A Just Farewell

by Brian S. Wheeler

  General Harrison knew the enormity of it all would bring that lone, abstaining governor to him.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 4 – Slender Shoulders Holding the Weight of the World

  Governor Kelly Chen slumped in her seat as she felt the weight of the world crush upon her slender shoulders. She had reluctantly run for the governor’s office of the Neo Madrid space station, agreeing to pursue the title only after her family and neighbors urged her to bring the pluck and focus she had displayed while maximizing her station’s yields from its hydroponic gardens to the chief executive’s office. Kelly had never craved power, had seldom craved attention or clout. Yet she sat in the front row of Neo Madrid’s great cinema and opera house all the same and considered whether or not she could agree to the destruction of an entire world.

  Twenty-four hours ago, she had felt young in her middle age. Now, she felt old, and she feared looking into a mirror lest she discovered that her lustrous, black hair had overnight turned completely gray, or that wrinkles had gripped to the corners of her eyes and mouth until her skin looked like crumpled paper. She feared her body chased to keep pace with how the weight of the world aged her soul.

  She had cleared her appointment calendar the moment she returned from the emergency session of governors held on the castle of New Paris and instantly retreated into her space station’s grand opera and cinema house, a majestic work of architecture that attracted guests from all fifty-one of the castles orbiting old Earth. Kelly always loved escaping into the cinema, and she considered the private sessions her title granted her with the cinema’s large screen the only benefit of her office she truly enjoyed. Whenever the stresses of her station taxed her, Kelly found the time to take a private seat in the front row of that cinema and watch a black and white movie of how Earth had been before the rise of the zealot savages, to smile at one of the colorful musicals films that celebrated a lost time. Kelly thought it incredible that such music and dancing, such romance and love, once existed on the planet’s surface. She would never have believed it if the builders responsible for the great castles hadn’t possessed the wisdom to archive the films that documented such a time, and watching those movies filled with children playing in green parks always gave her hope that the influence of the clerics could one day be eradicated so that the old world of laughter and mirth could be resurrected from the ashes that currently covered ancient Earth.

  But she knew nothing could ever be recovered should she give her approval for the ultimate answer. She knew that the world that smiled upon her from the flickering, silver screen would never be anything more than a projector’s light the moment the castles instituted that plan that promised the destruction of the zealot savages.

  Trespassing light flooded into the cinema as the visitor for whom she waited opened one of the entrances behind her to enter the dark theater.

  “I’m down here, General Harrison,” and Kelly raised her hand to help the general as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. “I’ve saved a seat for you down here in the front row.”

  Kelly felt her grip tighten on her seat. General Harrison had immediately answered her request for a consultation. He had set off from the military offices housed in the Black Rock space station the moment she asked to speak with him, and while the general traveled to reach Neo Madrid, Kelly had waited in her cherished cinema and done her best to calm her nerves by focusing her attention on what the world had once been.

  “I’m grateful for your invitation to your castle, Governor Chen.”

  General Harrison smiled very softly in his crisp military uniform, the ribbons from his tours fighting against the savages on Earth gleaming softly as the ghosts on the movie screen flickered. Kelly stood from her seat, and she winced at a dull ache that had settled into her knees, making her wonder if such discomfort was yet another indication of the years the decision facing her had overnight thrown upon her petite figure. The general accepted her hand, and Kelly was surprised by the warmth of the hand the general offered to her. She had expected the general’s fingers to feel like stone.

  Kelly smiled. “I feel I should be thanking you, General. You’ve answered my request very quickly.”

  “I wish I could’ve arrived sooner,” and the general waited for Kelly to sit first before he followed, “but each castle has a security checkpoint now that forces the space tram to stop at every entrance platform. They put me through a security scan at every stop. Even my uniform couldn’t slip me past the body x-rays.”

  “The attack on our rockets have put all us governors on edge.”

  General Harrison nodded. “And that’s a good thing. I was thankful for the scrutiny.”

  “Do you think they can reach us in our castles?”

  The general shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but our castles are too delicate for any uncertainty. One bomb, detonated at the right location, could bring an entire castle burning into the atmosphere. We didn’t think the savages could harm our rockets, and yet we’ve just lost five transports filled with innocent civilians trying to retreat a world not yet conquered by so much hate.”

  “And you think the ultimate answer is the only thing that can protect us?”

  “I do.”

  Kelly pressed a touchpad hidden on the arm to her theater chair, and the black and white movie on the screen vanished. “Did you suspect I was the one who voted against that proposal?”

  “I might’ve guessed your name after a few attempts.”

  “You must think I’m weak and naïve to hesitate to give my approval.”

