![]() ![]() The scientists among the First Expedition wept to find us. But then the Katalinans found it, found us: a population of clairvoyants and telepaths empaths and mediums and, most importantly, oraculos. They call Buyin the Pearl of the Katalinan Empire.īy rights, in the great expanse of the celestial sea, it should have remained an insignificant backwater. I shut the gates to past and possible futures, both yours and mine, and prepare trajectories from Buyin to the Homeworld. ![]() I lock you in, before you can cause an unpleasant scene. She thinks you’re afraid of leaving home but it’s me you’re running from. Sweep yourself out of the ship like a child running from ghosts. I will only be known by the name across my hull: Empress of Our Stars.īut you, you are an oraculo unmade. All of them are Blessed, their names and genetic lines canonized in the Book of the Rose.īut I, like all my peers, am destined to remain unnamed. What Katalinan scientist, what bio-engineer first thought to take their knife to a Buyin oraculo’s back? To the delicate webs of an oraculo’s nervous system and connect them to the navigation systems of the great galleon ships? Their names are legion. To the stars’ present, their past, all slivers of their possible futures. Watched as they attached hundreds of bio-luminescent tendrils to brain and nervous system, connecting me to the galleon ship’s systems, opening my oraculo’s eyes to the great expanse of the celestial sea. I remember floating, high, watching with an archangel’s serenity as they exposed my spinal cord, the flower of my brain stem. ![]() I remember the bio-engineers painting cool antiseptic gel against my back, the growing sense of weightlessness as they drugged me to open up my oraculo’s eye. I remember Madre Eglantine speaking from the Book of the Rose. In an enclosed chamber in the heart of the galleon ship, I lay on my belly, my arms outstretched as if I were at worship. Me, at sixteen, undressed for my assignation and my back laid bare for the engineer’s art. Two oraculos will always recognize each other, mirrors reflecting each other in an endless loop. They have chained your hands behind your back and I can hear you weeping.) Your cheeks starved to sharpness, lungs wracked with fever, your back flayed open. (I see the infant spiders again in the dark of your prison. Suddenly, inexplicably, there are infant spiders in your brown-black hair. Dancing ancient Balanchine in the Glass Cathedrals with white roses at your feet bargaining down the price of nephila silk in the Buyin Merchants Association. I shift my oraculo’s eye and look into your present, your past, the starlight threads of all your possible futures. But I draw up your name, I see your profile: seventeen years old, destined for the Conservatorio. For all of your finery, you are just another Buyin girl travelling to the Homeworld. What compels me? I have ferried a hundred thousand passengers and will ferry a hundred thousand more: each of them a tapestry of past and present, a constellation of possible futures. Silk on white marble, roses at your feet, a sweep of golden bees falling from throat to hip on your white dress-the oraculo’s sign. I see you the moment your pale white slipper touches my floor. ![]() © Galen Dara, "These Constellations Will Be Yours" ![]()
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