Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  “I believe the man in the hut was one of our group who disappeared several days ago. I have no doubt that Tixil and his men tortured him for information about us.”

  “Tixil?” Neelix couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Tixil the civil defender?”

  “I’m afraid the authorities are riddled with people like him—who want war and who will do anything to suppress opposition to it.”

  The room began to swim. What was life coming to if one couldn’t trust the civil authorities? Those sworn to protect and defend?

  “Tixil knows you saw someone who’d been tortured. He can’t afford to let you spread that around. It’s a wonder he didn’t take you in for questioning right away.” Tixil paused portentously. “You’d never have survived.”

  Visions of the man’s burned feet danced in Neelix’s vision, and he tried to blink them away. Was this the fate that awaited him? Cold terror began to creep from his belly, radiating outward to his extremities. His father wouldn’t let this happen. His father was wise, and strong. He would protect him.

  But his father was talking to Uxxin, making the plans for his clandestine trip to Talax. Neelix was told to pack quickly, taking only necessities. Within fifteen minutes after Uxxin had arrived, Neelix was standing with his mother and father and his sisters Xepha and Melorix, the only two left at home. Tears were streaming down their faces, and while crying was exactly what Neelix felt like doing, he forced himself to appear confident, for their sake. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised, kissing the briny tears on their cheeks. They cried even harder.

  His mother embraced him, her eyes moist as well, but she was stalwart and refused to give in to grief. And finally Papa held him strongly, briefly, unspeaking. And then Neelix was gone, off in the night like a felon on the run.

  He never saw any of his family again.

  Inevitably, war broke out. Talax actually made the first strike, the warlike faction of their race having predominated. But after that, it hardly mattered who had started things. It was brutal and relentless, fought on many fronts: in space, on the Haakonian homeworld, and on Talax. Losses on both sides were staggering. The economy was devoted entirely to the war effort, and food shortages abounded. Winters were devastating, because fuel was in short supply. Medical centers were overrun with the war wounded.

  Haakon suffered just as harshly. Resources were dwindling and riots had broken out on Haakonian outposts everywhere. Their government was under great pressure from the citizenry to end the devastating conflict.

  Neelix spent two years helping to run a sanctuary for deserters from the military. He had never acquired the zealousness of his fellow pacifists, and from time to time considered coming forth and offering to join the military. But he knew the time had passed. He was a deserter, having never shown up for obligatory service, and would be executed summarily.

  And so he protected those who had fled the fighting, those who were convinced the authorities wanted to protract the war for their own financial gain. These hardened veterans told tales of unimaginable horror about the battle fronts, and spoke with loathing of the venality of the government that would perpetuate this evil.

  In the end, Neelix didn’t know what to believe. He had come to his situation not through ideology, or passion, or even choice. Fate had placed him squarely on one side of the argument whether he liked it or not. He was as helpless as a leaf blown before the wind. He reasoned that he should eschew philosophical musing and simply do the best he could for the cause that had protected him, snatching him from Tixil’s grasp and keeping him safe for over two years.

  He had to admit that when he heard the heartrending tales from the front, he felt relieved not to be a part of it. It all sounded so futile, so needless—fighting for weeks over a kilometer-wide strip of land, taking and retaking it countless times, back and forth until the corpses were stacked like deadwood and no one could even remember why that strip of land was so important.

  They heard rumors that the Haakonian populace was out of control, threatening to storm the governmental buildings unless the war was terminated. Hope sprang in many hearts that, soon, it would all be over.

  And so it was.

  The end of the war occurred on a warm spring night, and the terminus took no more than four minutes.

  Neelix was sitting outside, in the walled compound of their hideaway. A wild yute bird sounded, reminding him of home, and somewhere someone was playing a gentle melody on the ixxel. For a moment, it was possible to believe that, soon, life would become normal once more, that love and joy would return to their hearts, that bellies would be full and spirits nourished. That he would see his family again.

