The Savant and the Saint

1 LESSER CALAMITIES

The great tragedies in life play out as a backdrop for the lesser calamities. Icarus falls, but to the farmer he is but a flickering golden light in the distance and there is a field to plow, animals to feed, fences to mend.

The Last City may have been cloaked in shadow, but to Alton this was nothing next to the disaster of his broken toy.

It was a bear, a balding and half-blind bear, and when you squeezed its paws or patted its head it played one of several audio recordings. That voice was all Alton had left of his father. Now it would not play and he cried in the stone garden of his home. His mother worked days at the City’s foundries and he was alone and he cried for the broken bear, and for the father he would never hear again.

A shadow fell across the boy and he looked up and saw one of the four-eyed aliens looming over him. It was wrapped in a tattered cloak, face hidden behind a white-misted mask and had four taloned arms and four pupiless eyes and it ate children for breakfast. Alton screamed. He yelled at the top of his lungs and bolted, wailing, bawling for help, into the house. He shut and barred the door. Then peeked above the window sill to watch the thing in the garden.

The Fallen did not follow. As Alton watched, it crouched by the bear, picked it up turned it this way and that.

Outrage overcame fear. The boy marched out, vibrating with anger. “Hey, that’s mine!”

The Fallen did not look up from its examination. “It is a thing of loss, worthy of remembrance,” it said.

“You better give that back,” the boy threatened.

“We Eliksni know what it is, to long for things that promised to be here always.” It took a tiny knife, a thin sliver of starlight, and ran it down the bear’s back.

“Hey!”

“A thing is more than a thing,” it said as it worked. “It is the light of distant stars: A glint of what was.”

All four hands plucked at the machinery inside, gently, as a harpist would. The work done, thread appeared and deft fingers wove it closed again. It held the bear out towards Alton.

Cautiously, he took a few steps forward. The Fallen waited, patient as a statue. Alton grabbed the bear, retreated back to the doorway. He squeezed the bear protectively against his chest.

His father’s voice said: “Hey big guy, what shall we do today?”

Alton almost dropped it in shock. When he looked up, the Fallen was gone.

The bear was almost as good as new. You could hardly see the seam any more. The recordings played perfectly—except one. Now, when you squeezed the right foot, an alien voice began:

“This is the story of Riis, once golden in light but now fallen…”

2 STORIES

The story spread, as stories are wont to do. From family to neighbors to colleagues and then the story escaped, ran loose into the wild wherever it would.

They called him the Savant. It was not always meant kindly. Strange and moody and silent, he lived among and for his machines and they were often the only ones he spoke. He lived apart from the other Eliksni in their crumbling and disused corner of the Last City, alone at the top of an abandoned apartment building, one wall missing, open to the sky.

Sometime after the story of the bear had spread, a man huffed and puffed up the zig-zag stairs to the top of the building and found the Savant sitting there. There was a table, a brutally simple thing of steel and right angles, and piled all about it were bits or robots, drones, machinery, loops of wires, bulbous and spiked things of unknown provenance or manufacture, insectoid antennae and gently fuming generators. The man cleared his throat. The Savant glanced up briefly, and returned to its work.

“I, uh, I hear you can fix stuff,” the man said. He held a small black rectangle of plastic in his hands, with a screen on one side, a discreet row of buttons down either side. “I can pay.”

“The price depends on the significance,” the Savant said, putting down his tools.

“It’s a book reader,” the man explained. “You understand, books?”

“Yes,” the Savant said, distantly. Voice far away. “The significance of stories is known.”

“Significance?” the man echoed. “Well, I dunno about that. They’re mostly fantasies, you know, escapist stuff.” He laughed the kind of self-deprecating laugh that people laugh when they want to pretend they’ve made a joke, in order to fend off criticism.

“Escape? They are a doorway that is only ever entered once, then closes forever.”

The man didn’t know what to say to that. “The file architecture is corrupted.”

He held the reader out towards the Savant. The Eliksni held it close to its eyes, unmoving, as though communing with it. White ether misted and fogged about it with each long and slow exhalation, until both Savant and reader became dim and occluded, vague figures like half-remembered memories.

“It is done,” the Savant said suddenly, and thrust the reader back across the table.

