by Ryu Mitsuse
Jesus of Nazareth knelt in the driving wind.
“Great Shi. My Father who art Heaven. I have done as you commanded. Please, forgive the sinning Samarians. Summon them to you. Shi, the world is tired, blind, already moving toward a funeral procession of its gods. Shi, Father who art in Heaven. Already there are none who live upon the land, none left to worship you. Shi, will this world never again know her former days of glory?”
The words of his prayer were lost in the wind. Gradually, shadows deepened across the sky and land, while the wild white waves danced and sprayed.
“Shi! How can it be that man never earned your forgiveness? I know we are sullied by evil and sin, that our hands are stained with blood, and yet . . .”
The direction of the wind shifted, and an icy cold breeze struck the back of Jesus’s neck.
“Shi . . .”
All that was left to him was prayer now. Yet he swallowed his words as he felt the presence of something behind him in this wasted world of wind and surf and sand.
Who’s there?
The presence was almost inorganic in its absolute stillness. Whoever it was was not even breathing.
Who are you?
Drops of cold sweat trickled down the Nazarene’s back like tiny insects made of ice. He could feel his mouth grow as dry as the sand beneath his feet.
He realized he was in a place of absolute death. Were he to stand, his life would surely end.
So what do I do?
His metabolizer was running at maximum capacity. He felt the tingle of the insulin as it spread through him, thinning as it reached his hands and feet. Each passing second brought him closer to death.
The wind ceased. All sound vanished. In that instant, he ran, swift as a shadow. Something in Jesus’s chest felt hot, as though he had been burned. He still had two small cylinders in his pocket; he fished them out and tossed them over his shoulder. Then he pulled off the magnetic field generator wrapped around his left arm, pressed the switch, and threw it on the ground beneath his feet.
Can I escape this?
He was not entirely without hope.
The ultramarine light of a lithium nuke suffused the flats. A massive white ball of flame expanded with hideous speed, boiling the sea and fusing the sand beneath it. Nearly five hundred meters in diameter, the fireball suddenly inverted behind Jesus as he ran, becoming a crater in the ground, swirling with energy. Like a giant wave crashing against an iron seawall, the fireball surged and swelled, trying to break through an unseen barrier.
Glumly, Jesus admitted to himself that his attack had probably failed to destroy his enemy. His opponent was clearly as well protected as he was. Ensconced within his own barrier, he would make his way through the sea of flame created by the nuclear explosion and launch an assault on the barrier that Jesus had erected on the flats. Still, even if his enemy had not been defeated, his assault would surely be slowed by the blast.
It was only another five hundred meters to his own pod—suddenly a despairingly long distance.
A small black object slid through the sky, white flame ejecting from its anterior: a hand-fired missile. He waved toward it with the laser gun attached to his wrist, and a brilliant arc of light split the sky, swallowing the missile entirely.
My enemy lives!
The black hatch of his pod was open before him. Something exploded behind his back, sending crimson flames streaming over his head. Stinging particles of sand followed, searing the air like glowing embers, but even as they began to strike around him he made it through the hatchway.
The hatch slammed shut automatically behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the dim interior light, he saw two silhouettes in front of the pod’s luminescent xenon wall.
“Now, you will take us to Shi.”
The figures’ cruel smiles turned Jesus’s despair to loathing. Trying to keep his spirit from crumbling altogether, he peered furtively around the inside of the pod. His two enemies slid forward from either side, their expressionless eyes glittering like stars.
They have me, Jesus thought, and his confidence guttered like a candle flame. Then, in his moment of greatest terror, he spotted something—there was still a way for him to escape! Leaping several meters in one bound, he reached out to the subspace positional circuit on the far wall.
In an instant, Jesus of Nazareth had vanished.
“Where’d he go?”
“He’s escaped!”
Siddhārtha and Asura exchanged bitter glances. A moment’s hesitation had cost them their advantage. There was only one thing left for them to do. It would be highly dangerous to pursue their enemy now, yet with every second they delayed, their ultimate victory became increasingly distant and less likely.
Siddhārtha reached out through the hatch to pick up Orionae and drag him inside. The cyborg’s protruding forehead cast a deep shadow across his largely featureless face.
Asura was focusing, expanding to her full height, as though listening for some far-off sound.
There was a panel near the ceiling on one of the side walls from which a transparent case extended, housing three multifaceted electrodes. On the floor below it sat a turntable platform large enough to support several humans. The cylindrical space above the turntable glowed with a faint reddish light. The rhythmic sound of a rotating scanner emerged from the structure nearby.
Asura nodded to Siddhārtha, who thrust Orionae’s body into the reddish light upon the platform, then jumped onto it himself. A fraction of a second later, Asura joined them. The sound of the revolving scanner increased in speed until it sounded like a storm.
Immediately before Siddhārtha lost consciousness, the image of a great galactic spiral burned with incredible brilliance inside his mind. The swirling light was made up of two distinct parts, one horizontal, the other vertical, and the waves of fusion energy erupting where they met soundlessly swallowed the darkness.
