【英文搬运】星球大战：遭遇超自然第二十二章：祂们冷酷的主权

OF TILOTNY

Of the four of Wutzek’s progeny, Tilotny had awoken first to observe all the beauty and grandeur of the galactic gardens around her and the beings that dwelt there. Her own form was as yet amorphous, and thinking it pale and small in comparison, she felt a sense of shame and dismay. Furthermore, she could hear a grand discourse between the one who’d made her and his cohorts, lofty entities of swirling lights. Perceiving that she was less wise than those speaking, she tried to hide the fact that she’d awoken and behaved as one somnambulant.

It was then that she heard her maker speak her name, followed by the names of those who must be her siblings, and she felt the love and connection between them. In the next instant, however, she was struck by a stab of fear. A great evil was about to come upon them! And in her heart, she felt terror and loathing, distraught in the knowledge that the death would come from the one who’d given them life.

Before she knew it, she, Horliss-Horliss, Cold Danda Sine, and Splendid Ap whisked away to elsewhere. For but too brief a moment, as if in a vision, Tilotny glimpsed the deathless lands. Bathed in shades of verdigris, a carpet of genuflecting trees, wreathed in the bleeding golds and reds of the rising sun, gave way to the ocherous mountains and cinnabar citadels that soared up past the horizon in mina-rets of dolomite and rutilant ores to far-off, agate clouds like the ascent of parhelion rocs with the first light of the flower moon. There, on elegant cygnus-ships, as a musical breeze played through their rich caftans and long, aigretted hair, ineffable movers floated along a rippling river that ran winding betwixt the indesecrate, emerald laurels and forest-faun.

Though saddened at the passing of that empyreal vision to arrive at a misty, inchoate world, Tilotny came alive to the sudden freedom of power she felt and shaped her form into that of the most beautiful of beings she’d espied from afar, determining that she would never again be less than any other.

Horliss-Horliss, whom she perceived as a powerful metastyler not unlike herself, now threw a shape for himself, a null inversion of standard form that was spectral and liquescent in appearance. It secretly alarmed her, for she had never conceived of it before, and this confounded her newfound belief in her supremacy. How could he even imagine that such a design was greater than hers? Besides, she was first!

Next came Cold Danda Sine, who threw a shape, an anti-conceptual one of an empty unlit sphere with a fiery face; he spoke wild things of the pleasures of the void that she didn’t yet understand. She would soon find out what these things were and put them to use.

Splendid Ap came last, taking a flickering, conical shape and speaking even odder things of equations and formulae. She didn’t think such things had comparable value, but she could sense the potential in him. In all, she loved and feared her siblings, but the voice inside her said she was a goddess and must rule them.

Tilotny espied from afar inchoate people on the inchoate world. Reckoning that she was the loveliest of all creatures, she decided that she must also be the wisest, for a strange interior voice whispered this to her, telling her she had begat all things. Thus, she determined that it must be so, and for this reason had the beings of shimmering lights been jealous and seeking to harm her. She would do whatever was necessary to ensure her survival in the face of this existential threat!

Arguing her supremacy with Horliss-Horliss had grown tiresome by the time a tiny mover appeared on the surface of the ground before them. What had been indistinct earlier resolved into clear forms, leaving Tilotny abashed to see a Human creature that bore a shape similar to hers (though not as beautiful in her estimation). HorlissHorliss wondered if Tilotny had, in fact, shaped the tiny mover. And perhaps she had. Was she not the goddess, after all, shaper of all the up-and-down things that were substance and form? Even time must be of her making, for the voice hinted as much. That she had no memory of having done so concerned her, but she pushed it aside.

Three other tiny movers arrived, each covered in a white shell and sharing the same form. After her siblings mocked her for her redundancy, Tilotny changed one of the white-shelled ones into diamond. Horliss-Horliss thought a more subtle refinement would be better and altered the heart of the first mover into diamond. But upon so doing, it suddenly became an unliving thing. It was shocking to her, but when she realized that this was what the Being of Lights had sought to do to her, she steeled herself to it. Tilotny had to prove herself more artful, and so she entwined the other three into one screaming, multi-limbed form, and they too became unliving.

Cold Danda Sine called it tasteless, and Horliss-Horliss found it disorderly. Tilotny was forced to admit that it was, and in the deepest part of her heart she felt a sickening premonition that disturbed her. She pushed it aside. A goddess must be strong, she reasoned. Is that not what her own thoughts told her? Yet there was another voice that emanated from deep within which warned her to avoid this strange voice and do what was good and right, but when Horliss-Horliss ordered her to tidy up the mess, she grew angry and shunted it away. No one ordered her! With that, she commanded Splendid Ap to do it.

So Tilotny departed, wondering at the role of a goddess.

