The Vanishing Star: part 5

Science and magic

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Lola Styles is on her long road to recovery…

The Appilan Rainforest. Palinor.
3205. Early Brightsun.

It was time for another test. Lola’s life was a series of challenges, one after another and all at once. She’d had to relearn how to walk, how to use her legs. How to regain fine motor control over her hands, her fingers. It had taken months, and she still couldn’t run or sew.

In truth, she may have been a little distracted.

Daryla looked at her expectantly. “Are you ready?”

Lola nodded. “Yes. Ready. Let’s do it.”

“Remember to stay focused. Think about where you’re directing it.” Daryla put a hand on her shoulder.

They were stood at one edge of the camp, in a small clearing. Upon the stump of a tree were several objects: a ball, an apple, a pile of sand. Through her shoulder Lola felt the buzz of energy, which always reminded her of drinking a hot drink on a cold day and feeling its warmth spread through her body. Her skin tingled and she felt as if she might burst into flames. Oddly, it made her feel like she needed to urinate. Every single time.

Her breathing shallow, Daryla tapped her once on the shoulder and withdrew a safe distance, where she sat down in a carefully prepared camping chair and covered her lap with a thick blanket. Lola didn’t look back, for fear of throwing off the targeting; besides, she didn’t want to see Daryla’s pale face, or the strained veins around her eyes.

Concentrating on the tree stump, she looked first to the sand. Reaching out with one hand, she rubbed her fingers together in the air, and the sand on the stump shifted and drifted across the wooden surface as if blown by the wind. Shifting to the apple, she gestured at the stalk, and after a few moments severed it. The ball was the last of the objects. She was to shift the molecules on the tree stump’s surface, such that the ball would be pushed off the edge. It would require only a subtle change, and the point was to demonstrate finesse rather than brute force: the micrologist abilities she was siphoning from Daryla could not handle significant mass and were not designed to do so; instead, micrology was about the manipulation of tiny things. Good for chemistry, or cookery, or assassination. The surface of the stump would only need a tiny massage beneath the ball to cause it to roll.

It proved more difficult than she’d anticipated. Lola had managed similar feats before, but she couldn’t find the right frequency. The air rippled, but the stump remained unchanged and the ball unmoved. Gritting her teeth, she pushed harder, both hands outstretched this time, and she felt the invisible impact of having telekinetically attached herself to the stump. She began manipulating the wood, tiny piece by tiny piece, working the solid into a malleable semi-liquid. The sensation, as always, began to overwhelm her, as if she’d tapped into something forbidden and which should not be known. She persevered.

The left side of the tree stump melted, slid down towards the forest floor, then evaporated into the air and dispersed on the morning breeze as little more than finely sanded dust.

What remained of the stump was sheared off, as if cleaved by an axe. The ball rolled into the grass.

“What did you do?” Daryla’s voice was alarmed, worried. “Are you alright, Lola?”

Her fingers were buzzing, and she could feel the sun on her back, its light pouring into her. She could rip apart the other half of the stump if she wished, molecule-by-molecule.

The ground before her shook, then rippled, and the solid earth turned to mud. The stump sank into the sucking liquid and its diameter began to spread, a small tree collapsing and disappearing into the mire.

Lola stepped away from it and glanced back at Daryla in a panic. “What do I do?”

“Breathe, concentrate, remember that you’re in control,” Daryla said, up from her chair and moving closer, though careful not to touch. “You’re doing this.”

Her fingers vibrated so fast that she thought the skin would be flayed from the bones. “I can’t make it stop.”

In one swift movement, Daryla unfurled and flung the heavy blanket over Lola. Allowing it to envelop her, Lola sank to the ground, the thick covering blocking the daylight. Slowly at first, then rapidly, the power drained from her, and the pulsing beat diminished until everything was still.

Lola remained beneath the blanket, in the dark. “What was that?”

“I’m not sure,” came Daryla’s voice from the other side of the blanket. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”

Resting her forehead on the forest floor, Lola sighed. “I can’t control it. It’s too dangerous.”

“We’ll find a way.”

The Appilan Rainforest. Palinor.
3206. Late Leafless.

The raid on the archives at Fountain University, in the heart of Bruglian power, had gone well. Right beneath the nose of Chancellor Baltine, who was no doubt choking on his own bile. They’d used the same technique that had worked so well for acquiring funds of dubious origin in the past: Yana helped them climb up the outside of a supposedly impregnable fortress, then Slava picked the lock and Zlati did the vent crawling.

Quiet in, quiet out.

Unlike the last time they’d attempted an operation in Bruglia, during the bombings, it went according to plan. They’d chosen the timing with precision, waiting until all eyes were on the newly built stadium on the other side of the bridge, in the main town. Nobody was watching the outskirts of the university campus, which gave them the opportunity to pull off the operation in daylight. Riskier in theory, but it made matters easier for Yana and Slava: creating minor gravity wells and unlocking vaults remotely wasn’t easy in the dark, without light sources to draw upon.

The university archive, nestled above the library, was a horde of knowledge. Yana could have spent weeks there, but she’d only had fifteen minutes. She found the section for K and took what she needed.

