The blue woman said it was time for them to go.
“Go where?” Pig asked. Bark could have told him not to bother.
“Just go, that’s all,” said the blue woman. She leaned closer. “I have to admit, Pig, that I misled you. I’m not really a mutant. Not in the way you might expect, anyway.”
“I thought as much,” Pig replied, even though he hadn’t.
“I’ll be seeing you again. Stick with those two…” she nodded towards Bark and Reina. “They’ll be needing you.” She went and stood beside the black stranger.
“You’ll understand one day.”
Bark looked around. What was supposed to happen now? There was no ship; not even a device of any kind. He looked into the sky above them. Nothing.
He looked back to see the two figures slowly turning transparent. After a few seconds, they became ghosts, growing fainter and fainter, until finally they were gone altogether.
No one said anything for a few seconds.
“Well, fuck me,” said Tommy.
“You get used to it,” said Reina. “I have no fucking idea.”
* * *
Sinus Roris, the Moon
OUT NEAR THE MOON, the black ship went into an orbit that would take it over the Sinus Roris area.
An officer had taken Thead and Alexis to the viewing area, a bubble that hung from the underside of the ship like the cabin area of a zeppelin. The moon’s surface slid silently beneath them.
They saw markings that stood out among the natural chaos of rocks and craters. They had been partially covered by drifts of sand and dust over eons of time, but were still visible. There were small grid patterns, larger rectangular objects, and other things that looked like designs carved into the surface.
Alexis felt like a fish out of water. She was used to being in charge, but here she had nothing to do except be a passenger. She asked the officer whether the objects on the ground had anything to do with their destination. The officer laughed and said no, those were ruins that had been there for thousands of years. No one knew exactly how old they were, or who or what was responsible for them. As for their destination, they would be seeing that soon.
When they did, they knew why he had laughed at her question.
The ship came flying in low towards the bottom of a large crater. In the cliff face ahead of them was a huge set of doors, four of them, each framed by lights that blinked in slow steady rhythms. Embossed in shining metal in the center of each door was a gigantic swastika.
The base had been there for more than sixty years, the officer explained. Our little secret, he said.
Not so little, Alexis said, admiringly.
One of the doors opened, spilling yellow light across the landscape in front of it.
“Home,” the officer said, and went to prepare for the landing.
Thead and Alexis looked at each other solemnly without saying anything. After a few seconds Thead arched an eyebrow. A thin smile curved his lips.
Alexis smirked and nodded slowly. She’d had stranger bedfellows, after all.
They contemplated the entrance to the base as the ship drifted towards it.
Home? Hardly, thought Thead. A place to gather their strength, that was all. And then out. There must surely be some wonderful prizes hidden among the stars in this strange, weird part of the universe...
* * *
Epilogue
THINGS WOULD BE DIFFERENT NOW.
The water in the streams and rivers flowed with a new, vibrant energy, and the plants and trees were growing as they never had before. The bird song had a new brilliance. Even the air seemed to hum with vitality.
The only machines on the planet that were working were the few that had been adapted to the Stream. It would take time to adapt more, and many conversions would never happen. A lot of the old ways suddenly seemed silly, pointless, or both. When life settled down again, it would have little resemblance to the old ways.
Above the new world, the sky shone with its new eternal brilliance, with no night waiting in the wings to claim the light. But the photon belt had left more than just a never-ending day. Inside the body of every living creature, the DNA was rearranging itself, shaping itself to the new frequencies. In time, people would begin thinking differently. In time, there would be new races.
“So, we’ll build a new ship?” Reina asked several days later, knowing that their lives would change forever if they went ahead with it. Bark is looking different today, she thought. It must be the light.
“Yes,” said Bark, who had been thinking about the future as well. “We’ll build ourselves a ship. And then I’ll show you the stars as they should be seen.”
“Cool,” said Reina, noticing for the first time that her own skin had a new tint to it. “Yeah, awesome.”
THE END
* * *
Well, that’s it. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ve been asked whether there’s likely to be a sequel, and the answer is no. Just like relationships, there are times with stories when you just need to “move on”, and this, dear reader, is one of those times.
If you thought The Day of the Nefilim was OK, feel free to slip me an email ([email protected]) and tell me so. And keep an eye on osiran.com, for any new writing, etc etc etc...
