Forever Shores

by Peter McNamara

  In a manner of speaking, they run, the dromedaries loping across desert sand and stones, kicking up a wake of dry dust, beginning to pull further ahead of the Roman horsemen. Looking behind, Simeon sees that the horses are being urged on to greater efforts, though not breaking into full gallop as yet. Soon, they are gaining once more, but the dromedaries have energy aplenty in reserve. ‘We’ll go yet faster, Queen.’ They do so, but only to an extent where the pursuers neither gain nor begin to fall away.

  ‘Our camels can do this forever. Aurelian’s horses will soon have had enough.’

  ‘Normally, Zenobia. Normal horses.’ She does not seem to mind being called simply Zenobia in this time of crisis. ‘With the sun in the sky, I believe that the Imperator’s power will be able to sustain them. Is your dromedary yet tiring?’

  ‘She is still strong.’

  ‘My mount also. His power has not extended to us. There must be limits to its range.’

  ‘Yet, the sun appears to take strength from his enemies across a whole battlefield. How close may we let him approach?’

  ‘We’ll have to guess. But he must have limits, otherwise he could have brought down your city with exhaustion from Antioch or even Rome. Besides, the weakness which your armies have suffered when opposing him is a gradual one over a day; whereas when he defeated me with sickness and vertigo it was at close quarters.’

  The chase proceeds into the afternoon. As the sun becomes hotter in the sky, Zenobia suggests they pull further ahead—perhaps the range of Aurelian’s power becomes greater as the sun itself grows stronger. He takes her advice, but once they have doubled the distance between themselves and Aurelian they do not allow the gap to increase; Simeon does not wish Aurelian to lose heart, if that were possible. He wishes to tempt the Imperator into consuming his strength.

  Late in the afternoon, before the sun wanes, Aurelian acts. There is a long downward slope between him and his quarry, and his horses put on a fresh spurt, finally breaking into full gallop across the desert. Zenobia and Simeon run their camels hard, but at least they can use the dromedaries to fritter away some of Aurelian’s power.

  Eventually, Aurelian gains on them, and he gets close enough for Simeon to feel his exhausting presence. No use fleeing any longer. Simeon and Zenobia stop and dismount, lay down their weapons, stand waiting for what must seem their inevitable capture. They fold back the hoods of their paenulae, making their identities plain. It will take perhaps a minute for the horsemen to be upon them.

  Simeon uses the time well.

  ‘I’m sorry, my Queen,’ he says, ‘for what I must now do.’

  ‘What!’

  The horsemen are close. Time stops; Zenobia’s speech is halted, her mouth left gaping open. The whole desert freezes. Aurelian and his soldiers are suspended in dusty blue air; a hawk, high in the sky, hangs frozen; even gnats are fixed in position, like dots of ink on parchment; isolated tussocks of desert grasses lock into bent shapes made by an intermittent dry wind. Simeon walks calmly to his dromedary, draws from its sewn straps the Sword of God; for that instant, his arm and the black blade are the only things in the desert that move. It is now many hours since he has had his fill of blood; he can sustain this effort for only a few more heartbeats. He concentrates, walks purposefully back to Zenobia, seizes her roughly by the wrist. ‘Ah, if this moment could last,’ he says softly, to her unhearing ears. Ever so gently, he holds her narrow wrist, calling to her blood, feeling a pulse begin, though her body is otherwise as frozen in the moment as the rest of the desert. Red blood wells under her skin and flows for him, another visible movement among frozen sand and stone and time. Reverently this time, he puts his mouth to her arm.

  And drinks her. Dry.

  It is a perfect draught, as strong as he has ever tasted. The blood of a demi-goddess flowed in her veins—no wonder he loved her! Now it flows in his. There is a power in him. His mind is a sharp blade. His body was a wolf’s; now it is a lion’s or a huge German bear’s. He is stronger than he has ever been. Time unfreezes as Simeon conserves his powers; the horsemen approach. Horror in their faces. Simeon is half-crouched, the scimitar held at an angle across his body, in the attitude of a man prepared to die fighting.

  Aurelian’s spirit is pulling at him, trying to suck the sorcerer’s strength away. But Zenobia’s blood seems to turn to golden power whatever it touches within Simeon’s body. For the moment, he resists and turns back the might of Sol Invictus.

