by Stephen R. Case
Stephen R. Case lays out the ideas that inspired the universe in his story “Sisters of the Flare,” now available in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
A few years ago I began drafting a story about a religious order, ships that were huge cathedrals in space, and a super-luminal Lattice that allowed them to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. It was a sort of mirror image to the grimdark future of fictions like the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I wanted a galactic empire of humanity, which I called the Instrumentatum, that was bright, ordered, and at peace. In my universe, the empress (who may or may not be a god but is worshipped as one) rules from Holy Hearth, and her sisters of mercy travel the stars as emissaries, traders, and sometimes enforcers of her will. Like the galactic empire of Asimov’s Foundation, it’s an anthropo-exclusive cosmos: though humanity has spread across millions of worlds, it has encountered no other intelligent life recognized as such.
The key to this empire, and to the empress’s control over it, is the super-luminal system of travel: the Lattice, a network of conduits carved beneath space (so legends say) by the empress herself at the dawn of the Instrumentatum, before Earth became Hearth. Those who travel the Lattice don’t understand the technology behind it, but pilots on each cathedral-ship know how to steer their vast vessels down these corridors of light. The Lattice stitches together all the worlds of the galaxy. For a hundred generations the sisterhood has traveled up and down the Lattice, recruiting novices from the worlds they call upon.
Each of the empress’s cathedral-ship is a vast honeycomb of sacristies, libraries, chapels, workstations, and mosaiced landing bays built around a core that houses a cluster of miniature, tethered stars powering each ship. Gravity on these huge vessels is partially artificial, referred to by the sisters as “guiding hands,” providing inertial stability and in the bowels of each ship tightly binding the coiled star-heart fusion cores. Hundreds of different specialties of sisters go about their work under the direction of each ship’s Mother Superior, from the venerated pilots to the gardeners (genetically modified to walk the hulls tending the delicate sensor-gardens) to the eremites living in the caverns of the interior tending the fires of the fusion cores to sisters who pass their lives in study, contemplation, or prayer.
Two gifts make the sisterhood’s work in this universe possible. The first is the Lattice, which it seems is theirs alone to traverse. The second is the chemical known as the Calm, which sisters begin to take when they have been fully inducted into the order. The Calm deadens emotions and passion, thus (the sisters claim) opening the path to true prayer and contemplation. It also extends life so that a sister becomes effectively immortal, an eternal passenger on a cathedral-ship’s centuries-long travels. On worlds across the galaxy, children imagine a cathedral-ship coasting into their system from a Lattice terminal and offering to a handful of their planet’s best and brightest the gift of dispassion and immortality.
It was a bright, ordered cosmos, but my stories focus on characters trying to make sense of their universe after this ordered structure has been shattered. At some point, shortly before my stories begin, the Instrumentatum makes contact with a new kind of life at the fringes of the galaxy. Not an alien race, not an invasion, but rather an infection: a catalytic process that attacks planets themselves as a virus attacks cells, reducing entire worlds to dust-like spores. The galaxy, the sisterhood has realized, is diseased.
It was a bright, ordered cosmos, but my stories focus on characters trying to make sense of their universe after this ordered structure has been shattered.
In response, the empress orders the Long Retreat, calling all cathedral-ships back to Hearth. If the spreading infection, which may naturally take millions of years to spread from system to system, reaches the Lattice, it could allow the infection to quickly jump from inhabited world to inhabited world, like a cancer metastasizing. To slow its spread, the empress waits as long as possible and then does the unthinkable and erases the Lattice from space.
For the sisters on the Hearth-bound cathedral-ships, this is as unimaginable as losing the sky itself. Ships en route fall from the Lattice back into normal space, possibly trillions of miles from any star or habitable planet. Where there had been an Instrumentatum linking the galaxy, now there are only planets isolated by light-years and cathedral-ships marooned in space with no means of super-luminal travel.
My stories—the first, “Daughters of the Lattice,” appearing in Asimov’s a year ago and the second, “Sisters of the Flare,” in this issues—are set on the cathedral-ship Decalogue, which finds itself marooned when the Lattice disappears. The characters on board find themselves asking difficult questions in this new reality: What’s the point of living forever if you may not reach a habitable planet for a hundred thousand years? And even if you do, is immortality on a single world anything but a prison sentence? What do the virtues of prayer and obedience mean when your god has abandoned you? How do you create a new life when your vocation no longer has any meaning? If it was possible, would you bring children into such a radically transformed world?
“Daughters of the Lattice” picked up the story once the Decalogue had found and settled a marginally habitable planet, following a set of characters who realize there might be a way to re-open the Lattice, though at the potential cost of whatever tentative safety they have found. The story in this issue, “Sisters of the Flare,” steps backward in time to tell the story of life on the Decalogue in the immediate wake of the Lattice’s collapse. A rebellious sister and an ancient nun who tends the fusion cores deep within the ship form an unlikely friendship, which may be key to finding a new home for the Decalogue. It’s also a story about stories—the ones we tell and how they shape the worlds we inhabit.
I’m drawn to space opera—huge galactic vistas and god-level technologies—told with (I hope) literary sensibility and a sense of wonder. I’ve enjoyed developing the universe in these stories, and I hope you enjoy inhabiting it for a time through the characters I’ve created. I’d love to hear your thoughts on “Sisters of the Flare.” Find me at www.stephenrcase.com or reach out on X @StephenRCase.
From Earth to the Stars 