  The general shook his head. “I think quite the opposite. I think it showed that you have the conviction to follow your heart. It’s a shame that more governors don’t have your courage to vote according to their true conviction when presented with a proposal of such enormity.”

  Kelly’s fingers again tapped at her armrest before the cinema’s projector hummed to introduce new ghosts to the screen.

  “I hoped to show you something, General.”

  The greatest achievements of humankind’s creation flickered upon the screen – photographs of the magnificent artworks and structures long ago razed upon the planet and stolen from civilization. Beautiful temples, churches, mosques and domes graced the screen. Pyramid peaks stretched high above jungles and deserts and reached towards the sun. Tall spires stood upon giant, granite arches, with windows of stained glass to tell tales of magnificent creatures and gods that once tumbled through man and woman’s imagination. There were photographs of pious monks turning massive prayer wheels while snow-covered mountain ranges in the background silently listened to their prayers. Golden calligraphy shimmered across the screen, holy words carved and scribed by master craftsmen. There were so many photographs brimming with bells and organs, with instruments shaped to sound wonderful music.

  Kelly and the general silently watched the images glow upon the movie screen. Great oil canvasses and watercolors reminded them of how a brilliant world’s colors once burned before madness set all the forests on fire. There were such graceful and powerful sculptures that through marble captured the male and female form. Fine jewelry bent and shaped by lithe fingers sparkled like the very stars. There were great chalices shaped from glass. Strange statues of metal and steel stood in the middle of great, green gardens of fishponds and topiary menageries. Kelly and the general exchanged not a word. They hardly breathed. They watched the great creations, and they envied those who lived in the world before the clerics and the savages murdered and destroyed everything they feared was never created by their terrible Maker.

  General Harrison was the first to speak after the last image faded from the screen. “Angkor Wat. Teotihuacan. Thebes. The Vatican. Westminster and St. Paul. The Blue Mosque. The Buddhas of Bamiyan. All of them beautiful. All of them incredible.”

  “So you know what humanity was once capable of creating.”

  General Harrison nodded. “Perhaps once, Governor. But all of those great works are destroyed. All of
them lie in ruins. All of them pulled down by the savage tribes. All of them judged by the bearded clerics as blasphemies and affronts to their Maker god.”

  “And do you believe such things can never again be realized on Earth?”

  General Harrison instantly answered. “I do not. I assure you, Governor Chen, Earth is forever lost. It was lost a long time ago. We can only do our best now to insure that the zealotry responsible for destroying those great works or architecture and art never reaches the stars.”

  “And we do that by employing the ultimate answer?”

  “We do. One world will be lost, but consider how many other worlds might be saved.”

  Kelly’s fingers tapped her seat’s armrest. How did she arrive at this moment? What decision had she ever made that placed such responsibility in her hands? She had aspired to be a great gardener of the castles. She had only hoped to make her family and neighbors proud by doing all she could to insure that their gardens orbiting the remains of the old world thrived so that the population that escaped the savages didn’t starve. She had only wanted to play a part in the research that would discover the means to transplant tomatoes and potatoes into alien soil, how to increase protein yield so that settlers could thrive on moons and planets very different from their native Earth. Yet somewhere along the way, she had become a governor. Something strange, and horrible, happened so that she sat in the front row of her beloved cinema and decided whether or not she would destroy an entire world.

  “Is it guaranteed?” Kelly turned to the general. “I have to know that without a doubt that nothing about those savages will survive. Your proposal must be failsafe, because there won’t be anything else left to us if we fail to destroy so much fear and hate.”

  General Harrison paused. “I don’t think a perfect guarantee exists anywhere in this cosmos. But I know that, sooner or later, that the tribes, or their zealotry, will reach our castles and pull them down. I believe those savages will burn even our colony worlds if we fail to extinguish them when we can. I believe the ultimate answer gives us the power to do just that.”

  “I want you to show me again how it will work.”

  “I thought you would,” and General Harrison peeked over his shoulder, as if checking to make sure no savage hid in the heavy shadows. “Remember that what I’m about to show you remains classified. Don’t forget the oath you shared with your fellow governors that no one would mention anything regarding this plan.”

  General Harrison removed a small hard drive from an inner pocket of his crisp uniform jacket. Governor Chen quickly opened a panel on her arm rest and inserted the drive. The projector winked once as it accepted the information upon that drive and waited for Kelly to command it to play the general’s proposal upon the screen.

  General Harrison nodded. “The objective of the ultimate answer is the complete obliteration of the tribes.”

  Kelly sighed. “At the expense of our Earth.”

  “I say again, Governor, we lost the Earth a long time ago.”

