10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

by Ryu Mitsuse

  In the center of a plaza, three obelisks stood pointing toward the dark night sky. The obelisks were made of a material that glimmered like gemstone beneath the light of countless spotlights. Several dozen ropes extended from the obelisks out through the crowd toward the edges of the circular plaza, making the whole thing look like a giant wheel, with the obelisks for an axle and the ropes for spokes. The crowd shouted in unison as they pulled on the ropes. With each coordinated pull, the three obelisks wobbled. Flares went up, one after the other, creating tiny stars of light above the surging throng. From somewhere rumbled the sound of explosions.

  Suddenly, a swarm of rotodynes descended from the sky onto the tops of the tall buildings around the plaza, from where they unleashed aqua laser rays upon the crowd below. Flames rose up in every direction—people swarmed away from one blaze only to be engulfed by another. Their shouts and cries gradually became one unified scream, like the roaring of the sea. The obelisks toppled, then fell—slowly at first, then quickly, until they lay flat on the ground, pointing toward one edge of the plaza. The impact when the obelisks struck the ground sent up great plumes of dust, and one of the buildings standing at the edge of the plaza collapsed from the power of the shock waves.

  The rotodynes began tossing small explosives down into the plaza. The charges were small, yet they exploded with such ferocity that even from a distance they echoed in Siddhārtha’s gut. Flares of light shot into the sky from where the explosives landed, sending up a spray of severed hands and feet. The remaining crowd flowed into a single line like a river and made for the far side of the plaza.

  Another explosion rang out, not loud enough to drown out the cries and screams of terror.

  The three travelers pressed themselves against the cavity high up on the wall of one of the towering buildings, looking down at the chaos far below them.

  “This is more than just a demonstration. This is rebellion,” Siddhārtha observed.

  “Look,” Asura pointed out across the city. “Another fire over there.”

  An eerie crimson light soaked the sky behind a tall cluster of buildings. More explosions echoed from that direction, accompanied by distant columns of flame.

  “We must find the Planetary Development Committee,” Orionae said, his eyes filled with the sort of abject terror that comes from deep experience. “This city will soon cease to function.”

  The three went in through an open window in the side of the building and found themselves in a wide corridor. Several rooms lined the sides, but the walls had been stripped and the doors blown off their hinges into the rooms. All had been abandoned for a very long time. They found the doors that had once opened to a lift, long since blown in, the metal remnants hanging like scraps of torn paper.

  “Guess we’ll take the stairs,” Siddhārtha said dryly.

  The paneling of the stairs and parts of the walls had been stripped, exposing the skeletal framework beneath and making the footing treacherous. They descended cautiously. Halfway down the building, they found more chaos—a wide corridor filled to bursting with people chanting “Death to the leader! Kill the leader!” As one, the crowd lifted their arms and opened their mouths wide, shouting for blood.

  “You!” Siddhārtha shouted, grabbing the shoulder of a man passing by them. “Where is this leader of whom you speak?”

  The man turned eyes like lenses toward Siddhārtha.

  “Where is your leader, the one who governs you?”

  The man paused, considering the meaning of the words. “Our leader, yes, our leader . . .” he mumbled.

  “Yes, your leader, where is he?”

  The man grabbed Siddhārtha’s wrist. His grip was incredibly strong.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I will take you to him. I will take you to our leader,” the man said.

  “I only require you to tell—” but before Siddhārtha had finished speaking, the man broke into a run.

  “Wait, hold up! Let go of me!”

  The man dragged Siddhārtha along as though he weighed no more than a burlap sack. Though it should have been an easy thing for Siddhārtha to wrest his arm free, the man moved with superhuman speed, not giving Siddhārtha time to think. The crowd turned at the sound of the shouting, dark suspicion in their eyes. Abruptly, those around them stopped moving and surrounded Siddhārtha and the man. With eyes devoid of emotion they reached out to grab him. He felt a grip like iron close around the antenna on his shoulder, and left with no other recourse, Siddhārtha diverted power to his discharge panels and generated a fireball. A ball of flame swelled to an enormous size, rolling through the crowd around him, the smell of ions mingling with the stench of scorched flesh. One of the walls burst into flames. The rage of the crowd quickly transformed into terror. Siddhārtha took advantage of the confusion to slip from the main corridor into a side passageway, leaving both the crowd and his companions behind.

