The Astrologer's Telling

By Therese Arkenberg

Six stories explore the ways and the price of survival when everything seems lost:

An astrologer loses her stars but not her faith in them. A woman watches as her lover and her planet transform with new life—or die with it. A young man seeks revenge for unwelcome mercy granted in a world where every breath is agony. A group of artists discovers the strange loveliness which is all that remains of all the other worlds.

At the end of things, people display selfishness, exhaustion, but also connection. Friendships are betrayed and nurtured. If hope is gone, there is still determination, curiosity, and beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Therese Arkenberg
• Release date: Jun 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393383185

Therese Arkenberg

Therese Arkenberg has done her best to earn that checkered work history so popular in writers’ biographies. She’s worked at a library and as a cashier at a craft store, been a philosophy tutor and volunteer income tax preparer, and interned at two international nonprofits. She makes her home to Wisconsin, where she serves as co-president on the boards of two local organizations, runs an editing business, reads almost too much, and writes. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Analog, Ares, and the anthologies Thoughtcrime Experiments and Sword and Sorceress XXIV. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and the occasional love story. Some of her darker work has been described, to her surprise and secret pleasure, as horror.

Book preview

The Astrologer’s Telling:

Stories of Worlds Ending and the Cost of Survival

Therese Arkenberg

The Astrologer’s Telling: Stories of Worlds Ending and the Cost of Survival

Copyright Therese Arkenberg 2019

Cover Design by Therese Arkenberg, using a base image from Unsplash

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and locales are figments of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real incidents or persons is pure coincidence.

CONTENT NOTICE:

This collection of stories explores the ways people make sense of tragedy, cope with loss, negotiate survival, and face the worst-case scenario. Many of these stories contain depictions of death, including death by suicide. In our own, real lives, resources are available to confront such challenges. Hotlines, including chat lines where you can communicate by text, are available to offer emotional support in a crisis or outside of one (you do not have to be currently suicidal to use a hotline). In the US, dial 800-273-TALK (8255) to reach out.

Table of Contents

The Astrologer’s Telling

Drown or Die

Arnheim’s World

Sibial’ in Exile

The Last Veteran

Following the Mercy Man

Outlive

Acknowledgements

The Astrologer’s Telling

Ihave loved the stars too dearly

to be fearful of the night

-Sarah Williams, The Old Astronomer

They left when Behein began dying in earnest, but long before it went entirely cold. After the sky had gone dark, but before the last of the sturdy and shade-loving trees in her neighborhood’s park had withered and died. She would have stayed longer, but it was not her choice. Her father and her aunt who was now his new wife insisted, and she was young enough—just a year short of her majority, but young enough—that she must go with them.

In a way, those last days were the most beautiful of all, for after Behein’s sun had gone dark, Shebeth could always see the stars.

Afterward she could remember little about the refugee ship except that it was crowded and dirty. It was as if the warden of her mind knew what belonged in it and what didn't, and those memories clearly did not. And if her mind had a bedroom perhaps, a secret inner chamber for only the most intimate and beloved things, that was where the skies of Behein in the final days rested. Many nights she held them close like a lover, and like a lover, they gave consolation. 

At the bottom of the single trunk her aunt-mother allowed her, because space on the ship was precious, Shebeth packed the best of her star-charts and Tellings. Perhaps in other trunks, her customers were packing their own copies, perhaps not. She would have liked them to, but was not presumptuous enough to hope.

Neither was she presumptuous enough to dislike their new home: four rooms plus a lavatory in a brown stone apartment on a brown stone apartment block on Chidah. She heard the city's name several times, but always forgot it. The rooms were warm in summer, but not hot; cool in winter, but not cold; sweet smelling after her aunt's attentions; and serviceable. They weren't the townhouse with its green courtyard back home, but that was hardly their fault. In the same way, Chidah was not Behein, and Shebeth's father’s new spouse was only her late mother's sister and not her mother.

Shebeth kept the house with her aunt, and when her father helped his wife get a job managing software at a mechanized silverware plant—Chidah was famed for its precious metals and what it could do with them—she kept the house alone. She befriended neighbors, one family who was native to the city, two that had come from different regions of the same eastern continent, and one other which was from Behein. She turned twenty-one and stayed with her family despite her majority. And then, on a quiet night when both her parents were working late, she drew back the curtains and looked out on strange stars.   

Chidah had no moon worth the name, only spare, pale chunks of rock that floated through the firmament or drifted across a daytime sky as if ashamed to be intruding. Its stars, so near the galactic Core, were thick and bright even through the dust and smoke of an industrial and mining atmosphere, so thick and bright that it took her time to learn one from another. But in time she did, and in time she would know more, and by the time her father came home at an hour closer to dawn than sunset she knew what she would do next.

I am going to become an astrologer again, she told him.

He hitched his coat from his shoulders and it slid to the floor. But there was no denying her, not in this, and he knew it, so he only nodded and smiled, saying nothing. In the morning she went to the library—her family couldn't afford subscriptions to specialized information channels or databases—and read about the stars of Chidah, the shapes they made, and what they signified.

Chidah's constellations were not as fine as Behein's—they formed simple shapes with unimaginative names, like Spilled Wine and Long-Tailed Dog and even one called Fish Fork (she told this to her aunt after a long day at the silverware factory and they laughed together). But Shebeth learned them all dutifully, and read, watched, and absorbed the limited information available on Chidahen astrology. The time came for her first Telling. She made it for the woman from the Davalese family downstairs.

The woman had been born in the third month of spring, beneath the round, bright sign of the Space-Faring Ship. The planet Komann, Chidah's twin in all but its poisonous atmosphere, was in the sign of the Long-Tailed Dog. Together, they marked her nature, a sweet and dissatisfied one.

Moru, which rules love, is in the house of Tibb, the Murderer, Shebeth explained, her finger on the chart pointing to one of Chidah's more colorful constellations. Your romantic desires are crossed—perhaps eternally.  

The woman sighed, and they both were glad her husband had not come to the Telling.

Other planets and their aspects suggested that the woman was creative, or at least had the impulse, though she hadn't had the energy to express it since her harrowing emigration from Daval six years earlier. And the conjunctions spoke well of financial matters.

Shebeth refused payment for her Telling—she had done it for the joy of practicing her art once more rather than for any gain. But several months later, when the neighbor's business in pressed flower stationary picked up, fourteen murrahs were discovered in an envelope slipped under the apartment door. Shebeth put them in the aluminum tin with the money her aunt-stepmother dipped into for errands.

BEHEIN’S SUN WAS VISIBLE from Chidah, a tiny yellow spark caught in the web of milky stars. It would be visible for another thousand years, as the light it had sent out like a lover’s message traveled through the void, until the void ran out of light and revealed the emptiness now in its place.

It wasn’t part of any constellation, and was of no interest to an astrologer. In time Shebeth forgot to look for it.

IN THE FOLLOWING MONTHS, a story was printed and reprinted in Chidah's fiction journals and digests. It was a fantasy, following the adventures of a time traveler. He went far into the future, millions of years, to see that at the end of everything as the universe slowly withered and cooled, mankind had become little more than wage-slaves who punched cards and tapped keys and greased machinery as sluggish and dreamless as themselves. By his understanding of time, the traveler knew this future was inevitable, yet upon returning to