Vigil
For our fourth free story of 2025, David Bowles brings us a new Midwife story — where mistakes have been made. Read more of David’s Midwife series, “Relocation,” and “Dismantling” in our archives as a paid subscriber.
~ Julian and Fran, January 26, 2025
January’s stories — by E. Catherine Tobler, Margaret Ronald, Marissa Lingen, and David Bowles — will all be free-to-read, and we hope that you’ll enjoy them and share them. However, it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.
Vigil
By David Bowles
I
The Praniman Protectorate spread burgeoning in the Bhuri star system, a testament to what sapient species could achieve when guided by mutual respect and a wise avatar of order.
But the Keeper disapproved. It was offensive enough that the Midwife nudged events away from destruction, chaos, entropy. For her to actively shape a civilization was unconscionable. So he watched for centuries until he found at last the loose thread that could unravel the Praniman Protectorate with a single tug.
Kris Malisorn.
Kris had just been selected seasonal chair of the Penrot Upbakorn Admin Panel. Though the role rotated regularly, he was giddy at the added duties and deference.
As the announcement was made, he reached to tap open a channel to his partner so he could share the good news. But his hand paused halfway as he remembered. Fah had requested the dissolution of their partnership ten days ago. Though disappointed, he had agreed with a numb smile.
“Of course. I only want your happiness.”
“And I yours,” Ingfah Tassananakajit had replied as a housing construct had registered the dissolution and begun loading her things onto a transport. “We’ll find more suitable partners soon.”
It was regrettable their time together had ended, but among humans in the Protectorate, such changes of heart were respected. Though Kris felt loneliness, he had a counselor who checked on him and family members who supported him.
Still, emotional muscle memory made him imagine Fah in his life, a phantom limb of love. Yet that ghostly incompleteness was not debilitating. It didn’t make Kris irrational or angry.
However, it would have, under more . . . natural circumstances.
It should enrage him, the Keeper reflected as the engineer moved forward with his artificially placid life.
When Kris had been just a child, an unusual development of his brain had been discovered. It was the sort of genetic fluke that would have, in humanity’s past, led to various mental disabilities, including extreme forms of psychopathy.
The boy’s family had been relieved when the Protectorate implemented a treatment plan that involved reconfiguration of neural pathways. After a brief spate of antisocial behavior, Kris had become a healthy child like all others in that society.
He should have become a killer, the Keeper mused as he watched the adult Kris, who was monitoring the spinning black hole that provided a quarter of the energy consumed by the Protectorate.
Let me nudge him back into his natural state.
II
The Keeper has been watching this universe for many eons from its most shadowy corners, infradimensional nooks and crannies that his people discovered billions of years ago. That ancient race has since slipped into oblivion—as is the destiny of all life, all organized matter—leaving only one of their number behind to keep the long vigil until the end of everything.
But the Keeper has reinterpreted his task down the ages. Not only would he accompany the universe in its decline and death throes, he would also undo the work of any who attempted to halt that inevitable dissolution. Thus had the Keeper come to obsess over the Praniman Protectorate, a type II civilization that existed only through the efforts of his nemesis, a human woman born 6,500 years ago.
Mahtlactli Omeyi Olin. The latest being to assume the title “Midwife,” with its arrogated duties of guiding the universe toward some ill-considered apotheosis.
Olin needed to be humbled, to learn a lesson about the inexorable mortality of the cosmos.
Therefore, on the fifth night of Athikamat in the 888th year of the Protectorate—October 13, 9005 CE, in the calendar of long-dead Earth—the Keeper reached into normal space-time. Shifting his trunk and prehensile tail into baryonic matter, he placed them on either side of the head of Kris Malisorn, who lay deeply asleep. With a sighing twist of his appendages, the Keeper undid the corrections made to the man’s brain.
“There,” he whispered as he withdrew. “As you were meant to be.”
III
It took a few weeks for the cerebral reset to make itself felt.
Kris at first began to experience a vague distaste for his coworkers, a feeling that was exacerbated by a heightened awareness of their harmless yet frustratingly foolish traits until it became disdain and finally disgust. Even with his new status and the temporary perquisites it implied, Kris found himself deeply dissatisfied with all his interpersonal relationships.
