10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

by Ryu Mitsuse

  Though he sensed that the danger facing him had grown even more urgent, he did not interpret the sudden opening of the hatch as the commencement of an attack.

  By now he was just below the opening, near enough to reach the hatch that hung above him. There was a green dusting of something like rust where the hatch was attached to the edge of the portal. The hull of the ship around it seemed as thin as paper. He looked at the back surface of the door and saw that it was made of some silvery-white material, metallic and luminescent.

  He put his hand on the edge of the opening and took a look inside. The interior of the craft was too dark for him to make out anything. Silence.

  Gingerly, he reached into that dark orifice and felt around. He traced a small circle with his hand, then a wider one, yet touched nothing. He swung his arm around, high and low. Nothing.

  Stepping back, he continued on to the far side of the spacecraft. From there he could gaze out over the entirety of the gray flats. The shallow valley dug out by the spacecraft began directly beneath his feet. He saw nothing resembling an enemy, neither in the valley nor on the flats all the way out to the horizon.

  He wondered if he should leave the spacecraft where it was and continue toward the city. The enemy-presence he felt in his mind had spread across the flats, leaving danger for him in all directions. Could he simply ignore it and continue along his way? Would his enemy allow that? What was his enemy, anyway? It irritated him that he could not recall who or what it was that threatened him now.

  He turned to look at the distant silhouette of the walled city. He knew he had to get there as soon as he could, yet he thought it folly to abandon this confrontation altogether.

  He turned and made his way back to the hatch. The portal lay open like a dark window. Once again, he gripped the edge of the hatch and stuck his round head through into the interior.

  The air inside the spacecraft was as still as it had been before. He flexed his arms, lifting his body up to the opening. Ice-cold air enveloped him. He paused, hanging there for a moment in alarm, then decided it was more dangerous to stay where he was with his arms occupied and pulled himself the rest of the way through the portal.

  It was so dark inside that he could see no more than a meter ahead.

  Dropping down to his knees, he advanced slowly, exhaling as quietly as possible. His chest tightened with fear. He could feel all the nerves in his body extending like feelers, groping through the darkness.

  Nothing! There’s nothing here!

  There was no sign of an enemy—in fact the darkness seemed to hold absolutely nothing at all. Like an insect confronted with danger, he stopped, frozen. His breathing and even his pulse slowed until he became like a stone, one with the darkness and stillness around him—and yet his awareness blazed through his nerves.

  Though there was no enemy here, there was something far more frightening.

  What is going on here?

  The oddness of his situation staggered him. Cautiously, he advanced several meters, straining his senses.

  Suddenly a brilliant light flashed before his eyes. The beam extended like a bolt of lightning, emerging from a point in the darkness to his right and striking left and downward at an angle through the space inside the craft.

  The light burned his eyelids, passing through their membrane to sear his visual cortex. A moment after, another light erupted, crossing the first at an angle. Then the two crossed bars of light began to revolve, hot and brilliant through the darkness. They lit the space around him, first crimson, then orange, then clear green, transforming finally to an incandescent white. Countless particles of light swirled like sparks around him.

  In the center of the brilliance, a cloud of light formed into an enormous swirling spiral. As he watched, it extended fingers of light in all directions, mingling with and impeding the movement of another spiral that appeared beside it. The spirals pulsed like living things, revolving slowly, trailing shining clouds of gas.

  He stepped back, marveling at the light storm before him, feeling that he had seen it all somewhere before.

  The two clouds of light cutting through the darkness were each comprised of billions of tiny particles, and where the two spirals touched, floating bands of deep crimson were overlaid with a silvery radiance.

  The light wavered and flickered without a sound, exploding and imploding before him, and the dark void beyond told of the passage of infinite time.

  That’s it!

  For the first time, he understood the source of his fear. These are two spiral galaxies. They’re colliding.

  One is the Milky Way, the other . . . Andromeda!

  In his heart, he screamed. Each was comprised of one hundred billion stars, with diameters one hundred thousand light-years across and thicknesses of roughly fifteen thousand light-years. They were massive, and they should have been more than two million light-years distant from each other, but here before him the Milky Way and Andromeda were colliding.

  A wave of fear crashed into him, and he reacted. His energy-flooded visual cortex was already overcapacity, but he left it that way, connecting it to a circuit breaker. He withdrew his limbs and hugged his knees to his chest, placing his head atop them; then he ceased to move, as if he were some inorganic object floating in space. His breathing and pulse stopped, his metabolism went into lockdown, and his mind became a void.

  The lights burned more intensely, reflecting against the surface of his mind. He activated a tri-D sensor cell antenna array, silently racing to the far edges of the two galaxies—which by now had transformed into surging currents of pure energy. Still, he detected no presence there. Nothing existed in this void of energy and light. He compelled himself to keep looking, searching in between the stars, and still he found nothing.

