by Chad Huskins
“What keys?” Moira asked.
“Why, the Scrolls themselves,” he answered, opening his hands to offer the logic of his words. “Their residue—unseen and unfelt—saturate a person’s body. Not all Scrolls have enough residue left, but clearly this one here does,” he said, pointing to the Kennit Scroll, still giving its light-show. “They are the keys. Or, rather, receivers. A means for whoever the so-called Worshippers were to communicate with the Strangers. Perhaps the Worshippers were not worshipping at all, perhaps they had only discovered a way to make contact. I still haven’t worked that part out yet.”
He shrugged.
“In any case, as soon as I heard another Scroll had been discovered, I immediately queried as to who had it in their possession, and for how long. When I learned that Lyokh had sole possession of it, I got access to his file, as commander of the Crusade. And it confirmed my suspicions. That’s why I sent him out there. That’s why he’s leading the team to the center of what he assumes is a dead station.”
Moira’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What do you mean? What have you sent him into?”
“I’ve sent him on a vision quest. One that I once enjoyed myself, but alas, my body was much younger then, the residue of the base molecules still rich in my system. Were that I was that young again…” He trailed off a moment, gazing deeply into his past.
“Senator, what is it you think the captain will see in there?”
“Difficult to say. I think it’s different for everyone—Isoshi records indicate one or two of their kind also experienced these anomalous visions. My belief is that the Items, the Scrolls, are tapped into a certain frequency to whatever transmitter it is locked on in the future. It opens a line of communication to vast stretches of time. But Lyokh’s dreams were of a three-mooned world, so I suspect he will visit there, in mind, and potentially in body.”
“You mean…you walked into a chamber on a Watchtower, and the residue…or whatever you got from the Scrolls…they activated some antitelephone line on the station?”
“Yes,” Kalder said.
“What did you see?” Moira asked.
The senator didn’t answer the question. They sat in pregnant pause. Finally, he said, “A moment ago, you asked me why I’m telling you this now. It’s because, in the future—possibly the very near future—we will be seeing things. Things you may not comprehend. Things you will not want to comprehend. Captain Lyokh is about to be made into a believer, and I need you to be one, as well. Though, without the experience, you may still have reservations.”
“What experience? What’s about to happen, Kalder?”
“I imagine Captain Lyokh is about to see something truly wonderful. And it will be for him, and him alone.”
IT WAS A feeling like no other. Of falling. Of spinning. Lyokh sensed terrible fear, and was only distantly aware that it was his.
Then the feeling passed into his throat and poured into his belly. It trickled down his spine and to his sphincter, to his bowels and his knees and feet and toes. It radiated through his face like a hot morning sunrise, pushed against the backs of his eyes, pushed into the very tips of his hair.
He stood there, aware that his jaw was slack and that he was drooling, aware that his penis had gone as rigid as his spine. He started trembling as power quaked within each of his cells. He felt nauseated, and excited, and enthralled. Blood ran from his nose and tears poured from his eyes. His heart raced.
Echoes…like in his dreams…
He heard whispering grass and felt a cool breeze on his cheeks.
Then he felt cold.
And alone.
The light of the chamber faded and he was left in darkness. From the darkness, there came a light. It began deep, deep inside his palms, and burned through his hands and into his retinas. A holographic display opened before him.
Stars.
He saw stars wheeling over end, frothing and swirling like billions of grains of salt cast onto a black tablecloth that someone had shaken clean. Vomiting, bowel movements, ejaculation, salivating, bleeding, it all happened at once. Soon, he could not even recall his own name. He wasn’t even a he anymore, he was nothing and no one.
There was only the stars and an endless nothingness that continued spiraling into a forlorn mockery of all things living. A dead sea of stars and gaseous clouds that stood towering above and below and all around.
It was impossible for the mind to correlate everything it saw, and it saw everything.
And then, there came the birth of a planet.
: Wyrm
The planet could not have formed any other way. Lyokh knew that as soon as he saw it. Only the unwitnessed white-hot rage and continuous cycles of violence could have forged it, only the relentless crucible of fire, ice, and time could have purified it.
It all began around two stars, one blue and one white, both of them brilliant and bold. The larger one was bright blue, and like all blue stars it was larger than the white star it captured. The two had been involved in a long, slow dance, one whose first flirtatious introduction began a hundred million years before their two fledgling systems clashed. The blue star was carrying with it three fully formed planets, gas giants all, and forty or so protoplanets. The white star was towing only one gas giant and one protoplanet. Both stars brought along an inestimable number of asteroids, comets, and cosmic dust.
The stars never collided, but the two systems they brought with them came together in a horrendous collision. Neither star system had been anywhere close to being cooled or fully formed when they met, and now, in their formative years, they were being torn to pieces, children facing a violent fight between parents.
Chaos reigned.
After a hundred million years, a stint of time so vast it is meaningless, two of the gas giants collided. Unbeknownst to the stars watching, or indeed to the planets themselves, or to anyone, complex organic molecules began to form in the protoplanetary disk of cosmic dust grains swarming around both stars.
