Xenofestation 2-01
~Leap of Faith~

Paragonas Vaunt

[SAMPLE]

 

PROLOGUE - Relics

Inoue Dome, Mare Fecunditatis, Luna

Near side or far side?

The argument had raged ever since the founding of Luna's very first permanent settlements. Back then it had still been known as the Moon, a relic of a time when humanity had known of the existence of only one moon. But as the settlements had grown, both in size and number, and the new name was adopted, and along with it a new sense of identity forged, the argument had grown ever more fierce. It had raged even more fiercely once the first settlers were followed by the first real estate agents, whose very livelihood rested on its outcome.

Was the near side or the far side the best place to live?

On the near side of the Moon, Earth was a permanent presence in the sky. Not always clearly visible but always there, even in the day. A reassuringly solid presence, for those who needed such reassurance, but also a reminder of earthly, clay-bound origins, an anchor to the past.

For a settler on the far side, though, Earth would never be visible at all. Just the endless sweeping backdrop of the universe, tumbling dizzyingly overhead with a frighteningly naked clarity, as if an observer might, with the smallest moment of inattention in the Moon's delicate gravity, lose their tenuous grip on the ground and fall into it forever.

To live on the far side of the Moon was to live on the very verge of infinity.

It was the only thing Julie and her sister Claire ever really disagreed about.

Julie could look up from their garden to see the Earth - Terra firma - hanging above her head, and see where her species had come from, see her ancestral roots. She could feel the wind on her face and feel a connection to those ancestors, to the steppe nomads thousands of years ago who had stood on that slowly spinning ball of mud and themselves looked up, to gaze in wonder at the very place she now stood. She could feel the soil between her bare toes, and feel the countless preceding generations of teeming life that had lived and died to make it.

Of course, Claire would tell her dismissively that the wind on her face was artificial, the result of naked sunlight striking the outer skin of their habitat dome, heating the air inside and causing convection currents. And Julie would try to see her perspective, while arguing that it was practically no different to how wind happened on Earth. And Julie would acknowledge Claire's further assertions that the soil beneath her feet was merely a confection, a carefully-balanced mix of nutrients and substrate that had been concocted in a factory mixer rather than by the work of billions of years of biological action.

But the feelings were real enough.

Julie could see all that, feel all that, the light and the wind and the soil, and know in her bones that all of evolution had been bent solely to one purpose, to bring her - Julie Inoue - to this point, on the cusp of humanity's greater purpose fulfilled.

Claire, on the other hand, saw Terra and saw a rock pinning her down. What was Earth, she said, what was she, in comparison to the abyssal depth of the vacuum beyond its fragile bounds? She saw the infinity of the universe, saw how tiny she was in it, and knew the only possible response to that enormity was to surrender to it, to cast herself into the void, be nullified by its cold, unknowable vastness.

Inward-facing or outward-looking.

Light or dark.

It was a dichotomy that ran right through life on Luna.

The first pioneers to arrive, generations ago, had come with dreams of creating a new society, a vibrant new world in all its complex variety of thought and action, love and leisure. But the invention of the Watts propulsion drive, and then of the interstitial portal gate, which had made interstellar travel within a single lifetime first practicable and then routine, had turned Luna almost into an irrelevance.

Luna was dead, after all.

It had always been dead, unlike the thousands of living worlds now within reach, and it was so much easier to use the immense molecular machinery of the biotech companies to bend those other worlds to meet human needs than it was to create and sustain life on a tiny moon too barren to bear it willingly and too small to retain an atmosphere that might protect and nurture it.

So Luna's value to the human race changed, its focus narrowed, and nowadays Earth's closest companion had two distinct roles.

With its handy location and its low gravity, it was still a useful stepping-stone to the universe, a role for which its lack of atmosphere was a positive benefit. So it became a site for heavy space industry and freight staging. Huge factories sprang up, manufacturing plants casting components, refining fuel, assembling mechanisms, the thousand dirty, noisy and dangerous industries necessary to feed humanity's boundless hunger for the universe.

And when the ships humanity had flung out into that universe started to return, their holds full of wonders and treasures, Luna became the focal point for that too, the trading post for the plunder of the galaxy. There wasn't much the curious buyer couldn't find for sale somewhere on Luna, if they knew the right person to ask, and there were fewer barriers standing in their way than on Terra, weighed down as it was beneath its heavy gravity, its thick atmosphere, and its cloying rules.

In many ways, Luna was much more free.

Luna's second role exploited that freedom, as it gradually became a rich person's bolt hole, a play island where they could build edifices to their vanity without the restrictions of land, planning laws or pollution they would find on Terra. For the fabulously wealthy, the immense difficulty of carving a liveable space out of lifeless ground was the attraction, and the more challenging - and expensive - the better.

Industry and leisure.

Practicality and posturing.

Inward-facing or outward-looking.

Yin and yang.

The same dichotomy ran through the middle of the Inoue family.

Julie and Claire mostly lived with Mother Inoue on the near side, in a sprawling ranch dome in Mare Fecunditatis - the Sea of Fertility - a huge field of dark, cold lava outflow, the scar of an ancient meteorite impact. Mother Inoue's husband - Hiro - lived on the far side, the elder Inoues finding long ago that the secret to a happy and long-lasting marriage was to remain as far away from each other as possible.

Mother Inoue - she strongly discouraged Julie and Claire from calling her that, though since she was reluctant for them to call her anything at all the point seemed moot - was not really their mother, not in the traditional sense. And nor were Julie and Claire sisters. They were in fact clones, cultured from stem cells extracted from Mother Inoue's spine a little less than twenty years before. On the rare occasions the matter of their parentage came up in conversation, people would usually express surprise that, in an era of abject overcrowding, somebody would go to such expense and effort as to have themselves cloned, not once but twice, simply to have children.

