The vision faded and they pulled apart, separating into six separate spirits, their powers spent, used up once and for all—but the power of their final vision remained.
“What was it?” Maddy asked. “What was that we just felt?”
“A billion stars,” Winston said, his voice faint and wondrous. “A billion stars going supernova.”
“Did we do that?” Tory asked.
Dillon shook his head. “Unless I’m mistaken,” he said, “I believe that was God hearing the prayers of pigeons.”
They said no more of it, but each held in their own heart the knowledge that, from this moment on, nothing on earth would ever be the same.
39. Luck Of The Draw
Spring came early to Poland in slow increments after the winter thaw. For a brief time in December, grass had sprouted and trees had greened, but such an instant of growth could not last long. In a day, the leaves had fallen and the grass had withered under the numbing cold of northern winds. In April, when the snows had gone, the hills filled with green at a much slower pace, undetectable to the human eye, but steady enough to cover the countryside in a few short weeks. Ash mounds in and around Birkenau filled with wildflowers and rye, as if nature were somehow pining to ease the mind, without taking away the shape of the horror.
Ciechanow, which had once been a very small town, now had on its outskirts a pinwheel of 112 buildings. With each building thirty stories high and as long as a football field, the complex was twice as large as the rest of the town. Few of the brand new buildings were occupied—in fact, most of them had been donated by Tessitech to the Polish government, and now an entire wing in the Ministry of Housing was filled with bureaucrats working to fill them.
However, one small corner of the complex was occupied. Six buildings and part of a seventh, a drop in the bucket really, but a community nonetheless; close knit and still a little bit wary of the outside world, but that was only to be expected.
It was on a temperate day in April that Elon Tessic walked the paths of this towering apartment community with Dillon Cole.
“I did feel your joining,” Tessic told Dillon. “Your ‘fusion,’ as you call it.”
Dillon shrugged. “Everyone felt it.”
“Yes,” Tessic said. “But I understood what I was feeling.”
Dillon grinned. “I suppose now you’ll claim you were responsible for saving the world.”
Tessic smirked. “Well, you said it yourself. I did help to develop the world’s greatest defensive weapon, did I not?”
“That you did, Elon.” And indeed Dillon knew that there was credit due. And who’s to say that had Dillon not been put through Tessic’s unusual boot camp, he would have had the fortitude to fill his role in the stand against the Vectors?
“I even provided the means for imprisoning that creature you allowed to remain.”
The reminder unnerved Dillon, but he didn’t let it show. “How is Okoya taking to lockdown?”
“Far better than you did. He is content to stay in the cell—he actually seems to like it there.”
Dillon was not surprised. The containment dome of the Hesperia plant wasn’t exactly like being chained to a mountainside and left for the birds. This was a cushy exile, and in it, Okoya finally could find what he always wanted. He was the center of his own private universe with an entire facility devoted to his personal maintenance. He was out of sight, but never out of mind.
The path down which Tessic led Dillon came to a place where grass had not been sown, and the buildings before them were barren and bleak. Although Dillon slowed, Tessic seemed to know where he was going.
“There is a park around this next building. Another island in the ghost town. You will see.”
“Do you still think of what might have been?” Dillon asked, as he looked around at the vacant buildings.
“Of course,” he answered. “But then I look around and see what is. There are almost eleven thousand here—a single one brought back from the death camps would have been a miracle—and we have eleven thousand! I look at these faces around me, and know that I will go to my grave a happy man,” he said. “Although, I hope it’s not in the too near future. I intend to enjoy my retirement.”
“What could you possibly do that you haven’t already done?”
“I have a goal, remember,” Tessic answered. “I intend to die broke. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of my kind of money?”
“It’s not easy being the twelfth richest man in the world,” Dillon scoffed.
“Twenty-third,” Tessic corrected. “Building this place was quite a blow to my standing.”
“Is that why you called for me, Elon, to see this place?”
Tessic hesitated. “My pilot—Ari—he was my nephew. You didn’t know that, did you?”
Dillon looked away. “No.”
“He was my only real family.”
“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. He wasn’t certain if Tessic knew the circumstance of Ari’s death. How he’d been taken as a host by the Temporal Vector. “I hope you’re not considering making me an heir— that is, if you can’t lose all your money.”
“Certainly not, but I would care to see you from time to time. Like me, you have no family.”
The thought never hit him without a pang of regret, and loneliness. Far too few of the Shards had anyone to go back to. With Tory’s mother dead, she had gone with Michael and they were staying with Michael’s father. Both were facing the ridiculous prospect of going back to high school—which might as well have been preschool, considering what they’d lived, died, and relived through. Still, their reintegration into the world had to start somewhere.
