Seeker

‘The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled’

      Plutarch

Seeker was born nameless, the spawn of a struggling line that had eked out a subsistence on the fringes of the Dusk for as long as ancestral memory extended.

The domain to which she belonged was small; a knot of cramped warrens surrounded by a few square kilometres of marginally arable land. The sun rocked in the hazy sky, low on the horizon, large and red and mottled. Its constant motions were the only measure of time in this place, for there were no days here – just endless undifferentiated seconds. Mostly, the sun’s invisible rains nourished the crops, but sometimes its face grew stormy; the rain became a deadly hail and they would seek shelter beneath the earth.

At the time Seeker was only dimly aware of how these systems wove together to shape her world. What set Seeker apart from her kin was her dissatisfaction. She hungered for knowledge in the way other Dyn hungered for an eternal line or an expansive domain. Through knowledge those things might be secured too, but they were secondary concerns. She had a true sense of curiosity; a mind of sparking fire that grasped at thoughts more rapidly than they could be set into order. But that did little to spare her.

Like all her siblings, she barely remembered her childhood; the half-formed memories were suppressed by the pheromone-induced fugue of bonding hormones that flooded her body on the cusp of adolescence. Her sense of self dissipated, her nascent fertility was inhibited. As with all but the luckiest fraction of Dyn she bore the scars from that time; the relentless, desperate struggle for food, approval and survival.

Seeker was never the strongest or the fastest. She suffered from constant malnourishment; her forelimbs grew slowly, while the hardened plates that formed her head were thin and brittle. The constant need to escape the cullings drove her to innovate, to adapt as the others could not. Those were the times when her unusual intelligence stirred faintly, driving her to improvise weapons and tools that might make up for her weakness, or crafting toys and trinkets that would please the others.

When Seeker was not working at the tasks set for her she rested, or fought with her younger, more ambitious siblings when they could not be placated. Despite the absurd odds she survived and rose to a position of some security, if not privilege.

That all changed when her parent’s line ended abruptly. Her mother was caught in the open during a sudden sunstorm and killed before she had finished grooming her successor. Without a single carefully shaped vessel into which to pour her soul, the line sundered between her many offspring.

Seeker was reborn prematurely and fell into a violent, terrible state.

When the storms had faded, the now motherless Dyn fought and died in a conflagration of spectacular violence; a lashing of jaws, forelimbs and bladed weapons drenched in blood red light.

When the bonding hormones left her system, Seeker felt her self-knowledge rekindle for the first time since childhood. This freedom was not without its costs; pain was enhanced by an awareness of pain. She despaired at her loss and feared for her future. She looked up at the sun and recognised it as the sun. She looked around at the fighting, the alliances that were forming and disintegrating as her home fell apart, and fled in blind fear. Her last glance back at the domain of her birth revealed the fields in flames. It was an anarchic total war, fought over a dismal scratch of land. The victor would reign over the ashes.

As she stood on the hillside watching smoke billowing into the sky, she felt a new emotion burning in her. It was shame.

Seeker’s body changed as she fled towards the Night. Her search for unclaimed territory grew desperate as her ovaries fertilised themselves, her biology responding to the rare chance to secure a limitless future.

At last her flight ended in a land utterly alien to that she was born into; a dark, twilight world where the sun’s disk never climbed above the horizon. She birthed her first litter in a hole in the ground. She was overjoyed by their arrival, paltry in number though they were, but was sorrowed by the thought that this might be all her line would ever know.

Then the clouds cleared and Seeker gazed upon a sight that few Dyn had ever seen. The Night sky, strung with countless glinting points of light. In a flash of insight she understood – this was not a mere dome, but an infinite expanse. She wondered whether each of those lights might be a sun like that which nourished her world, whether they might have worlds of their own… If only there was a way to get to them, then the Dyn, all Dyn, might never have to fight for scraps again. Her thoughts raced ahead of her as they so often did. There was beauty in this new world, after all, and whilst this land was barren she took solace in the heavens. She had traded one sun for an infinitude – this thought gave her hope. She held it close in the millennia* that followed.

