by Russ Colson
Gamal got the shuttle and met Shamar at bay one. They loaded the repair film and circled the ship to the area of impact. They put on two layers of repair film, delaying the third so as to hasten their search for Talat.
They parked the shuttle, Gamal’s main pump pounding against his ears like storm waves, and went to find Talat. They found trim in the engine room. Tre lay beside the emergency-suit cabinet, suit half-on. Talat hadn’t had time to seal the suit before losing consciousness. Frantically Gamal fell on trim, feeling for signs of life, the beat of tris main pump, the flow of air into tris body.
There was none.
They found blood on the floor beside the air lock into the room. Tre must have reached the lock as it closed and tried to hold it open. It crushed the end of tris central tentacle.
Shamar stood apart, not coming near Talat.
“Is tre...?”
“Dead, Shamar.” He tried to say it matter-of-factly, but it didn’t come out that way.
She looked away. “We can’t have children, now, Gamal. No children forever and ever.”
Gamal stared at her. Was that all she cared about?
“You’re responsible for remote sensing, Shamar. Reconnaissance. You should have seen the asteroid. Warned me.” All his pain came out in a surge of anger and blame.
She answered in kind. “You shouldn’t have been so quick to seal the ship.”
They glared at each other before she fled the engine room, leaving him to take care of the body.
Gamal couldn’t bear to dump Talat into space, where tre would fall cold and alone into the Hole. He dragged the body to the freezer room and leaned it against a wall. Set Talat’s limbs into a natural pose, as though at any moment tre might laugh again and make everything ok.
He moved the ship back into the Hole. Deep into the Hole. He wasn’t sure he wanted to come out again.
He didn’t speak with Shamar for three days ship time, three hundred million years this far into the Hole. He went to find her when he needed help projecting how long before cross-over, when exhalation turned to inhalation and energy began to drain from the universe. He coiled and uncoiled his left dorsal in anger. Shamar shouldn’t have left him to do it alone. It was Talat’s job, and they should share the extra work.
He checked her sleeping cabin, the cafeteria, the rec room. She wasn’t there. At last, he found her in the freezer room with Talat.
She turned when he entered, her central nostril trembling, struggling to hold back tears. “We can’t bring him back, Gamal.”
Gamal stepped beside her and looked down at Talat. “Can we get along without trim?” He snorted, doubting.
Shamar didn’t speak for a moment. “Gamal, why do you d...dislike me so?”
The skin below his eyes fell slack in surprise. “I don’t dislike you.”
“Then why deny us children?”
He couldn’t watch her face. He looked into Talat’s golden eyes, now faded. “You cared for preserving our race. Not for Talat. Or me.”
“If we’d had ch...children, Talat wouldn’t be completely gone.”
Her words surprised Gamal. Not the cold analysis of lost opportunity he expected. He’d misunderstood. “You did love him?”
“I loved you, too, Gamal.”
Her central nostril trembled again, struggling to hold back the rain of tears.
He wrapped his limbs around her and pulled her close. At his touch, her struggle ended, and she sobbed, her tears wetting his coelomic collar. He rumbled comfort and affection until, at long last, she grew still.
¤
They didn’t cycle again for a year, thirty-six billion years real time. New races had come and gone, some leaving ruins strewn through the galaxy. They documented what they could, and returned to the Hole.
Shamar moved into his sleeping cabin soon after. They grew close once he understood she wasn’t as coldly analytical as he’d thought. Scripture forbade their sharing living space of course; a broken Triad shouldn’t fold in on itself. But Shamar always argued for practical action over scripture, and Gamal knew that scripture served people, not the other way around. With no chance ever again for a Full Triad, what sense did it make to cling to a rule that no longer applied? He loved her, and she him, and what else did they have in all the universe but each other?
Several times they took excursions to surrounding star systems. Once, they visited a barren world, newly cleansed by some unknown catastrophe. They landed on a rocky plain at the outskirts of an empty city. They explored the ruins, wondering about the race that lived there and what happened to their world.
One building housed a variety of artifacts—a museum of some kind. Gamal found a copy of the scriptures from his own race, tattered and old.
He beckoned to Shamar. “See, its survival verifies its validity.”
She laughed. “Survival as a relic for display, scarcely a proof of validity.”
She must have seen his face fall, and rumbled gentle apology. “I’m too analytical again, aren’t I? These people must have explored our worlds. Maybe they found other artifacts.”
They found a full replica of the Vault, one of many their people built before he, Shamar, and Talat took the original on their long journey.
“Do you suppose it gave them hope, like it did our people?” Gamal asked. “A sense of meaning?”
“If so, then hope came to them through us.” Shamar stood close to him, stretching her central nostril into a warm smile. “We did leave a mark, something that mattered.”
A glow of hope burned in Gamal. They might be alone, he and Shamar, the last of their people. But, it still mattered that their race had lived.
