by Nick Cole
Casper spotted an ancient scout vessel of pre-Republic make. An Ardent class from the old scout service. Diamond shaped and turned rusty with age, she lay along the beach with her hatches popped.
Those ships were in service nine hundred years ago, he remembered in amazement.
And…
Others came looking too.
And…
Where are they?
Reina?
He followed the trail down along the grassy, tropical flower–laden slopes above the temple. In time he picked up a small road that wound down through the outer districts, passing forlorn stone buildings, all of them adorned with Medusa-like faces carved in stone, tongues lolling, eyes wide with some kind of communicated knowing. The buildings seemed more ancient than anything he’d ever known. As he passed by one such structure, with a tall roof like the hull of a boat, he decided to ascend a short flight of low crumbling steps in order to peer into the darkness within.
The building was empty.
And still.
Outside, he’d heard the slough and response of the distant surf down along the outer coastal walls. But here, within the shadowy building, he heard nothing.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he spotted a round hole in the floor. The absence of light that came from it was deeper than the gloom of the empty chamber. Cautiously, hearing only the sound of his beaten boots against ancient flagstones, he approached. The hole was a pit, and there was no bottom to it—not that he could see. He kicked a small pebble over the lip, and heard nothing. No reply from the unseen bottom. And that, too, disturbed him, just as the knowledge that Urmo was… something more than he’d guessed. Something like the Dark Wanderer. Except—in some way he knew this, without knowing why—maybe even something worse.
He left the empty ancient stone building, and felt glad to be back out in the high tropical sunshine. Smelling the distant and somehow melancholy flowers of the hills that surrounded this place, and the closer scent of the vines that clutched at every structure.
It took him hours to make it down into the bowl of the temple complex. He watched the ominous tower at its center, squat and ever rising, as he threaded the ruined districts and found gaps in the cyclopean stone walls that guarded the inner rings. At times he thought this place might once have been inhabited by giants. At other times, doors and openings seemed normal-sized, or even too small.
In the afternoon the red star began to sink into the ocean, turning the beached whale skeletons of the alien extra-galactic starships into dark and shadowy silhouettes, like the skeletons of damned men hung at the crossroads for crimes they never should have committed. Night fell, and both moons rose over the silent temple city where no one seemed to live anymore. He gazed up at them as he passed down a wide street lined with monolithic open porticoes that led into massive edifices. These structures reminded him of the most august of government buildings the hubris of the House of Reason had ever dared to construct in their own honor. Or perhaps temples to forgotten dark gods that were really demons.
At the end of what must have once been a triumphal way lay the final high wall that guarded the innermost ring. Beyond it rose the massive tower like some fat idol watching over the silent districts of this ancient and lost place. He knew he would go there. Knew he must. Knew that when he did he would find the tower was nothing more than high walls. That within its circumference he would find something terrible and open to the stars. Like something he’d read about in some lost fantasy epic from long ago. A place where mortals angered the Immortal with obscene rites meant to make them gods among men.
Turn back, tried some quiet and fading voice for almost the last time.
“I’ve come too far,” he whispered to the starless night as he gathered grass and dead wood that had clustered against once of the decrepit old buildings. Probably blown here by eons of typhoons that crossed this planet, much like the tiny planet had been blown here, out beyond the galaxy, circling a dying red star.
I’ve come to far too turn back, he told the night as a wind came up from off the ocean, bringing with it the smell of dead starships long overdue from the dark.
At midnight he saw the Master. He was as surprised as he ever could have been. The Master came close to the small and pathetic fire shifting in the night winds off the ocean. The Master was holding his own guttering torch, and within his mind Casper heard the final offer. The final call.
The summons to seek power.
I thought it was the end, he thought before he surrendered. But it’s just the beginning. Just as it was always meant to be.
Casper rose. In his left hand was the head of THK-133. Beaten, battered, somehow perpetually smiling in its machine way. He could hear its droll yet taunting butler’s commentary. Still, even, inside his mind. Had the bot been destroyed in the crash? Had he carried it all this way because he’d lost his mind and needed something to talk to?
He set the head of the machine down next to the fire. How much was real? he wondered. How much had actually happened?
And…
What happened that I’ll never know? Never remember…?
He smiled wanly at the processing unit of the bot, the head of his only friend, and thought, Let some other stranger find it and wonder who he was. Maybe it will be the final straw, in its own enigmatic way, that turns them back from what I’m about to do.
But then he thought of his own wrecked ship out in the jungles. And all the ruined ships along the coast beyond the walls that guarded this place. How could you turn back, he thought, when you’d been headed here all along?
The Master led him beyond the last wall, and into the tower of the temple.
