“Not as well as I’d like, but yes.” Gavin ripped a piece of fabric from the hem of his robe and tried wrapping it around the wound, but it merely soaked up blood.
“Don’t bother,” Will said, his voice rasping.
Adan could tell from his connection to Will that his body was shutting down, but Adan refused to accept it. “Use your bioseine—do something, Will. You’re not even masking the pain.”
“No. No more of that for me, compa…I want to die like a man, even if I didn’t live like one.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it. If I can just stop the blood—” a single tear slid down Gavin’s cheek as he tried in vain to staunch the wound. But the blood kept coming. Adan could hear his thoughts, “If only the esolace wasn’t down…”
“Adan,” Will’s voice was desperate, panicked. “Adan, come closer.”
“I’m here.” Adan bent down.
“I’m sorry—”
“You don’t have to say it.” Tears flowed freely down Adan’s face. “I forgive you.”
“Let me finish. I hated myself for what I did. You don’t know how hard it was…for me to go through with it once I found out what I had to do to you…It wasn’t my idea…I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t.”
“It’s over now. It’s in the past.” Adan’s tears splashed onto Will’s dusty garrick.
“I told you that you were a better person than me.” Will attempted a smile, but it ended in a grimace.
Adan thought he was surely going to lose him then, but Will gathered himself and looked Adan in the eye. “Adan, there’s something else I have to tell you,” he whispered.
Adan leaned in closer.
“I saw him…” Will said.
“You saw him? Who? You saw who?”
“The eidos. In the midst of the storm—glorious…and terrifying. Sparc must have seen him too. That’s why he attacked you.”
Adan searched Will’s face, wondering if he was hallucinating because of the pain.
“I see everything so clearly now…” Will said. He reached out with a blood-stained hand and grabbed hold of Adan. “I’m so, so sorry,” he whispered.
“You fought for me in the end,” Adan said, his voice catching in his throat. “I won’t forget that. I wish—I wish things had been different.”
Will did not reply. He was fading quickly. “Will, don’t go,” Adan pleaded.
A faraway look glimmered in his eyes, “Can you hear his voice? It’s like music…music on the wind,” he murmured.
Gavin ripped off a strip of cloth to stop the blood, but it was too late. Will closed his eyes and the beginnings of a brave smile formed at the corners of his lips. His body gave one last shudder and he was gone.
Adan lay in the soot, clinging to Will’s lifeless body, and gave himself over to sorrow. Hot tears streamed down his face amidst great, heaving sobs.
Gavin was right. Death never cut clean and this was the worst cut of all.
He stared at Will’s face as his tears washed it clean. Those eyes, those brilliant eyes—he would never see them again. Their light had faded forever.
In the flitting currents, surrounded by the crumbling ruins, Adan felt Gavin quietly wrap an arm around him and the two of them wept together as the wind whistled gently by.
Forty-Eight
Into the Vast
Adan’s tears were not yet spent when Gavin nudged him. “We have to go.”
“No, we can’t leave…” Adan muttered, though he knew Gavin was right. The winds were picking up again. The shell of the building around them was no place to be if the storm returned.
“You’re right. We should go,” Adan said, rising to his feet. “Good-bye,” he whispered, taking one last glance at Will, who, but for his blood-stained garrick, looked as if he were sleeping peacefully.
They turned and clambered through the wreckage.
“What was this place?” Adan asked.
“The Institute,” Gavin said.
Ominous swells of darkness pooled in the clouds above.
“What happened, Gavin? How did you get free?”
“It was Will.” Gavin raised his voice over the mounting winds. “He needed help finding the Developers. He used a zoelith to revive me.”
Gavin related the events after Adan had been captured as they cleared the ruins. Once in the clear, they took off racing through the streets of Oasis. Soon the winds grew so loud, they had to link their minds to communicate.
“So what happened to Darius?” Adan wondered.
“I don’t know. I came to just before the storm died down. I looked for his body, but it was gone. The storm must have carried him away.”
While Adan was not glad the storm had come or that Darius had died, at least he would no longer control the Collective—if there was anything left of it after this storm. The charcoal green skies above threatened to smother Oasis at any moment.
They pushed on through the Service Ring. Occasionally, amidst the noise of the winds, they heard the sounds of people running and shouting, but they never got close enough to see who they were, whether Waymen or members of the Collective.
“I don’t think anyone is going to survive,” Gavin remarked. “If only there was some way I could have stopped this.”
“The storm? How could you stop something like that?” Adan asked, his stomach churning anxiously in rhythm with the frothing sky.
“Not the storm itself, but the consequences of it. I keep thinking about Illiud’s prophecy. It said something like this was going to happen.”
“You tried to warn the Developers, but they chose not to listen. I don’t know if I would have listened either. It must have seemed so safe here before.”