  ‘Stay behind me,’ Aurelian growls to his men. ‘I don’t want any of you dead in the confusion.’ Then, grimly, ‘I shall finish this task.’ Simeon buries his scimitar, point first and almost to the hilt, in the desert sand as Aurelian charges upon him, short sword pointed at Simeon’s heart. A drumming of hooves on sand and a guttural shout. ‘Die at last, creature of evil!’

  Simeon feels the huge new strength from Zenobia’s blood start to siphon away, as Aurelian’s sorcery asserts itself, close up and under the grim Imperator’s conscious control. Time will not freeze … but it slows … enough. Simeon avoids the charge and crouches low as the panting, whinnying horse rushes past; he seizes Aurelian by his leg, dragging him out of the saddle as he passes. Both fall to the ground, Aurelian losing his sword, but kicking powerfully with a thud into Simeon’s chest and crawling away. Simeon springs upon him and they are wrestling; Simeon cannot concentrate on slowing or stopping time, and Aurelian’s sorcery waits to fall upon his own like a huge iron hammer smashing upon a floor of glass. The Imperator’s strength is enormous, and he seems to glow from inside with heat, heat which quickly burns away Simeon’s own reservoir of strength. They wrestle like titans, Zenobia’s blood renewing itself within Simeon. She must not have died for nothing! And now each is draining at the other’s strength, for Simeon’s long fingers have tightened on the Imperator’s throat; he is calling in his mind to Aurelian’s blood, and it hears …

  It comes to him; it seeps out under strange, long, hairy fingers.

  Bruised, they roll and struggle, but then Simeon’s mouth finds the side of Aurelian’s neck where the carotid pulses; blood spurts, splashing Simeon’s face and tawny hair—some of it, enough of it, going down into the hollow of his belly, sustaining, strengthening him further. Within seconds, it is over. The Imperator’s body is white and limp. As the remaining horsemen charge upon him, time finally freezes like blue ice. The rest is sheer carnage: Simeon tears them limb from limb …

  The priests of Sol Invictus created well. Aurelian’s blood is as potent as Zenobia’s. Simeon closes his eyes and concentrates. He must work his greatest act of sorcery, displace everyone in sight, everyone except Zenobia. The power of Aurelian’s blood boils in him. First, he looks behind his eyes at what he wishes to see.

  And opens his eyes.

  The scene is changed. A hawk flies against the sun. Gnats zigzag in the air. Occasional tussocky vegetation waves in the intermittent breeze. There is a charnel house of death about him. Horses run wildly back and forth, arching their necks and shaking their reins, startled to find that their masters have vanished from their backs. But, in the other direction, a tall dark-haired woman dressed in a white linen paenula is beginning to mouth the word, ‘What!’ She looks about her, where she stands, confused, beside her Palmyran dromedary. Her dark-skinned Saracen face is as shocked as the first time she saw Simeon’s bloodthirsty sorcery. But she says nothing.

  Simeon draws his blade out of the dry, fine sand. Somewhat raggedly, he saws from its shoulders the sneering head of Lucius Domitius Aurelianus Augustus, the Imperator of Rome known as Aurelian. Simeon speaks to the head in Latin: ‘You set yourself against the Sword of God, Imperator.’

  Satisfied, he grips the trophy by its cropped hair, turns toward Zenobia, sagging to one knee.

  ‘What happened here?’ she says.

  He is mute with sickness and confusion.

  That last effort, displacing six dead men plus himself to a time several minutes in the past, has taken all the strength he had; it has al
most killed him. Yet, he remains glutted with Aurelian’s blood. No longer a source of strength, it is evil, lifeless stuff within him. It weighs sickeningly upon his bowels.

  ‘You cannot imagine what I have had to do here, and I am too weak to explain it or just what it has done to me,’ he says. He sits back on his haunches and throws the blood-drained severed head so that it lands at her feet. ‘My strength is gone. I am no protection to you. I may not live beyond the next minutes. Perhaps in some of these corpses there is a little poor blood to sustain me back to Palmyra.’

  ‘I still have all my blood.’ Zenobia suppresses a shudder of disgust. ‘Take some of it.’

