The Vanity of Hope

by G W Langdon

  Awareness returned and a knowing conviction blossomed in his heart. Beyond doubt, or reason, his sacred mission was to guard and nurture the great force of change that had come. His mind settled and the sensory world crept in. How much time had passed? There was a chill in the room. Had last night’s storm blown open a shutter he hadn’t noticed in his absent-mindedness?

  A terrible wail from a stricken animal shrieked through the open window then shouts from the guards on the outer wall. He sprang from the floor and ran out of the hall, impatiently loosening the belt of his thick robe to reduce the ruffle against his over-long strides.

  “Bring the nets and a stretcher,” he said, rushing into the courtyard. “There’s not a moment to lose.”

  The guards opened the monastery gates and immediately raised their staffs against the terrifying silhouette in the cloud. The cold damp drifted out over the valley on a wind from the east. The corpse of a Forest Dweller lay by the cliff edge.

  “What could do that?” Silak asked, pointing at the golden spear protruding from its skull.

  “I fear only one creature could do such a thing.”

  Silak ran his pole over the bumps of sharp, new teeth pushing through the Dweller’s bottom jaw. “I have seen them on the Northern Plains, but this one is changing.”

  “Decay is building an army.” He rubbed the cold from his hands and stared skyward. The Federation would be keeping an extra close eye on events on the ground since the fireball. He searched for a divine omen and intuitively looked to the top of the gates. “Silak, remove the golden spear,” he said, motioning for six monks to follow him. “When I give the sign, dispose of the Forest Dweller.”

  A small bow wave of golden glue started at the top of the gate and oozed down, growing thicker, resisting the push of an invisible weight.

  “Now, Silak.”

  A band of monks lined up along the forty-foot Dweller and pushed their poles up against its scaly skin. The long tail rolled over first and with an extra shove helped drag the carcass over the ledge. The Dweller tumbled away and freefell into the deep snowdrift on the valley floor. The Great Northern Forest brooded upwards in defiant half-shadow.

  The bow wave reached the bottom of the gate. Choen fumbled for an edge and peered underneath the light-bending cloak. The dawn sunlight glowed through the bioPod’s front panel onto a pasty-grey, alien face. If it weren’t for the slowly pulsing green light, he would’ve thought the occupant dead. A row of symbols flashed on the crown of the bioPod and the inquisitive monks collectively gasped and stepped back.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Get the nets ready.”

  “What is it?” a monk asked. “Where’s it from?”

  “He is a gift from the Master of Light.” He let go of the flap. “Place the bioPod onto a stretcher and take it to the infirmary.”

  The monks felt their way around the unfamiliar awkwardness of the cloak and removed the bioPod from the wall onto the stretcher.

  “Wipe those poles clean,” Silak ordered, standing next to the cliff, “and double the guards on the outer walls.”

  “The alien changes everything,” Choen said, approaching Silak. “Others will covet him.”

  “It wasn’t by chance the Dweller came up here; not when it did,” Silak said. “If the Master of Light sent us the human, then what sent the Dweller?”

  #

  Choen marveled at how the cloak bent light in such a way his arms vanished underneath. It was a very sophisticated Federation cloak and the bioPod wasn’t one of those cheap models that could be acquired down a back street in the port. He placed the cloak in a heap on the adjacent bed and returned to the bioPod. He leaned closer and brushed his hand over its protective front panel. High-Color Federation—military, and that guaranteed trouble.

  The fluorescent red ring around the sealed lid changed to blue.

  “What’s happening?” Silak asked, closing the door behind him.

  “The bioPod’s analyzing the atmosphere and comparing it to the host’s planet.” The blue ring turned green and a timer appeared in the front panel and counted down from one hundred.

  Silak pointed to the details scrolling down the left side of the panel. “His name is Thomas Ryder—from Earth—wherever that is.”

  The timer reached zero and the bioPod clicked three times.

  Choen placed his finger on the final sequencing switch.

  Silak stepped back from the table. “Are you sure?”

  “There’s no going back.” Choen licked his dry lips, took a deep breath, and pushed down.