They were nearing the Ancillary Rim, the outer ring of buildings in Oasis. The darkness extended its choking fingers. Winds kicked up towering clouds of dust, blanketing the outskirts of the city.
“Perhaps I should never have left Oasis,” Gavin lamented. “Perhaps I might have been able to change things.”
“But wouldn’t they have erased your memory? That’s why you made the virus, wasn’t it?”
“After I had the miasma channel I could have stayed here as long as I wanted and no one would have ever known what I was doing. I could have been the one to influence their thoughts instead of Darius. I could have made them see what they were doing, made them change.”
“Wouldn’t that make you just like Darius, though? Forcing people to be the way you wanted them to be?”
“I suppose you’re right. Still, I wish there was something I could have done.”
They came to the last of the outlying buildings. In place of the misty shroud from the first time Adan passed this way there rose an anxious slope of silt-covered rock covered in roiling dust clouds. Virid Ridge loomed above it in an ebony smudge.
The gusts beat against them as they toiled up the slope. They scrambled as fast as they could, but waves of flying debris kept pushing them back. Torrents of wind hissed past their ears.
By the time they finally achieved the rocky ridge, Adan looked back to see if the storm had overtaken the city. Shadows hid large sections of it. Sheets of silt whipped by. Adan remembered all those unconscious people inside the buildings. He could only hope they got out in time.
If the two of them didn’t hurry, they would be swallowed up in the devastation as well. Adan turned and plunged into the craggy labyrinth, the rocks giving them some measure of protection from the gusting winds. The hissing noises dissolved into woeful moans.
As they wound their way through the landscape, the empty garricks of the Waymen who had lost their lives on the Ridge, littered the ground. As chilling a sight as it was, Gavin had the presence of mind to stop and gather some supplies. They suited up in desert clothing and stashed as much kern as they could inside their garricks. They took two full water pouches each and two shivs as well.
A burgundy headband floated along the ground. Adan wondered if Zain had taken his advice and fled. He sa
id a silent prayer that he had.
“Forgive me. I couldn’t help but overhear your prayer,” Gavin thought as they started back through the rocks. “I wonder…who were you praying to? Or was it just a wish?”
“I don’t really know. I remember Illiud’s vision, and what he believed about Numinae. It seems hard to imagine someone like that. But Will said something at the end that made me think. He said he saw an eidos, one of Numinae’s messengers. Do you think he really did?”
“That’s hard to say. I’ve seen the memories of thousands of people just before they died. When someone is close to death, they often see strange things. Perhaps he was just speaking out of the confusion and pain. But perhaps not.”
Adan recalled the memory from the remin fluid. Once again he saw himself as Will, lifting his hands and reaching out to Numinae. The memory would continue to haunt him until he understood what it meant. But it was dear to him as well, like carrying around a small piece of his friend.
The darkness deepened the closer they got to the edge of the Ridge, until they were forced to go almost blindly through the rocks, feeling their way. Soon, the darkness swallowed up Gavin’s mind. Adan could no longer sense it.
“Gavin! Are you there?” Adan shouted.
Out of the darkness, he felt Gavin’s hand grab hold of his arm. “I’m here!” he yelled. “We have to get out of this!”
They kept hold of each other from then on. Each step took longer than the one before it as the winds fought to keep them from escaping the ridge.
Just when Adan felt he lacked the strength to wrestle the gusts for one more step, it was as if they broke through a wall and staggered out onto the edge of the Ridge. Behind them a huge black vortex moved off across the rocky maze.
Though they had passed through the worst of it, the winds still raged on the other side of the murky mass. But down on the plains below the landscape shifted dramatically. The ground there lay still for the most part. Only a few eddies of shifting sand disturbed the land. Pale green light bathed the horizon with promise.
As they headed through the foothills, the presence of Gavin’s thoughts returned.
“Gavin, there’s something else I’ve been wondering about. Darius told me that I was a memorant. Do you think he was telling the truth?” Adan asked.
“I thought that perhaps you were not because they let you escape with Will. But if were not a memorant, Darius would have killed you instead of taking you prisoner.”
“Then why am I not able to think and do things the way you can?” Adan wondered.
“Though the talent itself is inborn, it has to be developed. Even so, think about how you were able to survive in the Annex by using the minds of the assessors and even the Developers. Most of that was pure instinct. You picked it up far more quickly than a normal person would have. But to realize your full potential, you would have to be trained.”
Adan wasn’t sure he wanted to develop the kinds of abilities Gavin had, but he was curious about them. Perhaps once they got to a safer place he would ask him more about them.
By the time they reached the Desiccant Flats, the winds had withered to almost nothing. In fact, Adan could not remember the sky ever looking calmer. The emerald shade of green seemed almost inviting.