Those times were hard. The children were set to working the earth as soon as they were capable; too young for the subtler kinds of mental influence, they had to be corralled by cruder means. Even out here some plants grew, but they were black and tough and had to be domesticated from scratch. Warrens had to be dug, they were designed to resist the harsh katabatic winds that blew in from the Night rather than to provide shelter from the fickle sun. Children died almost as quickly as they could be born, killed by starvation, exhaustion and cold.

It wasn’t just the climate that culled the young. Great Hunter-Kites, scanning with echolocation, would swoop down to prey on the unsuspecting. Yet more dangerous were the other Dyn, the marauders that eyed her realm hungrily. They were wraiths without domain or line, driven into the wastes by desperation as Seeker had been, but lacking her determination and ingenuity.

That ingenuity served her well. With the end of those hardscrabble early years, Seeker turned her mind to more ambitious projects, so that she might further  increase the yield of her domain. Rudimentary greenhouses were constructed, steam was harnessed to heat the warrens and tethered balloons lofted massive mirrors high into the sky where they could ensnare the sun’s rays.

As the wealth of her fledgling domain grew so did the threat posed by the marauders, who began to cooperate. Seeker watched these alliances intently, playing divide and conquer where she could and readying herself all the while. She was faced with a binary choice; innovate or die. The renewed prospect of annihilation honed her mind. Seeker toured blockhouses and workshops, ordering improvements that she envisioned in fevered dreams or on long walks under the sunless sky.

The inevitable came without fanfare. Though Seeker observed with trepidation the hordes of spear and pike troops that massed on her borders, she knew she was prepared. When battle was joined her children, guided by improved metallurgy and tactics, cut down the numerically superior force with ease. The primitive iron weapons of the enemy were no match for hardened steel, and her superior military doctrine pressed this advantage. The dead became fertiliser, while the survivors were enslaved, working the expanding farms and gardens. Seeker’s domain, temporarily secured, grew more prosperous still.

To have come from such lowly beginnings and achieve so much would have been enough for many Dyn, but for Seeker all this was merely in service of a far greater ambition; to escape the bounds of this world. At the time it was a thought she dared not confess to even her most loyal and favoured children. The others would never be able to understand, not until they were shown. She knew that she might not attain such a lofty goal in this life, but maybe the next?

Her quest for knowledge continued. Seeker sent out envoys and spies across the world; to the squabbling autarchies and the decadent eunuch courts to learn of discoveries being made out in the wider Dynic civilisation. Their interference spread rumours of a strange and isolated domain beyond the Dusk and with them, for the first time, a name. The Dyn told stories of one they called Seeker in a thousand copycat tongues.

Nevertheless, Seeker’s efforts went largely ignored, her line a mere kink in the thread of the world’s great tapestry. The larger domains waged endless wars. As ever, the casus belli was the same; Dyn were not bound by ties of tribe or ideology. The wars were fought over practical matters – the control of bountiful lands and the endless Malthusian squeeze of population pressure.

In the waning years of her life, Seeker was enthralled by the nascent field of optics and designed devices capable of magnifying the heavens. She took to venturing out on expeditions ever deeper into the Night. She mapped the stars and even directly observed other worlds sharing the Dynic sun. But whilst she gazed up in wonder, she was shrewd enough to never lose sight of the earth at her feet and so, in time, she began grooming an heir so that this life’s work could be continued in the next.

Individual identity was a matter for record-keeping, meaningless in the greater scheme of things. The Dyn had ways to describe the culture and personality shared across generations; their lines had descriptive names like ‘Seeker’. But no individual, no matter how powerful, would name themselves. One’s own death was irrelevant when compared to the ebb and flow of the great lineages. In her final expeditions Seeker’s heir accompanied her every step of the way and when she died Seeker was entombed in ice, out under the Night sky, in defiance of Dynic tradition.

Seeker, her mind shaped into a close imitation of the first of her line, was born anew, her determination to push beyond the shackles of this world undiminished.