  Suddenly the great whorls of light began to melt, their cores becoming violent blazes that rapidly spread. Their energies formed concentric rings, extending in waves out into the darkness. The deep blue of those waves was so bright it hurt his eyes and made his heart grow cold. Over and over again they swept through the dark reaches of space. Finally, one of the waves broke into several pieces, each piece becoming a giant orb of light. Then the cluster of orbs shifted directions—and stopped, silent.

  He wondered for a moment if he was dreaming. It would not have surprised him to learn that he still lay on his side in that pod in the frigid water, asleep. Vague memories of himself before he entered the pod swam beneath his consciousness, yet he had no idea what he might have been, or what he might have done. He could feel his confidence in his own identity slipping away. For the first time, a powerful feeling of loneliness gripped him.

  What am I looking at? What does it mean? Am I dreaming?

  Have I been flung to the end of worlds, where no other life remains? Is there no one here to fight by my side and no weapons with which to do battle?

  What am I supposed to do?

  He replayed the movements of the swirling lights in his mind, feeling cold sweat trickle down his skin. The orbs of light did not move; but they began to grow even brighter.

  Get out!

  Something screamed inside him, the sound echoing through his chest.

  You are in danger there. Get out now!

  Out? But that didn’t make sense. How would he get out of this confinement?

  He felt something, somewhere inside him, despairing.

  You are in danger. Get out now, the voice said with rising urgency. Your time is short. He felt his mind dry up like a pool in the desert, a surface crazed with sudden cracks. Death in the form of brilliant spirals of light swelled up from those cracks with frightening speed. The blazing orbs had grown to twice their original size.

  It was at that moment that a memory came to him, an instant of clarity that had been lost to him until then. With a dark heart, he stared at the silent orbs of light, understanding that his own destruction was swiftly approaching.

  By now, the whirling lights filled most of his vision, spreading ever more rapi
dly.

  I can’t see them moving because they’re coming straight at me.

  He was a target. The voice sounded once again in his mind.

  Get out now!

  The danger was now only an instant away. He turned and saw the hatchway behind him, a white window of light floating in the darkness. He ran toward it, fear swelling up behind him like a great wave. He ran with all his strength, leaping toward the portal.

  An unknown force of incredible strength twisted and warped the dark space around him. Lines of light, like a web of occult electricity, pushed against his body. In the fraction of time that remained before the orbs overtook him he closed the impossible distance to the hatch.

  He shot through the portal like a bullet, plunging down onto the sand. Then he rolled down the slope, dust rising in a cloud behind him. When he finally came to a stop, he lay there at the bottom of the valley, awaiting the next calamity.

  Nothing happened. He extended his tri-D sensor cell antennae as far as he could but detected nothing approaching.

  For a long while he lay as though dead, unable even to grasp his own situation. All he knew was that he was driven by an urgent need to reach the walled mirage on the horizon, and that on his way there he had encountered a strange enemy and only barely escaped its trap. That and one other thing. There was a strange voice inside his head that projected warnings into his mind and directed the actions of his body. All of these things were shrouded in mystery.

  He picked himself up from the ground. Lifting his sand-covered head, he peered back at the silvery spacecraft. The hatch was still open, small and dark. He could not decide whether this was truly some trap of his enemy . . . or was in fact a vessel that somehow contained two entire spiral galaxies. He wondered if he should investigate its interior again or abandon it as the voice had directed him to do. Either way, he understood that the actions he took henceforth would be largely determined by the strange events he had experienced inside the spacecraft. The flickering presence of the enemy he felt within his mind frightened him almost beyond bearing.

  He decided to leave the valley. Cautiously he moved up the slope opposite the spacecraft, irritated that his path had been determined by a mere inanimate object.

  He stood for a while when he reached the top, sweeping his surroundings with his alerted senses. He detected nothing new . . . except, just once, somewhere far across the flats, he thought he noticed something moving. Immediately he focused all of his attention in that direction, but by then whatever it was had already disappeared. It did not surprise him that he was being monitored.

  He pressed onward then, leaving a long trail of footprints across the faded brown sea of sand, remnants for the wind to scatter and the sliding sand to fill.

  He followed the line of the half-buried highway. It did not seem like very long before the spires of the city were towering above his head. The walled city—the mirage he had seen from a distance—was now very real and spread out before him. A collection of yurtlike buildings extended out from the shield wall, and the wall was half covered by a translucent dome that seemed to be half melted, its edge a waterfall of drooping threads and beads of water frozen in place. The yurts spilled out from the walled city in a tangle that showed no order or planning, like intestines from a ruptured stomach. The shield wall above them rose to a height of roughly five hundred meters, he guessed, without a single window or visible seam. It appeared to have been carved from a single piece of some unknown substance nearly ten kilometers in circumference. Above it the spires rose like a tangled forest impossibly high, seven to eight thousand meters above the plain. The spires’ bases were thick enough to form buildings many stories high. Their tips were sharp and narrow, like spears piercing the sky. From their tips and edges bristled antennae and other objects—he guessed them to be radar dishes and laser cannons—in a pattern like some ancient arabesque, their structures seeming to defy the laws of gravity.

  He stood and stared.