“But you didn’t do anything.”

“It is done.”

Frowning the man touched the controls, and was pleased to see the screen warm to life. He experimented with flipping backwards and forwards through The Iliad, one of his favorites. He stopped and scanned a few lines. Frowned again.  Read as Achilles fell to Hector’s blade, and the Achaeans retreated in confusion.

He closed the file. Opened it again. Read as the Amazonian warrior woman Briseis dueled with Hector.

“What the…”

“The doorway remains open now,” the Savant said before he could complain. “Now the stories can run free.”

3 COUNTING IN THE DARK

“I feel so tired all the time,” Alyssa said, looking up at the sunless indigo and lavender sky. “I think it’s because I can’t tell the time. Like how people get depressed in winter, you know? Oh, maybe you don’t know.”

The Savant peered at the woman’s device, a small square with liquid crystal display and a loop to go about a wrist or arm.

“We Eliksni know what it is to count in the dark.”

The Savant examined the watch with an eyepiece fashioned from a servitor’s lens, forged in the bowels of a spacecraft that had never felt the touch of starlight. He took a Winter probe, once used to diagnose the illness of superluminal engines driving a great ketch through the poisoned waters separating stars. It touched delicately to the side of the timepiece, and listened to the song it sang.

“It’s called the circadian rhythm,” Alyssa explained. “Do you know what that is?”

“Circadian?” the Savant said absently. “Yes, it is a kind of insect on your world. Very noisy.”

“Hah, cicadas, no, that would be cicadian, not circadian,” she laughed. “Just imagine a cicadian rhythm: Sleep for ten years underground then emerge and spend a week screaming at the top of your lungs before keeling over dead. Kind of relatable, honestly.”

“We Eliksni know what it is to want to scream.”

“Yeah, no, that was just a, look, never mind.” Alyssa sighed. “Jeez you guys are cheerful.”

She paced about the narrow workshop as the Savant worked. The silence and gloom gnawed at her. The lack of sunlight made her feel time was standing still, each instant now stretching into infinity. Not knowing when or if it would end. Not knowing the future.

“We’ve used all kinds of ways of counting time in our history,” she said to break the spell and try to impose order on reality and return the world to the orderly march of time. “The Mayan Long Count, the regnal years of emperors, years since the birth or ascension of religious figures, the number of seconds since a software program was booted up. Only since the Collapse we’ve lost track of time and nobody can agree what year it is.”

“We Eliksni know what it is to be lost.”

“There you go again. It isn’t a contest, you know. No need to one-up me every time.”

“It is a contest,” the Savant averred. “It is a battle and one that is always lost but always must be fought. Here is your weapon.”

The watch was repaired. It told the time, both Terran and Ship time, with Eliksni numeral glyphs slowly traced in white as though painted by an invisible hand.

“Thank you,” said Alyssa. “We humans know what it is to fight against time.”

4 ESCHATOLOGIST

A long metal tube, resting upon a tripod. Fitted with clear lenses. At first the Savant had assumed it was a laser weapon, until the owner explained it was an observation tool. For looking at the stars.

“From where comes your certainty it is broken?” the Savant asked, and gestured to the featureless sky. “Thanks to the Vex, there are no stars to see.”

“The lens is flawed. Cracked. Won’t focus the light properly.”

The Savant removed the lens and held it up to a lamp above his table. Sure enough, the light that passed through was fractured and distorted. It cast a dozen jittering shadows across the room. A dozen shadowed Savants held a dozen bright lenses.

“You do not fear the stars?” the Savant asked. “They spawned your enemies, we Eliksni, yes, and the Hive and Fallen and Cabal.”

“Sure but when you see how big the universe is, you realize how small all of this is. Some people find that scary, I know, but I find it comforting. Whatever happens to us, it’s not the end of everything and creation will carry on.”

“You wish to see possibilities.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it. Sure. Possibilities.”

The Savant clacked his teeth and returned the cracked lens to its housing, and then busied himself at the other end, near the eyepiece. He strapped a bulbous device to the side, looped cephalopod coils of multicolored wiring from eyepiece to lens. Purple light rippled along them, moving back and forth in regular rhythm.

“That part is fine,” the owner protested.