After a month, Kris could no longer pretend there wasn’t something wrong. But he worried about his counselor’s possible reaction to the malaise that was flooding him, so he instead contacted the one person he knew he could trust, the only person whose imagined face didn’t repulse him. His older sibling, Gamon.
The two met at a café in front of the main secular temple on Khabfa Station, dedicated to the Bodhisattva Dhatri, also called the Midwife, who shepherds sentient species toward enlightenment and the universe toward godhood.
Kris pressed his palms together and inclined his head before sitting across from Gamon. She was ten years his senior, so he had no memories of her being tentatively but incorrectly assigned male as a child. He’d reached awareness after she affirmed her gender and was recognized as kathoei. To him, she had always been his big sister. This morning, she was wearing pastel civilian clothes rather than the uniform of a health provider.
“Suasti astu, elder sibling. I’m so happy to see you.”
Gamon returned his greeting. “So am I. Please, sit down. You look . . . terrible.”
Kris dropped into a chair across from her, pulling his black bangs back with a trembling hand. “I’m not sleeping well, Phi Mon. My head is so full of useless speculation and weird concerns that I just lie in bed for hours, torturing myself.”
Gamon patted his hand. “It’s because of the dissolution, isn’t it? You must really miss Fah. Or do you feel anger toward her? That’s normal.”
Kris shrugged. “Maybe. But I’ve started to not like most people around me.”
Gamon paused to consider. “Perhaps you’re projecting your negative feelings. How long has it been since you visited Level Seventeen? You loved nature as a child.”
IV
On his next day off, Kris took a stroll through the station’s botanical gardens. Though the bright flowers struck him as insipid and vain, he was drawn to the underbrush, where insects sought unsuspecting prey and vines strangled saplings.
As he sneered with twisted delight at the mottled leaves and other signs of decay, Kris spotted a flash of gold among the foliage. Stepping closer, he parted some fronds to get a better look.
What he saw made him stumble backward. His hands trembled as a golden raccoon-like animal ambled toward him, cocking its angular head.
It was a lingfai, from the nearby planet Haichiwit, of the sort often kept as pets. Kris had gotten one for his fifth birthday. Maemot, he had named her. She’d escaped the family compound once, when in heat, and had come back pregnant. Later, after she’d birthed a litter of kits, Maemot had heard the loud whirring of an approaching neighborhood cleaning bot and had rushed out to attack what she perceived as a threat.
The beautiful lingfai had been crushed, its eyes popping from their sockets. And that was when the troubles had begun for Kris, whom the family had found screaming as he cradled the dead animal in his arms.
Three decades later, the sight of another such golden pet overwhelmed him. He dropped to his knees, gripping his temples.
Inside his mind, something cracked.
V
Kris couldn’t remember returning to his apartment, but he was slumped at the dining nook when he regained awareness.
Perhaps it was all a dream.
Then he looked up at the meal-prep area and gasped.
It was another lingfai. No. Not just another. Maemot.
And her eyes were gone.
In their place swirled pools of darkness.
He burst from the nook and rushed out of the apartment, running as fast as he could, leaping from slidewalk to lift to promenade, climbing the levels to the observation deck that allowed inhabitants of Khabfa Station to peer out at the spiral of red-shifted light being ever devoured by the local black hole.
Sitting on the railing that ran along the base of the transparent dome was Maemot, her empty eye sockets staring at him accusingly.
Kris could feel their draw, like the gravitational pull of the black hole outside.
Inescapable, once you fell within its invisible grasp.
Tugging at his mind, unraveling it strand by strand.
Dragging him toward oblivion.
VI
No matter where Kris went, Maemot was waiting. He pointed the lingfai out to others, but she was invisible to everyone except him. At work, she perched on a shelf above his station, and he could feel her eyeless stare, as dark and absolute as the void of space.
Weighted down by that bleakness, Kris began to hear a whisper. Indistinct, but always chittering in the background. Even in the quietest of moments when the only sounds should have been the soft whooshing of life support and delicate thrumming of the station, a hoarse susurration crowded the corners of his awareness.
