The Stargazer's War - Chapter 27

Chapter 27: Back to Work

I wish I had an interesting story to tell about clearing my brain meridian. After all that excitement, it feels wrong to just open my final meridian without a hitch, doesn’t it? Anticlimactic, even.

Sometimes life doesn’t make for interesting stories though—or even boring stories for that matter.

In this particular case, I waited a few days after my discharge from the hospital to make my attempt, used a different shower than the one I’d almost killed myself in, plopped down, descended into my center, pushed a thread of qi into the entrance of the meridian in question, and promptly fell unconscious.

That’s pretty much it.

Unlike the spine’s pain or the muscles’ seizures, the main difficulty in opening the brain meridian was training your spirit to do it while you were out cold. Since I knew I’d already done that thanks to a teensy bit of severe head trauma, I was good to go.

Unfortunately, this time around I can’t even treat you to the in depth description of the process because I was, well, unconscious. I woke up a half hour later with enough meridian gunk in my hair to seriously consider shaving it all off.

It wasn’t until after I’d sent Nick and Xavier on their way and shut the shower door to wash up that anything worth relaying happened.

I cycled it.

Time slowed down. The world broke apart into a series of inputs and outputs, losing a layer of abstraction as my mind processed the sheer data. My thoughts sped and grew clinical, divided by some spiritual wall from my instincts and impulses, my desires and ideals.

And then I added my sense meridian.

My eyes went dark, iris and sclera black as the night sky and as full of stars.

Hot water didn’t stream down my back. Distinct drops, eight degrees above my body’s temperature, struck me at a point three radian angle before breaking apart, sending droplets splashing in all directions, colliding with the walls or the floor, or flowing in a complex yet predictable path across my bare skin.

I stood and I watched and I listened. I calculated the viscosity of the falling water, tracked its temperature as its warmth leached into the tile walls, simulated the splatter of each drop before it even hit the floor. None of it mattered, of course. Nothing mattered. But I found the exercise no more or less interesting, no more or less worthwhile, than anything else I could’ve been doing.

My holopad beeped. I glanced down at it. Seven o’clock. Dinnertime. I’d been standing in the shower for two hours.

It took but a moment, but I had to parse through the reasons to finish up. My body required sustenance. If I didn’t eat, I would eventually waste away. If I wasted away, my friends would be sad. Preventing that would constitute “good.” In the absence of a compelling argument in either direction, the general consensus among society took precedence—perhaps they knew something I didn’t. The general consensus stated that one should do “good.” Ergo, I should finish my shower and head down to dinner.

I cut off the flow of qi.

My heart sped. My blood rushed. I gasped for air.

What the hells was that?

From what I’d read, the brain meridian was supposed to sharpen your thoughts, slow down perceived time, and hone your ability to pick out relevant information.

Mine had done one of those things. Threads, how was I supposed to win a fight if I had to keep reminding myself I didn’t want to get stabbed?

I’d have to practice with it. I’d been able to reason using previously established information—namely the bit about following consensus, something I’d concluded while adrift in the infinite sea—so maybe I wouldn’t have to remind myself of things, but needing a logically sound reason for everything felt like a nightmare.

I got the impression I had an awful lot of meditating in my future.

For the time being, I forced the worries from my mind as I hurriedly scrubbed myself clean and dried off.

I made one last stop before finally departing the third floor bathroom, a momentary pause as I threw away the last of the anti-meridian-gunk shampoo. It landed in the bin with a satisfying clunk.

I grinned.

Twelve down, none to go. Next stop: forming my core.

——

After a long and deeply enjoyable meal spent receiving congratulations from Nick and Xavier while relaying every detail my brain meridian’s weirdness to a furiously tapping Charlotte, I walked with the happy couple up to the transport platform. As they waited for a pod to bring them back to housing C, Charlotte took every opportunity to talk me out of my own destination.

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” she said. “The other cadets already think of you as an upstart mortal. You’re only going to prove them right.”

“The other cadets can think what they want. I’m the only one here who wasn’t handed a spot by my parents.”

“You’re also the only one that hasn’t been training every day since birth,” Charlotte countered. “You can’t keep falling back on your qi supply to carry you. Eventually, you’re going to need people to respect you.”

I scowled at her. “People do respect me.”

