An End tst-2

by Paul Evan Hughes

  I searched on all bands for something, anything. Galleons. Had to get to a galleon.

  They called them prisons, but they really weren’t. When Earth system fell to the “alien” attack, there were billions of humans on the outer planets, the colonies, a few nearby systems. They became the galleon refugees, searching for inhabitable worlds in the near-Outer. We came across them from time to time, interacted with the crews. Uncle disapproved. I’m sure Mother disapproved. I’m sure some of the alien worlds we were sent to cleanse with the silver were refugee worlds.

  Two people, tiny sliver of slither, searching for

  i love you for your hands.

  long, lean fingers interlaced with my own, the interruption of your rings, long nail, long nail, short nail. the grasp of small hand within my clumsy, shaking own, the tightening of your grip on my shoulder as you gasp, fingers slipping to my neck, pulling me into a kiss.

  i love you for your skin. smooth, soft, infinitesimal hairs. i love your taste, the salt of our passion, the warmth and wetness of two bodies joined together by desire and love that has waited so long to appear.

  i love you for your lips, the medium of the first hint of Us: stolen kisses.

  i love you for your hair, that halo of tickling that descends to my face when you are above me and shines out around you when you are below. kissing ears through gateways, pulling traces of you from my mouth.

  your dimple. perfect dimple. i love you for your dimple.

  i love you for your tummy. you hide, yet it is beautiful, taut skin interrupted by button, stippled with my kisses on a journey into abandon.

  i love you for your eyes. cliché in action: they are the window in which i see our future.

  your heart. i love You for your heart, that organ of fire that i cross with my fingers, kiss with my lips, feel in the depth of my own. curled together, tender moment: i hear you, the quickness of your acceleration, the echoes of our times together, the futures i

  love you for your soul. my soul. Our soul. decades of searching before we found Us again. i felt the touch of your essence years ago, but never knew that i would find myself within you, that perfect soul resonating with my own, all pieces of one returning to the eternal, two souls traveling the same path for the moment, the perfect moment.

  i love You for your Love.

  How we deny. That moment. Within stillness and cold, how we deny.

  Never had a dog. Our neighbor had a dog. And a baby. For a while.

  Do you know of silver? What she told us, the ice, the wind, a blade? Do you know? Believe?

  There are things we know, resident memory, special memory, species memory coded into us. We know. Just because. There are things we’re told. To read, to watch to be. I read of lions and witches and robots, a desert, a jihad, rabbits and a warren, a submarine, boys on an island. Arch had no Piggy. I read, Mommy read to me, and I liked the stories, although the room shook, the sky was fire. I liked those stories before bedtime, although sometimes they made me think too much, too much to sleep, to breathe. I knew of broken glass: and blood.

  We read of Ender because we were supposed to. There were girls on his ship.

  I read about Hank years before I met him, many years before he died. I never knew he was real.

  Those stories…A different dust, a different wind, a different showdown at noon. Hank was

  How he’d stand, hand poised, brow furrowed, staring, staring down. Hank didn’t wear a white hat, but he killed men in black. Primitive. I can’t imagine

  a lifetime without you, yet it stares me in the face right now

  and he smoked. I’ve never. Smoked. He chewed tobacco sometimes. Spit on the desert floor. Disgusting process, but

  why do i enjoy it so much?

  How the hell did Hank end up in this? Anachronism, fictional character made popular by a return to traditional values after the war of the turn of the century. Hank, last-name-less Hank, on billboards and action figures and prime-time pay-per-view. Hank. He. Was good. For the world.

  A painter, a cowboy, a ghost, a child, a warship, a

  Love.

  Know? Believe?

  that I didn’t want her to shiver besind me, hated that it was so cold, that my skin crawled with silver infestation, that I had to keep shielding in that cramped cockpit so that I wouldn’t

  Her smile was so sad.

