“I’m ready to vote. The choice doesn’t seem very hard after watching it all.”
“I’ll notify the other governors,” spoke the general. “I’m sure you could use a little rest from it all.”
“Thank you. I could.”
Kelly dreaded the thought of counting all the hours she had spent the last few weeks sitting before the silver screen of her castle’s cinema, alone in the surrounding darkness while spying on a fallen world’s barbarity. That silver screen was meant to be a backdrop for laughing, young romantics falling in love, or for sweeping, historical epics of Earth before humankind spiraled into so much superstition and dogma. Watching the bearded clerics pummel and shape children into weapons felt to her like a perverted use of projector light. She was tired, and her eyes itched for all the hours staring at the screen. Yet Kelly once more tapped her fingers upon her seat’s armrest and summoned one of her favorite classics from the castle’s vast film archives. Soon, music and dancing once more filled the cinema’s air.
Governor Kelly Chen was surprised that she didn’t feel the smallest urge to cry.
* * * * *
“May I offer you something to drink, Governor?”
Governor Chen shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m not very thirsty.”
The server nodded and turned to silently continue through the maze of governors crowding the viewing deck aboard the space station castle of New Paris. Kelly wondered how any of her peers could eat cheeses and caviar and drink bubbling Champaign and red wines moments before they would witness the utter annihilation of humankind’s homeworld. She harbored no doubt that she made the proper decision, that she had voted in the only way that secured human civilization and gave it a chance to flourish on distant, new worlds more incredible than even the one about to be lost. But as clear a choice that vote proved to be to Governor Chen, she couldn’t imagine how anyone kept a thirst or appetite when they thought about all the history and promise that was about to vanish. Perhaps, those governors, like General Harrison, had long before recognized that Earth was lost, so that they had more time than did she to come to terms with the consequence. She had only wanted to help her castle learn to grow tomatoes as efficiently as possible. She had so reluctantly chosen to pursue her term as a space station governor. Certainly, she had never dreamed that she would ever gather upon a viewing deck to view Earth during its moment of destruction, a moment she believed couldn’t be avoided.
Kelly felt General Harrison arrive beside her as she stared at the orb whose waters, despite all of the land’s ruin, maintained such a blue glow.
“I still think it’s a shame,” Kelly sighed.
“Because it is,” agreed the general.
“And yet we do it.”
“We must,” the general waved a server away before she could present him with a polished tray of cheesecake slices. “I’ve come to live with what we’re about to do by convincing myself that the destruction of our homeworld is only one more step in the natural chain of humankind’s ascendency. I tell myself we’ve always been destined to step into the stars and leave that world behind us. Consider all the great minds who have come before us. Our forefathers and foremothers, Governor Chen, strove to preserve that planet as long as possible. The ancestors of those savage tribes did the very opposite. Our great-grandparents tried to warn the world of the looming ecological disasters, did all they could to convince the others to make simple sacrifices to stave off the drought and the heat before it exploded into so much famine, war, pestilence and death. Our ancestors argued as rationally as they could. They collected all the objective data that they might. And still, the ancestors of those savages chose to deny it all, on account that any sacrifice was too much of an inconvenience, or that any scientific paper was a threat to every single value they claimed to have followed during their lifetimes.
“So our ancestors quietly resigned themselves to the folly of their fellow woman and man. They researched and built, while their neighbors and peers descended deeper and deeper into ignorance. The dimwitted mocked the efforts to build the great castles. The dull bemoaned about the cost to raise those space stations just below the stars. And those who chose to ignore all the signs of how the world unraveled despised our ancestors when they started to lift into the heavens and leave the foolish behind. Those who hated what our ancestors built conducted so many wars and instituted so much slaughter until all the old gods and bigotry melded together into a single deity of cruelty irony named the ‘Maker.’ And then, those fools, who time turned into savages, turned their killing upon us. Only by then, it was too late, so that while their bombs, swords and guns claimed a few of us still left upon the old ground, they failed to touch those of us whose efforts built a place on the threshold of the universe.
“I believe, Governor Chen, that we deserve this place in the heavens, and that the tribes do not. Toil, sacrifice and work have provided us with an opportunity to lift humankind above a lost world’s rubble. I believe we’ll come to call so many new planets home. I will not mourn for the old world, for I know it’s simply time for us to rise.”
Governor Chen lifted a finger and caught the eye of handsome server bearing a tray of mimosas. “I think I might have a drink after all.”
