With a torn swatch of fabric looped around one hand, the other empty, it took a moment to register what she should have been holding tight, then another to recover from the spasm of trying to use limbs too broken to hold her weight as she pushed furtively up for a visual search.
Splashing back to the boards, completely alone, pain became fear, fear passed through guilt, and erupted as the perfect anguish of a parent’s greatest loss.
Her heart spilled out through clenched teeth, but with only sharp, shallow breaths to carry her cries, she was robbed even of the ability to mourn beyond pathetic whimpers, drowned out by the crash of waves.
GREEN EYES snapping open, Queen Fae’Elayan willed the glass to form again, and the howling of the wind instantly fell.
Returned to the silence of her private chamber, she dabbed at the eyes and cheek of the grim mask she now wore, a single teardrop perched on her fingertip, then thoughtfully rubbed between finger and thumb.
How rarely she recalled her mortality anymore. But this morning she indulged the reverie, allowing her life to play as echoes of worlds past. Those gathered in the adjoining room would wait.
IT HAD BEEN a battered superyacht on counter-balanced nacelles that hauled her from the sea two days after the Deluge, near death from exposure and starvation. One retired medic was among the ship’s surviving passengers—one healer among hundreds!—and he had told the recovering Elayan Palatino of the changes in the world while he applied splints and straps to her limbs.
As best the crew could account for by monitoring the now fading transmissions on the Urimet, Earth had been attacked by its neighboring moon of Tiamet for reasons unknown.
Attacked! It was unthinkable.
They had gathered incomplete footage of King Anu’s visit to the breakaway mining colony just days earlier, an envoy to broker a return to central governance. Greeted with garlands and fanfare, it had been on all the channels. Anu, first king, still reigning king, great Anu who had walked with the Builders in the beginning, was attending Earth’s neighbor in the spirit of fellowship.
Come back to the fold. Let us press outward together, not apart. We are of one race, one purpose.
Fast forward to his address in the glass-domed Tiametian Parliament, where at the very podium he was wrestled most unceremoniously to the ground, his holy Scepter of Rule seized unworthily by jeering guards and handed to Premier Enlil, the snake!
He who had merely been Administrator Enlil months earlier, now a master of treason claiming the very throne for himself? Surely he knew this was political suicide! No, not suicide. As it turned out, Enlil had darker motives—genocide!
Earth had no need of planetary defenses. Commerce and exploration had taken mankind to its neighbor-moons, and all nations were united, until Tiamet had seceded. There was no way anyone could anticipate that Enlil would place a collection of slow churning drill rigs into orbit and point them back towards Earth. Not expecting them, none saw them coming.
They fell from vacuum into the High Sea, sonic lances piercing the hydrosphere and explosives blowing holes through anterior and interior membranes sufficient to vent some atmosphere into space. What the vacuum didn’t bleed out, gravity pulled to the surface below.
One mile thick, the hydrosphere had been the outermost layer of the atmosphere, and was the most essential to life on an inhabited planet this far from the central sun. The hydrosphere filtered out the constant barrage of cosmic rays and background radiation; it cushioned and absorbed stray meteorites not sucked into the greater gravity well of the nearby gas giant that milled worlds in this system; and even more importantly it served as a heavenly prism that magnified light and heat from the distant yellow star, making the planet green and tropical.
All this was washed away, quite literally, when the hydrosphere broke. Water fell, not in gusting pellets, but in mountain-sized slabs. Within moments, the great capital of Rabis was swept away. The vibrant metropolis of Akædïn fell into the sea. The ocean paradise of Lameç drowned in mud as the earth swallowed it in liquefaction. Urgent faces filled Urimet screens in every Fae’er city, first calling for calm, then screaming for help.
Help that never came as the world drowned.
Elayan learned the superyacht had been skating on the ocean surface one second, then tumbling under half a mile of water the next. The thousands of revelers on deck imploded with the immense pressure that crushed them in an instant. Steel buttresses slammed across the ship as oxygen sumps opened to maintain air and pressure in individual cells.
