by G W Langdon
The stroll slowed to a death march and small garden noises filled the deepening silence. She held out the possibility of an extraordinary lifespan, but a sense of urgency seeped through her soft words as though a greater, unseen deadline approached, beyond his need to decide in the next few days if he stayed on this side of the river under her sway, or searched out Sarra and risked falling under the guard of General Reuzk. A genetic upgrade would make him a superior man, but might such an intriguing realm distract him from more ordinary concerns? What hope then for a peaceful mind? Why bother to search for God if he was one?
Chapter 21
The three-quarter drawn curtains cast a peaceful shade over the room. Spiced candles burned in the shallow saucers at each corner of the square wooden table. Everything about the sparse room, from the woven mats of divine, mythical winged creatures to the Scrolls of Goral and the Eight Tenets on the wall, served the single purpose of keeping the body and mind on the right Path. Silak sat beneath the wall Scrolls, reading intently from the small, red book of parables he’d brought from Gukre.
Tom loosened his robe and sat cross-legged on the cushion. Choen’s residence was a welcome change from the organized complexity Ba’illi thrived upon—and the spreading clutter of his own room. Were the monks lucky to live in a pre-ordained world, or were they trapped by their traditions, fighting an unending battle against their natural desires?
“Here we are, Thomas,” Choen said, setting the crystal saucer on the table. He placed a half-full cup of blue Meil tea in front of him and sat cross-legged on his pillow. “You put on a brave face, but your busy eyes have the look of someone who has a lot on their mind. I had hoped you would’ve slowed down by now, but I guess others have different ideas.”
He pulled his sleeve lower to cover the personal assistant lightBand around his wrist. “I have a difficult choice to make, Master Choen, and seek your wise counsel.”
“Choice? That is difficult indeed. Much easier if no choice.”
“I have been offered the chance to live for a thousand years.”
Choen blew on his tea. “Was this an offer, or a demand?”
“I got the feeling it was a little of both,” Tom admitted, sipping his tea and wishing he’d let it cool more. “It’s a bad idea, isn’t it?” he spluttered. “I mean, I wouldn’t be the same, would I?”
“I don’t usually agree with her ways, but I think longevity has its place.”
“But who would I become?” he said, idly running his fingers back and forth over the hieroglyphs and stories carved in the staff.
“Become?” Choen tilted his head to one side. “Nothing would change. You would be you.”
“How can you say that? Humans don’t live that long.”
“The idea of longevity troubles you, but it’s nothing special. What do you think will change?”
“She said I would become taller and stronger—and smarter.”
“None of those changes make suffering go away. You’d gain many natural lifetimes of learning, but great knowledge is no guarantee of true peace. Longevity, or not, makes no difference to your fundamental quest because the cause of your unhappiness remains. You stay trapped within Time.”
“There would be no hurry to attaining mastery.”
“However long your life is to be, unless you take action now, it will end exactly the same—you’ll wonder why you squandered your allotted years.” Choen took his first sip of Meil. “Why do you want to prolong your unhappiness?”
This wasn’t right. Choen should be encouraging him to reject the queen’s offer. “A thousand years of thinking would drive me insane.”
“What is a thousand years to the age of the rocks and the stars of creation? The challenges of becoming a true king do not change. You must overcome Time to have an abiding peace.”
“I’d become distant and arrogant towards those lesser than me.”
“Like us?”
“No. That’s not what I meant.”
“There are millions of ‘superior’ beings across the river from us imprisoned in a dream world so deep and pleasurable they’ve no chance—or choice—of ever escaping to realize what’s eternal and true.”
Tom drooped forward and closed his eyes. Surely it was against God to change your essential nature? “Is that what Master Goral meant when he said if you can’t find the truth where you are, then where do you expect to find it?”
“Longevity, Sarra, Nu’hieté, and especially Gi LaMon are distractions from what is true. Why does time continue to play on your mind? Why did you truly come here?”
He shrugged his shoulders. He half-turned his wrist and checked the time beneath his cuff. “I would outlive Sarra.”
“She’s alive?”
“I don’t think so, but I have to find out if Reuzk has her. If I decline Queen Lillia’s offer and stay the same, then Sarra and I could both grow old together—naturally.”
“You do not know Reuzk’s plans.” Choen gently blew the drifting candle smoke away. “What does it matter if Sarra is here, there, or nowhere? Let’s say you leave the castle, which I doubt will ever happen, and you cross over to the Federation and Sarra is there. Do you think it’ll be as it was on Earth? You’re on Heyre, dead center of Decay’s plans. A long or short life, the Fall will come for every single one of us.”
“She said I’m free to choose,” he said, playing idly with the corner of his robe.
“Have you not wondered about the extra-long cuffs on your robe, the heavy hem?”
He rested his hands on his knees. “She said it was part of her design. ‘Regal,’ was how she put it.”
“The gussets under your arms and across the shoulders? Your whole robe is designed to fit a ‘larger’ you.”
A sudden paralyzing realization came upon him. She had known from the time he’d arrived that this moment would come and that he’d have no choice. He was a ‘Keilo.’ He had the illusion of choice but was actually trapped in a larger game. Was he destined to die for the sake of future generations? “She’s known all along.”
