“The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.” 
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

For eons the stars of Dulcyss watched mankind fumble at life, descend into the nothingness of death and they have never intervened. Gaining consciousness and forming bodies, they began ruling over the League of Progressive Worlds to benefit their wayward mortal offspring, the children of their dust. After an abrupt absence of Empress Stars, one has returned unlike her predecessors. Will their children accept the yoke of the Immortal Empire or have they enjoyed their freedom for far too long?

As long as Holland could remember, he had lived with the real and the imagined, light nestled next to the dark, the good alongside the evil and the past running concurrent to the future. Living two lives simultaneously, he believed, was the cause for most of his troubles. Plus having active and ongoing relationships with two imaginary women who had come to represent the two halves of his whole was no easy feat either. If he was falling apart, and there was no shame in that, the complexity of his lives was why.

In his assessment, once all the variables were considered, he should have gotten far more credit than what he did. But this opinion of self was constantly at odds with those of the professionals. The doctors claimed that his dreams, visions and the two women were symptoms of a sleep starved mind.

The doctors were so very convincing. Concerning the woman he believed to be his mother, what he spent the last six centuries recalling was not a memory at all. It was his mind trying to create what never had existed in order to give him some comfort. She had died so early in his life, it was a deep scar that could only be healed by realizing the hurt for what it was.

And as for the girl that he had fantasized about- she was the most unsettling to the doctors. He had created her from thin air and given himself such high impossible standards of beauty, he, the second son of the king, had cancelled three strategically beneficial engagements. When Holland began to hint of the possibility of just not having met her yet, it set heads to wagging and pencils underlining words rather emphatically. It most certainly was not a prophecy; that was the purview of the immortals.

The brain, they said, had more hidden and unknown places than the galaxy they inhabited. ‘Dulcyss is more easily navigated, young master.’ That is what they had said but his charts, the whispers and his intuition said something else entirely. Namely, he was going mad.

It was natural that Holland had forgotten how his mother looked but it was strange there was no picture of her on record. No family portrait, no video, no avatar or hologram. If he did not exist, it was quite possible that he would have concluded that he had no mother at all, but that would have been insane.

In his mind, when he had control of it, she had become something of an amalgamation of every good trait, every fine feature and characteristic of mothers he had watched from a distance. In her absence, he had made his mother gentle, loving, kind, accessibly pretty and selfless. She was the type to give him warm milk before he slept and cold juice when he woke up. She tucked him in at night and woke him up with kisses behind his ear in the morning. She cleaned his face with a licked thumb and embarrassed him to blushes. That’s how he imagined her when he could force his mind to behave. She was a fair haired saint that came to him when he needed her the most.

Except she, he was almost positively sure, never had.

To the doctor’s credit, Holland would readily admit that he also saw things that he knew for fact never happened. Like there was no Condottieri vessel with the name The Raven, even though that dark masted ghost ship haunted him in most of his nightmares. He had checked every ship registry down to the serial numbers of refurbished bolts and scoured logs dating back to the days of the first Condottieri King Vasham and no, no Raven. And if the ship did not exist, then the woman who inhabited it, the woman that he had come to view as his mother, she did not exist either. Especially when all official documents told him that his mother died shortly after giving birth to him.  

“The 345 Session of the Security Council will be called to order. I first would like to, on the behalf of the members of the Security Council, offer my condolences to the Ordans, whose interplanetary commercial vessel was declared missing with all 1,679 aboard believed to have perished. Representative Urcha was personally affected in the tragedy and the Security Council has pledged ships and resources on search and recovery efforts. Let’s stand and observe a minute of silence for those lost in the tragedy.”

Holland was the first to stand in an effort to keep his mind from wandering. The woman that he had come to regard as his mother in his “memories”-if she did not exist then neither did the other woman, rather the girl he had come to love. Holland sighed. That was the worst of it. He had fallen irretrievably in love with a symptom of his disease.

Holland tried to return to the matters before him. He stared at the screen of the Security Council president until the computer complied with his silent wishes and the screen enlarged.

