by David Mack
“But you can fix that, can’t you? Extend it?”
“Just because we can do a thing, it does not follow that we should do a thing. Veronica made her wishes clear long ago. For us to defy her stated desires and impose our cures upon her would be a violation of her personal sovereignty, and an act of unforgivable violence.”
Tears of rage fell from Hernandez’s eyes and were warm against her cheekbones. “You ‘violated’ Valerian, didn’t you?”
“Only with your permission,” he said. “As her guardian, you assumed the right and responsibility for making that decision. But Veronica is capable of making her own choice, and she has.”
Fletcher’s faint whisper, like a breath across dried leaves, commanded Hernandez’s attention. “Don’t fight it, Erika. Let me go.… I beg you.”
Hernandez’s thoughts were trapped in a storm of chaotic emotions—remorse and denial, rage and guilt. She picked up Fletcher’s hand again and held it more tightly than before. Her sorrow was a tourniquet around her throat, and her voice quavered as she choked out the words, “I don’t want you to go.”
“Promise …” Fletcher’s voice faded as she ran out of breath. She wheezed as she inhaled and continued, “Don’t be seduced, Erika. Refuse their gifts. Don’t take their medicine. Please.”
It wasn’t the last request she had expected. “Why not?”
“Because the price … is too high.”
A spasm jerked Fletcher’s body into grotesque poses and blocked her airway. Her eyes squeezed shut as her face tensed, and her hands clenched like spiders shriveled in a flame.
All that Hernandez could do was weep and wail as Fletcher twitched in her death throes. Then the seizure stopped, and the tension left Fletcher’s body. A soft gasp escaped her mouth, and she looked up at Hernandez with a beatific smile.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m free.”
From that moment to the next nothing seemed to change, but Hernandez felt the difference, and she knew that everything had. Fletcher’s eyes were still open, but they no longer saw. The warmth was still in her hand, but it would soon fade. Life had become death cradled in Hernandez’s arms.
Inyx reached out and caressed Fletcher’s brow with the delicate cilia that the Caeliar used as fingers. “I’m sorry, Erika,” he said. His visage was as stern as ever, but the tilt of his head and the timbre of his voice emoted sympathy. “Would you like to say something before I inter her remains?”
She let go of Fletcher’s hand, closed her friend’s eyelids with a gentle pass of her fingertips, and lowered the body to the ground. As she stood on trembling legs, Inyx straightened to his full height beside her. Hernandez looked again at the dark pit in the ground that was waiting to receive her friend.
“I have nothing left to say,” she declared, and then she turned and walked away from the three trees, and down the hill.
He called out, “Can I take you back to your house?”
She didn’t answer him. There were no words.
* * *
No place felt like home for Hernandez.
The house on New Erigol was too big for her to live in alone. Though she and Fletcher had resided there for less than half a year, it had been built for the both of them. It was theirs, and with Fletcher gone, its open spaces had taken on a conspicuously empty quality. Hernandez’s footsteps echoed when she crossed its hardwood floors; the pattering of rain resounded on the roof, reminding her that what had been meant to serve as a home was now just another hollow cage.
Worst of all, no matter where in the house Hernandez went, her eyes were drawn to the world outside her windows, and it seemed as if every view was of the three trees on the hill, where Fletcher lay buried. She tried to shut it out, ignore it, look away, pretend she didn’t see it, and go on with her life. But it was always there, the defining element of the landscape.
After six days sequestered in her house, Hernandez stood in her kitchen and called out in a loud voice, “Inyx!”
It took him a minute to answer her summons. She’d expected another of his trademark light-show entrances. Instead, she heard a knock at the front door. Doddering steps carried her there. She opened the door to see Inyx standing with his head atilt. “Is everything all right?”
“No,” Hernandez said. “I want to come back to Axion.”
He pulled back and sounded confused. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.” She turned and felt overcome with melancholy as she looked at the barren confines of her house. “I can’t stay here.”
