U’Sumi broke free of his brother’s enormous arms. “How are you even alive? I checked your pulse!”
‘Peti laughed. “I always said you’d make a lousy healer—no bedside manner at all!”
As if in a surreal dream, U’Sumi’s mother and the Ancient came out to greet them. Na’Amiha pushed a wheeled chair that carried an old man who was barely recognizable. Half the elder’s face drooped in a numb loss of motor control. Were it not for the gaze of his single good eye and the partial upward curl of half his lip, U’Sumi would have never guessed that he looked upon his grandfather Lumekki.
Iyapeti quickly told them how Nestrigati had led some commandos down through the trenches and managed to ambush the enemy chain cannons before they had reached the command bunker and the dugouts beyond, where U’Sumi and A’Nu-Ahki had been. The Chief Acolyte had been able to pull out Lumekki with several of the wounded. However, by the time he had reached A‘Nu-Ahki and U’Sumi’s trench, the Elyo had already picked up U’Sumi, and A’Nu-Ahki had been captured.
“Fortunately,” Iyapeti concluded, “the enemy had left me for dead too—thank you very much! But it turned out I only had a bad concussion and a lot of blood lost. The wound itself was clean and easily stanched.”
U’Sumi asked, “Where’s Khumi and Mamu?”
‘Peti slumped a little. “Mamu passed away last year, and Khumi? Well, I think I have a pretty good idea where he might be.” He said the last with a scowl.
“Well, go get him,” commanded their mother. “Our prayers have been answered!” She then gazed upon T’Qinna and the beautiful striped sphinx that rubbed at her thigh. “And who is this exotic young maiden?”
U’Sumi said, “This is T’Qinna, Mahm. She helped us escape.”
A’Nu-Ahki added, “More than that; in three more years, when their espousal period is complete, U’Sumi and T’Qinna are to be married!”
U’Sumi and T’Qinna turned to A’Nu-Ahki.
“But a traditional betrothal is seven years!” said the groom-to-be.
A’Nu-Ahki smiled. “Don’t you think you two have served the equal of four of those, after all we’ve been through together?”
“Where’s my say in this?” Na’Amiha gave a feigned huff.
Her husband laughed. “What do you wish to say?”
Na’Amiha hugged the girl from Aztlan. “T’Qinna, welcome to the Seer Clan! You smile now, but you’re going to need all the help you can get—believe me, I know!”
THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367
Epilogue
T
he living star chariot glided through deep space, the very fabric of which bent before and after its passage. Time itself dilated to a crawl within the liquid metal of its boat-like body. Inside the passenger bay, a man and a person somewhat more than a man continued their age-long discussion while the hours slipped by outside as centuries.
Q’Enukki said, “The last generation is being born now?”
He was not so sure now that he really wanted to see his visions vindicated as he had sometimes wished during weaker, angrier moments back on Earth. The Earth where I woke up and broke my fast this morning is already ancient history. Even the smallest lad back then is now an old man.
Samuille switched back to speaking aloud rather than projecting his words into Q’Enukki’s mind. “Now they have reached adulthood.”
“Adulthood?”
The luminescent Watcher continued, his large white-less eyes pools as deep as the ebony expanse outside. “We need to slow down again on this approach. Some of us have business to conduct below. If you like, I can make it so that you can see things almost as we do.”
Q’Enukki half wanted to scream, No more seeing! I have seen enough! My eyes are weary! I have vanished from the world of men! That part of my story has ended! Just let it die!
Yet the other half—the philosopher, the observer, the learner—could not resist. They would be far away, these people of the world’s end—too far for Q’Enukki to feel the full horror he knew he ought to feel—he hoped.
Samuille rose from his couch and swept a shimmering hand over the Seer’s head. The inside of the cabin began to fade, as the outer skin of the star chariot took on the same crystal transparency as its oval view-ports. For a moment, Q’Enukki sensed the chariot as a living thing—with a silvery heart that pumped gold-fire blood—and that it was something else; not a chariot at all, but more of a living gate. Now he seemed to hurtle through space without a vehicle, except he could still feel his couch and the deck.