  Yes. He has room in his belly for a last small draught of Zenobia. ‘Lady, there will need to be a new Imperator of Rome. Your fortunes will turn, now.’

  She walks to him. ‘You cannot talk. Be quiet.’

  ‘Zenobia, you are, as they say, just a woman, and you cannot be Imperator. I propose your son, Vaballathus Athenodorus.’

  ‘Indeed, he has always been a dutiful boy. Be quiet now.’

  She crouches to him, extends her arm towards his hungry mouth, her hand bent backward at the wrist, veins upward.

  The future shudders; it cracks open like an egg; it breaks, shatters. And is reborn.

  The Gate of Heaven

  Rosaleen Love

  The Buddhist monk is wired to the EEG. As he enters trance, the machine traces evidence for Nirvana.

  See these DNA strips. Here is the location of the gene for God.

  Here is proof of the power of prayer. These people in the cancer ward do not know that others are praying for them. See how they improve.

  Fourth comes the discovery of the gate of heaven.

  Of course there will always be those who say that what happened on space-craft Mir is fraud, or mass hypnosis. What, though, if it were true?

  I have kept my peace about Mir, until this day. Once, upon Mir, the veil of reality was lifted, and we beheld with a celestial clarity, and we were all transformed.

  Then Mir was destroyed. It went plummeting into the great Southern Ocean, or so they said.

  What if I were to say that Mir is still aloft, the real Mir? It was the material Mir that burned and crashed into the sea, but in the reality beyond the material world, which is uncreated, which pervades everything, and which we have always thought, until that moment, to be beyond the reach of human knowledge and understanding, the real space station Mir still flies aloft, the cosmonauts at their posts.

  I tried to tell what I saw, and was called crazy. They felt sorry for me, and gave me drugs that caused my vision to fade. The everyday world crowded in and my normal life was returned to me.

  My friends are still aloft, and I am here.

  I have lost entrance to the gate of Paradise.

  ‘I have a theory of everything.’ We were on board Mir, doing one of the endless sleep experiments. Tsiolkovsky attached himself to the wall-panel by strips of velcro. He wore a blue cap fitted with sensors, stuck to his head with greasy gel. He closed his eyes to allow me to fix the REM sensors to his eyelids. He had a large bulb thermometer in his rectum to measure core body temperature. I placed a catheter in his vein, and took the first blood sample for the night. ‘This cannot be the real world,’ said Tsiolkovsky. ‘Volkov, what do you say to this idea? I believe we are trapped in a nightmare.’

  I splashed his blood onto paper and fed it into the Reflectron. Measurements from the machine went straight to Base on earth.

  I agreed with Tsiolkovsky’s theory of the nightmare, but I argued with him to urge him on, to help him find a better reason for being born. ‘When I prick your arm, you bleed,’ I said. ‘This is not the blood of nightmares. It smears on the strip. You can see it. Here.’ But he could not see. The sensors pressed on his eyelids.

  ‘They are studying sleep on Mir, but they create the conditions under which it is impossible to sleep.’ He had to wake up every hour, if indeed he ever got to sleep, to provide more blood for the machine.

  I was the one to wake him, if the alarm did not.

  ‘What do you think the real world is like?’ I asked, as I taped the catheter to his arm. I did not adjust the thermometer in his rectum.

  I, too, thought the measurements were crazy, but unlike Tsiolkovsky I believed there was a world where this had some meaning.

  ‘Tell me, why do I exist in this world?’

  ‘You are placed here for a purpose,’ I replied, knowing it would not calm him, but it was what I believed.

  ‘What is the point of our lives? How can I attain something other than this world, with its machinery that breaks down, its computers that give stupid readings, this water that drips endlessly over everything …’ His voice trailed away. He was, despite all, asleep.

  I wiped up the water. It came from leaks and spills and human sweat and pooled in puddles over everything, blobs in free fall. Dampness was all, on Mir.

  Each hour I woke Tsiolkovsky, to draw blood for the Reflectron, the measuring machine that scientists other than ours said was useless, never tested in space, in the heat, and obsolete everywhere but Mir. He said, the American Linebarger, when he was with us, that the measurements it gave were wrong. They had to be, because if they were right, we would be dead. The results they sent back to Base were incompatible with life.