Winston, even with his gift exhausted, managed to retain quite a lot of his supernatural learning in his natural brain and blew the top off of entry exams into Harvard. No sooner did he return to his family, than he left them again.
And then there was Lourdes. Her family dead by her own hand, her deeds an anchor on her spirit—she had not landed with quite the same grace. Even there on Thira, when the six of them had broken off their syntaxis, and realized that their powers were spent, Dillon had known her path would be a hard one, for even then, she would not look any of them in the eye. Then when they had all parted company, she had slipped away without even so much as a goodbye.
“I had a dream about her,” Winston had told him. “She was flipping burgers in some fast food place, in a town too small to be on the map.”
“Hell on Earth?” Dillon had suggested, but Winton had said, “Maybe it’s her new idea of heaven.”
No, Dillon was not the worst off. After all, he had Maddy. She was waiting for him now, at her sister’s in New York.
“Will you and Maddy marry?” Tessic asked.
Dillon laughed. “Come on, Elon, I just turned eighteen—let me be legal for a while first. Let me at least vote!”
“Forgive me,” Tessic said. “You were robbed of your childhood—I only wish for happiness in your adult life. This is why I ask.”
They rounded the empty building and came upon a park. As Tessic had promised, it was a crowded pocket of life. Old men played chess on built-in tables carved from only the finest Italian marble, and children played in a brightly colored jungle gym. Dillon found himself amused that, even though these children were speaking a language he didn’t understand, their stylized gestures and battle postures gave away the nature of the game.
“They’re playing Star Wars,” Dillon said. Apparently, these children had already filled in their massive gap of time and culture, adapting to their own rebirths, as if they had done nothing more than oversleep the morning.
Dillon wondered how they—how everyone—would adapt to what was coming next. He had high, but reserved hopes, considering the progress made over the past four months. Since the Shards made their stand, the world that was in such a steady state of decline found the capacity to heal itself. People who had lost their ambition returned to work. The unnameable s
ense of dread and dysfunction resolved into a fresh sense of direction. Hell, even the airports were starting to clean up. Pundits were already labeling the troubling time “the Occipital Recession,” and called it “a collective psychosis of informational overload.”
People were doing their best to forget about the Backwash, and all the documented feats of the Shards, not realizing that those events were merely a taste of things to come. The age of science, the age of reason, was coming to an end after all, but not in a great collapse. Instead it would come in the form of a birth. Of many births.
“When I wrote to you, Elon, I told you about the vision that I had—that the six of us had—when it was all over; stars all exploding at once, thousands of light-years away.”
“The way the Scorpion Star went supernova when you and your six friends were conceived?”
“But this time it was millions of stars. Maybe billions.”
“That’s still just a tiny drop in the bucket, when you consider how many stars are out there,” Tessic mused. “A billion stars could go supernova, and God would barely blink.”
“I was hoping you’d have an opinion.”
“I always have an opinion.”
“That’s what I figured.”
Tessic leaned against a light post and crossed his arms. “I believe there are three possibilities,” Tessic said. “One: You and I are both entirely insane, your vision was a hallucination, and all these undocumented people around us are, as the Polish government claims, ‘refugees from war-torn Lithuania’ that I smuggled in over the border.”
Dillon smiled. “I’d buy that.”
“Or, two: The universe truly is a living thing, as you say, and the bursting of stars is an immune response. Therefore, by allowing those nasty little dybbuks to survive, you triggered an even greater immune response to protect us against them in the future.”
“And the third?”
“The third is simply this: By benefit of your mercy to creatures who deserved no mercy, the Almighty saw fit to gift humanity with a spiritual evolution.”
“And which do you believe, Elon?”
Tessic grinned mischievously. “I keep my answer close to my heart,” he said. “Between me and my creator.”
Tessic looked around the many benches of the park, as if looking for someone or something. “If your vision was a true one, we’ll know soon enough—the first premature ones will be born as early as next month—but I think people are beginning to have suspicions.” Finally he spotted who he was looking for. “Ah, there she is. You see her?”
He pointed to a woman who sat throwing crumbs to a gathering of birds, with her husband beside her.
“They met shortly after they arrived here. A whirlwind romance,” Tessic explained. “She is yet to show, but she expects a child. She is three months along now.”
“Three months,” Dillon said. “Lucky her.”
“What caught my attention were the rumors. You see, there is an old custom; you hold your wedding ring on a string before your unborn child. If it swings side to side, it will be a girl. If it spins, it will be a boy. Do you want to know what the ring told her?”
