by Ashanti Luke
Then Uzziah, along with Tanner in unison, answered the question, “The Aish Tamid.”
“The what?” Milliken asked, more puzzled than ever.
This time Uzziah answered, “It is the eternal flame that burned in the Tabernacle in the Temple. In idea, it represents a living Torah, a flame that a person who has experienced Torah on a deeper level carries with him.”
“Which can lead us back to Davidson’s lions,” Tanner added before Uzziah even finished. “In Egypt, lions were also connected with Ra or Horus because they guarded the rising and the setting of the sun as it passed from the underworld, through the world of the living, and then back again. This idea could also represent a guarding of a kind of esoteric knowledge.”
“I don’t get it though. We have Oannes, Viracocha, Poseidon, Ea, Osiris—all bearers of knowledge to different civilizations. But the Temple is distinctly Judaic, correct? It’s not just Near Eastern. Where is the Judaic civilizer?” Everyone looked to Tanner then to Uzziah, and then back to Tanner again. Tanner began to look extremely uncomfortable until Darius spoke.
“Azazel.”
Tanner did not look as if the name surprised him, but his expression was of unmistakable discomfort.
Darius continued, seemingly insensitive to Tanner’s discomfort, “Azazel was the leader of the fallen angels after the original leader, Samyaza, gave in. Azazel had experienced a displacement of sorts. He had chosen to cohabitate with humans and to take wives of the daughters of men, but most importantly, he brought esoteric knowledge to the humans against the will of the godhead. He taught men to wage war, possibly against the gods themselves, and he and his progeny were punished.”
“Let me guess,” Milliken asked, the discomfort leaving his face, “with a flood.”
“Yes, the godhead sought to eliminate the damage that Azazel had caused, and it had Azazel imprisoned by his nemesis in a place called Dudael,” Darius added.
Cyrus could not hold his curiosity any longer and addressed Tanner directly, “What is so disconcerting about this information?”
Tanner paused for a moment, exhaled, and then spoke, “If Azazel is the equivalent to those others we mentioned, it would imply Noah was somehow the offspring of the fallen as Lamech had feared—that Noah himself, in some way, either literally or figuratively, was nephilim,” Tanner shuffled in his chair. “Which makes the Old Testament godhead, as Darius so tactfully put it, look more like the Demiurge of the Gnostics. Since knowledge seems to be at the root of the problem, both here on Asha and in the Old Testament…”
Cyrus had crossed the room and now rested his hand on Tanner’s shoulder. Cyrus did not want him to continue any more than Tanner himself wanted to. Tanner had come to this planet just like the rest of them. Just like the rest of them, he had been looking for answers. But unlike the rest of them, all the answers presented to him had tested what he understood of the world in a merciless kiln.
Milliken tried to work through his own confusion, seemingly oblivious to Tanner’s internal struggle. “So if this Azazel guy is at odds with the godhead, that would make him Satan, no?”
“HaSatan is merely a title that means ‘The Adversary,’” Darius corrected, “It implies conflict, but not evil. The title is sometimes used to refer to the being Samael, who serves as the Judaic Angel of Death. Samael is also sometimes referred to as this Demiurge that Tanner mentioned, or as the head of the Sitra Achra, one of the Kabalistic representations of chaos. Samael is sometimes represented as both good and evil—more a necessity to the universe than a representation of wickedness.”
“So let’s assume this Azazel did set all this up and was banished and had everything he had built destroyed. What does that mean for us?” Davidson was intrigued.
“It would mean that the loveliest trick of the Devil was not to persuade us that he didn’t exist, but rather to trick his opponent into siring and nurturing his children,” even Cyrus was unamused at the revelation as he said it.
“Or at the least, instilling in us the knowledge that this Demiurge wanted to hide,” Davidson’s qualification settled Cyrus, but did nothing for Tanner.
“Knowledge of what though?” Torvald asked, as oblivious to Tanner’s struggling as Milliken.
