10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

by Ryu Mitsuse

  A moist wind blew low over the field and rain began to fall. Gray clouds hung low like shredded flags, drawing a watery veil of light over the upland fields. Black smoke continued to rise through the rain, and the burning ground spat hot steam.

  Now, a barrage of fiery cylinders arced through the sky, each trailing golden flame as they plunged into the high ground. Where they hit, huge gouts of flame burst up, dancing over the grasses, becoming a sea of flames too intense to face. The shock wave swept everything before it. Men ran wild like dancing matchsticks soon to be ash.

  “Asura!” Another of her officers, General Tāshkand, raised a gauntleted hand and pointed. Explosives had already melted off the man’s ears, nose, and lips. “Their launchers are positioned over there!” At the base of a hill off to the right, Asura spotted a six-wheeled vehicle sporting a launching platform on its upper surface. A new salvo of twelve fire tubes had already been set on the metal wires that guided them. They were pointed straight at Asura’s position.

  “General! Do we have any long-range crossbows remaining?”

  Tāshkand darted out into the sea of flame and returned, carrying a crossbow in his hand. A small incendiary bomb had been fixed to the tip of the bolt. Asura raised the weapon and fired toward the launching platform. The bolt traced a line like a single silken thread through the rain, crippling its target on impact.

  It would have been meaningless to remain there any longer. Asura’s front lines were collapsing; enemy forces drew closer with every passing moment. She gathered her remaining troops and began a retreat. The rain increased in intensity, turning the battlefield into a churning sea of mud. Enemies rose on all sides, and Asura’s foot soldiers fell one by one, but they left ten times their number in enemy corpses behind them.

  A great rumbling sounded through the earth ahead of the retreating column. Asura wiped the rain from her face with one hand and stared. A line of shadows like small mountains were advancing through the white veil of water. This was their enemy’s main force, an armored elephant brigade. They swiped at her men with their long trunks and beat the ground with their massive feet, rumbling toward Asura like an avalanche. Crouching low, she rolled like a ball through the mud. A giant foot stomped down, barely missing her shoulder, and the shock threw her up into the air. She got to her feet, only just making it between the legs of the next elephant. One after the other the giant beasts stampeded over her. She lifted a hand to protect her eyes against the flying mud, dodging between thick pillars of gray flesh that shot past her with the speed of the wind. She twisted and spun like an acrobat, running till she was out of breath.

  “Asura!” A voice sounded from far above her head. “There is no longer any escape. Abandon your cause and join me . . . or I’ll stomp you to a pulp right here in the mud.”

  She looked up and spied a stern man seated in the gondola atop the clifflike flank of the nearest elephant.

  Asura smiled, the line of her white teeth showing brilliantly against her mud-streaked face. “Śakra, you coward! Why don’t you come down from there and fight me, sword to sword!”

  Śakra put a hand on the edge of the gondola and looked down. His silvery armor shone in a stray ray of sunlight. “Asura! Look around you.”

  She didn’t have to look. She was standing in a sea of mud, a circle roughly fifty meters in diameter defined by nearly two hundred elephants standing side by side. Soldiers perched in the gondolas on the elephants’ backs leveled several hundred crossbows directly at her.

  “You may possess miraculous talent in battle, but there is no way for you to escape this encirclement. You should know that better than anyone else. Well? Join my forces. It’s about time.” Śakra looked down at Asura as she stood in the muck at his elephant’s feet. “Who sent you to wage this endless war and plunge Brahmā’s world into chaos?” he demanded. “For how many years have you fought against my celestial army, never realizing the sin you wrought, not once suing for peace? Whence this ceaseless animosity you bear for me? Why continue this profitless struggle?”

