An End tst-2

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Not like that.” The slither soft-docked. “Let’s go meet her.”

  Assistant shrugged its shoulders ineffectively. “I don’t know if I should—”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. She talks to gods. That’s all.”

  “Right. You’re right.”

  “Let’s go.”

  in those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, it hurtled into damnation and spawned and its progeny spread outward and outward and consumed everything in their path, and before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained

  Judith opened her eyes.

  The sleep of liquid travel was disconcerting. She trusted the process, told herself to trust the process, but each time she woke up from the night between the stars, she had the urge to stand before a mirror nude and inspect herself to see if anything was missing.

  That’s not where it’d be missing, Jud.

  Ten fingers, ten toes, all the usual bipedal accoutrement. Little hands touched face; everything appeared to be all right there as well, except for the

  Well. There would always be that.

  Softdock platform extended, and the slither gently melted into the side of the warworld above System Fourteen-Seven, Planet One. Judith pulled herself out of the vacuum chair with a slurp, shook her hair around like a barker, coagulating pellets of liquispace emulsion floating freely, lazily spattering onto the walls. She pulled her hair back, squeezed more of the disgusting yet crucial slime from her coif. It was now dissipating into a high-density gas. She was dry.

  “Situation?”

  deity re-animated.

  “Who is it?”

  standard.

  “Good. It’s been a while.”

  plank extended.

  The lock doors cycled open. Just beyond the chamber, Judith could see the disturbing androgynous faces of a Doctor and an Assistant. The Doctor held out a (claw) hand and tried to smile in that way the nearish always tried.

  “Welcome, Medium Judith.”

  She waved off the hand. “Take me to it.”

  “Yes, of course. Have you been briefed?”

  “Briefed? Briefly.” She walked briskly. It had been a long time since she’d been in the aether, and she was eager to talk to the god. She knew she was an addict. “Something about a planet being lost?”

  “A new technology, yes. There was a terrorist—”

  “What kind of technology?”

  Doctor’s pace slowed. “I don’t know if I’m qualified to—”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It’s a silver. A metallic pathogen.”

  they would live forever. in the ocean of silver fire, Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the

  “What’s it do?”

  “Replaces biologic with metallic.”

  “How’s it work?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “And it killed a planet?”

  “Yes.”

  Judith pinched the plastic cheek of the Doctor, squeezed it like a child’s. “Well you’d better find out how it works and what it is and who else has it, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, of course. We—”

  “Better get to work.” She glanced through the phased glass of the chamber at the end of the hallway. “This is it?”

  “Yes, Medium.”

  “Good. Seeya.”

  Doctor bowed and retreated.

  Judith placed her palm on the reader beside the door, waited for a miniscule genetic sample to be sequenced and verified, and entered the shielded chamber. God floated in a static tube at the chamber’s center, hardware connecting him as needed to the outside world, gelatin suspending him in near-solid.

  “Hey there, buddy.” Judith smiled that smile, pulled up a wheeled chair to the glass. She sat down on it backwards. “How’ve you been?”

  The host body remained motionless, swaying gently in the omnipresent sludge. Why did the basis of their technology have to be scum? Scum from trees? Scum from giant trees? She tapped on the glass, as if God were a goldfish. No reaction.

  “Well, shit.”

  She caught a flash of movement from the periphery of her vision and saw that Doctor and Assistant were observing from the deck above, shielded behind phase. Judith pulled the curtain that surrounded God’s static tube closed, blocking the view of the nearish. She preferred to work alone, or at least with real people.

  Concealed by non-fabric, she withdrew the hardlink cable from the base of the static tube, plugged it snugly into the jack in the center of her chest between the cardiac shields and

  turning, raindrops spattering on her face, face framed with curls, curls the color not of fire or blood but

  atmosphere choking with something and

  the in-dark answered with

  wind

  blew white paper, black ink, folded, to the floor. Pungent aroma, a humidity of percolation. Dark day, rain, undertone of well-groomed man in black suit on viewers, ratcheting tones of a music from somewhere, dark day people sipping black liquid, foamy brown liquid, something gathered from mountains. God sat alone at a table, the host body that of a young man with a streak of white in his hair, old eyes, a book bookmarked and set before him. Demian. Hesse.

  She pulled out a chair across from Him and sat. “What the hell is that smell?”

  He smirked, held out a mug. “This shit. Apparently they enjoy drinking it.”

  “Oh God.” Judith rolled her eyes. She wondered what color they were. “When are we? Something’s not right about this place.”

  He leaned back in his chair, contented. “You don’t like it?”

  “The air’s different. And…”

  “And?”

  “It just feels different. I can’t quite—”

  God leaned forward, unzipped Judith’s jacket, slipped his hand into open-necked shirt, placed his palm flat against her chest. Her eyes widened with realization.

  “What are they?” Her own small hand reached to touch her upper chest, below the collarbone.

  “Just a little project I’ve been working on for a while. Unfortunately, it seems that one of them got out of control.”

  “And this place?”