Inyx stepped back from the door, onto the edge of a travel disk. “I will do as you ask,” he said. “But I would like to know why you’ve chosen to abandon your home.”
“It’s not a home,” she said. “It’s just a house.” She stepped outside, intending to leave without a look back, but she couldn’t help herself. As she turned to take a final gander at the house, she said, “I always knew that, barring some event that killed us both, either I or Veronica would die before the other. I used to tell her I didn’t want to die first, because I refused to let her have the last word. But the truth is, I didn’t want her to die first, either—because I just don’t want to go on without her.”
She offered a silent valediction to her short-lived house in the country and stepped onto the silvery disk with Inyx.
He asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Yes,” she said, looking at the house. “Raze it.”
* * *
Night in Axion was never silent. The Caeliar didn’t sleep, and their labors respected not the hours.
Large crystalline pods had departed the city-ship weeks earlier and fanned out across the star system, to begin the Herculean labor of preparing the next phase of the Caeliar’s all-consuming Great Work. Inyx had kept the details of their task from Hernandez at first, but when she saw the thin dark line being traced across the dome of the sky, she began to suspect the nature of their new project. “Are you building a planetary ring?” she’d asked, full of renewed hope and wonder, eager to witness the creation of such a marvel.
Then Inyx had dashed her optimistic fantasies by telling her the truth. “No,” he said. “We’re building a shell.”
“Around the entire planet?” she’d protested.
“And its star,” Inyx said. “Privacy is essential now.”
In the weeks that had passed since that conversation, on those rare occasions when she was able to sleep, she’d been plagued by nightmares of being sealed in a brick wall, buried alive, or trapped in a covered well. The smothering terror of being confined alone in the darkness had roused her again this evening. Driven by lingering fear and adrenaline, she rose from bed and drifted like a shadow through her compact quarters.
Her body felt lighter than air, insubstantial. She’d lost the will to eat days earlier, and the gnawing feeling in her stomach had abated quickly. Since then, her senses had taken on a dreamlike surreality; her vision felt softened at the edges, and sounds were muffled, as if underwater. Air smelled sweeter, and she was convinced it was because part of her essence had begun to transcend the mundane limits of sensation.
Walking the boulevards of Axion, surrounded by the milling packs of Caeliar, Hernandez felt as if her own passage had become as effortless and graceful as theirs. She let herself stare freely at all of them; wide-eyed and slack-jawed, she displayed all the bewilderment they’d provoked in her since her first day in their city.
Not one of them looked at her.
She realized that to most of them, she was a nonentity. Except for Inyx, and occasionally Edrin, none of the Caeliar regarded her as anything more than a nuisance and a burden—a pet they had been duped into adopting, and whom they either resented or ignored, depending on whether she misbehaved.
A crowd of them gathered in an open amphitheater, hovering in tiered rank and file, listening to a mournful musical performance that resonated from beneath a perfectly engineered acoustic half shell. There was only one performer on the stage f
ar below, but she sounded like a quartet.
It had been so long since Hernandez had seen the city at its best that she’d forgotten the wonders it contained. The Caeliar, with their staggering gifts of art and science … their casually dynamic habit of coming and going in flurries of light, or just floating away, like soap bubbles on a warm summer breeze … their unaging bodies and unfathomable machines … they were power personified.
Standing alone among them, Hernandez saw herself as she really was: tiny, weak, old, and fragile.
She looked up at the stars, which once again flickered on the other side of an atmosphere, and her eyes were drawn to the empty patch of black sky where the view of the starfield had been obstructed by the Caeliar’s shell-in-progress. A bigger and better prison. They’ll even take the sky from me.
Eyeing the towers that loomed overhead, she thought of Johanna Metzger’s fatal leap. Then she pictured Sidra Valerian, reduced to a screaming puddle of burning flesh. Desperate to exorcise that horrible memory, she forced herself to remember Veronica Fletcher’s dignified, quiet exit, but it brought her no solace. Envisioning her friends in happier times yielded no comfort, either.
