by Gethsemane
Pegasus Keeler shook his head so hard it almost dizzied him. “I don’t know, but I’ve discovered that if I had remained here, I would have accomplished nothing of consequence, and my friends would all be twits. And yet, leaving on Pegasus is almost as bad, I’ve found that my mission means nothing to anyone here.
Delia disagreed. “That’s just New Cleveland, or particularly, the University. The academic class is only interested in their own navel-gazing, but most of the planet is very excited about the Odyssey missions.”
Pegasus Keeler vented his frustration. “They made a cheesy fiction-drama about it; a ridiculous space opera with holographic sets and dim-witted actors spitting out second-rate dialog. It’s like I get no respect. No respect at all.” Delia smirked at him from behind her tea cup. “You never cared about respect before.” Pegasus Keeler grunted. “I’ve seen a much larger universe since we started this mission.
I’ve seen humanity, not just as a bunch of people I know, but as a great race that despite its foolishness, despite its pig-headedness, despite its tendency to destroy every good thing it manages to create spread itself across an entire galaxy.
“And in all those worlds, no one, anywhere, has kept it together as well as we have on Sapphire. And that’s something those pretentious fops from the Faculty Club we’ll never understand. Our world is special. We matter.”
Delia tried to interrupt him. “I have never known you to be this reflective. It’s interesting.”
But Pegasus Keeler was on a roll. “Furthermore, when they trivialize the mission we’re on, it’s not me that’s being disrespected, it’s my crew. They bring down all the work and accomplishments of my crew – who are truly exceptionable. And I think it’s because on some level, they realized that most what they do will amount to nothing. But history will remember Pegasus!”
She waited. “Are you finished?”
“I think so,” Keeler sighed.
“The last time I saw you give a speech that passionate, you were drunk and challenging the President of Sapphire University at Corvallis to a seed-spitting contest.” She reached across and touched this arm. “It’s good to see you like this, believing in something. I like it.”
Keeler gently took her hand from his arm and set it down on the rail, letting his hand rest next to hers, just close enough to be barely in contact. “In this reality, how did I manage to grow estranged from you.”
“Oh, come on,” she protested. “We’re not estranged. I love you in this reality, and you love me, too. But it’s different now. We have the love of two people who’ve shared a life together.”
“Well, excuse me,” Keeler sputtered. “I never got to have that. And he doesn’t appreciate you. Not the way I do.”
“He’s you,” Delia reminded him.
“Neg, he isn’t,” Keeler protested, although a nagging little voice in his soul was saying,
“Za, is too.”
Delia patted his hand. “In your reality, I died. When I died, I was frozen in amber…
metaphorically, I mean. I assume I was interred in a more conventional manner… But your memory of me was frozen in amber, and I remained always how I was, and maybe you even forgot about some of the niggling things, the little disagreements, the annoying habits that build up like… like tartar on the teeth, I guess. To grow old together, you have to grow together old.”
Keeler shook his head, and swore, “If it weren’t for him, I would never leave. When they pulled me back through the Gateway, would tell them, ‘Send me back! Send me back, now! And I would never leave you again.”
Delia raised one elegant arched eyebrow. “You would give up the exploration of the galaxy, that you were praising just a few minutes ago, as the most meaningful thing you have ever done.”
“For you, I would.” The little voice inside was silent at this.
She laid her hand gently on his. “Maybe… maybe… the purpose of this journey you’ve taken… and I mean the journey here, to this alternative life… is to give you the chance to confront yourself.”
Pegasus Keeler issued his assessment of this theory, “Oh, horse manure.” Delia chided him, “Is it really horse manure. Your desire for an Afterlife took you back to the place where you were most comfortable. It took you home. But it wasn’t enough.
You had to meet yourself. You had to judge yourself, and you found yourself wanting.
There’s something… metaphysical about that.”
“How so?” Keeler asked.