Designed for shallow diving as well as surface skipping, the ship boasted systems to travel under the waves, but not at such depth.
It was all Quall Gilgam could do to maintain a power-assisted ascent as one baffle after another blew, each implosion slowing the ship as it limped ever slower towards salvation. A credit to the qualler profession, the sea lynx broke surface against all odds, and opened all decks to oxygen with minutes remaining in the masks that had been donned when main air gave out. Bilging began in earnest, the water coughing out in sprays ruddy with oil and blood.
But being on the surface held its own dangers. The water canopy had not fallen uniformly, causing thick columns and sheets of water to crash erratically into the rising sea. Bursting from each cascade, tidal rings sped outwards, ring joining ring to form super swells that sped around the planet’s surface. It had been only a few hours after Elayen was rescued that the ship pitched again.
Quall Gilgam and his crew wrestled doom by turning the ship’s aft into oncoming surges, or risked diving through the waves too treacherous to surf. Of the six thousand aboard, two hundred and four survived. They outlived the qualler and those in his bridge by the time the tides calmed.
The epic tale of Gilgam and his sailors was passed down in oral tradition long after the heaven and earth it occurred on had passed away.
Queen Fae’Elayen flexed her toes now, recalling the time her legs would not respond, when the kindly old medic had found her a repulsor chair in the wreckage of the yacht. It listed to the left but she was far from being choosy. Days passed and support crew placed the ship under control. The Urimet, a constant source of news and other programming, was eerily silent.
Earth turned cold, by night a startling new canvass of black pierced by winking eyes, and by day the great orange orb, the black shadow of Tiamet playing across its bands low on the distant horizon.
With communications down, none could know what events transpired on Tiamet, nor what fate befell King Anu’s convoy. It was therefore without fanfare or explanation that one morning as some gazed to the sky, treacherous Tiamet was seen to change.
Silently the perfect orb became oval, then slid outward into a ribbon of powder as though a knot of laces had been pulled undone. Then it was no more. It had only taken seconds, and the people blinked, uncertain what they had witnessed in the heavens.
Debate was rife hours later, when watchers raised the alarm that the fine talcum suspended above had changed. Elayen Palatino navigated her floating seat up winding stairwells to the deck, wrapped in a blanket against the chill, and with a hundred others saw tiny grains in the sky, almost imperceptible against the bands behind them. Then the planet rotated away as night fell.
By next morning’s light the grains had turned to small pebbles. Then another night was spent turned away from the spectacle, anticipation high as to what the dawn would show next, dread rising as fast as curiosity. Realization dawned with the light, as pebbles were now uneven stones, visibly tumbling Earthward.
The yacht had been in darkness when the first shards struck the other side of the planet. First came the wind, then a distant thunder, and finally the quaking of waves as the sky filled with cloudy plumes of fire as rock scraped across the fragile gas atmosphere.
With the dawn their position rotated inexorably toward the incoming hail of molten rock. They saw it coming at them from the horizon, pelting the sea with rapid staccato fire that joined surface to the sea floor in millisecon
ds.
On every strike, water collapsed into the superheated passages and vented a million exploding jets into the morning air. The ocean shook from below as smoky fingers snatched down from above.
If the meteors were Tiamet’s shattered fingers reaching after them from the grave, next came the giant hand itself.
Grinding its way into the atmosphere with a long mournful bass note, a mountain sized fragment of the moon hit with the full fury of a clenched fist. Superheated air incinerated the whole northern ocean, and without deep water as a partial cushion, the falling rock cracked through the ocean mantle as a metal spoon cracks an egg.
Deep seams opened into which whole seas tumbled and packed underground much of the debris that would have choked the sky. Then, the planet broke from its moorings and fell into frigid space, tumbling away from the orange bands of home toward the distant yellow sun.
Queen Fae’Elayen remembered being pre-noble Elayen Palatino, a mortal in what seemed a lifetime ago—no, several hundred lifetimes ago, her life full of fear then.
