The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Sleep came on short order, with each member averaging between only three to five hours a night. Even with automated feeding and watering systems set to both quickfire and mechanical timers, the care of over twelve thousand animals, regular machine maintenance, and the additional repairs on top of these, had everybody working on nervous energy.

  Well, not everybody—as days wore into weeks, one thing became painfully apparent: Sutara had vanished, and apparently liked it that way.

  Q’Enukki watched the ship from afar, as unbroken seas carried it eastward above the dissolving Haunted Lands. Winds and currents, driven in huge cyclical patterns by Earth’s gravitationally disrupted rotation, pushed it over the remains of the Kharir Urkanu highlands, which etched away below under bottom-crawling gravel-heavy cavitation currents. This freed surface flows to draw the vessel over what had once been Satyurati and central Assuri.

  Forces shaping the more-or-less circular ocean currents were in continual flux, depending on extraterrestrial tidal pulls and continental surface contours that could partially withstand the gravel-blasting erosions. The northward push of the Dudael tectonic plate toward the Assuri subduction line split the great eddy in half in its forward shock waves. This turned Barque of Aeons south, and then southeast, driving it out past the subduction zone, over the narrowing head of the rising Assuri Abyssal.

  Q’Enukki was glad for his ship-bound descendants. Continuing south would have stranded them where the leading edge of Dudael’s sub-continental plate—a slab the Time’s-Enders would call India—collided with the bigger northern plate. Huge mountains would eventually thrust up at the impact zone to become the tallest range on Earth. Farther west, the collisions of other pieces of the Southern Landmass with the northern plate would form the Zagros, Elburz, and Caucasus ranges, on out to the European Alps.

  A’Nu-Ahki’s vessel arced westward, and then northwest, on an ovoid current of displaced water that came first from Dudael’s sub-oceanic approach, then from the broken-off slab of the Fire-drake Forest landmass that the sages of Time’s End would call the Arabian Plate.

  All this seemed to happen in minutes to Q’Enukki, although many months passed below. Something from the dimensions Samuille had opened alarmed him even more than the fury turning the ship in its vast irregular cycle. A flurry of normally invisible activity now focused on A’Nu-Ahki’s vessel.

  Q’Enukki only perceived the danger in shadow-forms. It seemed that Watchers had somehow detached from Samuille’s living dimensional gate to engage an army of what Q’Enukki saw as wraith-like sea serpents. These Leviathan specters tried to neutralize a security escort around A’Nu-Ahki’s ship. The Gate Guardians hacked at them with huge swords of fire from outside the siege sphere. This was but a picture of what happened, in symbols understandable to the human mind—Q’Enukki, though able to see much, still had to process the images as familiar forms.

  “What is happening down there? It looks bad.”

  Samuille said from somewhere behind him, “It is. Leviathan has gained a foothold on the ship. Our forces are trying to extract the intruder without harming your descendants. A large veil blocks our sight in several dimensions. We cannot see the immediate outcome.”

  “You mean you cannot look ahead to see if we win or not?”

  “Exactly—or as close to it as you can comprehend,” said Samuille, who seemed to be engaged in coordinating some aspect of the battle totally beyond even Q’Enukki’s enhanced perception.

  “Can they do that? Can they block your ability to see that badly?”

  “Oh yes. And we do it to them, too.”

  “But E’Yahavah sees all, does he not?”

  “Yes.”

  The Seer shrugged. “Why does he not show you the situation then?”

  Q’Enukki could feel the Watcher’s dark, patient eyes upon him.

  “Real choices are involved,” Samuille said. “When deep choices are involved, our field of vision can be blocked. In order to engage the Enemy in space-time, we must ourselves operate largely in that realm. There are what you might call ‘landscapes’ in all dimensions—some more obstructive than others. Remember that we cannot directly read thoughts; only hear spoken or projected words. We usually interpret from the actions that result from the choices, as we follow them down the time-stream.”

  “What choices?”