Hernandez had only the most tenuous grasp of her present moment as she wandered and explored the empty avenues and plazas of the darkened city. Her mind cast itself back to her life-that-was: the Columbia NX-02, her crew, the people she’d left behind on Earth … Jonathan. They were all hundreds of years in the future, and from her perspective they were all long gone.
She stood at the top of a steep staircase of white granite, high above a circular plaza. In the plaza’s center was an inverted fountain, a circular cavity into which water poured from a surrounding ring. A geyser of spray shot up from the hole’s center, dozens of meters into the balmy night air. The falling mist caught the pale starlight while it still could.
Holding out her arms as level with her shoulders as she could, Hernandez felt for a fleeting instant as if she could fly. Vertigo twisted her thoughts even as it seemed to lift her bare feet from the cold ground. She gave a push with her toes, shifted her weight incrementally forward, and hoped she was strong enough to do what she should have done so long ago.
Gravity made her its slave and tugged her into a tumbling plunge down the staircase. Delirious and feather-light with hunger and dehydration, she barely felt the easy snaps of her brittle old body breaking with every rolling impact, with every hammering collision against the corner of a step. The pummeling was unrelenting and overwhelming, and it pushed her to the brink of euphoria. Then she slammed to a halt on the plaza and lay very still, her body throbbing with the tactile memory of violence. She focused on the icy caress of the stone under her twisted body and imagined it bleeding away her last ounce of heat and life, snuffing her out with a cold and gentle embrace.
As she lay on the ground waiting for death, an amber shimmering of light formed on the periphery of her vision. At first she hoped it was her final hallucination before expiring.
Then the light began to assume a familiar shape.
Please let him be too late, she prayed, as she let go of awareness and sank into what she could only hope was oblivion.
* * *
“Are you in any pain?”
Inyx’s question awakened Hernandez. She opened her eyes and was partly blinded by the flood of white light that was focused on her. It took her a moment to realize that she could see only with her left eye. She thought about his query, took stock of herself, and said, “No, I don’t feel anything at all.”
He leaned forward, blocking some of the light. She was relieved to have a respite from the glare. Staring up at his enormous, silhouetted head, she asked, “Where am I?”
“A sterile facility,” he said. “I was concerned about a risk of infection by organisms from the planet’s atmosphere.”
A wave of his hand conjured a rectangular sheet of reflective liquid metal above and parallel with Hernandez’s supine body. At first it showed only her reflection—broken, bruised, and bloody—but as Inyx spoke, the image on the sheet rippled and shifted to reveal scans of her internal organs, deep tissues, and endoskeleton.
“Your fall caused great damage, Erika,” he said. “You’ve suffered compound fractures in both femurs, as well as simple fractures in your left tibia, right fibula, right humerus, the left ulna and radius, and the pelvis. In addition, you’ve cracked the parietal and occipital bones of your skull, concussed your brain, detached your right retina, and ruptured your liver and spleen. You’d also collapsed your lungs, but I took the liberty of repairing them and blocking your pain receptors so that I could discuss your options with you.”
Lolling her head away from him, she muttered, “What’s there to discuss? I’m dying, Inyx.”
With another gentle sweep of his arm, he dispelled the reflective liquid screen as if it were nothing more than smoke. Gradually, the bright lights dimmed. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and close to her ear. “You will die today if I don’t treat your injuries,” he said. “Is that what you want?”
Part of her wanted so badly to cry, but she felt emptied out, desiccated. “I don’t know what I want,” she said. “But I feel like I can’t go on. Not alone.”