  Asura raised her sword, pointing it straight at Śakra’s face. “I will tell you this! I know your objectives already, you who call yourself Śakra, and even those of Brahmā who rules this world. Already you have destroyed too many civilizations. Mohenjo-daro, Sumer . . . all have disappeared into the flow of time by your design. Why? Was it because you saw in them the potential to become aware of your existence and thereby endanger your own world? Is that why you doomed their civilizations to eventual destruction? Is that why you seeded their hearts and their beliefs with pathways to ruin? Ever since you placed that statue of Maitreya deep in the Pearl Palace, you have been working to fulfill that singular purpose. And to this you added the great insult: the lie of promised salvation! Tell me, how long is 5,670,000,000 years in your reckoning? One year? One day? The merest blink of an eye? I would drive you from this world! I would destroy your world! Those were my—”

  My orders. Asura snapped her mouth shut.

  “What’s that?” came the voice from above. “Everything is as you say, but what were you about to say next? Having second thoughts, perhaps?” Śakra tilted his head toward her, urging her to continue.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “Yes, you. What about you?”

  A look of despair crossed Asura’s face as her eyes went from Śakra above her to the elephantry all around her. She was trapped, a tiny squirrel among wolves. The great sword fell from her hand.

  “Cakravar . . .”

  A powerful shock wave fragmented Asura’s thoughts. Her enemy’s psychic assault was incredibly powerful—more powerful than any she had before experienced. She felt cold sweat running in torrents down her body. Her enemy had brought all of his power to bear in an attempt to destroy her, here in this corner of this cold basin—and not just to destroy her, but to expose her to a higher existence than her own, exalted and unbearable.

  Searing pain ran across her shoulder. Without thinking, she probed with her hand and found a fragment of metal panel buried deep in her shoulder. She yanked it out. Fortuitously, the tip of the metal had damaged part of her secondary circuitry, sapping the effectiveness of the hypnotic waves directed toward her cerebral matter. This will be my last chance. Asura brought her gravitation-generation device to full power and closed the dimensional space where Maitreya was hiding. Negative heat entropy resulting from the adiabatic change shrank the closed space to a singularity in an instant—an infinitely dense, infinitely negative space, awash in a Dirac sea.

  The darkness thickened; only the lingering hot breath in the air told of the flames that had raged there moments before.

  “Asura! Are you okay?” Siddhārtha and Orionae came running out of the corridor. Orionae had his emergency respiratory system cranked to maximum—he was breathing with his entire body.

  “Our enemy is very powerful,” Siddhārtha gasped. “We were almost destroyed ourselves.”

  For the first time in a very long while, Asura let herself relax.

  “Jesus escaped west across the basin,” Siddhārtha told her. “We were going to give chase but were concerned about you.”

  Asura smiled bitterly at Siddhārtha’s words. They were right to be worried for her. She had been on the defensive from start to finish and had only narrowly escaped destruction. Maitreya’s next assault would surely not be long in coming.

  “Siddhārtha,” Asura said quietly. “Have you ever wondered . . . ?”

  “Wondered what?”

  “Wondered if, perhaps, we are working under someone or something’s orders?”

  Siddhārtha raised an eyebrow.

  “How about you, Orionae?”

  Orionae shook his head in silence.

  “As it so happens,” Asura told them, “just now in my fight with Maitreya I was held captive by a psychic attack and surrounded by a phantasmal army led by Śakra himself. He spoke to me from atop an elephant. He wanted to know who had ordered me into battle—who launched the assault on his w
orld. He wanted a name.”

  The three exchanged glances. It was as though the veil that covered their hearts, unnoticed until now, had peeled back, revealing something they had never glimpsed before: the idea of an entity supporting their minds and bodies from time immemorial—a power in opposition to the endless war that threatened to demolish their universe, a transcendental being that actually wanted to save their world from destruction.

  “Have you ever thought about it before now?”

  “At times, yes,” Siddhārtha admitted. “I wondered what power had fashioned us into cyborgs and placed me near the shore in that barren, lifeless land—and buried you in the sands. There had to be some design behind it all, or at least I thought there was. But whenever I tried to recall what it was, I found a complete blank in my neural memory web. The circuit had been cut, you might say. Perhaps as a defensive measure. And, seeing that Śakra had to resort to ordinary words in order to try to badger information from you, I would say that our designer’s plans met with perfect success.”

