The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey

by Millerson, Brady

  “I know that. But, listen-”

  “John,” Sofia interrupted him, “this whole thing’s getting too crazy. I don’t want to-,” she began to say, the corners of her eyes filling with tears.

  “Sofia, it’s okay. Listen, dear. Just-”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore. Really, I don’t.”

  “Sofia, I think we’re the only ones here. There hasn’t been a single sound from outside.”

  “You’re not listening to me again,” Sofia interrupted. “Will you please-”

  “Look, Sofia, we’ve made it this far-”

  “Take me home. I really want to go home, now. Just take me home.”

  “Sofia, you need to listen to me. There’s no-”

  “There’s no what?”

  “No sound,” John repeated.

  “What do you mean no sound? Of course there’s no sound. The Labor Security… they’re probably waiting outside for us. They never seem to make noise. They just sneak up on people.”

  “No, girl. They’re not waiting for us. Just calm down and-”

  “How do you expect me to be calm when-?”

  “There hasn’t been a single transporter that’s taken off or-”

  “A single what?”

  “Transporter. There are no transporters taking off or landing. Just listen, okay. I think we’re the only ones here.”

  As she buried her head into his chest, tearful and frightened, John ceased in his efforts to convince her of their safety. She needed the release. Their adventure was getting far beyond what he had promised her, and stepping out into the alien world, he feared, would throw her over the edge of the boundary of her own sanity. For all the troubles he brought to bear upon her, stepping aside while she vented her emotions was the least he could do.

  Sofia had wept, stating her frustrations and anxieties, for, what felt to be, another hour before calming down. She had become apologetic for her outburst, and afterward she looked emotionally drained. John hated hearing the penitent words that fell from her mouth. He was the one that needed to be apologizing, not her, and he was well aware of that fact. But for some selfish reason, of which he could not comprehend at the time, he was unable, or more to the fact, unwilling, to ask for her forgiveness.

  With the spiritually traumatic moment behind them, they finally left the upper storage bay behind, descending the ladder into the vessel’s crate-filled compartment below.

  Placing a few bottles of water and some salt cracker packages into his thigh pocket, John led Sofia to the control panel. As they were not about to get into a firefight with the Labor Security, should they find themselves face to face with them once the door opened, they slid their rifles over their shoulders by the slings, hanging them across their backs.

  The handheld computer’s connectors fit directly into the ports at the side of the airship’s towering metal door, bringing the menu screen upon its display. Unlike the vessel’s Pilot Control System, the icons were straightforward and obvious in their implication. Swiping his finger across the words Panel Open, the gears above them began to grind. Within seconds the wall of the transporter began to rise.

  The thick, triangulated locking hubs that protruded from the bottom of the rising, bay door, like the teeth of a metallic beast, lifted from their sockets, giving way to hot gusts of swirling debris and dry, dirty air that reeked of rotting flesh. Gagging under the control of the stench, Sofia and John wrapped their face coverings around their noses and mouths. Although it did stifle the odor to some extent, it did little to remove the taste of death that had coated their tongues. Unlike the ash filled base that they had left behind, the dust passing through the threshold was brown and heavy, completely devoid of the gray-white soot that they should have been exposed to had the area been a base of heavy transporter activity.

  The rising barrier of the hull had opened to an area approximately leveled with their knees. Kneeling down, they were able to gather in the first view of the mysterious world.

  The light outside was quite dim despite the high position of the Savior in the sky, as it dispersed in a yellowish-beige glow, blanketing the parched, wind-swept station. The few warehouses that were visible from their point of view were similar to the metal structures back home, but they were completely unmanned and devoid of the stacks of crates that John and Sofia had expected to see.

  Cautious to avoid stepping into a trap, they peeked around the edge of the opened bay with a controlled curiosity. The base was much smaller than they had expected it to be. And just as their first glance had suggested, there was not a soul to be seen. Unlike the busy system that they had experienced within Labor’s base, there were only a half dozen empty landing pads and sealed-off warehouses that made up the entire station. The thick bars of the surrounding fence created the relatively small arena in which they were enclosed.

  As John and Sofia stepped out of the transporter and onto the ramp, they both felt an odd sense of being free, yet trapped. And although they both experienced the same emotions simultaneously, neither was aware of the others thoughts, as they had not the desires to share them with one another.

  John’s hand was tightly wrapped about Sofia’s palm as they hopped off the ramp and onto the crumbling, dry surface of the planet. The hot wind kept a steady cloud of dust permanently floating in the air, polluting the blueness of the sky above with its thin, blanketing veil.

  Because it was only lightly obscured, it appeared to them that the heavens above were quite overt in displaying the contrails so difficult to see back on Labor’s planet. The white lines of the airships trailed and crossed over each other, sailing to and fro from a far off base, whose view, they believed, was only obstructed by the heavily barred fencing around them.

  Lifting the binocular to his eyes, the white lines of hundreds of transporters suddenly became visible contrasting against the blue face of the sky. They were joined every few seconds by freshly added streaks.

