10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

by Ryu Mitsuse

  Another city, another civilization destroyed. It was meant to happen, as the three travelers had been meant to come to that place.

  Asura stood on a vast plain where blue light fell like a silent rain of death. There was no atmosphere, no air to protect the exposed rocky surface. Though the lack of wind meant that there was minimal erosion, cracks formed over millennia crisscrossed the surface of the rock; some had grown large enough to be called crevices. The trickling of small fragments of rock down into those crevices appeared to provide the only movement in this world.

  Everywhere there were signs that this planet had been subjected to incredibly strong radiation over a very long period of time. The radiation alert system on Asura’s necklace had been sounding at maximum danger level since she arrived. The discordant clamor of the alarm shrieked in her ears, an unwelcome call to action.

  She took a step, and her foot sank to the ankle as the surface soundlessly crumbled beneath her. All the way to the horizon, the conditions looked the same. In every direction there was nothing but the faint curve of the horizon—no indicators to say which way was north or south. Asura knew that even if she did cross over the horizon she would find no remaining mountain ridges or deep valleys.

  Over the long years, the powerful radiation had transformed the very material composition of the rock, grinding down mountains until they were nothing more than dust that filled the valleys and the ancient seabeds.

  Even death had no shape in this place.

  Peering around, Asura realized that no one else was there. With blue light streaming down across her shoulders, she stood alone at the end of the world.

  Neither Siddhārtha nor Orionae had been able to reconstitute themselves on the other side of the conduit. For reasons Orionae clearly had not foreseen, it had taken longer than the coil could withstand for them to pass through the region of space filled with negative energy. Either that, or their transit had used more energy than expected. As Orionae had suggested, it seemed that at the last instant the circuit breaker had tripped, dumping the remaining energy into Asura, who was already passing beyond the negative energy zone. As for her companions—

  She remembered Siddhārtha’s prediction of the sea of negative energy and shuddered.

  This was what she was witnessing now: utter ruin made manifest.

  Siddhārtha’s energy and Orionae’s energy—and whatever was left of Asura’s—had combined to power their last, desperate effort, and now she was left to discover for herself what her final objective should be. I could not have predicted that this would happen, she told herself. Nor could she ignore the terrible loneliness she felt in her heart when she considered her chances of fighting and defeating a transcendent, godlike being alone.

  The glacier and the phantasmal city that had appeared within it were gone and would never be found again.

  Orionae had mentioned a mistake, but could it be that this devastation was, in fact, what they should have been seeking? Is this our final destination, this small planet in the outer arm of the eighth quadrant of the Andromeda galaxy? With great unease, Asura set out across the crumbling surface, feeling as though she were walking not on matter, but on pure light.

  She contemplated the blue light that suffused the surface of the planet and looked up toward the sky to find its source. First she saw the stardust, countless billions of swirling fragments in an endless dance above her. Then beyond it she saw that there was something more, pulsing behind the stars like an aurora there in the remote vastness of space—a great spiral of timeless light turning in the center of the sky.

  For a brief moment, Asura stared, the brightness burning into her visual cortex, not understanding what she was witnessing. She felt herself part of a tableau, a tiny figure standing on a devastated planet beneath a white-hot whirling spiral—a perfect portrait of the end of the world.

  I know what that is!

  An icy tremor passed through Asura’s heart.

  It was a massive spiral galaxy, coming from the depths of space directly toward the galaxy of Andromeda. Already the interstellar material of both galaxies were intermingling, each invading the other’s territory, emitting powerful electron radiation. Eventually, the heat trapped in the gradually thickening cloud created by the collision would rise to tens of thousands of degrees, then hundreds of thousands, burning away stars and spewing out vast nebulae. In time, the two spiral galaxies would combine entirely, and release all of their energy at once.

  Later, once that energy had dispersed, all that would be left behind would be a faintly radioactive nebula and the slightest dusting of interstellar material. The tremendous volume of heat released into space would radiate in every direction, eventually vanishing into the far reaches of the universe altogether. Existence becoming nonexistence. Being becoming nonbeing. The simplest process of all.

  Of course, the dispersed energy would not truly become nothing. But how much effect on the rest of space could such energy have—even if it came from so potent a source as the collision of two galaxies? What could you call its long-term result, if not “nothing”?

  The residents of this planet had wrapped their great city in a near-perfect gravitationally sealed space, after creating another such space that surrounded the entire planet—effectively girding themselves in a double layer of protection. And yet, Asura mused, their gravitational fortress relied on a planet to anchor it. How long could this fastness last within the torrent of energy released when two galaxies collided?

  The giant spiral galaxy above her was making its final descent, pitching off-balance with the weight of entropic death it carried, raining radiation down on its Andromedan rival.

