Beyond the Sabre, a great dark forest lay. The trees were taller than any on Earth, grander even than the mammoth trees on the slopes below Abid’s fortress.
Of course, those are all gone now, I reminded myself.
The trees. The fortress. Abid.
“Don’t you want to eat?” Cal asked as I keyed open my door.
“Later,” I said. “When it quiets down. You’re right about Maura. She’ll find me and want to talk. And I don’t feel like talking tonight.”
“Oh.” Cal sagged.
“I meant I don’t want to talk to anyone else.” I shot her a smile. “You, I’ll always talk to. It’s like you always say: how many people are lucky enough to have a pretty blue girl for a best friend?”
For an only friend.
“You really think I’m pretty?” She pretended not to know.
“The most beautiful thing on any world,” I said.
And I meant it.
* * *
The next several months brought hard weather and harder work. Warm rains fell day and night, and the drainage systems I’d designed were pushed to their limits. I came home every night wet and exhausted, but happy.
I’d never slept better in my life.
I claimed not to have a purpose, but with my help, the people of Sumer settlement 209 would have a food output exceeding all others. In fifty years, more settlements would spring up all along the great green river.
In a thousand years, humanity will cover this world.
Just like on Earth.
I wondered sometimes if I was doing the right thing. By helping these people, I was setting off a small chain reaction that might well accelerate their dominance of Sumer to happen hundreds of years faster than it might otherwise have done. Cal came to believe I was doing it out of the natural goodness of my heart. Maura, who I’d befriended, believed the same.
As for Aly, so caught up in designing S.R.’s for terraforming, she might’ve known what was really on my mind. I saw the looks she gave me in the rare moments we saw each other, and I saw the sadness always hiding behind her smiles. She loved me, and I loved her. As siblings, even ones with childhoods as strange and broken as ours, we had few secrets between us. It was hard to hide the truth from someone who’d known me since birth.
And so, on the nights when the clouds were thin enough to allow it, and when the rains slowed to a drizzle, I crossed the green river and stood in the first field I’d worked in. Under my arm, tucked in a waterproof satchel, the skypad Aly had designed for me lay hidden. In the skies a few thousand kilometers above, the Ring awaited my command.
Cal wasn’t with me those nights. I’d asked her for a few hours alone every eve, and she’d granted it, even if reluctantly. After all, she’d unlocked the last secrets of her lost memory. With Aly’s help, she’d created Sumer’s first string reprogrammers. The two of them would work endless wonders, I knew. They’d reshape Sumer into what might become the strongest human planet to ever exist, perhaps even mightier than Earth itself had been in its prime.
Let the two of them tinker, I thought.
Let them build. Let them create. Let them usher in a new era.
Let me keep watch.
And I did. I watched every night. For weeks, for months, and for years, I came out to the lonely field every possible eve with my skypad. Long after my field went fallow and the crops were moved downriver, I remained a fixture in the tall, wild grasses that sprang from the ever-saturated mud. I admitted to myself I was obsessed. It didn’t bother me.
For so many years, I kept vigil. I missed the birth of Aly’s first child. I was absent when Cal successfully created a nano-friend for herself, a little green boy she named Griff. I avoided Maura until finally, exhausted of my escapes, she married and moved to a settlement far, far away.
And then one day, more than twenty years after touching down with the Sabre into the green fields of Sumer, I asked my skypad the same question I had thousands of times before. And she gave me the answer I’d always known would come.
The stars are fewer.
The darkness between them was growing yet again.
About the Author
J Edward Neill writes dark fiction, sci-fi, horror, and philosophy – all for adult audiences. He lives in North Georgia, where the summers are volcanic and winters don’t exist. He has an extensive sword collection, a deep love of wine and scotch, and a blind cat named Sticky.
He’s really just a ghost.
He’s only here to haunt the earth for few more decades.
Shamble after J Edward on his websites:
TesseraGuild.com
DownTheDarkPath.com
More by J Edward Neill:
Fiction:
A Door Never Dreamed Of
Down the Dark Path – Book I in the Tyrants of the Dead trilogy
Dark Moon Daughter – Book II in the Tyrants of the Dead trilogy
Nether Kingdom – Book III in the Tyrants of the Dead trilogy
The Sleepers – A Sci-Fi Horror Short
Hollow Empire – A post-apocalyptic serial co-authored with John McGuire
Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows
Coffee Table Philosophy:
The Ultimate Get to Know Someone Quiz
101 Questions for Humanity
The Little Book of BIG Questions
101 Questions for Couples
101 Questions for Single People
101 Sex Questions
444 Questions for the Universe
The Ultimate Video Game Quiz
About the Artist
Amanda Makepeace has been drawing and thinking up imaginary worlds and characters since her childhood days in the suburbs of Maryland. Since those formative years, she's lived in the southern burbs, moved abroad to England, and now calls rural Georgia home. Her imagination is fed by a love of nature, myth and the fantastic. When she's not in the studio, you can often find her wandering the woods, collecting bones and other bits of nature for her ever growing natural history collection.
Amanda has done excellent cover work for J Edward’s other novels, including Down the Dark Path, Nether Kingdom, A Door Never Dreamed Of, and Old Man of Tessera.
Her piece, War for Jupiter, inspired the planet Ebes in Darkness Between the Stars.
Learn more at amandamakepeace.com
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