by Jacob Whaler
“Have you ever seen real power?”
“Where I just came from, the Alleho—” Matt stops himself before letting the word slip out. “What would you like me to call them?”
“They or them is fine.”
I saw what They do. Creating planets without number, stars, systems of galaxies. And life.” He stares into Jhata’s blue eyes. “That’s real power.”
“Wrong.” Jhata’s smooth lips curl on one side. “Sure, they’re great organizers, good at putting things together, efficient mechanics, you might say. They provide me with an unending stream of new worlds to conquer. They look powerful. But it’s all deception and lies.”
The sphere is now an even mixture of boiling fire and black emptiness. Heat is coming off its surface.
“Deception and lies?” Matt shakes his head. “I know what I saw. It was real.”
“They talk of love and unity. They say they have the perfect society. They create, and then give their creations complete freedom of choice. But it’s all lies. Don’t be seduced by it. You can’t exercise power in such a society. Here’s the truth, plain and simple. Power means being able to make everyone submit to your will. It’s control of others. You could never have real power in their twisted world.”
“I don’t understand.”
Jhata’s eyes drop to the sphere. “This is power.”
Matt steps back and shakes his head.
“What’s wrong?” she says. “Do you fear the truth?”
“No.”
“Then look and feel and know.” Jhata lets her head fall back onto her shoulders and stares up at the ceiling. “Put your hands on the sphere.”
Matt drops the palm of his left hand on the glass surface and stares into its depths. Holding the Stone in his sweaty right hand, he can’t keep his thoughts from drifting to Jessica. And then he remembers his dad and the old temple ruins back in Thailand. Ryzaard may have gone back. Leo will be the only one able to protect them.
“I need to go home now,” Matt says. “I’m not going to be a slave to you or the Lethonen.” he says.
“You can leave after you have chosen. Not before.”
“I’ve made my choice.”
“No you haven’t.”
A flash of light explodes inside the sphere.
Matt sees a young girl, perhaps eight years old, flying through a great city between glass skyscrapers in a vehicle that reminds him of an old Lamborghini Spyder. It has no wheels and floats high off the ground. She weaves in and out of other flying vehicles, laughing and screaming with youthful joy.
“My home planet,” Jhata says. “When I was young.”
A huge black disc hangs over the city, covering the sky, with a maze of intricate circular carvings cut into the surface of its underbelly. A mass of thick liquid, like crude oil, hangs down from the middle of the disc in the shape of a tear. People run in panic through the streets. When it’s a hundred meters off the ground, it explodes, turning into a ring of blue energy that levels the city.
“The Jerati came to destroy us and our civilization with their superior technology.”
Matt keeps staring into the sphere.
The girl lies in a pile of broken glass and metal, blood pouring from her nose and mouth. Swarms of robots with vaguely humanoid arms and legs roam the streets, shooting anything that moves with pulses of blue light. One of the monsters looms above her, focusing a lifeless eye down on her form. Her hand touches something hard behind her. Fingers wrap around it.
It’s a Stone.
“A gift from the gods? I’ll never know. But it was the moment that changed everything. I no longer had to live in fear.”
Blue pulses of energy shoot down from the robot. Her hands fly up to protect her face. A thin bubble of light forms around her body, and the pulses dissipate against it. Again and again, the robot rains down shots upon her head, but they can’t penetrate the protective layer.
The girl sits up, bringing the Stone in her hand close to her face. She casts a glance up at the robot. It stops and begins to back up. Then it turns and runs. She stretches out her arm and points the Stone at the fleeing machine. Green spheres explode from the point of the Stone and slam into the robot’s back. It becomes a burning fountain of molten metal.
“My first taste of power.”
The image changes. The young girl is now a teenager. She wears the uniform of a military officer and stands on the open deck of a starship, gazing down through a transparent hull on a planet floating in the void of space like a green jewel. A hundred identical ships hang in the blackness to the right and left.
“The home planet of the Jerati. They refused to surrender.”
The girl wears a slender gold chain around her waist that holds eight Stones. She slips one off, raises it in her hand, and points it down at the planet. A single purple sphere erupts from the Stone, flattens into a disc as large as the starship and shoots down upon the planet.
There are no explosions or fire. No bursts of light. The planet simply disintegrates into a cloud of gray dust.
“The first of many conquests,” Jhata says.
“You destroyed their entire planet?”
“Yes, of course. With billions of them on it.”
“How could you—”
“Look,” Jhata says. “I’m a simple woman. Profoundly selfish. You might even say two dimensional. That’s how I got to where I am. I don’t hesitate to protect my own interests and destroy all others.”
The image blurs into another view of her wearing a kimono. Twenty Stones hang from the gold chain around her waist. She sits on a large jewel-encrusted throne. A row of men in crisp uniforms stand at attention on each side, their hands behind their backs.
She stands up from the throne and walks forward onto a platform, looking down through a transparent hull on innumerable stars spread out in spiral arms from a central core of light.
