by Ryu Mitsuse
Orionae raised his eyebrows. “I was placed here merely with the purpose of transmitting what I had seen with my own eyes to future generations. That is all.”
For a long while, Siddhārtha carried his burden in silence. At last he reached the long hall that led to the city gates. Through the dark arch of the gates he could see the vast desert beyond. The air was as cold as ice and bore the faint metallic smell of ions.
Just a little farther and we’ll be free.
At that moment, Siddhārtha spotted a single figure standing as still as a statue in the darkness beneath the arch of the gates. The dirty white cloth in which the figure was wrapped made an audible sound as it slapped against his bare legs in the wind.
Siddhārtha’s enemy had known he would have to pass through the gateway. Already the man was taking aim.
In an instant Siddhārtha thought of a plan—but it had one drawback. He could do little holding Orionae, and abandoning him here would be tantamount to murder. Quickly he shuffled backward, burying his heels in the sand. He was left with no choice. Placing Orionae in the shade of the wall, he prepared to make a decisive counterattack.
“Siddhārtha,” Orionae whispered. “Be careful. Your enemy is a very dangerous man. He has already waited here five hundred years for your arrival. He is the very hand of Shi.”
“Wait, Orionae. Don’t tell me that he is what you saw—was he the destruction of the city?”
“Siddhārtha. What I saw was a great host of angelic beings—but now I wonder if they were not merely a phantasm.”
“A phantasm?”
His enemy slid forward across the sand.
With sudden clarity, Siddhārtha understood that his foe was not merely trying to kill him, but Orionae as well. Of course—clearly the man had known well ahead of time that Siddhārtha would attempt to escape with Orionae. He had left Orionae alive so that he might catch them together.
My enemy is not this man before me.
“My enemy is Shi!”
Siddhārtha looked around in desperation. It seemed that the world around him had grown dim, and within that gloom a certain death was waiting. He had no time! No time to remove the electrodes from Orionae’s head and switch his supplementary processors to full battle mode. Nonetheless he began to do what he could, slowly removing the electrodes, adjusting the circuits connecting his processors.
His enemy was taking his time, observing Siddhārtha’s every movement, waiting for the right opportunity to let that crimson flame burst from the maser in his hand. He grinned as he drew nearer, revealing yellowed, rotting teeth; Siddhārtha heard him muttering, but all he could make out was the sound “. . . zareth.”
At exactly the same moment, Siddhārtha and his enemy sprang into action, each taking a sudden leap to reach a better position. An instant later Siddhārtha noticed a girl with clear eyes standing directly between them. Her body was lean and supple, like a young boy’s, and a glow like that of the evening sun suffused her face and form.
His enemy shouted something. A crimson beam of fire from his right hand pierced the girl’s body. She laughed soundlessly.
“You have heard the name of Asura?” the girl asked. “She stands before you. Now tell me: where is Shi?”
Again, the beam of fire sliced toward the girl. She extended her hand, and the beam veered off sharply, vaporizing a section of wall behind her.
Siddhārtha’s enemy shouted something and retreated several paces as swiftly as a shadow retreats before the sun. All expression faded from his chiseled, bearded face. His eyes, blue as shallow water, gazed without emotion at Siddhārtha, then shifted back to rest upon the girl.
“So it is true after all,” the man said, nodding. His dirty rags slapped noisily against the bare skin of his thighs.
A gust of wind rose and the girl leaned into it, letting it support her. “What do you mean?” she asked as the wind dropped again.
The question seemed to shift the balance of their enemy’s mind back toward aggression, and he began sliding to one side, moving into position for another attack.
“I recently received word that in addition to my primary target, I might find two other enemy elements waiting for me. Until this moment, I had no idea who those two might be. But now I see it is you and the cyborg.”
Hatred darkened the man’s sunken eyes. His toes flexed, and he moved forward. Then he stopped, raising one finger to point at the girl.
“A-A-Asura. Why have you come here?”