  We found a school of unknowns on screen and raced

  like vultures to the

  toward them, hoping beyond hope that air would last.

  I tried to breathe less, slower, but I knew that she didn’t really need the air anyways, hybrid of silver and something, calm to my rage, cool to my heat, heart to my heart. Target locked, we flew. I let the system drive. We huddled together as best as shielding and timing allowed, allowing precious hours to slip by unprotected until the jabbing started along fingers and wrists, behind eyes, and I retreated behind liquid glass.

  Can you appreciate the touch of a lover not marred by distance, flesh to flesh, swimming into, entering, not echoed through phase, cold, wet, not shivering and yet feeling the same pang, the same pain, the same

  The realization of distance physical.

  I was so scared that the galleons wouldn’t be friendly.

  How I miss home, or the idea of home: safety, family, parents still alive, teddy bear unburned, cartoons on the television, no grocery store walks past a little girl, waving. I miss an idea that would have prevented this love. Which life would I choose?

  Better to have loved and lost…Is bullshit.

  I’ve killed her. Weight of body, smell of sweat, tack of blood. I’ve killed

  Lies since birth, all that they taught, all that they taught. I’ve known truths, but I’ve assembled them myself from fragments of Us. I’ve known the silver, the stillness, the loss, the night. I know. i Know. You. Do you? You?

  Focus. Inhale. moment

  It isn’t like books or movies, holograms or

  a boy a girl and the end of the

  No words.

  A mind dissembles.

  I’d passed out by the time we were in range. Lilith activated the beacon, mindful that it might draw unfriendlies too. There was nothing more we could do, dead ship, cold and silver onset within me. I remember snap of static and gush of warmth as they released the cockpit seal in the galleon hangar, shadowed images, old men in miner’s jumpsuits, jaws agape at my passenger. Woman. Shielded.

  Weakness: they lifted me up, out. Conversation like waves, echoes, forth and back. I knew it wasn’t English. French.

  I remember fever: slurred speech, sweaty brow, cool floor, a man squatting beside me, looking from his shipmates to the sick destroyer captain and his companion. Deactivated my shielding, let me breathe deeply of old air, taste of ore, reach out to Lilith, please, just let me hold

  She was uncomfortable. Center of attention, moreso than I was. Because. Just because.

  A new man, my vision fading from black to

  Silver was retreating.

  He knelt, touched my cheeks, forehead. Spoke to his shipmates with foreign tongue.

  Lilith: standard? english? anyone?

  oui. yes.

  I don’t remember what happened after that, but waking up in their sickbay. Warm. Normal, stabbing gone, heart regulated. Rested. I panicked but she was at my side, shielded but there. I wanted to hold her hand, but knew that it was getting too close. To time. The time. When we could no longer be together. She kept her distance, a distance that I knew could only grow. You know. You do. grow.

  She’d spoken with the man in broken Standard. Told him everything. Incredible story, but she was the proof. She. was the proof.

  It was a group of three galleons, miners. They worked around the periphery of a single system where they’d found the closest approximation to Sol that they could. Dead system, planets harvested of almost everything, but still breathable atmosphere, a little water. Nothing left but desert, flattened cities, a spire…Three ships, a few hundred crewmen. W
hen she asked where they came from, they told a story as incredible as ours, yet there it was, intersections, intersections, paths crossed in the night.

  Many of the colony came from rogue Fleet vessels. Soldats perdus. And now I knew, and I knew.

  His name was Berard, and he’d known my father.

  There are histories hidden between these stars, histories that die before revelation. I feel them; they bring poignant tears to tired eyes.

  out of the hell of whatever it was

  Do you know of France, interior struts of Guerra’s midsection, wine country converted to bulkheads? Do you know of Paris, the war, the hole in the earth that led to

  Berard served under Jean Reynald and Joseph Windham after the war, during Mother’s rise. He knew Whistler, the original projection. He was responsible for the Paris Compound. He was the Pierce de Paris, taking his boys to the sky when the “alien” invasion began, for a while turning them into good little soldiers, later breaking target and killing angels and leaving the master plan of the jihad. Berard saw through the plan. Maybe Pierce did too.

