Moon Phoenix
A science-fiction short story
This story is my entry for the Soaring Twenties Social Club monthly symposium. This month’s theme is “Growth”.
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Nix was on the fifth day of fasting and meditation. It was the last day, the last chance to achieve the transformation and he was having trouble concentrating.
The wind howled, whipping past outside the cave, one of many dotting the great fissures in the landscape outside. The wind brought with it the smell of ammonia and sulfur which mixed with the dry, icy-tasting air of the cave.
The wind was no immediate concern. Nix was completely sheltered from the elements while in his vulnerable transitionary state. However, the temperature, dropping with each passing hour, meant that his time was growing short. With each passing day he grew weaker and weaker, more vulnerable, and the cold that he endured on the first day might kill him on the fifth.
Nix refocused on his breath, pulling air not through his vestigial mouth, but rather through the gills across his back.
Pain. Sheer pain.
Fire erupted from the outermost edge of the narrow gill slits that stretched from the spine down his sides and plunging straight into the innermost depths of his lungs.
He exhaled and the pain subsided to a dull icy ache along his back, the gill slits sealed once again against the air.
Away from the geyser and its vast plume of water vapor and out in the raw air each breath was painful, gasping, almost impossible. One breath each hour, thirty-two breaths each day, the vapor in the air providing just enough oxygen to survive, pushing his body closer and closer to his goal: auto-regeneration and rebirth.
But not without the proper focus and, most crucially, the alignment of his mind with his body’s chemical processes. His people had long ago (too long to recount in their oral tradition) discovered the necessity of fasting and exposing themselves to the harsher elements of their world in order to achieve transformation. The first transformations, like so much progress, had been accidental. Now it was ingrained in their genetic code.
How many years in their past had that occurred? Some guessed but no one knew, not even the elders, the Presbuteroi, who frequented the lowest parts of the geysers and who remained sequestered together, not to be approached, for years at a time.
Stretching out his cilia on either side of his body, Nix braced himself against the rocky floor and breathed again. Intense pain ignited across his back. The cold air threatened to freeze his gills while the sparse water vapor brought sweet, if temporary, relief to every cell in his body.
Nix tried not to think about failure, either failing to transform or failing to do so properly.
The impatient tried to push too hard too fast by holding their breath and waiting rather than simply breathing. For some this shortcut was successful. The unsuccessful, bodies and minds imperfectly transformed, were held up as examples. In the environment of the caves so cold and so far from their homes among the geysers of the south pole, not to breathe was the easy way out, the pain of suffocation much easier to bear than the pain of inhalation. Breathing, just breathing at regular intervals was the hard part.
Nix focused himself again, scanning his body with his mind. Shrunken, rounded nub of a head with its vestigial eye sockets. Eyes were too vulnerable on Enceladus. Two sensory cilia, used for sensing and emitting electromagnetic signals. Both were high on the head connected to the brain which had receded into the body. Mouth, vestigial because all his nutrients were filtered through the same gills that processed the water vapor in the air. Flat, round body, dozens of cilia extending from all sides. Two vestigial forelimbs, two vestigial hindlimbs, all useless for traversing the terrain anyway and empty of bones that would give them structure.
The temperature dropped a few degrees. Then a few more. Time was running short. His body was competing with the external temperature. Too cold and he would not be able to complete the transformation today and would miss the once in a lifetime window to attempt the transformation when the maturity of the body coincided with the control of the mind over the processes of the body. He would not ascend but remain as he had been born, left bound to the earth at the base of the geysers and attempting sexual reproduction to produce, before he died, a new generation that would attempt the same transformation. Valuable and necessary, but ultimately a failure.
Chemical reactions in his vestigial limbs fired, increasing the warmth of his body. He felt them cascading from his outermost extremities flashing crimson and violet in his min as detected by the sensory cilia.
He focused, pushing the fires, encouraging the energy cycles to grow and multiply exponentially, breaking the cell barriers, nudging his body closer.
Another breath. Another wave of agonizing pain that started in his gills and spread to his chest, pressed against the ground, and out to the tip of each cilia, each limb.
The electromagnetic signal pattern of his cilia indicated his extreme pain. He knew that it could be read by the Watchers, those tasked with observing the transformation caves in case any candidate should complete an imperfect transformation.
Nix knew all too well the stories of imperfect, incomplete transformations. Not only were they transmitted among the colony, discussed, held out as examples of what impatience can do, his own brother had failed his transformation.
The stories had not prepared Nix for seeing his brother’s tortured body with its slavering gills and incomplete wings and hearing the screams and curses emitted from his sensory cilia.
Nix breathed again then allowed himself to reach out, to feel for the others in nearby caves. He sensed faint, indistinct signals, signals tinged with pain. It made him feel less alone, though it did nothing to lessen his own burden or the necessity that weighed upon him. That innate encoded necessity to strive, to advance, to progress, to display for all how the individual made the group stronger.
One of the faint signals changed, warping and stretching. The notes encoded in the signal reached a higher and higher pitch then, for an instant, ceased altogether before beginning again as a low hum, the telltale electromagnetic note of a newly transformed being. The signal moved. She was emerging from her cave. She passed by the opening of his cave, impervious to the winds, giving little thought to gravity anymore.
Nix felt impatient, panicked.
Another faint signal in the distance started to change. Higher and higher, reaching the point of transformation. But the note took on a sour hue, lacking harmony. The discordant notes competed then shattered and combined, another telltale sign, this of a failed transformation, the mind and body locked in dysfunction for the rest of the life of the poor being.
A mix of pity and revulsion welled up inside Nix.
Thoroughly warned and the temperature dropping even further, signaling the end of the day, Nix focused once again on the tiny fire within each cell, coaxing the chemical processes that would begin the engine of transformation.
One more agonizing breath, then he stopped. He wanted to nudge his body over the edge, to give it the final push but he knew he must remain right on the knife edge, as he had been taught, and allow it to teeter over of its own accord with its own inertia intensified over the many hours and days of concentration.
It was like the geysers he knew so well. Water would fill an underground cavern and slowly heat. Over time, the pressure would increase, doubling again and again until the water, transformed from liquid to gas, could no longer be held back and the gouts of water vapor would stream forth.
A hush came over his external senses. He could not hear the wind. The smell of ammonia and sulfur, so apparent before, disappeared almost entirely.
All feeling left his vestigial limbs. Cilia slackened. It felt as if the ground itself was gone from beneath him.
The cellular fires burned hotter, consuming the energy of his body hundreds of times faster than normal, burning right into his core, concentrating on the seed of himself.
An instant of silence, of blackness, of nothingness.
Then shocking pain combined with euphoria as his mind and body toppled over the edge together into a new existence.
The last physical vestiges of his humanity left behind, Nix spread his wings and soared magnificently out of the cave to join his fellow Ascended gamboling in the vast geyser plumes of vapor and gas bursting from the surface of Enceladus there in the shadow of Saturn’s majestic rings.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance, perceived resemblance, or similarity to any other fictional works, to actual events or persons, living or dead, and any perceived slights of people, places, or organizations are products of the reader’s imagination. This fiction is the result of a partnership between a human writer and the character(s) he accessed with his creative subconscious as he raced through the story with them. No AI of any kind, generative or otherwise, was used in any way to write this story.