  “There’s hundreds of them up there, girl. Where are they all going?” John questioned. But he received no answer from Sofia.

  There was something quite concerning with regards to the high volume of flights taking place above them, but what it was that caused that feeling was shackled to John’s unconsciousness. There was no way for him to discern what it was that caused him to feel so uneasy.

  As the young couple reached the fence, they were surprised to find, a few thousand meters below on the down slope, a densely populated city. Through his binocular apparatus, John was able to make out tens of thousands of people, like tiny ants due to their proximity, moving about through the streets, and entering into and exiting out of the surrounding farmlands, baking under the heat of the Savior’s rays. The buildings, although lacking in visual clarity, appeared to be constructed close together, squared off by the natural layout of the cross-system of roads that ran throughout the urban complex.

  Further out on the distal side of the metropolis, beginning at the edge of its limits, John could see the flatlands, expansive and green. Perfectly squared upon its visible sides and surrounded by the deathly world of desert sand and sparse, brown vegetation, it rolled out for an innumerable distance before disappearing over the horizon.

  Children and women seemed to be more abundant than all the citizens of Labor combined. John could clearly see that the larger bodied population was covered with colorful, rippling dresses that waved about under the command of the wind, while the smaller framed citizens were running about with a disordered chaos.

  The road leading to the city was, to his horror, littered with the rotting carcasses of what were perhaps the village’s deceased. The dead were varied in shapes and sizes, surrounded by clouds of buzzing insects and partially covered over with blankets made from the same flapping fabric of the women’s attire. Smaller plots of land bordering the highway were being farmed by groups of women who were indifferent to the decaying bodies that were lying nearby. They continued with their business, as if the corpses were as common an e
ntity as the sand and the rocks.

  With the closer proximity of the fields below the abandoned base, John could make out more details of the common populace. They were all female, completely emaciated, existing as nothing more than skin and bone. The exposed flesh of their bodies was mostly tan, some nearly blackened, under the light of the Savior. They appeared to be, for the most part, in various stages of pregnancy, with their bellies protruding out from under their colorful tops. Many of the women held infants in swaddling bundles that wrapped over their shoulders, allowing them to continue to work, even while breastfeeding.

  Handing the spectacles to Sofia, John said, “Here, take a look. It’s terrible: all those poor people down there. I’ve never seen such poverty.”

  As the binocular’s eyecups pressed upon the sweat-drenched sockets of her eyes, Sofia could see why John was struck with such awe at the sight. The city seemed to her to eclipse the breadth and width of Labor, but with one distinct exception: there were no walls.

  “How strange. It seems like they’re free to leave their homes and wander where ever they wish,” she said.

  “Look around, though. Where would they go? It’s all dead land. There probably isn’t a single water source for kilometers in any direction. Maybe none at all on such a dry planet.”

  “But look at how green the land is over there,” she retorted, pointing towards the flatlands. “There must be water on the planet.”

  “But, that might be the only place where it springs up.”

  John then directed Sofia to turn the binocular downward, so as to allow her to see the source of the stench. She only glanced at the dead for a moment before handing the binocular back to him.

  “I don’t want to see anymore,” she said, looking back towards their transporter. “Are we going home now?”

  “It sounds bad,” John began. “But we should probably go down there. Maybe we could try to talk to some of them. They had to have seen us land. And they certainly don’t seem to be hostile.”

  “But, why would you want to go down there? Those are dead people on that road,” Sofia protested.

  “That city probably has some answers.”

  “Answers to what?”

  “I don’t know. To anything, I guess.”

  It had not been an easy task convincing Sofia to leave the station, but John eventually won out in the end. As they followed along the fence line, Sofia kept a close watch on the people below, anticipating some kind of response from the planet’s inhabitants regarding their presence. But, after several passing minutes of insignificant action, it appeared that there was not going to be an incoming investigation.

  The entryway to the compound was just a few hundred meters ahead of them. It was built with an identical layout to the Security gate constructed at the City of Labor. Approaching it created an almost dreamlike state within John’s mind, as it was such a familiar site.

  Rounding the corner of the gate’s booth, John tugged at its door as they walked by, but it was locked. Through its glass partitions, the interior looked clean and orderly, but lacking in life, as its control panel had been completely powered down.

  Ducking under the vehicle-security arm, he and Sofia found themselves on the dirt road that led directly to the city below. Unlike infiltrating Labor’s base, there was nowhere for them to hide. Considering that John might, perhaps, be the only male present once they were within the city’s boundary, and the fact that they were dressed in military garb, there was no possible way for them to blend in, either.

  For the first few hundred meters following the path, the soil was similar to the dry ground that they had first encountered at the landing base at the top of the slope: completely barren and devoid of anything other than rock and dirt. But, as they descended further, green plots of land, in approximately one-acre, fenced lots, began to manifest… along with the dead.

  Sofia was aghast at the site of the decomposing shells of women and children. Holding onto John’s arm and smothering her face into his shoulder, she refused to watch where they were walking.