  He inhaled the spring air deeply, and gazed up at Rinax, luminous in the night sky, half in shadow at this time of the month. He imagined his parents and his sisters, and hoped they weren’t suffering too badly from the war. He’d supposed his sisters’ husbands had been pressed into service, unless they were protestors and avoided conscription. He had had no contact with any of them for two years, since he’d been taken off Rinax crammed in a cargo container loaded onto a freighter piloted by a friend of Uxxin.

  As he stared upward, a curious brightness illuminated Rinax, turning its whiteness briefly to a cold blue.

  Then it began to disappear.

  Neelix stared upward, trying to reconcile the puzzling sight with some understandable phenomenon.

  He couldn’t do it.

  It was as though dark fingers began to obscure the moon, creeping swiftly over the surface, occluding it completely. Dust clouds, he thought, or some unusual space storm. But a coldness in his heart told him this was something far worse than a storm.

  As he stared upward, the call of the yute bird still wafting through the night air—and forever afterward, he would associate that sound with the catastrophe that had struck— Rinax disappeared completely. He knew it was there; he could see its faint outline, as one does in an eclipse, but it was a dark disk in the sky.

  It hadn’t been an eclipse. It didn’t behave like one. What were those strange fingers of darkness that clawed at his home, like bony talons of death?

  He wasn’t sure how long he stood staring up at the darkness where Rinax had been, but after a time he heard a commotion inside. People were shouting. Then he heard an unearthly wailing.

  Lixxisa, a good friend, came running toward him. Her eyes were wide, and her face was pale in the darkness. “Neelix . . .” she began; then her knees buckled and she sank to the ground. Alarmed, he crouched beside her. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “Unthinkable . . . unthinkable . . .”

  “Lixxisa, tell me!”

  “Rinax . . . destroyed . . .”

  Neelix’s mind froze, and he willed time to reverse itself, to return him to the pleasant reverie of mere minutes ago. If he could back up just those few minutes in time, all would be righted. Rinax would still gleam in the night sky, and this time, events would proceed differently. It would not disappear before his eyes, Lixxisa would not come running, pallid, from the house and crumple at his feet. She would not say the awful words she had just spoken.

  But his will wasn’t strong enough. Time pressed inexorably on. Lixxisa gasped for air, as though she’d been hit in the abdomen. “A weapon . . . horrible weapon . . . a cascade . . . every village on Rinax is gone . . . everyone dead . . .”

  This litany of horror droned on, but Neelix tuned it out. He couldn’t listen. If he refused to hear it, it would be robbed of validity. What one doesn’t hear cannot have happened.

  But once again his determination was thwarted. Lixxisa kept on, and on. “Massive fireballs . . . the atmosphere nearly consumed . . . no one’s ever heard of anything like this . . . what kind of animals are they who’d develop a weapon like that?”

  Aghast, Neelix stared upward at his home. Now, through the dark clouds, streaks of light were visible. Orange flickers, licking at the darkness. Flames. Massive fireballs.

  Rinax had
been attacked with weaponry so strong that the smoke from the explosions had completely obscured it. And now the fireballs were blazing. If they could be seen from Talax, they must be immense. No one could possibly survive.

  Pictures of his beloved family seared his mind. His father and mother, entwined in each other’s arms as they were incinerated. His sisters, writhing in agony as flames burned the flesh from their bones. Sweet Alixia screaming and screaming and screaming . . .

  He could smell the odor of burned flesh.

  A hot coal formed in his belly. He couldn’t identify it; it was completely foreign to him. It hurt, and yet it was somehow satisfying. It grew steadily, burning him from within, taking him over completely, overwhelming, igniting his brain, boiling his heart.

  It was rage.

  Rage sustained him for weeks after the disaster. The war had ended summarily, with Talax surrendering immediately and becoming in essence a Haakonian outpost. The weapon, they learned, was called the Metreon Cascade, and had been developed in order to bring the war to a swift and certain conclusion.

