Her black and red hair was over seventeen feet long. It was lifted up above in decorative shapes, like an ornate umbrella surrounding her beautiful face and creating a canopy above the whole room. When she moved, the hairdo would adjust itself and gracefully follow her. As always, she carried her kitten with her.
The Queen Grandmother rested in the garden, near the rear of the ship. Gloryannana Mellifluous was still sovereign and chairwoman of the British Corporation, but her daughter and then grand-daughters had long since taken over the public relations role.
Gloryannana didn’t appear to be a day over nineteen. Her skin was tight. It glowed with the golden power of newly-won adulthood. Her eyes looked old. They looked gray and deep and she no longer had the patience she had once had to play games or pretend, to please others.
By the time Queen Gloryannana landed on the planet Venus, she was oldest human being in the world, and likely the oldest who had ever lived. It had cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but in the process they had learned tens of trillions of dollars worth about the human body, and longevity. Once the population was firmly under control, they would use the new science to expand the average human lifespan up from the current average of fifty-five up to perhaps a hundred and fifty-five.
Of course, in the meantime, the diseases had to be allowed to persist. There were too many billions of souls, and no power could sustain that many forever.
The Queen wondered what the correct population might be discovered to be. Perhaps one billion per world? Maybe as few as one billion stretched across the entire solar system? She suspected it could even be lower than that.
But Venus, Venus was a growing world. Only four hundred Venusians ran and swam through the molten metal. When she spoke to them they always sounded so happy. In the videos they always looked like they were playing, even when hard at work. So different from old Aelfwyrd’s brutally ugly Martians. A universe different from the diseased and exhausted population spread across the filthy old homeworld.
Venus was bright. Even under the thick mass of clouds and floating pools of liquefied metal, it was shining and illuminated. The colors seemed more vibrant than they did on Earth. It reminded the Queen Grandmother a little bit of Australia, in that respect.
Delilliyah met with the colonial leaders. Gloryannana didn’t bother with any of that anymore. She smiled as they were all transported into the grand hall, but she then slipped away to one of the observation chambers to see all that a non-transformed human could see of the second planet.
The air and the temperature were carefully controlled, but she could still smell Venus. It was a thick and meaty smell, like the roots of flowers just dug up from fertilized earth. The air always seemed to shimmer on the world of Love, even when the refrigerated air was as cool as April in England. The heat of the planet was a change in reality. It was mystical.
There was a figure sitting quietly across from the Queen. He wore a black hood and a long black cloak. The pew was orange, the same as the floor and the ceiling.
The man didn’t speak.
Beyond him were the massive observation windows. “Thirty feet thick synthetic diamond,” the Queen stated. “They say there is more diamond in this colony than the total amount which occurs on the planet Earth.”
“Who could want anything more?” His voice cracked. He was nervous and angry. The Queen understood that the man was not supposed to be there, and he might even be dangerous.
Gloryannana had left the guards behind in the main room. If the man was dangerous, she would have no one to protect her.
“Do you remember when there were more trees in the world than people?” the hooded stranger asked. “Do you remember the world when it was clean?”
“That was before my time, child,” she replied in a kindly voice. “Civilization was already out of control when I took charge.”
“Is that how you see it? You are personally in charge of all of humanity?” The stranger coughed in such a way that the Queen believed he had been trying to laugh.
“We all do our part.”
“But, no. You believe you own humanity. You patent billion-year old genes. You give and take humanity from the hopeless and empty. In an age of darkness you sell defective candles.”
The Queen took a careful step backwards. Carefully, she fished an immobilizer from her belt and braced herself in case she had to use it.
“This isn’t an age of darkness, child. This is just the beginning. Humanity believes it’s all so old, but we haven’t even started yet. This is just the prologue. It’s barely the beginning. We’ll create a universe of wonder yet. Just you wait and see if we don’t.”
“And we’ll forget about everyone who died to get us there?”
The Queen stiffened her jaw and nodded sharply. “As we always must. We’ll remember them, not for their pain, but for the joy they would want to experience with us. Their joy will be felt through us. It could never have been any other way.”
“And what about India?” The figure knelt forward and lifted her cloak back. Not a man at all, she was a disfigured woman with black boils across her face, deep clefts around her mouth and cheeks. Her hair looked full of mange. A fetid green substance leaked from her eyes and nose.
Gloryannana covered her mouth with her sleeve and pushed herself back against the wall. “There was no greater tragedy than what happened to India.”
The woman took a long step forward, delighting in Gloryannana’s repulsion. “And would you do it again?”
The Queen took out her immobilizer and lifted it towards the sick woman. With a graceful twist, the Indian survivor tossed her sleeve up into the air and then whipped it back down, pulling the defensive weapon from her sovereign’s fist.
“You own me, legally. You legally own most people on Earth now. If we want to work for you, or use your medicines, we have to use your patented genes. My insides are yours, like a lover. My disease is your possession.”
The Queen fell to her knees. She felt stiff stone hitting her bones. Her attacker wrapped her hands around Gloryannana’s face and began stroking it gently, rubbing her scabs and ooze all over her sovereign’s skin.