When he finally dared to look straight at her, Kris found that Maemot’s triangular jaw was open impossibly wide, her maw as black as her eyes.
The lingfai’s maddening presence kept Kris on edge. He couldn’t focus. His many errors made his team members question his aptitude for his new role.
Tension built as he stooped his shoulders and averted his gaze from the omnipresent golden creature. Soon his head ached without ceasing, a dull throb at the temples and base of the skull.
Existence was becoming intolerable.
VII
Of course, the eldritch pet was the work of the Keeper. Its quiet voice was his.
Such would have been his visions, he mused, had no one interfered. Such would have been his spiraling decline.
But the Keeper wasn’t alone in his vigil. Station Wellness had detected unusual patterns in the public behavior of Kris Malisorn. And three different individuals had submitted queries about possible feral lingfai on the station, as each had been asked by an unidentified person matching Kris Malisorn’s description whether they had just seen one of the golden marsupials.
A lingfai without eyes, to be precise.
Station Wellness, seeking clarity, reached out to the counselor assigned to Kris. She had not seen him for the better part of a month. Her messages had been met with the same response: his new responsibilities had Kris very busy for the moment, but he would circle back to her when his schedule permitted it.
A careful review of his work patterns revealed that he was lying. So Station Wellness contacted his older sibling, Nutrition Specialist Gamon Malisorn. Upon hearing the various reports about her brother, she began to weep.
“Take him into protective care,” she pleaded. “You have no choice. It’s like what happened when he was five. He experienced a . . . psychotic break, I believe it was once called . . . and hurt several children at school before receiving treatment.”
VIII
The following morning, a week after his mind had cracked, a team consisting of four experts from Station Wellness and Station Safety converged on Kris Malisorn’s apartment.
Upon awakening, Kris noticed Maemot glaring at him from atop the toilet through the open door of the hygiene nook. Her mouth was open, and she was muttering at him.
This time he could understand her.
To end the pain, his dead pet told him, you must end the world.
His door chimed.
“Kris Malisorn” came a voice across the speaker. “Please open the door. We’re with Wellness and Safety. We want to have a conversation.”
They will make you suffer even more, Maemot said. Years on end. Without surcease.
Kris leapt from bed, rage and despair reaching a flash point in his soul.
“No. I won’t let them. You’re right. If I can’t be happy, then no one else should be.”
Maemot now crouched before an open maintenance panel, whisking her ringed tail.
Then you know what you must do. Where you must go. I shall clear the way.
IX
Using the illusory lingfai as a lure, the Keeper led Kris through the labyrinthine conduits within walls and between decks, unsealing hatches and doors until they reached the control room for the Penrot Upbakorn, the massive device that harvested energy from the black hole.
Maemot kept shouting at team members on the other side of the door as Kris overrode safety protocols and bombarded the ergosphere with nodules.
But as he reached to shut down the retrieval process, a woman stepped out of nowhere into the control room.
“Kris Malisorn,” she wheezed, out of breath, “stop what you’re doing.”
His hand hovering over the touch pad, Kris couldn’t keep from gasping.
It was her. Dark skin, short hair, white blouse, colorful skirt, scuffed sandals.
“Om manipadme hum,” Kris whispered out of ingrained piety. “The Bodhisattva Dhatri.”
She nodded, reaching her hand toward him. “I prefer ‘Midwife,’ but yeah. It’s me. Not a jewel from the cosmic lotus, just a woman from a pocket dimension, trying to steer the universe in the right direction.”
“How—” Kris began.
“Did I know what you’re up to? The Protectorate was pretty safe when I last checked a century ago, but I’ve lived a long time. Seen a lot. So I had my helpers leave subroutines monitoring all the more dangerous systems. They just alerted me to your sabotage. Kris, you’re about to hurt a ton of people.”
“Good,” he rasped. “I’m hurting. I want to die. But not alone.”
“You don’t have to hurt. I can heal you. Just . . . don’t move, okay?”
Light blossomed from her uplifted palm, wreathing his head. A tingling caressed his scalp, sank through his skull, and Kris felt the headache slough away. The darkness weighing down his thoughts lightened. Dread receded.
