Lady of the Sands

by Fuad Baloch

  “Share what you know with them,” said the First in her ear. “Change the world and you can return to your own.”

  “Shut up!” barked Ruma. She rose, startling Yenita and Sivan, who turned to look at her way. “Just keep your bloody mouth shut!”

  The First didn’t reply.

  “I…” stammered Yenita.

  “Not you,” replied Ruma, waving a hand at her, breath coming in hot gasps now. The clothes hung heavy on her, choking her every time she drew in the stale air.

  She could spend an eternity being careful or could just throw caution to the wind. After all, she was nothing but an insignificant player in the larger scheme of things, a mere insect that found itself in the wrong flowerbed in the wrong garden. What difference would it really make if her interactions changed the local, immediate experiences of a few people so long as she limited what she did share of the future?

  Patience required too much thinking, too much care. Not traits she had in abundance.

  Even as she tried to convince her mind, remind herself she didn’t really care for what might or could happen, that she hadn’t ever been one to worry about hypotheticals, some part of her continued to resist her efforts, screeching at her to be aware of how her actions might magnify down the centuries.

  She could play it safe. Or play a card she had been thinking about while she sat miserably atop the saddle.

  Ruma turned around, then, without saying a word to the Kapuri siblings, headed towards the tavern door.

  Boots scrunched on the gravelly ground behind her, accompanied by the rustle of clothes.

  “By Alf, if you leave us here, the night would grow bleak!” said the young trader who had been eyeing her before. He slurred his words almost as if drunk. Another paradox in this age that put much emphasis on outward piety yet seemed to allow other vices like drinking. “Stay with us a bit, eh!”

  “Get out of my way!” Ruma growled. “What would your precious holy Lady say if she could see you like this?”

  “Know no Lady.” The trader grinned and scratched his cheek. “You’re tall. Almost as much as me. What great kids we would make!”

  “L-let her be,” came the shaky voice of Sivan behind her. “Now!”

  The trader guffawed. “Try and stop me, boy!”

  Ruma had had enough. Shaking her head, she stepped forwards, kicked the lecherous man in the nuts.

  “Argh!”

  Not stopping a moment to stand over the screaming man, she walked past him and stepped out into the dark night. The tavern was at the outskirts of some small trading community, practically surrounded by dark sand dunes. The torchlight filtering from behind her cast a long shadow ahead, dancing as she moved forwards.

  Exhaling, her fingers still curled into fists, she headed west, away from the stables and into the blackness. Voices rose behind her. Curses. Laughter. Shouts.

  Ruma marched ahead, never breaking her stride despite not seeing what lay ahead. One benefit of being surrounded by sand was one always fell on the soft surface if they did lose balance.

  “FIRST!” she shouted, stopping when the inn was a good five hundred yards behind her. “Enough, I say! Get out of my mind. Get the fracking hell out. Or I am going to carve you out.”

  “Change the—”

  “I heard you the first fracking million times,” she thundered. “What you want is not going to happen. I am not going to as much as harm a calf if that’s what you’re after. Get out!”

  “You change the world. Or remain a part of it.”

  Ruma stomped her feet. Then she drew the dagger, felt the sharp blade with her fingertip. “First, either you leave me this very instant or I carve you out!”

  “Change—”

  “You’re here with me, aren’t you?” She licked her lip, going all in. “If you know me even a bit, you’d know not to push me. Either you leave me or I will not let you live. Even if that means bawling out my brains with my own hand!”

  The First fell silent. Ruma stood, waiting for the Pithrean, turning the dagger round and round in her hands. Now that she had voiced the idea, there was little to not like about it. The blasted aliens had been responsible for billions of deaths and had changed the course of her life in ways she had not wanted or desired.

  Maybe she could take revenge on their behalf here.

  “Alright, I gave you enough time!” she said. Drawing in a long breath, Ruma raised the dagger. The soft voice of self-preservation called out, got drowned by the red-hot rage.

  “Wait!”

  Ruma shook her head, exhaled, preparing herself for the sharp blade.

  The world swayed underneath her feet.

  Before she had a chance, the darkness around her melted away into a universe of galaxies and vast swathes of inky blackness purer than any she’d ever seen.

  Eight

  The Sight

  Ruma opened her jaws, screamed, heard nothing. She was in a vacuum of sorts—almost as if she had been physically thrust into space—her voice finding no purchase in the ether. Except, in space, even without a suit, she’d have a sense of directionality.

  All around her, galaxies swirled, over and around. Little pockets of glittering diamonds and sprinkled sawdust over velvety blackness. Uncountable, the lot of them, each one of them containing billions of stars housing an equally staggering number of heavenly bodies with satellites of their own, all swirling, tumbling, revolving without a particular focus point.

  Her breath caught. Shock and awe overwhelmed her senses. She’d been in space countless times before, enough to consider herself intimately aware of its amorphous contours. Yet none of that had prepared her for the view in front.

