“How do you like power now? How does death feel to you?”
At every corner he pile-drived those fleeing into one gruesome end after another. They weren’t human, they were Comannda. Stolen bodies, selfish souls – more alien to man than any extraterrestrial race. Soldiers appeared and fired rounds that he sent whirling back at them. He flattened some of the men and shredded others. Hatred for the Comannda boiled over until he felt it physically. His face blushed and contorted. Intention swelled in intensity, the ocean of potential at his fingertips. He would show them what it meant to destroy.
Johan managed a distant communiqué: Stop it man, you’re losing it! You’re losing control! We’re free! Get out! Watch the walls, Soldado will guide you out. Just get out! Get out before you lose it!
The warning hit him like a tap amidst a thousand punches but he held on to it, knowing vaguely he was not fully in control. On the wall a yellow Pac Man appeared, chomping at blue dots. To see the video game graphics interrupted the rage and returned a sense of self. Soldado… He followed the blue dots, racing ahead of Pac Man, knocking down troops instead of destroying them. Left, right, another left then the hall intersected with the curving hallway. Down a ways stood a bank of elevators. Blue flashing arrows pointed down and game ghosts disappeared as if following them. He clenched both fists and split the doors open to expose a dark elevator shaft.
The draw to rise up the shaft and destroy the base felt like a welcome heat in the chill of night. He could do it. The potential was there, all there, and so were the reasons. Millions of them.
“God damn this shit!” he shouted and shook his hands as if they’d been burnt.
He leapt forward into the shaft and descended instead.
Chapter 30
There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.
-Natalie Clifford Barney
Storm clouds dumped rain in the murky dusk, forming mud in the trenches. Bursts from a tripod-mounted machine guns drowned out the cries of the wounded. Orders shouted were lost to all but the nearest soldiers. A breach had occurred and grenades were expected.
Johan stood on a trench ladder and saw the improbable – two men midfield, grappling in hand to hand combat. A wall of soldiers rose from the enemy trenches and filled the sky with thrown charges.
“Change!” Johan shouted and blinding light stole the moment.
High winds buffeted the two men struggling on a skyscraper’s wide ledge. Gray clouds wrapped the sky and cold air chilled them to the bone. Below on a broken window-washer’s rig, eight of the Council stood helplessly, three having been released according to the sand men’s plan.
Cathbad throttled Bastion’s throat and banged his head against the stone wall. Bastion kneed Cathbad in a bid for control. Overhead, a pitch-dark cloud descended and coalesced into a band of black birds that swarmed over Cathbad.
Again Johan shouted for change but the scene did not. He leaned into it and formed a hand the size of a bus. He batted a swath of the birds away and took both men in his grasp, tossing them across the city–
–and stole into a pickup truck speeding along a dusty road. Sun-baked earth and browned weeds stretched out in every direction. Cathbad turned and nodded in approval at the tied and gagged bodies stacked in the back. Bastion’s murderous eyes peered through the window at the two men. Somewhere ahead a border crossing with a single hut loomed.
“You’ve got it locked in?” Cathbad asked.
“I’ve got it in mind, if that’s what you mean. God knows if it’ll be there or not.”
The race to find Eden and deliver the Council was on. Johan grimaced at pressure from the hunters. A pothole jarred the truck. The resulting bounce threatened control. He fought the sliding pitch of the back end against unnatural forces.
The road suddenly curved and rocks appeared alongside it.
“Bastards!”
He pulled the wheel and willed the truck to follow. Tires narrowly missed rock. The landscape rose ahead, a sudden hill that grew impossibly steep.
“Change it up,” Cathbad advised.
The truck began to fold into geometric squares until it collapsed into a single matchbook-sized cube cart-wheeling on the dirt. It slowed and caught the edge of a rock and bounced in the air. When it landed, the train’s engine strained, vibrating the floor. Johan leaned from the open window to assess the approaching tunnel. Thirty, maybe forty seconds away. He glanced back at the car where the Council was held then ducked back in at the sight of single-engine fighters lining up to strafe. Metal popped as their rounds made their mark.
