“Pangea,” Arrosha announced. “What you’re looking at is the world as it once was, the world as I created it.”
We zoomed in until before us was a lovely beach by a peaceful ocean, boarded by exotic tropical flora. I felt the warm sea breeze blowing through my hair.
“Ah,” she said, relief in her voice. “It feels so good to be back home. This is my personal garden.”
As we hovered silently above the peaceful scene for what seemed like a long time, I studied her. In this relatively peaceful moment, I had to admit that she was strikingly beautiful. Her alabaster skin was radiant. Her features and bone structure were perfect, set off by high arched black eyebrows, long black eyelashes, and wavy ebony hair that grew past her waist and flowed softly in the breeze. Everything about her, her face, her figure, her movements, was perfect. But only her housing was perfect, wasn’t it? The evil inside of her had kept me from noticing before how exceptionally beautiful she was on the outside. Why, I wondered, would such a perfect exterior hold such a corrupt interior, such a black mind and heart? Had she always been evil, I wondered. Had she always been mad?
Suddenly, she snapped out of her dreaminess and said, excitedly and happily, “The children! But you haven’t seen my children! They were my most wonderful creation ever!”
She waved her hand again and suddenly we seemed to fast forward in time as paved roads appeared and beautiful buildings of crystalline, gold and marble sprang up in time-lapse fashion.
“We won’t be able to hear any sound,” she narrated, as if it were very important that I understand. “This is just a projection. My children won’t be able to see or hear us at all. We can’t interact.”
People, transparent at first, then gradually growing solid, appeared, all quite tall and very aristocratic looking. Intelligent in appearance, they were perfectly beautiful and stately, remarkably elegant with perfect posture and extremely graceful movements. They reminded me of her followers at her plantation home except, if it were at all possible, these people were even more beautiful, more perfect.
“Is this…?” I began to ask.
“Yes, this is Illeaocea,” she answered before I could finish, pride in her voice. “Actually, this section is Illeaote, the capital city, the crown jewel in my crown jewel. This was my heaven on earth, my home on your planet.”
“It was so beautiful.” I said, truly impressed.
Arrosha sighed deeply. “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”
She turned to me with tears in her eyes. I didn’t think it was possible that a monster such as she, capable of such abominable acts, could feel tender human emotion.
“Ben told you what happened here, did he not?” she asked me, as if it were important to her that I knew.
“Yes, he did, during his tour at the mansion. At least he told me all he knew.”
“You know enough of the story, then. My beautiful, sweet, perfect children. So kind, so smart. This was their world. Let me show you now so you can see for yourself.”
The camera lens of the panorama around me zoomed into the city, allowing me a glimpse into the lives of these people.
“The humans that called Illeaocea their home were so very beautiful,” she continued, silent tears streaming down her face. “They possessed an intelligence that has never been matched to this day. They were the loveliest, kindest and most civilized of all creatures. Their voices were lyrical, their manner, polite, their movements, graceful. You’ve marveled yourself at the beauty of the group that lived once at my mansion. Until they betrayed me, they were my hand-picked chosen. If you’ve seen them, you’ve seen the beauty of the inhabitants of Illeaocea. I have taken ordinary mortals and transformed them into the image of my poor lost ones, because, to this day I miss my darling Illeaoceans, I miss looking upon their sweet faces. But my followers could never be anything more than living photographs of my poor, dead children.”
As Arrosha became quiet, different scenes of Illeaocean life played out around us. Their private moments at home and with family, their leisure activities, of which there seemed to be many, their political and business lives, which seemed to be lively, were all included in the panorama. Then Arrosha showed me their scientists and I was able to see how remarkably advanced these people were. Their technologies, more organic than our own, made those of the early twenty-first century seem stone-aged by comparison. I could only look and marvel, thinking in my own backward way just how much like magic their technologies seemed to me. I suspected that even the top minds in modern science would be humbled in viewing their accomplishments.
A scene came before me that featured chambers like the one Edmond had revealed to me as his prison.
“What’s that?” I asked her, cautious as I went for confirmation, lest I set her off again.
“Those are the stasis chambers,” she answered. “Stasis fields were employed in Illeaocea for only the most brilliant and accomplished citizens. This is how the momentum of their knowledge was never lost. They allowed for a virtual immortality of sorts. Transformation was usually the first line of medicine for either injury or disease, but eventually, resistance to it built up, rendering it useless.”
At this point, I remembered what Max had told me, that Arrosha never got tired of changing his looks, and I wondered why his resistance to transformation had never built up.
“When someone of import was close to death and everything else was exhausted,” she continued, “they were placed into a stasis chamber until their mindless clone was ready to receive their brain patterns. Personality and the rest of their incorporeal selves would be downloaded into it. As the chambers could be used indefinitely, some, tired of living in the world of the flesh, chose to remain comfortably resting in their chambers for thousands of years, allowing their brains and their knowledge to be accessed via computer interface.
“The stasis field was also considered an emergency device, and the rich and powerful never traveled without them. In case there was ever a medical emergency on the road, these devices would create individual stasis chambers that would allow them to go into a state of what you might call suspended animation until they could receive medical attention.”