“A galaxy inhabited by a unique race of telepaths. A few hundred thousand planets of them.” Jhata stares at the image inside the sphere without the slightest hint of emotion on her face. “I tried to reason with them, but they failed to understand why they should worship me instead of continuing their pathetic pacifist existence.”
Matt can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because I want you to understand what you’re being offered. To feel it so you can choose wisely. Like me.”
Trying to pull his hand off the sphere, Matt discovers it’s stuck. The skin of his palm has bonded with the surface. Before he can object, his mind is pulled into the sphere. He is staring down at the galaxy through Jhata’s eyes.
He is Jhata.
No, please don’t do this, Matt thinks. To me or them.
There is no answer.
The string of Stones is around his waist. His hand reaches down and slips one out.
Why do you do this?
“Because I can,” Jhata says.
The Stone comes up in the open palm of his hand, glowing intense white. The other Stones burn like the surface of the sun on the gold chain.
Let me go, Matt thinks. Don’t make me do this.
“It has already been done.” Jhata’s voice echoes inside Matt’s mind. “You must feel the power. That is the only way for you to understand. Then you will choose.”
Still locked inside her body, Matt moves through the transparent hull into space and floats outside the ship. A thin blue skin clings to his body. His hand raises a Stone and points it down at the galaxy.
A single white speck the size of a grain of rice rises from its tip and hovers in front of his face.
“I discovered how to unlock the strong force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of atoms. No strong force, no atoms. Clever, don’t you think?”
Matt says nothing.
Against his will, he raises his left hand and watches as his middle finger flicks the white speck away like a piece of dust. It jumps through space to the cluster of stars at th
e center of the galaxy where it ignites the matter around it. A visible wave of destruction grows like a disc and rips through the core of the galaxy at many million times the speed of light. The stars simply vanish, leaving behind churning ribbons of purple-red plasma that remind Matt of the aurora borealis.
A roar like a lion bores into Matt’s mind. The muscles in his body ripple, and his arms spread out, fingers curling into fists. A sound rises from deep in his throat and out through his lips. As he drops his head back, he hears the yell inside his head. It feels like fire shooting from his eyes.
Intense pleasure surges through his body. It turns to extreme euphoria, like high-pressure gas escaping through every pore of his skin.
Feel the power.
As Matt watches the destruction playing out below him, he is sucked into a cluster of minds formed by the telepaths that inhabit the galaxy. As the wave front of devastation ripples out from the galactic core and sweeps through the first inhabited worlds, the cluster ignites with activity and desperation. Billions upon billions of minds scream out in fear and agony at the realization of their impending doom.
The cluster disintegrates bit by bit, piece by piece as minds are ripped away and silenced. It holds on, alive with chatter and pleading until the end.
It takes time for the galaxy to go dark. Matt endures the contradiction of intense pleasure from Jhata mixed with his own horror.
And then he drops out of Jhata’s mind and comes back to the glass sphere, standing with both palms glued to its surface, staring into it, his clothing soaked with sweat, his muscles tense and rigid.
“Quite exhilarating, don’t you think?” Jhata picks his Stone up off the floor, eyes it and hands it back to him. “It was one of my proudest moments.”
His fingers release from the sphere, and he grabs his Stone from her delicate fingers. “You’re nothing but a genocidal maniac.”
“Wrong,” she says. “And I’ll tell you why. Your statement assumes there is a moral law that stands outside of me, to which I am subject.” As she walks away from the glass sphere, its interior goes back to the churning blue flames Matt saw when he first entered the building. “But in all my years of building an empire, I’ve discovered a great secret. The greatest secret ever revealed to humankind. Would you like to know what it is?”
“I’ve seen enough. Now let me go.”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Here’s the great secret: There is no moral law.”
Matt backs away from her. “You’re wrong. No matter how you try to justify it, you’re still a murderer.”
“Good and evil are a mental construct, a crutch for weak minds that lack imagination. Labels for something that doesn’t exist. There is only power and weakness.”
“Why do you destroy?”
“You felt it. Don’t deny it.” She approaches Matt and lays her palms on his chest. “Power is its own justification. Once you have it and use it, enough is never enough. It’s like a drug. You need more and more to sustain your addiction.”
“How can you be happy?”
“Happy? Who said anything about being happy? Happiness is overrated. It’s for the weak and naïve. I don’t want to be happy. I only want power.”
“Then you are one of Lethonen.”
“The Lethonen? The only thing I share with them is a burning hatred for Them, the ones who create and organize for no purpose. Beyond that, I’m strictly my own operation. No alliances. No friends. Just me.”
Matt takes another step backward. “Then why are you talking to me?”
“So you don’t try to join Them. So you don’t fall for their lies and deception.”
“Why do you care?”
Jhata closes the distance between her and Matt. “Many eyes are upon you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have a gift with the Stone. There have been others with gifts. But no one has ever passed through the Eye of the Universe and survived. I find that intriguing.”
“The black hole?”
