by J. J. Keller
He opened his eyes. The morran’s skull was smashed beneath the stick, dark liquid and spongy pale lumps sprayed upon the floor around the point of impact. Its legs and tentacles jerked spasmodically.
The slapping was becoming louder, and a hideous smell permeated the corridor--not the smell of dead morran.
Reigo picked up his light. “What is that smell?” he shouted. “What is making that noise?”
He flattened his back to the wall and looked left and right, but he could not tell which direction the sound originated from. Still it grew louder.
A faint green-tinged light began to color the walls of the corridor to the right. Holding the lamp in one hand, Reigo raised the rod above his head, poised to smash whatever might come round that corner.
A naked, glowing figure. Naral. The stench was overpowering. His body was not whole--it had been mutilated in Ceril’s autopsy. His chest had been cut open, exposing the dull gray surfaces of the lungs and the black knot of the heart between them, and the glistening wet darkness of the coiled intestines. The skin and cartilage of his cut-away thoracic shield hung from the base of his abdomen, down over his knees, and it was the motion of this loose flesh striking his legs as he walked that was making the slapping sound. The skin of his scalp had been peeled back, the top part of his skull sheared off about the crown. The rubbery protective envelope of the cranium dangled over his face in torn strips, and the upper surface of the brain protruded from the opened skull, its ghostly pale folds covered by thick spidery tendrils.
Naral’s eyes rolled in their sockets, his mouth groped wordlessly, and he raised his arms horizontally before him, reaching with rotting fingers toward Reigo. Reigo could not move. His knees were locked, feet rooted to the ground. He could not uncoil his arm. A coldness ran through his veins, suffusing his whole being.
With a senseless yell, he broke from his paralysis. He threw down the rod and turned from the apparition to the opposite corridor. He fled headlong, screaming out in the dark and crashing into walls, not daring to chance a look behind, until he hit his head and the ceiling and floor turned over. His light slipped from his hands, and it fell before him and smashed, spreading luminous flecks across the floor.
Murmuring filled his ears and, in the blackness that ensued, he saw the silhouettes of beings, and it was their voices that sang this moaning dirge--men, morrans, every one of them a victim of Lazarus. The ten billion from the circumfercirc it had wiped out. They pressed around him in the dark, vying to get close to him, and their numbers spread from beyond the confines of the ship, out into space and far away.
“Go away!” he roared at them, eyes shut and hands covering his face. “You are dead! You do not belong in this world!”
The voices began to subside, like an audience anticipating the first notes of an orchestra. Reigo became aware of light filtering through the spaces between his fingers. Slowly he took his hands away from his face. A glowing figure stood, several yards away, outlined by the rectangle of the corridor. He saw it as a shape at the end of a long tunnel, and its features were indistinct, although it was coming closer. He could not identify if it was male or female.
“Mother?”
Was she dead, too?
No. This was not the greenish, sickly pallor of Naral’s and Aspera’s skin. It was pure, lambent--cool and soothing on his fevered skin. When the light touched Reigo’s face, his fear evaporated and a great sense of calm and reason overcame him, and he felt a safe reassurance that all would be well.
Stiffly, he pushed himself to his hands and knees, and leant back. He closed his eyes and let the white absolution of that cleansing light wash over him.
He opened his eyes to the figure, so bright, and yet with a soft, clean light that did not blind him nor hurt his eyes.
“Are you the Pagan Atheist?”
“That is the name by which some know me.”
“The name?”
“I have been known by many names. I have been a part of man as long as man has existed, and man has given me many names. Man has called me Buddha. Confucius. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Allah, Muhammad. God, Jesus. Jehovah. Pilgrennon, the Pagan Atheist, Epsilon, amongst a great many others. I am the essence of hope; I am every god and every prophet and teacher there has ever been. My name today is Lazarus.”
Reigo fought against the deep sensation of peace and benevolence that was flooding his cognizance. He tried to be of Steel and Flame. “You are a disease?”
“That is for you to decide.”
“I have not heard those names afore, aside from Lazarus and the last three. What are you?”