  Neelix volunteered to be part of a rescue mission to Rinax, and was among the first to set foot on the devastated landscape. Fires still burned there, and the smell was something that would haunt his dreams for years: the same odor of roasted flesh that had permeated his hut after he had found the tortured man. Clouds of rancid smoke and dust billowed placidly, like a meadow of dark flowers, their gentle swaying a grotesque counterpart to the horror they manifested.

  No one could be alive in this place.

  He and his friends forced themselves forward, steeling themselves to the awful sights, breathing through moistened handkerchiefs to quench the noxious odor. They soon realized this search would not be lengthy, because almost nothing was left of Rinax.

  His house was gone. Not even the foundation was left, just a large black spot indicating that something had burned. Vaxi’s house, too, was obliterated, and the pond the children had frolicked in was nothing more than a dry pit in the ground.

  Someone observed that they must be very near a “ground zero” point—where the weapon had made its initial contact. That was the first heartening news Neelix had heard in days. That meant it was very likely that his family had been annihilated on the spot, instantly vaporized and suffering no pain. They would now be united in the afterlife, where one day he would join them. He tried to remind himself of this faintly comforting fact as they continued to prowl the smoldering ruins.

  It was he who first detected the faint sound that emanated from the undulating clouds of smoke. At first he thought it might be a bird, and wondered how a bird had survived this devastation.

  Then he saw figures moving toward them with maddening sluggishness, each step taken as though through heavy mud.

  They were monsters.

  Charred skin, the color of shale, hung from their torsos and extremities. The pulpy flesh underneath, swollen to bursting, dripped with watery fluids. The monsters had no faces, just a mask of spongy tissue, swirled as though someone had stirred a thick batch of red and black pudding.

  Vague orifices emerged from the pudding, distorted beyond any identification as eyes or mouth. Yet somehow from the misshapen gullets a sound emanated, a keening, a bestial moaning, that made the tufts on Neelix’s head stiffen.

  One of the monsters moved in his direction, hearing rather than seeing the members of his group because its eyes were obliterated, its hideous limbs outstretched, scorched skin dangling. Terrified that the thing would touch him, he turned away.

  “Wahhhh . . . wahhh . . .”

  The thing spoke with what could clearly be identified— even though the words were distorted by the monstrous mingling of lips, teeth, and tongue—as a child’s voice. Appalled, Neelix turned back.

  The child was pointing toward its grotesque mouth. “Wahhh . . . wahhh . . .” it repeated, and suddenly Neelix realized the poor creature was asking for water. He reached for his container, uncapped it, and held it out. The child couldn’t see it.

  Neelix held the container to what had once been lips and tipped the liquid into the ravaged mouth. The child managed a few sips but then began choking from the pain of swallowing through such damaged tissue. Neelix felt himself begin to tremble. What was he to do for this creature? This was beyond his experience.

  He glanced around and saw the members of the team busy with others of the unfortunate survivors. They seemed to know what they were doing, and he wondered briefly how they could function so calmly when presented with a calamity of this magnitude.

  He remembered that he had a pain medication in his medical container, and reached in for it. But before he could administer it, the child tumbled into his arms, unconscious, leaving hunks of burnt matter on his clothing. Revulsion threw gorge into his throat, but then it subsided, and Neelix felt the tiny weight of the child, the frantic beating of its heart. He picked it up effortlessly and moved toward the others. He made a determination that this child would live.

  Thirty-seven people survived the Metreon Cascade, all that remained of a population of more than two hundred thousand. Those thirty-seven were alive only because they were in an underground recreational facility miles from ground zero. They were taken to medical facilities on Talax, where doctors were stupefied by their condition. Traditional burn treatments were simply ineffective, and gradually, one by one, the survivors began to die.