“Call it whatever you want. It’s quite impressive. I’d like to know how you did it.” Jhata reaches out to Matt again. “You’ve stirred up fear among the Lethonen. They fear what you are. What you may become.” She eyes him from head to foot. “You can choose the Lethonen without becoming one of them. Like me. But if you choose Them, you give up everything.”
Matt turns away and walks to the door. “I’ve seen enough.”
“Where are you going?” Jhata says.
“Home.”
“But you need to choose.”
“I have.”
“What have you chosen?”
Matt turns to face her. “The only thing that makes sense.” Then he touches the door.
It swings open.
“Power or weakness? Strength or surrender?”
Matt walks out of the darkness into the sunshine and speaks without looking back.
“Love.”
CHAPTER 120
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Jake says.
Leo sits on the ground and shakes his head. “I’m not leaving without Yarah.”
Kent sweeps his glance around the temple site. “I’m sure she’s just playing around somewhere. We’ll find her.”
“You said you would keep an eye on her.” Leo stares at the ground.
Jake lifts his face above the broken stone wall and looks at the brown form lying on the grass a hundred meters away. The chest moves slowly up and down.
“Looks like Ryzaard is healing himself. It won’t take long.” Jake shakes his head. “He’s not happy about the beating you gave him.”
Kent is silent. “I should have finished him off when I had the chance.”
“I don’t think you ever really had the chance.” Jake scans the ruins for any sign of Yarah. “He has just been toying with us.”
“What about the Monkey’s Stone?” Leo says. “We can’t just leave it here for Ryzaard to collect.”
“Why not?” Jake says. “Let Ryzaard have it. I don’t want it anyway. He’s going to kill whoever has it, just like—” He looks away from Kent.
“Matt wouldn’t have left it here.” Leo stands up.
Kent nods. “Leo’s right. We can’t let the old bastard get any stronger. One of us has to go get it.”
“Which one?” Jake points to his empty eye sockets. “Not me. I already have my special gift.”
Leo looks at Kent. “Matt would have wanted you to have it,” Leo says.
“Did he say that?” Kent stares down into the boy’s face.
“No, we never talked about it. But he told me how much he loved you. How much you taught him.”
A wave of emotion rushes into Kent’s chest, and he can’t hold it back. He turns away as tears well up.
“Besides,” Leo says. “I already have one.”
Kent nods. “Which means you know how to use it. It makes sense for you to get it.”
Leo steps back. “I don’t know anything. I’m just a kid.”
“With amazing courage and a heart to match.” Kent puts his hand tenderly on Leo’s shoulder. “You remind me of my son.”
“I’m telling you, we have to get out of here.” Jake wipes the sweat from his brow.
“I already told you.” Leo shakes his head. “I’m not leaving without—”
“Don’t worry.” Kent bends down to pick up his backpack. “We’ll find Yarah. She can’t have gone far.” He stops and stares into the backpack, and then stares up at Jake.
“What’s wrong?” Jake says.
“The little monkey statue.” Kent’s eyes move to Leo. “It’s gone.”
CHAPTER 121
“So you think you can just leave?” Jhata walks outside behind Matt, her kimono swishing softly as she moves.
“I did what I was sent here to do.” He stands with his back to her. “I made my choice.”
“Unfortunately for you, it’s the wrong one.” She has a Stone in each hand and a perky smile on her face. All the Stones on her
belt are lit up with a faint pink glow that wasn’t there before.
Matt remains silent.
“But I am curious.” She turns her back to him and looks at the people walking by, bowing politely to them and receiving bows in return. “After all I’ve shown you, how can you not choose the power you saw, or even greater power? Why would you choose a path that requires submitting to Them and spending the rest of eternity as slaves to their philosophy of sacrifice and love?”
Matt turns, takes a few steps and inspects her profile, the line of her nose and lips, the elegance of her form, every detail honed to exquisite perfection. He folds his arms behind his back. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, of course.” Jhata turns to face him.
“They—” Matt stops and shakes his head. “The Allehonen showed me what they do. I was one with them. I got to experience it, what they call work, but it was much more than that.”
“You’re brave to utter that name here.” She looks away. “Making worlds, star systems, galaxies. Populating them with people in their own image. And then just walking away and forgetting about it, letting them do whatever they want.”
“They don’t just walk away, and they don’t forget. Everything they make is precious to them, nurtured in their minds, given the freedom to grow. It’s incredible.”
“It’s pointless. If you create something, it should be yours to do with as you like. Look at this city.” She lets her gaze drift up to the towering skyscrapers of crystal. “I made it. I can destroy it. And everything in it. No restrictions. No restraints. That’s what power is.”
Matt shakes his head. “You really don’t understand, do you?”
“What is there to understand?”
“Love. The Allehonen do it because of love. Love for each other. Love for their creations. And those creations return the love. It’s an ever expanding circle. Joy beyond comprehension.”
Jhata throws her head back and laughs.
“Joy? Love? I think I’m going to throw up. Do you know what joy and love are? Illusions. Words created by the weak to take away the power of the strong, to take away the freedom they deserve. Words that make you weak. The opposite of power.”