“The Garden of Eden story says it is knowledge of Good and Evil, and of humanity’s own ‘nakedness,’ or, more accurately, ignorance, that was hidden from us. Enoch says Azazel taught men to wage war and women to wear make-up—implications of base ideas, but also of self-respect. The Mayans say this being taught men to be less feral, less beastlike. The Greeks say men learned acculturation, while the Sumerians say Ea taught the secret of eternal life. They all imply that whatever knowledge was taught by these ‘civilizers’ made humanity closer to the gods than the gods were ultimately comfortable with.” Darius’s treatise settled the room. The implications the hologram used must have been from criticisms and annotations, but they were profound nonetheless.
Torvald was the first to speak, “This all makes sense in reference to myths and primitive peoples, advanced or not. But what could they stand to show us, or the Ashans, in this day and age?”
“Whatever the Ark, or the Arks in this case, are designed to facilitate mechanically,” Tanner said, surprising Cyrus.
Cyrus nodded to Tanner, who returned the nod, and began to pace. “So what knowledge pertaining to modern humanity would Mundi see the relevance of as soon as the existence of the city was communicated to him?”
“Maybe the city was just an afterthought.” Darius surprised the entire room time, filling them with the din of surprise. “The war could have been started because Mundi discovered the gold deposits in the scar. Think about it. The man who shows up to a troubled planet with a ship full of gold would surely be seen as a god among men.”
“But how could he move enough gold to impress an entire planet, however destitute? The density alone would be too much,” Milliken retorted.
Darius looked as if he were contemplating something and everyone stopped, to see what he had to say. “What about the five ships beneath the pyramid? Echelon records show the resources to build those ships have been collected over the last hundred years.”
Cyrus should have been used to the weight that seemed to pile onto his shoulders whenever he spent extended time in this room, but it seemed every nuance in the conversation made the air heavier. “But what’s the point in setting up something of this scale if you don’t live to see the end of it? Did Mundi even have any descendants?” Cyrus was perplexed, it all made sense, and yet it didn’t.
“As far as I can tell, there’s no conclusive proof Rex Mundi ever existed,” Darius said.
“So why would…” a thought stymied Cyrus in mid-sentence. “Wait, you said they only made one of those star skimmers?”
“It was made and then put to dry-dock, but after that there is no record of it. Although...” Darius looked as if he were trying to remember something again, “There are several records of inquiries from Mundi, and then suddenly, nothing.”
And then it all came together like the doors of a mausoleum.
Cyrus looked to Tanner, but it seemed like Tanner was looking beyond him. “What was the Ark used for again, traditionally?”
“It was placed in the tabernacle, where the priests would communicate with God. They also placed the blood of the sacrificial lamb on the mercy seat, the place between the cherub wings.”
Tanner seemed to be in contemplation himself, the lids of his eyes straining under the pressure the last few months had placed on his faith, and he seemed not to notice as Cyrus muttered “sacrificial lamb” to himself and then wandered through the door toward the storage room.
When they rounded the corner, Milliken and Tanner gasped as they saw Cyrus drag the blade of a knife across the palm of his hand. He looked over his shoulder, acknowledging them with a smirk that seemed as disturbed as it was confident, as if deep down he was hoping he was wrong.
“Maybe they dabbled in genetics,” he sai
d aloud to himself, and then he turned, squeezed his fist over the mercy seat of the Ark, and then he simply froze in place as if he was a holo-image on the fritz. Tanner moved to touch him, but even as he approached, it felt like the static in the room held him back, and he found his feet refusing to move him within arm’s reach.
No one said a word, and Tanner was not even sure he could speak if he tried. He tried to take a step back, but he realized he could not retreat either. He was stuck there, his arm outstretched toward Cyrus, unable to move.