And the enormity of what he was about to cause hit him so hard that he moaned.
“Oh no. What’ve I done?”
“Nothing that I can’t reverse. Just, please, put your hand in your lap.”
For a moment it seemed Kris would comply. But then his eyes widened in sudden shock.
“If you’ve healed me—WHY CAN I STILL SEE HER?!?” he cried.
And with an unhinged howl, he slammed his hand against the touch pad.
X
Normally, when the Midwife attempts a course-correction for a civilization, she spends years preparing. Months, at least. Worst-case scenario, she has a few hours to find allies and distribute resources.
But this crisis had caught her completely off guard for the first time in thousands of years. There had been no indication from parallel universes where time ran faster that the Bhuri star system was in any danger.
Which could only mean—
Alarms began to blare all around as the lighting went ominously red. A display near the Midwife indicated that energy being generated in the ergosphere by the excess nodules would in mere minutes crescendo past anyone’s ability to halt it. The runaway effect would trigger a black hole bomb as powerful as a supernova, obliterating everything in the star system.
She took a step toward Kris, meaning to restart energy retrieval . . . but an eyeless lingfai floated down from the ceiling to hover before her.
And behind it, like an elephant shrouded in mist, she could perceive her enemy.
“You!” she snapped. “Reveal yourself, Destroyer!”
Maemot faded into nothing as the Keeper stepped from his hidden realm. His bulk filled the rest of the control room between the Midwife and Kris Malisorn, shaggy gray with four thick legs and an agile trunk, like a mammoth from long-dead Earth. Instead of tusks, however, a single horn spiraled from between two large black eyes.
The Keeper’s long, prehensile tail wrapped itself around the neck of Kris Malisorn, who gibbered in manic fear.
“I destroy nothing, Olin,” he said, not deigning to use her title, preferring the feigned familiarity of her name. “I nudge our universe back on course. Nature, red in tooth and claw. It shrieks at your creed, dear. Yet you continue with this useless struggle. Remember what your people’s greatest poet said: ‘None becomes jade, none becomes gold. Like paintings, we fade away. Like flowers, we wither.’”
“Don’t quote Nezahualcoyotl at me, monster.”
“He understood the essential senescence of the cosmos. Civilizations crumble. Worlds die. As did your precious Earth.”
The Midwife almost snarled, her normal poise difficult to maintain when faced with the being who had cost her so much. Cost the galaxy so much.
The warning sounds came louder all around. Only two minutes remained before the bosonic feedback reached a destructive, irreversible threshold.
The Midwife considered stepping out of the universe and then back in, closer to the panel where Kris was now screaming amid the claxons. But she knew the Keeper could prevent the opening of portals in his immediate vicinity. And there was no getting past him. She had tried direct conflict with him before. It had nearly broken her.
All she could do was plead.
“There’s nothing natural about the destruction of this entire star system. Let me stop you. Just this once.”
She took a deep breath. Her next words tore at her mouth like shards of glass.
“Please, Keeper.”
Her enemy laughed, a low and sinister sound. “Ah, such melodies. Yet I cannot allow it. You see, this time is special. This loss will be worse than the last, because you have overseen the founding and development of a civilization. I shall take it away from you because it should never have been yours. And thus shall I continue, Olin, until you shatter under the weight of despair like the scores of midwives before you who crawled to me at the end, begging me to unmake them.”
Fifty seconds left. The Midwife had only one choice.
Limit the damage.
XI
When the bodhisattva winked out of sight, the monster tightened its grip and spoke in a dispassionate rumble. Kris stopped screaming and listened.
“Witness, Kris Malisorn, futility at its most desperate.”
On the viewscreen, the woman popped back into the universe, floating between the station and the black hole. The monster used its trunk to tap at the controls. The claxons fell silent, and the view magnified, centering the bodhisattva, who Kris now saw was surrounded by a faint force field.
Beyond her, the black hole reached super-radiant instability and exploded. Flinging her arm in an exaggerated arc, the bodhisattva caused a massive disk to form in front of her. Desperate gestures made its diameter expand at dizzying speeds. The Keeper zoomed out, showing that the circle of darkness was some four thousand kilometers across.