  The child’s name, Neelix learned, was Palaxia. Though badly disfigured, she had suffered less damage to her internal organs than some of the others, and the doctors believed she had a chance to survive. She was resilient, they said, and possessed a will to live. That was often the factor that made the difference.

  Neelix spent weeks by her side. She was blind, eyeballs having melted in the blast, and so he read to her for hours at a time—inspirational stories of Talaxian heroes who had overcome difficult circumstances, hoping that she would be heartened by the examples. He had no way of knowing if this was so, of course, as Palaxia had lost the power of articulate speech, scar tissue having occluded her larynx. But she could hear, and he imagined that the sound of his voice, hour upon hour, was comforting to her.

  Skin grafts were applied and quickly sloughed off. This process was repeated three times before doctors began shaking their heads and admitting that they didn’t know what to do next.

  Palaxia was kept on powerful pain medications. Without them, she would have been in constant agony. With them, she still suffered, but at what the doctors called a “tolerable level.” Neelix wondered how they managed to determine this, or even how they assessed the level at which she hurt, but was glad something was being done for her.

  Palaxia, for her part, lay quietly on the bed, tiny chest rising and falling, face and body swathed in dressings, enduring her agony privately, in a world she could share with no one.

  And Neelix sat with her day after day, reading, talking, even singing some of his favorite songs from Prixin, although he usually couldn’t finish them because his own grief would overcome him.

  Palaxia lived five and one half weeks, three weeks longer than any of the other survivors. Neelix was with her as her breathing became more ragged; she stopped and then started breathing four separate times, as though her will refused to let her die. He spoke to her throughout, words of comfort and solace, telling her that she would soon be reunited with her family, who had been waiting for her.

  Finally her chest rose and fell no more. Neelix quietly gathered his things and left the medical facility, saying good-bye to no one. He shed no tears for Palaxia, or for his vanished family and friends. He did not mourn them at all. It would have destroyed him.

  He met Wix two years after that, while he was in a prolonged euphoria caused by inhaling the smoke of burning Rhuludian crystals.

  They weren’t really crystals, of course, but dried and ground herbs with a potent narcotic effect. The term “crystals” had been coined because of the amazing clarity one felt after inhaling the smoke. N
eelix had first started using crystals after Palaxia died. He knew others in his group often partook of them, but he never had. After the Metreon Cascade, he couldn’t remember why it had seemed so important to abjure their use.

  And when he first inhaled the fragrant smoke, he was sorry he’d waited so long.

  Why were there such dire warnings about using crystals? Why had his parents and every other adult he knew cautioned him never to consider inhaling them? They’d made a huge furor over nothing. The crystal fumes didn’t make him disoriented, or dizzy, or out of control. Quite the opposite: his mind was never sharper, never more focused than when he’d lit the tightly packed taper and drawn the sweet smoke into his lungs. He gained clarity and insight that were unachievable otherwise.

  But most important of all, he could forget what he had seen on Rinax. The dreadful sights that he had thought were permanently etched into memory faded into obscurity. The queasiness in his stomach—a constant since the Metreon Cascade—disappeared. Well-being returned, and he could plan for a future once more.

  Why would one not partake of such a therapeutic substance?

  He had to be careful not to become addicted, of course. He had to monitor his usage, not let it get out of hand. But that wasn’t a problem. He didn’t have to use the crystals; he could stop whenever he wanted to. He simply chose to use them in order to lessen his pain. Once his life was in order again, he’d quit entirely.

  Until then, he had to continue finding a supply. That had become more difficult since Haakon had won the war. They took a rigidly negative view of crystal use, and set out to eliminate the trade on Talax.

  And so it was that Neelix left the planet, one of several passengers on a cargo freighter, mind humming with possibility after inhaling a few sniffs of smoke, ready to seek fate and fortune among the stars.

  Among the passengers was Wixiban, a young man near his age, who was witty and clever, who spoke beguilingly about the possibilities of scavenging as a career, and who had a copious supply of crystals, which he was willing to share. For a price, of course.