“What did it tell her.”
“Absolutely nothing,” Tessic said. “But it turned from brass to silver before her eyes.”
“Silver, huh,” said Dillon. “Not exactly the golden touch, is it?”
“The child is yet unborn—give it time.”
“It won’t be the same as it was with us,” Dillon told him. “There were only a handful of us. But in a few years’ time—"
“—in a few years’ time,” Tessic said, “we will all be obsolete. Cro Magnon men in a world of Star Shards.” And yet he didn’t say it with downtrodden finality, but with a strange effervescence.
“It doesn’t bother you?” Dillon asked.
“Why should it? Ascension is not extinction, my friend. I’m sure our knuckle-dragging ancestors would be thrilled to know what they have become, through us.”
Dillon tried to imagine what the world would be like a hundred years—even ten years from now, with every child born a Star Shard, but with his own powers of insight gone, he had a hard time envisioning it. Hundreds of thousands who could control weather and moods—just as many who could regenerate flesh, or bring life from death. And other powers as well—powers he had not even imagined.
“It’s going to be a wild world,” Dillon said. “At least until that first generation gets a handle on how to make it all work.”
Tessic shrugged. “Every great change has its growing pains. I can’t help but think that the ones gifted with wisdom will be able to see us through the change.”
The pregnant woman stood and left, arm-in-arm with her husband. Others glanced at them and whispered. They didn’t seem to mind.
“I have something for you,” Tessic said. “You only turn eighteen once. For you, I did not want to miss it.” Tessic reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small gift-wrapped package, handing it to Dillon. “Forgive me for not getting a card to go with it,” he said. “But all the cards around here are in Polish.”
Dillon removed the bow, and peeled back the shiny paper to reveal a box of blue Bicycle playing cards. An odd gift to anyone else, but not to him. Tears began to fill Dillon’s eyes in spite of himself. In his life there had been so many simple joys that were denied him. Tessic understood. Perhaps better than anyone.
“Thank you, Elon.”
Tessic glanced at the sky, then at an unoccupied table. “It’s a fine day for a game. Shall we?”
They sat across from each other, and Dillon pulled the cards from the deck, removing the jokers.
“Your shuffle,” Tessic said.
Dillon’s hands were shaking, but he forced them still enough to separate the deck in half, then glanced up at Tessic.
“Go on,” he said.
Dillon flicked the left hand cards into the right hand cards, and wove them together again, and again and again, until the motion felt natural.
“What’s the game?” Tessic asked.
“Five card draw,” Dillon decided.
“And the stakes?”
Dillon shrugged. “If I win, I get to keep that jet of yours that brought me here—how’s that?”
“Agreed. And what if I win?”
“If you win, I’ll name my first kid after you.”
Dillon dealt the cards face down. Tessic picked his up first, glanced at Dillon, but kept a fine poker face. Dillon could not read him at all.
Then Dillon reached for his own cards, hesitating. He had done this many times before, back when he still had his powers, and the burden of responsibility that came with them. He never needed to look at his hand then. A two-handed deal from a well-shuffled deck would always reveal for him the same cards: the deuce, four, six, eight, and ten of spades; the direct consequence of dealing alternating cards from a deck in perfect order.
Now Dillon fanned out his cards to reveal: an ace, a five, a king, a nine and a jack; two of them diamonds, two clubs and a heart. Although all his powers had been gone and he had been a “normal” human being for four months, this was the first time he truly felt it. His spirit was not only contained, but comfortable within his flesh. His sphere of influence was no longer defined by the gravity of his presence, but a function of his words and deeds.
“I’ll take two cards,” Tessic said.
Dillon dealt Tessic his cards, then looked to the randomness of his own hand once more. He had always been order in the face of chaos—but here chaos was looking him in the eye, and he had no weapon against it beyond the luck of the draw. Until this moment he never knew how beautiful not knowing could be. In his cards—in the world, there was an unmarked future out there. He would be a participant, but only a participant, like everyone else in the world. He would play, but would no longer bear the burden of redesigning the rules. Which meant that no matter what cards were dealt him, he had already won.
“What do the cards tell y
ou?” Tessic asked.
“Everything I want to know.”
Dillon kept only the ace of diamonds, and with all his soul threw caution to the wind.
FB2 document info
Document ID: ooofbtools-2011-11-13-22-58-18-1456
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 13.11.2011
Created using: ExportToFB21, FictionBook Editor Release 2.5 software
Document authors :
Document history:
1.0 Всё создание книги полностью sonate10
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
Shuttered Sky ss-3 Page 48