Beneath Ceaseless Skies #161
Page 5
The pounding grows tolerable. I breathe normally again. The voices. I cannot isolate them because they do not belong to individuals, but to a chorus. To understand them, I must make out the whole song. I concentrate. I note patterns, I discern harmonies. I think they are talking to me.
Images populate my mind. At first they are just a blur, appearing all at once, washing over me like a wave. Then the voices grow quieter, slower, almost melodious. The images flicker and still. I am drawn toward them.
Contact. I am standing on firm ground. The first things I notice are the trees—like alders, but full of dark fruit as heavy as eggplants. I look up. The sun is a deep, fiery crimson, dominating the entire sky. I know it is dying. We had to go, the voices say, it was time.
The picture changes. A fleet of silver ships adrift in inky blackness. Ten thousand vessels sailing in different directions, each headed for a different star. I hear the voices whispering: it was a splintering, a fracture. Most fell victim to the void. Only some made their way to other worlds.
I understand now. The voices are those of my people, but they are somewhere else, far away.
Where are you? I ask.
Scattered. We are of many worlds. What is your world?
Earth, I reply. They call us Beta.
We are always searching. The pieces of each ship still carry traces of our collective entity. We find each other by linking minds. But why have so few of you made contact?
We were afraid, I respond.
There is nothing to fear.
Will you come find us? I ask.
Now, there is no path. There are no more ships. But someday, we will come.
Then contact is terminated. I lift my shaking tongue and collapse on the burnt earth.
I writhe in and out of waking dreams. I ride a silver dragon through the ruined Aristotelian universe, darting in and out of shattered celestial spheres. Epicycles elongate and pulsate; planets are flung from their orbits like projectiles. The fixed stars escape into darkness; the Prime Mover travels backward and evaporates. I say a lament for the Almagest and its lies.
Then I am a block cutter. I chisel away at my greatest creation, only to discover when I am done that it is Father’s face jutting from the wood. “Tell me about the great ships and stars,” I beg of him, but the wooden face is mute. I ride on past, grasping vainly at nothingness.
Mother is here too. “Mother,” I say breathlessly, “I too touched the stars. I heard their voices. We share a great secret. We need not be afraid.” I want to touch my tongue to hers, to share secrets like we once did. But Mother does not listen. She weaves a thread so long that it could rein in the moon, and she hangs herself upon it. While her body dangles from the very heavens, her tongue grows long and dark and fat, then flies away on crystal wings.
Zelhorn’s face appears out of the gloom. “Kev, my boy, we were wrong. Alchemy was the answer all along. Its masters teach us that nothing is immutable, and no substance is as it seems. With the proper reagents, we can even remake the stars. Everything is subject to generation and corruption, both in this sphere and beyond.” His face begins to shift and dissipate, pulled apart by an unseen vortex. “See, even I am immaterial, subject to the winds of an ever-shifting fate.” As Zelhorn fades to nothingness, I hear him shout, “You must have faith in the future, although it is yet unseen.”
I try to follow, but I do not know where I am going. Instead I hear music, and I ride toward it. The Beta are singing among the remnants of the spheres. It is a great chorus that transcends distance and time, encompassing all the generations. I sing with them too, my voice rising and falling with the shattered stars. I think Mother, Father, and Zelhorn sing as well. Perhaps a part of them grazed the tip of the beyond and joined the mighty chorus. I do not know for sure, but I must have faith. For the first time, I feel like I belong.
I come to in the ruins of the colony. The day is ending; the red sun shines a path through smoky haze. As I sit among the dead and their ghosts, I finally allow myself to cry. I shed bitter tears upon what might be the ashes of my parents, until the tears and soot are mingled as one.
I clutch the relic to my breast, and voices rustle in my mind. Here of all places, amidst the dead, I have found new life. The relic carries with it a future yet to come, and I will be part of it.
I wrap the relic in the folds of my cloak. I pack water skins, salted meat, and pickled vegetables that I recovered from the colony. As I prepare to return to the Bureau, I look up at the sky. Twilight reigns in purplish grandeur. Then slowly the stars come out, like a carpet unfolding. I shoulder my pack and do not look behind, for the stars are all that I have left, and they will have to be enough.
Copyright © 2014 Yosef Lindell
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Yosef Lindell is a lawyer and writer. Although he has published history articles in scholarly journals, this is his first fiction sale. His turn to speculative fiction is probably related to his childhood interest in taking tea with hobbits who lived in a golf course. Now he lives near Washington D.C. with his wife and son, and is a member of the Codex Writers’ Group. You can follow him on Facebook.
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COVER ART
“Golden Age,” by Juan Carlos Barquet
Juan Carlos Barquet is an artist from Mexico City. He has done illustrations for books, album covers and tabletop games for clients such as Fantasy Flight Games; concept art and matte paintings for short films supervised by DreamWorks Animation and ILM, and exhibitions at Art Takes Times Square (New York, 2013), Parallax Art Fair (London, 2012), Euskal Exhibition Center (Bilbao, 2012) and more. View more of his work at jcbarquet.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
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