  “You have come from another star, haven’t you,” said a voice.

  He whirled around and saw a man standing in a brown and yellow jumpsuit. The man’s porcelain-smooth forehead gave off a cool gleam in the glow from the luminescent walls.

  “Another star? I suppose so, yes.”

  “You wish to meet the leader?”

  “That was my intention in coming here, but I’m afraid I got caught up in the crowd—”

  “Come with me,” the man said, turning and walking away.

  Hoping that Asura and Orionae would be able to determine his location, Siddhārtha followed after the man.

  The man passed from corridor to corridor, increasing the distance between them and the confusion back in the hallway. From windows opening in the corridor wall, Siddhārtha occasionally caught glimpses of red blazes in the city.

  They crossed through a high overpass and entered a grand building that was surely the seat of the government.

  “The leader’s chambers are at the end of this hallway.” The man stood by one wall, lifting a hand to indicate the direction.

  Siddhārtha walked on alone, acutely aware that so long as Jesus of Nazareth was at large, he could be walking into a trap.

  A door at the end of the hallway opened automatically at Siddhārtha’s approach.

  A single tall man was standing in the middle of the large room beyond, wearing yellow-brown robes that cast a long shadow in the dim illumination.

  “You are the leader here?” Siddhārtha called out from the door.

  “I am. And you are a traveler from another star. You have come here to meet me,” the leader replied in a low voice that nonetheless was clearly audible in the spacious chamber.

  “My name is Siddhārtha. I came from Earth, in the Sol System,” Siddhārtha said, sensing a sudden increase in the leader’s interest.

  “The Sol System?”

  “Is this surprising to you?”

  “No, it is just that, as you can see, we are in the middle of a great rebellion here, and it is very dangerous for travelers from abroad. You should remain here within the government complex for your own safety.”

  Siddhārtha nodded noncommittally and walked closer.

  Observed from less than two meters away, the leader’s cheeks were shiny, with the same porcelain smoothness he had seen in the face of the man who led him here. He had a smooth head and silent eyes with a cruel gleam to them.

  “If I may ask, what is the cause of your rebellion?”

  The leader nodded. “Our citizens are of two minds, and these two schools of thought have developed into armed conflict. That is to say, an armed conflict though one side has yet to even show itself.”

  “I believe I heard them shouting they were going to kill the leader, which I assume to be you.”

  The man averted his eyes, anguish rising in the lines on his forehead.

  “Unfortunately, I cannot acquiesce to the rebels’ demands. That is why they protest.”

  Siddhārtha tried piecing together all he had seen in his mind. Still, he was unable to reach anythi
ng like a satisfying conclusion.

  “Soon, the rebels will come here,” Siddhārtha said. If it came to it, he and his companions could protect this leader while developing a strategy.

  “No, do not worry. The only way into these offices is by the suspended corridor you came through, and it is already sealed by a barrier. Nothing may pass through.”

  “Why do you not try to appease the two factions? Is that not a leader’s role?” Siddhārtha asked, an edge to his words.

  “Already I have tried reconciliation dozens of times, not entirely without success. But it is a lost cause now. I’m tired. But enough of that. Tell me, why have you come here?”

  Siddhārtha paused, unsure of what to say. In truth, he had no real purpose in coming here. He had jumped onto the spaceway in pursuit of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet he still didn’t know why he even had to fight Jesus. The only thing he knew were those words: “Yellow 17 in the New Galactic Age, the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 received a directive . . .” and a vague sense that this curious, shielded city was somehow connected to the Kingdom of Atlantis where Orionae claimed to hail from, and to the barren flats and ruined city that Siddhārtha had found upon emerging from the sea. There was an overall trend toward destruction and ruin in all that he had seen, and lately Siddhārtha had begun to think that some power had placed him here for the sole purpose of investigating that trend and possibly divining its cause and origin.