We continued to watch the scenes that played out before us. Even though the points of view kept shifting from close up to far away and back again, it all seemed so real, so three-dimensional. It was not like watching a movie at all, rather it was as if what she was showing me was real and immediate, happening in the here and now.
“My sweet, brilliant children,” she sighed. “They were so intelligent, so creative, so inventive. They were my best creations ever. After they were destroyed by those horrible, inferior, jealous Malitiuans, I was never the same again. I never got over their loss. I never created anything again. I’ve tinkered around with things a bit, yes, but true creation, no. It was just too painful.”
The scene before me shifted to a city that was dark and bleak, blanketed with a thick sense of foreboding, a view reminiscent of what the Communist empire might have looked like had it been designed by a German expressionist. Arrosha was right to say that these people were very different indeed from her beloved Illeaoceans.
“The Malitiuans were horrible!” she ranted. “Inferior in every conceivable way. They may have been technological savants, but they were stupid and crude and thick in every way otherwise. They were worse than most of the peoples that sprang up as descendants from the survivors of the Pangaean holocaust. I hated them! I had nothing but contempt for them. They were ugly and they smelled bad. They even tasted bad! They were such a brutish, paranoid people, always tinkering with stronger and stronger weapons to use against my children should the need arise. As if it ever would. My children were far too advanced to make war upon them. They were civilized and peace loving. The Malitiuans were a hateful people and they destroyed my beloved children!”
Arrosha’s mood became mournful. “We are now standing in the temple that my poor children built for me before their destruction,” she said, great
sadness in her voice. “This is how much they loved me.”
When I looked at her, she looked far more tired than she had earlier. Her fair skin had gone pale and dark shadows circled her eyes. Had I not known what she was, I would have thought she was getting ill. I wondered if it was her proximity to the necklace with its amulet which was taking so much out of her.
“I know that Ben told you of their fate earlier,” she said, tears still in her eyes. “But I think it better that you see it for yourself. Then only can you grasp its true horror.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Arrosha’s commentary stopped as, all about us now, the ultimate fate of Illeaocea began to play itself out. There had been no sound to anything that Arrosha had shown me and this was no exception, but I didn’t need sound and soon became grateful that element was missing. Normal, everyday life as usual changed to panic as the earthquakes hit. In every direction I turned, the full force of the tragedy began. The realism of the projection was now disturbing and truly frightening. Buildings toppled, the people within them trapped and crushed. The ground fragmented, vast rifts opening which swallowed whole neighborhoods in an instant. Lava spewed from the ground as volcanoes spontaneously rose from the earth, expelling boulders and more molten lava, engulfing masses of people running in futility to escape, only to be overtaken and destroyed. Those undertaking to leave by sea fared no better as massive amounts of lava poured into the ocean, making it boil furiously. The entire country was lost, as under red skies filled with black smoke, huge chunks of land continued to fall into the sea until the entire country was gone, not even the land upon which it once stood remaining. The scene around us then panned out quickly until we were looking at the Earth as from a satellite. We saw fissures running through the gigantic Pangaean continent, as if they were cracks in a glass window on a hot summer day spreading at lightning speed; from this altitude, the cracks seemed to be unzipping the continent in many different directions. As the continent was ripped into pieces, we saw huge chunks of land, some larger than Australia, fall off into the sea as the continent itself was torn asunder and began to drift apart, rapidly at first and finally slowing to a crawl. Some of the pieces began to take on recognizable shapes, especially those that would later become Africa and the Americas.
“My world quite literally broke apart. There was no one, nothing left to be saved, so I turned my airship around to rejoin my envoy, only to find that they too had been wiped out while I was gone. The massive earthquake that was now Pangaea had caused an upheaval across the entire continent, sending massive showers of boulders raining down upon my convoy while I was checking on Illeaocea.
“I needed to travel further, to find other survivors in countries that had large Illeaocean populations, but all luck ran out as a boulder landed on my ship, rendering it too damaged to go any farther. I took my personal portable equipment plus what little from the convoy that remained intact and went as far away from the major fissures as possible. I had lost everyone and everything that I ever loved, I had lost what had become my home. I was devastated and did not want to go on living, but, being immortal, I had no choice.
“The worst of the destruction was over in this area, so I materialized the sole stasis chamber with which I was equipped, crawled inside, activated it and its cloaking device. It was in there that I went to sleep for a long, long time. I wish I could have slept forever. While I slept, my stasis chamber later told me, a nuclear winter ensued, far sooner and lasting far longer than anyone could ever have imagined. Any meager, surviving remnants of these once magnificent civilizations were then plunged into darkness, into savagery, into a black age such as the world had never known before and has never known since. While the world struggled to survive, while entire races of people died, while entire species of life went extinct, I slept in stasis. There was absolutely no reason for me to stay awake.