By the time they’d made it back to Appilan, she already knew it wasn’t enough.

“I’d hoped it would contain some undisclosed spell or energy harvesting trick,” she said to Krystyan around the fire, holding aloft the newly acquired edition of Kaenamor’s journals. “But it’s just more of the same. Or ramblings about other experiments.”

Krystyan poked at the flames with a long stick. “Not worth the risk of going, then, you’d say?”

She shrugged. “Not for this. Perhaps the records Zlati and Slava got will prove useful. Not for my project, but for revealing something else.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding, “they’re already trawling through them. Financial records, mostly. I’m sure they’ll dig up something incriminating that we can use against Baltine.” He sighed and snapped the stick in half. “If we ever get a chance.”

“No change on the front?”

He stared into the fire, the flames dancing in his eyes. “The Mid-Earthers are providing arms. We’re holding Blue Towers. But there’s no way we’re getting Kunac back. And even if we did, it’s flattened. The Mid-Earther artillery turned it to rubble. Nobody could live there. Lairn hangs in the balance. The Peak is off-limits, let alone even thinking about striking against Bruglia. Even hit and run is off the table.”

“Stalemate.”

“That’s a charitable way of putting it. Something needs to change or we’ll be at this until everyone on all sides is dead.” He snorted and shook his head. “At least Baltine and the Bruglians got to have their little sporting festival. ‘The first inter-dimensional sporting event to be held on Palinor.’ They’re scrubbing the blood from their hands with racquets and balls and running shoes. Every high jump and javelin throw is an atrocity forgotten. The people of the triverse watch the games and forget the war.”

Across the grass from the tents came Lola Styles, limping, a little uncertain, but no longer using a crutch. At first, Yana had to restrain herself from recoiling in Lola’s presence. Witnessing Daryla’s suffering at the hands of the vaen’ka and then from Lola had been horrific, an image she couldn’t shake from her memory. To think that Daryla had then voluntarily submitted to the experience, over and over again, for seasons, in an effort to teach Lola to control the impulse, and to better understand her temporary abilities — it was all too much.

It had worked, though. Over the year Lola had begun to control her siphoning of wielding energies, such that she was able to briefly come into contact with a magic user without instantly draining them. She said it took enormous willpower, like trying to hold in an especially powerful sneeze, but she was managing it. And the woman was walking, somehow, on her leg and borrowed leg. Lola was so small, so unassuming, that Yana had made the mistake of thinking her weak.

“Lola,” she said, “come join us.”

“How’s the reading?”

“Disappointing.”

Lola scrunched her face up in empathy. “No great revelations, then?”

“It’s all so piecemeal,” Yana said, throwing her arms up in exasperation. “I’ve studied Kaenamor’s work for over a decade, have read every report from the time of the Joining, and I’m still none the wiser as to how he did it.”

“Are you sure he did?” Lola pierced a mushroom with a long knife, then held it over the fire to roast. “We were taught at school that nobody knows how the triverse came to be, or what caused the portals. Kaenamor was a famous scientist at the time and was killed when the portals opened, but the university denies any actual involvement, right?”

Yana looked at Lola from beneath sceptical eyebrows. “Oh, he was involved. Portals don’t open up by themselves. Somebody cast a spell, and nobody else back then even came close to possessing the skill or necessary power.”

Lola flipped the mushroom over. “So what’s the big mystery?”

“None of it makes sense. Not least the amount of energy he would have needed to wield. It’s not possible to draw that much, even if you set up a focusing mirror array. You’d need an unfathomable amount of energy to punch holes in reality.”

“Where would you get that amount of energy from, theoretically?”

“There were reports from the time of two stars disappearing from constellations in the sky. But astronomy was rudimentary on Palinor — still is, really — so it’s hard to corroborate what was there before, and what was there afterwards. And nobody has ever extinguished stars before — I don’t understand how that could be done, or how it would help.

Blowing on the mushroom, frowning at the fire, Lola tentatively touched her tongue to the fungi. Wincing, she started blowing some more. “I’m new to all this,” she said, “so I don’t really get the disappearing star thing. Wielders can use light that’s around them, but the light still has to be there.”

The Mid-Earther didn’t know what she was talking about, evidently, but Yana was happy to entertain her. “I could take the light from this fire,” she said, and the fire flickered and dimmed, “and then I could use it to power my physology, just so—” a log shifted, then lifted from the fire, up into the air, “manipulating the mass of the wood. In the day, I can use sunlight.” She shook her head in frustration. “That’s obvious, everyone knows that. None of that helps explain what Kaenamor did.”

Lola pointed her mushroom at the fire. “When you did that, the light of the fire dimmed. But that doesn’t happen with stars, because the light is so intense, and because the star is still sending light our way. So how could stars have gone out?”

Before the war, Yana had been hoping to travel to Max-Earth to study astrophysics. Those plans had been put on hold. “Explain, please.”

“Well, let’s say Kaenamor did use the light from two stars. They wouldn’t just disappear, though, because that light is travelling millions of light years to get to Palinor. You could suck in all the light that’s arriving here, and the star wouldn’t go out, because more light was right behind it.”

