The Far Side of the Sun
Amal Singh
He waits for his mother, cradled by a basket, wrapped snugly inside a satin cloth, gliding on the river. His chest glows with the fire of a thousand suns. His earrings are droplets of golden sunshine. He is immortal and he carries the armour of the sun itself.
He is the son of the morning.
◆◆◆
The impact of Karna’s starship was as brutal to the ground as it was to the vehicle itself. A lightning bolt scar ran through the alien field, splitting into branches and making fissures through which smoke oozed out. The Hammerborn’s guns, its navigation system, and its chassis were all but gone. A lot of fires spewed out of a lot of cracks. Inside the metal chariot, Karna awaited his fate.
His breath came in gasps. Fog left his mouth as the temperature inside the ship dropped rapidly. Outside, the planet was frigid and unforgiving. There was no sun here to pray to.
Karna pressed a couple of buttons. To his surprise, a screen popped to life. The ship was still alive, if only barely. A broken, robotic voice crackled back into existence. “Karna… Karna… we have fallen, Commander.”
“Shalya,” said Karna. “It’s alright.”
Karna winced and let out a gasp which was all pain. He ran his hand down his left side. His fingers met something warm and gooey. His own blood, oozing out and mixing with the liquid running through his suit lining.
“How far is he?”
“Not far,” said Shalya. “Karna, I still think an effective dialogue is the solution.”
“Dialogue, you say?”
“He’s a reasonable man.”
“He has vowed to kill me.”
“Vows are broken all the time.”
Karna sighed. “We’ve failed. I have failed us… everyone who counted on me.”
“As your assistant… it’s my job to tell you that...” the static beeped, and sputtered, then went dead. A deafening silence, one which rips your ears with a black tinnitus, followed.
“Shalya… Shalya…!” Karna’s voice quivered, at the edge of shattering completely with grief of his confidante’s demise. A faithful charioteer through many battles. A friend.
He slammed his fist at the panel with whatever strength he had. But the panel was as dead as dead could be. His chest heaved and his arms fell limply by his side. Karna closed his eyes.
Outside, the sky turned blue.
◆◆◆
He walks in shadow, knowing he is different. But he hides it. He can’t die by means of mortals. Only a sunspear could wreck his armour, no more, no less. He knows he is an outcast, but he does what is just. He does what is right.
Under a sunlit sky which warms the meadows of the East, he becomes a forever pilgrim. He knows not that he’s born out of a divine union, and he seeks the truth.
A kingdom awaits him. A kingdom which calls another warrior its true king. A warrior who is a brother to him.
He knows not. But he still walks.
◆◆◆
His eyes opened and there was no sign of the enemy. The world blurred, then blurred some more. He shook his head. The dashboard panel was still lifeless, and the window-pane had developed frost. He grazed his hands over the wound — a rough scrape, no longer liquid. It didn’t hurt anymore. Was death close-by?
Karna tried to hoist himself up to see if he was hurt. He unchecked his safety belt but it refused to budge. He first gave it a gentle nudge, then a pull, then a yank. On the third try, the belt gave in to sheer persistence.
The cockpit was, luckily, mostly undamaged. He could move around and examine.
In the twisted geography of the mangled warship, up was down and right was left. It was mostly dark. The only light was coming from someplace to his left. He reached inside his suit pocket for a pin-torch and moved towards the small light source. The place he reached, holding the meagre light the pin-torch supplied, was a panel which showed how functional the engines were.
A blue light flickered in the panel.
A light of hope. The reserve engine, at eighty one percent, was functional. The damage miraculously hadn’t reached there. But could that number pull an entire craft out of harm’s way? Could eighty one percent pull the Hammerborn?
If Arjun, with his cavalry, with the full might of the Pandavas, got here, in the frigid, remorseless nowhereland, then he was dead. He won’t be able to make the guns work. Escape was the only option.
Karna grunted. Escape wasn’t in his blood. He was too proud, too righteous.