The Last Lesson Is the Lesson of Becoming the Thing You Fear
Part One
The man who was once Casper came too late to save his parents from the past. The old military transport had broken down over Texas, and they’d had to make an emergency landing on the freeway alongside a UN refugee camp. Three days later the military supply train headed for the LA Reclamation Zone had lumbered into Union Station beneath the crumbling ruins of downtown.
He was away from the platform at almost a dead run, shaking off the familiar smell of burnt smoke and overwhelming dust that had been his childhood. Because, after all, he was actually back in his childhood. Two blocks from the station he flung himself into an abandoned building, gutted and looted. He shrugged out of the UN uniform he’d been using as a cover to travel with. He’d acquired other clothes. Rougher clothes. He was going out beyond the downtown perimeter, into the farming districts of Midtown and Beverly Hills and the West Side. Familiar names he’d made himself forget nearly two thousand years ago.
As he pulled on the faded jeans and laced up the combat boots he’d stolen from within the refugee camp, he felt giddy. All the old names. Midtown. Beverly Hills… the West Side. All places from his childhood. He’d played in those places.
He pushed away the date.
The date said he was late. But that had been two thousand years ago, and he’d been a child. Maybe he’d had it wrong. So he strapped on the pistol belt and the 1911 he’d taken, though he asked himself… did he need such weapons now?
He’d learned so much in the temple.
A temple he’d pursued across almost his entire lifetime. Which was the length of many lifetimes. But the weapon comforted him on some level. He’d always worn a sidearm. A blaster. As the captain of a UN assault frigate. As a legionnaire. Even as an admiral in the Republic Navy. And all the other many things he’d ever been. He’d always had a weapon.
He pulled on the faded green trench coat. It was spring. And he remembered spring in Los Angeles being cool. Biting winds and sudden rainstorms that swept across the dust-covered ruins of an ancient city that probably never recovered from the death of civilization.
Had it?
There were things about
Earth that he’d forgotten and would never remember. One thing especially. But that wasn’t important.
And then he ran. Ran for all he was worth. Getting through the flimsy barriers that protected downtown and out into the wild and deserted streets north of the reclamation zone. It wasn’t far to La Brea Boulevard. To his family’s farm. To where it had happened.
Later, when he found their fresh graves, he would tell himself, yell at himself really, that he should have asked someone in downtown. They would have known. Known that raiders had come in and killed a few settlers in the days and weeks before. That was always the big news back then.
Which ones?
The Sullivans and a few other families, they would say. Would have said. He couldn’t remember those other names now, though he knew them then. He did remember a blond-haired little girl who’d been his friend. Her family had lived in movie theater a few blocks away.
It had happened three days ago. His parents had been murdered three days before he arrived at what remained of the farm.
Their bodies were buried in the dead landscaping of a burned-out gas station a block away from the house. Their house. The house he’d grown up in two thousand years ago. The markers he’d made them were still there, though the other families had helped bury them. All of them coming from their own reclamation farms in the blocks they’d been allocated.
Someone had even come by and shot the marker that lay over his father. Blowing his first name away and making a new word out of what was left of “Sullivan, Justin.” Sheriff of La Brea. Some old score finally settled in the bare days after the funeral he could only just remember.
And this was a strange thought he had while standing over their graves. He knew where he was. He being the child who’d been salvage-wagoned off into the reclamation zone, to the orphanage there. And he being the very long-lived man, here and standing over their graves.
Had he perhaps passed himself, his now-self, as a child, back in the zone? Had child-he seen some man running like the devil was at his heels? Racing to beat a clock that had been struck long ago?
“It’s all… some cruel joke,” he muttered in the afternoon light of the quiet street.
The temple was ever that way. It was full of cruel jokes that somehow taught you a lesson you needed. If you survived.
And he knew that the temple could violate the laws of time and space to teach such lessons. That there were ways to use it to do such things as travel to places “other.” To give you the feeling that in other realties they, his parents, had not died. That they’d been there at his graduation from NASA. Giving him an Omega Seamaster watch as a present, when the real gift had been the pride in their eyes and voices. They were alive somewhere, just not this reality.
The temple was cruel in its lessons that way. As though everything in the universe was connected to the temple via some insane hyperloop that never really quite took you where you wanted to go, but instead dropped you off in some nightmare station along the line that only served to remind you that you’d never really make it back. And that the hour was getting late indeed.
It was a cruel joke that had sent him here, all the way here, all the way back in time, only to arrive just a little too late to do anything about what had…
… what had made him become…
… who he would become.
The child he was, from that moment, that very moment when he heard the distant gunfire back at the farm, that child who came running, had always been afraid, ever since that moment. That moment when he’d known, by the echo of the distant and sudden reports, that everything had changed forever. But instead of surrendering to the fear, or running away from it, he’d fought it. That child had fought… even though he’d run away. Even though he’d always and ever been afraid, he had fought anything that was like the looters who’d slain his parents.