“I will now give the floor to Representative Golan. Mr. Golan you have the floor.” The councilwoman brought her gavel down hard. 

He slumped in to his seat. Sometimes when he thought long enough, the way his mother smelled, her laugh, her smiles, sometimes they were given to him- little glimmers of what she was winking back at him like gold coins at the bottom of a deep well.  But try to go to the doctors with that. That is when they tried to give you the shots.

But she was not forever lost to him. On days like today, days that started off with a preoccupation of the faceless woman and ended with him sleeping for two to four days without waking, he saw what he believed to be his mother and what he saw frightened him. “No.” Holland fought his eyes closing. He did not want to see her today. “I won’t let you.”

Zinmyk, his second in command hissed in his ear. “Mute your damn microphone. We can all hear you.”

How long had it been since his last episode? Holland scraped his teeth on the top of his fist and looked at a calendar off screen as the Security Council meeting droned on. When was the last time he had his visions? When was the last time he slipped in to his paralytic sleep? That’s what the doctors called it in his heavily redacted records. ‘A brief comatose state proceeded by long periods of insomnia.’

‘Not in this month.” He swiped through the virtual calendar with the darting motion of his eyes. “Not in the last.”

Three months? Two days were highlighted and the words “To sleep, perchance to dream...” scrolling across the bottom. He had not slept in three months. “92 days. It’s been 92 days.”

“Representative Holland. Would you like to speak?”

Holland snapped his head up and found all 28 of the Security Council members staring at him. He looked at the frown on the face of the Security Council Chairwoman’s face. Her frilled throat collar fanned out and had turned a bright orange. She was agitated. Looking at her, Holland realized that was probably why they gave her the president position, that mood meter collar of hers.

Holland shook his head. “No, Chairwoman I would not.”

“I would suggest again that members mute their microphones until they have been called on to speak. Representative Golan has the floor.”

Holland nodded and leaned forward in his chair, as if he were eager to hear the same arguments as to why he shouldn’t be trusted. He had every intention of pushing through this meeting without seeing things that were not there. He rubbed his eyebrow over and over with the backs of his fingers, dragging nails over the arch to subdue an impending headache. He stretched open his eyes, blinked, slapped his cheeks and tried to concentrate.

Holland was surrounded by the odd faces of the League, important but ugly talking heads from around Dulcyss populated on the holoscreens floating in and out of prominence around his command console.

The screen containing the Fou representative flew in front of his face. Hundreds of needle thin fangs flexed back and forth in the circular mouth as he pressed the silver button on a thickly wrinkled throat and spoke hoarsely through a stoma, “What is needed now more than ever is transparency. With the Verderae coming to the League, any hidden agendas, any at all, could completely disrupt the unity of the League.” Black beady eyes that covered the face like the seeds in a pomegranate all turned towards Holland.

It only took two eyes glaring at him for Holland to know that he was being accused of something and here there were dozens of them. He knew he should speak but his tongue seemed glued to the soft bottom of his mouth. His eyelids were coming closer together, becoming heavy curtains to eyes that were rolling back. He forced them to come back to proper place and luckily, it wasn’t seen as a near slip in to unconsciousness but disdain for the comment.

“Lord Admiral Xojin.” The Fou refused to call Condottieri emissaries by their adopted Nadiran names as some political statement about past war crimes. “Do not roll your eyes at me. Is that the maturity level that we want as head of our peace keeping forces?”

The comment was ignored as another representative began, “We do not know what the Immortal Majesty is able to see. From what I have heard, she is not only more powerful than the last empress. She has more star sight.”

“Lies. Nothing but Verderae propaganda to keep the mortals under their control. Let us not be swayed from our original agenda by the words or the presence of the star race!”

Representatives of the League that agreed gave their backing to the last statement. Green lights bordered the screens of the majority in agreement.

The lights hurt. Holland looked away. He should have signaled his agreement as well but his head dropped and bobbed. Painful throbbing along the band of his brow kept him from lifting his head back up again. It was as if he was anchored there, staring at his clenched hands just beyond the superimposed virtual touch screen and keyboard of his lateral console. Pressure surged towards the back of his eyes and slowly built behind his forehead.  