  We were so tired, so much of the time, we did not know what we were doing. We were dead enough. I believed the measurements were accurate.

  Tsiolkovsky asked, ‘What is the point of our lives?’

  And his question was answered, but not, as it turned out, by me.

  I asked Base if we could stop the experiments. ‘The men are exhausted. We have six nights of data. Is it enough?’

  ‘We’ll see about it,’ Base said, secure on earth. ‘We’ll get back to you later.’ When the experiments were over. I needed a swift reply. I was not confident of one.

  We were so tired we started to hear things. Each of us heard something different.

  It happened when Mir reached the apogee of its orbit. The closer we were to heaven, in which we did not believe, the more we heard the celestial music.

  I heard it as a rushing in the ears, as if I pressed a sea-shell close, like the distant seas. Manakov heard a deep mournful sound, and I knew when he was listening, because tears sprang to his eyes. Tsiolkovsky found it more restful than distressing. Globa heard a kind of celestial Elvis, his version of Paradise.

  We thought the music was within us, and that it was one of the effects of micro-gravity. In weightlessness, calcium leaches out of the bones and is excreted in urine. We pissed our bones away. Likewise calcium was leaching from the bones in our ears, so we heard sounds that were not there. That was Manakov’s theory.

  Tsiolkovsky said we were so high up we could hear the murmur of waves from beyond earth’s shores. He said we heard the music of space. We were in a gap between heaven and earth, between the music of the head, and the music of the spheres, as far apart, and as close, as the gap between the singer and the song, the raw stone and the sculptor’s vision.

  Living as we did between heaven (in which we did not believe) and earth (in which we once believed, but then had doubts) we were seduced by the music of spheres.

  I should have reported to Base anything that smacked of religious fervour. But I did not. Here, in space, we sensed most clearly the disjunction between what lay beyond and that which pulled us back, the broken machinery, crashed computers, leaking coolants, and the myriad tasks of the day. Things could be otherwise, if only … if only.

  First came the music, then the visions.

  The space walks were, at first, routine. Two of us went outside once a week to change the radiation dosimeters, check the particle sensors and the thermal safety blankets round Soyuz, our escape module.

  Tsiolkovsky was with Globa the first time it happened. They went out through the Kvant 2 hatch to the Kristall hull.

  Space walks began at sunrise. Tsiolkovsky went first, just as
the first rays of the sun hit Mir. That’s why he saw it, he said, while Globa reported nothing.

  Tsiolkovsky said: ‘I crawled through the hatch, and swung out to the ladder. All I could see was the brightness of the sun, and its rays falling towards me. The rays of the sun were falling and I felt I was rising towards them.’

  Globa said: ‘I could not exit the hatch. Tsiolkovsky stayed half in the door, half outside, his helmet turned towards the rising sun. I asked him if there was a problem.’

  Tsiolkovsky said: ‘I felt as if I were standing at the base of a high mountain, at the edge of an abyss. I was not afraid. Both mountain and abyss glowed with light. I wanted to let go of Mir, to rise into the light.’

  Globa’s said: ‘Tsiolkovsky tugged at the handrail, to which he was tethered. I thought it was the rail. Once, it came loose from metal fatigue. Now we always check them first thing.’

  Tsiolkovsky said: ‘The entire universe was filled with infinite light.’

  Globa said: ‘Tsiolkovsky did not move for thirty minutes. I was stuck in the capsule. I could go neither backwards nor forwards. He did not respond to my repeated calls for help. I tell you, I began to feel frantic. I pushed him, I pulled him, but he only swayed a little, pivoting on his tether. It took all my training to think through what I would have to do, if he would not move.’

  Tsiolkovsky said: ‘It lasted a moment, this sense of infinite light. I turned and saw the earth huge beneath me, and the spell was broken. The light contracted to a point, and that point swelled to become the earth, and I knew the earth under Mir is not a sphere of cooling magma, as we have been told, but a sphere of contracted light.’

  Globa said: ‘After half an hour, Tsiolkovsky resumed the space walk as if nothing had happened. When I questioned him he said he’d been momentarily blinded by the light as he went through the hatch.’

  Later, as I helped him from his space-suit, Tsiolkovsky seemed his usual self. His first words were: ‘Volkov, how can I ever really comprehend myself and the universe?’