But Mother Inoue hadn't wanted children.

She'd wanted an organ bank.

With a lifestyle that could politely be described as louche, and moving in circles that were often hazardous, Mother Inoue had long ago decided it would be prudent to keep spares of all her vital organs. And, being as carelessly wealthy as she was, she didn't need to bother with any of the usual routes. Not with hand-me-downs from indifferently-compatible donors, not with vat-grown substitutes, not even with the death-cheating inauthenticity of a regen tank. Nor did somebody of her status and influence need to worry overmuch about the dubious legality of such a plan. So Julie and Claire had known from childhood that their continued existence was suffered only as long as Mother Inoue remained fit and healthy.

And perhaps a lifetime of waiting to be dismembered had affected their philosophical approach to risk, and to death, given them a certain fatalism. Julie felt it had certainly been a factor in her ultimate decision to take control of her fate, and direct the manner of her own end. After all, why should Mother Inoue get to choose the time and place of Julie and Claire's doom, just because she'd donated the girls her DNA along with her slightly wonky eyesight?

But then, just under a year ago, the silly old bitch had got herself flattened by a cargo loader, in an accident that had left her in a condition somewhat beyond what might be salvageable by replacing a kidney or two, and the whole question had been made irrelevant.

There was talk it might have been foul play, talk amplified by the fact that her husband - Hiro - had died the same night of simultaneous lead poisoning and falling into a vat of two hundred thousand litres of unset plascrete.

There were no living witnesses to explain the coincidences involved in that occurrence.

Indeed, Mother's bodyguard and Hiro's driver had each been with them on the night in question, as they usually would have been. But the bodyguard unfortunately died in a random bar fight a few nights after the accident that had killed his erstwhile employer, and the driver had been celebrating some recent financial windfall with his Russian girlfriend, and impetuously decided to jump into the freezing waters of the Nevka river to impress her.

The heart attack had been instantaneous, the defibrillator curiously missing from the first-aid post.

Now Julie and Claire were in limbo, in probate, waiting for the lawyers to finish arguing over who owned everything the couple had left behind, and to decide whether Julie and Claire themselves were beneficiaries of the estate or its chattels.

At first, the deaths of their "parents" hadn't really had much impact on Julie and Claire's day-to-day lives, or their social interactions, such as they were. Mother Inoue had spent as little time in their company as she could get away with even when she was alive, and Hiro had had nothing to do with them at all, so the clones had spent most of their youth on the ranch, beneath the arch of its safety dome, figuratively wrapped in crash padding, Mother Inoue being unwilling to risk pointlessly damaging the goods. So life after the accidents went on much as before, with their main point of contact being their Proctor, who acted as their combined bodyguard, prison guard, nanny and chaperone. Plus the ongoing coaching with their tutors and trainers, of course.

Oh, they'd had the best education money could buy, as if Mother Inoue had been worried they'd be able to donate stupid along with their livers when the time came. And they'd been forced to keep fit, spending hours every day being spun in a gravity tank to simulate Terran norms, so their hearts and organs would be strong enough to survive off-Luna. Even if they themselves weren't still wearing them.

But with Mother Inoue now gone, and the possibility of a future that didn't end in an organ harvester opening up in front of them, they'd become curious about the universe outside their dome, and eager to know more.

They'd begun by pumping their tutors for information. Ultimately that had brought them to the attention of Gareth, who had arrived as their Geography tutor, but by the time he left had become their guru. Or Grandmaster Gareth, to give him the secret title he had confided to them one evening, when he revealed the existence of the Order of the Eighth Tentacle.

The scales had fallen from their eyes that night.

Near, far, he had told them, wherever you are, you must always believe in He whose heart will go on. Julie had heard the portent in the words Gareth spoke, and grasped instantly the wisdom he revealed.

Grandmaster Gareth it was who told them of their destiny as birthing vessels for the Ancient One and His Eight Mighty Limbs, the Lord of the Elder Dark, beneath whose frigid gaze they were as motes of dust. Be ready, he had warned them, for the moment you are called upon to make the ultimate leap of faith.

And then, by way of induction into the Grand Mysteries, he had fucked them both.

First one and then the other, over the escritoires they'd moments before been sitting at to hear his sermon. Bending them over, pulling up their skirts, pulling down their antique cotton briefs, and then showing them with what he referred to as his Staff of Generative Exactitude exactly what they were made for, how they should offer supplication to the Elder Dark, what rewards they would surely receive in return.

They had been most eager to receive.

 

For the first time in their lives, Julie and Claire now had a purpose. A purpose for which they needed money. Huge amounts of it, to pay for faux IDs so they could get around when they needed to. To buy equipment for their ceremonials. Forbidden texts.

Artefacts.

But Gareth had shown them the way there too. In teaching them how their bodies could offer pleasure, he'd given them the key to unlock what they needed, opened the way to advantage. Now they had a new way to pump their contacts for information.

First of these was their mother's personal accountant.

Julie was sure he was carefully siphoning funds out of the estate, making ready to get away before it all unravelled. It didn't take much persuasion to get him to siphon some their way too. The use of their mouths, and their cunts, along with a few veiled hints they knew what he was up to and had made arrangements to act on it, had sealed the deal. He had set them up a secret credit account.

Growing up, Julie and Claire had rarely left the dome in which they'd been grown. But now they started to explore, to test the margins of their confinement. To work out schemes for evading their Proctor and gain a few precious hours of freedom. To search for the ancient knowledge and relics that might bring them closer to the Ancient One's grace, help them to fulfil His purpose for them.

Once again it was Gareth who had set them on the right path, putting them in touch with a dealer in rare and particular artefacts. That dealer had supplied them, at great risk and no small expense, with a single, unique specimen of incalculable value...