  The timer reset to ten thousand and the bioPod emitted a low, vibrating hum.

  “It’s stimulating his nervous system to wake up the vital organs.”

  “How long?”

  “I do not know,” Choen said. “The bioPod will release control only when the organism can transition safely to the new environment.”

  Choen kept a bedside vigilance while Silak guarded outside the door. The bioPod gradually relinquished control and Tom’s circulatory and nervous systems regained autonomy. His deathbed-blue lips reddened and his skin tone firmed, changing his ghostly white face to a summertime olive.

  Mid-afternoon on the second day, the bioPod played a short melody and the front panel hissed open. The room filled with a hyper-Spectral lightMatrix, tagged, ‘Shipwrights Way, Alice Holt Forest. 15.6.1499.’

  Tom jerked up from the bioMemic base of the bioPod and gasped a full gulp of cold air, then slumped back unconscious. Choen tallied up the sedatives laid out on the table—just in case. The Federation had designed the bioPod to ensure biological survival over a long period of time, but a healthy, emergent mind was never certain. He would help to his fullest capacity, but only Thomas Ryder could make the perilous crossing to his new mindscape.

  Tom’s eyelids quivered and he blinked awake.

  “My name is Choen. You are on Gukre.”

  Tom rolled his head to one side and his eyes tracked back and forth. “Gukre?” he said, in a parched, lazy voice. “No town around here called that. Lost? You must be a long way from home.”

  “Gukre is your home, now. You must rest.”

  “Who are you?” Tom said, clutching the sides of the bioPod.

  “I am Choen.”

  Tom stared down Shipwrights Way. “Danger, need to run.” He struggled against the wrist and ankle bands. “Where is Sarra?”

  Choen wiped a sedative across Tom’s clenched fist and said a small prayer.

  Tom’s panicked breathing settled, and his tight eyelids relaxed.

  “God… help… me.”

  Chapter 7

  The hyperPod stopped outside President Lauzen’s residence on the 111th floor of the communications tower. General Reuzk remained inside the pod, staring into the light-saturated foyer and wondered why the most powerful being in the Federation lived apart from everyone else. He disembarked, placed his hand on the bioPad at the door, and leaned against the window ledge to wait.

  Out to the west, beyond the Base’s mandatory exclusion zone, the last thirty-seven million Federation beings at the tail end of thirty-five thousand years of civilization lived inside a sixty-mile wide asteroid crater. Sheltered from the cooling desert wind, the one thousand-foot deep crater was a natural microclimate for the plants from a dozen conquered planets to grow to their fullest across Nu’hieté’s scores of parks and avenues. The lush, hanging gardens modeled on the original on Tilas in the great city of Segeth cascaded down hundreds of feet with tree roots and lichen of every color gripping the sculptured rock in tight curls. Idyllic from the outside, Nu’hieté harbored an underground menace. The high concentration of iron left from the asteroid impact turned any lightning storm straying off the desert into an electrical firestorm, forcing the residents to flee below to the subterranean world of subStrata.

  From twelve hundred feet high the mighty mile-wide Aiakar River was a thin, emerald-blue vein of hope winding through the arid Magrebian Desert. It buffeted the raised cra
ter rim and flowed around the far side, to emerge wide and slow under the Eastern Bridge to Port Lyonia before sliding away to the Carasia Sea, eighty miles away to the south.

  The Tylinite suspension cables on the bridge shone like a fine web in the high sun. On the far side of the river and up the small hill of ejected asteroid debris, Queen Lillia’s castle towered as tall as any skyReacher. She would know with her elaborate network of spies about the events on Gukre and view the distraction as an opportune chance to nibble away at the edges. Maybe Lauzen knew what she was up to? He knew many matters that weren’t official Federation business.

  Reuzk passed over the gothic speck in the distance of Nu’hieté, but the dark shadows and unkempt grounds of the abandoned Kaleria asylum drew him back and inwards to the horror of his tormented days on Tilas at the hands of Emperor Tilaxian’s henchmen. He rubbed the sleeves of his jacket and soothed the rising goosebumps.