And then he realized he could not feel the usual twinge from holding his muscles in place. He could not feel the floor against his feet, the dense air of the barracks against his skin, or the beating of his own heart. Dust particles no longer moved in the air, light no longer played across the gilded edges of the Ark. It was as if the physical world had frozen in time, but somehow his mind still functioned.
He tried to blink and found he could not, but it didn’t matter, the sensation of dryness in his eyes, of irritation from holding his arm out for too long, of anything for that matter, was non-existent. And when he tried to think of how long he had held his arm out, of how much time had passed, he realized time had no longer had meaning. It just didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Not time. Not the strange revelations that had been laid before him today. Nothing.
But something did matter. There was a connection around him that he had not noticed before, perhaps because there was only one time in his life he could remember feeling it. A time that he had forgotten until this frozen moment reminded him. It was the indelible consciousness of every life around him. Of Milliken, Uzziah, Cyrus, the Apostates outside the complex. Then, he realized it stretched farther than that. It stretched out to Eurydice, Druvidia, the J.L., even back to Earth. The sum total of all human consciousness somehow resided with him in this timeless brainspace. It should have seemed foreign to him, should have been a shock, but instead it was familiar, comforting, because he understood that life, all life, began this way, or at least it should. He found his memory of it very clear. It was the same connection he had shared once before, although more acutely, with his mother, before he was born. It was there, in that timeless sanctuary, his soul, as it slowly melded to a growing body, had felt this connection with the rest of humanity. It was amazing how clear this was in his mind. He wondered if those that had been unfortunate enough to have been born in pods had been afforded the same comfort of knowing, at least for a moment, that they were a part of something greater. And if the dread that whelmed his soul had had any effect on his body in that eternal moment, he would have cried for each of them, for they were the true apostates.
As far as Cyrus could tell, his eyes were still open, but the world around him had shrunk into a pinpoint in the distance. Cyrus felt completely disconnected from his body. It was like dreaming, but at the same time drastically different. In a dream, you still had a concept of self, but here, self was the only thing that seemed not to exist. Instead, one was left with everything, and everyone, else. Then, as suddenly as it had shrunk, it expanded, and he was standing in a room that he could not see, but he somehow intuitively knew formed two pyramids that connected at the base and were inscribed in a sphere. He could not see the sides, the roof, or the floor because, in this place, wherever he was, sight did not exist. Even now, thrown here unexpectedly, the simple question of what could and couldn’t be seen was absurd. Eyes had no sway in this world.
He stood in the center of the concurrence of the axes of the pyramids, and at the vertex directly in front of him, impossibly, Cyrus could feel, standing in the center of his own sphere, exactly who he had expected to find—his best friend, Alexander Kalem.
twenty-eight
• • • • •
—So what’s this I hear about you getting into fights at the tram stop?
—It’s bunkus, Dada. Don’t worry about it.
—Why shouldn’t I be worried about it? You’re starting to get a reputation as some kind of hooligan, and it don’t exactly rest on the axis with me.
—I know Dada. That was the whole point.
—I’m afraid I don’t follow, and you need to explain it to me so I get it, or there’s gonna be arrears to pay.
—It’s all houndwash, Dada. A rumor to throw everyone off the ave.
—What ave?
—I don’t wanna say.
—You don’t have a choice, cuz I’m two steps off taking your HoloStation Prime and selling it to a more honest kid.
—I did it to help someone, and they asked me not to tell.
—What is it that’s so important or bad you can’t tell me?
—I promised I would not tell.
—Did you promise you would lose your HoloStation?
—You can take it if you want, but I think that’s foul that you would sell it because you don’t believe me.
—Dari, you haven’t been the most copasetic student the last few months. You need to be straight-forward with me so I can believe you.
—Danny Silberman, the new guy from New York. His nose started bleeding at the tram stop and he ran off. I went to look for him and found him in the bushes by the recharge station. His nose was bleeding, and he tried to clean it up, but some of it got on his collar and he couldn’t really hide it. I tried to help him, but at first he was like, ‘Get away from me,’ but after I wouldn’t leave, he told me he had this disease that made his nose bleed and made him hard-of-hearing in his right ear, and sometimes it made him pee funny, and he said that was one of the things that convinced his family to leave where he used to live, and he was scared the jokes and stuff would follow him here if people found out.