On the ground, Gloryannana was able to reach out. She clenched her teeth at the woman’s lecherous groping. She found the immobilizer, but instead of activating it, she used the high-tech device like a rock and slammed it against the woman’s neck as hard as she could.
The impact activated the electronics. The Indian woman was in the process of falling over backwards. The Queen was rising from her knees, but they were both enveloped and frozen by the immobilizer’s energy field.
Her eyelids were heavy. They moved slowly, as if each weighed ten pounds. The rest of the Queen’s body was paralyzed in mid-air. For two minutes, three, the two women floated there. For five minutes, and then seven, they didn’t move a fraction of an inch. By then, the Queen had managed to turn her eyes to look at the pathetic woman. Underneath the sickness and disease, she could have been beautiful. She might have been intelligent, maybe funny. The weight of the decisions she had been forced to make were heavy upon the Queen.
People like this didn’t understand the way she had fought against mass-sterilization, against manufactured wars. They didn’t understand how little support she had had when she decided to send humanity out into the stars. And more than that, so very few of them understood that all life on the planet would have soon gone extinct if she had done anything else.
But the Queen knew.
Shortly afterwards, the guards found the Queen and her attacker. They released them from the immobilization field and took the criminal into custody. The Queen spent six months fighting the diseases which had been brought to her by the woman’s gentle stroking hands. And then finally she died, most of the way through her second century of life.
10
PRESENT DAY
Charlie was surprised to discover that he slept. He woke up lying in the sand. Mew Tse was still draped across his sleeping form. Her f
ace was against his stomach. The sand had buried one of his legs and both of hers. A tall dune had appeared overnight just a few feet from where they slept. The two of them could easily have been suffocated.
As they dug themselves out, Charlie began to notice that one of the larger rocks which he had made their shelter against had become largely excavated. Below the rough and craggy face, the rock appeared to be a statue. Like the ones Mew Tse had shown them underwater. The top half had lost all form, but the lower regions which had just appeared clearly showed a waist, hands, and legs. The hands each had four fingers and a thumb. They couldn’t have looked more human.
He looked at another tall rock nearby and wondered if it might also be a statue. The sizes were roughly the same and they stood up at the same angle.
Mew Tse walked down to the shore to fill her cup and drink some water. Charlie began digging away at the bottom of the statue, shoveling the sand aside with his palms. It was hard enough work, but the sand was loose and cooperative. He made progress quickly and was amazed by what he found.
With the submerged statues, there had been some question as to whether they were real or a trick of nature. But with the two in front of him, Charlie had no doubt. These they were very old and weathered, but an intelligent being had carved the figures of at least two humanoids.
The sun was bright and it warmed him up quickly. It felt like the light was healing his sore and wounded form. Charlie stood in the shining sand and shells of the beach, digging away at the ancient statues.
He heard a splash, and Mew Tse disappeared into the water again without saying a word.
Pausing twice to get water, Charlie dug for about two hours, bringing most of the stonework up above the ground. He found a metal object between the two statues.
He didn’t hear Mew Tse return from the underworld until she was just behind him. She wore the projection of a uniform again, but in Charlie’s mind she was still naked.
“Shuttle,” she said.
Charlie took another look at the partially exposed metal object. It might be shaped similarly to their spaceship. He hadn’t expected it to be as big as that, but it was possible.
She knelt down and started to help him shift the sand away from the metal and the stone statues. The work went faster with her help.
By mid-day, Charlie lay back in the sand, drenched with sweat and aching with hunger. Enough of the sand had been shifted away for the hidden object to become visible. It lay at a ninety degree angle between the statues, where it had apparently crashed in ages long gone, but it was a ruined and broken spaceship.
Silver dust poured out of a broken hull. It felt like sand, but looked like flakes of sterling steel. At first they just found a few fragments of it, but as they moved the sand away a sizeable portion of the stuff fell from the machine and out into the beach.
There were no wires, but there were little plastic flattened orbs mixed in loose with the silver flakes, some of which seemed to still have a couple drops of liquid inside of them.
The door was twisted and dented. It came loose in Charlie’s hand and he was able, with great effort, to pull it away. But the inside was filled with sand and so they had to get to work again and clear most of that away.
Mew Tse went back to the water and swam again. Charlie wasn’t sure, but it seemed likely that the amphibious woman needed to submerge herself regularly. If not, it would at least allow her to cool off after the hot and hard work.
At a minimum, assuming that the ship was not going to be useful, the inside of the broken ship would be a much better shelter than they had had on Primus-3, and Charlie was sure that he could empty at least enough sand so that they could fit inside. Of course, there was the fear that the water would move the sand back and bury them inside.
He dug deeper and found a tilted bench up above him which looked suspiciously similar to the ones inside of their own shuttle. The color was different and the style wasn’t identical, but the similarity was unmistakable. He crawled along the sand, his back against the bench on the “ceiling” and was able to push his way through into a hollow inside.