“Light is and is not, it is both ocean and teardrop,” the Savant said as he worked. “Part of its probabilistic nature. Here, observe the possibilities that unfold.”

The owner approached the telescope cautiously, slowly lowered their eye to the eyepiece, closed the other eye and looked. Saw. The owner gasped.

“The Almighty, the sun, oh my god, we’re all—no, wait, this, what is this?”

“Possibility,” the Savant said.

5 THE FIRST HAND

A Guardian appeared unannounced. A Titan, her form almost entirely encased in an armored carapace. The ground crunched as she walked, and she moved with a kind of unstoppable deliberation, a juggernaut, as inevitable as time. The other petitioners stood aside to let her pass.

“I hear you fix things,” she said gruffly, without preamble.

“You hear, I listen,” said the Savant. “Things tell me what they want to be.”

She grunted, shifted a little, clanking on armored legs. For all her invulnerability, she suddenly seemed fragile. She reached some kind of decision, reached over her back. “Well, what does this say to you?”

She placed a fusion rifle on the table before the Savant.

“It is a weapon, it wants what all weapons want,” the Savant said without looking at it.

“And that is?”

“A message. A promise: Vengeance.”

The Titan laughed, without humor. “You’re right about this one, at any rate,” she said. “Towards the end he was so... bitter. Resentful. Years and decades of loss. It was more than he could bear. I only wished I’d noticed sooner, but it was too late.”

“That is the problem with vengeance,” the Savant agreed. “It is always a step behind.”

“Well, he is gone and vengeance falls to me. I would wield it again, if you will help me. Will you?”

“Vengeance against Eliksni?”

The Titan gave the Savant a look that spoke for her: Yes, against Eliksni, and more. Eliksni, Hive, Cabal, Vex, dark Guardians. She was a hammer, a blade, a brand, burning with desire to scar the face of the universe so that it never forgot what it had cost her.

The Savant peered at the fusion gun. He ran a hand over the barrel, down towards the silver plate that clad the trigger and grip. He traced the words he found engraved there, like this:

先手は万手

He cocked his head and looked up at the Guardian.

“Sen te wa man te,” she read. “It’s an old saying, it means there is an advantage to seizing the initiative or being a pioneer. Literally it means, ‘the first hand is ten thousand hands.’”

The Savant froze. “How many hands?”

The Titan misunderstood his hesitation for incomprehension. She shrugged her massive shoulders. “Ah, you know, it’s kind of like a fancy way of saying ‘shoot first’, kind of thing.”

The Savant was silent and still for so long she wondered if he was sleeping. Finally, he blinked and stirred, slowly, a dreamwalker rising from the night. “The price,” he said.

“Name it.”

“I ask only this: In future, do not wait for vengeance.”

6 A LESSON IN VENGEANCE

The attention drew the Saint. Of course it drew the Saint. The Saint and the Fallen were the poles on a bar magnet, opposite yet forever locked together. Neither could pull away, weighed down as they were by rage and grief and sorrow. So when the story of the Savant reached his ears, of course the Saint had to see.

If the Savant was afraid, he hid it well. He watched his guest patiently but warily, the way one might a passing shark or sleeping lion.

“A Titan came to see you,” said the Saint. “You gave her a weapon.”

“She took nothing from me that was not already hers.”

“Possibly.” The Saint approached the work table. He loomed over it. He was kind and gentle and fed the pigeons and his shoulders bristled with murderous spikes and his helmet had a single unblinking eye and he loomed. He was good at looming. “Since then, she has grown… impetuous. Reckless. If you did anything to her...”

“Once, I wished you dead.”

“Many of your kind did,” he shrugged and opened his arms wide in invitation. “You are welcome to try.”

“I dreamed. Such misty cold and clear ether dreams. I would fall upon your city in shrieking red wrath. I would cast down the tower and slay the Guardians. I would poison your souls with the blackest, bitterest poison.”

One mailed hand reached out and lifted the Savant from his seat by the scarf about his neck. “Your next sentence better begin with ‘but’.”

“But?” The Savant laughed, and he never laughed. A clacking, chittering laugh. He laughed in the face of the nightmare of his people. “You have to ask?” He gestured out the missing wall of the building. To where the tower had once stood. “Don’t you see?”