“I had my suspicions when I first saw you in the robe. She must have got the extra Rilla cloth from Nedje. The depth of her intrigue goes deeper than that. Her and Lauzen have a long history. Our president has a very mysterious past that somehow includes the Négus.”
“She had the knight cloned two hundred and fifty years ago because she didn’t know when I would arrive, only that the quest had begun.”
“Does the choice of longevity still trouble you?”
He gripped the staff and lifted his head. “If I undergo longevity there’s no turning back and I must become the great king who saves everybody. I can’t do that. I want the simple life—as we had on Gukre.”
“There’s no shame in being afraid.”
He looked through the gap in the curtains. “Sarra needs me.”
“Of course, but first you must save yourself. Your longevity, quest for kingship, or desire to be with Sarra, makes no difference to your true struggle. Longevity will tempt you beyond your wildest dreams but also make you confront your darkest fears. You will soar to unimagined heights then crash into an abyss of despair beyond anything you have witnessed or think possible to bear. Regardless of how much time you’re fated to have, your goal to become a true king remains unchanged. However, a word of caution. You cannot claim victory if you do not have a true heart.”
“By ‘true,’ you mean a heart that harbors no secrets?”
“A true heart is not attached to desires that attract darkness. You must have a clear and compassionate conscience, but above all else, a deep compassion for your wretched self.”
“Isn’t it vanity to put yourself first?”
“It is the opposite. This is the deepest love. If you cannot love within then you can never love what’s without.”
Tom dampened his flushed forehead and wiggled lower in the cushion. “I have a confession. I saw it in a dream.”
Choen suddenly grew earnest and slid his cup
to one side. “It?” His face whitened. “You mean…”
“I thought the lights might’ve been something spiritual… the dazzling colors. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He gulped to finish the tea. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin against it.”
“You must find a way.”
“Today, I thought I had a choice. That you would agree with my reasons for remaining the same and I would leave here with the certainty of knowing I’d made the right decision to forego longevity. But now I see there’s no true choice. I must undergo enhancement to defeat Decay and save Sarra.”
“Do not concern yourself with free will or fate. What does it matter? That question is just one more concern to tie your mind into knots.” Choen pushed up and straightened his robe. He undid his belt and retied it with one of his baggy knots that never held its grip. “Duty takes courage, sacrifice, and demands endurance. Longevity is the right path for you.”
“But winning the war inside comes first.”
“And that remains true—but winning the external war will take an age.”
Tom straightened his back as he stood up, smiling at fate’s sense of irony. Decay demanded he changed the fabric of his existence, yet his personal enemy required nothing special of him.
“If you conquer yourself you can conquer anything,” Choen said, “but if you cannot defeat your own mind then what chance have you against Decay?”
Silak came to Choen’s side. Tom adjusted his robe, suddenly burdened down with the perils of navigating longevity and the rigors of fight training.
“Remember, Thomas,” Choen called out. “Choose wisely.”
Tom paused at the doorway and turned around. The high ceiling diminished Choen to the size of a child. So much wisdom packed into someone so small. For better, or worse, fate was the only true choice he had left.
Chapter 22
The hyperLift soared past three hundred and the floor numbers changed from blue to indigo. Tom rested the staff in the corner of the lift and rubbed his clammy hands against his robe. He checked his sword and adjusted the scabbard belt. Queen Lillia’s pain was undeniably real, but she was far from revealing the full extent of her trials.
The doors opened on the 337th floor into a rarefied realm far removed from his comfortable residence so many floors below. He touched the staff onto the marble and strode across the red and black dragon mosaic of the Royal House of Tilas in the middle of the foyer. On either side of the doorway to the Upper Room were bronze statues of Feheri rearing up on their back legs. He massaged the constriction around his throat and pushed through. He stopped midway up a steep flight of stairs and cracked his neck to loosen a nagging kink. Nerves, that was all. He rested his hand on the jeweled pommel of his sword, planted the staff firmly, and pressed on two steps at a time.
Inside the Upper Room drawn velvet curtains cast a pervading weight over the circular room stripped bare of the wealth and power displayed in the Lower Chambers. An ancient pain from a bygone age haunted the inner sanctum.
A smoke trail curled up from behind a tall chair silhouetted against the fading sun. “It’s an impressive view,” he said, approaching her side. Queen Lillia’s regal gown, rings, and fine necklace were those she wore for the painting with King Jialin in the Lower Chamber hallway.
“I seldom venture this far up,” she said. “There are too many memories here for a casual visit, but I thought it best you saw what’s at stake. You get a different perspective up here of how things might be perceived lower down.”
From half a mile high, the crater was more a geological feature than an idyllic home for the diaspora from Tilas and beyond. Ridgelines of the material ejected from the asteroid strike radiated out over the plains. The hills of the central uplift zone were a thin ring of rock around Lake Rekeila.
“I need you to fully understand that billions of souls and countless natural wonders of life are at stake.”