By the time the powercells and food were gone they had run aground as the first ice flows choked the receding seas into undulating slurry. In this twilight world the Earth’s sickening undulations slowed enough for the stars to appear as fast-moving dots instead of streaks.
Leaving for high ground, the ship was stripped of anything that could burn or be lashed into shelter. Some tried to survive in makeshift quarters on the surface, others burrowed into caves and dugouts where heat could be trapped.
Elayen’s group took their allotted rations and bridged ice sheets and desolate marshes until they chanced upon the flooded remains of one of their southern cities. At least it had once been in the south. The rubbed iron they dropped in water told them otherwise. The whole world was sideways now, and compasses were rendered useless.
It was here amongst the fallen minarets and sunken plazas of the once great citadel Raymonis-Bev that Elayen’s fellows found underground sections of the city that could be barricaded against the cold. It was amongst the discovered caches of sealed bags and non-perishables that Elayen and her companions knew hope for the first time in months. It was in this place as ice inevitably penetrated their deepest keep, that they desperately chose members of their flock as a sacrifice to draw their gods’ sympathy.
Oh Builders Above, hear our plight and have mercy on a fallen world!
It was in this service that Elayen felt the cold blade pierce her breast just days before those who had raised her to that honor froze to death themselves.
And in death, Elayen Palatino found a strange new life.
Vivid in memory now as it had been to sight then, eyes she had closed to darkness opened to a golden light. The next sensation was of white hearthstones warm under her tiny feet. Finding her balance, she had staggered from the soft white recliner to the curtained balcony, draped in white gossamer that shimmered unlike any silk she had seen.
In the valley below, the blues and green spires of Raymonis-Bev gleamed tall and strong, apparently rebuilt. People thronged market stalls as air traffic gingerly plied paths from one tower to the next. Everywhere there was life, and the golden hue of the sky convinced her that she was back home, the apocalypse being a dream—albeit the most vivid and realistic of night terrors.
Yet everyone she met had known the same dream, and the same awakening. Scout ships soon connected cities and brought news from afar. Technicians re-established the Urimet and new faces began broadcasting news and conjecture. What had caused the great storm? Was it an attack from Tiamet? Hadn’t their Urimet screens filled with Premier Enlil claiming presidency?
The memories had been elusive.
Could it have been Tiamet that had crashed into the Earth? What else could it be? But what could have shattered it to pieces? Upon seeing his world ravaged by Enlil’s missiles and fearing Earth lost in the flood, could King Anu have restrained himself in his fury and his grief? Might he not have summoned the Builder’s old teachings to spit Words of destruction at his captors? Had his great power been the doom of both worlds? In the absence of facts from this collective amnesia, fiction served as a balm for the Fae’er to make sense of their new circumstance.
Queen Fae’Elayen remembered that some families were reunited, though it was quickly apparent the population was greatly reduced; once a world of billions, the Fae’er now numbered only several hundred thousand.
It was a strange world. Identical to the one they had known, with the same technology but few of the same cities, and all in different locations on a different landscape that was no longer one landmass.
Tribal groups were formed. New Families and Houses rose. Priorities were set to understand what had befallen them, and fleets of perfectly functional skycraft took off from the surface to pierce the constant cloud cover and get their bearings.
Three discoveries came from that venture. First, no hoped-for gas giant greeted them; the best they could tell Earth had inserted itself in a temperate zone, third planet from the sun and far from the bands of home. Second, attempts to leave the atmosphere were thwarted by an unknown force; try as they might, ships once capable of reaching other moons were able to view the galaxy beyond but not interact with it. Third, as instruments failed and caused some of their scout ships to tumble back to the surface, pilots and crew walked away unscathed from the twisted metal and flames.
Collectively they realized all Fae’er hospitals were empty and there were no sick among them. It hadn’t taken long for people to test their new condition. Slamming fingers in doorjambs with no effect led to experiments with mallets, kitchen knives, then macabre tests involving highspeed ground-cars and building ledges. Even their sacrifices hopped off altars and walked home, to the astonishment of all.