For now, however, she remained bound by its laws and was drawn into the war of all against all, dictated by the logic of preemptive attack and competition for resources. Whilst to many the lineage of Seeker remained little more than a curiosity, the fruits of her innovation were clear enough to her immediate neighbours as she wielded her superior technology against them to devastating effect. Yet she didn’t expand far; never overstretching. Her eyes remained fixed on more distant frontiers.

In one such conflict, as she watched gunpowder rockets arcing into the enemy formations, scattering them in disarray, Seeker did not thrill at their impending defeat but instead wondered whether a rocket might be able to leave this world behind altogether. Further experimentation proved that whatever a hypothetical rocket might be capable of, the technology was beyond her; the mass of powder swiftly grew far beyond what was practical.

So Seeker shifted her focus to a far more niche technology. Guns had been largely ignored, seen as useful for static defences, but mostly ignored. Although attempts had been made to miniaturise them, high humidity made them unreliable whilst the oxygen saturated atmosphere made them dangerous. Such concerns did not dissuade Seeker.

In the shadowy isolation of her walled keep Seeker devised fantastic designs that could hurl shells dozens of miles. None of the others could have guessed her true purpose – to pursue a fantasy with such single-minded determination was madness. But if the lineage of Seeker was mad, it was a very specific strain of madness. For she also kept abreast of developments in the wider world; the discovery of electricity, advances in chemistry, machines that propelled themselves with fire and steam.

Where she could she pressed these inventions into the service of her own ends, often improving on them; new ideas came to her with a fierce regularity. She also anticipated the dangers that such a blossoming of industry would bring. Every increase in food production simply increased the number of children born; in a mere century a single Dyn might spawn more than a dozen offspring. The outcome seemed as inevitable to her as it was obvious. The recurrent conflicts would extend into churning wars of attrition. There would be war without end, and it would be all-consuming. She redoubled her efforts.

She accepted certain strategic defeats in the following centuries as she dug in and turned her focus inwards; enemies overran outlying lands whilst she encircled herself with heavy fortifications and entrenchments.

The first great gun took almost a millennium to design and construct, whole broods were worked to an early death in casting the great alloy construct and assembling the segments together. It was erected within a secured mountain valley away from the sunward side of Seeker’s territory, deep in darkness and ringed by forts and barbed wire. Her survey teams and ranging devices determined that when it fired the slug tore a hundred miles into the sky. It wasn’t enough.

More wars were fought, more time lost repelling nervous neighbours, afraid of Seeker’s newfound powers. The second gun was larger by far than the first; the projectile flared like a comet as it fled from the surface, a hot liquid fuel mixture igniting at altitude and hurling it still faster, almost fast enough that the curve of the world held it forever upwards. But it still did not reach orbit.

Losses mounted as Seeker diverted far more of her resources to the project. Hosts of fearful domains attacked simultaneously. Seeker’s earlier guns were co-opted and pressed into the more mundane function of hurling explosive shells against her enemies. She never invested many of her children into standing armies, preferring to scour the land around her clean. Mundane conflicts over food and territory could not hold her attention. Even aircraft, which enthused the other Dyn with their range and versatility, held little interest for her. Dirigibles or planes could never fly beyond the edge of the air.

The stories she told herself and her children became more obsessive – lurid visions of colonies on other worlds, of an infinite garden and eternal peace.

The last cannon, the greatest of them all, was completed after twenty years of work. Buried deep in a mountainside, riddled with staged charges and hydrogen gas valves, it was the largest machine ever built.

Eventually her forces were broken and the enemy stormed past her final defensive line. As their armies advanced unopposed, the cannon fired with a detonation that shook the earth, the flash lighting the Night like a new sun. The solid booster burned a pale yellow as it accelerated. Seeker knew she had sacrificed most of her territory, but it didn’t matter anymore.

She saw the second engine ignite, triggered by an electrical machine of her own design. It coasted higher and higher, moving fast enough that it would never return to the ground. It flew far beyond the edge of the air and blazed like a new star in the sky, fixed forever upward.