  They hid. Found a home. Became soldat perdus of a friendlier persuasion.

  He knew of her beginning, those precious secrets held by precious few: ice, wind, blade. He knew. Maybe she saw it all: intersections in the night. Maybe she let him escape.

  He said I looked like my father.

  Joseph Windham was the strongest man in the world. I saw tears in his eyes once, that day that he left and I knew he would die only months and centuries later, in the cold of this, bathed in a bridge sea, bubbles of gelatin glass, the sound of cracking shell, an instant of

  My father never trusted his path, chose to tell a small circle of his officers that which he’d seen in Mother’s eyes. He wanted them to distrust. He needed them to distrust, because he knew.

  My father told him of

  long summer bonfires, those stupid cushions we put around the fire that get wet as the air cools, sending everyone else off to play hide and seek so we can be alone, a cute girl throwing dandelions at me, the time when we first laid by the fire and i explored every inch of your face with my lips because we were both too terrified to kiss.

  i could go on. i think too much. i wish things had not changed.

  i still love you.

  The child is dying. Younger and younger. The process speeds. Tears of frustration and fury. She begs.

  This weapon is

  The ice plain slipped toward night and

  i win

  I know now of a system of two stars, a species with two hearts who buried their god in the center of the world. I know of centuries of civil war, a fragile peace enacted by machine angels. I know of a woman from the edge of the worlds, trees that swam through the sky, an alien called silver, between times and whens. Silverthought. I know.

  She could have talked, but she was action. She could have talked, but no one would have listened. She heard the whispers in her blood, whispers in her single silver heart, and she acted.

  Berlin, Kath, others. They had access to the lumbers, had access to the inexplicable resonance of flight and time. They helped her at first, wanted to make a difference, wanted things to change. They knew that their god was asleep, that machines were taking key positions in the power structure, that left unchecked, the machines could decide to replace biologic with mechanic.

  and this heart, for

  They never knew that she would try to kill them all.

  His superiors found out about Berlin’s involvement after she struck, after she was captured. They had no intention of letting him off the damaged planet. He would have died in the cold and the dust if he hadn’t found the photographer Task and his machine lover Elle. They tried to stop it all, tried to warn Hannon of the contamination. They were caught in the phase flux and followed Maire’s exile craft to Earth, where it this all began in earnest, where eons of waiting culminates in a man, a gun, a child, a desert.

  Forty thousand years she waited in that cave.

  Task died soon after the crash from his injuries. Berlin’s hand was crushed, became infected. His mind and body toxic, but she didn’t care. She had all she needed: code. The planet wasn’t empty; she made men of monkeys.

  The mind

  Simmering until fruition, sleeping for millennia, sleeping with intent, letting her evolution spread. She recovered that which she had lost, recovered and augmented. She waited, taste of Berlin on her lips, in her blood. She fed from him as she would later feed from Reynald: soul, code, rebirth. Hibernation.

  out of the reach of our sea

  Believe?

  that she walked through the impressionist streets a wraith, marveling in all that she had spawned: thousands, millions, billions. She looked for him, felt him there, somewhere, that old soul with the stigmata of white. She walked for years, seduced and ravaged, fed upon and found him outside of a jewelry shop, arguing with the mistress Hiffernan.

  Followed, whispered as stars falling in the night sky, whispered to his blood and he knew, he knew. What. Futures and distances and silver. She whispered.

  She waited for that moment, as she had lifetimes away. Hid through three major conflicts, hesitant, uncertain, but knowing that it was not yet time; the world could not yet produce what she needed for completion, for purpose, for infection. She waited until they made machines like men, and it began. With the painter’s help, it began.

