“Are we getting close?” I asked. Then, hearing nothing, “Teru?”
“You tell me. You can feel the flow for yourself, can’t you?”
I rolled my eyes. I should have known better. Ask a silly question, get some vague metaphysical answer.
“You’ve forgotten more than you know, Alpha Wing,” said Teru. Alpha Wing? What did he mean by calling me by Uprakon’s honorific? Was he taunting me, or was it custom for the killer of the Alpha Wing to become the new one?
“I don’t know what you think I did to Uprakon…”
“I know. Don’t speak. Conserve your concentration on your movements. Then you might just hear instead of always talking.” Riddles and gibberish again.
But I do admit that there was something to the steady rhythm of moving my body. It was like the kind of flow state that I had entered so many times in the cockpit. I was acting without thinking, moving without any kind of conscious response. After a few moments, I could pick up on what I was doing and had the cognition that maybe Teru knew a thing or two.
Once, at the military academy, we were told about a group of Mexican religious zealots who used to walk for miles across the hot desert even after they had the technology enough to easily have moved themselves by other means. At some points in the journey they even crawled. Ridiculous, of course. That was the whole point of learning it. The Federation wanted to show a contrast between the silly superstitious tendency of primitive Earth peoples to invent meaning in rituals like these and the enlightened rationality that we enjoyed without these kinds of misguided notions. Now, floating around in the vacuum of space, I got the sense that maybe I had misjudged the whole purpose of the ritual. Maybe there was more to what those people had done than simply crawling around to appease some invisible deity. Maybe there was something else that I was missing. Something to be reclaimed.
We were moving closer to the center of the web of lattices, and as I looked down I could see Teru was making his way towards a roundish object that looked like a comet caught in the latticework. It was almost like a fly wrapped up in a spider’s web. There was something shiny at the center that moved with respect to the planetoid so that the light it reflected was only visible from the side. I made another jump through open space and managed to grab ahead of the lattice with this object attached. Then I climbed down, or up depending your perspective, towards what I assumed must have somehow contained The First Flame. As I drew closer, I could see that the ball was the size of a rather small asteroid, and in roughly the same shape, though definitely created by intelligent life. As soon as he touched it, Teru was able to walk along its surface. Synthetic gravity, definitely. The object was far to small to exert the kind of pull required to walk along. I followed his lead and found myself treading carefully along the surface of the ball. The surface wasn’t smooth. It was pockmarked all over with impact holes from space debris. I was following Teru, watching carefully as I went. Then I looked up and he was gone.
What the hell? He was gone without any sign. I moved in the direction I had last seen him in, then I came upon a gap the size and shape of which suggested a door, or a pit for garbage to be jettisoned out of. There was no way to know. I decided I didn’t have any better option than to climb inside and see. As soon as half my body had passed the lip of the hole gravity changed direction and I fell to what had been the side of the pit. I was inside lying flat against a smooth metal floor. Then, lights came on. I sat up and saw Teru standing at an airlock door. It opened for him, and he beckoned me forward.
“We’ve arrived.”
Inside was decor like I wasn’t expecting. After we removed our space suits. I was ushered into a space that looked like some sort of a Japanese tea room, except that it was one hobbled together with pieces from some space cruiser. There was a screen separating the small room from whatever lay beyond, and on the wall was a tea kettle and a small kerosene stove that might have been sitting there for hundreds of years for all I knew. Who had kept this here and why I couldn’t guess. Teru? Had he been tending to this place all this time. He put the kettle on the flame and I silently prayed that all of the gases were properly balanced so that the spark didn’t just send the place ablaze.
“Take your place” instructed Teru. I took that to mean a seat at the low table in front of me. I didn’t know the proper way to kneel, so I sat cross-legged the way that I had seen Teru the way we first met. He seemed more comfortable and more accustomed to it. We stared at each other. From almost getting killed in an airlock to tea time. I couldn’t fathom what was next. Wouldn’t there be some kind of a fire somewhere?
After a moment, the kettle started to hiss and Teru went to take it off the boil. He fiddled in the kitchen for a moment and then returned with something silver glinting in my cup. I took the cup he offered me and saw that it contained a kind of tea made from some kind of silver leaves.
“Do we have to say some words first? Good luck, a prayer or something?” I asked.
“Drink,” he responded. So I took a deep draught from the strange elixer. It tasted sticky on my tongue, but not metallic as I’d been expecting. More like something that had been growing underneath a log and had been dug up and dried by somebody with an odd sense of taste. I waited, anticipating the queasy feeling that the Torbanini pipe smoke had given me. Then, I melted into the floor.
I was flying through space, watching suns pass through my skin as I flew. Each was like a speck at the bottom of the ocean floor and they troubled me not at all as I fell, or sailed, whatever it was. Then, I froze in place. I was looking at a green gas giant planet with a set of three moons visible and a chain of asteroids. In orbit was a ship. My cruiser. The Hammer. I found I could rotate in space to view it from any direction that I liked. I could make it bigger or smaller. I was in control of this universe.