“Cultivators, Cal. You need cultivators to respect you. At the rate you’re going, soon enough you’re going to outgrow Fyrion. You’re going to outgrow me. My social network will only get you so far, and you’re going to have a hard time getting the materials you need to advance if nobody in power respects you.”

I shrugged. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I’ll always have some clout through Lucy, and theoretically I’ll eventually get to the point where my cultivation speaks for itself. I obviously can’t hide it forever, just until I’m strong enough to scare off anyone who wants to take advantage. In the meantime…” My holopad beeped as a pod pulled up. “Ope, that’s me. You two have a good night.”

“G’night, Cal!” Xavier bid in return.

Charlotte just sighed.

I ignored her theatrics as the pod door closed behind me and took off down the transport tube. I gazed out the window, watching station after station blur by, the platforms growing dirtier, the city more crowded, its residents more destitute. Twenty minutes later, I emerged in a familiar work bay.

I almost didn’t recognize the place. Instead of the mess of laborers running about every which way, the mortals moved about in casual efficiency, chatting amongst themselves as they geared up or peeled away their vac suits to hang them on the wall hooks. It appeared I’d caught them at the shift change. Perfect.

Those who noticed me flashed me surprised looks or fell into messy salutes as they spotted my cadet uniform. I tried to wave the first few off, but word spread through the staging area faster than I could contain it. By the time I reached the foreman’s desk, not a right hand in that room sat anywhere else but upon its owner’s brow.

The foreman—or forewoman, as it were—greeted me far more politely than the man I’d spoken with last time. “How can I help you, sir?”

“Don’t—” I gestured downward with my hand. “Don’t salute. Please.”

She lowered her hand, glaring at the workers around me. They followed suit, returning to their tasks even as they failed to hide their gawking.

“So what can the southwestern exterior maintenance division do for you, sir?” the forewoman asked. “I’d warn you, this is a place for work, not for seeking enlightenment or picking fights.”

“Good. I’d like a job.”

“You-um… excuse me?”

“Part time, of course. I’m only free between eight and midnight each day.” I pulled up my holopad and swiped over my credentials. “I’m a certified zero-G vac-welder with four years experience. Since my schedule is tight, I’ll accept below entry level pay, which you’ll give me, because working alone I can outperform a full team of three.”

Her eyes darted back and forth as she scanned through my certification and work history. “This is all… I’ve heard of you. You worked on the void incursion repairs?”

“I did.”

She glanced up at me with narrow eyes. “And now you want… a job.”

“I do. Part time. Working alone.”

“If you say so, I mean-ah, yes, sir.”

“You’re going to have to stop calling me sir if you’re gonna be my boss.”

“Yes si—er, um—” She glanced back down at her holopad. “Caliban.”

I grinned. “Call me Cal. Can I get started then?”

“Sure. Just sign this and this.” She swiped over a pair of boilerplate employment contracts, terms auto-edited as per our conversation. I gave them a cursory reading before sending them back.

“Great, you’re all set. Oy! Garry!”

I flinched as her shout caught me off guard.

A half-dressed man with the top of his vac suit hanging off his waist ran over.

“Get Cal here into a suit. He’s working the back end of second shift.” The forewoman turned back to me. “Welcome aboard.”

I could feel heads turning to track me as I followed Garry to one of the benches that lined the wall, picked out vac suit number eighty-six, removed it from its hook, and suited up. Garry didn’t speak a word throughout the process, communicating entirely through grunts and gestures up to and including the point I stepped into the airlock.

Something about the hiss of air draining out, the artificial gravity fading away, and the iron walls of Fyrion vanishing beyond my periphery sent a wave of relief crawling up my spine. For a few beautiful moments, my fears and ambitions and hurdles ahead fell to nothing. For a few beautiful moments, I gazed upon the gray wasteland around me and found strange comfort in its barrenness. For a few beautiful moments, I looked at the sky.

And then I got to work.

Through all my life, I’d never quite put my finger on why I’d found the dull repetitive act of vac-welding so calming. I figured it lay in some combination of the simplicity of following directions, the rhythm of trekking to an impact site, making repairs, and moving on to the next one, and the ability to do it all on autopilot, keeping the busybody parts of my brain active and leaving the rest to wander as it may.

It’d taken becoming a cultivator to realize what I was doing. In the unbreakable silence of a vacuum, undisturbed but by the guiding arrow to my next task, surrounded on all sides by the cold embrace of the infinite sea, I meditated.