  “Hasn’t happened yet.” An exclamation of joy. God and Judith turned to see a young man and woman embrace near the back of the shop, the woman sporting a glint of silver on her left hand.

  “How could you—”

  “I’m God, Judith. I can do anything.” He sipped his coffee with a grin. “I contain multitudes.”

  “Don’t get too big for your britches, O Omnipresence. We’ll throw you back down the hole.” Judith took the cup from God, took a sip, grimaced. She placed the cup back down on the table. “Why’s the wind blowing? And rain? It’s—”

  “Autumn. Not a perpetual autumn, but an autumn nonetheless.”

  “What’s—”

  “A season. There used to be seasons, long before you were born.”

  Judith rubbed the flesh of her chest, exposed between drapes of fine silk. She was mesmerized by the single beat.

  Click, scratch, sizzle, click. God inhaled deeply, exhaled smoke. Judith hated the smoker scent.

  “How bad is it?”

  “I’ve only just been briefed. Briefly. But it’s bad. You said you let one get loose?”

  “I didn’t let her get loose.” God ashed in his coffee cup. “Shit happens. I wasn’t watching.”

  “We shouldn’t have dropped you after the war. Maybe if you’d been—”

  “I wanted to be down there. You’re too noisy. I need my space.”

  “I understand.”

  “I feel asleep for a while. Just a nap. I wake up and there’s a planet fucked.”

  Judith traced figure eights on the tabletop with precision-filed fingernail. “Will it be salvageable?”

  “That’s the th
ing…I don’t know what she did.”

  “It’s a silver. Downloading specs.” Judith’s eyes flashed for an instant as she hardlinked into the system. “Full-spectrum phase catalyst. Biologically invasive, gaseous dissemination in nitrogen atmospheres.”

  “I didn’t make a silver like that.”

  “See for yourself.” Judith grasped God’s hands in her own. His eyes widened.

  “I didn’t fucking make that.”

  Judith sat up, released God’s hands. In that last instant of contact, an emotion: fear. Genuine. Overwhelming. “Where did it—”

  “You have to get her out of here. At least until I can work this out…Please don’t drop me yet, Jud. I don’t know—”

  “I’ll tell the—”

  “We have to—”

  “We will.” She never seen Him like this. The host body’s face was deathly pale, eyes darting. His hand grasped a napkin from the table, clenched and released, nervously started tearing it into strips.

  “I didn’t make that silver.”

  “We’ll figure it out. I have to go for now.”

  “Please don’t. It’s been so long since—”

  “I’ll be back.” She tenderly patted His hand. “I promise. We’ll do all we can.” Judith reached to her chest, grabbed the invisible hardlink cable that she knew was there.

  “I’ll be here.”

  “See you soon.” She tugged at the cable,

  severing the connection. She fell to the floor, body powerless, head throbbing from the agony of the deity flux.

  Footsteps: running. Unnatural. Machined. Doctor. He (it) lifted Judith, near form effortlessly picking her up, placing her softly on an examination table on the other side of the curtain. God’s host body floated without any indication of life in the gelatin tube.

  “What do you think he said?”

  “Quiet.” Doctor waved Assistant off. “Usually takes a few hours for the spell to pass. Until then, we wait.”

  “She was crying.”

  Doctor nodded its head. “So was He.”

  he’s crying.

  Nearish to nearish, sub-thought.

  so was she.

  Berlin’s hands were to his face. His body shook silently from within the glass filter, crouched on the floor beside his daughter. Little body, little-to-no-body left. Pile of metal forged into human, human forged into metal.

  should we—

  no.

  Fingertips traced the grit of dissembling silver dust, filter scraping away parts of what had been a child’s cheek. Berlin saw what he was doing and stood up in frustration and disgust.

  They’d found his old living quarters without incident. His floor had been beneath the zone damaged by fire and falling towers, although buckled bulkheads and cracked load-bearing supports of the superstructure gave evidence of the force of the attack from above. They wouldn’t stay in here for long, even though neither escape nor continuing really mattered at this point.

  Walk past nears, standing at attention, lifeless faces hidden behind black metal, weapons and searchlights bristling from armor. Walk down hallway, past open doors where toys sat in forever disarray, photographs hang on walls now stippled with something, where viewers were black. Frank the cat, a pile of filings.

  End of the hallway: Push open bedroom door.

  Berlin sobbed when he saw her

  Kath. Botanist.

  on the floor.

  Hands swam through liquid glass filter, up to neck, activation points grasped. He knew the nears wouldn’t stop him. Couldn’t stop him. Two points, turned clockwise and counterclockwise. Snap into place, pull up. Glass dissolves.

  He turned off his shield.

  away, away from vain struggle

  Alarms, immediate, as frigid nitro closed in. The glass pool splashed to the floor, drops spattered the armored legs of nearby nearish. The rapid change in pressure activated Berlin’s emergency communications beacon: a swarm of luminous nanos erupted from the chest pack of his atmosphere suit, stopped in formation several feet away from the man and the nears, and pulsed into the sky in stuttering phase bursts. The nears’ chestpacks all began to glow in similar readiness.