She fixed him with a glare. “Jesus of Nazareth,” she addressed him, ignoring his question. “How long have you been waiting for us?”
“Ah . . .” He nodded slightly, considering. “Since I began my vigil for you in this barren desert already eight hundred years have passed. Yet I have been waiting for my moment since three thousand years before that. It has been a very long time.”
His words rang with expectation—clearly he foresaw a swift end to his long, arduous duty. There was confidence in his look even as the dark shadows deepened over the man’s small eyes.
“You—” Jesus jerked his jaw toward Siddhārtha. “Siddhārtha, you called yourself? It seems that you’ve unconsciously chosen your old name again. Fascinating, that.”
“My old name? What are you talking about?” Siddhārtha asked, rashly turning to face his foe full on.
“Look out!”
The air split in two, and a deep red luminance painted ground and sky. Dust burst up in lines across the sand. Then the sand itself became steam, and the ground began to shimmer like a mirage. Asura flitted into the air like a feather, but the crimson beam followed her in a boiling column of fire that pierced the sky. A blast wave erupted, striking the desert like a giant hammer.
Several of the lofty spires above them broke and fell down into the city below. Where they landed, new plumes of sand rose in mushroom clouds. The faded red sky shifted to lurid orange, clogged with numberless whipping particles carrying death and destruction. The chances of escape from that apocalypse dwindled rapidly to almost nil. Their enemy’s assault was as perfect as it was complete.
Siddhārtha lay half buried in sand, still as a lump of stone. His tri-D antenna opened slightly, shedding a tiny stream of dust.
He could sense his enemy nearby—everywhere, it seemed.
No—there he was, not more than a hundred meters away, moving from left to right across Siddhārtha’s field of vision.
I wonder what he’s up to?
He resisted the temptation to fully extend his antenna. In the quiet that now reigned, even the slightest movement could draw attention from a considerable distance. The release of kinetic energy was one of the easiest to detect. It would be far too dangerous to reveal himself; the last attack had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt his enemy’s hideous strength.
So what is he doing?
Unable to restrain his desire to know, he let his antenna push another ten centimeters above the top of the sand.
Unthinkingly, Siddhārtha tensed every muscle in his body.
A thousand meters ahead of where his enemy slowly made his way across the flats was his destination—a small black shadow atop a dune. Asura.
Jesus of Nazareth was moving slowly, leaving footprints in the sand. The flames and explosions had singed his already tan skin to such a brownness that he threatened to disappear into the desert landscape altogether.
Jesus was almost out of Siddhārtha’s range when his path began to curve as he headed directly toward the top of the dune where Asura was standing.
The sky and land were lit with scarlet for a moment. Then as Jesus began to climb the dune, the world faded again to its former monotone, and an icy wind blew in between the swirling flames. The brightness of the flames waxed and ebbed. Even the rapid energy shifts and massive discharges generated by the Nazarene’s weapon lost much of their power in this world near death.
Siddhārtha searched around for any sign of Orionae, but could not detect him anywhere. Finally, he fully extended
his antennae, reasoning that his enemy’s attention would be fixed on the far-off dune where Asura was standing.
As he did so, he felt a terrible and urgent need to act. I have to distract him!
Siddhārtha struggled out of the sand to stand. “Hold! Jesus of Nazareth!” he cried, yet his voice only traveled from the top of his throat back down his neck into his own body, reverberating up into his ears, but never reaching the outside air. Siddhārtha panicked, realizing that if he did not draw at least half of his enemy’s firepower in his own direction, Asura would not be able to withstand another of Jesus’s attacks.
Jesus of Nazareth stopped abruptly, then slowly lifted his right hand.
Suddenly, the far edges of the flats erupted toward the sky without a sound. Higher and higher they rose into the gray atmosphere, creating a valley with impossibly steep sides, while at the same time the edges of the sky plunged toward the ground. At the limits of Siddhārtha’s field of vision, sky and land joined together, fusing into a single curved wall. Lighter than shadow, more indefinite even than the void, the flats and the gray sky formed a giant cylinder, as if the very laws of geometry had broken. Far out in that vertiginous space, like a fragile image in a kaleidoscope, he could see Asura looking very small.