That did it; Seeker had proven a mastery no other Dyn could match. Defeated and yet exultant, she was dragged before the autarchs of the victorious coalition to explain her actions. She did so. She promised an eternal peace if they co-operated. If every line had its own world, there would be no possibility for conflict, there would be nothing to do but persist forever into the future and tend to their world-gardens. She threatened eternal submission if they did not. Sooner or later another line would replicate her feat and if one held dominion over the heavens, one held dominion over all.

Word of Seeker’s gift spread and a tenuous peace descended on the war-torn world. The autarchs of the great lines and envoys of the eunuch courts gathered to observe a second demonstration. They witnessed her place another star in the sky. The idea of inscribing a mark on the heavens, of joining the world below with the world above, seemed to break something fundamental in the minds of the others.

The meeting of minds that occurred was spontaneous – it did not result from some global call for dialogue. That infinite space above held opportunity, and all Dyn could sense it. The negotiations weren’t easy. Most Dyn spoke their own language, warped by transmission across countless generations and lineages and used only to instruct children, or to reinforce thoughts within their own minds. Communication between equals was not a common occurrence; imitation and the thrust or retreat of invasions were how Dyn spoke to each other. The process took decades.

The meeting broke up with an agreed ceasefire, but ultimately a refusal to fully commit to Seeker’s plan. It was too utopian to be believed. They insisted she prove that survival in space, let alone on another world, was possible. Sending projectiles beyond the air had become easy, but its advantage was mostly symbolic. To send a living being would be much harder.

A rocketship was constructed, utilising bleeding-edge technology, made of thick steel and tall enough that its nose broke above the waves when underwater. It was based in the shallow sea that bordered Seeker’s former domain, floated out on pontoons and filled with water. The target was the next planet out, orbiting a few million kilometres further from their red dwarf sun. It had an atmosphere similar to that of the homeworld and therefore, it was inferred, life.

Seeker boarded the ship, having already delegated ownership of her lineage to her firstborn, whose mind and development she had carefully shaped. For this brief moment, there were two Seekers on one world. The pontoons were retracted and the tremendous fission rocket motors ignited with a wave of hot steam- tonnes of impure water flash-boiled by the ship’s uranium core. Nearby islands, with their dense clumps of vegetation and hastily evacuated settlements, were consumed by the blast front. Clouds of irradiated steam gushed into the air, destroying all life for square kilometers.

Adrift in the capsule at the tip of her ship, Seeker glanced back at the homeworld; one side shrouded in ice and night, the other storm-wracked and parched. Only in a thin band of bruised grey, where every square meter was intensely cultivated, could the Dyn flourish. But the line of Seeker had already broken that paradigm.

The journey took less than a decade; though Seeker didn’t know it, the planetary systems of red dwarf stars were tightly packed. The target world drew closer, resolving into a planet of shallow seas and low islands. The planet was ringed by a curious silver bracelet that didn’t look like simple rock or ice. It also spun relative to the sun, a novelty that Seeker was sure would introduce many complications. How would her biology respond to a sun that moved across the sky dozens of times every year? Would a new lineage take root here? She felt how she imagined her mother must have done when she made her own fateful journey so long ago.

Her fission rocket, intensely radioactive and depleted of reaction mass, was discarded along with life support and electrical power as she made her approach. The atmosphere of this new world was thinner than that which cloaked the homeworld. Entry was violent, and her capsule almost tumbled out of control. But the parachutes that popped out at the last moment braked her with a savage kick.

Seeker’s capsule came down in the midst of a shallow pool barely deeper than her forelimbs and thick with life. Seeker stumbled out; her limbs feeling springy. Her head tilted to taste the unfamiliar air. She was lighter here, the sky above was an unfamiliar blue, the sun was too high and too small. There were no mountains; the landscape of ponds and shallow seas stretched out to the flat horizon. The air was cool, and that strange ring loomed overhead.

Coming here had always been an act of faith. Yet Seeker had expected to find sustenance, making the intuitive leap that two worlds so close together shared a common heritage. The life in the pool confirmed it – swimming among the plants were tiny, aquatic animals, their Y-shaped frames so familiar.

She had but one final task. Before the sun had set she gave birth to a litter; the start of a new line on a new world.

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*The Dynic homeworld orbits close to its parent star and thus their years are substantially shorter than ours.

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