  Siddhārtha turned to face the vast basin of the night, as though he might find the truth of the world buried within that darkness. “Do you have any idea who it might be, Asura?”

  She shook her head. “I feel like I should, and yet—”

  “Orionae?”

  The cyborg philosopher tilted his head, frowning, then began hesitantly. “A long time ago, I heard of a civilization that believed in an evil supreme being who existed in opposition to their good god. I have visited the village where they believed in a god of night in opposition to the god of day. The good god is the sun god, and the sun itself, and eventually the god who is heaven—the heavenly father. I always thought that the evil god, the night god, was a purely allegorical being.”

  Asura and Siddhārtha stared intently at Orionae.

  “So the people who believed in an evil god believed in something other than, or perhaps even directly opposed to, the ancient god of the sun?”

  “Yes,” Orionae said. “Or perhaps they realized that God was only a pathway to destruction and saw in the god of night the means to save their world.”

  “Is this, then, the nature of the transcendent being who designed us, Asura?” Siddhārtha asked.

  “I do not know,” she said. “Gods who administer death, sin, disease, and poverty have featured in the folk beliefs of many cultures. What do these gods mean? And to what end were they eventually abandoned and forgotten?”

  “You are one of them, Asura,” Siddhārtha said.

  “All right,” she said, “then it could be possible that my very existence is part of the effort against those beings that want to destroy our world. If that’s the case, then who sent me here? And sent me here to coincide with our enemies’ arrival?”

  Orionae strode across the stones, hands clasped behind his back. “Your existence, Asura, was hidden from the people’s eyes by the religion started by Siddhārtha. I believe it was this transcendent being who opposed the destruction of our world that inserted concepts into that religion such as the idea that ‘all is void,’ and the story of how souls cross a river to reach the afterlife. Such details suggest the true nature of our struggle to the minds of humankind.

  “Siddhārtha—” Orionae turned. “You believed your teachings could lead to an escape from the misery of life, a path toward enlightenment and freedom from the endless cycle of reincarnation. Yet you erred. Why should existence be a void? Is the void not a denial of consciousness itself? Your words were twisted and used against you by those desiring our destruction. I presume that the transcendental being, as a final measure, sent both of you into the far future, and that is how you came to be standing here, at the very entrance to our enemies’ realm.”

  “Yes.” Siddhārtha nodded gravely. “There’s even a sutra claiming that Asura became a believer in the Buddha . . . Their ploy met with smashing success.”

  Dark orange clouds stretched out across the sky. The air grew gradually colder as an ancient stillness wrapped around the ruins.

  “When I looked out upon the distant gray land from those barren reefs, I saw shapes like mountains sliding toward the city ruins on the horizon. Many of them. That was the moment when I first realized how odd my situation was. Asura, do you have any idea what those mountainous shapes were? And there was another mystery—a large, black shadow that lay deep in the sea trench near the reef where I had been hidden. The fish, when there were still fish in the sea, were too frightened to approach. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that it bore some deep meaning for me.”

  Asura turned her eyes to the distant clouds. “It is dawn. Another day begins—I do not know whether I will live to see night. We must leave here at once. But before that—Siddhārtha, those shapes you saw, could they not have existed in an alternate dimension? A warping of space beneath that troubled sky could have created a mirage, amplifying whatever was passing across the flats.”

  “Perhaps,” Orionae said. “Whatever they were, they were looking for us—me buried beneath the dust of Tokyo, Asura ensconced in the desert sand, and Siddhārtha under the surging waves, all back when we knew nothing of our future selves. Though their repeated search attempts did not meet with success, it is likely that this was the time they first learned of our existence.”