The Saint followed the outthrust arm and looked and thought and the great proud crest dipped a little. His fist opened and let the Savant fall back into his seat. The first closed again on nothing. Empty air. “I should have been here.”

“Don’t you see?”

“What, that your dreams came true?”

The Savant laughed again. “That my dreams were mocked. My great and righteous and terrible vengeance was exactly what you people were already doing to yourselves.”

“We have only defended ourselves.”

“Yes, yes, of course, of course. You are right, I am sure. You are always right.”

“Is this… story… is this what you told her?”

The Savant reached under the table and he nearly died then for when he looked up, he was looking into the maw of the Saint’s shotgun. Slowly, deliberately, the Savant placed a projector on the table. Keeping all four eyes locked on the Saint’s one, the Savant turned the power on. The City appeared in the air. The City as it was, before the Red War. Almost reluctantly, the Saint lowered his gun.

“Vengeance is a loop, not a way back,” said the Savant as translucent children ran and played across his features. “The hand that reaches forward is ten thousand hands.”

“That’s all? That’s what has made her so reckless?”

“Some might sacrifice all for the chance at a new beginning.”

7 PROBABILISTIC WEAPONRY

The fireteam retreated deeper into the caverns, pursued by the skittering cries of thralls and acolytes. The thunderous, tortured roars of ogres shook the ground and brought small waterfalls of dust and debris raining down on their heads. Ammunition grew scarce, then nonexistent. Their Light guttered, starved of fuel, tiny candles in the dark as wide as the galaxy and deep as forever.

In the ghost-green light at the bottom of the chasm they stumbled into an ancient battleground. The floor underfoot crunched with Fallen bones and keratinous Hive hides. Hunched in the center they spotted a small and cloaked figure.

“Wait—” the Titan cried, but the Hunter had already drawn their hand cannon, and a single shot rang out. The figure jerked and pitched backwards.

“—that’s the Savant, you idiot.”

While the Hunter exchanged baffled looks with the Warlock, the Titan sprang forward, scrambling over the wreckage of a dozen lifetimes, but when she reached the place where she had seen the Eliksni fall, the body was gone. She twisted left and right, suddenly wary, fusion rifle ready, scanning the shadows. “Savant?” she called. “You there?”

“I was not but now I am,” came the reply. The Savant stepped from behind the ruined hunk of a Fallen walker tank.

“Are you—” the Titan peered at him. “You’re unhurt.”

“I was not but now I am,” he repeated.

“Raoul, you fool, you missed,” the Titan said in exasperation to the Hunter.

“I don’t miss,” he protested. “I never miss.”

“The doorway was open and I stepped through again,” said the Savant, as if this explained everything.

“We don’t have time for this,” said the Warlock. “Ir Naqi’a and her brood are coming.”

The howls echoed in the cavern. Wave upon wave of thralls poured into the chamber, followed by phalanx ranks of acolytes, and here and there the towering horned shaped of great knights. Gigantic ogres slavered and moaned and roared. Above them all floated the terrible cloaked and shrouded form of Ir Naqi’a, Consort of Crota.

“I’m sorry,” the Titan whispered sadly to the Savant. “Looks like we’re out of time.”

“We Eliksni know what it is to fight against time.”

A pulse of light blinded them. Blinded all of them. A tiny sun flickered to life in the cavern dark for an instant, and was gone.

When the Titan could see again, the air in the chamber swam with languid white tendrils of energy. Like the explosion of a Fallen web mine, only a thousand times larger.

The Hive.

They.

Moved.

So.

Very.

S

low

l

y.

A thrall’s foot moved, barely. Dusky light flickered about the barrel of an Acolyte’s soulfire rifle and flickered and flickered and flickered. A knight raised his blade. A millimeter. Given an hour, he might even lift it over his head. An ogre bellowed. One long, unending syllable. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Purple light slowly gathered about its forehead, in no hurry to go anywhere or do anything.

The Guardians could move at normal speed. The Hunter wasted no time. In an instant he was among the Hive, blades flashing, carving a path through the horde. The Warlock rose and floated before Ir Naqi’a, one wizard to another. Almost regretfully, he blasted her with cold purple-black flame and her cloak and shroud withered and burned.

