NOVEL NEXT Chapter 38: The Return
The wind buffeted her face and made her sweat-clumped hair billow in tendrils behind her like grasping octopoid tentacles, and the constellation of lights peering downward from the monoliths leaning over her shifted from dim to bright. After a brief intermission her veins and arteries were once more lit afire, and her turbid blood burned rivers of gold through the latticework that was her cardiovascular system.
I could be anywhere in the universe, anywhere… yet I am here. So much power, caged to nothing but a muddle of personal insecurities…
She rode on without safety, without care, her brain pulsing against her skull.
For what was I given so much? For what purpose? God's plan, they said, is something ineffable to describe. Stars will burn out, the galaxy will freeze over, entropy will enmesh all matter in stillness—to find that God's plan was nothing but eternal peace eternally achieved in stillness...
The holo-cycle's thrusters hummed and the blacksteel chassis vibrated against her thighs and she could feel the engine drone in her ears as though it were pressing against her tympanums. Concentrated jets of air blasted against the ground to be reflected against her bare calves, and she wondered briefly if it would scour them enough to have a depilatory effect. The thrusters made the vehicle hover twenty centimeters off the ground, and she gilded at speed on wheels of wind and found in the experience much-needed pseudo-freedom.
Hobbes was against her chest, obtrusive. It was just such a thing, such a piece of matter, such a focal point for humanity's various obsessions and cathexes, that she wished not for the first time that it were gone.
There was a time in her life that being blessed by a Golden Incunabulum was everything to her—her goal, her vindication, her raison d'etre. But then it became clear to her that all of its potential was to be plowed into a life of drudgery and endless politicking. She saw the lives that her father and mother led, a life and a relationship choked to death by Lebensraum's endlessly warped regulations limiting personal time between her father and mother, limiting family time between the three of them; regulations which, at the same time, permitted her mother a legion of paramours and her father a harem of the most nubile childbearing women the galaxy had to offer.
And that was all a Golden grade amounted to, she realized—a pawn to expand the might of the Mentzers beyond the stars without end. What did it really matter, then, to be at the apex of the hierarchy, if she had not the freedom to enjoy her power? It was a hierarchy of dust, built on bones and lies.
The world around her was warping and becoming one with her surreal visions. The louring darknesses grew welts that on closer look turned out to be immense OLED signages and then from out of the deep murk emerged cavalcades of people and life and a city street that looked finally like a city street, with commuters trodding under the lidless eyes of hologram advertisements, touts finding customers for their food, beverages, 'massage' services…
A fifteen-storied building hove into view, squat by Saltillan standards, and on it was hung three refulgent characters blasting a golden lucence into the vicinity: "S-2".
Marja sailed into a rising plume of gas and found herself assailed by a scent that reminded her of Earth's Bharatic Subcontinent, dimly remembered. Chillies, Turmeric, Coriander. Something curried. Dalcha.
Her appetite ballooned and made it difficult for her to focus on difficult thoughts. But eating wasn't on her mind, she felt it really couldn't be on her mind. She didn't have the constitution for it and felt that she might puke if she tried to eat.
So she hurtled past jabbering commuters, racing away faster than they could shout angry things; she smiled as the masses before her dodged away to flash what must have passed for rude gestures. The rush of wind through her hair was exhilarating and the promise of danger was arousal and food all at once.
It was several blocks of a city half-stuttering with activity, past hawkers of food and leering men and solicitous prostitutes of every gender and sporting every strange modification, and then she passed on into stillness, the change coming on so suddenly she was still playing with the choice to stop and grab something that might satiate her whetted appetites…
As it appeared the decision was already made for her, and she rumbled down lifeless streets, until she saw figures emerge lumpen and strange from out of hidden egresses in the ground.
Her breath caught and her heartbeat quickened. The figures, again. She gunned the holo-cycle accelerator and the engine whined powerfully. Another one of the masses appeared before her, and she wondered briefly if she should call upon her blessing—even without the Power Magnifiers, it was unlikely that the creatures, whatever they were, could withstand the inversion of spacetime.
She settled for running the thing over. Less collateral damage and she wouldn't have to report it to Lebensraum (which she was obligated to do, seeing as her attempt at grabbing the corporation by the balls had as yet proved unsuccessful). She turned her headlamps up to high-beam.
Less than a second after the decision was made in her mind, her eyes made sense of the creature that was revealed in that burst of light. How familiar. It was, in fact, a man. Marja stared, an icy shock flooding her system and dousing the madness coursing through her veins: it was a man of highly suspect hygiene, ungroomed and older perhaps than Jirani and wrapped up in a thick coat that made him look like a pumpkin. He was tottering down the street, his eyebrows bushy and white and contrasting greatly against his coal-dark skin. As the holo-cycle bore down upon him his eyes widened against the harsh glare, and he froze and cringed and raised his arms up so that his wizened face was blocked from Marja's view.
The space around her became soft and viscous. Marja blinked. Before she knew what was happening she had snapped the handlebars rightwise, causing her vehicle to swerve madly away from the old man.
A scream and a muffled thump. She hit something, hard, and she continued forward some tens of meters before the holo-cycle's counter-thrusts managed to stabilize the vehicle and prevent it from capsizing.