“Lord Admiral, you are on screen,” Zinmyk whispered in to his ear piece. The sound traveled along Holland’s jaw.

Holland opened his mouth, popping his joints as he scratched at the soft place where his ear and bone met. If only he could rip out the implant.

“Lord Admiral! I just got a private message from the chairwoman asking if you are ok.”

Every Condottiero alive knew the answer to that. No use in pretending. Holland put both fingers in his ears and opened and closed his mouth like a fish.

What did Zinmyk expect? He had spent the last three months of his manic phase. Sleep had fled from him and left him alone in the dark. His mind conspired against him, whispered with voices familiar but with the words of a stranger. It showed him things that never were, things that he hoped would never be. It had been 92 days of chasing shadows and now he was beginning to dream with his eyes wide open.  

He veiled his eyes with a hand and pretended to read a report on his bottom console. If he fought hard enough, perhaps he could stave off the attack for a couple of minutes longer. Then, he promised his body, then he would sleep for a day or two but not now.  

His eyes closed.

The laws of genetics put to rest the hope that his mother was fair headed. His hair was blacker than spent engine oil and the woman in his nightmares did not have fair hair either. Black hair, darker than dead space, hung to her waist.

The Fou dignitary was not satisfied and began to inquire further about the Condottieri positions.

“We demand a more up to date detailing of your ships’ coordinates, Lord Admiral Holland. I’m sure I speak for the majority here but the Fou are not comfortable with the amount of artillery brought over Nadira nor are we completely sure that you have given us all the coordinates to all your ships. We believe an untold number of them to be cloaked and therefore unaccounted for. How are we to be sure?”

“Because that’s what I told you,” Holland mumbled before unmuting his microphone. “We have submitted our formal declaration of positions and will do so again daily before, during and at the completion of the operation. We can do no more to assuage your paranoia.” It was not often that Holland got to accuse others of what plagued him, so he took special pleasure in it.

“What assurances do we have that the Condottieri are not using this transport of the Verderean empress to strategically maneuver their ships in to protected airspace positions around Dulcyss?” The Fou representative’s fangs began to rise and fall in a wave that circulated one row after the other or maybe Holland’s mind was playing tricks again.

Someone spoke for him. “Baseless accusations…”

“I will finish the statement. I will finish it!” The Fou’s fangs stood up straight as he swiveled his fleshy head. “I have three minutes left…”

“Three minutes too long.”

A mixture of green and red lights flooded Holland’s room as representatives fought.

There had been no milk. There had been no juice. That part of his past he made up. If his visions were actual memories, his mother never ate and yet she had always complained of hunger as she clutched a concave belly. “Xojin, my darling son. You haven’t had the taste yet but you will. And when you do…” She brought her thimble capped fingers to her lips and whispered, “I’m so hungry.”

If his visions were real, if they really had happened, he had barely been a toddler when he had last seen his mother. They were always in a room full of silver silk thread hanging from the rafters and no light. He had no memories of being taken care of, instead it was he that was the caretaker in the relationship. He seemed to have been especially preoccupied with feeding her. The doctors told him that it was his subconscious depicting how he continued to nurture this part of his disease.

Perhaps but he “remembered” grabbing her newest plate of food and placing the cold bread against her lips. He “remembered” begging her to eat. The room they were in aboard the ship that didn’t exist was full of plates with food growing stale and moldy. Holland could see them, stacked eye level to his toddler self. And there he was, pushing a hard roll against her soft lips, opening his mouth as he wished she would.

She had slapped his hand and before the stinging started, his mother had clutched him to her breasts and dug her fingers in to his scalp. She had terrified him with how much she loved him. “What do you want me to eat, Xojin? What?” She looked around, eyes wild and not even regarding the plate filled with bread, dried fruit and smoked meats and hard cheeses. 

Her voice, as he remembered it was as warm and thick as heated honey when it left her lips. He remembered loving her voice but hating her words. Even to a child’s mind they were incoherent, not thought through, rushed and raving mad. Each one was a mile marker of just how far in to madness she was slipping. 