This is how the Fae’er learned they could not die. Nor, they discovered within the year, could they create life to restore their numbers.
After these discoveries, the Builders had returned.
BLINKING HERSELF BACK to the present, Queen Fae’Elayen reminded herself that she had dignitaries waiting in Conclave. This was why she rarely indulged in memorials anymore; having lived for millennia, a light paddle in the shallows of memory could so easily tumble to the fathoms.
Tightening her grip on the Scepter of Balance, the young ancient queen drew a deep breath and turned her back on the rising dawn.
Passing through to her round antechamber, Stormers on detachment from the High Command stood at salute flanking both doors, their crisp uniforms pure white to distinguish their royal service from the High Command’s standard gold and blues.
At her entrance, six Chakanni-khi maids stood from their prayer cushions atop a more ornate rug of thick woven cords that laced the floor.
Wearing their own simple mauve coveralls and black mop wigs that shadowed painted eyes under deep fringes, two efficiently removed her sandals and exchanged them for brown linen slippers, two draped Fae’Elayen’s shoulders with an embroidered cyan mantle that bore glyphs denoting the names and deeds of past queens and kings back to the days of Anu himself.
Two replaced the queen’s simple white cowl with a more elaborate yellow disc that clipped to latches behind her collar. So adorned, the queen’s very garb denoted unity between sun, moon and earth.
Wordlessly falling into step beside her, three to a side, the Chakanni-khi moved with Queen Fae’Elayen through the forward doors to Conclave as four Stormers followed ceremoniously at the rear.
The Chamber of Conclave rested atop the longest spine of the tower, a glass bead with the Monarch’s Throne centered in one hemisphere and House Chairs in the other, arranged in three receding concentric circles so all twelve representatives could face the ruler and each other with direct line of sight at all times. In the Galleries on each side were the court recorders, politicians, media and various commercial scions. Yes, even in immortality, trade remained a constant, and with trade came politics.
Brace Hurcan Aragenti of the Fae’ro opened the session,
stepping forward from a row of three seats below the Throne in which the tripartite sub-presidency of Fae’ro, Fae’rst and Fae’qua Nations were represented. He stood at a crystal podium of twining glass stalks, and tapped at icons that played across the surface of his thummin disc.
“I call this extraordinary session of Conclave to order and bid welcome to the Royal Houses and other dignitaries and guests so gathered to this place, presided over by Her Eternal Majesty Queen Fae’Elayen, who has invited me to conduct this day.” A handsome man forever in his late fifties, Aragenti’s tight grey tunic bore the colorful decorations of a long life in public and military service.
Indeed the Stormers who even now patrolled the local clouds invisibly beyond the crystal perimeter all reported into his aerial garrison. Their people may have died together, may have been restored with special mandate from the Builders together. But that shared history did not guarantee a shared destiny. There were divisions and enemies, now more than ever. Were it not so, his particular faction of the Fae’er High Command would not be required.
“We will commence with wellsoul, followed by an epicle by Vail Telemor of the Nabiyã Siancay.”
The old Fae’ro clipped his thummin disc into a clasp on his breast pocket and returned to his seat as the podium stalks lit from within and grew thicker, pushing upwards to radiate in a perfect twining circle around the inside of the chamber. Each stalk resembled an Arum Lily, a slender tubular bell with a wide trumpet mouth that wound its way around a central cone tweeter stem. The stalks drove down through the very pin that anchored the structure into the Earth’s bedrock where the planet’s own harmonic voice resounded, the wellsoul.
To ears tuned to hear this particular diffraction, an acoustic capriccio sparkled forth with sustained high notes tumbling into a tremor of circadian sopranos, joined by alto strings that rapidly rose and fell, as an exciting bass fugue built up with exquisite counterpoints into a harmony unlike anything composed by man, yet oft echoed by it.
Echoes of Worlds Past Page 13