  “Sometimes when people approach the final decisions that E’Yahavah enables us all to make within our limited spheres; it causes screens of clashing possibilities that we cannot see past. Both the Enemy and we take advantage of these ‘landscapes’ to hide our activities from each other. E’Yahavah often does not allow us to see through such screens on our own—although he sees and acts through them all.”

  “Why? No disrespect intended, but that seems self-defeating.”

  Samuille answered, “To show us everything would often intrude on the choice-domain limits the Divine Name ordains for each person. The more consequential the choice, the more chaotic the screen is.”

  “But life is full of choices! If this is so, how can you see anything?”

  “We can partially detect enemy activity behind many screens, and reliance on our knowledge of E’Yahavah’s good ultimate purposes helps us to interpret the ‘landscapes.’ But in one sense we have learned to behave much as you men do.”

  “How is that?”

  “When knowledge is denied us, to maintain integrity-of-choice in the big picture, we piece things together on limited information. We interpret our observations according to the truth E’Yahavah gives us, and then we extrapolate the probabilities. It would not be a war otherwise.”

  Q’Enukki shook his head. “It seems insane to tie your hands so.”

  “Without this limit, there would be no liberty in space-time for people to choose good or evil, love or indifference. With choice, however, comes the potential for both real love and real evil. Remember what I told you before, about how Creator faced this decision at the Beginning; to make beings that choose—knowing they would choose wrong and bring much evil—or not to create such beings at all. It is the moral principle of Double Effect in action, large-scale, with the long-term goal of the greatest possible good ensured at the end, despite the evils chosen by fallen sentients in the heavens and Earth during the short-term situations we see now.

  “It is easy to look at all this now, and say that it would have been better for E’Yahavah not to create—even he struggles with a terrible grief over what humanity has chosen. Bad as this is, however, the alternative would be worse in his eyes—and only his eyes see everything.”

  “How could it possibly be any worse than this?”

  Samuille’s gentle voice pierced Q’Enukki’s despair. “Imagine a loveless universe of animate, self-aware machines, trapped in eternal living-death where nothing ultimately matters. Without other beings that choose, real love with real people beyond E’Yahavah’s self-sufficient persons was logically impossible. Love and relationship existed within his Divine continuum, yes, but no creative expression. The pinnacle of Creation—Man, who reflects the image of E’Yahavah—could not be complete, as his Creator is complete. There is more to it than this, much more, but this will suffice for now.”

  “He needed us? Why must the Creator obey the laws of logic?”

  “The Creator obeys only his own nature, but his nature appreciates meaning—if fact, he demands it. Meaning and logic are related. E’Yahavah did not need any of us—not for himself. He considers you to be worth all the trouble, nonetheless. At times I wonder why, but it is not my place to second-guess him.”

  “What a disappointment we all must be to him.”

  “Not all of you—not even now. In the long view, it is the opposite. This horror did not surprise the Creator—he knew of it and brooded over it before calling light into being. He saw the end before the beginning, and it is a good end! Choices made by the created others turned a potential for evil actual. That does not make E’Yahavah’s ultimate purposes evil, n
or did he force Shining One or Atum to choose evil by making them evil by nature from the beginning. We touched on this subject before.”

  Q’Enukki shuddered. “Still, he knew! He went and made us anyway! I spent my whole life trying not to ‘second-guess’ him on this!” He quaked on the verge of collapsing inside into the maw of a consuming black hole.

  Samuille said, “He knew, but he did not create irresponsibly. He set choice-limits on created people. He knew that in creating others outside the Divine Name—people who could love, and could therefore choose—that he was creating a system where those who chose could—indeed, eventually would—choose badly. Do you not remember how I said that E’Yahavah built something into the foundations of existence before He began to create everything else, something I do not pretend to understand, though I wait with anticipation for him to reveal it? This hidden foundation is the cornerstone of what creation is all about.”

  Q’Enukki’s shoulders slumped in his invisible chair, which seemed to hold him somehow like the arms of a consoling mother. “How can this ‘hidden foundation’ reverse the bad choices of men and of heaven’s legions, which self-evidently cascade into branching, multiplying evils without end?”