He had put his small hands on her fevered face and forced her to look at him. She placed her slender pale hands over his and smiled. “Oh, Xojin, I cannot eat you. Though I do love how children taste.” She fell upon him as if she might bite him and tickled him until his throat was sore from laughing and his sides were bruised from her silver tipped fingers.

She had been joking, right? She did not truly eat children. Holland shuddered. In some dreams his mother appeared sitting among a pile of corpses while babies screamed, cried and played with the body parts. What was that an expression of?  He would have to remember to ask the doctors the next time. On second, better thought, he’d shove that one down until it drowned.

Holland got the impression that his mother had been especially beautiful even though her features still escaped him. Lips. Her lips were cherry’s blood red as she spoke to him. Her hand would comb through his hair, mercilessly yanking out the tangles her rough embraces had put in. He could still feel the torn strands fall and tickle down his shoulders.

She had not been gentle or kind. She had hurt him. Her touch always started off as pain and thinking back on it, he didn’t know if it ever grew softer or if he had just grown harder and gotten used to it.

Perhaps he had watched his mother starve herself to death and his mind wouldn’t allow for that reality. Perhaps this psychosis was a little pearl shell wrapped around the shard of glass of his mother’s untimely death. In a room, in a ship that didn’t exist. Holland smoothed his hands over his face. Don’t lose yourself yet.  -

How he had loved her. His body back then seemed too small to contain it all.

“I am sure Representative Holland has something to say on the matter?”

Another screen came in front of him. “We Arrom trust that the Condottieri have been forthcoming with the information on the Verderean security detail.”

A new screen fought for his attention.  “Then the Arrom can be fools if they want!”

The zooming screens were not helping him with their rapid movement, lights, and menagerie of faces, ranging from tolerable to nightmarish. Holland quickly changed his meeting attendance to audio only.

“The Arrom aren’t within 65 AUs of Nadira and according to these dubious looking ship placement charts, they are not within a distance to be the least bit concerned of a Condottieri attack. Nor do the Arrom have a tense history with the Condottieri like so many of us. There is nothing on your planet of any value, respectfully.”

“You can’t say anything that comes to your damn mind and negate it with respectfully!”

There was laughter that escaped shocked mouths and hisses of indignation.

His second in command bellowed in Holland’s implanted communication device. “Are you not going to say anything?”

“You will do just fine, Zinmyk. I cant’.”

“Lord Admiral, you need to.”

“I am on a brink of another episode.”

“Can you not inject yourself again?”

“I’m tired of it, Zinmyk, so tired of it.” Holland pressed his tongue against his right molar and stopped the internal communication. He was beginning to feel dizzy and disoriented. He sank in his chair and eased the back of his head on the neck rest.

“Representative Golan is right. For every five Condottieri ships there should be a League peacekeeper. Does that count the cloaked ships? I would like the Condottieri to again, on the record, verify…”

Holland’s second in command, Admiral Zinmyk roared his way in to the conversation. “This was already discussed, documented and promised…”

“And we are to believe the Condottieri have revealed all of their intentions and ships. What about the MaruBah incident?”

Admiral Zinmyk growled, “The operation against the Army of the Empress was for the preservation of the League and voted for unanimously by the Security Council. At the time the Nauq were not part of it. And you should be glad with your tiny fleet of 500 ships that you were given a seat in a Security Council…”

 “Order!” The head of the League Security Council banged her gavel and Holland ‘s throbbing brain was going to escape the sound by seeping out his nose and ears.

“Order indeed,” the rounded even voice of League Moderator rose above and quelled the arguing. “Order must be maintained in our discussions. We do not have time to fall in to petty dissent amongst ourselves when the Immortals fully expect as much from us. We must show the Immortal Highness that democracy and peace have replaced her empire and war. The Condottieri have not only pledged their loyalty and their ships, they have pledged their votes to the League. None of what we wish to accomplish happens without them…”

Holland slapped his hand against his flat screen and left the meeting. He stumbled off towards his bed. Maybe if he just lay with his eyes closed for five minutes, he lied to himself.