After another few million years, while the dust tried to settle, some of the cosmic bodies began to find a rhythm to things. They found a path, a figure-eight orbit around the two stars, which were still dancing around a shared center of mass in the vacuum. While the stars danced, the gases, dust, and ices formed huge looping rings around each of them, swerving and swimming and colliding, some of them accumulating into larger globs. The largest clumps attracted only more clumps.
There was no one point when Lyokh could identify any clump as the beginnings of the planet, for it was an assembly line of ever-evolving parts, some of them growing to colossal size, only to be smashed to pieces by another similar-sized rock.
Some of the rocks collided, others only raked each other, slicing off clumps that would go spinning out of control on wide, long, oval-shaped orbits, where they would remain for millions of years until one of the bigger clumps snatched them up, and made moons out of them.
The two stars continued to dance, and their ever-cooling system began to congeal. The combined gravity of each piece pulled things inward, inward, inward, compressing and crushing and heating. The largest gas giant grew to be just one-hundredth the size of the blue star, but it gathered the majority of the system’s metallic hydrogen and molecular hydrogen, which it stored greedily in its core, as well as a good amount of helium. However, it lacked the necessary amount to conduct fusion, which would have made it a third star. It was not meant to be.
So the gas giant compressed, tightened, drawing everything around it in, all while the two stars cooled. And as they cooled, the blue star became a little smaller, a little less blue. It was still the dominant partner in the dance, though, and the children that it and the white star had spawned were still growing, still making children of their own. And all their gravitations were influencing each other now, the dance becoming more intricate, a bit wobblier at times. But the wobbliness also brought a certain creativity, bizarre interactions that could not have been predicted by any of the parties involved.
The planet of wyrms grew out of this. Lyokh could already see it, though he hadn’t reached that point in time yet. Racing through the figure-eight orbit, collecting dust and gases like a giant net, the planet swelled, compressing in on itself and cooling. While it had been molten, its lighter materials slowly fell towards the center, forming a strong, thick core and mantle. Its pieces were tugged by titanic forces, its body stretched and heated while its materials swirled and agglutinated.
And all this time, it was being bombarded. Millions of ice-bearing asteroids and comets came raining down through an atmosphereless sky. The planet’s surface, though cooler relative to its beginning stages, was still covered in seas of molten lava, pushed out by uncountable volcanoes that blasted at all times. The heat of the planet and the ices from the comets brought new processes to the planet. Ices were liquefied then cooled, liquefied then cooled, again and again, influencing the landscape in more creative and unpredictable ways.
The planet spun on a crazed axis of rotation, without any semblance of control, and Lyokh followed it on its sickening course. It went about the developing solar system with total abandon, as bold as an adolescent believing in their own invincibility.
Lyokh wanted to leave. He wanted to exit this nightmare of ancient time and endless days, but he couldn’t. He was forced to watch and endure. He screamed, and his voice went unheard.
ALL THE WHILE, organic molecules were settling around the planet, gathering close as the planet continued for millions of years on its figure-eight orbit. Then, the planet suffered a heavy impact, its heaviest yet, a glancing blow by not one, but two protoplanets, all in the span of half a million years. These scrapes sent two separate spouts of ejecta into the skies around the planet. Like the planet, these two separate spouts agglutinated and cooled, forming moons that raced around it. One moon was less than a third the size of the other, but together they stabilized the planet’s fluctuating axis of rotation. The planet was no longer spinning out of control, a kind of harmony had been found.
Two hundred million years passed, another stretch of time that is utterly useless for any chronicler to consider. Two hundred million years of the planet cooling, circling, weaving in and out of the titanic fight between its parents. Two hundred million years of being handed off from one star to the other, as though they were trying to hand the troubled child off to each other. It’s your burden now. No, yours. Two hundred million years of that bickering orbit.
Two hundred million years. Lyokh saw it all, felt it, endured it, and yet raced right through it.
Because of the figure-eight orbit, at some points in the year there were two stars in the sky, and at others the blue star eclipsed the white, or the white would attempt to eclipse the blue, but couldn’t quite do it.
Gases piled high around the planet, and soon it had a weak atmosphere. The stars did not notice. The planet itself did not notice. No one noticed. No one but Lyokh.
The asteroid bombardments happened less frequently. Eventually, they appeared to cease altogether. Even still, the planet had its visitations, and continued weaving around its stars. Its surface was unforgivably hot. If anyone had been present to walk it, they would have heard the constant popping and crackling beneath their feet, felt the gyrations and fluctuations of the uncertain crust.
Only Lyokh was present to chronicle it.
He screamed.
No one was listening.
The planet would have been hit by a great deal more impactors, had it not been for the gas giant. It was still there, still becoming its own. It had come first, and was growing the largest of all. And like a big brother, it was either pulling in the comets and asteroids that would harm its younger sibling, or else swatting them away by capturing them in its gravitational pull and sending them careening out of the solar system to join the ring of cosmic leftovers that was circling the entire system. It had been doing this all the while, it was doing it now, and it would do it always.