  Space was no longer the shapeless mass that only acquired a definite shape when one approached it or utilised sensors to calculate specifications following a particular scale. Instead, it looked like a living being of sorts, made up of an infinity of breathing, writhing cells brimming with potentiality and mass and bulk and… a presence she’d never realised before. Now that she saw it all, her life up until now felt like a blind man’s experiences as he stumbled through the grandness of creation.

  The universe moved, sped past her.

  She screamed once more, her thoughts a roiling mess of confusion, terror, despair. Beneath all that, anger threatened to override everything else.

  A dream. That’s all this was. The Pithrean’s parlour trick. One he must have used on Gulatu before and now was subjecting her to.

  Her eyes fell on a sea of dust to her right. A thick, viscous blanket of vapour. Nothing she had seen before. Cosmic in nature, she knew it intuitively, matter as yet unformed, going through states of being with no firm final destination in view. Matter vast enough to birth a million more galaxies, house another infinity of stars and worlds, initiate new ontologies in their own rights.

  Her head hurt, the sheer scale of it all taking her breath away.

  The brilliant whites and yellows and oranges dimmed, replaced by a glow that permeated throughout the cosmos. Not the black of nothing she’d grown used to in space. A glowing, ethereal silvery latticework of lines binding everything to everything. Dark matter?

  Even in the void, she felt herself move. That, or the universe sped past her. The stars twinkled out. The galaxies winked, then they too vanished. The brilliant, ever-present lights blurred, eclipsed by a mask she couldn’t see.

  She blinked.

  The formless clouds swam everywhere now. No burning balls of flame in their embrace. No galaxies, either. Just the sheer potential of life and space and time.

  Something, a force she could feel but not see, permeated the vista. A crippling presence that moulded matter, shape, space, subatomic particles, codifying a set of laws, binding all the disparate elements into a cohesive yet uninspiring superset of unimaginably complex patterns.

  “What… what is all this?” she muttered, hearing her words echo in the chamber of her mind.

  The First, if that was even its real name, kept sile
nt.

  What was going on?

  The clouds shuddered, then parted as if curtains being drawn back. The dimensions of height and mass and depth and time collapsed into each other, even as they seemed to take on a form her mind could almost sense but not quite perceive.

  She screamed, her mind protesting against the paradoxical view of complex geometric shapes that had vacated space-time and yet continued to occupy it. Her mind tried to conjure up analogies, explanations, and failed. The implosion reversed, a shower of brilliant light emanating from it, then collapsed again.

  Causality was broken, and her mind shouted at her. No, not broken. Working in ways she couldn’t understand. Instead of consequences following actions within a frame of reference, the events seemed to be happening in different frames, but were somehow still interlinked. The arrow of time, straight and immutable, had turned into a waterfall, its droplets splashing this way and that without a discernible pattern.

  Shadowy figures, dark yet brighter than middle-aged suns, thrashed into each other, copulating in between the implosions.

  The figures stretched out, extending beyond the sphere of mass around it, growing larger and larger until each dwarfed a medium-sized galaxy, their numbers rising exponentially.

  Living beings. Sentient life of a kind that her mind, even in this abstract form, could only try and glimpse. Goosebumps spread on flesh she couldn’t even feel in her disembodied sense. Like giant cogs of some unseen machine, they exerted themselves on the universe itself, changing it, letting it change them. Part of the universe. The universe itself. Masters of dimensions and portals and experiences far greater than those of a trillion trillion trillion souls would ever accumulate.

  The Pithrean?

  The figures dimmed, winked away, leaving behind a smattering of smaller blue dots so indistinct she almost missed them. Like insects with their antennae swaying around, they hobbled in the afterglow of the shadowy figures.

  The cosmos grew dark, a realm that had never seen as much as a pinprick of light. She shivered, realising the arrow of time was swinging wildly.

  Flashes of brilliant light bloomed around her. Out of nowhere, gaseous stars winked into existence. Another instant and galaxies containing a billion of them swirled. To the right, a magnificent explosion bloomed. She whipped her head around. Not a star, even if the discharge of energy seemed greater than one going supernova.

  What then?

  She felt the ripples the explosion left in the fabric of space-time around her. A dense weight settling in the middle of a tightly strung cloth at each end, causing a bend with its bulk.

  More explosions flared up around her.

  The galaxies continued to spin, continued to birth stars, oblivious to what was going on in their midst in the interstitial spaces that continued to expand at a pace faster than her capability to calculate.

  “What…”

  The shadow figures emerged beside the flares of light. Weaker than how she remembered seeing them before. Shadow of a shadow of a shadow, and yet bursting with energy and potential.

  Time sped by.

  The universe grew dark once more. Again, a realm that had never known light, energy.

  She floated around, no axis or sense of direction guiding her presence. She exhaled. More lights bloomed into existence. Tiny. Puny.

  The birth of stars.

  More time sped by.

  Heavenly bodies formed into clumps of baser material, began clinging to each other over aeons, acquiring stable orbits.

  Life sprouted cautiously, almost furtively. Simple amoeba and germs at first. Worlds filled with carbon and nitrogen and noxious gases, each producing living, breathing products shaped by their ecologies, nothing in common with others except for the spark of life.