A fighter released a bomb that struck near the tracks and rocked the trailing cars. Johan doubled their weight to keep them on the rails. Another bomb fell, then another. Both missed but still tipped the cars. Each time he countered with the needed weight, slowing the train. The korjé pressed many distinct fronts, coordinating in an overwhelming collage of creativity. Distractions grew – children ran onto the rails and were struck, sections of rails disappeared requiring his instant attention, black widow spiders dropped from the ceiling, and the floor superheated as if on fire. While limited to the world he’d created, they were taking advantage of their numbers to tweak it and distract him.
“Damn!”
The engine ducked into the tunnel just as a bomb hit the third car back. The explosion sheared the car’s walls outward which struck the tunnel’s entrance. A thunderous report filled the tunnel and the train shuddered when the linkage broke between the cars. The engine and second car shot down the tunnel line alone.
A dim bulb in the cabin revealed Cathbad’s worried face.
“Keep it focused, man!” he shouted.
Johan peered out again. The light at the end of the tunnel grew impossibly bright, as if a giant flashlight had been placed at the entrance. The train rocketed towards it.
“Is that it?” Cathbad asked.
“I don’t know!” Vague shapes swam in the light. He prepared to release the Council.
The train shot from the tunnel into bright sunlight and the lurch of freefall. Johan saw blue ocean out one window, sheer cliffs from the other. Rails gone, the engine tilted and fell towards a rocky shore far below. He grabbed the window frame as he rose in microgravity.
“This is not Eden!” Cathbad shouted.
Johan pushed off from the side of the cabin and shifted, just clearing the mothership before it blinked into hyperspace. His tethered cargo recoiled behind him – Cathbad in a suit, the Council stuffed into a life-support crate. Billions of stars peered at them from every direction, distant but infinitely present. Silence pervaded.
Via a tinny comm link, Cathbad asked, “Where are they?”
“Fighting my ghost on the ship. At least for the moment. Think Eden. We need to attract it.”
“Aye. I’m doing my best.”
Warning lights in the helmet’s rim lit and an AI announced a possible collision imminent. Johan spun in time to see the mothership return, fresh from hyperspace.
“At this rate, we won’t see Eden,” Cathbad said.
It was all too familiar, too easy for them to wedge in and push or pull the scene. Something drastic might give them the time needed for Eden to approach.
He burrowed deep and found what he wanted. The next shift brought them to a market in Barcelona. Crowds gathered to watch street vendors perform. Laughter rose above the din from a group of men outside a pub.
Johan walked with an old woman and pushed an old man in a wheelchair. The old man’s head bobbed and drool rolled from his mouth. In his lap was a ceramic cremations jar. The old woman raised her brows and looked around.
Johan smiled. “Catherine, what a delightful dress. Purple is your color.”
Cathbad wobbled alongside, awkward in heels. He ignored the jab and the garb and looked around. “The weave... amazing. Truly amazing.”
Johan nodded at the comp
liment though he owed the technique to the sand men.
The throng jostled them as they passed under the arches of the market. Fruits, vegetables, fish, and meats of all kind lay on display. The memory of La Boqueria Mercat proved a beautiful setting to become lost in. The most impressive aspect, though, was the meta flowing out of each and every person – so authentic it formed several layers of group minds. At the edges of the dream, multiple observers dwelled with depths that felt alien. Almost certainly Mu. In the crowd were korjé, out-classed but still searching.
Cathbad stopped to sample a morsel of bread. The aged Bastion slumped and made a gurgling sound.
Johan leaned in for a piece of bread. “Heavenly, isn’t it?”
Cathbad nodded. “But I’d rather have some good news.”
There was none, yet, other than the freedom of movement. Or the illusion of it.
“I rather think we’re being toyed with.” Johan tried the bread. “They may have a way of keeping Eden away.”
Cathbad scowled his old woman face. “Where are the sand men? I’m still not sure I trust them.”
