Issue 137 February 2025

Hear me: it is the second cencycle of decay, the forty-fifth season of cancer, the third cycle of exodus from Indus the Magnificent, and I am the last oracle left.

For many eras, our peoples thrived in Indus: our titan, our world of worlds, our galaxy-cleaving vessel. We slept curled in aer cell clumps. We walked aer silk veins from aer skyrise heart to aer extremities—spacebitten digit-tips and arctic setae—to aer deepest wildernesses: the entrail labyrinths, the cerebral sea, the cloacal trenches. In our heyday, we venerated Indus daily for providing aemselves as cornucopia and citadel. Now Indus is dying.

I am too.

Though it’s my duty to find and follow patterns, I feel little satisfaction in tracing Indus’ long death parallel to my own. What pleasure is there in terminal empathy? As my body suffered, so did we: dermis colonies flooded inward as Indus’ chitin cracked, and fleshrural dwellers fled as aer muscles quakecramped. Further exodus followed.

While my spawner was coaxing my larval self to stand, feeding their own stomach’s worth of ironrich blood into my breastmaw, the marrow metropoli grew crowded with refugees who carried nothing but prayers. What else could they bring? Everything they owned was woven into their wasting homes.

Back then, my health was already deteriorating, but I was heavy with prophecy. This made me hysterical. Every ache was an omen, every counted breath and day part of an augury. My predecessors had encouraged endless excess. Our apocalypse felt inevitable.

Inevitable or not, it came. Vesselways closed beneath swelling tumors. Erratic breathing destabilized the lunglivers. Organplexes collapsed. Thousands clustered into thorax shelters as their homes squeezed into unlivable layers of pulp. The stomach peoples begged for assistance as Indus vomited all the planets aey devoured. Undigested rings and meteors crushed communities on their way up. Their children’s entrails flecked the back of Indus’ baleen alongside cancerous waste. For so long, they suffered. Today, they’ve been eaten away.

Yet since time is a body of beautiful, self-propelling loops soaked in past turns, the stomach peoples remain in my flickering visions, forever thriving, forever dying.

In a way, I tell (told) my spawner, the cancer is an oracle. It knows growth is death.

They gurgled in disgust.

Don’t compare our blessing to that decimation again. My spawner knotted their shawl around my neckplace. If you confuse blessings and curses, something will befall you. Mind yourself. We are different.

A cycle later, they fled Indus on a globuleship without saying goodbye. I didn’t know they were gone until someone neuronwired me the news. When I learned they’d abandoned Indus and me, some soft core within my chitin shattered. I couldn’t even unravel this paradox. I laid inside Indus’ aching heart. I ignored everyone’s pleas. I cried.

Love, unlike cancer, has limits.

* * *

When I crawl the organ centrals now, all is quiet. Dim. Their raw luster has faded. Membrane skies have turned muddy. Veiny constellations and landmarks have vanished, sickened, or shifted. The stretches of artery where whole neighborhoods would line up to suckle are empty. Waste clutters byways. I can travel for setalengths without sensing anyone. All the webs of stardust made meat, all our hopes stacked high in this homeplace alongside infrastructure and history, and it amounted to this.

Desolation.

If I swim the vesselways, I might find someone in a subcutane, but there’s no guarantee the veins are open. So many are blocked by swelling tumors. The roads are already ruined from trapped commuters chewing holes in them to escape, even with saliva patches plastering those holes. I’m too weak to add to those injuries.

I crawl past wet ruin until exhaustion forces me to retreat.

* * *

It’s fruitless, but I do my duties. I bathe in the aortal shrine’s atrium until I’m cleansed. I chant, pray, and drink sacred blood until I’m sick in hopes it’ll grant me the visions I once had. I try divining meanings from Indus’ tremors. I perform pulse dances. Such rites used to be reserved for times of starvation. Now, they’re routine. When I weaken, I unspool one of the fine vessels in the shrine, then latch it into my breastmaw. I feed. This rich blood is all that’s sustaining me. When Indus goes, so will I. This leaves no room for hopelessness. My own undying tumors of acceptance and bitterness have forced it out.

I, too, am dying full of excess.

Oh, titan, tell me what to do. I stare at the three apertures above, watching them pump, alone, sore. What ails you? How can you be hospiced?

What hollow questions. Indus hasn’t spoken since my grandspawner was oracle. I’ve divined needs through reading aer snot, cleansed aer heart, and directed our peoples to pull upon sinew and nerve to steer our titan through space, but I’ve never heard aer voice.

Perhaps aey’re angry we neglected aem.

* * *

And still.

I sleep where my spawner and grandspawner slept. Eat where they ate. I stroke my shawl, tracing the pulsing web of fat, imagining what they would do, as if I don’t know. While Indus and I rot in the consequences of my predecessors’ choices, we live in all the cycles they loved us.

All that exists between swelling inevitability are apathy and abandonment. I stay with Indus less to prolong my life and more to enrich it: I’m dying a god’s death, or aey’re dying an orphan’s, which has put oracle and titan closer than ever before. I am ending. So is our universe. It’s all the same.

Hear me: it is the second cencycle of decay, the forty-fifth season of cancer, the third cycle of exodus. We are already gone, buried alive in our biotomb, but I pray that when Indus fleshcomets upon another galaxy, when the peoples of entropy eat our ruins, deduce meaning from Indus’ cancer-chewed bones, and peer into the cosmos, they find no sign of us.

Only our unspoiled potential.

Only the stars.

* * *

Ⓒ Samir Sirk Morató