as he worked to operate the house hangs over the edges of his bed like curtains of flesh. And the room still glows with heat as processes seem to be powering down and the storm appears to reach its end. I kneel next to the cradle and touch his shoulder, but his first instinct is to thrash against me, his eyes flickering in fear or some misapprehension, because he either does not see, or in seeing, does not comprehend, who I am.

So it comes to me again, that trick of stretching the tissue of the vocal cords with elements of the ghost, but instead of giving my voice strength and authority, I weaken and raise it slightly. In these spoken words, I’m a child again—a boy who no longer exists except in his memory, not so unlike the father that exists only in mine. And the change in my voice must have some effect, because my father’s breathing evens and a strained sound escapes his cracked lips.

His eyes do not track me fully, instead hovering this way and that. But yes. He understands who I am now, I think. So we sit this way awhile, and, from time to time, he says, or attempts to say, fragments of things to me. Some of it, urgent, practical, about the operation of the solar, the warning systems that indicate when storms should be generated or when ships are detected in the atmosphere. Some of it, though, is indecipherable.

“So much like her,” he mutters. “You . . . Always like her.” He tosses, fidgets, shouts weakly in moments when there are flashes of unexpected anger. “All of it . . . was necessary. Necessary,” he says, and I interpret the words as defensive, a form of preemption of the difficult questions I’m not certain I can bring myself to ask. About why he grew frustrated and abandoned me to IZA’s instruction.

Or why he distanced himself from me over the subsequent years. Or how he felt that severance was ever, could ever, be justified. It’s then that I realize, the feeling I could not describe to Ni before—the need that drove me, in searching for the solar—was, in reality, a hope for something from him. Not an apology, precisely, but . . . some kind of . . . acknowledgment. But he’s so rigid and so certain about his choices that it feels as though there’s no meaningful way to bridge my thoughts with his.

“No way forward,” he says wearily. “There was no way forward in all of this without Izanami. She . . . Ami . . . was always the one to care for you. And you know you were better off in my absence anyway. There’s no . . . pretending that isn’t true. You know that it’s true.” The name Izanami . . . Ami, I know it from somewhere, but I don’t remember where exactly I have heard it before.

And I think, for some reason, of the memory of my father mourning again, of him standing on the sinking sand and spreading the ash in the frothing waves. Could that have been for her? I think also of Yom then, his hesitation, when he spoke of my father and one of his companions from his youth. But I do not fully comprehend what any of these pieces might, together, mean. My father’s blood-spotted eyes roll, and his lips no longer close around the teeth.

“I can see it. You . . . you look at me, what’s happened to me and my body, and . . . you intend, to do better things than me, I can see. I remember too . . . in the solar in your . . . position, seeing my own father at the end, thinking I’d never use the solar for the storms either. But . . . given time, when you care enough . . . You’ll want to protect certain things, protect the house, too, like I did.

You’ll see . . . ” Then he waits, like he expects a reaction, even in his delirium. But I find there’s nothing I can provide, that much of me feels numb, like I’ve turned somehow to stone. So instead, he asks a question, the only question he asks me after all these years—one I believe has been weighing on him for longer than he can admit. “Do you think . . . will you . . . uphold the traditions of the house?” I hear a mix of emotions in the shaking of his voice such that an answer either way seems bound to disappoint him.

Yom had been correct, I think, that my father once aspired to change the Levinites and their traditions. The manner in which he raised me, alongside the su-folk. The barriers he placed between me and the family, so that no one figure had undue influence on my upbringing. Even his own withdrawal from me. All likely a part of setting this, of setting me, in motion somehow. But I feel, too, a perceptible trepidation in his question.

The sense that the structure and history here in the manor had still given him some meaning—that he and the manse, and all it contains, are still intertwined. Dread that disregarding the past, his past, will only lead to some unspeakable catastrophe. If any doubt endures in him, it’s this. This hope and fear in equal measure that he may be the last of the Levinlords. So, I answer him in the only way I’m able—in a way that does not, in truth, answer at all.

And I have no way of knowing if that satisfies my father, especially since I have never known what does. But his eyelids flutter, this way and that, and he returns to fitful breathing and quiet. And I think perhaps he was right, about the necessity of everything he did. Because it makes this less painful than it otherwise could have been. Because I’ve grieved my father well in advance of tonight.