  Berlin wiped silica gelatin from his eyes, nose, mouth. The comm implant in his right temple began to throb, but instead of acknowledging the incoming transmission, he swiftly brought his fist up, colliding squarely with the side of his head, crushing the metallish creature underneath his skin. The pain was almost as swift as his blood.

  A return of the swarm: the near nearest Berlin snapped to attention, infinitesimal lances of light cutting through space and silvered atmosphere and building to penetrate the non-mind of the lump of flesh and download a carrier pattern. It removed black composite faceplate to reveal almost-human face, eyes glowing with universes of comm nanos.

  As brain matter re-arranged itself to accept the signal, atrophied mouth, tongue, vocal chords came to life, producing nonsense sound, an uncomfortable experimentation with non-mental communication. Signal lock. Dry tongue instinctively licked dry lips. The glittering link seemed to connect the top of the near’s head to the ceiling in an unambitious rendition of a halo.

  “Berlin.” Voice beyond hoarse, but still recognizable. Berlin was still disconcerted by the technology they had acquired from the planet of trees and botanist and

  “Let it be, Hannon.”

  The near walked closer in a disturbing pantomime of Berlin’s second, who right now floated safely miles above the planet, a similar nano halo linking him to this non-human. “You shouldn’t have done that. You know that you can’t—”

  “I know.”

  “It didn’t have to—”

  “Yes. It did.”

  “We could have—”

  “I know you saw it all, Hannon. My wife, Maire, the trees.”

  The near stood in silence.

  “I’ve known since the attack. And I know what you had planned for me.”

  “There’s no way you—”

  “I didn’t want this.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have—”

  “I know.”

  Berlin bent to his wife, form silvered in shadow. His hand reached out to touch her cheek, hesitated, withdrew.

  “Just kill me and get it over with. Have them kill me.”

  Silence.

  “Hannon?”

  The near approached, looked down on Berlin’s face. The wind-torn flesh was without emotion, but the voice that it channeled was razor-sharp.

  “No. No quick death for you, traitor.”

  The air burned with cold

  above the lumber plains on the night that Maire had been so convincing. It was a winter month, and the floater didn’t offer much protection against the wind.

  It wasn’t dancing, and it wasn’t singing, but the flora hovered in formation below them, basking in the phosphorescent hydrostatic mist of the mid-atmosphere. The canyons echoed with their keening midnight song.

  Berlin wrapped his arms around Kath, hands clasped in front in a bundle of their intertwined fingers. Squeeze. Sniffle and one hand went to her face as demure form shook with sob and fear. In moonslight, twin tracks on windburned cheeks: just two tears, but they were two too many.

  “They’ll be harvested.”

  “Analysis was conclusive. We can isolate the flux ability.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because they can. And they don’t want anyone else to figure it out.”

  “So that’s it? They take a few lumbers for sampling, isolate the tech, and kill the rest?”

  “That’s the way we work.”

  “No.” She turned around in his arms. Gray eyes swallowed by black pupils. “That’s the way they work.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You can’t. But we can.”

  She slipped from his grasp, walked to the other side of the floater, leaned precariously over the edge. The vehicle swayed in the wake of a forest passing beneath them. Berlin walked to join her.


  “We?”

  Kath hesitated, cleared her throat. “You don’t have to know about this.”

  “Do you think I’d—”

  “No.” She squeezed his hand, let go. “But they’d kill you if they knew about it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve met someone. There’s a woman who can help.”

  “Help what?”

  “She comes from the outer. Came in months ago on a transport. Just something about her…”

  “Who?”

  “She knows what to do. To make it right.”

  “Kath—”

  “She’s not like us.”

  “If you’re talking about—”

  “She wants to help. Not just this planet. She can make it right again.”

  “Make what right?”

  Kath’s hands balled to fists at her side. “The last war…Nothing’s been the same since. Planets in slavery, One ruled by machines and nears. Gods dropped into the slumber. Nothing’s right anymore.”

  “We had to fight that war.”

  “But we didn’t have to become this.” Her fingertips traced the insignia on her chest, moved to her temple, where the metallish uplink writhed under her skin. “We didn’t have to give up our—

  “It was for the best.”

  “Whose best?”

  “Our best. It had to be done.”

  “We’re killing the system! The stars can’t support us anymore. The energy load alone between the two—”

  “That’s why we need the lumbers. Deep galactic survey missions, colonization hives—”

  “We have all that we need right here. We’ve just forgotten how to live within our means.”

  “We can’t turn back now. We’re pushing the saturation mark as—”

  “We don’t have to be pushing the saturation mark.”

  Berlin felt the throb of the comm uplink, but kept it static. “You can’t be talking about—”

  “Planet One alone uses eighty percent of the system resources.”

  He said nothing.

  “A lot of bad people on Planet One.”

  “Not all.”

  “They started the war.”

  “The war’s over.”

  “It’s not over. Not yet.”

  He’d never heard her talk like this: such determination. Passion. He never suspected that she felt so strongly about the civil war that had split the binary system a decade before.