He’d fought as if trying to make right what he’d been unable to as a child. He’d fought death on alien worlds and collapsing starships. Fought tyrants that wanted to turn the galaxy and its citizens into playthings for their own personal amusement and pleasure. Fought monsters who just wanted to watch it all burn down. He’d fought everyone—instead of fighting the monsters who’d started it all. The monsters he would always be afraid of in the night when he felt like he was smothering.
Gothhhhhs.
He’d always hoped the fighting of other monsters would banish the fear of the first monsters who had taken everything away. Destroyed everything that had been built. Murdered the child he’d once been without ever touching him.
But it never did. They were always back there, in the shadow forests of his memory.
And as if on cue, his blood froze at the sudden eruption of sound he heard out across the dead city. Sound traveled for miles in this city that had been blow to smithereens by massive weapons. The sound was distant, and building up into a full-throated roar—like the roar of monsters he’d one day stand before in high and distant valleys. Or the roar he’d one day hear across dark jungles as he ran for his life in the moonlight.
It was the sound of a motorcycle winding up along some distant road. Speeding off into the night. It was the sound he heard when he found his dying mother. His father’s body out in the yard.
Goths.
The word was like ice in his veins. And even though he was two thousand years old, it made him feel small and frightened once again. Powerless as he stood over his mother, dying inside the house. His father already dead.
It froze him because he’d heard that sound, the sound of their motorcycles fading into the distance, when he’d reached their dead bodies.
As if they’d only just left.
You’ve always been afraid of monsters because you’ve always been afraid of them.
The man who was once Casper had once more come too late to save his parents from the past.
Casper.
He hadn’t heard his own name in years. Centuries. In the temple he was merely the student. And there was only the Master. And the dead who had tried and failed to learn the ways of what was being taught.
And before the temple… he was many men. With many names.
Casper.
Who was that anymore?
The frightened child of the dead in the graves before him? But he’d become so much more than that. Not just in his two thousand years before he left the galaxy, but in the unmeasurable time within the temple. Days? Years? Decades? In the temple, time has no meaning, and that’s why the story can be told all at once and alongside all the other parts that need to be explained.
He had no idea. And long ago he’d stopped thinking of himself as Casper Sullivan or any of the many other aliases he’d once used to try and save the Republic from itself. By any means save one.
That had been the agreement. Between Rechs, Reina, and Casper. They would never seek the power they’d seen inside the Quantum Palace. They, the only three survivors of the horrors on the ghost ship Moirai.
And the girl.
The girl, the lone surviving medic from among the Martian light infantry who had set out to rescue Reina from inside the Moirai. She had survived, too.
Take my hand, Corporal Maydoon! I’ll save you.
They, the triumvirate of Rechs, Reina, and Casper, had kept an eye on her, because that was what they’d sworn to do. To watch and wait.
For whom? And what?
For the Dark Wanderer.
That was one answer.
And for someone to try and become him.
That was the other.
They would watch for anyone who would ever try to use that terrible power they’d witnessed. Because as Reina said… with just a thought, one could rewrite the rules of the universe. Among other things. Theoretically. Imagine the terrible possibilities the mind of a psychopath might dream up…
In time the girl, who was once the medic e
veryone called Bones, died an old woman. She hadn’t been a slave on the Obsidia, and so she had lived a normal life, of normal length, with a husband and children, and good health, and, hopefully, her share of happiness. She died peacefully at a good old age. Long ago. And they, the triumvirate, committed themselves to their watch once more.
They would watch the entire galaxy. Reina would watch the sciences; she would stop any development in a direction that might lead toward the paths the Savages had been wandering down. Rechs would watch the power struggles; he would see who might be putting themselves in front of the others a little too effortlessly. And then they would be smitten. Hence the Legion.
And Casper… Casper would beat, cajole, and manipulate from behind the scenes. In a galaxy full of aliens, connected by the gossamer of hyperspace, he would form a government that might work together to keep an eye out for the Dark Wanderer. That might respond when the time came.
But the Savages, who even then were beginning to come into communication with one another, were taking worlds of their own in which to grow their nightmare societies. The galaxy-wide conflict that would be known as the Savage Wars was coming. And that too was the reason for the Legion. And the Republic and its mighty navy.
Standing over the graves of his parents, he thought: You did all that because of fear.
Fear that the Savages, the barbarians, the Dark Wanderers of the universe would come in from the fringes of reality… like some no-name biker gang that called itself the Goths. Come in and ruin the fragile jewel of your civilization. Your family. Your galaxy.
It is them you’ve always been afraid of. And it was easier to sail off into the dark cosmos and fight Savages, monsters, and even the Dark Wanderer… than to confront the real monsters who made you who you are. Set you on this course. Of them you will always be afraid. Until one day you aren’t.