Yana had heard the term light year, but didn’t understand it. “Pretend I am a fool,” she said, “and explain to me what a ‘light year’ is.”

Lola looked startled, as if someone had just shone a spotlight on her. “Oh, I’m not sure. It’s the speed of light, isn’t it? Or how long light takes to get somewhere? Like, how far light can travel in one year. Don’t ask me how far, I have no idea.”

In Palinese science, in the study of magic, light was a constant. An infusion of energy in the air that varied in intensity. Yana had definitely heard the term ‘light year’ before, but she couldn’t think from where. Perhaps on a visit to Mid-Earth as a child, or in a lecture at university in Parphelion. It wasn’t something that scholars talked about.

“For the star to disappear, all the light would have to be absorbed,” she said.

Taking a bite of the mushroom, Lola shook her head. “You couldn’t do that, though, because the light hasn’t got here yet. It’s literally millions of light years away.” She reached down and picked up a small stone. “I can pick this stone up because it’s here. But a stone over there, by the forest’s edge, I can’t pick up because I can’t reach it. It’s over there, I’m here.”

The concept of light moving, of it having a physical existence in the universe, was entirely foreign to Yana. “Then he would have needed to find a way to do it. To take all the light from the star, all at once.”

Lola shrugged. “I mean, if he did what you think, he was Mr Portal, right? Jumping through time and space and all that.”

The possibilities bloomed in Yana’s mind.

Krystyan stretched and belched. “I have absolutely no idea what either of you are talking about.”

---

References

• If you’re wondering about the previous operation Yana recalls, it’s in part 2 of ‘Bombings’ (December 2022).

Meanwhile.

It’s been an extremely hectic couple of weeks, for reasons I won’t go into at this particular moment. Apologies to those of you following along with my Babylon 5 rewatch — I should be back on schedule next week.

Triverse, of course, is not allowed to slip. I think I’ve missed perhaps a handful of weeks in the ten-or-so years I’ve been serialising fiction, so I’ve kept a fairly decent track record.

To be honest, if I don’t write every week I start to go a bit peculiar, so it’s in my own best interest to get on with it.

Here are some Interesting Things from the last week that you can use to occupy your brain:

• My Note about world building seemed to be well received. Do check out the many excellent replies and restacks.

• I’ve been massively enjoying Eternal Strands. If you haven’t played it, do check it out. It’s fun from the beginning, and only gets better from there. It’s so good I haven’t even launched Balatro.

• Substack (the set of tools I use for this newsletter) frequently blunders into causing self-inflicted wounds through tone-deaf blog posts, so I appreciated

  Taylor Lorenz
  ’s more in-depth conversation with
  Hamish McKenzie
  :

  Discussing free speech w/ Hamish

• This newsletter is all about writing more, and

  S J Watson
  had some good tips this week:

One last thought: I write in part to make sense of the world around me. Through my fiction I can better understand the real world. Writing is therapeutic in that manner; I’m not sure how I managed before I built up a decent, regular habit.

So, yes. As the world continues to feel a bit scary, make sure you write more, not less.

It helps!

Author notes

Sportswashing, eh? It’s a fascinating thing, and Delayed Gratification magazine had an extensive article about Saudi Arabia’s efforts to improve its reputation through putting on fancy sporting events. There’s an article about the article here.

As someone who has never been interested in watching sport (sorry), I find it especially fascinating. The two things — random gaming events and murderous regimes — seem so diametrically opposed that the idea of one cancelling out the other is ludicrous.

And yet.

As such, I couldn’t resist putting a bit of it into Tales from the Triverse. As if Krystyan and the rebels didn’t have enough to contend with, they’re also being battered by Bruglia’s superior PR tactics. Which, let’s face it, is a major part of modern warfare and politics: it’s less about what you do and more about how you shout about it.

I’d considered doing a specific story or one-shot about the games in Bruglia (think: Olympics, but on a triverse scale), but that felt like too much of a distraction at this point in the story. Alas, when I pulled the trigger back in ‘The Assault on Stamford and Coin’, I moved the overall narrative away from the episodic case-by-case structure. Hence here we are, with Krystyan mentioning it as a background detail.

The idea that Baltine is arranging fancy sports events while the rest of the triverse slowly implodes seems oddly appropriate for 2025.

Another aspect I go to poke at in this chapter is the idea of different educations across the triverse. Mages on Palinor might know about magic, but Max-Earth is going to have a much more advanced understanding of astrophysics. Mid-Earth falls somewhere in the middle, absorbing a bit of both while also being stuck somewhat in the past.

Which, really, sets up a situation where multiple people have to work together in order to share their knowledge, right? Tales from the Triverse has often been about culture clash and the challenges around a multicultural society — especially when you have in-built prejudices getting in the way — but here we have Lola accidentally giving Yana a piece of information she wouldn’t otherwise have had. The central point of the Triverse, if there is one, is that functioning societies are difficult…but worth the effort.

Change of pace next week, methinks.

Thanks for reading.