  Kelly tapped her armrest and the projector whirled. A glowing image of Earth floated upon the center of the screen. The Earth diminished as if the camera retreated from the blue planet as icons representing all fifty-one space station castles blinked into the display. The tram lines and conduits that linked those castles together retracted into the space stations as each castle drifted into a precise location to surround Earth like terminals in an otherwise invisible cage. A soothing, feminine voice suddenly arrived to explain how the positioning of those castles represented the final preparation the remnants of a civilized humanity would need to take before the ultimate answer would save them from the scourge of the savage tribes that conquered the old world below. The voice explained how all of the castles’ non-essential systems would momentarily divert power so that beams of light would knit the space stations together and encase Earth within a deadly spider web. The voice didn’t waste the effort to attempt to explain the science behind the process, for the governors didn’t need to know how the ultimate answer really worked; they only needed to understand the scale of the proposal’s destruction.

  The spider web of laser light grew brilliant and pulsed before delivering ripples, rings of bent space and time, into the heart of the Earth. The planet shimmered as one ripple after another constricted upon it. The familiar land masses contorted into strange shapes, pulled and stretched by the massive, unseen forces that flowed through the very fabric of existence. Then, in the time it took to wink, the great planet Earth, once home to millenniums of life and civilization, collapsed upon itself into a single mote of light, which pulsed once like a distant, new start before simply vanishing from the heavens as if it had never ben, leaving all fifty-one space station castles alone to encircle empty space.

  “There’s not a single chunk of debris. There’s not even an asteroid cloud.” Kelly sighed.

  The general nodded. “There will be nothing left that might endanger any of the existing castles.”

  “But where does it go? What happens to Earth?”

  “I don’t think any of the engineers and scientists responsible for the ultimate answer know,” the general replied. “Perhaps the small, black hole that exists for only a moment delivers the Earth to some parallel universe. Or perhaps, the Earth simply ceases to exist all together. What matters is that the planet will no longer exist as far as we’re concerned. What’s most important for us is that the tribes will no longer threaten our survival, and that the savages will never deliver any of their zealotry and savagery to any of the stars or worlds that wait for us.”

  Kelly stared at black, empty space on the screen where a glowing planet had been. “And now the decision whether or not to go ahead with that proposal falls upon me. One way or another, I must decide.”

  “You must. If you refuse vote, you decide to spare the Earth and the savage tribes, a choice I believe only keeps us in danger.”

  “I’m as afraid of the tribes as anyone else who’s ascended into the castles, but how can I vote for this? How can my soul live with? Do the tribes not have children who might offer us all hope? Do any people deserve such a punishment?”

  “The tribes deserve it,” answered the general. “What if I could prove to you that the tribes are irredeemable? What if I could show you that they’re no longer even human, that they’ve devolved into a kind of virus?”

  “How would you do that?”

  “You will find another file on my drive currently installed into your system. Run that application, and I can explain.”

  Kelly easily located the file, and a quick double-tap with her fingers upon her armrest executed the program. The silver screen winked a moment before revealing a view of a dimly-lit chamber whose earthen walls suggested it to be subterranean. The camera’s angle was very low to the ground, and it moved about the chamber as if mounted to a pair of wheels. General Harrison removed a small remote control device from another of his jacket pockets, and his fingers rotated the small joysticks as the camera focused upon a young boy nestled into the dusty blankets of a cot.

  “What am I looking at? Who is that?”

  The general twisted the joysticks, and the image settled upon a half-dozen large insects scuttling about the floor, their shells painted in vibrant colors and illustrated in a variety of patterns.

  “The men and women in castle intelligence have little difficulty in infiltrating the tribe’s hovels,” the general chuckled. “Our camera is mounted upon one of the large, burrowing cockroaches so common now on old Earth. The tribes will never suspect we watch them through such small eyes.”

  “You control the bug?”

  The general nodded. “We’ve fused small circuitry directly into the insect’s nervous system. It’s tedious and time-consuming work. But it’s amazing work. You can control the creature’s movement, and you’ll have access to all the little tunnels the creatures burrow to connect all the hovels together. “

  “And what if someone squashes my friend beneath a
boot?”

  “Then you flip a switch on that remote and access the eyes of another bug.” The general cycled through the eyes of the cockroaches that scurried about the floor. “They’re very easy to operate, and they’re smart enough to hurry back into the shadows the moment you set the remote control aside. They’ll make no noise, though their sensitive ears will eavesdrop on the faintest of whispers. The men and women in intelligence burned the midnight oil trying to decide the best place to drop our little spies, and everyone thinks this village is the perfect place, and that that boy provides the perfect subject.