The howling of the wind had ceased entirely, leaving a sickening emptiness in its place.
“Stop! Do not do this!”
Siddhārtha sprinted through the deathlike silence, lacking the time to consider why Jesus of Nazareth grew no nearer no matter how much he ran.
As Siddhā rtha sped across the sand, the battle structures in his body prepared for combat. Palisade tissues—resembling those in a plant, but more closely akin to the electroplaques of an eel—linked his processors and his core reactor to his weapons units; discharge panels on his shoulders opened like unfolding leaves. Automatically, his metabolizer revved up to maximum capacity as the circuit from the reactor connected to the roots of the panels. In an instant the leaves were ready to unleash their deadly stores.
Siddhārtha did not hesitate. Still sprinting, he released the high voltage inside his condensers in a single blast.
With a flash sky and land turned ghostly pale. The electromagnetic waves pulsed toward their target, tracing a circle of pure blue ions around Jesus of Nazareth.
Less than a breath later, Siddhārtha struck again. This time, the gray sky turned a dark leaden color. Seen from within, all the objects inside the great cylinder lost their individual colors, becoming translucent. Then, a circle of ultramarine light began to spread, enveloping all.
Siddhārtha watched as his attack ran its course.
The shining ring of the electromagnetic wave was rapidly spreading in all directions, losing its coloration as it went. It dispersed like a broken circlet of chain links, some sections clinging together, others severing completely until all had disappeared. Siddhārtha spotted Jesus’s emaciated back standing just beyond the fading circle of light.
He shook his head and resumed his mad dash across the sand.
While he ran, the gray sky and the vast desert ground into motion, moving with increasing speed until all was rotating around him. Gaping vortices formed in the sky, while the flats transformed into a faded spiral that spun at a frightening velocity. The only things not carried by their motion were Siddhārtha and the man from Nazareth.
Siddhārtha’s thoughts raced. Why, when everything around us is spinning at such a furious rate, am I and Jesus alone still able to stand? He felt cold sweat trickling down his back as understanding slipped from his grasp.
Then suddenly he understood: he had been pushed into a separate space from the one where Jesus and Asura stood—a fold in space-time, or a separate plane entirely.
“Let me out!” he shouted with all his strength. “Let me out of here!” But all his voice accomplished was to vibrate the air that closed around him.
Yet Siddhārtha’s shout reached across the swirling tumult like a single ray of light, piercing Asura’s ears.
WHEEEEEEEEN
A high-pitched vibration, too high for even Asura’s sensitive eardrums to detect, caused a slight stirring in the air. It pressed in on Asura’s body, shimmering like a mirage, assaulting the cellular structure of her body via the sensory cells at her nerve endings, causing her nucleic acids to begin to ionize. Now the space around her began to revolve at a frightening speed. Outside that whorl, Jesus shone like a primary star with a comet tail of streaming light.
Gradually Asura’s form grew more transparent. The spinning sky and land and the brilliantly shining form of her enemy were as light that coursed through her body, spreading beyond her as she dissolved.
Stretches of the rapidly spinning flats erupted in incandescent fire; fragments of molten magma rained down, trailing tails of white smoke.
Satisfied with his attack, Jesus flicked a switch on the ultrahigh frequency generator in his hand.
Deep silence returned. Several meters ahead of where Jesus stood, a number of wide, shallow trenches radiated out through the dunes toward the horizon, scars where the sand had been evaporated by the high temperatures of the ultrahigh frequency vibrations. Wisps of white smoke still rose from the trenches in places.
Ultrahigh frequency vibrations had the power to neutralize cellular activity, scramble nerves, and destroy cellular structure altogether. It seemed highly unlikely that Asura had been able to escape the attack.
