Orpheus, Page 2

are the result of exposure to a nitrogen geyser. (Shard does not answer questions on this subject.) I see water on his face – tears? I dislike public demonstration of emotion. For several weeks afterward, I wear a mask on our public excursions. The media pick this up, and within days everyone is defiantly wearing masks in public. Except Shard.

  He tells an audience: “The dissonance, for any artist, between the world the Muse calls us to see and the world as it now is, forces us to drugs or drink to blur the painful distortion resulting from that. We can cross from the world as it banally is to the world as it is intended. We can steal back our souls.”

  Three teenagers immolate themselves outside the performance dome as an homage to him. Local law enforcement charges him with incitement, but the charges are dropped after a visit from Shard’s lawyers. “Freedom to suicide!” becomes a minor political movement on Dione, doomed by its members’ predilection for living – and dying – by their principles.

  On Triton, he disappears for a week and I am frantic. When he reappears, he is rail thin and nearly blind. But he smiles as he plays a new cube for me: an acoustic hologram. Sound shapes ambient air into transparent 3-D figures; when Shard throws a handful of glitter into the air, the room fills with dancing images that tease the imagination in three dimensions. The images dissolve, re-form, enchant. And the accompanying soundtrack speaks of liberation and fulfillment, of love, grief and the pain of true freedom.

  The holos invade my dreams, moving pictures that dance on the edge of hypnogogic sleep, that flee before consciousness. As identity is determined by environment, so I am dissolving before the force of this new environment. Shard is making the world, and me, anew. I do not know what world this will be, or what the I that knows it will be. So I cling to him as a drowning victim, closer than before.

  Revolution in 855nm

  At the speed of light, the holowaves cross the gulfs of space. As they arrive, the pirate radio webs, the pornography nets, the restless, seething anonymous children of the Age of Drone decode them. The holos dance, sing, insinuate, the formula for Psychophane encoded in the music for all to use. Using the techniques perfected by years of psychotropic concerts, Shard’s holograms persuade and defy and tease and anger. The revolution virus rides the holograms from world to world on an unstoppable wave. Psychophane floods the gray markets. The coalescing masses look at one another with new meaning, tossing catch phrases from Shard’s concerts like passwords to a cabal. Workers heft tools, eye locked doors hiding corporate masters, and growl.

  On a night when bloody battles rage in dark tunnels, Shard and I hunker behind a barricaded door. I tremble. He laughs.

  “Why?” I ask.

  He smiles the shark smile and says something obscene in flawless Chinese.

  “Anarchy for its own sake?”

  He looks at me out of luminous eyes. Literally luminous, as he has been testing a new drug that releases bioluminescent bacteria into the brain. “Anarchy? No. Growth. We are stagnant, dying. To make these worlds work, we have become the machines we create. Machines feel no pain, no life. But life is pain.”

  “Life can be sweet, too.”

  In the morning he is gone, plunging into the heart of the revolution he has made, and all I know of him is the holograms that spin out of the maelstrom. The worlds convulse, one by one, as the carrier wave of the revolution holograms reach them. Each one is more intimate, more daring, more challenging than the last, as Shard peels himself down to the inner core of his soul to inspire and hector and inflame.

  Everything changes, faster than anyone could have guessed. Workers simply walk away from the machines, or rebuild them to suit other uses. Corporate goons sing as they lay down weapons and armor, joining the masses as they dance down the corridors of space stations, domes, tunnels dug into moon and planet and asteroid. Armies refuse to fire on singing, dancing, laughing people. When the admiral of a privately owned navy orders a mine targeted with pseudonukes, his own executive officer shoots him in the head, and then turns the flotilla into a medical center.

  Everything changes, changes, changes. Everyone is singing, dancing with psychotropic sculptures, melding with one another in an ecstatic blend of Psychophane and revolution. The message in the music, the drug that liberates, Shard’s message is embedded everywhere, in everyone.

  Everyone but me. Without him, I am bereft and alone again. I wander, from world to world on rusty transports, on gypsy ships carrying rum and rusty tools, on former military warships now converted to colonies where the babies sleep in slings on the arms deck. Everywhere, everyone knows him. No one has seen him.

  Two years later, I finally find him, or what is left of him, in a black laboratory orbiting Jupiter. The electrodes have been in his cortex so long they have rusted. The scarred man I loved is gone, faded and bleached out, nothing but a husk kept alive by the machines he denounced.

  But the image in the holotank, straight from his brain, humming on a wave of Psychophane, is strong and clear and alive. It’s that image that has burned past a million corporate firewalls, that soaks the consciousness of a humanity beginning to redefine itself.

  Shard the Lightsinger.

  Shard the Revolutionary.

  Shard the God.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Sarah Stegall is the author of Farside, Deadfall, Deus Ex Machina and other stories. She researched and co-wrote the first three Official Guides to The X-Files, which spent a collective fourteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy movies, books and television since 1994; her interviews and trivia contests appeared on the TV Guide web­site for several years.

  Sarah lives in northern California with her family, one dog and three cats, but travels throughout the West.

  Her website is at www.munchkyn.com.

  Other Books by Sarah Stegall

  Farside

  Deadfall

  Short Stories

  Deus Ex Machina

  (Research)

  The Truth is Out There: The Official Guide to The X-Files Trust No One: The Official Third Season Guide to The X-Files I Want to Believe: The Official Fourth Season Guide to The X-Files