Whatever I needed, whatever I hoped to find by speaking with my father, will not be found here in the solar. And I will have to decide to come to terms with it on my own, one day, or not at all. Because a sense of peace or meaning will never come from him or others, I finally understand. So I spend what time I can, close to him, simply watching his breaths, each slower than the last. His chest rising and falling, rising and falling, until it no longer does.

My thoughts drift to the Stochast, lying nearby with the flowers. Then to Ni, somewhere, still wrapped in that moldering metal. The su-men and su-women, scattered in Biku’s compartments and near the library market, motionless in those connecting passageways. And in mourning them all, I find a way to mourn him, among their number. All of them, together. Like the light of a ghost dissipating over calming ocean swells.

Or a quiet sky one might imagine, or hope, has seen the last of its storms. Ash is heavier than I expected, mixed with bone and pieces not fully incinerated. But crushed in the mortar, spread evenly with the processed salt, it becomes fine and even, and much more like the sand. When I make the walk along the service road that leads from the outer calyx, it’s slower going because of the injuries.

My ribs, nearly all the muscles on my limbs, and the internal adipose tissues, are damaged in more ways than I care to admit. IZA queries constantly about initiating rejuvenative treatments in the solar, and it may be the integration with the Second Order protocols or my imagination, but she is more persistent and creative in her chiding as of late. Nonetheless, I’ve set her to other, more pressing tasks.

She works to contact the other Levinites, one by one, notifying them of what’s come to pass with the Levinlord, and what will follow soon, with me. Dian will be among the first to respond, I’m sure, eager to pledge and establish her position, if there is such a thing in the house anymore. And there’s the matter of Biku, who very well may have fallen during the storm. But IZA knows I will not believe he has been lost without undeniable confirmation.

I also anticipate Yom will be lured from the underground eventually, if only to discuss the transition with the rest of the family, something I know now interests him more than he pretends. And there are others, I suspect, that I have yet to encounter in unexplored parts of the house, or to learn about from the solar’s past records. Like, perhaps, the “Izanami” my father spoke of so tenderly—a name that carries familiarity and makes me think of the scent of the cosmid loti and thoughts of childhood, for reasons I cannot bring to words.

Knowing what I know now, after the events of the night, it all seems less of an impossibility than before—that my father might have had a close su companion. I begin to wish that I had asked him more urgently, that I had thought to summon the questions before he was gone. But I suppose there will be many things like this that I will have wished we discussed—things I can never, will never, fully understand now that he’s no longer here.

The frigid water hisses at my fingertips when I bend to touch the froth of the tide. I’d forgotten what the tumble of waves was like here, at the island’s edge. And behind me, at the shorecliffs, I sense su gathering from the house and nearby settlements. Finned bodies moving together to watch the funerary rites, as a gesture if for no other reason, and Trun and the others are among those watching, I’m almost certain.

Trun knows, I think, that the ash I hold here for these rites is not just my father’s. His su-men no doubt told him that I returned to Biku’s compartments for Ni’s body as well, to come here and to lay her to rest. I would not be here without her and could not leave her in that place and in that way. The oceanids respect these traditions, just as we do. And it may be the only reason he and his men do not descend upon me here.

The only thing that may buy me future discussion with the su, and what we do with the house now, and I hope to have those discussions. There will be problems, of course. Difficulties that I don’t foresee. Conflicts that will arise with the su, or the Levinites, or perhaps other seed houses on other isles, which I know must still operate like our house does, somewhere. Or even with the heaveners from the homeworld, if they are still out there, should the solar remain untouched, and the skies above us remain cloudless and clear.

Because I understand all too well now how dysfunction and pain only thrive in that kind of silence and separation. And in watching the flotsam of ash pulled away and swallowed by the sea, I think only of the flow between the water, and the salt, and the house, and the skies. The movement that is necessary to carry us all forward. And above, in the unclouded heliotrope stratosphere, I can see the vague outlines of our eight fellow-moons, old allies we’ve not contacted since the Antiquator, and I wonder what else might be accomplished if we commit to something different, something new.

More time than I expected has passed when I look down to find that my feet have been swallowed by wet sand. But I shake myself free and turn from the water’s edge, facing the house again in full daylight, that mass of brightened glass and metal. Thomas Ha is a Nebula, Ignyte, Hugo, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated writer of speculative short fiction. You can find his work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Weird Horror Magazine, among other publications.

His work has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. His debut short story collection, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, is available at Undertow Publications and wherever books are sold. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade plus of living in the northeast, now resides in Los Angeles with his family.

Summary

This report covers the latest developments in artificial intelligence. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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