by Clay Gilbert
Eternity spun around, startled at the sound of the small voice behind him. The boy had piercing, questioning, blue eyes, and a dusting of blond hair. He was only a teenager, and something in his face reminded Eternity of himself. He imagined this boy must have undertaken his own quest, and that his parents—if they still lived—were quite unaware of their danger, or his risk.
“My name’s Luke,” the boy said.
“Yes, Luke,” Eternity said. “They’re dead.”
“They’ve been dead a long time,” Angel said.
“But then how did they talk to us?”
“The people did their work for them. The Citizens did all of this, all these years. The ‘voices’ were just recordings.” They did this—we did this to ourselves, Eternity said. How many turns of the wheel does it take to learn a simple lesson? “They have to know,” Luke said. “They have to be told it isn’t true.” “Come on, man,” Morgan said. “It’s time to get out of here.” * * * *
The Towers were burning, and the citizens outside were terrified. Many were angry, confused. They were alone now, and it seemed their gods were dying. The history, the life of the Black City was collapsing upon itself—even as the Towers themselves—and nothing was left to stop the end from coming.
The night air was choked with smoke from the growing conflagration. In the shadow of the ruined Towers, crowds of Citizens thronged the streets. Many looked lost, as if all of the sense had been lost from their world. Yet, a scattering of the others had a different expression in their eyes: a light that looked like joy. They were free from Regulation for the first time in as many years as any among them could remember, with no idea what to do with their newfound liberty. Freedom or fear—which would win in this moment where the scales stood in balance for the first time in memory? As yet, there was little to do but wait.
* * * *
The flames from the ruined Towers burned hot and bright behind the Prophet’s crimson eyes. He could sense the others—all the Black City’s forgotten children, gathered in the darkened streets of this Forgotten City. He’d been apart from them so long, these dissidents who should have been— who were—his brothers and sisters. He’d always felt like a freak, ever apart from them, always existing on the margins of the Two-in-One and belonging nowhere.
In the dream-drug’s hallucinatory haze, he’d found a realm in which he could belong because it was his alone. Few had dared disturb the refuge of his visions. Ace was the first, then Brain, and nowEternity, who alone of all ofthem helped him find the strength within himself to find the Sight within himself and without the drugs. At last, he sensed his kinship with those around him, those whose presence he could feel as, bathed in candlelight, they stood in the City’s cold air, warmed bythe feelingof freedom and family. Hefelt a bond, too, with Eternity, Angel, Timothy, Morgan and the others who still struggled to escape the darkness in the heart of the Black City. He was with all of them, and he felt a prescient glimpse—a gift of the Sight, showing him how it would be when it was all over.
When all the walls have fallen, we will stand together. The Prophet went out into the darkness to be with them in spirit, and in heart. Soon, I can leave this place for good. Soon, we will be together.
* * * * “Is it connected?” asked Luke in a hushed tone. “Still working on it,” Eternity and Angel said almost as one. The smoke from the spreading fire was threatening to smother all three of them as Eternity and Angel worked together to connect the loudspeakers from which the Providers’ broadcasts were made.
“All right,” Eternity said. “It’s done.” He pressed a button, and the machine sprang to life. “You go on out and join the rest of them, Luke. We’re going to stay for just a little longer.”
“But this place is burning!” Luke cried. “You’ll die!” Eternity’s face was calm, expressionless. “No, we won’t.”
The boy looked frightened, but he got up and began to leave. “I’ll see you outside,” he told them. In the last moments before Luke left them, Angel and Eternityboth saw again the images from the Net, playingout the whole dark history of this place where so many dreams had been built and lost.
Luke stood in the doorwayfor a few last seconds, silent tears welling in his eyes. When he could no longer stand the sight, he turned and left, blocking all thoughts but those of the City’s bitter freedom.