-- David L. Major
by the same author...
The Secret Weapon - Poems and Short Stories
If steampunk or mythpunk are your thing, there will be something in this collection of eight short stories and 21 poems for you. The story Air for Fire is going to appear in the issue #8 of Steampunk Magazine.
CONTENTS
Travel to Allahabad
All 1,000 Songs
The Unspeakable Kangaroo
Air for Fire
Machinist Tippit
The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
One Falcon Wing
Twelve boats
The Flaneurism
The Party
The Great Roc
The Scythian Horse Archer
The Fundamental Question
The Monumental Lie
Berthezene
Gorgon
Static
Taniwha
8:55
Dionysus in Two Acts
Finding the Weight of the Moon
7:49
A Fairy Tale from the Clock: the Princess Aslauga
This is Port Dog
Port Dog is Flooded
Wyfurge’s Letter
The Tower
The Secret Weapon
All that the Thunderer Wrung from Thee
**
For more information and links:
Plasticine.com - publisher's site
Osiran.com - author's site
The Unspeakable Kangaroo
... from The Secret Weapon
Among the rocks,
Helen sprang to her feet
and swiftly, lithely fled.
The sun was still high then;
it was a hard blue white,
it was cold, it burned the sky.
Ice burns like that, from the inside out;
He had said to her:
“Helen! Do you not wonder about the sun?
Yellow, was it not, once?”
Helen did not want to speak of this, and they fought.
“At least, Helen,” he said,
“spend the night in the car, don’t go far.
Spend the night listening to something
reassuring — Schubert,
or grounding, like Bach.
“Do not listen to Shostakovitch —
for Shostakovitch was not known for doing favours,
and he is not going to start with you.”
The night from which the kangaroo emerged was black.
It had settled hard, like black ice on a road.
The kangaroo was six feet or more tall,
if he existed at all;
as solid as one of those Egyptian statues he was,
the way
they seem to stand on the edge of everything;
in the silence he waited and did not move.
His eyes overflowed with darkness
and did not move;
Simon approached the kangaroo
where it stood and did not move;
he reached up and laid a hand upon its face.
You could ask a mountain to hear you;
or just as well this apparition / that if it were to move
would split the ground
in two without a sound
and of the witness leave no trace.
Something like Horus on a rooftop,
and he has bought infinity to the dawn,
and you are something to do with Seth, perhaps,
some lackey of mortality, the end of it all…
flee the light, for Horus is on the rooftop —
Helen arrived at dawn with the sun on her back,
back at the point from which she had fled;
music they did not discuss.
A veil had drawn behind her;
she held a book,
and she had drawn pictures, of kangaroos,
in the spaces on the pages of this book
that he had never seen before;
(it was in fact the manual,
taken from the document pocket
of the Falcon’s farside door).
Now the circumference may be small enough,
but the axle moves to a baritone,
and when the Falcon starts, its engine roars to life;
Horus leaves the roof,
and flies into the sunrise,
the golden spokes of which form chords, suspended,
that never will resolve to a tonic or to proof;
and the Falcon no longer sits upon the roof
with its gaze upon the silence
in which the kangaroo does wait
with darkness in its eyes
and does not move.
The Tower
... from The Secret Weapon
I have been told that we have been building this tower for thousands of years.
I have no direct experience; no reason to believe this—nor to doubt it—but it is what I have heard, and I can see a little way into the waters that keep rising, lapping below our feet as we keep building, board after board, nail after nail.
In the depths, dissolving into the darkness that is the limit of our vision, below which there is only falling, the faint shapes of the bulwarks that my predecessors built in defiance of the water linger—but they failed; I can see also the remnants of the sealed chambers, broken, flooded and empty, the seals torn and perished. Nothing has worked; the waters still rise, taking everything out of reach; it all becomes illusion and memory.
The Enemy who lives in the water comes without warning; I think he never really departs, he just lurks out of sight, waiting. The Enemy is clever, I think; he changes his shape from one minute to the other, but his shadow is always the same.
We build upward—spar by spar, a piece of wall here, so that we know where one room stops and the next begins, a piece of ceiling there, which will become tomorrow’s floor; ever upward. Sometimes it is tiring, but sometimes, too, it is exhilarating; on those days we have so much hope, and it is good to build, and we are sure then that when everything is said and done, as one day it surely must be, the Tower, somehow, will love us for our work, or at least will approve of it, and our hope will be vindicated—and what is hope for, if not for vindication?