Delia cocked her head, raised her perfect eyebrows. “Judgment is a common theme in most mythologies of the Afterlife. In this one, you judge yourself.” Keeler snorted, “So, I’m the Allbeing. I’m God. Is that what you’re saying?” Delia lifted her tea to her lips. “I am saying, you’re the god of your own life.”
“But here I am judging a life I didn’t actually live. That’s just stupid!”
“Maybe that’s the criteria you set for yourself,” Delia argued. “Maybe that’s the benchmark you need to compare it to.”
“Then, maybe I’m just stupid… aw, hell,” Pegasus Keeler slumped over the top rail. “If I am judging myself like this, then what am I supposed to take away from it? That if I had stayed behind on Sapphire, I would have become a cartoonish buffoon with no purpose…
but on Pegasus, I became a cartoonish buffoon with a meaningful life. Okay, suppose that is the lesson here. What do I do with that?”
“Maybe your takeaway is much more simple than that,” Delia suggested.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re lonely,” she said. “A ship with 7,000 people, and you could only name four of them. What does that tell you? When you came to your Afterlife, you found me, maybe the one person you ever got really attached to. What does that tell you?” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “If you can love someone again, I think you should. You’re not the sort of person who should go through life by yourself.”
“Would that betray you?” he asked quietly.
“Neg,” she said. “Look, there has been something that has been on your mind ever since you saw me here, but you haven’t had the courage to ask it. So, I’m going to tell you.”
“Don’t!” Keeler begged. Her hand on his suddenly felt as heavy as iron. He couldn’t get away from her words.
Mercilessly, she went on. “You have always wondered if I was going to Corvallis to meet a lover on the weekend I died, in your reality.”
“Don’t do this,” Keeler begged.
“And I was,” she answered.
Keeler felt part of himself die.
“Although not in the way that you think…” she went on.
“Oh, jeez, it was a woman, wasn’t it?”
“Neg,” she had to stop herself from smiling. “Neg, it was Gabriel Van Helsing.”
“The Poet?” Keeler gasped.
“The very same,” she told him. “We went to secondary school together. And I knew he was attracted to me. And I enjoyed his attention, his flirtation… but that’s as far as it went.
We never consummated it.”
Keeler felt as though he had released a breath he had been holding for twenty-one years.
“Is it getting darker?” Pegasus Keeler asked. The light of the day had begun to dim, and Keeler feared he was being pulled back across.
“It’s an eclipse,” she told him. “It’s Ulysses, so it should be getting dark fairly quickly.” As he watched, the city fell into the umbra of the largest and closest of Sapphire’s three moons. Lights began to glitter on, making the city look almost like a sort of magical kingdom.
Keeler let his gaze linger over the downtown lights of New Cleveland. “Would you hold hands with me until they pull me back across?” he asked.
Delia smiled and took his hand, and they watched the shadow of Ulysses pass over the city and press on toward the far shore. Stars cane out, the old familiar constellations of the Southern Hemisphere: Hermes, Malachi, Morbo, Calculon. They sparkled in the darkening sky.
“I wonder,” Delia whispered. “If this entire reality was created just for you, what will happen to all of us when you leave.”
Redfire: After dessert had been served and finished, a busboy appeared from the kitchen, and began removing the plates, cups, and utensils from their table. John Philip noted that the busboy wore no shirt beneath his smock.
Just as John Philip was noting the bare, smoothness of the boy’s chest, the busboy looked up and cocked a smile.
Gabrielle busied herself flipping chairs up on the tables at the rear.
“Last call,” Philip John Redfire said, and he grabbed John Philip Redfire’s hand and examined the pulsing red beacon on his palm. “You’re going to be leaving us soon.” John Philip Redfire pulled his hand back. “Just when this was getting interesting.” The light outside changed quickly. Instead of bright noonday, it now took on the quality of a dreary, late afternoon in winter. John Philip looked at his red sigil, and suddenly felt all strange, as though he were in a deep sleep about to be awakened from a dream.
“Now, for the bad news,” Philip John Redfire began.