  Asura wished she could show this quiet world to Siddhārtha and Orionae. She now realized the nature of the mistake that Orionae had spoken of. The mysterious blue light shining on the glacier they had visited was filtered light coming through a gravitational barrier constructed around the planet—a barrier that should have protected and preserved its civilization. Yet nothing had been living there. What could live at minus two hundred degrees and below? The mistake had been a faint warping in the gravitational seal, or perhaps a slight error in their gravitational field generators that had allowed heat to leak out over a long period of time. By the time the planet’s residents realized what was happening, it had already been too late, and their home world was lost, buried beneath a thick layer of ice. And so the survivors had acted, raising another line of resistance, an even stronger gravitational barrier around their capital. It was they who had appeared, walking the streets of their phantasmal city. She wondered how long that civilization had lasted.

  Did it even really matter? Was there any difference between being trapped in an endlessly reiterating city and being stamped onto a metal plate—the fate the citizens of Astarta 50 had chosen in an attempt to evade their approaching destruction? Asura thought she could hear Siddhārtha laughing somewhere, perhaps inside herself . . . A smile rose on her lips, but it was a pitiful thing with no purpose, not the sort of smile that could be mistaken for happiness. Mankind had first developed civilization less than ten thousand years ago. She wondered how it had gone here in Andromeda. On this planet.

  She saw no signs of a transcendent being attempting to stave off the destruction here. Even with his power and his plans, had the three of them not been awakened too late, to find Earth already transformed into a dead planet, nothing but a wasteland to greet them?

  We should never have awoken. Her memories went back to that day when she had first met the man of Nazareth in that cold, wasted desert.

  Asura.

  She heard a faint voice that seemed to come from inside her own body. Asura spun around, looking for the speaker. The surface of the planet was as still and silent as it had ever been.

  Asura.

  Now it seemed to her as if the voice were coming from somewhere far beyond the surface, carried to her along rays of blue light through the barrier above.

  “Who’s there?” she sh
outed into the distance.

  “I have been waiting for you, Asura, but you did not arrive in time. Still, this is not your fault.”

  She thought she detected the ring of deep sadness in the voice.

  “Who are you? Where are you?”

  Asura linked the brainwave detector embedded behind her right ear into her entire nervous system, scanning. She found nothing. The planet’s surface remained as featureless as a calm lake around her. She sensed that the level of the ground was slightly slanted toward the left—perhaps the remnant elevation of what had once been the tallest ridgeline on this world.

  “Asura.”

  This time it sounded as if the voice originated right next to her. Reflexively she jumped to a spot several meters away. “What are you?” Asura squinted but saw not even a shadow of anything around her, only the suffusing blue light.

  “I did not imagine that we would meet in a place like this, in this way. For I am sure the record will show that we have never met before.”

  Asura did not know how to respond to that. After a short silence, she heard the voice again:

  “Asura. Do you think Siddhārtha understood the meaning of the ‘other shore’—the place to which the dead must pass? I was pleased when he sensed something lacking in the teachings of the Brahmin and harbored doubts about several of their doctrines. Follow the threads of those doubts, and they lead here. I chose you three, placed you in a long sleep, and kept you until such a time as I would require your services. I also placed within your minds several words, several concepts, you would need. Asura: ‘All’ is existence. ‘Void’ is Dirac’s sea. ‘All is void’ means nothing other than the fact that the sea of negative energy is the true mother of all existence. Asura, the ‘other shore’ is none other than a transcendent being or the world where that transcendent being exists. I wonder how you, Asura, understood the sense of separation, that desperate division we hear in the word ‘other.’ Siddhārtha was a signpost along the path. Orionae had memorized the letters written upon that sign. And you—”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . I regret now that ultimately, I have been little more than a bystander, observing the change passing through this universe, unable to affect it. I wonder how many people paid attention to those words I whispered into the collective heart of humanity, warning them of the destruction that would come? I regret that I was not able to take more decisive action.”

  Asura screamed into the blue-soaked waste. “Why didn’t you just come out and tell us the truth?”

  “I could not reveal myself, lest those powers who have always manipulated your world with the intent to bring it to ruin should take notice of me.”

  “Yet they did notice, and in short order.”

  “And so they worked to erase all signs of my warning. It is in mankind’s nature not to believe that misfortune and tragedy are approaching and to forget calamity after it has occurred. Ultimately, my passive strategy did not help prolong their lives by one minute. While the sun shone, they prayed for a good harvest in the coming year and adorned their altars, and when the storms and the floods came they thought only to raise their levees and protect their fields. When plague spread, they nurtured physicians and synthesized ever more medicines. Eventually, the land dried and the desert covered all, so they moved their cities below ground. When there was no longer any place on land or in the sea to support the growing of food, these places became wastelands and passed away, unmourned and forgotten. Humanity spread to Mars, Venus, and beyond, throughout the solar system, yet in the end their productive capacity always failed.

  “Eventually, humanity became aware of the coming fall. They crafted robots and enhanced their own bodies with cybernetics—they searched for ways to escape to the outer reaches of the solar system. Yet what came of that, Asura? In the end, those bent on the destruction of the human worlds were victorious. Indeed, perhaps their victory was predetermined from the start.”