But things were the way they were. He got to work.
◆◆◆
He seeks the solace of war, never given his due. He is an unwitting participant, and no songs will be written in his name. He is brilliant, but never seeks glory. He seeks acceptance from a mother who doesn’t want him.
But acceptance has a cost. A cost he pays with his life.
Brothers meet brothers in a field rank with blood. One by one, in a rage fuelled by anguish and rejection, he finishes the enemy off. In the process, he decimates a child, in whom he saw himself, a mirror personality.
The child was a warrior in the field, and his legs spun as he fought with a chariot wheel.
The son of the morning shoots an arrow through the heart of his nephew.
◆◆◆
The alien world twisted. Like a giant snoring beast turning in its sleep, it turned too, revealing its many wonders. Frost melted, the cracked and barren ground which was smeared with snow now glistened with moisture. Then it heated up, and up, until it became too hot.
Inside the Hammerborn, Karna rationed his breaths. The engine sat at seventy eight percent capacity. His hands shook and shivered as he made calculations on a notepad, alternating between a pencil and his own fingernail, crossing out equations, doing more integrations. Then he threw the pad and grabbed a spanner. He’d snapped the casing of the engine shut with a duct-tape and done more minor repairs. But his calculations showed him, neat and clear, that seventy eight percent capacity wasn’t enough to haul the guns with the warship.
Karna didn’t like his options. The force-field around the ship drew power from the main engine. The bright, shimmery ring-like field protected the Hammerborn from asteroid debris while in space, and missiles during combat. The force-field was Karna’s pride, and he had earned it only after completing the riskiest battle training module. And now it would have to go.
He shifted his seat to the area from where he would normally operate the field. A round dial shaped like the sun, which when twisted from the right to the left, would vary the field’s intensity. When in combat, the force-field also acted as a weapon, incinerating anything it came into contact with.
However much he disliked doing so, Karna had to let go of the only armour he had on him.
“Fuck… Fuck this damn war,” he barked. He rubbed his hands together. The cabin wall went out of focus, then came back. Should he take a deep breath? Who knew when oxygen depleted? What was the line between breathlessness and death? What was the meaning of anything? It was all dark.
He soldiered on, holding his breath as he twisted the spanner.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
The lights of the control panel dimmed. After a groaning sound, the force-field went silent, permanently.
Above, the blue skies became littered with black pinpricks. The pinpricks grew, became ball-like, and approached the ground. A deafening roar made a rent through empty air, followed by the piercing sounds of more warships as they raced forward. One warship among the countless others was not ordinary. It was shining silver, mammoth, shaped like a crescent moon, a slicing, cruising chariot of death, driven by a soldier who was here to finish things off.
The silent planet was no longer silent.
◆◆◆
Warriors fall, all around him. The battlefield is death-quiet. His chariot moves laboriously ahead, then sinks on the ground made soft by blood and sand.
And fall he does. His wheel is stuck and he can’t, with his immense strength, pull it out. Veins pop out of his arms and sweat glistens his forehead in the torrid heat of Kurukshetra. He sees his brother and his god-charioteer in front of him. There’s doubt in his brother’s eyes, but the god is always right.
“‘tis but your duty, Arjun,” says the god. “Perform your duty.”
◆◆◆
Karna heard it all.
He sped towards the cockpit and strapped himself in. He slammed the main-panel and luckily, this time, it lit up. At seventy-one percent fuel, he could manage the liftoff.
His ears rang. The windowpane which a moment ago showed him vast plains, now showed him nothing but smoke. He was surrounded. They were here. He was here.
Karna still tried. The chassis shook, left and right, right and left. The floor groaned with activity.
Then, the smoke cleared and he saw ten warships with their guns aimed at Karna.
It was over.
The navigation panel spluttered to life with an incoming ping. Karna waved his hands over it. A baritone rang through the cockpit. The voice of his brother — Arjun.