The sand men’s betrayal of Bastion was not in question. What they might do after a successful coup was.
“If they fail to take out teams one and two, we have a problem. And if their intent is to double-cross us... well, it won’t be long before we know.”
Cathbad shook his head. “I don’t like to gamble.”
A group of merchant sailors buffeted the crowd, searching. Another three entered the market through the arched entrance. Johan moved on to the busy fish vendor and joined a hodge-podge that served as a waiting line.
The sailors were converging on their position.
“This is getting old,” Johan said. “Either they’re smarter now or they’ve got someone stronger at their back. Catherine, something more drastic is in order. Brace yourself. I’ve been toying with an idea and now’s as good time as any to try it.”
“Oh Lord.”
Colors in the dream shifted hue, sounds pitched higher, and time slowed. A driving sense of déjà vu struck then, the moments of which aligned like gear teeth... he’d formed this energy before, had been in the market when he did, and had faced the unknown outcome before. The wet tip of intuition held the answer to what would come next yet still a fog obscured the future. He took it as a sign. Primed and focused, he pushed the energy to manifest further.
The market suddenly splintered, second and third dimensions fragmenting in a confusing array. He cried out, the sound lost in a crush of imagery and noise. Voices shouted among a cacophony of whispers. A background silence held the cries of millions. Agony and ecstasy rang like two bells in a darkness with a hidden light no man would ever see. Near felt far away. Familiar felt strange. Right was also wrong, and evil had expressions that ranged to the divine. He struggled and shifted to retain control but couldn’t. The maelstrom he’d unleashed was more than him, more than he could conceive. There was no withdrawal, no avenue of retreat.
Layers upon layers of imagery exploded in flickering contention for dominance. Each tick of thought popped random experience. Rejection. Ponderance. Arrival. Displacement. Negation. Demand. Each stuck like a pin in an endless stream of punctures.
The beginning of it fell away, as did any expectation of an end. No sides nor safety. No height nor depth. All meaning arrived and departed at once. Chaos reigned. His sense of the others faded and one of sheer crisis took its place.
He’d gone too far, grown too sure of himself. He’d lost the others and been caught again–
“No.” A whisper close but distant. The concept of speech pierced the madness with a sense of time. He pulled the voice around him like a safety blanket.
“What have I done?”
“Shhh.”
The chaos continued unabated until it seemed he would lose himself after all. He had loved his childhood kaleidoscopes, had stared into them for hours, but this was a perversion of the beauty of randomness, a recipe of creation serving up a demented and disassembled reality. How anything remained cohesive in the universe – meta, soul, individualism, thoughts, let alone the rigidity of Raon... how did meaning form from the vast mix of infinite possibility? Who was responsible? A more pressing question rose: where was the pristine beauty and order of Saoghal? It was as if he’d struck a crack and fell through. He clung to the ebb of emotional response like a floating device.
“Impulsive and dangerous, dreamer. You create ripples in all that is.”
Pale sun-yellow face with black eyes. He internalized the pang of understanding. It was the Mu with him, there in the field of –
“Not Mu.”
Meaning flickered in the chaos, glimpses that became messages. No, not the Mu. The Mu belonged to a confederation, to the Owners – one of a vast collection of species.
“The Pure. We are free.”
The Pure didn’t belong to anyone – they were Outside. The Owners had claimed entire galaxies but the Pure had escaped their control.
“What is this?”
Beyond the mesh, beyond the Last Seam lay the raw stuff of reality, the ingredients of Saoghal. From here, in the wash of what felt like God’s own mind, the alien race thrived and watched all that manifested. They observed life forms fish for meaning, divine for secrets, and contend for authority. From here, they had sensed Johan’s affect and grew interested.
“Dreamer, you have broken free. Fortunate we saw. Soon Faction will act.”
“Who are they? What do they want?”
Answers formed. Layers of structures represented the bureaucracy of the many Factions, the most advanced species from hundreds of galaxies. Together they tended worlds for the Owners. Who or what the Owners were wasn’t clear, but their place at the head of the confederation was.