Inyx stepped behind her head and walked around to the other side of the metal surface on which she lay. He passed out of her field of vision for just a moment. When he reappeared, she saw him completing the final details of his physical transformation into the likeness of Veronica Fletcher, as she had been in her youth. The sight of him wearing her friend’s appearance like a cloak filled her with fury. “Don’t do that,” she snapped at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said in Fletcher’s voice. In a blink he altered himself into the semblance of Fletcher as she had been only weeks before her death. “Is this—”
“Stop it! I don’t want your imitations, or your illusions.”
Fletcher’s face and form expanded and changed color and texture until Inyx stood beside her again. “Forgive me,” he said. “I only meant to offer some comfort.”
“Well, it didn’t help,” she said.
He pivoted away from her for a few seconds, apparently feeling chastened. Then he turned back and said, “You have not answered my question. Do you want medical treatment?”
“What good would it do? It’s not like I have long to live.”
“That might not be true,” Inyx said.
She harrumphed. “Of course it’s true. Look at me, Inyx, I’m an old woman. How long do you think I’ve got?”
“As long as you want,” he said. “If you let me help you.”
“The way you helped Sidra? No, thanks.”
He squatted beside her and dropped his voice to a whisper. “After the incident with Sidra, Ordemo and the Quorum ordered me to cease my research into your species’ physiology and genetic structure. I acknowledged their order. And I disobeyed it.”
The intensity of his words alarmed her. “Why?” she asked.
“Because I had to know the truth about what happened to Sidra,” he said. “I needed to know if she died because of my error, my negligence. But I found no evidence to support that.” His tone brightened. “As a result of my investigation, however, I learned a great deal about your species and how to treat its myriad diseases—including what you call ‘natural’ death.”
Hernandez rolled her good eye. “Death isn’t something you cure, Inyx. Death is a constant, not just another illness.”
“In your species, natural death is the end result of unchecked cellular senescence,” Inyx replied, with profound earnestness. “Most of the problem is related to the shortening of your cells’ telomeres, which are sacrificed, bit by bit, to prevent the loss of your working DNA during cell division and replication. But these losses lead to your aging process, and, eventually, you run out of telomeres. That triggers your cells’ preprogrammed senescence—cell death. Then your organs fail.”
“That’s a long way of saying humans get old and die.”
“What I’m saying is that I believe I can correct that flaw in your genetic program. Aging and death are a disease, Erika. Don’t you want the cure?”
She considered the implications of what he was saying. Beyond mending her shattered bones and ruptured organs, he was offering her something that humanity had searched for and dreamt of for eons: eternal youth and near immortality. A bite of the fruit of the Tree of Life itself.
“No,” she said. “It’s too much. I can’t.”
He lowered his head and sounded despondent as he said, “I wish you would reconsider.”
Fletcher’s defiant warnings echoed in Hernandez’s thoughts, and she gave them voice. “Inyx, if I accept that kind of gift from you, it would be the same as sanctioning my captivity and that of my crew. I’d be dishonoring all their sacrifices.”
A note of desperation crept into his voice as he replied, “Erika, your crew and your friends are gone. Only you remain. And no matter what they might have wanted or believed, you should make the choice that’s best for you, here and now.”
“I think I am,” she said, feeling her strength ebb.
He reached out and transformed his waggling cilia into more human-looking fingers and a thumb, and took Hernandez’s hand. “I’ve seen how much death frightened you in the past,” he said. “But I don’t want to appeal to your fear, and I won’t ask you to set aside your resentment of me and my people for having imprisoned you. I’d like you to consider an entirely different rationale for accepting my help.”
Hernandez’s curiosity overcame her guilt. “Which is …?”
“By your reckoning, I’ve lived for tens of thousands of years,” Inyx said. “In all that time, I have encountered very few sentient life-forms from outside of my society. But of all the beings I have met, you are one of the most … vital.”
She tried to swallow the saliva pooling in her mouth, but her tongue and throat felt like poorly lubricated gears grinding to no avail in a dusty machine. “Ironic of you to say so,” she said in a hoarse croak of a voice.