“I am the part of man that is greater than the sum of flesh and blood--of Steel and Flame. I am what transcends this mortal coil. I am your savior--the guardian of your soul.”
“A disease? A prion?” Beaded light spilled over Reigo’s face like drops of ice. A shivering frisson spread from his fingertips and up his arms to his chest, cold thrills coursing up his back and through his scalp. “A symbiont?”
“I am a part of you. A part of you that, before this day, you did not know you had. You never knew it, but before now you lived incomplete. You are blind Reigo, but lo, your eyes shall be opened.”
Patterns of light began to form upon the walls of the corridor. Forms ran and dripped, like falling dew, delineating the ship’s architecture. With the light flowing through their matter, the walls became translucent.
The corridor fell away before his eyes. He saw the immense cargo hold beneath the floor on which he knelt. He saw the unlit phytoculture tank behind him, and the annex where the snakes and dark twisted things crawled on Hectar. As he looked farther, he found he could see other things: the slow fusion of hydrogen atoms in the Nimrod’s tail column as it lay in the shadow of the moon, and beyond the shadow of that moon, the promise of light...
“Are you intelligent, or am I hallucinating? True I do not know the mechanism by which hydrogen atoms fuse, so how is it that I see it?”
“There is more to this universe than what the senses inborn to the body can perceive.”
“Does that mean you augment my intelligence? How intelligent can you be?”
“That depends. In terminology you would understand, it depends on the concentration of the substances I can create in your bloodstream.”
“The light,” Reigo said. “The dead things...the snakes”
“The snakes came from the man who walked among you. His mind was hardened and his eyes were closed. He was not worthy of the light and, thus, he perished. The souls of the dead are in your hands, Reigo. Is it any wonder they walk, and they come to you and beseech you?”
“They are from the circumfercirc?”
“They are. For all who will see my light will not taste death, but will live on, for so long as I live on. I live in you, and in the survivors here. When you die, your souls will pass to the next generation, and the next.”
“You expect me to believe that the identities--the natures--of billions of people can be transmitted by mere light?”
“So long as you continue to allow the laws that served you in your prior life to influence your thought, your eyes will remain closed.”
“But what of morrans?”
“The body is just a vehicle for the pre-life that comes before the true life after death. In death, all are equal.”
“Equal? Even morrans and low-caste men?”
“All are equal, Reigo, you are looking for someone you have lost, are you not? Se is seeking you, too.”
A second shape began to form from the figure. It grew from a nascent swelling of light into the shape of legs and tentacles, and a rounded cranium upon a long neck, with a blunt muzzle and pendant ears. The morran’s body shimmered as it separated from Lazarus’s entity, its glowing feet treading the floor toward him.
“Na’Athril!” The real Na’Athril, as in life, not the pathetic ruin he’d seen in the vision before. He held out his arms and embraced it around the neck. He took its head in his hands and k
issed it upon the forehead, the sensation of the light flowing from its body warm and liquid--truly alive. Golden eyes looked back at him in freedom, and he perceived great depths within. In life the morran had been so young, a silly thing he and Ogonaovan had been fond of. Now instead of blood it had light, and instead of nerves it had wisdom, knowledge coruscating through its whole essence.
As the morran walked backward to Lazarus, its gaze never left him. “I’m coming with you,” Reigo promised it. “We will be reunited.”
“How can I preserve the dead and bring the light?”
“You need only be exposed to a little more light before the prion, as you understand it, will begin to write into your DNA and replicate. Once you have been exposed to that light, the progression will be self-sustaining.”
“How do I do it? Tell me how!”
“Look.”
He saw the bridge far ahead and in the upper section, where his mother sat at her table, aloof and isolated from his epiphany, this rapture she’d purposely blinded herself to. She had ensconced herself in that narrow space, in the dark, where the light could not reach her.