  Samuille corrected him. “Not without end.”

  “How can it go any other way, then?”

  The Watcher replied, “E’Yahavah reserved the only unlimited choice-domain to himself because he is the only one with the wisdom and power equal to handling that. The First Insurrection came when a created being with the largest finite choice-domain chose self-centered chaos. Shining One wove a delusion so seductive that a third of my kind thinks it is a fully functioning alternate reality. In truth, they only follow self-destructive patterns on a web of ghost-lights.”

  “Pride blinds not only men, it seems.”

  Samuille said, “Yes. It sickens me when I think of how easily he did it! He actually had to work much harder to sway Khuva and Atum—who knew nothing at all in their innocence, except what E’Yahavah had commanded.”

  Q’Enukki froze. “What do you mean? They were only human.”

  Samuille’s words thundered in the trembling core of the Seer’s mind, “How easily you say that—as if it were the cause of their fall! They were created in E’Yahavah’s image—more so even than we who serve in the heavens! Those of you rescued shall judge us all in the end! Shining One despises you for that! All his arrogance stems from wanting to be like the Most High! Although you are but models of the Creator, and not Deity, even that much of a semblance drives the Basilisk to utter madness!”

  “Why? We are so weak! Your people have so much power!”

  Samuille roared like a cyclone, “Power has nothing to do with it! It seems so to you because we live on, learn, and accumulate vast knowledge. That, and the fact that we dwell in the heavens, which frightens fallen men. Yes, we have more power and authority than you do—right now!”

  “What do you mean, ‘right now?’”

  Samuille’s gaze tore through Q’Enukki’s mind like a whirlwind of flame. “You have the imagination to create built right into you—far more than we who exist merely to guard you like the senseless children you have become! Even marred by the tragedy of sin, E’Yahavah’s image in you is more still than that! Yet it is from men’s darkened imaginations—that image contorted and inverted—that the Fallen Ones draw new skills!”

  “But the Basilisk invented the lie! Not Atum!”

  “Yes; and a crude, childish thing it was, too, until he harvested generations of humanity to refine it! Why do you think E’Yahavah cursed the cosmos and took away the Life-tree—spite? Not even the Basilisk realized, until later, that if Atum gained eternal life in a fallen state, Man would rapidly outclass even him in power and cunning. Such is a tyrant’s pride! They imagine that they have no blind spots. Then everything starts to unravel!”

  “What did the Basilisk hope to accomplish?”

  Samuille’s mind-voice softened some. “Evil grows in the absence of E’Yahavah’s influence. The Basilisk hopes to replace E’Yahavah’s influence with his own. Then he imagines he can reorder things, and afterward restore a semblance of moral sanity—yes, he actually thinks he has a noble goal—that he can create his own reality and ethics! Men invent new evils far more efficiently than we can, even those of us given over to evil! Your people are an addiction to the Fallen Ones! You believed the Basilisk’s lie in the beginning, but ever since then his malice grows best by mimicking you! His armies of enticers perpetuate a self-feeding cycle!”

  Q’Enukki stared off at the planet dying below him. “So World-end falls on humanity, not just the Watchers. They have greater power to execute evil, and to add the malice of centuries to centuries, but human hearts invent new patterns! It was always us all along! Oh my E’Yahavah, it was us all along!”

  Samuille gently touched Q’Enukki’s shoulder. “Yes.”

  “What happens if our forces fail to protect the ship?”

  Samuille whispered, “Inevitably, the remnant will be infiltrated—darkened human nature itself would see to that. But for it to happen this soon, during the deliverance itself—that would be an incalculable disaster!”

  [Abraham’s servant] Eliezer asked Shem, Noah’s oldest son, “How did you manage to take care of the many kinds of animals with habits so divergent?”