  “I’d like to meet with the other faction of your citizens,” Siddhārtha announced, dodging the leader’s question.

  The leader considered this for a moment, then waved his hand off toward his left in a silent gesture. The entrance door slid open and a man stepped inside. This man, too, was wearing a jumpsuit with bands of yellow and brown.

  “Take this man to the A-Class Citizens’ compartments,” the leader instructed the new arrival.

  “A-Class Citizens?” Siddhārtha echoed out loud, lifting an eyebrow.

  “At once,” said the man behind him, and he led Siddhārtha out of the leader’s chamber.

  “So your citizens are divided into two classes in this place?” If that were the case, a rebellion made a certain kind of sense, he thought to himself.

  Outside of the leader’s room, the corridor began a gentle downward slope, suggesting that wheeled vehicles had been used both inside and outside the building when it was first constructed, making the age of the building at least two thousand years old, judging by the level of the technology he saw.

  Together with his guide, Siddhārtha went farther into the depths of the government complex, following the gradually sloping corridor downward. From the length of the descent and the lack of windows, he guessed that they were probably underground by now. At last they came to a giant door at the end of the corridor. Siddhārtha’s guide spoke several times into an intercom on the wall before a red light lit above them and the door slid upward into the ceiling.

  The man motioned for Siddhārtha to go through, explaining that he was unable to accompany him any farther.

  Steeling himself against the chill that ran through his heart, cold as a polar wind, Siddhārtha strode through the doorway. He glanced up at the bottom of the door as he walked beneath it, noticing that sandwiched among its many layers was a composite silicon layer for filtering radiation. The heavy door shut behind him.

  The corridor continued on straight for a very long time. The luminium coating the ceiling and both walls provided dim light, though it had peeled off in places, and a thin layer of dust upon the floor rose in small clouds around Siddhārtha’s feet as he walked. The dust was finer and lighter than volcanic ash, and the clouds that rose from it thinner than a northern sea fog.

  “No one has passed this way for over a thousand years,” Siddhārtha muttered to himself. He approached one of the doors along the side of the corridor and pressed gently on it. It opened without a sound. What luminium remained on the walls of the room beyond lit the space with a lonely light. A storage shelf built into one wall was half open, and a mountain of dust spilled out of it, covering whatever contents it had once held. Along the far wall, he saw three chairs fashioned of metal tubing, the rust making the metal look like fossilized bone. A single pilot lamp on the back wall cast a small circle of orange light that made the abandoned room seem unreal, like a place from a dream.

  Siddhārtha turned and was about to leave when he sensed a presence behind him. He looked around to see a large gray creature emerging from one of the walls. It had a large head, sturdy limbs, and thick scales like tree bark covering a cylindrical torso. Siddhārtha retreated to the entrance as the creature’s hind legs emerged, followed by a long serpentine tail. The end of the tail was pointed, and it lashed violently against the walls and the floor. Moving as quickly as he could, Siddh ārtha slid out into the corridor and shut the door behind him. A moment before the door slid completely closed, he spotted another of the strange creatures emerging from one of the walls.

  Siddhārtha leaned against the door, catching his breath. Then, stepping quietly, he walked farther down the corridor and pressed on the next door. The room behind this one was exactly the same construction as the previous room, and likewise abandoned. Instead of chairs, this room had a single bed that seemed to have been made of some kind of reinforced glass. It was remarkably transparent once he blew the dust off of it. Siddhārtha sat down on the bed, suddenly feeling very weary. Emotions rose inside him, tugging at the corners of his memory, binding together snippets of something that had been familiar to him once, yet now felt very distant. He could feel his subconscious trying to piece together the self he had been from the parts of the self he was now. Threads of memory slowly wound together in his mind, creating a picture. But when he tried to look at it, opening his mind’s eye wide, he felt it recede into the distance, his memories like strangers standing on the opposite shore of a wide river. He could see them with his eyes, but never know or touch them.