“She will not see,” he said. The realization came to him in an angry rush. It wasn’t that Tiorné couldn’t see the light, but because she wouldn’t see it. She held fast to the words of the Pagan Atheist, even when it was utterly clear the words held no meaning, that they were one-dimensional rules only fit to be followed by the blind. Words that would serve none once the higher purpose was revealed.
“She is my mother! I do not want her to die blind! We must make her see the light, and then she will turn the ship and we will be free, and the word will be spread! There must be a way.”
Lazarus’s light was more distant now, the figure retreating down the long corridor. “You will find a way. But you must find it soon.”
Where was Ogonaovan? Reigo concentrated and found him by the port airlock. He got to his feet. He had to get to Ogonaovan. He saw the fastest route and began to walk. The perspective he could see! The huge moon against the tiny Nimrod, and beyond that, the gravity well of the planet, bending the wave-particle duality of photons from the more massive gravity well of the more distant sun. The distances! Could he see the galaxy? Reigo concentrated hard. There was the Sagittarius arm. He followed it, reaching back toward the central bulge, and the black, infinitely dense gyre around which it turned. He saw gravity knitted into itself, the strange colors of microwave radiation.
He had never been able to understand it before. Not in any terms that made sense to his mind. The universe was not a vast and inhospitable place. It was merely an extension of his own being.
Chapter 8
A twinge of doubt impinged on Reigo as he approached the airlock near to where his second sight had located the mechanic. What if Ogonaovan was not enlightened, but insane as Hectar and Ceril had been? What if a murderous motive had taken grip of him, as it seemed to have done Tiorné?
“Ogonaovan?” he called, recognizing the bulky shape of the mechanic’s mobility chair.
Ogonaovan’s voice was joyous. “Reigo? Brother, have you seen the light?”
A great swell of relief washed over Reigo. Ogonaovan had not gone mad in the dark, and he needed his friend in this, his greatest time of need, if they were to survive. “I see the light, Ogonaovan! Lazarus accepts me!”
“Then you are my brother!” Ogonaovan walloped Reigo on the back, making him stagger.
“Tiorné will not. If we do not have light, our bodies will wither and Lazarus will be taken from us. Then there will be no resurrection and no life for us beyond this one.”
“She did not see the light as we did.”
“No,” Reigo said. “On the observation deck, it was you and I and Na’Athril who were exposed to the light. That’s why you and I witnessed the rapture, and Na’Athril has passed to the next life. The others have gone mad because they were isolated from the light. Ceril tried to kill me and Tiorné has been using the ship to try to kill us ever since we began trying to reach the light.”
“Hectar tried to kill me,” Ogonaovan said, in a tone of voice suggesting he’d expected as much. “I almost killed him, but he shut himself inside some room, like the fucking coward he is. Let’s force our way onto the bridge and seize control! We bring Tiorné into the light, or if she won’t come, we kill her and take the ship!”
“The ship is Tiorné’s, Ogonaovan. It won’t heed another, not you or I, even if she’s dead.”
“We must force her! She should pay for making us suffer, for taking the light from us!”
“Ogonaovan stop! Naral sacrificed himself to bring us into the light! It is time for us to stop thinking in this conceited way! It’s time for us to learn from Naral and think of the greater picture.” Reigo could see inside Ogonaovan’s body--the pulse of blood in his veins; the heat his skin gave out, the soup of endorphins flooding his brain. He’d hoped they would find others, people they could enlighten and bring into the light of Lazarus. Now Reigo saw why the Prophet Naral had tolerated his body being in the state it was. When he knew the soul was all that endured, the body did not matter. And to give this, the greatest gift to another, that would almost justify death. His death would be well worth the enlightenment of millions.
“There is a radio communications blind spot at the stern of the ship. Tiorné won’t be able to see us there. If we go there, can you operate the machinery that will open the hydrogen flow to the fusion engine?”
Ogonaovan snorted. “I can, but Reigo, that’s fucking suicide. If the ship starts accelerating while we’re on the outside, we’ll be pulled off. We’ll be stranded until either our air supply runs out or our suits lose power and we freeze.”