“How long I slept, I knew not. It could have been a few thousand years for all I knew or even a few million. The chamber could easily have told me, but I never wanted to know. Eventually, after my long sleep, I decided to awaken, to see what had become of the world, to see if I was alone in my survival. Thank goodness, I was not. How anything besides myself could have survived was a complete mystery to me, but when I awakened, some semblance of life had returned to the planet. So many species were wiped out completely. But in the areas farthest from ground zero, some life had survived, but only the very strongest, the smartest, and arguably, the luckiest.
“In this new, horribly brutal existence, everything was profoundly altered, even the weather patterns.” She shook her head sadly and said, “It’s all so sad. While I searched all over, I could find no people that were even remotely familiar to me. Nothing existed of those once-noble races and their long, rich and thriving cultures. My search, like my mourning, seemed to have no end.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The view around us began to blur out of focus and we were surrounded by a gray mist. Arrosha lowered herself until she was at ground level again. The mist gradually departed and we were in the room with no walls again, the sunset shining in once more, as if no time whatsoever had passed since I first arrived here.
“Now that you’ve seen my story for yourself, you can understand that I am, indeed, the one, true Goddess.”
Needless to say, despite her elaborate show-and-tell, my opinion of her had not changed.
“If you’re a goddess,” I questioned her, curious, hoping she would not fly into another rage, “Why is it that I’ve never heard of you before?”
“Ah, but you have heard of me before. I’ve traveled through this world under many different names.”
“Such as?” I asked in a tone that I hoped would not incur her wrath.
“Ishtar, Isis, Hathor, to name just a few. My followers at the mansion know me as Arrosha, my real name. I never before wanted to give any single civilization the knowledge of my real name, but once I get that amulet you wear, I will rule this mass-media world with my rightful name to honor my dear, long-gone Illeaocea. I want the entire world to know they once existed.”
“If you are a goddess, why would you ever step down from that position?” I asked her. Her thought patterns certainly weren’t very goddess-like.
“My beloved Illeaoceans were faithful and true, the only people perfect enough for me to make a home amongst. But the people of this new world, so brutish, less civilized even than the apes, kept breaking my heart. No matter how many times I tried, it was always the same story. Everything would be fine for awhile, but within only a few of their generations, they lost all interest in being faithful to me and began instead to lust after other gods, gods of their own invention, deaf, dumb and blind gods that they carved with their own hands. Worse than that, they began to think that blood and burnt flesh would make me happy instead of sacrifices of fresh life-force. This I found to be an abomination, so I turned my back on them and left them to their own devices and to their home-made false gods and goddesses of stone, clay and wood. With no one to look after them, their entire societies eventually fell.
“Then, as time progressed, this world dealt my heart a death-blow, as it began to gravitate more and more toward a handful of major religions, so I completely gave up on the human race for the time being and was happy to slip into the relatively anonymous and carefree life of an aristocrat. It was a wonderful lifestyle, no worries, no real responsibilities. It was the best of all worlds at that time, for while no demands were made upon me, nothing was denied me, either. I fed off my enemies and rivals when necessary, but my main sustenance was from the massive underclass smorgasbord, from which I fed freely as I liked. Back then, you see, if a person was not nobility, he was considered inherently unimportant and therefore, immanently expendable. No one cared if peasants lived or died. They were merely valuable as a mass to do the work necessary to support our lavish lifestyles. My favorite meals were always farm boys, fresh from the country, so strong, so succulent, so satisfying. For centuries, I lived this
way, traveling from kingdom to kingdom. Lavish living for the aristocracy was the order of the day.
“Life, while not ideal without my beloved Illeaoceans, was at least bearable now. At least it was until the early 1800’s, when I decided to take a quick trip to the New World because I was bored and needed something different to do. I’ve regretted that decision ever since, because, just as I was preparing to leave and return to Europe after a three-decade stay in New Orleans, that annoying little man Edmond stepped into my life.
“I was introduced to him at a party. At first I liked Edmond, so much so that I wanted him to replace my lover at the time, Jean, and take him back to Europe with me when I left. By our second meeting, however, he had changed so much that I could not stand to be close to him.”
“Don’t you mean you couldn’t stand close to him?”
“If you must split hairs, yes, I suppose that would be more accurate. He had the second amulet, the headpiece to his cane, the one he showed you before you ever came to New Orleans.
“Because of this new development, I was forced to give up all hope of taking him on as a lover. As if that weren’t bad enough, he took to stalking me. Since I couldn’t kill him, much as I would have liked, I imprisoned him instead.
“So in all of these years since, he’s had me so busy looking over my shoulder, dealing with his ‘champions’, as he likes to call them, who are all out to kill me, instead of being able to live my life freely! I’ve had to baby-sit him instead of being able to attend the modern world’s best parties. Paris in the 1890’s, Berlin in the 1920’s, San Francisco in the 1960’s, I’ve missed them all! Worst of all, I, who have been Goddess to entire civilizations, who have consorted with, lain with and fed off Caesars, kings and czars, have been demoted to a common estate agent! Do you have any idea what that feels like? Of course not, how could you? How could any puny mortal?
The Nightmare Game Page 61