  Water diverted from the Aiakar plummeted over the crater rim to the floor and flowed along a network of irrigation channels. A road branched off an arterial highway running between the quadrants and climbed through the Inner Ring hills then down to the tree-lined Lake Rekeila inside the central uplift zone. The Petalia resort at the edge of the lake was a playground of bright lights and a den for the dark secrets of the famous and frivolous. A two-lane causeway ran from Petalia out to the middle of the lake and the Gated Zone of the Council Elites.

  “With you soon,” Lauzen announced through the bioPad speaker. “I’m caught in a meeting with the Council. Hope you’re enjoying the view. Shouldn’t be long.”

  He tapped the toe of his boot against the skirting board. Maybe it was the way the Federation so easily encompassed those from the outside, but it saddened him how the Tilasian diaspora of the second Exodus had, apart from their token festivities and rituals, so readily discarded the culture of self-reliance that had enabled them to rebuild Tilas after the Great Plague. They had much too easily embraced the Federation’s lazy world of perpetual distraction to become the hedonistic puppets of an uncaring elite.

  Far below, hundreds of Fighter hangars bristled across fifty square miles of painted runways and sub-surface weapons warehouses. Epic in scale, reach and capability, the Base reflected the Federation’s desperation to succeed where they’d always failed. As the military commander of the sprawling military installation, he stood at the front of the last line of defense against Decay, the undefeated destroyer of worlds.

  The mile-high surveillance tower that housed Lauzen’s residence monitored Heyre, the Gate on Gukre, and the incoming dataStreams from the interstellar early-warning dataNet, one hundred and fifty light-years closer to Tilas. Combined with the formidable hardware, the Base provided the logistics to fight Decay directly in a terrestrial outbreak or to support off-world operations. However, as all-powerful as his Base appeared, its true might resided far below—unseen, but all-seeing.

  The further the military complex spiraled down, the fuzzier the demarcation line became between the bioMech and quantum systems until somewhere in the descent the intimidating surface hardware morphed into super-conductive, gossamer webs and finally into light-filled shafts. At the farthest point, beyond the reach of bombs and beings, technology reached the zenith of its powers inside the largest, military-grade sphere of Tylinite the Federation had ever created. Glowing the ghostly blue of glacial ice, Amie saw everything.

  President Lauzen and Amie occupied opposite ends of the Base, in more ways than one. None of the inhabitants that lived on the Base enjoyed such freedom from Amie’s gaze. Lauzen was an outsider in every way. He had access to the inner circles of power inside both the military and political domains, yet remained free to pursue a personal crusade beyond any title. Too many things about Lauzen didn’t add up.

  “Come in, General Reuzk,” Lauzen said, opening the door.

  Reuzk pushed away from the ledge, unnerved by Lauzen’s sudden appearance at the moment he’d been thinking about him. Coincidence. What else could it possibly be? He removed his beret and followed Lauzen inside.

  “General Reuzk, do you believe in God?” Lauzen asked, waving the tint line lower in the window.

  “I try not to waste my time thinking about it.”

  “You’re a realist.”

  “In my line of work actions speak louder than words.”

  Lauzen, willowy tall, stood ramrod-straight like the marble columns supporting the high ceiling. He looked into the tinted, blue sky and drew a deep breath. “God has arrived on Gukre.”

  “There’s no God on Gukre. I was there.” Prisms, crystal figurines, chandeliers, mirrors, and Tylinite sculptures filled the room. The place was a shrine to Light.

  “I respect your doubt,” Lauzen said. “It would require from you a great leap of faith to acknowledge how things truly are. However, in the end, you will come to see it is harder to deny the truth than to keep believing in unlikely coincidences.”

  “Gukre needs my attention, now.”

  Lauzen tapped the bowl of his pipe onto the window sill and knocked out the dregs. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small pouch. “What you know about Decay is what Amie knows, which is to say what I’ve chosen to let her know.” He plugged a heavy pinch of Spice into his pipe and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. “Your association with Decay goes back one planet and two thousand years, but I’ve endured a much longer sentence.” He gestured with his lighter for Reuzk to sit with him. “Let me explain.”

  “This had better be good.”

