Jal stays with Katya and together they watch the Terraformer merge into reality from
thought, pieces materializing over a period of time from nothing, forcing the machine’s
elegance on the sky. Chemical steam vents from its base and superstructure, shrouding it
in mist, making it seem ethereal even on a clear day. Sometimes they walk around its
base, touching its cool dark metal.
The silent war with Siah continues- the number of unmodified humans dying the final
death soars into the thousands, driving many to take the implant for protection. Siah’s
attacks do not go unanswered- strange satellites have appeared over the surface of the
ancient world Siah inhabits. Spinning through the night, they resonate with telepathic
messages that create waking nightmares and breaches of reality that leave a residue of
terror over the surface of the world. These images create a new pantheon of demons that
will haunt the minds of whatever religions manifest, offering to fulfill their deepest desires
to the point of insanity.
Katya watches Jal sleeping one night, the light from the city falling on a face of innocence-
she touches him- he scowls for a moment in his sleep and rolls over. She watches him for
a long time- he has grown distant. She’s tried doing things with him that made them happy
before, like searching for strange artifacts in the ruins, but he quickly grows restless and
bored.
An ocean of souls have claimed him, dividing him over and over among themselves,
stripping his soul of all things except for the reason for it’s creation, it stands pure and
bright, a black pearl, indestructible. The destruction of the God of Man is all that remains
of him now, all other pieces falling away like a shattered moon that had eclipsed a burning
star.
She draws back from this vision, considering this new idea. Looking up, she sees a boy
standing in the doorway, and thinks for a moment she hears the ocean. The boy smiles,
laughs, turns and leaves.
*
The day of departure arrives- Katya sits on top of the building that was her home,
watching the streaming processions make their way to the Terraformer, its Displacer
engines making it shimmer against the sky of the bright afternoon. The crowd is like a
river, each person a dimple in its surface- they represented the totality of what Jal had
become.
Katya feels the rage that had been building within her moving a shade closer to
consciousness- a part of her is trying to repress it, but it tears these veils apart one after
the other. Soon, its face would be revealed, and the rage would give itself a name.
Katya stands, turns and leaves the rooftop for the last time, joining the crowds below.
*
Katya lies stretched over the bed with Jal, her arm thrown over him, finger tracing patterns
in his rough skin. He sleeps, breathing softly while she lies awake watching his dreams
acted out before her, projected in the clear air of their cabin by his implant. Light from the
Displacer engines outside flickers through the portal, dancing on the floor, the stars a
thousand eyes that watch her as she stands, naked, and kneels, touching the ghosts from
her lover’s mind.
Some of the dreams are of her- not her, but his mind’s picture of her. He dreams of his
greater mind, his soul stretched thin, each agent getting a fragment of the hologram,
Jaldeja getting a fragment in return- blood brothers of the soul, uniting him and all his
followers in an unbroken chain of symbiotic completion.
There is something primordial in this that she understands, something she has known
even before her first birth- something familiar- a laughing boy, the sound of the ocean.
The last mask is torn from the rage that before had no name- Jal had created what he had
set out to destroy- created his own Steppe to demolish the old God of Man. When he was
finished with this weapon, he would cast it aside like a suit of flesh, using souls as tools
just like the God he said he despised.
Jal continues to sleep untroubled, dreams drifting through the air, thin phantoms or more
vivid than reality itself. Kat always keeps a weapon close at hand- a small laser sits within
arm’s reach next to the bed.
Rising, she picks up the laser and fires, the beam striking Jal’s abdomen, tracing upward
to his chest. The dreams become like a speeded up film- they continue for an hour before
fading, Katya watching them. Jal’s eyes are open, but she knows he doesn’t see her.
*
The air is dry, and still very thin, but Katya is not thirsty. She stops to sit, even though she’
s not tired. She has been walking for what seems to have been a long time- days seem to
be meaningless here on this dusty world that orbits its miniature red sun, itself surrounded
in a sea of dust and ash that engulfs it and its single world, making other stars invisible.
The dim sky is alive with the bright trails of thousands of meteors night and day, the light
of which is so constant and bright that her shadow jumps in different directions, becomes
longer or shorter. Sometimes there are so many that she stands at the center of a
compass of shadows that playfully jumps about.