  Asura stood on the slight swell in the earth that was the ghost of a former ridge, looking out across plains that now appeared to her as a seabed at the bottom of an ocean of blue light. This place seemed a poor destination for someone who had traveled so far, but in a sudden rush of resignation she accepted that she would have to make do.

  “Asura.”

  Asura shook her head. “What are you? What are you?”

  The voice seemed to pierce her chest. “I am the Reincarnation King. I am the cakravarti-rājan.”

  It took several seconds for the words to sink into Asura’s weary mind. “The cakravarti-rājan?”

  “Yes. That is what the Brahmin monks once called me.”

  The cakravarti-rājan—King of Kings who moves the world. Asura had once described the cakravarti-rājan to Siddhārtha. The details of that night were still vivid in her mind.

  Siddhārtha had appeared behind Asura where she stood on an outcrop of stone.

  “And what is this cakravarti-rājan of which you speak?”

  “The Brahmins can tell you as well as I. He is the King of Kings, the master of karma. He stands outside this world and has viewed its life and growth for more than one trillion years.”

  “And have you ever met this cakravarti-rājan?”

  “My prince. No one has seen the cakravarti-rājan. Nor do we know where he might be. Yet all who know his name know that, not long from now, the cakravarti-rājan will appear among us. And when he does he will rule over all as the one great God, the Creator, he who transcends karma.”

  Now she faced not Siddhārtha, but the King of Kings himself.

  “My king,” Asura said, “am I to understand that you have existed here, upon this single planet in the Andromeda galaxy, and that from this place you presided over the rise and fall of many, many other planets?”

  “My schemes and structures have all crumbled and scattered. I have stood here on this ancient slope, devoid of all life, watching the universe transform into something beyond the ability of my power to contain. I watched those who believed that Maitreya would come to their world and save them . . . I watched them build a statue to their supposed savior within the Pearl Palace, as I watched Maitreya himself assume direct authority over the kingdom of Atlantis. He caused the man Jesus of Nazareth to believe that he, Maitreya, was a god in heaven above, and from here I watched Jesus perform miracles in his name. Asura, even among my best and brightest followers, there were some who believed Maitreya’s words and laid the blame for the ruination of the world at your feet.

  “Śakra, Vajra, all fought against the wasting of your world—your universe, believing in the Pure Land promised them by Maitreya. Yet they never once thought to seek that which gives birth to ruination in the first place.”

  Asura thought back on the long road she had traveled, the vast span of time during which all of these events had taken place. It all seemed part of an even longer voyage, one with no beginning and no end.

  “Let me ask you one thing, my king.”

  “Yes?”

  “What exactly are these beings that desire the destruction of our universe? From whence did they come?”

  “Before I explain, I must ask you whether you have ever thought about the limits of your reality.”

  “I have. I would assume they lie at the edge of the expanding universe, where the rate of expansion has reached the speed of light, forming a single, defined space, like an enormous sphere.”

  “True—but this is not a complete explanation. If we speak of a finite space, no matter how large, we must also accept a larger, infinitely vast space outside it, of which your universe is only a part.”

  The universe encompassed billions upon billions of galaxies. What did it matter if it was expanding or contracting, or doing something else entirely? What was the use of such knowledge?

  “Time is the same, you know. The time that defines the reality inside those expanding limits of space is just a part of the time that exists in the infinity beyond. The flow of time began at the origin point of the universe
you know, two hundred billion years ago, and its flow ceases two hundred billion light-years in the distance. Yet that is merely a fragment of the transcendent time stretching out into infinity.”

  The voice of the cakravarti-rājan was filled with the regret of one who had watched the entirety of the universe’s long journey and knew its eventual fate.

  “So, King of Kings, perhaps then you can tell me who Shi is? The absolute being who controls this transcendent time of which you speak?”

  A long silence followed. The blue light falling on the bleak landscape around her, the great unbroken stillness, seemed increasingly bizarre, like something that belonged to another universe entirely. If this truly was the place from which the cakravarti-rājan had observed all change in the vastness of space she knew, then here, she thought, even a god would be little more than one aspect of that change.

  Again, she heard the cakravarti-rājan’s voice within her mind.

  “Once, Asura, I had a vision. Though I do not know if it was a true vision, or just a shadow drawn in my weary mind . . . Perhaps I never saw it at all. I am no longer sure. Yet I remember the contents of this vision quite clearly. I will show it to you now, Asura—I will give it into your mind directly. I’m sure its meaning will be very different for you than it was for me. But that is to be expected. You, who have already traveled so far, will have to choose for yourself whether you will return whence you came or continue along a far more difficult path than any you have known.”

  As the words of the King of Kings ended, the vision began:

  Wrapped in incandescent light, two spiral galaxies quietly devoured a third. Then the three galaxies became one, advancing toward the heart of another galactic cluster. Radioactive nebulae—the remnants of other galactic encounters—shimmered with light, moving through the full spectrum of colors as they gradually faded.

  The scale grew greater and greater still. Now, several thousand galactic clusters swarmed in every direction, drifting at near the speed of light. The radiation they emitted destroyed other clusters billions of light-years distant.