  Lauzen set his pipe down and filled their glasses with water from a crystal pitcher while the lightMatrix focused onto Colaris, twenty-five thousand light-years from Heyre.

  “There were four Illumens on Colaris,” he began, puffing his pipe alight. “Each Illumen ruled a quadrant of the planet with benevolent oversight and they blessed Colarians in a harmony of abundance. Aramu was the oldest and wisest of the four Illumens. Helio was his protégé for many centuries before he merited elevation. The lesser Illumens, Grawnu and Trewil, were grand in nature but more limited in scope than Helio, and all lacked Aramu’s deep vision.”

  Lauzen dragged several long inhales and let out a long white cloud of smoke.

  “Unbeknown to all, Helio secretly plotted to preside over the whole planet—the entire bioSphere. He seduced Grawnu and Trewil by promising them he’d share his increased powers and together they’d make a final push for eternal life. All of them were deceived. You see, General Reuzk, as wise as the Illumens were… greater still was their fear of death. The longer they lived, the more they wanted to continue living. Thousands of years were not enough. Under the spell of their own greatness they came to see death as just another enemy to defeat in heroic battle, as surely as any mortal foe.”

  He dampened the glowing embers with his thumb.

  “Aramu saw through Helio’s deceits, but he couldn’t sway the other Illumens in time. Helio subsumed the Essences of Grawnu and Trewil and became more powerful than Aramu. Helio’s vanity that he deserved to be an immortal god cost the Illumens everything.

  “Full of rage for being denied the Essence he needed the most, Helio proclaimed war against any who opposed him, especially Aramu. He rounded up by the carriage-load any Colarians who exhibited Potential in the psychoSphere and had them executed. Helio calculated that if he erased the pool of Potentials it would weaken Aramu to the point he’d have to surrender his Essence.”

  “Potentials, Essences. You’ve lost me.”

  “Decay grew out of the Essences of Helio, Grawnu, and Trewil. It knew the sole threat to its power could only ever come from someone with access to a greater pool of Potentials.” Lauzen pointed into the cloud of swirling smoke. “Think of the smoke as Infinite Potential—God if you like; or not. The bowl of my pipe is the psychoSphere, and the Essence is the Spice inside. Like Spice, which consists of genetically matched compounds, the Potentials have a wide range of potencies that can combine in almost limitless ways. As a totality
they are an Essence—a unique pattern—like a fingerprint, but in the psychoSphere.”

  Reuzk picked a speck of thread off his jacket. The burning incense, rows of candles, and the jungle of plants and water features of Lauzen’s home were insufferable. “What does the slaughter of the Potentials on Colaris have to do with Heyre and our visitors on Gukre?” he asked, draining his glass of water and heading to the Stills cabinet.

  “Bear with me,” Lauzen said. “A full interpretation of the Potentials covers many forms of mental energy— intuition, mind-reading, thought manipulation, and telepathy: the ultimate means of communication that aren’t bounded by the limitation of light speed, and which are impossible for Amie to hack.

  “None who fled the slaughter aboard Progeny possessed a single trace of Potential. The Federation of today is descended from those beings. Without Potential, they naturally adore the rational world of technology and the power it bestows.”

  One by one, the planets along Progeny’s flight path in the lightMatrix went dark as Decay pursued Aramu across the void.

  “Again, what has this to do with Gukre?” Reuzk asked, taking a swig of Still and returning to the table as Progeny passed Stenari—the planet before Tilas.

  “Ever since Colaris, we were hounded without mercy, but something unusual happened near Tilas. Decay slowed its chase and changed course and settled on Tilas because something more important than our destruction had caught its interest.”

  “Wouldn’t Federation technology also detect this?”

  “I suspect this Attraction exists in the psychoSphere—and Decay is the master of that realm. The Federation is blind to such things, which is why they always lose.”

  “You brought me out of hibernation seventeen hundred years ago because you thought Decay would surely come to Heyre, but it hasn’t.”

  “The destruction of the Federation is an indulgence for Decay compared to its hunger for immortality. The quest to defeat death began this reign of terror and it’s why Decay stays on Tilas. Our defeat will come after that.”