10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

by Ryu Mitsuse

  The antenna had been attached to a rotating platform that had, over the course of thousands of years, decayed to the point where it could no longer support the weight of the dish.

  Orionae placed his forehead against a wall, staring through it at the fallen dish. “I have seen something like this before. Twice.” He wore a vague, clouded expression as he turned to face the others.

  “A parabolic antenna?” Siddhārtha asked. “Where?”

  Orionae craned his neck to look up at the thin yellow sky. “The first time was by that village in the desert, Elcasia. The second was on the roof of the royal palace in Atlantis.”

  “Interesting,” Siddhārtha said. “Could it mean that the Planetary Development Committee here on Astarta 50, and the village of Elcasia, and Atlantis, were all connected?” He imagined an invasion coordinated along a single line of communication. Could the fall of Atlantis have been dictated remotely from across the galaxy?

  “Yes,” Orionae nodded. “That might explain the window of the suzerain. And the mystery of the orichalcum. Now that I think about it, I wonder why I didn’t look into things more closely back when I was there. It is most vexing.”

  “Orichalcum, you say?”

  “Yes—a strange material that was used everywhere in the construction of Atlantis . . . yet there were no records at all concerning its composition or means of fabrication.”

  The last pale rays of the setting sun painted the large hall on the upper floor. The walls sparkled as the light passed through the dancing dust that marked their progress through the lesser rooms. Other than the dust, there was nothing at all in any of the small rooms that added to their information.

  The upper hall had an arched ceiling over fifty meters in height. It had clearly lain abandoned for a very long time. The only sound there was the sough and echo of the wind as it swept down the corridors. Toward one edge of the building was a section that looked as if it had been struck by some kind of meteor; a large hole had been opened in the exterior wall, facing out toward the basin beyond.

  In the center of the upper hall stood a large spherical object constructed of thin translucent pipes interconnected in a complicated weave. The sphere was about ten meters across.

  “I wonder what that could be?” Asura asked.

  It looked out of place, a memory stripped of its context—perhaps the last remaining vestige of whatever civilization had once thrived here. A thick layer of dust had settled on the thin pipes and the short metal bars that supported the sphere at its base.

  Twilight had fallen outside, casting the world into depths of indigo. As one, the three travelers were stricken with homesickness for their own planet, and in that mood they contemplated the staggering length of time in which this place had sat as a ruin.

  Asura had seen tragic devastation many times in her long life, but she had never seen anything quite so barren as this. The sort of devastation from which there can never be a recovery comes quietly and over many years.

  “Well,” Siddhārtha said simply. “Even if this were once the Planetary Development Committee’s headquarters, that was long ago.”

  “So our hunt ends here,” Asura said, perching on a fragment of fallen wall.

  “But this cannot possibly be the end of the trail. This must be Astarta 50. We will find something. Let’s look again.”

  “I am not so sure,” Orionae said, his voice solemn. “Those words we all know mentioning the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 are from five or six thousand years ago. It is rather unlikely, in fact, that anything remains here at all.”

  “I suppose they could have moved someplace else,” Siddhārtha admitted. “But since we’re here anyway, let’s take a better look around. The enemy we seek is not human. Just because this place is a ruin does not mean they aren’t using it. It would be dangerous to assume anything.”

  “True,” Asura said. “And if there is no way to influence one’s destination on that spaceway we traveled, then we can say with some certainty that Jesus of Nazareth did come here before us.” Abruptly, her eyes focused on the darkness overhead. “Look!”

  The ceiling above them had begun to emit a pale aquamarine light. The light grew steadily brighter until the hall was suffused in a beautiful brilliance. Quickly the three retreated to a corner hallway from which they could see through the walls back into the main hall—see, and also be seen.

  The sphere in the hall began to emit light in many colors. Bright crimson orbs appeared, traveling along the pipes, and from these emerged minute particles of illumination that scattered like dust. Soon, the entire hall was scintillating with projected color. The light breathed, growing in intensity and then fading in pulses. It must have seemed fantastically and eerily beautiful from outside the translucent building.

  Siddhārtha and Asura could feel their spines growing cold. Whatever was happening, it seemed likely that this was the trap they had long expected.

  “Someone’s there!”

  The light wavered like a mirage as it passed through the translucent wall, suddenly revealing a figure on the other side. Siddhārtha engaged the polarized filters on his light-condensing contact lenses, while Asura extended infrared night vision sensors from a bracelet on her wrist to scan the hall.

  The figure—a human man, apparently—was walking around inside the hall, wearing something like a monk’s robe that fell halfway down his legs and was sewn beneath his arms on both sides. On his feet he wore leather sandals. His eyes sparkled and darted with an eerie quickness that left a glowing trail across the imaging readout on Asura’s screen, making it easy to see where he was looking. His eyes seemed to shift regularly toward the sphere, then back to the walls of the hall.

  “I wonder what he’s doing?”

  The figure walked slowly in a wide circle, then paused as though listening. He raised the small object he held in one hand.

