Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 by Penny Publications Read Free Book Online Page B

mounds.
    "You will survive," she said. "We will survive. You will make a magnificent grand prince."
    His soul, and the stolen one, made sounds of relief. The princess had accepted him as her mate. Despite his crimes and the hardships of the migration, the souls sounded guardedly elated. A new hive. His hive. Grand prince. Diviya would be the father of a new generation, one that, due to the separation of time dilation, would never see any skates from another colony. And his colony would have no landlords, no tax collectors, and no beatings.
Past
    Furtively, workers came to Diviya in the slums, atop his mound. Most had never been unionists. Diviya recognized his old fear in them. They came to speak to Diviya about the massacre. Few had been there, but they knew the workers who had been killed, and the workers who had been exiled to the work farms. They came as cowards might, shamefully, weighed by the guilt that they were happy not to have been there.
    The idea of sacrifice in them was strong, as it was in Diviya. The Hero had built them to sacrifice for each other, for kin. They were pressed of the same clay. The success of a brother worker or a prince felt like a success for all of them. Demanding something for themselves was difficult. The newly ensouled like Diviya had to be taught selfishness, acquisitiveness by the souls. Yet these skates, who had not been brave enough to attend a union rally to help all of them, now slinked to the last committee leader, a skate who shared their guilt. They formed new committees.
    "Tell them what to do," his soul said. "You are better than this rabble. Leverage your influence here for patronage. Deliver the malcontents to the hive. Give bribes."
    Diviya had bribes. The workers smuggled innumerable tiny nuggets of frozen volatiles to him. This struggle with his soul could not go on.
    And then, he saw it again.
    In the distance, the brief, hot shine of a soul, looking this way. The sleet of radioactive particles stilled his soul.
    Diviya shut his eye, shuttering the emissions of his own soul.
    "Open your eye!" his soul said.
    "You can guess as well as I what that was," Diviya whispered.
    Diviya's soul laughed. "More unionists have been picked up by hive drones," the soul guessed. "The rascals must have spoken of an ensouled committee member dispensing fratricidal treason from a mound in the slums."
    "It is rich that you would call me fratricidal, when I have never hurt another skate, while the hive beats, imprisons, and kills my brothers," Diviya said. "Your disloyalty endangers every skate and princess in the hive. Open your eye." Diviya descended the mound with his eye closed. Tejas was with him, as were Barini and Ugra. They did not have souls and were accustomed to Diviya's silences while he communed with his own. With his eye closed, the world was dark, but loud, filled with the Hero's Voice and the scraping vibration of his own movement. But in this way, he was invisible to the other ensouled skate in the slums. "What are you doing, Diviya?" Tejas asked. "An ensouled skate has been moving at the edge of the slums," Diviya said to Tejas.
    "I have seen him several times today. He is looking for something." "Or someone," Tejas said.
    "I saw only one skate. Perhaps an ambitious tax farmer seeks favor by catching a union leader."
    "Hide!" Tejas said. "We must get you away." "Me?" Diviya said.
    "You're the key to the revolution," Tejas said. His voice was charged, tense. He believed what he was saying. And Diviya felt as he had when he'd first spoken at the rally. Exposed. Undeserving.
    "Tejas, Barini, and Ugra," Diviya said, "lead me closer, so that we can see, but not be seen. You will need to be my eye."
    "What are you doing?" his soul demanded.
    Tejas walked Diviya on a winding, blind way around the tailing mounds.
    The Hero was high in the sky, so none of the mounds cast shadows. Diviya heard the Hero's Voice change tone when they turned. Catching the subtleties in the polarization of