Unthinkingly, Siddhārtha screamed, and the sound of his voice held his consciousness for the briefest of moments. He remembered having seen this sight before.
One of the spirals is the Milky Way, the other is Andromeda.
He wondered briefly how he knew those names, yet decided almost as quickly that it did not matter. All he understood was that something terribly destructive was happening to these two galaxies, and that this destruction was not a natural phenomenon, but something caused by an external power.
. . . Yellow 17 in the New Galactic Age, the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 received a directive from Shi—
Siddhārtha’s waking mind melded with the void around him, and he was lost.
Night gathers at the base of the torch.
Darkness seeps into the traveler’s chest,
And raises there a flag of fear and shame.
“Emergency Sirocco from Ai System Planet 3-3-3,” a neutral voice by Siddhārtha’s ear whispered. “Leave the spaceway immediately. Emergency Sirocco from Ai System Planet 3-3-3. Leave the spaceway immediately. Too many unknown quantities. Repeat, there are too many unknown quantities.”
Complex symbols flashed on the metallic panel before him, signaling some sort of emergency. A large part of his head still felt frozen, hard as a wall of ice, but his consciousness was rapidly recovering.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The three travelers slipped out from between the multifaceted electrodes. They were standing by a long tube that stretched off into infinity. A short distance to one side was another tube—one of the spaceways the voice was talking about, Siddhārtha presumed.
He looked around at the space around them. “What a long narrow room,” he began, then he shook his head. “No, this is a very large room. As large as a spacecraft’s storage hold.”
The wall running beside the spaceway was little more than a partition. Above it, there was a considerable amount of empty space between the top of the partition and the ceiling high overhead, from which white light fell, the color of the noonday sun.
Siddh�
�rtha extended his tri-D sensor cell antenna as far as it would go, observing what lay beyond the partition.
“Well, there are thousands of these spaceways here. I can see several people moving in the distance.”
“Travelers from the Ai System, please report to survey department nine in sector four. Travelers from the Ai System, please report to survey department nine in sector four. There are too many unknown quantities. Repeat, there are too many unknown quantities.”
Asura’s eyes darted around.
“Asura,” Siddhārtha said, “I daresay that announcement is meant for us.”
“I would imagine so. This business about ‘too many unknown quantities’ sounds extremely dangerous.”
“Ai System Planet 3-3-3 likely indicates the third planet from the sun. But what is an ‘emergency sirocco’?”
Asura frowned. “Perhaps these are the closest words for whatever it is they mean. Or perhaps the pronunciation is merely similar.”
Siddhārtha shook his head. It seemed that the autotranslator in his outer ears was terribly confused. It was having difficulty transposing whatever language they were hearing into standard solar speech. The language was so unusual that he lacked samples of it in the neural memory webs inside his supplementary processors. The two exchanged glances again.
“Let’s get out of here.”
There was a small door on the side of the hall. No one was in sight.
The soft yellow light outside hit the ground at a slanting angle, reminding Siddhārtha of the light in the evening when a rainstorm is close.
“What is this place?”
The surface of the space into which they had emerged was covered with needlelike plants standing about thirty centimeters high and deep indigo in color that painted the faces of the three travelers with reflected light.
On the other side of the open space stood a line of windowless, boxlike buildings. Giant spires, about five hundred meters tall and covered with strange, winding patterns rose from the rooftops.
“Let’s cross and go inside one of those.”
The needlelike plants were remarkably brittle. Merely stepping through them caused them to snap, and something like crystalline powder fell from where they broke. They reached the far buildings and looked back to see that the building they had left was massive, at least a kilometer to each side.
“What is this place?” Siddhārtha muttered again to no one in particular.
“A good question,” Asura said. Even she had no idea where they were.
“Do you think Jesus of Nazareth is here somewhere?”
Sunlight spilled from around the edges of the large building they had left, casting long shadows across the bristling tops of the indigo plants. Siddhārtha looked between two of the closer buildings, spying a wide flat surface beyond that sparkled with a silvery light.
“Is that an ocean?”
The three hurried between the buildings up to the lip of what appeared to be a vast crater. Down the slope from where they stood stretched a smooth, silvery plain apparently made of some hard material that was neither metal nor glass.
“What is it?”
“No natural formation, though I see no seams, nor any openings for ventilation. Perhaps something spilled out of the ground here and hardened?”
“Like magma?”
The three looked around again. Behind them, their view was cut short by the row of buildings.
To the front, the curious flat surface stretched at least one hundred kilometers toward the base of a ring of towering mountains that cast a dark silhouette against the light yellow sky.
“It’s as though they took a valley one hundred kilometers across and put a lid on it. Perhaps to build a city below?”
“There are easier ways to fashion an underground city,” Siddhārtha said.
“Perhaps the city was here first, and they constructed the barrier over it.”
To defend against an attack. Siddhārtha and Asura understood the value of defense with painful clarity.
Orionae, however, stood saying nothing, his round head reflecting the yellowish light of the sun. He appeared to have no interest in the strange scenery.
“Let’s see if we can’t examine the inside,” Siddhārtha proposed. “Perhaps we will be able to figure out where we are.”
