The Tyrant's Statue Is Still Falling
by Sean Vivier
The tyrant's statue is still falling. It has such a long way to go. There are miles from the uppermost clouds of the gas giant to its core. It will topple for quite a while.
It felt almost as long as the struggle to remove the tyrant from power. We had had to hide low in the gravity well, with ballast sacs all but empty, where the pressure threatened the integrity of our membranes. I had watched friends die in merest hiding. I had watched friends die in battle. I had even seen friends kill each other by mistake. I had killed too many child soldiers to count. I had lost sleep and I had starved and I had bled ballast fumes. I'd bear the scars on my body and my mind as long as I lived.
The others of my kind cheer me. It takes the form of a thrum across their whole outer membranes. The thrum grows so strong that it reverberates through the hydrogen clouds and makes them dance. The longer the statue plummets, the more they cheer. They have much to celebrate.
The People still remember his atrocities. How he allowed the dominant religion to purge their enemies on nights when comets plummeted into the planet - a sign, they said. How his eugenics had made twisted mutants of many of our spawn. How his efforts at population control killed anyone who questioned his decisions. How he made every decision for the economy, giving pleasant work to those who pleased him and unpleasant work to those who disgusted him, without any consideration for talent or vocation, and the resultant want that came from rampant incompetence. How he sent his spores among unwilling mating groups, and how he held unwilling childbearers captive.