  Working with their archaic farming tools, the colorfully clothed laborers plowed and dug, picked and hoed, without paying any attention to John and Sofia’s existence. As if to purposefully ignore them, the women appeared to consciously avoid making any form of eye contact.

  A particular plot of land, its rich, dark soil set in columns of long, thin mounds, butted up against the dry, dusty road. Busily tossing about handfuls of seed, two women, emaciated and blackened of skin, were working it, inching along a path that neared the roadside edge of their garden.

  “Hello. Could you tell me-,” John began to say, pulling Sofia’s arm, so as to sidestep a maggot-covered corpse of a young boy, but the women turned their backs to him and began to walk away.

  “That was odd, wasn’t that,” John asked, glancing down at Sofia, then back at the women.

  Swatting at the flies that were buzzing around her head, Sofia made no reply.

  “Do you think it’s the rifle that frightened them?” he asked. But again Sofia would not answer him.

  Neither of the women looked back. They just continued walking to the far end of the parcel, oblivious to the couple’s presence. Before they could reach it, in bewilderment John turned Sofia away from them, continuing their walk towards the metropolis.

  After what felt to her to be a relatively short span of time, Sofia took a moment to peel her face away from John’s arm, looking back up the slope. The tip of their airship was visible over the wall of the landing facility, appearing as a small structure mounted upon a low-lying hill. It was, to her surprise, quite the distance behind them. The city before them, on the other hand, was growing terribly nearer. And she now could see that it was not a robust economic metropolis by any sense of the words. The distant view, coupled with the dusty haze floating about the air, had obscured what was actually a massive, economically oppressed environment. It was now within a reasonable distance for her to gather its minute details without the use of any visual aids.

  John was equally amazed at the oppressiveness of the land. He could hardly believe that it made Labor City actually look quite comfortable. As there were no threatening entities presently near, John, knowing he was moving entirely contrary to Sofia’s wishes, continued to lead them onward.

  The disparaged city’s features were in full view. There were no apartments or buildings as their first glimpses had indicated, or in the sense that they had understood them through their experiences on Labor. All the structures were mere huts, makeshift in design and rather asymmetrical in form. Roofed over with layers of cardboard, they did not appear to be endowed with any structural integrity. The housing proper was constructed of randomly placed, stained and weathered scraps of the same plywood crates that John and Sofia had seen on the airships and warehouses back home. They could even make out the areas where the stenciled letters had once been, denoting which places the crates had been destined for, but were now faded or else sprayed over with black paint, defacing them to the point of complete illegibility.

  As Sofia and John closed in on the masses at the edge of the city, as far as they could tell, there were still no men present. The women, dressed in tattered, torn skirts of various colors and patterns, their skin tones generally like those of the others they had seen on the outskirts of the city, nearly black as night, were busy transporting raw cotton and produce in wicker baskets that they carried, balanced upon their heads. Their drop off seemed to exist somewhere on the other side of the town, as their lines meandered towards the direction where the flatlands began.

  The unsupervised male children were equally tanned, and poorly dressed to the same degree of poverty as the women. Some were attired in torn filthy shirts, others were wearing nothing but underpants, barefoot and covered with blood-splattered layers of dried mud. They wildly ran amok through the crowds in various sized parties, violently playing a game under which it appeared that the rules required the use of heavy wooden sticks. Hitti
ng one another, scrapes and abrasions appeared immediately upon contact, often drawing blood that dried in thick streams that dribbled down their necks and backs, rolling down their chests and arms. Chasing one another with their high-pitched shrills and laughter, they skillfully weaved in and out of the lines of their laboring mothers, hopping over the fly-infested bodies of the dead that littered the dirt streets. The weaker of the youths stood alone, crying with no one to find comfort from.

  The female children were sedate in comparison to their male counterparts. Huddling together in smaller groups, they appeared to be learning various skills that were being taught to them by the older girls. They worked diligently and silently with their hands, keeping their heads lowered and focused on the tasks at hand.

  As John and Sofia entered deeper into the periphery of the town, they soon found themselves walking amongst the throng, terribly out of fashion and alien to the culture, yet not a single person paid them any attention. The poverty they were experiencing would have been unimaginable up to this point in their lives. Their only economic experiences were on Labor, where the word oppression seemed a rather over-reaching term to describe their former place of living after seeing what true oppression actually consisted of.

  With each step further into the city, the smell of death grew more intense. Dry-heaving under the stench, Sofia could do little to keep her gag reflex under control and the tears from continuously pouring from her eyes. Filled with the decaying pieces of flesh and bone, the streets’ edges were scenes of carnage. Dried blood had soaked into the surrounding dirt and rock, giving a bizarre crimson color to the city’s pathways.

  Having created an invisible bubble around the two travelers, the women of the town were purposefully keeping their distance: everywhere John and Sofia moved, the throng would simultaneously shift equidistant away, keeping an arm’s length between them at all times.