“I never knew the Eliksni had such weapons,” the Titan said, her voice shocked into a whisper.

“We did not, but now we do,” said the Savant.

8 AN OVERABUNDANCE OF RIGHTNESS

A crowd gathered. A mob. They’d heard of the strange Eliksni who terrorized children, who stole from homes and sent machinery back twisted and corrupted. There was little they could do about Vex simulations or Cabal warfleets or Hive rituals but this, this was something they could do something about.

A mob formed and marched up the stairs to the lair of the Savant.

They found him in the heart of his carbon fiber and nanotube web, a sessile spider waiting for its next meal, no doubt. The crowd raised their voices, their crowbars and hammers and knives, they roared for vengeance and blood.

“No.”

They had not seen the Guardian in the shadows. Everyone knew who it was. They had a name, to be sure, but there was only one Guardian whose fame exceeded something so paltry as a name. Titles, yes, they had many and more, the Young Wolf, the Slayer of Oryx, Hero of the Red War, the Angel of Light, the Relic Hunter, Fatebreaker, Rivensbane, the Chosen, the Descendant, the Harbinger.

It was no secret that when the Vanguard wanted a thing done, they called upon this Guardian. Fallen Kells, Cabal generals, Vex Minds and Hive gods, none could stand before their wrath.

There were stories and legends and no two of them agreed, save in one thing only: The Guardian almost never spoke.

They had just spoken now.

The crowd fell silent. One or two, the ringleaders, the ones who had whipped up the crowd to feed their need for attention, leadership and power, opened their mouths to protest, to demand action or belittle the Guardian for protecting a monster. They looked into the blank mirror of the Guardian’s helmet. And found no pity or understanding there.

Sullen, suddenly embarrassed, the crowd slunk off in ones or twos, pride trying to soothe itself with words of self-absolution, insisting they were only doing what was right. They might as well have been arguing with a statue. Denied even the release of argument, they retreated.

“Our apologies,” said the Ghost to the Savant.

The Savant spread all four arms, palms open. An Eliksni gesture, to show that one had but four arms instead of ten thousand. There was a limit to what one could do, in other words.

“We have seen this before,” the Savant said. “Riis was not lost to Cabal or Hive or Vex.”

“No?”

“Riis died not from wrongness, but from an overabundance of rightness. Everyone so sure they knew what was best and how to fix what was wrong, so any that opposed them must be evil. The soft-spoken Exo and her stochastic followers are symptoms, as was Skolas. The Darkness is not the absence of Light, but its rejection.”

“Does our request disturb you then?”

The Savant looked down at the grenade launcher, obsidian black and spiked and ridged like bone. “No,” he said. "There is Darkness here, but there can be motes of Light. Things are not all one thing or another. And thinking so is the first step to Darkness.”

9 ELECTRIC SHEEP

“Every time I close my eyes, I see it again. This waking nightmare with only one ending, the one we are forced to live and relive. I think I must be going mad.”

“Does your kind dream?”

“I wish we didn’t.”

“Console yourself it is all a dream then. One day you will awake.”

“If only.” [pause] “You helped them craft the weapon?”

“I always do.”

“They will use it again?”

“They always do.”

“But something is different this time, don’t you think?”

[silence]

“No, of course you’re right, just wishful thinking. It’s the same. The same damn thing every damn time.”

“No.”

[silence]

“That’s it? No? Just ‘no’?”

“It is not the same every time. Almost the same, perhaps, but never perfect and exact. There are… waves and the waves make patterns but there are always outliers. Nothing in nature follows a gaussian curve.”

“Outliers?”

“Just so. It is no longer hard edge and gentle curve, pyramid and sphere, dark and light. A new player has entered the game and casts a grey shadow.”

“Yourself? Is it you? Are you the one doing this? Why are you torturing me like this?”

[silence]

“If not you, then who? The Traveler? Rasputin?”

“A new mind cuts through the deep and sky. It carves a doorway that is never shut. Like a story, it begins over and over again. It sees not what is, but what may be. Time is nothing. Possibility is everything.”

“The Guardian?”

“A wonder with ten thousand hands. In ten thousand worlds.”

“What? No. They’ve never been there, at the end. Never.”

“That is why you find yourself starting again.”

Starting again.

Again.

A—