He screamed; no so much at the helpless sensation of speeding through the endless deep uncontained and unprotected, but at the sudden realization that it was the endless deep that actually hurtled around him—that the living-gate-chariot was completely stationary someplace else, while it somehow moved the entire universe, and all it contained, around itself. Awareness of the “someplace else” completely outside was what got to him.
Samuille laughed warmly in the background.
When Q’Enukki realized he now had a perfect view in all directions, he began to chatter like an excited child. “This is fantastic! I can see it all! Look—if I focus, I can magnify and observe even the smallest detail!”
Focusing on objects that seemed to pass by him in space lessened Q’Enukki’s uneasiness about the sensation of that stationary “someplace else” completely outside.
Samuille, now also invisible, touched Q’Enukki’s head. The Watcher’s hands throbbed with warmth and energy that could blast a man to ashes or restore one to life from the very brink of death.
Q’Enukki’s perception of reality changed, or rather, grew beyond its former limits. He could not completely express in human language, even to himself, exactly what happened because no human words in any present or future earthly tongue existed to describe the experience. The closest he could say was that he not only saw present events, but also their direct and indirect consequences stretching off into branching futures, all of which seemed to happen at once in multiple layers. The new sense of being partly “someplace else” grew, but his fear of it shrank.
The stationary-ness of the “someplace else completely outside” now lent a sense of stability somehow. He turned toward where he sensed the “someplace else” should be, but felt Samuille’s hand on his shoulder.
“Do not try to look there. You are not ready for that yet.”
Q’Enukki obeyed without question, and focused only on the relative motions of the universe he had once thought he partially knew.
Comprehension of his added dimensional perception suddenly caught up with him, as if he were simply a child who had learned a few new words. He could now also examine the past event-layers of objects, as he could the future branches, but only if he focused hard.
Like Samuille, he could not penetrate the secret thoughts of living beings—whether Watcher, human, or something farther up the heavenly ladder—directly. Unspoken thoughts and intentions were only imperfectly deducible from past events or from watching what was visible of individual futures or through hearing the distant echoes of words—whether spoken or mind-projected. Not everything was visible or audible; some view-paths and layers seemed blocked by huge “opaque” objects.
Q’Enukki wondered why this bombardment of simultaneous sensory patterns did not overload his mind. The Watcher must also have imparted a limited ability to process the new information. Q’Enukki suspected he would have made only a mentally challenged Watcher at best. For a human, the influx of new sights, even in the solitude of deep space, taxed the mind.
Behind it all, like a warm pulsing light, from the furthest beginnings to the last bitter consequence from the final evil defeated at time’s end, stood the Creator, E’Yahavah. He sent forth life from the past and stood to receive what would remain beyond all outcomes, to weave even from the bloodiest evils of humanity’s dark history a pattern of greater good.
Faces flew out at Q’Enukki from a distant Sacred Orchard inside a new Holy City, al
l restored on New-world. Trees grew from soil fertilized by the death and decay of nations, yet decorated with blossoms and fruit beautiful in depth, color, and fragrance—peoples called out of evil times and places, tested by suffering, bought back, and preserved from every land. Q’Enukki had taught that the Divine Name dwelt from everlasting to everlasting, but now he possessed a partial ability to see it.
Such vision also made the revolt of the fallen members of Samuille’s Watcher order all the more unconscionable. They must have seen! They had merely closed their eyes in the delusion that they could create their own branching realities apart from the real cosmos of E’Yahavah.
Samuille said, “There, do you understand now why we sometimes must be careful how we communicate with you?”
“I guess.”
“There are more dimensions than the four your people perceive.”
“I know. I went through them on our former journeys. We first met in one of the upper ones, remember?”