I brought the ship closer to me and expanded it to the size of a model, like the ones I had played with as a child. Then, from other side of the planet appeared a tiny armada of other craft. The Gix. The hammer deployed fighters, but the Gix opened up on the Hammer with their cannons and soon the ship was burning. I watched as tiny models of my friends were wiped out. The battle expanded before my eyes, and I was there watching as ships danced and exploded in space, the starfighters wiped out one by one in a matter of minutes. Jackal! Knight! I feel them struggling and scrambling to evade the onslaught, but they were woefully outmatched and each succombed before the battle was over. I floated closer to the bridge. And through the frontshield I could see Celeste observing the carnage. Ordering a full retreat, trying desperately to keep them from getting decimated. Then, a flash so bright that it dominated everything.
For what seemed like an eternity, or maybe just a few moments, I was enveloped by light, as if sitting in the center of a sun without burning. No heat, just overwhelming light piercing me from every possible direction. Then, I felt a presence. Something conscious, looking at me.
Do you see?
“Yes,” I answered. “I have to warn them.”
Then, the light subsided and I was flying above a lush, green forest. I flittered and flew down to a river and saw myself reflected in the water. I was a hummingbird. Cawww! A wave of terror coursed through me and I flitted into the underbrush for cover. I was in shadow, then I saw a light coming from a small burrow in the ground. I followed the light into the tiny tunnel and emerge out of a cliffside. I was a hawk, a powerful bird of prey letting out a mighty cawww! that sent lesser creatures scattering in fear. The moon was full and round and as I flew towards it, over the forrest canopy, I felt myself changed again. This time I was human, a pilot. The craft I was piloting was unlike I’d ever seen, but it was strangely familiar too. I looked up and saw a craft coming up on me fast. It was a robot craft that sent two rockets straight at my left wing. The impact burst my little craft, and me along with it.
Then, I was running through a hallway. I passed by a window and saw a burning city. I was a child, just a young boy of no more than nine. There was a dag
ger in my hand. A crowd of people fled in terror, but I passed by them travelling in the opposite direction. I had a purpose ahead of me. I ran into the city square and encountered two reptilians with heads like komodo dragons tearing into the flesh of a dead woman. She had been pregnant. In my fury, I rush up and drive my dagger straight through the eye of one of them. In an instant, the other sinks his fangs into my arm and I feel a flood of poison pulse through my veins. I screamed in agony as the lizard began to devour my arm as I died.
Then, I was on Valon 8, Drasheel’s underwater homeworld. I saw cities made of a translucent, glassy spires falling apart and collapsing. I pulled my child close to me and carried her through the crumbling streets. A contingent of Valonian soldiers was rushing to secure the dome and I tried to fall in with them, hoping for some relative safety amid the chaos. But their commander saw me and telepathically ordered me out of the way. He could offer no protection. I held out the crying child in my arms, but he spurned me. Then, I looked up and saw the glass dome caving in, shattering our city in a tidal wave of destruction.
Over and over I felt all the deaths I had experienced. Many were deaths in battle, but not all. Sometimes I was an old man dying in my bed. At other times I was a woman dying in childbirth. But many times I felt my life snuffed out by violence. War, murder, a sudden act of agression or a premeditated attack from a friend. As I remembered more, each life and each death seemed to lose some of their impact. It no longer felt significant each time I lost a life. That’s when I understood. Each life that I had led, and each that I would lead, it was all just temporal and always changing.
The Hammer being destroyed by the Gix, Uprakon murdered, the destruction of Drasheel’s race. All of it was something that was going to happen, or was fated to happen. I wasn’t Max Derringer. That was just a face I wore. And with that, I opened my eyes and was staring into my empty teacup. Teru was watching me.
“What was that?”
“You were one with the First Flame,” he said. “The planet’s core. The spark that brings life to this world.” I nodded.
“That was more than just some sun. It was more like, well…” He guessed immediately where my thoughts were trailing off to.
“God?” he asked, his tattooed lips pulled into a smile.
“Or something like it,” I answered.
“I saw all these lives. All the people that I had been.”
“Not all,” corrected Teru. “Just enough for you to see what you needed to.”
“What does it mean for me now? Uprakon’s death?”
Teru stroked his beard a moment. “Well, did you see his death?”
“No.”
“But you saw so many others. Plenty of death and destruction. Enough for many many lifetimes.”
“Yes, and the deaths of my friends too. So why not him? That is what we came for is, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and no. Maybe you saw Uprakon but you didn’t recognize him. Maybe you killed him in one life and he killed you in another.”
“But in this life I still have to answer to a crime I didn’t commit. What am I supposed to tell the Wings of Dawn?”
“Tell them what you saw.”
“How can I when I don’t understand it even now?”
“Call it satori. That’s what the Japanese did. That’s why I decided on this decor. A little joke for myself. But the cave is still the cave no matter how its dressed up.”
“The cave?”
“The power of the First Flame is far greater than you could stand to look at on your own. You need a place to view it through so that your mind isn’t lost in its vast and insensate being. That’s why you were brought here. Not to stand trial but to commune. To rediscover what you used to know.”
“So, you knew before you brought me here that I didn’t kill Uprakon?”