The velvet holographic curtain ghosted away and a barren landscape of dead and burning trees appeared in the windowpane. Dark, heavy clouds, yellowed by the smoke of continuously burning fires, veiled the weak sun. Wasteland hills of charred forests and enormous stumps smoldered in the swirling drizzle. Trails of white smoke puffed from roots beneath the seared ground as funeral pyres for the vanquished sentinel trees. There were no greens, or blues, nor fleeting signs of life anywhere to the ominous, black horizon.
“This is Tilas under the rule of Decay. It will also be the fate of Heyre, and Earth, too, if we fail to defeat Decay.”
The next pane showed the hill forest as it was in its original, natural state of lush meadows and grazing animals nestled between thick woodlands. One by one the panes compared Tilas under the heel of Decay to how it’d once been. Stagnant ponds in one pane were fast-moving blue rivers in the next. Grotesquely mutated animals ill-suited to existence in an arid environment became teeming species perfectly evolved for life on the open plains. The grand capital of Segeth lay in ruins. In the final pane, gigantic statues of heroic kings and elegant queens watched over the great Tilasian city of learning in silent witness to the untrammeled beauty of their fair culture. Unlike her other shows, the Fall of Tilas, wasn’t manipulated for his benefit. Such malignant horror was beyond the conjuring of any mortal’s imagination.
He couldn’t defeat that. The specter of doubt resurfaced, convincing—it was sheer vanity to believe he could ever fulfill the call of destiny.
“There’s one more thing you need to see,” she said, as a lightShield recalibrated.
A stone statue of King Jialin appeared, so finely crafted the king could’ve passed as alive in the evening’s fading orange light. He was eight feet tall and costumed the same as the painting. Fine wrinkles spread away from the king’s emerald blue eyes that sparkled as though they might see. The ruby-red jewel in the pommel of the king’s gem-encrusted sword was a pair with the jewel in Prince Arulian’s sword—his sword.
He bowed before the statue of the great king and stepped closer. He tiptoed taller and touched King Jialin’s crown. A rising sense of duty charged through his body. Heyre needed him; she needed him.
“No more surprises,” he said, checking around the room.
“You don’t trust me. After all I’ve done for you.”
“For yourself. If I say no to longevity, then who will save you?”
“Who will save Sarra?”
“I will when I walk out of here tomorrow.”
She engaged him directly for the first time. “I can’t let you do that.”
“I know, but I had to hear you say it.”
He stamped the staff on the floor and stood straight. “I will be your king. It’s time to find out what the Négus has in mind—for all of us.”
“You are a very long way from being anywhere near a great king,” she said in an abrupt change of mood.
“We cannot bargain with fate and I must get inside Gi LaMon.”
She laughed. “Of course. I had always intended to.” She reached across and laid her hand on his arm. “I have great sympathy for your need to know if Sarra is in there. I wanted to stay with my king, but I had to leave. You realize this, don’t you? I had no choice.”
He knew the story: the king ordered her to leave to keep alive the slim hope for a better future. “What’s your reason for sending me in?”
She silently clapped her hands. “Oh Thomas, how advanced of you. I’m going to enjoy watching you grow to your full potential. My reason? I want to see what Reuzk conjures up for your visit.” She took a tight hold of his hand. “Come, the ceremony is on the balcony.”
A round table with a vase of flowers and three cane chairs sat in the middle of the tiled floor. Fragrant smoke from the stand torches wafted over the narrow, curved balcony.
He rubbed his arms against the high-altitude cold and peered over the chest-high, steel meshed wall. Across the river as far as the eye could see, Nu’hieté spread over the primordial, shadowed landscape in epic splendor. A kaleido
scopic blanket of colorful lights twinkled up through the cooling layers of air. The hyperTrains circumnavigating the crater wall were reduced in the distance to bright, slow-moving lines of codified light. Far below, the castle gardens twisted and twirled in an irresistible fractal and the animals grazing on the lawn were black dots against a darkening sea of green.
“It’s a long way to fall.”
He turned to the unexpected voice and moved away, instantly mistrusting the elastic mask that hid the stranger’s true identity. A dark, heavy coat and high collar concealed the rest of his thin frame.
“Let me introduce myself,” he said, holding out his gloved hand. “I’m Doctor Teripeli.” The corners of the mouth turned up in a smile. “I created your Methuselah pill.”
Tom spread his fingers and kept his grip as large as possible to absorb the crush of the huge hand. A dark shadow flashed through his mind as they shook hands and the choke returned in his neck. “Pleased to finally meet you,” he said. “I wondered if you would make an appearance tonight.”
Teripeli glanced to Queen Lillia placing a pitcher of water onto the table. “You know about me?”
“Not directly, but I couldn’t see her majesty trusting Vera with the knight’s reClone. There had to be someone real behind my longevity.”
Teripeli’s smile returned.
“Please, have a seat,” the queen said, filling the glasses, careful not to pour in the fruit slices.
He rested the staff in the arm of the chair and swept the scabbard out behind as he settled down. The queen and doctor sat in a united front with their backs to the balcony wall.
“To the good health of Thomas,” she said. “May your days be long and prosperous.”
They chinked their raised glasses together and sipped to good health.