By the time my HUD led me home, I felt better than I had in months. I thought more clearly, my spirit sat soothed, and I came away a few credits richer for my efforts.

The other workers left me alone as I returned my gear to storage and hung my vac suit on its hook. I didn’t bother trying to strike up a conversation or escape their curious stares and quiet whispers. I waved goodnight to the forewoman, stepped into the transport pod home, climbed the steps to the third floor, and had my best night’s sleep in months.

——

And so the days passed. Three dueling days and the weeks between disappeared in bleary-eyed exhaustion and interminable, zealous work.

I knew the fervor with which I pushed myself was neither sustainable nor healthy, that I hurtled wildly towards a burnout the likes of which I’d never imagined. I did it anyway. I could rest when I advanced. I could rest once I’d met Lopez’s one-year deadline.

I could rest once I’d defeated Long.

Until then, I would train.

I awoke each morning to my holopad’s alarm, a torturous thing that sent me stumbling from my bed and into uniform for the morning workout. I exercised on my own as Nick slept in and the others didn’t bother with the trip from housing C, leaving me alone with my ponderings as I lifted weights and ran in circles, all the while cursing in frustration whenever my holopad beeped to correct my technique.

I broke fast with Charlotte and Xavier more often than not, taking the time to join them rather than eat alone or hope against hope Nick would make it out of bed in time for breakfast.

I took a transport pod directly from housing C to the family district, arriving at meditation class for my daily three hours of walking back and forth. As the weeks flew by, I advanced from simple pacing to navigating basic obstacles to performing the combat forms I’d so tirelessly trained myself in. I yet lacked the ironclad focus to fight an entire duel—reacting to the opponent, crafting a plan, taking hits, et cetera—but considering most students took several years to reach that point, I found my progress more than adequate.

A number of those class periods I spent working through the cold lens of my brain meridian, practicing the untaught art of acknowledging the constant calculations without allowing them to distract me. Faster and more efficient though it made my thoughts, running my mind at such speed came at a cost, one I paid in exhaustion come the session’s end.

Mental endurance because a cornerstone of my morning class, joining fortitude and focus at the foundation of an effective spirit.

Lunch with Martha fit neatly into my routine, us both misfits in our own right among the oversized class. Her right arm now lay continuously in a sling, apparently a result of some injury she’d undergone while opening her muscle meridian. I wished I could’ve commiserated with her over it, but I dared not reveal the extent of my progress to anyone I didn’t need to.

I felt for the girl, I truly did. From what little I’d seen of Nick’s interactions with his parents, she was under a lot of pressure, pressure that would’ve been difficult enough without both a missing hand and a non-functional arm.

She hid it well, all smiles and laughs and I’m okays, but every once in a while, when her shoulder bumped into something or she lost her focus too early in a meditation exercise, I caught her staring at the wall with unfocused eyes, a momentary crack in her facade through which a glimpse of soul rending exhaustion could slip through.

Whenever I saw it, a part of me wanted to rush over and give the kid a hug. Another part wanted to commit unspeakable violence upon her parents. Always, by the time I reminded myself neither option would’ve been appropriate, Martha’s mask was firmly back in place.

Maybe I wouldn’t whisk Nick away the day he turned eighteen. He clearly wasn’t the only one that needed saving.

Misguided notions of rescuing overburdened teens from abusive parents aside, lunch each day did have to end, leaving me to push on through my second class of the day.

In contrast to meditation two, cycling two proved more and more useless as time passed. As my classmates worked their way along the path towards opening their spine meridians, I took up the practice of purging the pain herbs from my system by cycling my stomach, blood, and kidneys so I could spend the class period working on my own.

Charlotte had, at risk of expulsion were she caught, given me a number of qi manipulation exercises designed to hone control and intake in preparation for core formulation, a stage for which I worked tirelessly day in and day out.

The promise of magic made for a good motivator.

So I practiced precision and detail and complexity in my internal constructs, growing more and more adept at warping the liquid darkness within me to my will.  I found it easy, too easy, almost. It took some effort to nudge my qi into motion, but it obeyed readily. I didn’t have to wrestle with it or otherwise assert control over the energy, a difference that made all three of my confidants deeply jealous.

After class I’d spar with Charlotte and Xavier, alternating between fending off his overwhelming and withstanding her meticulous control.