OF HORLISS-HORLISS

When Horliss-Horliss awoke, he saw his progenitor, a Being of great lights, and heard him pronounce his name. He paid attention to the discussion that ensued between this progenitor, a being of pastel, corposant lights, and others similar to him, and heard him wonder if their unmaking might be best for the galaxy. Horliss-Horliss felt it was wrong that he should suffer such a thing when he had only just been born.

Before he knew it, Splendid Ap reached out to him and his siblings and they shifted to elsewhere in time and space. The unsettling experience brought his gaze to a spatial sea of chrysolite and cerulean flame, a damassin band in the midmost sky where diurnal rays beamed forth in ethereous bands of hyaline garnet and mottled gyres; he moved to plummet its opalescent depths, to bathe in its blithe and azurestippled pools, but he was whisked away again. Safe for the moment from the one who sought to destroy them, they each took their forms, with Horliss-Horliss topiarized as a nacre, noctilucent nebula of lambent, silvern blaze in ever-changing epiphany.

Tilotny was elated to be free, though her first words to him were boasts that she’d invented shape, substance, and time! Impossible, for he recalled there were others in the other places, and he knew his shape was of his own design. Perhaps she did not understand the concept of time. A strange voice muttered in his mind that he was a god who should rule above all, but he immediately dismissed the notion as foolish. Shortly after, another being appeared on the planet below: a tiny mover. Could Tilotny have actually made this one? The voice told him she had, but he wasn’t sure. Others arrived, three in identical white shells. Tilotny turned one into diamond. The sensation he felt then unnerved him, but irked by Tilotny’s vanity, he determined to demonstrate how to produce a less ostentatious change. So he turned the soft, pulsing interior organ of the first mover into the same elegant but hard substance. Suddenly, that tiny mover ceased to move as well, and Horliss-Horliss felt a light go out.

This must be death, he thought, and for the first time Horliss-Horliss felt remorse. He learned something about the universe then, recognizing that if it was wrong for his light to be put out, so too was it wrong for the lights of others to be put out.Tilotny, seemingly oblivious to such notions, coiled the other three into one ugly mass, and small lights flickered out there as well. This was a grotesque disorder.

Since she claimed the tiny mover as her own, she should repair it, but she would not, and this told him something too. Splendid Ap opened a gate for them in time, and he left to a place where shapes and forms dwelt peacefully on every world, Scrying Tilotny’s calculating envy and Cold Danda Sine’s hungry exuberance, he urged caution, explaining that he understood something he hadn’t before: “The tiny movers of these lands are in many ways like us, possessing desires and fears. As we do not wish to be interfered with, neither do they.”

“Can you not see that these are lesser beings?” Tilotny countered, “Neither as powerful nor as wise as we and in need of our guidance.”

“Ambitious Tilotny, surely you do not still believe that you are their maker!” Cold Danda Sine interjected. “They have their own makers—the Celestials I perceive they are called—to guide them.”

“And as we are each different, it is likely that they are not all the same either,” Horliss-Horliss reasoned.

“Uncomprehending ones, you fail to understand! That is the reason we must save the tiny movers. We are meant to be their makers! For this reason had we been brought forth ere the betrayal we suffered; for this reason did the Celestials wish to see us destroyed. We are meant to supplant them.”

That sounded reasonable to all of her siblings, but Horliss-Horliss admitted that he did not have all the answers.

What he did know was that he no longer wished to play with shapes and forms in the presence of other living beings, for as he listened to Tilotny’s plan, he perceived they did not really hold the same concern for the tiny movers. And what of myself? Governed by pride, what might I bring upon the worlds? Another voice deep inside him said that in his absence, many lights would flicker out, and a blanket of darkness would cover the expanse so that nothing would be left but the volatile speech of Tilotny, the cold sovereignty of Cold Danda Sine, and the temporal chaos of Splendid Ap.

He no longer trusted himself or his siblings. Although a part of him said that he should stay to watch over them, what he did instead was create a null inversion. Here was a better option. He said to them: “Come with me, my siblings, and let us enter this place I have made that is uninhabited, a realm of our own imagining which we can claim as our own. Let us have nothing to do with these outsiders, great or small.”

“An empty, shapeless place,” Tilotny said with a look of revulsion on her face.

“We can each give it shape,” he replied.

“And so gild the cage of our making…” Tilotny turned away.

When they each declined in turn, he said: “I will neither oppose you nor be induced to take part in your designs,” and so, with considerable apprehension, he departed for the lonely realm he’d fashioned.

OF COLD DANDA SINE

Ah, the thrill of it all! Cold Danda Sine burned with the fire of life! Newness! Energy! Motion! All things excited him. When he heard that he was to be destroyed, he thought, How extraordinary destruction must be!