There was no light. That far in, not even the sunlight reached him, but he had gotten past the sand and into the main body of the ship. It wasn’t all filled with sand. Most of it was hollow. Charlie reached around. He felt carpet. He felt loose cloth, but couldn’t tell what it was. He crawled along the bench on the bottom of the ship a little further, and then he wrapped his hands around a stick.
The stick felt like it was wrapped in cloth. Charlie rubbed his fingers against the cloth. It felt like corduroy. He put the stick down and felt around. His fingers latched onto a pair of eyeglasses. Next he found a belt and it became clear to him that these clothes weren’t wrapped around just sticks, but very old bones.
He reached inside of the clothing and felt the body. There was nothing left except a very dry skeleton. Whoever it was had died a long time before, and no soft parts had survived.
Charlie crawled on past the body and he found a set of controls positioned in what would have once been the front of the ship. It was all laid out exactly like their shuttle had been.
Suddenly there was light coming from the back of the ship. “Charlie?” Mew Tse called out, barely loud enough for him to hear.
“I’m at the front,” Charlie called back.
She shone her light around and it became obvious to Charlie that she wasn’t holding a flashlight, the beam was emitting from her hand. The brightness paused on the dead body which Charlie had crawled over.
“David,” he thought he heard her say.
“Aelfwyrd?” Charlie shouted in surprise and awkwardly started making his way back to the remains. She was right. He recognized the clothes. Doctor David Aelfwyrd had died there. He had died when the ship had crashed an unknown number of years before.
Charlie picked up the glasses again and then found the dead man’s survival pack, identical to the one which Wu Gwei had handed out at the beginning of the mission.
“You bastard. What did you come down here to do?” Charlie spoke to the corpse, laid out like a Pharaoh on his death’s bed, with his skeletal wrists crossed.
Mew Tse was digging and crawling her way through the sand pile, and so the light waved back and forth. In the twinkling, Charlie saw another pile of clothes tucked under the bench. With Aelfwyrd’s glasses and kit in his right hand, he made his way over to them.
There were more bones. The clothes were red and stiff with hardened blood. He found another survival kit. Mew Tse had by then made her way into the room properly and she shone her light at Charlie and his new discovery. When she saw the black pants and T-shirt she pronounced, “Avraam Fock.”
Charlie knew she was right. He was holding the Russian’s dead body. He had liked Avraam. It was terrible to see him die, and die the way that he had. Charlie found a metal weapon. It reminded him of the pipe Avraam had carried, but this one was a work of art. It was some sort of club, a blunt instrument which had carefully been constructed by a professional smith. He picked it up and watched it reflect Mew Tse’s light. It was beautiful.
Mew Tse placed her hand on the skull. By the light of her palm her own extended head looked massive to Charlie. She looked like an alien.
“Avraam,” She said sadly.
She then got up and began working her way over the bench and to the controls.
“Do you think you can make it work? Is that even possible after all this time? I guess they know how to build things in the 30th century.”
She took a quick look over the controls, tried pushing a few buttons and then replied, “No.”
“At least we have a shelter now.” Charlie sighed.
Mew Tse crawled over to the side of the ship, looking everything over carefully as she crawled over the ruins.
“What do you think they were doing down here?” He asked.
She didn’t answer.
“How long ago do you think this was?”
“Years,” she mumbled.<
br />
“But how many?” He asked.
No answer.
“Have you ever heard of anyone recording musical notes in the positions of gigantic rocks?”
She didn’t reply.
Mew Tse seemed to open a compartment and reach inside. She spent a minute or so fumbling around and then finally said, “We have food.”
Charlie raced over as fast as he could.
The stale and dry rations satisfied him in a way no steak ever had. He could think again. Charlie wondered what he was doing, what kind of dream put him on an alien world with a naked blue alien twisting and grinding on his lap. What path had given him back his nose, healed his scars, and then put a third eye in the center of his forehead? Why would any intelligence put him in this position. What would motivate them to send out an exploration mission which could never return home? And then delete their notes so often that they could never really learn anything?
How many men named Charlie Daemon had there been? How many had walked on these beaches fighting and befriending David Aelfwyrds and Mew Tses? What had they figured out which he hadn’t yet? Did some other Charlie know why the notes were deleted? Did he find a way around it, a way to send a message down to other iterations of himself?
He hadn’t imagined the stones. The positioning had been exact. They looked like nature and volcanoes had put them there, but the positioning told Charlie otherwise. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that the rocks had been put there on purpose to mark the place where the shuttle had been buried.
Some clever person had found an extravagant work around to the problem of the deleting notes. What else could he learn by reading the topography?
He felt certain that it had been him. There were other musicians on board, but this felt like his idea. Some other Charlie from the mists of existence had put the rocks there to mark the grave down through his reincarnations.
Or was that insane?
That night, they curled up on the soft bench and prepared themselves for bed again. She didn’t have to but, without saying a word about it, Mew Tse climbed on top of Charlie again and tucked herself in against his body. He didn’t tell her not to.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 17