  Part of the corridor that led from the great hall vanished. The destruction had happened without a sound; not even the chilly night air moved. The man continued walking, moving slowly as though he examined something as he went. Once again, he lifted the object in his hand. This time a section of wall next to where the meteorite had hit vanished, along with part of the rocky shelf beneath it. Where the crumbled wall had stood there was now just a gaping hole, like an empty pool. The figure returned to the sphere, staring deep into its intricate structure. His silhouette was clearly discernible against the light from the sphere.

  “It is Jesus!” Siddhārtha gasped. “Perhaps this is one of his bases of operation?”

  “But why destroy his own facility?” Asura asked.

  Jesus lifted his gaze from the sphere to look out at the dark night sky.

  “Perhaps he is removing traces of his organization’s presence here?” Siddhārtha said. Even as he spoke he became certain that this was what they were witnessing. Jesus’s organization had accomplished all of its objectives, so its members were now removing their strongholds, eliminating proof of their own activities. They had reached the end of their plans—now they were starting to worry about cleanup and the possibility of pursuit. “Let’s grab him, then, and find out what that sphere is!” Siddhārtha moved quietly from column to column like a shadow gliding along the corridor.

  Asura slipped outside through a crack in the wall. A scant number of stars glittered in the dark sky. She strode toward the front entrance to the building, making no attempt to soften her footfalls. Stepping over the fallen door, she headed directly into the large hall.

  “Man of Nazareth!” she shouted. “It seems you have finished what you came to do!”

  Jesus glanced over at Asura as she walked in, showing just the slightest bit of interest.

  “So,” she continued, “is your Final Judgment done, or are we still waiting? Either way, no one remains to be judged.”

  Jesus waved away her words with one hand. “You did well to follow me this far,” he muttered, “but now it is over.”

  Asura switched off
the infrared device on her wrist, returning it to a regular bracelet. “Yes, and I lost. When I realized that a transcendent being was responsible for the destruction and decline that began on Earth five thousand years ago, I made all efforts to determine the nature of that entity’s existence and stop it. Yes, I was too late. Their plans have come to fruition. As you say, it is over.”

  Jesus looked away, snorting with derision.

  “Man of Nazareth, allow me to ask a question.”

  A look of alarm spread across Jesus’s face.

  “Don’t look so frightened,” Asura said. “I merely want to know what that sphere is.”

  Jesus stared up at the large object looming above him. “This thing?”

  “Yes. Its meaning has eluded me.”

  The Nazarene peered at the sphere with weary eyes, then returned his gaze to Asura’s face. “These paths of light here are galactic longitudes, and the green paths there are galactic latitudes.” He trailed one sick finger along the surface of the sphere where the brightness rippled in waves. “This is the galactic equator. An entropy D index is overlaid on this curve, indicating that an entirely different spatial dimension will be generated in this area.” Slowly he moved his right hand, and the aquamarine glow within the sphere slid diagonally to follow. “See, it will be like this. You understand?”

  Jesus pointed toward the sphere with his chin. He scratched the back of his left leg with the tip of his right sandal.

  Choosing her moment, Asura launched into the air. Her right hand extended in a flash, striking him squarely in the chest. He staggered, and when he regained his footing, Asura was standing between him and the sphere.

  “What are you doing?” Jesus shouted, his whiskers bristling.

  Asura fixed him with an icy glare. “Finally, I understand!”

  Jesus clenched his hands into fists and stepped forward. “What do you understand?”

  “The Archangel Michael—the being you claim to have seen coming down from Heaven by the Jordan River? I know who that was. As I know the identity of the great god who plunged Jordan into darkness the day you were executed upon the hill at Golgotha, and spirited you away into the sky—”

  “You know nothing!”

  “I’m not finished. I know now the provenance of the two giant kings—Atlas the Seventh and Poseidonis the Fifth—whom Orionae served in Atlantis, and I understand the statue of Maitreya in the Pearl Palace. I know now of Tuṣita, that land I desired so greatly to see. I have thought long and carefully about these things—where they could possibly have come from and what their intentions might be. Though the latter are still clouded to me, man of Nazareth, I now know the path by which they entered our world!”

  Jesus peered at Asura through the hair that hung loosely down over his eyes. “Gods sometimes do violent things,” he said, his voice soothing, “but it is a mistake to want to exact revenge upon them.” He held up one hand, as though offering salvation.

  “Say what you wish,” Asura spat. “Yet to revere a herald of destruction as some sort of heavenly father figure is surely a sin—”

  “Herald of destruction?”

  “Perhaps you do not understand. In this Milky Way, there are many planets upon which higher intellects have thrived. Imagine, if you will, that these beings you look up to as gods did not approve of these emerging sentient life-forms and decided to remove them. How would you go about doing this, if you were them?”

  “What do you mean, ‘how’?”

  “I will give you one possibility,” Asura said. “You could visit the life-forms at every stage in their development, sowing seeds that would, over the course of millennia, result in inevitable destruction.”

  Jesus’s face twisted.

  “You could build in economic dead ends, military strife, population problems, declining health, psychological and physical atrophy, and much more. Take any one of these calamities that plague humankind, and you can see that its true cause lies far in the past. Some hail from as far back as the ancient age when humanity’s forerunners existed only as single-celled organisms living in a warm, shallow ocean.”