  “Then what was that thing sunk at the bottom of the sea trench?” Siddhārtha asked. “It bothers me. All the more so because we lack the means to go back and find out.”

  Asura took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go. We need to take that sphere someplace safe.”

  The three tugged on the glowing construct, enveloped in its gravitational barrier. They brought it out in front of the ruins of the crystalline building. “I see no point in returning to that city beneath the shield. Let’s go to the foot of that mountain range to the south. There we can examine how this sphere works.”

  By now the orange light reached halfway across the plains. The sun still hung below the horizon, as yet unrevealed. In those fleeting moments between day and night, the three hurried southward, carrying the sphere between them.

  “Well, can you fix it?” Siddhārtha asked, peering down at Orionae’s hands as he worked. He had been asking the same question every minute or so, and each time, Orionae had answered “I think so,” though it was doubtful whether he was listening at all.

  Siddhārtha shrugged and turned around to Asura. “Do you think he can fix it? Shouldn’t we consider other options?”

  Asura was lying down on the cold earth of the basin, gazing up at the indigo sky. Her eyes betrayed no emotion. She seemed indifferent to the icy ground, her arms and legs sprawled out unfeeling.

  Looking at her, Siddhārtha ruminated on how different he was from his strange companions.

  “Give him a chance,” she said at length. “We’ll consider other options if he fails.”

  Orionae was struggling to reconnect a pair of broken supports beneath the sphere. If these could not be fixed, the secondary coils that slid along the outermost surface would remain stuck in place.

  “Well? Can you fix it?” Siddhārtha asked again.

  Orionae used his maser to separate the broken pieces into three sections. “I think so.”

  Siddhārtha extended a hand. “What if we melted some metal and fashioned a pipe the same length? We could probably find some in the city.”

  Orionae pushed Siddhārtha’s hand away. “We won’t need to do that.”

  Orionae cut another section, fusing it to part of the sphere.

  “If you break it, it’s all over.” Siddhārtha frowned over Orionae’s shoulder.

  “I know.”

  Carefully Orionae measured out a second, equal length of pipe, cutting off the excess from the part he had fused. Then he took the remaining fragments and fused them together to make a small orb that he then passed through the polls of a gravitational generator, reshaping it into a length of wire. Siddhārtha walked away, shaking his head.

  The whole time, Asura laid splayed out on the
ground, as unmoving as a stone.

  Siddhārtha looked up at the sky. Through the barrier dome they had erected over themselves, the edges of the small, yellowish sun appeared to stretch to either side, like a strange mouth opening in the sky.

  In Orionae’s hands, the sphere had lost half of its size. A considerable bundle of tubes, twisted into all manner of shapes, were stacked at his feet. It appeared as though he was in the process of constructing something entirely different.

  “What’s that?”

  “Please don’t touch. It will destroy your processors.”

  Siddhārtha withdrew his hand at the last moment.

  Again, night visited the plains. The thin atmosphere rapidly lost its heat. A dry, cold wind blew from one edge of the basin to the other. The scattered stars winked in the sky above the ancient stillness.

  “It’s done.” Orionae sat up.

  “You finished it?” Siddhārtha leapt to his feet, then gaped. “What is it?”

  The sphere they had taken from the ruins was completely gone. In its place rested a pair of coils, one inside the other. Lying on their sides, their height was roughly the same as Orionae’s.

  Siddhārtha’s gaze shifted suspiciously back and forth between the coils and Orionae’s face. “You’ve rebuilt it?”

  Orionae turned slowly toward Siddhārtha. “No. I did not rebuild it. I’ve made an entirely different thing. Though I did use two or three of the basic principles that were fundamental to the original sphere.”

  Asura slowly rose to her feet behind them.

  Orionae lifted the coils and placed them in front of her. He touched a part of the device, and the coils and the cylindrical space inside them shimmered a beautiful aquamarine. Fine bands of light formed on the surface of the cylinders, moving from one end of the coils to the other at an incredible speed.