—So how does this involve you?
—I told him I would help him. I told him to go running back to the tram stop and cry and not talk to anybody. And then later, I came ‘round and sat on the opposite side of the bench from him and looked bent. Then, before we got on the tram, I snuck and told him to complain about me being a repo-giver but refuse to tell people exactly what happened. I normally sit next to him on the tram and in most of our classes, but we sat on opposite sides of the tram and room and didn’t talk to each other all day.
—All this so people would assume you fought?
—And evidently it worked. Nobody pulled me into the office, but I bet they comm-satted you and asked you to talk to me, didn’t they?
—Yeah.
—Because you adults always take what you see and put it together to be what you want to believe. All someone has to do is set it out on a plate and ring a bell and you run to it like beta-hounds.
—You watch yourself, Dari.
—Well, it’s true. It’s the only reason why you’re standing over me sideways right now threatening to take something away from me to get me to say what you expect me to. To force me to show you what you want to see.
—Dari, I’m sorry if I didn’t believe you, but you haven’t made it easy the last few months.
—Fair enough. But, I may be a lot of things, but I’ve never been a liar, and I’ve never been a stoolie, and if I have to catch a couple degrees of heat to help a friend, well then so be it.
—So this was all an elaborate rumor?
—I didn’t really even expect it to work, but the beta… I mean Disciplinarian scarfed it up like sweetbars. It’s amazing how willing people who call themselves authorities are to believe their own back-wash. Especially when all they had to do was open the nurse’s file on the datadeck.
—I guess you do have a point. Sometimes when something stinks, it is a lot easier to jump to conclusions than it is to lift our own arms and smell ourselves.
—Well, maybe you guys should smell yourselves more often, cuz sometimes things stink more than you guys know.
—You do have a point, Dari.
—Well, thank you for saying so.
—Dari.
—Yeah Dada?
—I love you. And I’m sorry.
• • • • •
“Sur
prised to see me?” Alexander asked, looking exactly the way he had looked when Cyrus last saw him. It was not him, at least not his body, nor was it a projection. Cyrus could not see him so much as he could feel him, and his mind filled in the blanks.
“No,” Cyrus had very little to say. The mélange that welled inside him forbade speech.
“You appear cross. Why such malice when greeting an old friend?” Evidently, this conduit, limited in its ability to convey basic senses, transmitted what other forms of communication could not.
Cyrus, to anyone else, would have delivered a snide retort, but here, his very soul bare before his best friend and now worst enemy, could only manage naked thoughts. “You were behind this from the beginning. You used my son. You turned him into a monster. Why?”
“What cuts most deeply is that you can’t bring yourself to even see the answer,” Kalem’s words were melodramatic, but the Ark sent his emotions through as clearly as his speech. Kalem was not hurt, he was smug, content, and most disturbing of all, jubilant. “I did not need to supply your son with the capital that matured him into the Knight of Swords. You supplied all the raw materials for that. All it took was a push.”
“But you lied to him. You lied to me. You said you would take care of him.” Cyrus was not sure if it was the detachment from the physical world or his own resilience that kept him from crying, but he was sure, in this place, Kalem could tell he wanted to—but it did not matter.
“Once again, the pot gives his grand treatise on the blackness of the kettle. In your catalog of lies you have missed the greatest lie of all,” his words came across as calm, but Cyrus could feel the laughter behind them. And intertwined with the laughter, there was something else. Something he had felt once before, but had long forgotten. It was similar to what he felt for Darius, for Tanner, for Villichez, but there was a distinctly different flavor to it. It came from Alexander, and even though it was muddied with a scathing twinge of hatred, it was not directed toward Cyrus.