  He looked up to see a vast blue sea stretching out before him. The sun cast vibrant rays across the water. As he watched, amazed, the surface of the sea split in two, and a single enormous fish swam out of the depths. In the blink of an eye, the fish transformed into two spacecraft, their photonic engines displacing the water beneath into the shape of an inverted umbrella.

  Siddhārtha assumed, without explicitly thinking it, that this was some kind of dream, or perhaps a phantasm. He tried to shake it out of his head when he realized that what he was seeing was no phantasm at all, but an actual scene existing in reality. With a start, he leapt back out into the corridor in a single bound, his inertia causing him to trip and roll across the floor in an ungainly ball. He stood, but found he lacked the courage to look back into the room behind him. He ran.

  The corridor seemed as endless as it was empty. Siddhārtha could sense no people anywhere along its length, nor did he detect any presence in any of the rooms to either side. Only one of the rooms he found with its door half open. He peeked in to see strange forms rising underneath the dim illumination, rising and falling in the center of the room, spewing flame and smoke.

  “What is this place?” Siddhārtha wondered out loud. “Are these the A-Class Citizens?”

  He reflected back on what he had seen thus far in the rooms along the corridor—scaled monsters, creatures of fire and smoke, photonic spacecraft—and did not think that any of these could be what one called “citizens.”

  He was contemplating returning and speaking to the Leader once again, when at last he came to the place where the corridor ended in a wide, hard panel made of a light green metallic substance. Glowing letters across the panel read A-CLASS CITIZEN AREA.

  The panel slid into one wall at the slightest touch, revealing darkness ahead through which long rows of lamps along the floor and ceiling lit and faded, making it look as though the lights were jumping up and down in time to an unheard rhythm.

  Siddhārtha lit the light projector fastened to the end of the leather cord wrapped around h
is waist. It cast an intense white circle of light, revealing an enormous complex structure ahead of him. The structure looked like some kind of shelving system for storing files or physical media, save for the vast number of pipes that ran horizontally and vertically in front of the metal panels providing access to each compartment in the system. Most of the pipes seemed to contain wiring of one kind or another, while others were clearly designed to carry liquids as they were fitted with automatic adjustment knobs at regular intervals. High above, a hoisting mechanism like a giant, flattened crab slid quietly along a silvery rail near the ceiling.

  “Are you the otherworlder who seeks an audience with an A-Class Citizen?” came a strangely undulating voice from the direction of the crab.

  “Yes. I would know the truth behind the rebellion outside these walls.”

  “Very well,” the voice continued after several seconds of silence. “I will bring one out to you. You may ask it any questions you like.”

  Two arms extended from the sides of the crab. One of them shot downward, pausing in front of one of the many small panels where it split into four manipulators that deftly opened the container. From inside, one of the manipulators withdrew a thin, silvery dish. Another arm picked a single square tab of metal off of the dish, which it brought back up to the crab and slid into a slot in its side.

  Some sort of identification card? Siddhārtha mused, wondering at the high level of security here.

  He looked up at the metal crab hanging high over his head to see a green light flicker on just as a bubble emerged from the crab’s underbelly and ran along one of the vertical pipes, descending toward Siddhārtha like a translucent gondola.

  A single human shape was crouched inside the gondola. Siddhārtha narrowed his eyes to scrutinize the crab and found it far too compact and flat for a person to fit inside. The gondola landed on the floor directly in front of Siddhārtha. Its canopy opened to either side, and the man inside stood and stepped out. For clothing he wore a simple piece of cloth, hardly more than a bed sheet, and silvery circlets on his wrists. His eyes seemed strangely far apart and filled with suspicion as they looked at Siddhārtha. His thin lips parted halfway, exhaling a surprisingly warm breath.