“Although you visited those heavens in a sense, you were only allowed to perceive them through symbols that referenced the dimensions your natural abilities equipped you to handle. You could not see the vast majority of what actually went on around you there. In fact, though you call them heavens, even your use of that word is imprecise. I have increased your ability to see by two dimensions. Any more, and your mind as it is currently configured would suffer damage.”
“Two is enough, thank you!”
“I have done this because you are going to need all the confidence this sight can give you, both to watch what you are about to see and to bear up under what you will be called to do when we reach our final destination.”
Q’Enukki gazed ahead into space, not quite hearing the Watcher.
Growing like an icy agate in the void, a large comet they had passed a short while ago swung back into view. Q’Enukki knew it was the same comet because he recognized the shapes of several asteroids trapped in its snow-cement body. Something was also different, however.
“Why have we looped back to the comet again? Is this what you meant when you said we needed to slow down, or were you referring to another pass by Earth?”
“Watch and see.”
Q’Enukki had only observed the comet with natural eyes on their previous encounter. It had appeared then as simply a solar wind-bombarded, near-planet-sized chunk of asteroid debris cemented together by dirty ice. Now he perceived something more.
His senses transcended the temporal, capturing the voices of future storytellers recounting the memories of this heavenly interloper. It was the Sword of the Breaker, the Arrow of E’Yahavah on its way to pierce the body of Tiamatu, Leviathan of primal chaos; that wandering star between the planets of red L’Mekku and great Mother Khuva…
The names and images shifted.
In a future instant, all knowledge of the name E’Yahavah vanished from the recollections and stories of men. The air itself sucked away from Q’Enukki’s lungs in the sudden vacuum. What happened to the voices of my children rescued from World-end?
He had been listening in on a conversation of sages, when sudden madness broke out—a fevered insanity that reduced these fine speakers to gibbering idiots that reasoned like children at best and animals at worst.
The lines split and continued to divide further from there. A complex and distorted tangle of names and folk tales replaced the entire idea of E’Yahavah in the words of future humanity—a tangle that grew more twisted with the passage of time. Even the names Q’Enukki thought he recognized were warped and redefined—Anu, Enlil, Ea, Enki, Ninurta, and later Marduk, Osiris, Perseus, Hercules, and Quetzalcoatl, echoed by—brutish deities that no longer remotely resembled the original cleaver of the water dragon, but who got credit for his works.
In multiple streams of ethnic consciousness came other stories with other names. Each described the same fragmented pseudo-divine personages by different aliases with many more quickly forgotten. Each took future memory of the comet further into distortion and mythology, mixing it with the deeds of men and those reputed to be more than men.
Soon almost all knowledge of it drowned in a convulsing ocean of confusion and folklore. Even the widely separate historic events of creation and cataclysm coalesced into a childlike notion of prehistory that survived mostly as fragmented fables, with characters and events from each crossing over to the other. Fortunately, E’Yahavah restored his name and knowledge through a revelation to a special future nation—but Q’Enukki had to disengage from tracing the streams before becoming lost in their currents.
He shook himself free, and looked ahead of the comet at the planet Tiamatu. Largest of the solid inner worlds, shrouded by a chaotic blue atmosphere of gases he somehow knew were called nitrogen and methane, it had seven great reddish-brown features that the astronomers of Earth called its continents—though probably they represented portions of the surface rich in iron oxides. In prophetic interpretation, Seti had called the red continents “the Seven Heads of Tiamatu.”
Seti had also symbolically tied this planet to E’Yahavah’s Curse upon all of Nature—the decay spun out as a judgment against the Basilisk and Atum’s rebellion—disruption of the original created order—death.
Q’Enukki remembered the account from his second voyage through the Ten Heavens, when his guide had revealed to him that after E’Yahavah had cast Shining One down, the Rebel had briefly nursed his hatred on the planets of Tiamatu and red L’Mekku. From these, he had launched his stealth assault against newly-revealed Earth. He had descended secretly into the Holy Orchard to become the Basilisk. What was unknown at the time was that the Basilisk was to be the instrument of humanity’s great test.