“No. I discovered it when you revived. If you had really killed him your guilt would have betrayed you. The effect of the drug is that it makes it nearly impossible for you to lie. Kind of a state of innocence. You can’t hold anything back once you’ve experienced the oneness of everything. Don’t worry. The effect is temporary. You’ll be able to lie again soon,” Teru said, smiling.
It still seemed like a disjointed mess in my head. Spiritual enlightenment or no, I still couldn’t make sense of it all.
“The child on Valon 8. What did she have to do with Drasheel? Was that her, as a child?”
“Does it really matter? She’s as much that little girl as any other. She shares in her people’s fate. Just as you share in yours. Distance doesn’t really make a difference, does it?”
“So why did she do it? Was killing Uprakon part of her plan all along?”
“What fun would enlightenment be if you were just handed all the answers?” Teru was really having fun with me now. Brought me to his cave just to play games with me when I was actually eager for some answers. My mouth was dry, and the taste of the tea on my tongue made my stomach turn.
“There’s no chance I could get some water, is there?”
“Help yourself,” said Teru, pointing to the kettle. I rose a little unsteadily to my feet and went over to the kettle. To my amazement it was still hot. My interstellar trip through my mind couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes in real time.
“So, Drasheel had her people destroyed by the Gix. Finds her way to Dawn, finds me, seduces me and then kills Uprakon. Why?”
“What makes you think that she was the one who killed him?”
“She had the totem, and she took off at the same time that he left. Seems like fairly clear deductive reasoning to me.”
“You really need to stop thinking with your head,” said Teru. He was still riding that line between guru and burnout in my mind. There was no doubt that what happened to me definitely was some kind of a mystical experience, so I had to concede there was something to his philosophy.
“So what did you see when you drank the tea?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Many things. The past, the future. I saw the girl.”
“Drasheel?”
“Not her. The one you left behind.”
“Celeste! I suddenly remembered. The Hammer. I had to warn them. “What did you see? Was she okay?”
“She is as she is,”
“Come on, give me something. It’s always riddles with you. I need to know if she’s alive. She may be in danger that I have to warn her about.” Teru gave me an exasperated look.
“Look, I understand what you’re trying to do here. You want me to be free of attachment, or whatever. This is just one life out of hundreds or thousands lives I’m going to live. I get it. I understand. But I still care about this life. I mean, I’m alive, right? And I’m just not supposed to care what happens to the woman that I’m destined to be entwined with? I’m still loyal to my people. You said it yourself: there aren’t any others like me here. So, maybe what I need is to find a way back. Tell me that I’ve still got something to go back to.” Teru stared at me for a moment.
“Let me tell you something. You are chained to the floor.” I let out a groan. Thwap! Teru smacked me across the back of the head, then returned his hand to a resting position and continued as if he hadn’t moved.
“You know nothing except your chains and fire that sits just out of reach from you. You know nothing of the fire, except for its light reflected onto the wall in front of you. You know that you’re chained with others. Some of them you can see, and some you can’t. So, what do you know of reality?” asked Teru. I thought about it a moment.
“Just what I can see.”
“Exactly. You don’t know anything else. The wall is your entire reality. Then, one day, you are picked up and unchained and you are dragged out of the cave. You see the sun for the first time. You see the sky. At night, you see the stars. You feel the wind and you get a taste of real freedom.”
“—That’s what you brought me here for,” I interjected, “to show me what lies beyond me reality.”
T
eru continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Then, you’re dragged back and put back in your chains again. You try to explain what you saw. But you can’t. There are no words that you can use that they can know. And after a while, you start to wonder if you really saw what you saw. Maybe you were wrong. Maybe there was really no surface world like you saw. So how can I tell you what I saw? I don’t know in the way that you understand knowing. I told you I saw your girl, and I did. But as for the answers you’re looking for, they aren’t here.”
I sat for a long time with this. Confusion coursed through me, mixed with red hot resentment. All these mind games were really starting to wear on me. But I also felt a strange kind of calm after a few moments of reflection. Maybe it was the residual effect of the tea, or maybe it was the kind of inner tranquility I was supposed to achieve from this little exercise. But whatever it was, I wasn’t angry anymore. Not even for the smack on the head. Teru could see it too.
“Let’s go.”
9
It was silent on the flight back. None of the Wings of Dawn gave me any trouble. I guess that whatever Teru told them had satisfied them that I wasn’t the killer. I still had a lot to sort through in my head. I wanted so badly just to grab a ship and fly it straight back to Federation space. I almost did. It wouldn’t have been hard to steal away and never look back. The girl who had drawn me there was now gone, and I had another who needed my help. But if I returned, what would I say? Hey, Celeste. Sorry I’ve been gone. I was broken out of the reprogramming center by a bunch of space pirates who gave me drug tea that made me have a vision of your death, so are you okay? It was insane. If I showed my face back home I would surely be interrogated and imprisoned, at least. At least for the moment I wasn’t in danger in Dawn.
Or, so I thought until I entered my apartment and felt the knife to my neck. Shit. So this is how it was. I get cleared of my crimes just to be assassinated out of sight. Ties up loose ends, I suppose.
Alpha Wing Page 12