“Oh, neg, no bad news,” John Philip Redfire protested.
“Neg, it’s very important,” Philip John Redfire insisted. “Back when I was being tortured by an Aurelian agent…”
Halo Jordan interjected. “Tortured? That’s an odd way to describe receiving fellatio…”
“… I had two distinct visions,” Philip John Redfire continued. “I had a vision of a pathfinder ship and the crew of Pegasus crashed on a planet. I had another vision in which the Aurelians attack and destroy Sapphire. I have come to realize, that those are two mutually-exclusive destinies.”
“Meaning what?” John Philip Redfire asked.
“Either Pegasus is destroyed, or the Aurelians will destroy Sapphire,” Philip John Redfire paused. “I wish I could explain more to you, but I can not. All I can say is, what you do, when you go back, will determine which of these destinies comes to pass.” A pensive expression came over Halo Jordan’s face. When she spoke up, it was with a supreme sense of seriousness. “When you return to the temporal world. You will be lucky if you can hold onto one single thought, one single memory of this place. It’s important for you to choose the right thought to remember.”
“I think it’s obvious I should remember who I really am,” John Philip heard himself reply, but things seemed to be slipping away from him.
“Neg,” said Philip John Redfire, as though from a great distance. “I think my lovely wife is trying to clue you into something of much greater importance.” Redfire looked around. The lights in the café were turning off, and he could no longer see anything beyond the edge of the table. He felt frightened.
“Normally, this type of information would be kept from you,” said Halo Jordan, and though she spoke normally, John Philip Redfire found it hard to hear her. “It’s prophetic in nature; a closely-held secret. But you must know of it, the fate of our ship, of the entire human race may depend on you remembering this one piece of information.”
“I reject the premise of that,” John Philip shot back. “If there is truly some kind of Celestial Being running the shop, then he would know damn well not to entrust me with the fate of humanity.”
Now, the focus had drawn even tighter, and John Philip could just see the faces of the two others.
“Listen to her,” Philip John Redfire insisted. “You don’t have much time left.”
“I’m just saying that humanity’s fate can not hinge upon me,” John Philip Redfire argued. “I am sure there’s a back-up plan.”
“Shut up and listen to me!” Halo Jordan snapped, the first harsh words he had heard since his arrival. She fixed him with a look of all seriousness. “General Kitaen is going to betray you.”
“And what am I supposed to do about that?” John Philip demanded. It was very dark outside now, and now even the two faces of the other two had begun to fade around him.
In a moment, he would be alone in the dark.
Halo answered. “Let him.”
Chapter 14
Gethsemane—Port Gethsemane – Two Days from Impact: Dawn rose for the second-to-the last time over Port Gethsemane, and the sky went from black, to maroon, to a deepening shade of red. Volcanic gases and iron-rich dust kicked into the atmosphere by the groundquakes and surface storms had tinged the atmosphere. Yesterday, it had been a rust color, but today auburn. Tomorrow, it would be red, red as blood.
The sun’s rise was preceded by another tremor, strong enough to crack the windows in the tall towers in the middle of the city. Broken glass rained down in avalanches and spattered the empty streets. A sewer split open in an industrial zone, water… rusty and septic… flowed down the streets toward the harbor, flushing oil, toxins, and garbage ahead of it, but it was a bit too late for the environmentalists to get upset about it.
The morning was quiet for a half an hour. Then from the north came a rumble, like a steady thunder that moved across the sky, rising in volume and pitch as it grew closer. The sound carried to the docks where Anaconda Taurus Rook had set up her command post. It awakened her from a dreamless two-hour nap. She rose from her bunk, listened to the growing rumble, and pulled on her tactical jacket. The air had grown distinctly cooler over night, and a brisk wind clipped over the harbor.
In another corner of the tent, Shorpy snored underneath a survival blanket she had tucked over him in the night.