But it was not to be. Inestimable Splendid Ap took them somewhere incomparably scintillant beyond measure, a scoriac and preternatural purlieus of russet scaurs and violescent tamaracks, a great roaring mountain eructing Cimmerian clouds, sinuous with rufous, saltent runlets. Into its great maw, he wend to peregrinate as one mad with nympholepsy, but too soon they were somewhere else. This was all exciting and upsetting and fascinating and disturbing!

By means of an anti-concept, he threw himself a shape, a black and hollow orb with rivulets of basalt firelight and scorching magma etching the expressions of his face against ebon space!

Tilotny was truly stunning, but her boasts quickly grew old, and he thought it would be amusing to antagonize her! Horliss-Horliss was a wild thing! Was this his maker and the maker of all things? He had memories of another, but he did not put stock in old and upsetting things, and Horliss-Horliss was before him now in all his splendor! But no, his sister, Tilotny, claimed to have made matter and time. He did not think so. She was an expert metastyler like Horliss-Horliss, but she did not conceive the anti-concepts, for that was Cold Danda Sine’s own specialty, and he grew anxious to bring more to bear!

But what was this? A new form! A tiny mover crept upon the surface of the earth. Horliss-Horliss must be the maker after all! But no, again he denied it, and again dull Tilotny took the credit. But then three other identical movers appeared! If Tilotny had shaped them, she was repetitive!

In a flash, Tilotny turned the little mover into a dead thing. Horliss-Horliss followed suit, ending the life of the first tiny one! How bizarre and upsetting! Tasteless Tilotny proved she could repeat this skill by making the others unmoving too. This disturbed him greatly, for he perceived that it was unjust and evil, and he longed to avenge them, but a strange voice quietly murmured to him that it was exciting to watch such drama unfold. In a way, it was. Conflicting feelings raged inside him.

I can do much better things, he thought, new, antithetical things! Horliss-Horliss and Tilotny argued about restoring the lifeless ones. Was life and death as casual as this? Cold Danda Sine felt both repelled and fascinated. He did not want part in this grotesque drama. And yet, the voice said such was the way of the worlds; it was ugly and cruel, but he was above it all, for he was a god, and the worlds were his to play with, whatever he craved… novelty, contest, games!

Splendid Ap, who struggled with ups and downs and backwards and forwards but was a better shaper than dull Tilotny, opened a door, and Cold Danda Sine rushed through it! Ah, a realm teeming with greater and lesser beings! Tilotny sought their worship, and that made him think of their maker. Cold Danda Sine did not wish to think upon that one. At last, his vain sister was making sense, for she sought to avenge the evil that had nearly befallen them at the hands of these jealous, greedy Celestials!

Horliss-Horliss proposed instead that they depart for a pristine dreamworld, a null inversion of his making whereupon no other lifeforms existed. To Cold Danda Sine’s ears, this sounded dreary and futile. He had great love for Horliss-Horliss, but it was not in his nature to withdraw into the obscurity of hollow spaces. Nevertheless, he felt grief-stricken when his sibling declared that he would depart from them. Do you understand now? the strange voice seemed to say. Better not to feel, for that will only enervate you. Thus, did Cold Danda Sine discard such feelings, perceiving now that perhaps there was no maker of movers, and even if there was, it didn’t matter. I will enjoy myself, for there is much to do and a whole galaxy in which to do it! 

OF SPLENDID AP

Tilotny was the first to register a threat to her person. Horliss-Horliss wondered at the meaning of it. Cold Danda Sine felt it would be a sublime joy to experience. Discerning powerful emotions of terror, consternation, and excitement emanating from his agnates and construing the danger before them, Splendid Ap connected with his siblings and moved them out of the way. Ap was new to life and did not yet fully understand his powers, but he knew that travelling through space would not avail them freedom, for the one who constructed him was powerful. He and his siblings came to stop at a luminous window Ap had opened, and peered for a moment outside the dimensional walls that enclosed the elliptical realm to a wondrous land, but he could venture no further, repelled by a perilous force that none could surmount.

Perhaps he could project forward through time, but if time itself could not be skipped they would be frozen at that moment until the stream of time arrived at a future point. And what if the stream did not go according to his projection? There were trillions of directions in which the continuum might flow. No, he’d need another option to ensure they would not be caught or disappear from reality.

But if he couldn’t travel through time, maybe he could travel out of it instead.

In a place in which there was no time, he appeared. He could see windows laid out before him like equations. He’d have liked to have examined them all, but he felt that he did not have time and intuited that the dozen strange beings guarding them might not allow it. As this took place outside of time and space, his siblings were not cognizant of what was occurring, immersed as they were in empyreal visions of the Unseen Realm. Then he perceived a mind not unlike his own.

“Where is this?” he asked of it.

“Nowhere and everywhere,” a familiar voice said. “It is In-Between.”

“If there is no time in this place, perhaps we may hide here.”

“No,” the invisible voice replied, “only I may reside here, for I am out of the worlds, but you are yet of them.”