It was no coincidence that nearly every human civilization to look up at the stars would later associate the red planet with war—the planet of blood. Yet the planet named for L’Mekku the Warlord represented a mere pawn of the greater evil, for Tiamatu was the instigator.
The planet was dead—devoid of the elements upon which life depended. The banished rebels of the First Insurrection had looked jealously over the small void to newly-flowered Earth. These beings fermented in dregs of ancient bitterness, existing partly in the rapid time flow that had passed outside the event horizon of the Creation Singularity. Only a few short days had passed on Earth during those ages, because it had remained inside the white hole’s horizon through the early part of the creation week.
The aging embittered Rebels envied the new life they saw, the culmination of E’Yahavah’s work, the capstone of his favor. Unfathomed rage festered in those who had fallen, only to begin their wait for judgment on the frigid worlds of War and Chaos.
The open gate of man’s willful participation in the Insurrection provided the envious spirits a way to shift their place of confinement to one more suitable to their leader’s designs. The bleak vision of an Earth as cold and barren as the prison world these beings had deserted filled Q’Enukki’s eyes and forced him to turn away.
“Don’t fear,” said Samuille. “E’Yahavah has promised you that Earth shall not become a completely dead world, though it will be close.”
Overwhelmed by the implications of what he saw, Q’Enukki clenched his teeth and screamed at the tormenting vision of humanity’s long despair. “E’Yahavah could have stopped all this at any time! What could possibly be worth subjecting an entire universe to such drawn-out agony at such an unthinkable cost?”
There! I have said it! The thing that has haunted my nightmares ever since I became involved in this business! For a moment, he feared his outburst would earn him the contempt of his benefactor. Then a warm hand gripped his shoulder and all Q’Enukki could feel as he broke down into convulsive weeping was the Watcher’s empathic sadness.
“You are worth it, my friend—you, and all others like you.”
“How can that be?”
Samuille answered, “When faced with the choice between expressing his love through creation and no expression of love outside his own co
ntinuum, E’Yahavah chose to create others with the potential to share his love. Yet love has no meaning without choice. Although the Creator knew his sentient creatures would choose to reject him and bring horrendous consequences upon themselves and their cosmos, he deemed that the greater evil would be for him not to create.”
“How can that be the greater evil? It is not as if E’Yahavah needs the likes of us! We create nothing that does not twist into something hideous!”
“It is true that E’Yahavah does not need. That does not mean he has no love beyond the continuum of A’Nu, El-N’Lil, and the Word-Speaker.”
“Please explain.”
Samuille spoke gently, “The E’Yahavah Eluhar built into creation a mysterious aspect of their own nature that my order does not understand completely—the ability to bring good out of evil, in spite of evil’s intent. E’Yahavah did not directly create evil, nor was it programmed into sentient creations—only created others could choose it. But E’Yahavah knew the self-evident: that once other beings are created with the capacity of real choice, it is only a matter of time before some of them will make the wrong one and bring devastating consequences into the entire created system.”
Q’Enukki said, “Death and decay.”
“Yes. That is why E’Yahavah limited the choices of created ones and built into the system a restorative program based solely on his own promise to pay the ultimate price. I have only limited knowledge of this program, but I assure you it exists. You have already seen select parts of it.”
“I do not understand. I do not wish to accuse the Divine Name, but if this is so, then isn’t creating any being with the ability to make real choices effectively the same as creating evil?”
“Only if creating evil is the goal. A man may do great good, knowing his good will be taken advantage of by many to do evil. Should he therefore do no good? A father provides good gifts for his children, who then may build on that good or use their benefits to evil ends. Should fathers give nothing to their children? For a creature to choose against the nature of the Great God is for that creature to create evil and to take on its nature. It has real consequences that eventually reach a point of no return.
The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) Page 35