The glow chilled quickly. He scowled and turned from the relic. “Mattered to a dead race, maybe.” He draped his right dorsal around Shamar’s coelomic collar and leaned against her.
She held him close as they returned to the lander, and from there to the ship. “Well, it is what it is,” she said quietly. “And it can’t be any is-er.”
They revisited the world after another billion years. All remnants of the city and the artifacts it once held were gone, of course. They had a picnic on the mossy side of a mountain that rose like a broken tooth where the remains of the city on the plain once stood. He enjoyed the view of distant peaks, the fresh breeze, and conversation with Shamar, and tried not to think too much about eternity and pointlessness.
¤
They came up from the Hole less and less often. Nothing in this future universe had any meaningful connection to their own time or race. Empires came and went. Races rose and fell. Ages passed.
Nothing mattered.
Nothing except what he had on this ship. Shamar.
Often they talked of what all the change meant. Of the Vault and its promise. Of the Breath of God.
They still argued over scripture and science, Shamar challenging his interpretation of scripture, he arguing the importance of revealed truth. There was no anger left in their arguments. Even without Talat, they had learned to get along. Perhaps, because of Talat.
¤
He was fifty years old when they reached cross-over. In those fifty years—one and a half trillion years real time—a billion races had lived and died, including his own. Worlds, stars, entire galaxies had formed and vanished.
Their own galaxy grew dark, and only a few red dwarf stars remained. Larger stars had long since burned out, dying in fiery star blasts or fading into black dwarfs.
Beyond cross-over, the dark energy that had fueled the expansion of the universe began to recede, like ebb tide, going back into whatever sea it came from. Stars died. Galaxies collapsed into their Holes. Great races no longer rose and fell, no longer conquered galaxies, no longer pondered the nature of existence.
The Breath of God. It had filled the universe, bringing hope and possibility. For a trillion years the breath flowed into the universe. Now it flowed away, and hope and possibility flowed with it.
“Chartrae lived in the thirty-third
Breath,” Shamar said one day as they sat together in the cafeteria, where the big picture window looked out on the universe, only a smear of strange light this deep in the Hole. “This must be the thirty-fourth. Will there be a thirty-fifth?”
“Maybe that’s the question.”
“The question?”
“The question the Vault will Answer.”
“I want to ask my own questions, thank you!” Shamar laughed and punched him gently in the side.
“Like what?” Gamal leaned into her, comfortably nestled against her upper coelom.
“Do we get to be part of the next Breath?”
“We can ask God when we see Him.”
Shamar grew pensive. “Will we live long enough to reach the end? To see God?”
“Of course, Shamar. It’s our destiny!”
They both laughed, remembering Talat.
Decades passed ship time. Hundreds of billions of years real time. The fuel driving fusion in the stars was long since consumed and the universe began to grow too dim to see, although here and there a burst of light marked where stray matter fell into a black hole.
Gamal found it depressing. It was a dark and dying universe, like his own aging body.
¤
Shortly after the twenty-fifth cycle, when they had fled back to the blind comfort of the Hole, they went to read the Vault together.
“What’s it mean, ‘the Answer will open’?” Shamar asked. “Shouldn’t it say ‘the Vault will open’?”
Gamal turned his coelomic collar in a faint shrug. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”
Shamar was quiet a long time. Gamal had noticed her mind wasn’t as quick as it used to be. Not the keen scientist’s mind he remembered from their youth.
She peered at him with troubled eyes. “If part of it doesn’t mean anything, how can we trust the rest?”
They left the bay shortly thereafter. Shamar stumbled on the way out. Gamal caught her.
“Careful.”
She laughed nervously. “Should watch where I’m going, I guess.”
They returned to the bridge in silence, and he took up his journal. He didn’t notice that Shamar wasn’t working on her writings until she spoke.
“Gamal, I have to tell you something.”
He saved his edits and turned to her expectantly.
“I have the brain-wasting disease.”
Gamal absorbed her words. “You need to start treatments.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been taking treatments for two years now. I’m at the end of their help.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You should have told me.”
“I’m sorry.”
They stared at each other a long time. Hers was such a familiar face. The face that had shared his life. The face that had laughed with him, and cried.
“What does this mean?” His heart wasn’t beating right, and his breath came too quickly. He only half-heard her answer as his thoughts blurred into pain.
“I only have a few months left, Gamal.”
¤
They made one last cycle out of the Hole while she could still understand it. There wasn’t much to see, of course, but she watched the sky and commented on how it had changed.
She declined rapidly after that, as though she had held on for that last opportunity to learn. She’d always been the thinking one.
“Hang on, Shamar,” he said one day as they lay together in the cabin they had shared for so many years, her head resting on his coelom. “When we reach the end, God will heal you.”
There was a time when she would have challenged his assertion. “How do you know?” she’d have asked, searching for more than wishful thinking in his faith. Today, her eyes roved idly over the curves and angles of the familiar space of his cabin. Her right dorsal tentacle twined around the bed post behind them, searching for something solid to cling to. She leaned into him, turning her head so it rested against the side of his face.