I discovered that what little I knew of Cedric’s style suited me particularly well, the steps’ focus on economy of motion a natural fit for my qi’s preference for stillness and fluidity of movement. Like the infinite sea in face of existence’s imposition, I gracefully flowed around incoming attacks, moving as little as necessary to dodge and deflect and build a positional advantage until came time to deliver the winning blow.

Or, well, that was the idea.

In practice my clumsy attempts to incorporate bits and pieces of one style into another put my muscle memory in conflict with itself, leaving me as likely trip over myself or step into Xavier’s axe as outmaneuver it. In a way, adding Cedric’s moves was like starting from scratch as I relearned which steps to make when. At least I was starting from scratch down a path that would’ve offer tools I could wield against Long.

I’d never beat him at his own style. I just might beat him with mine.

Charlotte refrained from adding any of her own moves to the mix, both for simplicity’s sake and because nearly all the Veleraeu steps were designed for the empowered rapier the family favored. They’d be of little use to me.

Of my two instructors, which or both of them I worked with largely depended on whether or not they were speaking with each other that particular day, a fact that seemed to change with the frequency of a metronome.

By my count, they broke up with each other fourteen times in that five month span, miraculously winding up back together within a few days. Absurd as I found it, Nick informed me that wasn’t rare in unmarried cultivators—something about imperfectly controlled qi heightening emotions. Presumably they’d eventually either separate for good or settle down, especially as they advanced their cores and grew more accustomed to reining in their qi’s effects.

Personally, I laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. Annoying as their constant on-again-off-again might’ve been, it seemed preferable to the dangerous levels of nihilistic apathy my own qi had a tendency to inflict.

It thus struck me as absolutely insane when, upon Charlotte’s blisteringly early promotion to housing B, the two of them moved in together. Oddly enough, that seemed to lessen the frequency of their breakups.

After combat training came my hour working with Nick, using the word “working” as loosely as possible. Mostly the time consisted of reading through dense texts on spiritual science of germination while Nick tinkered feverishly at his desk. I tried and failed several times to keep up with what he was doing, each time running headlong into a wall of botanical jargon so impenetrable it could’ve held off the vacuum of space.

Since I still couldn’t externalize my qi, we ran a few tests trying to use the minuscule amount of dark qi that escaped as a byproduct of light qi usage, but Nick couldn’t sense it, and while I could absorb that percentage point that “returned to the threads,” I lacked both the experience in qi manipulation and the knowledge of extramundane molecular biology to accomplish Nick’s goal.

Despite my attempts to convince him I’d manage it eventually, that I’d form my core soon enough, Nick grew increasingly frustrated with the project. A few weeks in, his questions shifted once more from the properties of my qi to how he might learn to sense it. Worse yet, he refused to be dissuaded.

I can’t say for certain when Nick made up his mind that he had to find the infinite sea, but two months after I joined his research, he stopped assigned reading, stopped actively explaining things, and descended deeper into his own thoughts.

With alarming frequency I’d open his door at six pm to find him lying in bed, unmoving and silent but for his barked instruction to leave him alone. On other nights I’d return from work to see Nick standing in the hall, his eyes glossed over as he stared out the window at the starry sky.

I’d join him for a few quiet moments on those late occasions, offering words of advice if he asked or silent companionship if he didn’t. If nothing else, I could remind him he wasn’t alone.

I never lingered long at that window, my own mediation long finished for the day.

I spent my vac-welding shifts musing over all manner of life’s mysteries, the details of which I’ll withhold for the time being lest this turn into a painfully amateurish manifesto. I started from a place of icy logic, establishing firm—or at least firm sounding—reasons why I should continue living, strive to better myself, do good, avoid evil, that sort of thing.

I read philosophy, not out of curiosity, but necessity, building a logical framework from which my emotionally-stunted brain meridian could make decisions.

Most of all, I pondered the universe and my place in it. I mused on what it was I wanted and why I wanted it, for what I toiled day in and day out, for whom I trained and learned and fought.

In truth, this proved the most difficult step in my advancement, the last and highest hurdle in my preparation.

If I were to declare some piece of the great dark my own, to drink from its unending depths to bolster my spirit, fortify my body, build my core, to assert my existence upon the vast nothingness and wield its power in my futile struggle against infinity itself, I had to know why.

Because a full five months after the opening of my brain meridian, eight into my time on Fyrion, and with only four more before the deadline loomed, I finally sat down to do exactly that.

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