Reigo nodded. “That’s right. But the acceleration will take the ship out into the sun, and Tiorné and Hectar will be saved, and they will live to spread the word. Lazarus will live on and the souls of the dead will not be lost.”
Ogonaovan stared at Reigo for a long time and his expression softened. “You’re right, Reigo,” he said in a low voice. “All this time, I only ever thought of myself. The greater good matters more. What is your plan, Brother?”
“We put our gear on, we open the airlock door, and we go to the stern. We open the hydrogen valve. Then, we die. It may be the light from the fusion engine will be enough for Lazarus to complete its infection stage. We may still meet with salvation.”
Ogonaovan’s breathing came faster, his eyes wide, enthralled. “Then let’s do it.”
They went to the lockers in the alcove outside the airlock and equipped their gear.
As Reigo put on his helmet, Ogonaovan dismantled the electronics panel for the door. It didn’t take him long to close the inner door and open the outer one. He couldn’t master the decompression mechanism and the air tore out, but that was unimportant.
The exterior of the ship lay in utter blackness. The only light in the sky came from distant stars, a great circular hole in the constellations marking the position of the gas giant that blocked out the sun, devouring the light that gave life with its engulfing penumbra.
They spoke little as they went toward the place Reigo had caught Na’Athril as it fell toward oblivion, Reigo laboring in the stride of his electromagnetic boots, Ogonaovan’s chair rolling onward. This was the point where the Nimrod’s main engine nexus was exposed. Reigo knew he would need light soon. Lazarus raced against his immune system in a losing battle.
“This is it,” Ogonaovan at last said. They had reached the stern of the ship and a great pipe as thick as a man’s abdomen that connected the fuel tank to the rearmost part of the tail where the fusion reactors were located.
Ogonaovan maneuvered his chair into position and put on the brake. He adjusted the mechanics that controlled the position of his seat and pulled a tool from the collection on the back of his chair, and set it to the connectors on the heavy collar around the pipe. “Here goes fuck all.”
A buzzing sound rose in Reigo’s comm, and abruptly stopped. Th
e computer readout in his suit flickered out.
An RF pulse...
Debris tore out from the back of the stern. Reigo lunged down toward the Nimrod’s spines as his electromagnetic boots failed and the explosion blew him away. Fragments bounced off his visor and he felt tiny particles tear through the fabric of his suit, peppering his skin. In his peripheral vision he saw Ogonaovan, caught in that same instant of panic, make a fatal grab for the arms of his chair as it drifted loose, the lights fading. Ogonaovan vanished from his field of view as Reigo’s hand found one of the spines and gripped.
As he pulled himself down against the shielding, he saw nothing of the mechanic or his chair. Shrapnel had blown from the nexus, but the cables and the pipe were intact. He got his feet against the hull and stood, gripping the tail spines, and looked back.
Something dark had stained the Nimrod’s tail column. “Ogonaovan!” Reigo called in the isolation of the inch of air around his head, frantically trying to reboot his suit. The computer image readout flickered to life in the corner of Reigo’s vision. He tuned the visor to infra-red: nothing. “Ogonaovan!”
He’d fallen off the back of the ship and into the infinite abyss. The fall onto the tail column had probably killed him and, if not, he might as well be dead now. Even if the power to turn this great ship about had been his, he would never find the insignificant body flung back into orbit.
In his rage, he turned and began tearing the connections from the Nimrod’s posterior ganglion. “This is what I think of your control!”
Something hit him in the ankles and stars spun. In an instant, his magnetic boots no longer connected to the hull, and the ship whirled twenty feet above his head. For an instant his vision went blank and pain surged up from his abdomen into his chest. Vomit spurted from his mouth and centrifuged into the top of his helmet. As abruptly as it had begun, something arrested his fall, ripping him back by the legs. A huge, dark tendril reached up from the ship and wound round his ankles, contracting like a whip--one of the Nimrod’s prehensile winches. The ship flew up beneath him and he hit it with such force he felt his collarbone shatter. His head rebounded from the metal and hairline cracks exploded into the borosilicate alloy of his visor.