This city was rebuilt on a lie, Eternity thought. What was worse, he realized, watching the stark and tragic images march again on the canvas of his imagination, was that they’d believed it. One way or another, we all believed it. A few of us thought to be more powerful than the rest, and knew enough of history to use its names for their own purposes. Men set themselves up as gods, and when they were gone, left their legacy to rule in their place. And they taught others to take up the game.
Eternity saw all of it at once, then: the Providers—the true ones, if such a thing could be said to exist—had been the architects of the Black City, built after all the world around it fell. They’d ruled there until whatever disaster had destroyed part of it. The citizens’ robes had been stained grey by a constant rain of radioactive ash, their hair lost to the ravages of radiation poisoning.Heimagined that, in time, the City and its people recovered from the tragedy and shut the area off for safety as well as out of sorrow and embarrassment. Bythen, most of the original Providers were dead.
When did the charade begin? Eternity wondered. Perhaps the Regulations had grown up as a means of protecting the City’s people from their own past. Whatever its beginnings, the sanctified lie had grown into a cruel and fateful truth. The earnest faces of survivors had become the cold masks of soldiers fighting a false enemy at the command of dead gods. They kept believing, because they’d believed for so long already. As it became easier to believe, it became easier to spy, to lie, and even to kill in defense of their faith.
Someone had to have done it, Eternity thought. Someone wrote the screencasts, somehow convincing people to blindly believe—convincing them utterly.
Eternity imagined there’d been no force of will, for the most part, at the beginning. It was only when They—their myth— were threatened that the killings and deceptions began. The architects of that labyrinth of lies were long gone, fled in fright from their own creation—or fallen in the path of time’s wheel, which cuts down false men and false gods alike in its wake.
“Our abuse of power poisoned our City … We thought only of ourselves … Use your power well …” The words of the dead Providers rang from the Towers as fingers of flame, orange, yellow and red, tore at the violet tapestryof the early morning sky.
Eternity looked out a window high in the Towers and thought: It’s over. It’s finished at last. And he felt the wheel turn toward a new day.
* * * *
The Providers’ temple had fallen.
The highest part of the Towers was collapsing on itself. People were running left and right. The square was a sea of terrified humanity.
Morgan and the others looked up at the sight and thought in terror: Eternity and Angel are still in there.
* * * * They got away without a second to spare. Eternity seemed to sense the instant the Towers would fall, and in that instant, he remembered those very words spoken by the Prophet in the vision that was, now, finally coming to pass.
Those Towers gonna fall, man. Towers gonna fall. And then they’d run. Run for their lives.
He took Angel in his arms when they were at a safe distance, and kissed her. Her face was covered with dirt and ash, like his own, and cuts and bruises covered them both. But they were alive.
Morgan and the others caught sight of them across the crowd and all their worry and fear lifted from them, fading like a ghost liberated at last from the chains of a life that should have long ago been left behind.
It was over for them all, at last.
* * * *
Is it possible to be a boy, and yet a man?
It was Eternity’s eighteenth birthday, and the dawn of a new age for the City as
well. Eternity, Angel, Brain, Luke, Morgan, Jude, Eternity’s parents, their friends Scarab and Ariadne, Ari’s parents—even the Prophet—all gathered outside the Leaders’ Hall. Crown Avenue shone in neon splendor again, restored to the glories lost to it during the blackout and the war.
There was much still to be done. The wall would be torn down, and the Two-in-One would be only one again. The City’s people would have to learn to live free again, to know that the gods, who were Mother and Father of All, whose faces and names were as many as the stars in the sky and the people on the Earth, were not to be feared. It would taketime to heal centuries of wounds, but it would be done. The wheel would turn, and this time the lesson would—they hoped— be learned.
In time, more might come to join them, and some of those still unaccounted formight be found. Although therehad still been no word from Skylar, Eternity and Angel both hoped there would be, some day.
“What will be, Prophet?” Eternity asked.
“Hard to tell, man,” the pale youth said. “Take my hand.”