  Shem replied, “The truth is, we had much trouble on the ark. The creature whose habit it was to eat by day, we fed by day; the one who ate by night, we fed by night. As for the chameleon, my father did not know what it ate. One day, as my father was sitting cutting a pomegranate, a worm fell out of it and the chameleon consumed it. After that he would knead some prickly reeds infested with worms and feed it with them. As for the phoenix, my father found him sleeping in a corner of the ark and asked him, ‘Why did you not request food?’ He replied, ‘I saw you were busy, and I said to myself that I should not trouble you.’ Noah responded, ‘Since you were concerned about my trouble, may it be the Lord’s will that you never die.’ Hence it is said, ‘I shall multiply my days as the phoenix.’”

  —Ancient Rabbinical Midrash

  11

  Infiltration

  Nu and Khumi stood over the pump until the hose leading into the forward-most amidships storage units began to suck air.

  A’Nu-Ahki said, “Okay, shut her down, and open it up.” His foot throbbed even over the stiff pain potion he had mixed for himself. Getting around with a crutch on pitching decks had done little to improve his humor.

  Khumi switched off the pump, and disconnected the hose from its compartment fitting on the lower bulkhead, near the watertight door. He then depressurized the door’s seal, and swung it open.

  The place was a mess at first glance. Closer inspection revealed that most of the barrels strewn about by the water’s impact had remained hermetically sealed however, so that their supplies were salvageable. A’Nu-Ahki carefully stepped over the metal-lipped hatch coaming, and hobbled toward the freeze-storage units. His fears were confirmed when he opened the big stoned-wood quickfire-cooled meat locker.

  The salt water had shorted out the couplings.

  “Better get these carcasses down to the gryndels and the gators. I’m not sure even the battle-lion would eat this stuff now.”

  Khumi moved to obey, holding his nose as he jostled in a feed cart over the coaming.

  The flash-frozen fruit had fared a little better. The hard rind varieties still bore their proper color and texture. Nu grabbed himself a pomegranate, shuffled back through the hatch, and sat on one of the smaller barrels. He pulled out his hunting knife, and chopped the red fruit in two, using a slightly higher barrel as a table.

  Most of the purple nodules inside were edible, but several worms had managed to infiltrate in the lower portion. A’Nu-Ahki was about to poke these out of the husk and clean away the good portion, when a quick greenish-gray lash whipped out from the dimness somewhere over his shoulder to snap up the worms.

  Startled, but t
oo weary to jump, he looked behind his shoulder, where shelves of sacked wheat for New-world’s first planting lay fastened.

  “How’d you get out?” Nu asked the creature perched on the rack.

  The chameleon’s turreted eyes rolled about, independent of one another in a way that reminded Nu of the old rotating cannon mounts on the armored military vehicles of the titans.

  “At least now I know what you’ll eat, you fussy little bugger,” he muttered, as he took the little reptile, and shuffled aft to return it to its cage.

  He did not see another set of cold eyes trail him from the shadows.

  U’Sumi continued his inventory, trying to keep his eyes open while he leaned against a firewall to steady his legs.

  “Half our sugar reed got soaked, and infested with worms,” his mother complained, as she climbed down from the main fodder silo.

  “At least the chameleons won’t starve anymore.”

  Na’Amiha kicked over a wooden bucket, and ran her hand through her graying strawberry blonde hair. “I hate night watch! We’ve got to adjust more feed timers to a twenty-four hour cycle! This pulling twelve hour day-night duty just to cater to every creature’s culinary whim is too much! The beasties should just be glad they’re alive!”

  U’Sumi shrugged. “Pahp doesn’t want to risk any extinctions. He figures if they came to us, then we’re responsible for them. Several of the rare late arrivals—like the chameleons—almost starved because we didn’t know when or what to feed them.”

  “I know! I know! I don’t need a lecture from you, too!”

  “Khumi’s working on the timers. He says it’s a matter of adjusting the gears. But each unit takes a lot of fine-tuning. In a couple days...”

  “Shhh!”

  U’Sumi dropped to a whisper, “What is it?”