The first thing she did, before tucking her hair aside or using the field hygiene pod, was pull up a datapad and look over the ;atest evacuation figures. 6,229 children had been recovered, and 5,060 had been taken to Pegasus. The others were on docks, being checked out and prepared for the journey. There were still over 1,400 kids trapped by a dust storm at Fort Abaddon.
Alkema’s attempt to break up the storm by firing weapons into its convection cells had failed. If the storm didn’t break by noon today, she would have to give the order for Matthew Driver to take his squadron of storm-hardened Aves into the storm and evacuate.
They were running out of time.
Fangboner pulled aside the flap that served as the door to her command shelter. “Lt.
Commander Rook, tactical shows two unidentified ships moving toward us at low speed.”
“Hostile?” she asked.
“I don’t think they’re Angels,” Fangboner answered.
She stepped out of the shelter and zoomed her Spex at the aircraft approaching from the north. They were big heavy ships, whose design was so brutal they had to be military.
Four engine pods with rotating blades held aloft each ship’s bulbous fuselage. Tumultuous clouds of dark smoke trailed behind them. That smoke, coupled with varying pitches in the sound their engines made told her the ships had not been well-maintained.
Further along on the dock, she saw Max Jordan and her husband, Johnny Rook emerge from one of the rest tents. Max had just woken up, and was trying to pull on a tactical vest as he approached. He was still in the shorts he wore asleep.
Taurus Rook met her husband’s halfway along the dock. “We’ve got trouble, my love.
Where’s Skua?”
“In the ship, where it’s safe,” Johnny Rook replied.
Taurus Rook acknowledged this with a quick nod.
They watched the approaching craft grow larger and louder. They flew low over the city and then gradually set down on the far end of the dock. Hatches opened at the sides and rear, and a dozen or so Gethsemanian security troops in black body armor came out of them.
“Orders?” Johnny Rook asked.
Taurus looked behind her. About ten warfighters were lined up, waiting for her command. “Protect the children!”
Anaconda Taurus Rook began to wal
k toward them, seeking to meet them half way, before they could get close to the frightened children nearer the Aves parked at dockside.
While she moved, Johnny Rook urged the children to move closer to the Aves, behind the protective cordon of warfighters.
One of the security men gestured for the others to halt. It was Thall. Thall continued moving forward until he stood just a few meters in front of Taurus Rook. He favored her with the Authority’s martial salute, then pronounced loudly: “By order of the Planetary Evacuation and Relocation Authority, you are ordered to cease all planetary operations and leave immediately. You are further ordered to return all persons already removed from the planet Gethsemane back to the surface.”
“And if we don’t?” Anaconda Taurus Rook asked.
Thall gave an answer, one that he clearly was not happy to be delivering. “If you do not comply, we will deactivate the Gateway permanently. Your commander and his companion will be stranded permanently in the Afterlife.” Taurus Rook crossed her arms. “We reject your ultimatum and offer an alternative. You return to your base, finish evacuating your sorry asses off the planet, and let us finish saving these children.”
Thall marched a few meters forward, so that he could speak to Taurus Rook without shouting. “I don’t want to fire on you, but I have my orders.” So, Taurus Rook thought. Hildegard Kahn was upping the ante.
“Your orders are to leave children to die,” Taurus Rook answered him. “I can’t understand how any man could carry out those orders.”
“We believe these children will be reunited with their families on the other side,” Thall stated.
“But are you certain of that?” Taurus Rook challenged him. “We offer these children a shot at survival, of living complete lives, how can you want to take that away from them?”
Thall spoke to her more quietly. “If my men and I don’t stop you, Kahn has threatened to leave us on this side of the Gate. We are dead either way, so we have nothing to lose in fighting you.”
Taurus Rook’s shock at the ultimatum was soon overtaken by anger, not against Thall, but against Hildegard Kahn. The Gateway, she realized, was not just a means of rescuing her people, it was a tool for absolute control. What worse fate could be worse than being left to die on a planet doomed to cataclysm. And Kahn… the harridan … had been wielding this absolute power for thirty years.