Eternity did, and in his mind’s eye he beheld a vision of wonder and comfort. They were all together—all of the City’s people. Shining new Towers of brilliant, silver steel and glass rose in the very place where the fallen ones once stood. In front of them rose a great grey slab of stone, a memorial, engraved with a message, a warning—a promise. And even though visions were often uncertain, Eternity read the words on the slab and knew this would come to be.
In the vision, he saw himself, some years older, with the boy Luke close on one side of him, and on his other side, Angel, her bellyswollen with their child—one of the first to be born in the new time of peace. In the vision—as here, now, in truth—her eyes shone at him with the light of love.
He saw the faces of his friends, living and dead. He saw himself, just another dome, before the wheel caught them all in its path. He saw Shadow, and Ace, his two best friends, fallen along the long road of war.
Then the voice that always led him echoed familiar words in his mind: “This is the politics of rebellion: that each must find islands of light along their journey, stars to shine along one’s path when all else is darkness.”
The golden glow of vision filled the space behind his eyes a mere moment longer, and the words of the stone were clear, and they were true, he felt—he prayed.
NEVER AGAIN, read the words of the stone.
Never again.
AFTERWORD This novel has probably had one of the longest gestation periods known in literature—well, perhaps Stephen King’s The Dark Tower has it beat; I don’t know. What I know is this: I began it in the bedroom of my parents’ house in Knoxville, Tennessee, in early 1989, when I was still in high school, and I finished it, in longhand draft form, in Oxford, Georgia, in the fall of that same year, when I was a student at Oxford College of Emory University. I carried it around, off and on, for the next decade or so, in a blue, three-ring notebook that many people who knew me then will remember well. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that Ifinallysat down and typed the whole thing up, revising some bits, but largely keeping it as tonally intact as possible. I still didn’t attempt to publish it; I was in graduate school at the time, and more involved with other things.
In 2001, when the events of September 11thhappened, I sat down and looked at Eternity again, notinghow in some ways the images of falling towers in the end of the novel were strangelyprescient. In revisingthis book again in 2013, prior to its first publication, I never thought once about changing the ending. The novel was written well before those tragic events, and Eternity is both a warning and a prayer against the kind of prejudice, fanaticism and ignorance that can cause such things. If anything, Eternity offers a call to understanding; a call to freedom for everyone, regardless of faith, creed, gender, color or age.
The people in this novel, although theydon’t exist in the real world, have existed in my mind for many years, and never left. Eternity is, in many ways, the me I was when I was seventeen and eighteen years old. I hope, as I’ve grown older, I’ve remained true to the best parts of him. Many of my friends of that time are present in these pages: without John Francis, Greg Efurd, and John Wooldridge—my compatriots of my high school years and later—this novel would simply not exist. Thanks, gentlemen, you helped the Forgotten City come alive and stay that way.
To Rob Brown, my best friend from my Oxford College and Emory University years—thanks, man, for all the music, all those many midnights of Rocky Horror, and your continued friendship to this day. Thanks also for looking over the early edition of this book.
I want to say a special thanks to my editor on this new printing, Stacey Haggard Brewer, for helping this version of the novel be the definitive one.
There are other friends and beloved ones whom I have not mentioned by name here—but your presence in my life now is no less important for not having been a part of the past in which this book first came to be.
This book’s literary inspirations—Stephen King, Samuel L. Delany, William Gibson, and Ray Bradbury. Bless you all. Musical inspirations: The Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath (with Ronnie James Dio), KISS, The Who, and W.A.S.P. Last, but most important, my parents: you have always believed. You are the reason Eternity goes back to the City he risks so much to leave, for I would do the same. I love you.
For all of those who’ve read this—thank you. There will be a second tale in the Memory’s Children series, called Islands of Light, before too long. Along with Eternity, Angel, Brain and others, I wait for you on the edge of that new horizon.— Clay Gilbert, Knoxville, Tennessee, 2017.