  “Blasphemy! You have it wrong—”

  “Not that they had to predetermine everything. Some of the conditions could have been arranged later on, when there were more variables to work with.”

  Jesus fixed Asura with two eyes blazing like fire. “O, dear God who is in Heaven—”

  Asura laughed merrily. “Jesus! There is a legend which says that when you were born into our world, the King of the Jews was terrified by news of the Savior’s birth, and so he took every male child from his mother’s arms and killed them.”

  “A terrible thing, yes.”

  Asura clapped her hands with mirth, laughing again, though in her eyes there swelled a hatred strong enough to make a strong man quail with fear. “Terrible, you say? That, I suppose, would depend on your point of view.”

  Jesus looked away.

  “It was I who whispered murder into the mind of the king,” Asura said. “Would that he had been more thorough in carrying it out, for in the end, the massacre was for naught. You escaped, and in later years, you joined forces with the giant beings you call gods and angels. If you had died along with all those other children, how then would things have been different? . . . Well, Jesus of Nazareth? Speaking of which—your Final Judgment never came, did it?”

  Jesus looked out toward the dark horizon as though searching for an escape route.

  “When the four wise men appeared to Siddhārtha, they came as Brahmin monks. Yet in his case they made a terrible error of judgment. The prince never would have met me at all without their intervention, man of Nazareth. And the knowledge they gave to him! Their teachings speak of the cakravarti-rājan, and Maitreya who is to descend to Earth in 5,670,000,000 years as the Savior, and all the cosmology—why did they carelessly leave so many words suggesting the truth? I believe they underestimated the human capacity for understanding.”

  Jesus staggered, his face pale.

  Asura raised a hand, pointing toward the dark horizon. “Go, Jesus of Nazareth! Go into that barren, shadowed plain, and do not return. It is a most fitting place for you.”

  Jesus cursed softly under his breath. Cold sweat trickled down from his ashen forehead, collecting on his chin to drip between his feet.

  “Well?” Asura’s glare grew darker.

  Jesus’s eyes suddenly widened and the sweat on his brow visibly retreated. An instant later, all noise ceased.

  Finally, Asura thought, some results.

  “Asura!”

  By the sound of his voice, Siddhārtha was moving rapidly from right to left behind her. Asura didn’t need to turn—she knew what was happening. They had reached the moment of maximum peril. Springing into action, she ran from the hall on silent feet. The moment she was through the outer door she crouched and rolled across the cold, dry ground. She could feel Siddhārtha and Orionae moving off to her right. Inside the translucent building, Jesus had become a receding silhouette.

  Something like a dark tide had begun to spread from inside the great hall. It expanded in all directions as it came, pushing back the vast night before Asura’s eyes. As it grew it transformed in shape until it had become a gigantic figure looming over the plateau like a towering peak. There were arms and shoulders like mountain ridges, a chest like a sheer cliff face, immense pillared legs. Strangely molded armor wrapped around the chest and shoulders.

  The giant silhouette looked out over the barren stillness of the basin, seeming to envelop all the endless spread of night. Something like a crown grew from its head, concealing the few stars in the sky.

  You appear at last. Asura’s terror at facing the most dangerous of enemies mingled with her elation at the realization that they had at last found the entrance to their enemies’ world. Her enemies’ achievement had been near perfect, yet Asura and her companions represented a final remaining threat, a pinprick that had turned into a wound their foes could no longer afford t
o ignore.

  The giant figure stepped slowly out onto the basin. Beneath the shadow of its headdress, the features of its face were impossible to make out. Shrouded in darkness, it took another step.

  “I saw your statue,” Asura said, her voice traveling low through the frozen darkness. “When was it you were supposed to appear and save the masses? Five billion six hundred seventy million years from now? As I expected, you are big enough to reach the heavens, yet in places your statue rusted—”

  For the first time in her existence, Asura understood that there was a kind of fear in this world impossible to overcome. It began deep inside her and came with a terrible dizziness and nausea that swiftly developed into a bottomless whirlpool of madness she was unable to contain. She realized she had only one or two seconds remaining in which to escape this place of death. She took a step.

  “You did well to come this far,” a voice echoed down from the darkened sky. The force of the giant god’s words was almost enough to stop Asura’s heart on the spot. She had no time to think.

  “We did not expect anyone to reach this gateway to eternity. Yet this is the end of your road. The path beyond here is not one you may travel.” The great being’s denial scattered the shadows of Asura’s reality in every direction. Mountain ranges and giant oceans lost their shape. Before her loomed an unfathomable emptiness, a barrier which nothing in her world could hope to overcome. It seemed to block even the flow of time. No wonder he called it the gateway to eternity. This was the end of the world, of all worlds—the bridge to the true void.

  A wind blew across the dark basin, its passage through that unsympathetic darkness reminding Asura’s crumbling mind of where she stood. Slowly, she felt her former self returning from someplace deep within her shattered heart.

  “Where did you come from?” she demanded, thinking the question more than speaking it, unsure of whether her words would even reach the god before her.