  She blinked.

  Time sped by once more.

  Life teemed in the worlds. Less than a grain’s worth on a sandy beach, yet it was there if one knew where to look for it.

  Fantastic forms of life rose. Trees that stayed still in the sunlight, uprooted themselves at night, communicated with each other using vibrations on the crust. Beings who lived in seas of sulphur and molten iron and used telepathy to communicate through their thick poisonous worlds. A million variations of beings that looked suspiciously like the modern human, stumbling overland and in lush jungles no taller than six inches.

  Life rose.

  And evolved.

  And died.

  Worlds formed, spun around like beads of necklaces, part of an unseen pattern.

  Then either they collided with others or simply withered away. Stars, as magnificent and majestic as they were, cooled, then cooked their own satellites as they went out.

  She watched it all, spinning round and round in the middle of the vast nothingness that was also everything.

  The shadowy figures watched as well. Weaker now, but still great in their power, more insects swarming at their feet.

  Ruma turned to the figure closest to her, raised a hand that wasn’t hers, shouted at the distant figures in a language and medium she could feel but could not comprehend. Their resulting cries hit her senses, but went unperceived and died away.

  She, or the being she was in this world, tired of the paradoxes and strange laws, tried to return to her homeland. Was the way through the shadowy figures blocking her path?

  The view didn’t shift.

  Then the shadowy figures withered, began losing their gaseous form, dispersing into the interstitial blackness of space.

  She looked down, screamed at the Shard that lay at her feet, her connection with the universe, the cosmos, and all that it contained.

  Nine

  Awakening

  The world returned in a rush. Ruma blinked, stumbled as gravity took possession of her body once more. She looked around, saw the sand dunes bathed in silver, the light filtering from the tavern she had left behind.

  She was back in the real world. The nightmare was done.

  Fear of what she had seen remained, though, a menacing figure looming in the distance.

  “W-what was that?” she croaked.

  The First remained quiet.

  Ruma exhaled. Had she seen the cosmos from the eyes of the First, a Pithrean’s perspective of everything that was? Or just a mirage, a make-believe reality his kind used to dupe others with? Her fingers trembling, she brought them up to wipe her brow. The night breeze was cool, pleasant, but she was sweating profusely, the back of the tunic sticking to her back.

  “Is this… Is this all you can do?” she whispered. When the First didn’t answer, she ground her teeth. “Truth be told, that was a damn impressive show, much more believable than any holo film I’ve ever seen. Bravo! But think again if this will make me do your bidding!”

  Staring out into the night, biting her lips, she considered what she had gone through. It was possible what she had seen was an illusion, no matter how convincing. If that was the case, then—

  Breath caught in her chest as a memory of Gulatu recalling the worlds the Pithrean had constructed for him surfaced. They had created this world for him once. Doonya. What were the chances she had seen a dream within a dream? That in actuality she was in her ship, her mind under the grip of the Pithrean?

  Why would they bother with her, though? Why even entice her to change things here if this was all just an illusion?

  A frightening answer came back. She knew nothing of the Pithreans’ motives. How would she even begin to understand them?

  Ruma looked around again. Sand dunes marked by the silver moonlight. A cactus tree to her right, one of the only things that could thrive out in the open. The tavern with its lit windows standing out in the darkness. The world looked the same, yet so much had changed.

  Gulatu had seen through the fake reality. Couldn’t she do the same? Ruma squeezed her eyes shut. He had been back at his house in Irtiza, the city he had fled to with his young wife. The illusion had been perfect, he had said, until he had denied it.

  Denia
l.

  Was that all she needed to do?

  “This world isn’t real,” she whispered.

  Nothing happened. Filling her lungs until they seemed to burst, she bellowed, “This world is not real!”

  The cool breeze brushed up against her clammy skin, set the ends of her hair fluttering. But the world didn’t disappear as it had for Gulatu.

  Ruma felt her strength drain, leak away. Intuitively, her mind had accepted this world as real early on, and now, denying the Pithrean hold over her hadn’t returned her to her ship, either.

  Cold hard numbers started popping into her mind. Permutations of all things the Pithrean would have needed to get right to make the world self-consistent and coherent. Not just a couple of people in an old crumbling hut drawn from memory of a man as they had done with Gulatu. An entire breathing world with millions of souls that seemed to have the ability to deviate from how history would have recorded them, assuming the Pithrean was right about timelines being linear.

  She started calculating, gave up after three minutes. Her head hurt. She had been good with numbers all her life, about the only thing she had inherited from her mother. If she couldn’t even begin to gather the variables to calculate all the computing power necessary to pull off something like this, it really left two options for her.

  Either the Pithrean did have all the power to create this reality or she was indeed in the past. If the former, then there was nothing she, a mere fly, could do against the mountains that were Pithrean. If the latter, she still had to figure out a way to get back.

  Simple choices, really.

  “First!” she shouted, shaking a finger at the heavens. “Talk to me!”

  Nothing.

  For all the bravado she was putting on, there was no hiding the sheer terror roiling within her. What in the seven hells was she up against? How would she get back?