All this time, the planet that would spawn the wyrms circled, cooled, hardened, emitted gases, seethed, and waited. Lightning storms boomed perpetually across the globe, exciting the atmosphere, illuminating the dark nights, and creating one interesting byproduct: phosphorus. This byproduct would sit around with nothing to do for several million more years…
The planet continued to circle, and harden, and storm, and seethe, and wait.
Lyokh endured it all.
EVENTUALLY, THE PLANET found a use for all that phosphorus. It found a way to use phosphate as a kind of “spine” for the supportive strands of DNA. Lyokh was made to see this, made to understand it. Prokaryotic cells emerged, microscopic organisms that used carbon dioxide as a carbon source, and oxidized inorganic materials in order to extract energy.
It would be impossible for an observer to tell exactly when this happened, impossible to isolate the moment proteins, carbohydrates, and amino acids suddenly compiled to form instincts of survival. It happened too slowly, over millions of years while things on the surface of the planet continued to look very much the same. The two moons moved in and out of sight, eclipsing the suns sometimes, and each other at other times, and the planet roared and belched and crackled.
Lyokh screamed the whole time. No one listened.
THERE CAME A time when life finally split. It would never be known how or when life split between bacteria and archaea, only that it finally took permanent shape after about two hundred million years. The bacteria developed photosynthesis, which at first did not produce anything approaching oxygen. It was merely a process, one of thousands or millions tested by mutated forms of bacteria. Almost all of them failed. One bacteria exploited a proton gradient to generate a triphosphate, a mechanism that would catch on and spread to all of its descendants, allowing them to synthesize what they needed to thrive.
Five hundred million years of this is what it took to get the process more refined. Five hundred million years of life moving glacially along, with their countless unwitnessed trials and errors. Five hundred million years of bacteria going about their new programming. During that time, the atmosphere settled in, the ices around the equator froze and melted, froze and melted. Sometimes the planet’s axial tilt took it through ice ages. The mountains of ice cracked the surface, creating some of the fractures that the water would flow through once it melted. Oceans formed. And lakes. And valleys.
Also during that time, solar flares from both suns would wrack the planet and upset its atmosphere, sometimes causing devastation, and other times the radiation caused mutations, most of which killed off bacteria, while scant others encouraged mutations that, in the long run, had a handy side effect.
Lyokh stopped screaming. He had become numb now. Numb to it all…
Eventually, cyanobacteria evolved, using water as a reducing agent, which allowed them to produce oxygen as a waste product. The oxygen oxidized the dissolved iron in the oceans, creating iron ore. The oxygen levels in the atmosphere rose, which actually began to poison and kill off much of the bacteria. Only the hardiest were fit to survive, only the most tenacious were fit to weather the eons-long storms.
Of storms, as the oceans became wider and more thoroughly spread out, they began influencing heavily the weather of the planet. The two moons were extraordinarily close to the planet, producing tides a thousand feet high. Hurricane-force winds dominated the landscape, driving and eroding and carving the still-malleable stone.
Another two hundred million years passed, and now the planet began to experience a strong new phenomenon: heavy plate tectonics. The surface was hardening, yes, but deep underground things were still shifting, still molten, and that meant that the solid surface wasn’t on such good footing. Molten lava exploded up from the bottom of the sea, the superheated air exploding as soon as it touched the cold waters. The seas boiled for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years at a time. Small mountain ranges beneath the waters were pushed up, up, up by plate tectonics that shook the whole world. Large shelfs, built up over a hundred
thousand years, would sometimes break apart and go crashing into the seabed, leaving a wound on the planet that never healed. Precious few of these underwater mountains would form peaks that would breach the water’s surface and become islands. Most of those islands would fall back into the sea, but a scant few would remain.
Like Lyokh.
AND SO BEGAN the breaking up of the continents. The planet had three main continents, one of which remained around the equator, going almost all the way around the planet’s middle: the Ring Continent. A tiny continent just above that one sank halfway into the sea before stabilizing. Another, fatter continent began breaking up into six smaller pieces, spreading out along the southern hemisphere. Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere remained all ocean, with only a smattering of island peaks.
Three hundred million years passed. Three hundred million years in which things went on exactly like this. Three hundred million years of hurricane-force winds and thousand-foot tidal waves and solar flares and ice ages and heat spells and earthquakes. Such beautiful violence, such tumultuous rage, such horrendous operations, and all of it witnessed solely by Lyokh.
Finally, there came microscopic sacks that contained membrane-bound organelles that had a diverse group of functions. This was the rise of the eukaryotes. They emerged as the prokaryotes devoured each other.
Four hundred million years passed, and finally single-celled eukaryotes mutated into “male” and “female” parts, an accident that separated their genes into clumps of two different packets. They were now unable to reproduce if they did not mate. Thus, sexual reproduction was born out of necessity, out of an urge for one set of genes to reconnect itself to its other half. Most life on the planet would never again know the bliss of “oneness” experienced by its ancestors, it would be locked forever in a war to reclaim its missing links. Male seeking female, female seeking male.
Lyokh saw this, and it sparked a degree of hope inside of him.