“It is a portal,” the monster explained, “to an empty universe those of her order call the Void, but which I name Completion. Our reality must one day reach that final form. Watch as she blasphemes its perfect vacuity.”
The rebounding energy slammed into the disk. Some was absorbed, but much streamed around the edges of the portal, converging beyond the station, which shuddered violently at its passing. The Keeper closed sensors on the Midwife again—her struggle was fierce, the air inside her bubble ignited by such extreme forces.
Then she winked out of reality, and the viewscreen switched to a view of the expanding energy. She reappeared beyond it, creating another disk, even larger than the last, but the black hole bomb pushed around it.
And around the next.
And around the next.
Impossible that the Keeper could continue tracking her on the viewscreen, but track her he did. Her body was literally falling apart, eaten away by gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear decay run amok. Swarming nanobots constantly renewed her, keeping her alive, but they couldn’t outpace the destruction. She became not a bodhisattva, but a fleshless symbol of the Keeper’s creed—the inevitability of death.
Yet she would not stop.
Kris understood, his heart breaking, tears streaming down his face.
She couldn’t give up on them.
She loved them too much.
But her love was not enough.
Her bubble was at last flooded with a riot of colors. Birds. Thousands of them. Seizing her. Pulling her out of the universe.
The remaining energy slammed into Bhuri, the star at the heart of the system. And from it cracked whips of fire that shredded the artificial rings encircling it.
“Ten billion people,” whispered Kris as the conflagration spread, devouring worlds.
“Weep not,” intoned the Keeper. “They should never have existed.”
“Neither should I.”
“Indeed.”
The tail squeezed, snapping Kris Malisorn’s neck, and he existed no more.
The Keeper lingered, keeping a brief, silent vigil.
Then he faded into the unseen.
XII
For weeks, the Midwife lay numb and healing in a verdant valley, cradled in the mossy embrace of her beloved, the sentient planet Oneltishellellan, which whispered encouragement and hope into her grieving mind.
“I don’t know if I can carry on, my dearest,” she muttered at last. “Perhaps I should remain here. Leave the work to another.”
“It is hard,” replied the world around her, tender and soothing, “to watch them die, the plants and animals and thinking folk that sprout and mature upon me. Yet, precious one, it is with their leaves and flesh and bones that I build anew, each cycle more complex, better interwoven, closer to the dream that I shared with you when first we communed. I am bereft and hopeful, all at once and without end. It is the weight of the work we do, beings such as you and I.”
Olin nestled herself more deeply in the loam and grass as mycorrhizal tendrils caressed her. “Ah, such wisdom and compassion. That’s why I love you, Oneltishellellan. Thank you. I know what I must do.”
Soon she emerged onto Khabfa Station, not far from the temple dedicated to her. Thousands of refugees, the few survivors of the black hole bomb, camped before the structure, cared for and fed by the local residents.
The first to see Olin was a nurse—Gamon Malisorn, older sister of Kris, doing all she could to counter the unspeakable genocide her brother had inflicted.
“The Midwife!” she cried, dropping to her knees, overcome with grief and shame.
Everyone fell silent, hands clasped together in heartbreaking hope. The Midwife moved among them, power bleeding from her palms, healing each and every one. Then she reached Gamon and pulled the woman to her feet.
“Never kneel,” she said, her voice cracking. “For you are worthy.”
She turned to the people the Keeper regarded as worthless, as an impediment to some twisted ideal of natural selection.
They were beautiful. They were the embryonic divine. They were her purpose.
“You are all worthy.”
Taking a shuddering breath, the Midwife forced herself to smile.
“Now, let’s rebuild.”
#
Thank you for joining our journey this week.
David Bowles is a Mexican American author and translator from South Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. Among his multiple award-winning titles are The Prince & the Coyote, The Witch Owl Parliament, and The Smoking Mirror. His latest books are the graphic novel The Hero Twins and the Magic of Song (illustrated by Charlene Bowles) and the romantasy Hearts of Fire and Snow (co-written by Guadalupe García McCall). David presently serves as the president of the Texas Institute of Letters.
“Vigil,” © David Bowles, 2025.
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