I hear them being taken, sometimes, the others, while they are working, in the next room, or a few rooms down a hallway, or across a square, or off a thoroughfare (for the Tower is very, very large…).
Sometimes, when the Enemy takes one of us, he is quiet about it; they do not struggle or shout; I suppose he must come looming up out of the Darkness before they can do anything—or perhaps before they even know he is there, or upon them; he must lay his grasp around their hearts, and flood through them, and there is no mercy; and they are gone without a sound, as if they were never awake.
But I do not really know; I have never seen it. I have only heard about it.
And then there are other times, when the Enemy comes roaring, a great noise like a wind that wants to tear everything apart, and throw us over, our work and all, down into the water together, and to circle above us, whipping waves into knives that rend us into small pieces that no longer know each other; at those times, there can be a great panic that spreads, and everything is so huge, and those who the Enemy has taken into his cold embrace; they cry, and I have heard them begging, but the Enemy is implacable, if he understands us at all.
Sometimes he throws them around like dolls, breaking them, sending them down to their destruction, where we cannot see.
But I do not really know; I have never seen it.
Sometimes, the Tower shakes, the Enemy is so strong.
But we keep building, although we never draw away from the water; it keeps rising with us, always just below our feet, rising as we build, but just beyond our reach; so that even if we lie down, in a place where we might be yet to place a floorboard, or where we might even have lifted one up; pulled the nails, and prised it away (although this is frowned upon, and is not regarded as contributing to the building of the Tower; so it is not often done, or at least admitted to) — though we might lie flat and extend our arms, straining as hard as we can, or relax them, until they are like the water itself, we cannot, ever, reach the water. No-one, to tell you the truth, even knows what it feels like; there are all sorts of stories about it.
Some days, it seems as though the water is calm, and that the Enemy is far away, and has even forgotten us, and then it is easy to forget what he can do, and our hope rises and rises, and the sky seems bright and clear, and we imagine our Tower reaching into the sky forever, full of hope and made of wonder and strength and caught breath, and on those days we are sure, and we forget the Enemy, and we pour ourselves into our work, and we build as though we have an endless stream of tomorrows before us…
Sometimes, there are those who just sit, staring down into the water, watching it rise, waiting for it to reach them, or for the Enemy to rise up and take them. (The water never reaches them; it is always the Enemy; he comes for everyone in the end, as far as I can see.)
But I keep building. I think: if I can get this ceiling finished, and those windows into the wall so I have a good view out over the water, and finish the stairs, it will be very comfortable, and I will be able to start building the next level up, and I might even gain on the water, and put some distance between myself and it… I have heard of it being done, but I have never seen it. I do not really know.
The Tower reaches far down into the darkness, but we feel that we know so much about it because of the stories that we tell each other—about its great victories and heartbreaking defeats, its trials and torments, its secret places and great halls, its passages and doorways through which beauty has paraded, and horror stalked, through which song and blood have flowed. So have I heard…
I have also heard it said, by a man named Aeschylus, that long ages ago, we knew, each one of us, when the Enemy would come for us. But we all stood waist deep in the water then, and we built nothing, and knew nothing of a life above the water.
But the knowledge of the time when the Enemy would come was taken from us, and in return, we were given hope—hope that the Enemy might forget us; hope that if we work and build hard enough, we might rise above the water, out of the Enemy’s reach, away from the deathly chill of his grasp—and so today, there is always hope.
The Enemy came for a friend yesterday; he was one of the quiet ones, he went beneath the water quickly; it is almost as if the Enemy wants to be merciful about it sometimes.
But I do not really know; I have never seen it.
And now, there is building to do. Because everywhere, there is water.
A Fairy Tale from the Clock: the Princess Aslauga
... from The Secret Wea
pon
There was once a girl — excuse me, a young woman, you decide — who on account of having no excuse at all for an episode of bad behaviour, bad language, and bad attitude, was sent to her room. Not straight to her room, which is to say, without dinner, because none of the behaviour, language, or attitude were irredeemably atrocious or outrageous — but the whole package, considered together, was of the type about which grown-ups eventually — and quite rightfully — come to the conclusion that they have had enough.
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