“I love you,” she said.
She didn’t know his name anymore. Or her own. Even so, she’d found him through the fog, and touched her heart to his one last time.
“I love you, too.” He held her tighter and rumbled softly, his heart aching.
He held her a long time, until her breathing grew soft in sleep. So familiar, that soft breathing. So many days and nights together. So many discussions and excited discoveries. So many adventures and quiet evenings. So many sorrows shared, so many joys.
He held her a lot in the last days. He was holding her when she died.
He took her to the freezer room and laid her beside Talat. He wanted something better for them than this dark grave. Something continuing. Something that mattered.
How could he leave them here, in the cold, alone?
No. They were no longer cold or alone. He was much more alone than they.
¤
He came up for the last time. As he expected, nothing remained outside the Hole. It had all grown cold and fallen into the dark.
Not quite.
A fuzzy ball of light moved over the black void. He hovered over Shamar’s sensor console, curious about the unknown even to the end.
“Hello, Gamal.” The voice didn’t speak aloud or in his head, but both and neither.
His heart pounded. As near as Gamal could tell, God didn’t look at all like him.
“Why make this pointless universe.” Gamal startled himself with his anger.
“Pointless?”
Gamal tightened his right dorsal. Too late to back out now. “Everything died. Why make it at all? It’s meaningless.”
The glowing light pulsed, but the voice sounded more patient than defensive. “Would you wish to undo your time with Talat and Shamar?”
Gamal glanced at the empty seats where Shamar and Talat once sat, empty now but for the ghosts in his memory. “Of course not.”
“Then it isn’t meaningless, is it?”
Gamal paused. “But even the stars went out.”
The light pulsed again. Maybe laughter? “The universe isn’t made for the stars, Gamal. It’s made for acts of courage. Opportunities for compassion. Chances for love. All the beautiful lights of heaven.”
Gamal looked past the glowing light toward the nothingness beyond. Where his own race died, along with a billion others.
“With so much dying and darkness.”
The throbbing of the light slowed, no longer laughter. Something warmer, but sad. “Without darkness, there can be no sky full of stars, without danger, no courage, without suffering, no compassion, without loneliness, no love.”
Gamal bowed his head. He understood. There was no other way it could be. “So, meaning is found in the process of living, not in how things end. Just as the Vault promised,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That’s it, then? The Vault won’t open with its Answers?”
“It’s not the Vault that opens, Gamal. The answer itself opens when you understand it. The answer that was there all along.”
Gamal pondered that.
“Can I send a message to the next Breath, tell them about meaning?”
“What would you say?”
He composed his thoughts.
“My name is Gamal. I lived during the 34th Breath of God and reached the end. Here is my Answer for the next Breath...”
Russ Colson lives with his wife, Mary, on a farmstead in northern Minnesota, far enough from city lights to see the Milky Way and the aurora borealis. He teaches planetary science, meteorology, and geology at Minnesota State University Moorhead. In 2010, he was selected by the Carnegie Foundation as US Professor of the Year. Before coming to Minnesota, he worked at the Johnson Space Center in Texas and at Washington University in St. Louis where, among other things, he studied how a lunar colony might mine oxygen from the local rock. He writes a variety of articles and speculative fiction stories, publishing in Clarkesworld Magazine, Neo-Opsis Scienc
e Fiction Magazine, Kaleidotrope, New Myths, Kazka Flash Fiction, and others.
SHOWING FAERIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT
By Julie Frost
I DODGED THROUGH THE PICKETERS into the Expo Center, dragging a cart loaded with four aquariums and a box of tiny furniture and swearing under my breath. Greg Carson waved to me from across the show floor, and I made my way over to him through the general chaos that always attended the Annual Clearfield County Faerie Show. “I saved you a spot, Emily,” he said.
“Thanks.” I rolled my eyes as I set my aquariums on the table. “The faerie rights activists give you any problems?”
Greg drew himself up to his full six-foot four-inch height, flexed his considerable arms, and deepened his voice. “Most of them don’t want to mess with me.” Then he laughed, white teeth flashing in his dark face. “They get a rude awakening when they realize that Faerie Show people aren’t just elderly grannies with bifocals and bonnets.”
I’m an elderly granny with bifocals who firmly refuses to wear a bonnet, and I grinned back. “Some are former NFL linebackers who happen to breed very rare and attractive varieties. Do you have anything special for us this year?”
“That would be telling.” He squired me toward the door. “Need some help getting your faeries out of the van?”
“Oh, thank you! I...think I might have entered too many this year.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I saw four aquariums, so you brought eight faeries and no helper? Woman, are you crazy?”
“My kids and grandkids think so.” I sniffed. “They’d rather I stayed at home knitting or something instead of gallivanting all over the country.” I opened the side door of my minivan, and we started loading clear plastic critter totes, with my faeries inside, onto my wagon. We use the little totes, with their colorful lids, for safety in transport.