Jesus of Nazareth strode across the flats, crossing a kilometer of scorched sand. When he reached the top of the dune where Asura had been standing moments before, the ashen dust lifted around his feet like smoke into the wind. No trace of Asura’s presence remained. Along the horizon beyond the dunes, the lead-colored sea spread out flat and fallen. Behind him, the ruined city stood like a giant gravestone over the flats.
An ice cold wind cut through the man’s heart. Of his appointed tasks, he had completed the first, which was also the most difficult. Yet he was left feeling a slight dissatisfaction that it had ended so easily. His dissatisfaction mingled with an uncomfortable awareness in his mind that his enemy was hiding out there, somewhere. Doubts assailed him. Surely such a long wait could not be rewarded with such a short battle. And it had been such a one-sided fight, besides. He wondered whether this was really the end of it, whether his victory was truly complete. With some effort, he restrained himself from plummeting into despair and made for his second target, heading toward the place where the waves broke against the shore.
Sand drifted like smoke, and the wind whistled like a flute around him. The sea was pressing toward him—baring its white fangs at him. The spray wet the long shore, turning it black, and drifted in a fine mist onto his tattered garments.
His enemy had hidden here, beneath these waters. He had known for a very long time that his enemy would likely come from here.
And yet, contrary to his expectations, his enemy had come all the way out of the sea and into the dying city.
Far-off to his left, he spotted a massive, angular object resting atop the sand.
“There you are.”
He quickened his pace as he approached. The object was at least fifty meters to a side. It appeared wider than it was tall, though that was likely because its base was buried under the sand. Long years of erosion had left countless fine cracks and pockmarks on its surface. It looked entirely out of place on the vast, unbroken land beneath the flat gray of the sky.
An oval hatch was open at its upper end. From this orifice a cocoonlike cylinder of silver extended to the ground, supported on two metallic rails.
Jesus took one look at the silver tube and realized it was a free-form lift. Whatever had been contained within this giant structure had passed outside via this lift.
“So for five thousand years, you waited here. Perhaps this was once a mountain or an island. The sand covering your incubation tank was washed away, blown aside, until nothing remained but this flat land, and your vessel was revealed.” Jesus of Nazareth shook his head.
“We both waited for so long.”
He was overcome by a strong desire to look inside the strange vessel.
He wanted to see what sort of technology, what sort of devices had kept the life-form that called itself Asura alive and growing for five thousand years—the processors and power sources, the memory inserters, the oxygen generators, and all other such devices. He thought briefly on the vast amount of oxygen and nutrients a life-form would need to consume over such a long period of time. Of course, none of these necessities could be gathered along the way during a journey through the void, and attempting to store and transport that much material would be an inelegant solution, to say the least. Which left only one option: the designers of the vessel had used some sort of atomic compositing device to manipulate matter and create the needed stores from the air. The devices that controlled that process would be extremely delicate, allowing for no margin of error whatsoever; managing them would require a processor’s judgment, guided by a powerful neural memory web. Which was how his enemy, the destroyer, had managed to wait here for so long.
His second task was to ensure that this incubation tank was never used again. He turned the beam filament of the ultrahigh frequency generator toward the towering object in front of him. When he squeezed the trigger, the atmosphere around him twanged like a slender piano wire. Ripples spread on the surface of the object, quickly becoming rapid waves. Moments later the giant object vanished altogether. A faint mirage shimmered in its place for a moment until that, too, disappeared. It all happened without the slightest sound.
Another incubation tank was surely out there, somewhere beneath the waves, but he had no way of finding that.
The sea stirred, pushing toward Jesus’s feet. It drenched the edges of his tattered robe, and he disliked the feel of the cloth clinging to his legs. But for a long time Jesus stood unmoving, looking out at the sea.
He had done all that Shi wanted. The realization of God’s will must always be done to the fullest, and it gave him great honor to have played even a small part in bringing God’s designs to fruition. It was, in fact, the entire source of his own volition to live.