The edge of the silver plain was about fifty meters below them. Siddhārtha began to make his way slowly down the slope. The ground of the slope was firmer than expected, being comprised mostly of large rocky chunks.
“This looks igneous.”
Asura picked up one of the chunks and held it before her eyes. “Not igneous. These are granules of metamorphic rock created by applying intense amounts of heat to a sedimentary rock with a high calcium content.”
“What does that tell you, Asura?”
Asura narrowed her eyes, her thoughts ranging far off into the distance. After a while she shook her head. “Nothing yet. But I may remember something before long.”
The three stood on the silvery surface, the glacial hardness of it strange beneath their feet. It was as flat as a mirror, but upon closer inspection, there was a faint weblike pattern with crosshatching lines just beneath the top surface.
They advanced for a while until they could look back and see a small sun hanging low above the cluster of massive buildings that housed the spaceways. Its soft yellow light cast long shadows behind the three of them atop the featureless flat plain.
Suddenly, Orionae stood, a violent expression spasming across his usually blank face as he began to speak. “Yellow 17 in the New Galactic Age, the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 received a directive . . .” His voice was jagged, sounding like a recording played backward, and the words struck the other two like hot irons upon their chest.
“Orionae! Is this Astarta 50?”
Orionae craned his head to look again at the pale yellow sun, then returned his gaze to the silvery expanse around them. “Yes. This is Astarta. I would presume that now we are in the age of the Yellow Sun—an age that is near its end. Next we will enter the age of the Blue Sun, which will last for many hundreds of years. This time of transition is called the New Galactic Age.”
Orionae’s already small body seemed to shrink further as he began to walk around on the hard surface.
“Which means that the Planetary Development Committee is somewhere here on this planet.”
“And so is Shi.”
Orionae looked up. “The Ai System is none other than our solar system. Which would make the third planet Earth,” he said, his words a stream of rote information. “Though I cannot tell you exactly what the helio-ses-beta development that took place on our planet entailed, I can assure you that it was a very elaborate process that brought life from simple single-celled organisms all the way to humanity.”
Siddhārtha and Asura stared unblinking at the diminutive cyborg.
“A helio-ses-beta development uses a great deal of energy. Because of this, it cannot be attempted very often—even within our solar system, it was only performed on Earth.”
“Interesting,” Siddhārtha said. “There are those who once postulated that life developed on Earth alone because only Earth was capable of supporting it—but perhaps it had nothing to do with the conditions on the planet at all.”
“Exactly what kind of organization is the Planetary Development Committee?” Asura asked.
“And what is Shi?” Siddhārtha added.
Orionae pointed down toward the surface beneath his feet in silence.
“All our answers lie below, is that it? Then let us go.”
The three widened their search across the plain, but they could find nothing resembling an entrance.
“Asura,” Siddhārtha called out, touching his antenna to the surface at his feet. “Let us try to open a hole in this strange material.”
“I can judge the ionization potential; I’ll just run a high current through the material and see what happens.” Asura directed the energy fr
om her miniaturized reactor pile to the sapphire laser in her finger. That energy was condensed into a gravitationally directed beam with a diameter of a hundredth of a millimeter, which she pointed toward a spot on the ground several meters away. A section of the hard silvery surface roughly one centimeter in diameter where the beam hit transformed to a faded gray, then the dirty brown of singed paper.
“There.”
She stopped the laser, and the discolored section returned to its former silvery hue.
Siddhārtha spoke. “The ionization potential is roughly 207,000 volts. S.H.00913. When reactance is zero, 4.462. Asura, the surface is neither metal nor silicon. This is gravitationally sealed space.”
“Which reflects light, making it look opaque.”
Which meant that the diamond-hard surface supporting them, the material that formed the buildings and the spaceways, and everything else in this place were not physical objects at all, but barriers of gravitational energy.
“But why create such a barrier?” Siddhārtha wondered. “Was some sort of assault launched upon this planet? I’d like to know.”
“Siddhārtha, let us open a way through here.” Asura steadied her aim carefully, firing her laser for about thirty seconds to open a fifty-centimeter-diameter hole in the hard silvery surface.
The three took turns looking down through the hole. An icy cold wind erupted up from the darkness within. There was no sound.
They exchanged glances. The darkness inside spoke only of destruction and death. Asura produced a bundle of wire from somewhere among the folds of her clothes. Sitting down at the edge of the hole, she carefully wove three rough mesh nets, large enough to hold a man. She handed one to Siddhārtha and one to Orionae. Then, gripping the third, she leaned out over the hole and was sucked into the darkness, electricity playing across the metallic webbing beneath her.
Siddhārtha jumped in after her, his head reflexively shrinking back at the icy cold, as he sent a large current through his hastily constructed ionocraft. Below him was a bottomless sea of darkness. He saw Asura’s ionocraft moving through it, trailing a long tail of emerald light. Siddhārtha summoned all his strength to follow her. Rather a long while after, Orionae too came down through the hole. In a group, the three of them rapidly descended. After a long while in darkness, they saw the city below them.