Earth was a new world, its life having been groomed. Saoghal was only a container for mankind, a kind of womb for their collective consciousness. The Comannda had been grown to facilitate controls and safeguards that would ultimately allow Earth to be pressed into the folds of the confederation. The Korda was another growth for greater control. The ying and the yang, both by design.
“Plans long drawn. You, dreamer, are dangerous to them. Young and powerful. Unpredictable.”
Then he felt it, the approach of something massive, a form that displaced chaos. He shied away as did the Pure. The giant mass flowed, creating a distinct sense of locality amid the disarray. A sense of otherness arrived with it, something full of malice.
The Pure drew him in and away, surrounding him in darkness like an embrace. Silence bloomed, it’s silky absence comforting as continuity and identity reformed. Something intimate occurred, the nature of which he couldn’t fathom and felt only as an afterthought when he emerged in the virgin expanse of Saoghal. Cathbad and the Council materialized once more under his control.
Pawns, placed back on the chessboard.
Madness! What the hell was that? Cathbad asked. Where did you go? What did you see?
I’m not sure. Not what I’d planned. The space had been unreal, so basic and fundamental that it might have encompassed Eden as well as Saoghal and Raon. He hoped not Eden. Heaven ought not be accessible by alien beings. To be adept in that space would put him on par with the Factions, at least.
Cathbad bristled. Change this, we’re exposed.
Bastion and the Council pried and pulled in the effort to escape, sometimes savagely. Otherwise he felt alone – no korjé, no aliens, and no God. If the Factions could monitor him, they did so quietly. Across a distance that challenged perception, mankind’s consciousness burbled like a stream, undulating and flowing towards an uncertain future. He cast in the other directions and felt unlimited expanse.
This is safe as anywhere to wait. No need to draw attention with elaborate creation. I trust we’re here for a reason.
Cathbad disagreed. Saoghal is a container, you just proved that. They’ll scan and find us. Something, add something to shield us.
Cathbad’s worry
alone made waves. Johan settled in to pace the existence of the realm. After the chaos, Saoghal’s fabric became apparent. He entered the now-seen weave, lacing through and saturating it like the space between DNA helixes. He became an antenna, sensitive to the footprint of approaching meta. A web, and he the spider tending it.
You have something ready if they intrude? Cathbad asked.
Aye. In a dash.
The old druid offered an affirmative vibe, impressed and appeased. Ten souls floating free. Nine with expiration dates long past. We shouldn’t have much of a wait.
One would think.
Pond-smooth moments passed. Cathbad broke the surface. I’ve always felt there are others, in and beyond our galaxy and this or other realms. I’m left with the certainty now. Do me a favor. See if you can reach them. Be smart about it. See if there is a species that will intervene fairly, with universal justice and morality. Find someone to help. If not spiritually, then at least physically. Free the nations from their grip. Take down the ivory towers. Give man a chance to evolve.
Didn’t you try before? To reach out and find them? Didn’t Pons?
Aye, but we’re not you. I feel the trackways now. They tell me you might succeed.
If the Pure were what they said they were…
I wish I could see those trackways.
You will, when it’s most important that you do. Be open to what’s around you. They’re inlaid in every moment, in every situation. The strong ones stand out, thick with potential. Learn to read them, learn well the path they speak and they will serve you.
Johan drifted in the memory of the pale yellow face with its black eyes and slitted nose. The first visions of apocalyptic fire had come true. They had been trying to guide him and had just protected him from whatever was hunting in the chaos. He would try contact again when it felt right. Learning to sense the trackways, even possible futures, would be invaluable. If the Faction held sway over both the Comannda and the Korda, the future would be filled with as much conflict as anything seen so far. He wanted to believe some in the Comannda wanted to rule in a more civilized way, and if so, learning of the Faction might create a bridge between the groups. Maybe even help form an Earth faction to defend itself from the Owners. There was no way of knowing yet.
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