  Decades of construction, hidden from man. Angels and gates and tunnels. They fought their surface wars, struggled over black lines on a map, experimented with their atoms and their planets and their politics. She hid and built and waited.

  In those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, it hurtled into damnation and spawned and its progeny spread outward and outward and consumed everything in their path, and before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained behind.

  They would live forever. In the ocean of silver fire, Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the hereafter.

  Honeybear! Honeybear Brown! Cuddliest little bear on our side of town! Honeybear! He’s our friendliest friend!

  Lilith giggled like a child when I sang that.

  My quarters on Arch were cramped. Everyone’s were. But she’d sneak in and we’d make love and talk for hours. Forbidden, but yeah. We didn’t care. Knew that someone might figure it out eventually, but didn’t care. Long before the resistance began to weaken. We’d spend those hours unshielded, wrapped in each other, talking and laughing about Honeybear Brown and memories. Other memories. Laughing so that we wouldn’t think. About. What we were doing. What we were sent out here to do.

  She told me of life behind her gates and I told her of life outside her gates. What we remembered of a world now dead, of a time now dead.

  We figured out how humans fit together to make one.

  She’d tell me stories that she made up and dreamt: rain and marbles, paint and coffee. A betrayal, time, people wrapped in monsters, flying machines through yesterday, stealing souls and sometimes taking time, taking time to sit on a rusty swingset next to a mountain, something buried beneath, tunnels and stars.

  Sometimes her stories scared me.

  She told me about Nan. She missed her like I missed my mother.

  She’d hide behind the pillow, quickly peek out, Hunter!, and I’d laugh like an idiot. She’d do it again; I’d laugh again. Remember me like that. Please don’t forget me. Us.

  I don’t know what she saw in me that she didn’t see in the others. I don’t know why she let me in. Never felt so vulnerable, such surrender. Never let anyone that far in before, and now

  We found such beautiful stillness in those moments, just Us. None of the confusion of our purpose, none of the war, the flight, the silver. Those are the moments that I remember when I close my eyes. Hers is the face I see. Hers is the heart I feel beating in
my own chest. Quickly, now. Accelerated. Because

  Exhale.

  I now know that at the end of the war, Jean and my father found the entrance. I know that Maire sent Whistler to transport them to her, and I know that she changed them. They would be the first of many.

  I know she whispered to them in that voice like wind and

  They oversaw the Fleet modification, the construction of the Compounds on each continent, the mass-production of angels. They readied the populace for the realization that they had a greater purpose, and that purpose involved submission, war, sacrifice. They were the men people blamed when the female babies started dying, and the world realized that it would all end within a generation.

  End set in motion, Maire placed my father on the flagship of the advance force she sent to Hannon’s system. She hid Reynald in a military hospital, and sent for him when it was time to create Lilith. Their daughter, my Love, the Catalyst of the Sixth Extinction.

  Berard’s story broke an already-broken heart. How some could have known and not acted…I know that the silver was strong, but how could they not have killed her? Why must I be the executor of that act? After so many have died, after this extinction complete, silver now seeded throughout our known universe, dripping beyond into times and times, after such loss, after I’ve killed my

  Berard assured me that the galleon was running as fast as it could from my pursuers. We’d find someplace out there to hide. Had to. Failure was no option. We ran.

  We failed, of course.

  The hardest part is the fact that I’d gotten used to the idea of forever.

  i do know, and you know, too…

  Please rest now, knowing that I’ll join you soon enough. Be still; wait for me.

  Three destroyers, a corvette, and something still coming at us through the stream…They arrived in-system with a flash and my heart sunk. Galleons couldn’t outrun Fleet vessels in real space. We knew that; they knew that. Galleons have few if any weapons. We were unarmed, outrun, surrounded.

  Funny how time pauses in those moments, in this moment, how the mind calms, the clouds recede, all becomes clarity and truth. I knew in that moment that we’d be separated, but our paths would converge again. Someday, somehow.