The Terraformer rests in a shallow basin that Katya left some time ago. Looking up, she
can still see its dark metal arcs reaching skyward- a gravestone for Jaldeja. She wonders
if his ghost might still wander its dark corridors, even as the machine gave life to this world.
She remembers the images from Jal’s implant finally coalescing into an image of him- it
seemed to look through her for a moment before blurring, fading, then becoming like
phosphorescent smoke that seeped into the floors and walls of the room.
All that remained was the veined, tentacled creature that embodied Jal’s subconscious.
Raising the pistol again, she hesitated. Looking up, she saw a boy standing in the
doorway.
Tracing the sign of Cain in the air with his hand, the boy looked angrily at Katya. Striding
across the room, he picked up the creature on the floor and handed it to her. When he
touched her hand, she heard the faint sound of the ocean- then he was gone.
The creature turned into a raven that watched her, unblinking, as she dressed.
Day’s later, the ship’s sensors detected a small, habitable world whose climate was harsh,
but livable, and could be improved b the Terraformer. The star around which the planet
revolved was in itself in distant orbit around their home solar system.
No one questioned her about Jal’s absence- no seemed to notice her at all. She
sometimes had to shout or touch people to get them to notice her- even then they acted
startled, frightened, and denied ever having met her before.
After they landed, she wandered off alone, thick dust like fine powder raising a small cloud
as she walked- she had been walking for days, if not longer.
Katya feels no need to sleep. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees the last images
projected by Jal’s mind- the final equation of his soul. Kat cannot open her eyes until the
whole spectacle has played before her again.
Opening her eyes, she sees that the sun is far from where it was when the vision began,
the creature of Jal’s subconscious now a heavy thing in her pocket- she feels it there,
smooth and round. She takes it out, and smiles- a black pearl.
Looking at it, she feels an arc of pain- regret, sorrow, loneliness. Putting it away, she
stumbles on toward distant hills, the sun small and cold on the horizon, her footsteps
raising small clouds of dust.
*
Time in the course of the sun, a white yellow orb in a sky of gray-blue. Time in the dust
that stirs beneath her feet, until dust gives way to steel. Time in the mountains that once
soared in jagged monuments of basalt, replaced with angular towers of dark metal, filled
with endless corridors, decorated with lighted windows. Time in the vanishing of the dust-
there is only steel now and the white concrete of the boulevards.
Katya walks down one of these streets as vehicles the color of jade whisper past, their
courses arcing gently around the spires of the ancient Terraformer, now dwarfed in the
valley of metal that surrounds it.
The tetrahedron of sky visible overhead grows dim as the sun vanishes below the
unseen horizon. Floodlights around the base of the structure fade slowly on in the
growing gloom, gradually revealing a man who had been standing in the shadows, staring
at the Terraformer intently.
Katya approaches him until she’s only an arm’s length away, but the man’s eyes remain
focused on the object before him.
“You come here often, don’t you?” Katya asks.
“Why do you ask that?” the man says, turning toward Katya, smiling. “Did you follow me
here, perhaps hoping to meet me?” His implant projects an image of the two of them
drawing closer, arms extending in embrace.
“No,” says Katya, “I’ve studied your artwork- I could tell. Your name is Lao?”
“Yes,” Lao admits, the image he was projecting vanishing. Kat notices that he’s still
interested, just in a different way than before. “What image are you talking about?”
“Most of them- one in particular- the black and gray metal sculpture with the mist.” There’
s a pause as Lao waits for Kat to finish her thought. “You believe Jal was real, don’t you?”
“You refer to him in the past tense- he still exists, saving us from ourselves as he did
eons ago, keeping our thoughts from destroying us.”
“So it’s a real belief, then- not just something to help you sell art.”
“Your lack of an implant makes you difficult to understand. It’s too bad- it would have
added some needed subtlety to your question.” The image projected from his implant was
a picture of himself, gray mist tinged with red pouring from eyes, mouth, and hands- on
the image’s forehead was the mark of Cain. Katya couldn’t breathe for a moment- she
had been waiting for so long.
Lao turns to go.
“Wait,” says Katya, putting her hand on Lao’s shoulder. Lao turns angrily, but then takes
a step back when he sees the writhing creature in Katya’s hand. Katya tightens her grip
on the man’s shoulder. “Please.”