The lights of the viewing deck dimmed just as Governor Chen felt the drink’s warmth soothe her nerves. The power reserves had reached their maximum, and the darkness signaled that the time arrived for the castles to drift into their proper positions for the ultimate answer’s execution. The blue world beyond the wide window turned and shifted, and everyone held their breath as a low hum vibrated through the walls and tickled through the crowd of dress shoes. All the governors gasped as great beams of golden light flashed from each space station to bind them together into a cage that contained the planet below. A wave of vertigo pulsed through Governor Chen’s mind, and pressure forced her ears to pop. And then, the great, old and blue Earth simply vanished in less time than was required to wink. No fiery explosion blinded those observing in the viewing deck. No concussion caused the space station’s walls to creak. No pinhole of a black hole swirled at the center where the Earth had been. The homeworld was simply gone, and the stars betrayed no melancholy as they continued to twinkle.
“And so the savages are all dead?” Governor Chen asked with a whisper.
General Harrison shrugged. “I suppose so. But the engineers and scientists all agree that there just might a chance we only delivered them and that ancient planet to another parallel place. What matters most is that we’re finally safe. The savages will never reach us in these stars.”
* * * * *
Chapter 12 – A Sight to Inspire Prayer
“You’re sure it’s not too small?” Blake smiled as his wife Rachel planted a kiss on his cheek. “I know this settlement cottage was a little smaller for the money than some of the other catalog models, but I really thought this cottage was much more solid.”
Rachel laughed and leaned back against the tiles of her new settlement home’s roof. “Too small? How can anything be too small when all the heavens expand over our heads?”
Blake’s eyes beamed in delight. “This moon named Regis sure provides one hell of a night sky.”
The purple and pink gas giant named Abingdon loomed throughout much of the Regis moon’s eastern, night sky. Its wispy clouds swirled and spun as Blake and Rachel watched that planet’s furious storms rage against one another from the safety of their settlement home’s rooftop. When they succeeded in calming their racing hearts long enough to listen to the wind, they could her the friction of that planet’s storms murmuring through their sky, like some low chant that might’ve been hummed by strange and hooded monks.
“It’s such a miracle,” Rachel grinned.
Blake chuckled. “Oh, I’m sure all the mathematics and physics they made us study on the castles would well enough explain it all if you took the time to work it out.”
Rachel shook her head. “Oh, no they wouldn’t. I just kno
w all those scribbled numbers and equations wouldn’t come close to accounting for any of it. The air’s too pure in the lungs, and it tastes too sweet. It’s never too cold, and it’s never too hot. Don’t you dare start preaching about mathematical odds and possibilities, Blake. Don’t you dare break the mood with that kind of talk. That sky is an absolute miracle, and there has to be some kind of divine hand responsible for it all.”
Blake playfully embraced Rachel and pulled her body onto the blankets they unfurled across the rooftop. “You’re sounding a little like some tribal savage.”
Rachel kissed Blake hard and long. “And don’t you try to next tell me that you don’t like it when my blood turns a little savage. I think I’m going to build a little shrine.”
“A what?”
“A shrine,” Rachel extracted herself from Blake’s roaming hands just long enough to take another long stare at Abingdon’s whirling typhoons. “I thought I might collect a few of those incredible flowers with the beads of gold that pulse throughout their petals. They seem to grow so thick along that gravel path to our front door. I thought I might tie some of those flowers together and make a kind of wreath that I might place in a kind of wooden shrine. Promise me you’ll make one for me, Blake.”
Blake held up his hand. “But I don’t know the first thing about building a shrine, or even what one might look like.”
“Oh, but you did so well putting the pieces of this settlement cottage’s kit together,” Rachel pressed herself harder into Blake’s chest. “Just a little roof for the flowers. Something to protect the wreath from the wind. Don’t you feel the slightest urge to give thanks to whatever magic is responsible for creating such a view as the one we’ve discovered on this moon? Don’t you think we should at least give a little prayer to whatever god made such a heaven? There can’t be anything wrong with that.”
Blake nodded and let his hand drift a bit higher up Rachel’s leg. “No, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with building a shrine at all.”
* * * * *
About the Writer
Brian S. Wheeler calls Hillsboro, Illinois home, a town of roughly 6,000 in the middle of the flatland. He grew up in Carlyle, Illinois, a community less than an hour away from Hillsboro, where he spent a good amount of his childhood playing wiffle ball and tinkering on his computer. The rural Midwest inspires much of Brian's work, and he hopes any connections readers might make between his fiction and the places and people he has had the pleasure to know are positive.
Brian earned a degree in English from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He has taught high school English and courses in composition and creative writing. Imagination has been one of Brian's steadfast companions since childhood, and he dreams of creating worlds filled with inspiration and characters touched by magic.
When not writing, Brian does his best to keep organized, to get a little exercise, or to try to train good German Shepherd dogs. He remains an avid reader. More information regarding Brian S. Wheeler, his novels, and his short stories can be found by visiting his website at www.flatlandfiction.com.
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