“Karna, any last wishes?”
Dialogue… Shalya’s last words floated through the fog of his brain.
“My brother, are you really going to kill me after all?”
“Affirmative.”
“You’ll kill me and go against your own code? What will the Pandavas say? Their greatest soldier has no integrity?”
“You’re one to talk about integrity.”
Karna knew what was coming. Which was why he needed to be in utter control of his senses. The guilt had wrecked him and he now had to face his brother. Tell him the truth.
“Brother, I have to tell you something.”
“Don’t call me brother with that traitor mouth of…”
“I did not kill your son.”
The silence that descended through the valley was world-ending.
“Lies,” said Arjun.
“Please… you’ve cornered me. All your guns face me and I have dislodged my only weaponry from my warship. I am alone and I am scared. I wouldn’t lie.”
Karna could tell from the silence that Arjun was mulling it over. Good.
Dialogue was working.
“Arjun, brother… Abhimanyu fought bravely in the skies. The spacefarer formation was impenetrable, but he tore through it… it was magical. It was war-poetry.”
“And yet… and yet… you shot him from behind.”
“No… that’s where you’re mistaken. The missile that hit Abhimanyu’s warship was not mine. It was Captain Drona’s. The old man is still in grief over his actions. He was your teacher. And I… in a moment of foolhardy bravado, declared through the TramWeb, that I had killed your son. I was scared and I sought… ” He gritted his teeth. This was the moment of his truth. He’d waited all his life to say this. “I wanted to be accepted. By anyone. ANYONE! That day I felt if I could take the responsibility, I would be shown glory and riches by the Kauravas. I… I felt I could be free.”
Karna paused there. A massive weight lifted off his chest. He felt lightheaded, and the vision in front of him quivered like a gossamer. Was this the fine thread between breathlessness and death? “But in war… Nothing is free. I have come to accept that.”
“They called you the Son of the Morning. You were… still are… better than me. Where did everything go wrong…” Arjun paused, as if weighing the next word, “…brother?”
“I wish I knew the answer to that, Arjun,” said Karna.
A great pause built between the brothers, bigger than the chasm in the ground.
“I won’t kill you,” said Arjun. “I will, however, accept your unconditional surrender.”
“That, I am afraid, I can’t do,” said Karna. “I have spent all my life doing this ugly dance of choosing sides. I am an outcast after all. Neither here, nor there. Not Pandava enough, not God enough, not man enough. I don’t know what I am. And this time, I have chosen something, and I’ll stick to it...” Karna coughed. The windows in front of him blurred completely. His fingers went numb, and his body felt like quicksand. “If you can accept that, brother Arjun, then leave me be...”
“If I leave you here, now, you’d die anyway. And that still will be the most merciful end for you. But I, too, have chosen a side brother, and I intend to honour that.”
“Then I have no choice…”
“What… what are you doing?”
Karna spent his last breath firing up the reserve engine. As he did so, all his strength left him, as the oxygen inside the cockpit depleted completely from the damage which was done to it. Through the window pane, Karna saw guns revving up, ready for fire. His own guns were on the ground.
The Hammerborn lifted off the ground like a giant, hunkering beast, and sped towards the enemy battalion. The incoming fire was crass, brutal, metallic raindrops of death. But the Hammerborn sped forward still, unflinching, and met Starborn. One beast collided with another and erupted in a giant ball of flame.
The ground spasmed and then opened up, devouring man and metal alike.
◆◆◆
Arjun listens to his charioteer, and complies.
Karna curses his own kindness, his own selfless act of letting go of his god-armour. He is mortal again, fallible again, and the battlefield is merciless. His left hand grips the wheel while his right signals for Arjun to stop. He cries in denial as his brother’s arrow speeds towards him in less than an eyeblink and pierces through his heart. It is unfair.
But all war is unfair.
Amal Singh is a writer from Mumbai, India. His short fiction has been published in venues such as Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, Mithila Review, among others.