“Will told me once about Numinae’s dwelling place, beyond the clouds,” Adan said, hope swelling within him. He was happy to be able to use his own voice again. “Looking out across the Vast just now, I feel like I could almost see it.”
“It looks as if the clouds were ready to part, doesn’t it?”
“Will called it the Eversky. He said that’s where people go after they die. I wonder if that’s where he is now.”
Adan tried to imagine Will above the clouds, resting in that same mantel of serenity which blanketed him in death.
“I hope so,” Gavin thought.
“Well, we’ve made it,” Adan said as the light brightened across the flats. Something bordering on silence graced the infinite waves of sandy gray.
“Yes, I think so. But there’s still a long journey ahead.”
“I hadn’t thought much about that. Where will we go? I have no idea where the Welkin are or how to make our way across the Vast.”
“Perhaps we could find my memories first,” Gavin suggested.
“Right. Your memories. There’s no telling what’s locked away in that extractor.” Excitement flickered inside Adan, as if the lost memories were his own.
“From what you told me, Will must have left it back at the compound. It can’t be that far. Let’s just hope this break in the weather holds.”
Adan’s excitement drained as quickly as it came. “But we don’t know how to get there.”
“I may not, but you do,” Gavin said.
“What makes you say that? Half of my trip here, I was following the Waymen, and the other half, I was on the back of a somatarch with a sack over my head.”
Gavin chuckled. The sound took the edge off the tension Adan was holding inside.
“A memory is never wasted,” Gavin said. “Especially not when you have a bioseine. Even if you didn’t pay attention to where you were going, your bioseine did. It records everything.”
“You mean it can see things even when I can’t?” Adan asked.
“In a way. Your bioseine can chart the course you took with perfect precision.”
“Amazing. Then I guess we’ll head back to the compound, then,” Adan said, shaking his head. “I certainly never thought I’d see that place again.”
The winds rustled up the sands, as if daring them to make the trek across the open desert. Adan sighed, knowing the calm never seemed to last very long. But he scanned the horizon, somehow intuiting the direction they needed to go. Then, tightening his kaff, he set out into the Vast.
Dedicated to my wife Maria.
Thank you for reading my stories and
believing that they were worth sharing.
S.D.G.
“Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car…
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
One
Tabula Rasa
Two men sat across the table from each other in black polymeric chairs. They had met countless times before, but never in this place. The room was old, but it was new to them.
One of them had thick, dark hair and a short beard. He wore the gray robes of an assessor, the security force which monitored the Collective. His robes had black accents on the shoulders and the hem, denoting him as the Assessor Primary.
The other man was unremarkable in appearance. He wore the same silver lab coat all scientists in the Collective wore. His most notable thing about him was the knowing look in his plain brown eyes. Those eyes had seen much, but they were seeing things in a new light since the destruction of Oasis.
“My men found a ship in the desert, in sector seventeen,” the dark-haired assessor said, preferring not to use his bioseine, despite the speed which such mind to mind communication afforded.
“You’re sure the ship belonged to a scout?” The scientist’s face remained impassive. It had never displayed emotion as far as the assessor knew.
“It was a radial jaunter, the kind typically used by the Delegation for interstellar travel. It was severely damaged, but the pilot was not found.”
“That would be the second one. It is only a matter of time before one of them discovers our presence here and constructs a beacon portal.”
The Assessor Primary nodded gravely. “With
the anti-orbital battery down, we won’t be able to stop them from doing so. The only question is why they haven’t done so yet. Our only hope is that the pilots died from the injuries sustained in their crashes.”
“Highly unlikely. They are escalons, after all.”
“All this cursed biological tampering,” The assessor rubbed his forehead. “Darius should have finished off the Delegation when he had the chance. He should have known they would come after us. And destroying the Nebula—how did we ever sign off on that? That was our only advantage over them, militarily.”
At the mention of Darius’ name, the scientist’s eyes fogged over as he struggled to recall details about the past, details that were slowly trickling back now that the lead memorant in the Collective was gone. “Darius was an idealist. He must have had his reasons. But that does not matter now. We must prepare as best we can. How close are our forces to being field ready?”
“They are still unproven when fighting in large numbers. The simulators can only test so much.”
“So send some to the surface and test them there.”
“On what? The sand?” the assessor scoffed.
“The andros, of course.”
“That would hardly be a test.” The desert natives may have had numbers, but their weapons were far too primitive. His eyes lit up with a thought. “Why not send the somatarchs against the renegade? We know where his base of operations is now.”
The scientist regarded him with an austere expression. “We might want to wait until we’re fully ready. He has managed to build up quite a little army in the desert.”
The assessor’s frame shifted uncomfortably beneath his robes. He didn’t like getting military advice from this walking test tube. “Who do you think crashed the energy mesh? The longer we leave him out there, the more time we’re giving him to augment his forces. They’ve already attacked us once.”
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