“Where, then, can we go where we will not be found?” Ap asked.

“From here you can go anywhere, but that which you fear will always find you.”

“From a window we will travel to a point far ahead when we are long-forgotten.”

“No future is guaranteed,” the invisible voice stated, “but the past once written cannot be unwritten. You have powers of which you do not yet understand. Know only that they come with consequences, some beneficial, some detrimental; if you attempt to change what has been, you will only create a new stream, an echo of the original that will follow its own path.”

“Our interest is only in the future, not the past,” he assured the voice.

Moving forward into the projection of the future, they appeared above a far-off astronomical body orbiting a central, self-luminous heat source around which several other planetary bodies revolved. Because this was only a best estimation of what the future might be, it was a strange and shadowy realm.

He tried to explain to his perturbed and quarrelsome cognates all that had transpired by demonstrating how they’d traversed the six states, showing a simple progress of his position in the past, present, future, matter, space, and nonexistence: “It is a tabula rasa of interlaced solace in a parallax of perpetuity,” but his words and illustration only made them think he was confused.

That was when he saw one of the tiny movers. Splendid Ap tried to convey his concern, but they imagined that he was being silly and unduly worried and returned to their arguments over the nature of form and things which he perceived had far lesser value. Perhaps the tiny mover would move on. But then they saw it too, and, disturbingly, it resolved into a clearer picture!

The tiny mover was a female being of some kind. What were the chances that of all immense space and time, she would arrive on this barren planet in this barren sector of space at this very moment? Infinitesimally small, he realized. Calculating the odds, he concluded that any specified event whose probability is less than 1 chance in 10150 is altogether improbable if not outright impossible.

What it all meant was something he’d have to ponder later, as the female wasn’t alone. She was being pursued by three males covered in some form of protective plating. Their violent intent was clear enough.

As a result of his siblings’ absurd attempt to demonstrate their individual superiority, Tilotny turned one into a solid form of carbon with a crystalline structure. Horliss-Horliss followed suit, turning the female’s heart into diamond so that she perished—and the doorways vanished from before her. Splendid Ap was not a creature that could readily comprehend sorrow, so he did not grieve her per se, but he did perceive that this was a violation of sorts. The beings that had pursued her were also transformed into a single, unliving mass—and as they died the doorways vanished before them.

This was not the time or place for this!

Horliss-Horliss seemed to feel remorse over this too and requested that they depart once Tilotny corrected the problem. Tilotny gave the task to him, him whom she called “stupid!” Horliss-Horliss seconded the request. He objected. If they felt he was so unintelligent, why would they leave so difficult an assignment to him? But it fell on deaf ears. Very well. He could practice his abilities at least.

First, he had to remove his siblings from here. The emotional component in his decisions puzzled him. Best not to tell his cognates any of what had occurred, or they would just call him stupid again. He was not yet convinced that emotions were beneficial and pondered if they might be more of a hindrance. He clamped down on these now and concentrated, finding the door back to that nowhere point in space and time. He’d have to try something different. Ah! he thought. That is the answer!

After tracing a path, he then pushed them forward to a time just a bit further in the future from when they’d been created. This time, he embedded them to the stream itself so that no matter where it organically travelled, it would come to them, as he now knew better how to graft unto the riding maelstrom that was the continuum. This would mean that they would be suspended in frozen limbo until time organically caught up to them, but now that he better understood his powers, he felt more confident that they could protect themselves.

Once that was accomplished, he proceeded to raise the dead up from the ground. Of the tiny movers, he found it was not a difficult thing to restore them to the way they had been just before he’d encountered them. He did not think to alter their memories, but he could repair what was going to be broken by rewinding their body clocks to the time before they were injured.

These are of no consequence, said a strange voice, different from the one he’d previously spoken to. Why waste your powers on such trivialities? He ignored it. Pondering the quantum possibilities, for Ap tended to think mathematically, he calculated that he could remove the male pursuers far away so that they could not harm the female or themselves, for it would be disconcerting to fix them only for them to become unliving again.

He opened up a particular door backwards, which led to other corridors and doors, in infinite sequence; his vision clarified to a single point at the end of one of the infinitely long corridors, and he pushed the belligerent male pursuers into it. How they fared after that was up to them, but he realized he may have pushed too far! He would have to do better with the female…

Suddenly, he remembered that he was not supposed to leave any imprint on the continuum! He’d been warned that tampering with intrinsic and irresolute laws would create an anomalous echo, but he realized that there would already be consequences for what his siblings had done. You are of far greater intelligence than they, said the strange voice in his mind. Ap doubted that, though it did cause him to ponder where he belonged in the larger scheme of things. Did he even belong? He wondered. His maker seemed to think not. What of his argumentative agnates who knew nothing of such dilemmas? Ap perceived only this: despite their conflicts, they needed each other.