  Though he had not noticed it until now, behind the forest of spires the quarter shell of a translucent dome arced across the sky. And there were other shattered domes beyond it, beyond the city, standing empty upon the sand, some like giant inverted bowls, others with flat mesalike tops. He guessed that the dome had once covered the city in its entirety.

  He took in the sight of the great city, storing it in his neural memory web.

  At last he moved in for a closer look. The yurts were half buried in sand, making it hard for him to see inside them. On further inspection he found that the buildings were arranged around a long corridor, roughly one hundred meters wide, in which nothing had been built. Both the buildings’ walls and the roads between them seemed to have been made from an incredibly thin, specialized silicon. One part of the yurt closest to him was scorched where some weapon had opened a hole in its side. He approached and looked in, only to find it filled to its ceiling with sand. Then he walked on down the empty corridor, making for the main wall of the city. He guessed that he was walking along an ancient thoroughfare, perhaps the main entrance to the city in the past. If that was true, there was a good chance it would take him to a gate or some other entrance through the wall and into the city.

  The forest of spires threw a jumbled shadow across the sand around him. He wondered what had inspired the city’s architects to construct such high towers with such sharp points to scrape against the sky. He wondered if the people who lived here had borne the heavens some great hatred that led them to direct even their buildings upward as weapons, protected though they were by a wall and dome. He belatedly realized that he had been thinking about the city only in the past tense. This was very dangerous. Had he not just entered a derelict spacecraft only to find it functioning perfectly enough to unleash a terrifying attack?

  For all he knew, something might be waiting for him in there, buried beneath the rubble and the sand. As long as that was a possibility, there was nothing past tense about this city and the danger it posed.

  A giant door opened in the high shield wall. He crouched in its shadow, peering through the gate. The blowing sand had settled in beautiful windblown curves along the edges of the wall. Other than the drifts that gave way beneath his feet, nothing moved in all that space. Through the city’s entry gate a dark tunnel led toward the other, deeper levels. He peered into its darkness, tense. The danger he’d faced inside the spacecraft again came to mind—clearly this was no place to linger. He went through the gate, the sand rising up to his knees.

  Though the tunnel way had seemed inky black from the outside, once inside it he saw that it was dimly illuminated, its walls the same gray ash color as the world beyond the wall. He looked for the source of the illumination but was unable to find it. He decided that it must come from the high ceiling or the walls or the floor itself.

  The sand stirred like a mist around his feet as he walked. The tunnel was short, opening into a large circular hall with several short radio-tower-like structures at its center, the openings at their tops shaped like the mouths of trumpets. The towers’ circular bases were covered in drifting sand, and though it was apparent these were devices for absorbing radioactivity, it was obvious that they no longer functioned. He imagined the citizens of the city coming in from the outside world, always passing through this hall for decontamination, after which they would enter the city proper through one of several doorways set around the hall. He picked one of them and went through into the ruins of the ancient city.

  He walked among fallen, shattered ceilings, cracked walls and floors, twisted electrical conduits and clogged water pipes, and vast quantities of preserved goods that had been stored for so long they were now nothing but mountains of dust and sand. The destruction Fate had decreed for this place had been so thorough that over the long quiet years, the city had marched to its ruination with an impossibly ponderous certainty.

  Again, he sensed the presence of some enemy—closer this time. Perhaps his foe had come behind him and was even now standing at the city
gates beneath the towering walls.

  For a brief moment he hesitated, casting his senses in all directions, and then he continued his advance. He came across a line of large buildings, each about a hundred meters long. Peering into them through the openings at their sides, he saw that they were crossed with metal pipes like those in a rotary kiln, all red with rust. Many cranes and beltways hung from the ceiling of each chamber, their workings covered with thick layers of dust. A manufacturing sector, perhaps, he thought.

  He climbed to the upper levels of one building along a beltway that hung loosely, its belt dangling in places like shredded paper. From there he passed through countless rooms and halls of many sizes, including a communications hub filled with electronics and a manufacturing facility that seemed outfitted to produce large quantities of synthesized foods. Everything was rusting, half buried in sand, enveloped in silence.

  What am I supposed to do here?

  Fierce doubts churned in his chest. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for, why he was driven to search.

  Feeling empty and alone, he stepped into a small room with a floor buried in sand. There was a large window in one wall, and through its empty frame he could look out on the foundations of the towering spires. He stuck his head out through the window and stared up at the gray sky, then let his gaze fall back down to the dune-crowded streets of the ancient metropolis. There were symbols engraved on the foundation of one of the nearest spires—something commemorating the tower’s construction, possibly. He opened his two foremost eyes wide, trying to read the symbols.

  Two nine zero . . .

  He directed all the energy in his body toward his visual cortex. The circuit breaker that supplied his scorched optic nerves trembled with the load.

  2902 TOKYO

  TOKYO . . . Did that mean this city was “Tokyo”?

  Though the name did not exist anywhere in his memory, it seemed a suitable enough appellation for a place that had prospered in this sector at some point during the thirtieth century.