She looked back; the figures were clustering and from them were issuing harrowing screams. Marja turned the vehicle and saw revealed in the headlamps a multitude of people dressed poorly, their rough features stained with blood. A woman was there—kneeling, wailing—a boy in her arms, the boy limp and unstirring and drenched in a crimson liquid that pooled darkly about him.
The boy was young. He could not have been older than ten. The woman was staring at Marja through the beam of light, her face hung with a burning hatred that could scarce be matched in all the galaxy.
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And Marja saw that the boy had been made a strange mangle and felt the stirring of something horrible within her bowels.
'The… the compulsion…' was the first coherent thought she had. The men clustered around the woman and boy turned on their heels. They started making for her, yelling, screaming, throwing droplets of spittle and threads of saliva in her direction. She felt for Hobbes and found it purring against her chest; she made ready to use it, the compulsion, 'to defuse the situation. That's all I want to do, to defuse the situation…'
The environment pulsed with dark energy and she grasped around blindly for the energies of their incunabula, unsure exactly what she was committing to do.
I…
Marja couldn't muster within herself any capacity to manipulate their intentionalities. Her head was abuzz with so many things it felt like her heart might explode from the strain. She'd hit the boy, even though she hadn't meant to—
The men were almost upon her, their fists upraised, and she could see within their contorted faces a wrathfulness that sought to catch her and to kill her.
She had to run. She hadn't meant to do any of it.
She throttled the twist-grip accelerator; the holo-cycle bucked, its engine sputtering violently. She swerved and bolted, leaving behind anger and brokenness and an outpouring of bitter lamentations that chased her into the darkness.
The environment around her swirled in a tempest. Things were happening that she wasn't noticing. Her body was piloting itself.
When she had enough presence of mind to return to awareness, the first thing she realized was that she was holding something rigid. She gripped the binoculars hard enough that her knuckles went white. She had taken it from the basket placed by the entrance, grabbed it without thinking. Her hands were trembling uncontrollably now, and she struggled in vain to piece together the bits of her crumbling psyche.
Emotions that were indecipherable and unutterable assailed her mind and manifested through strange bodily contortions. The light was dim and yet too bright, scouring her mind white-hot with equal parts indignation and self-blame.
Her lower lip was vibrating against her teeth. She tried to stop it. It wouldn't stop. She bit down upon it until she tasted iron. The pain was dull and far away, as though it were felt through a pleasure servitor or mediated by a mind-to-mind interface.
She was sitting on a bench in the middle of that wide lobby. It was completely deserted. It must have been the Skydome, but then again she couldn't be sure and didn't much care for confirmation.
The elevator had taken her very far up, but she hadn't been paying attention. Now she was here, alone in a vast space built of galvanized steel and staring out the immense pane of tempered glass fenestrating the outward-facing side, letting her gaze wobble undecidedly across the craggy crimson-lit Desertian landscape.
It was a window that spanned hundreds of meters from length to length, unbroken by columns or supports or transoms. Her mind was aflutter and made of the moon's pooling blood-red beams the Saltillan boy's blood. It was so red and so fresh, his blood, and his mother had been covered in it, and her eyes…
Marja might have thought the sight breathtaking, if it had been any other time than this. How rare, how beautiful, she might have thought, if the universe didn't seem so cruel to her.
'It was cruel to him. I was cruel to him. Why am I thinking of myself?' she sputtered, finding that tears were streaming down her cheeks. And then 'what… what does it matter? I am a Mentzer… it means… it should mean nothing to me…' she cried silently, sobbing and wondering how far she had fallen from the tree, wondering why she had run, wondering why she felt guilty, wondering why she could not just shut out the fact that she had killed someone innocent.
The binoculars were still in her hand and she pounded it into her breast angrily, and finding that she was feeling nothing because Hobbes was cushioning the blows, rammed it into her forehead instead.
So many people have died already. Why should another one matter?
The warm exudate made a channel of blood down her forehead and fell into her eyes, stinging them closed and mixing with her tears. Dark rivulets streamed down her cheeks into her mouth and then made dark splotches on the bluish-white ground between her feet.
She tried to breathe but her breath made a lump in her throat. A feeling was rising within her that paralyzed her extremities and made a muddle of her perceptions. She tried to open her eyes but her vision was blurred. Frustrated, she flung away the binoculars with as much strength as it could.
It bounced off the window and clattered upon the ground, and the sound provoked her ire.
She got to her feet. The world spun. Far outside the climate-controlled space was a vast world of mountains and toxic air and coral-like promontories which had formed over billions of years and would be eroded into other forms over billions more. Her power meant so little in the grand scheme of things that in the end her struggles could be worth less than nothing on the cosmic scale.
How rare, how beautiful is each life lived in the universe…
She exhaled as hard as she could, and without realizing it she was howling jaggedly, screaming her lungs out, clawing at her breasts with her fingers. Once she ran out of breath she inhaled and started all over again, bawling inconsolably until the rage of her anguish became a ritual in praise of the Desert calm before her. The observable world was rimmed by the Amate Range, beyond which she wished she had never returned from.
Her feet had taken her forward in her sorrowful fugue, and her fingers met the cool surface of the window and smudged upon it bloody fingerprints. Her keening had lightened to sobs, and as she blinked her vision recovered a modicum of its original fidelity.
She stared outward, pressing her face to the window and falling to her knees. She saw a plains of rock and sand and pointed megaliths that marked natural milestones on the road toward the Amate. She loved life and movement and the twittering of birds, but this was a calm world, a dead world, where nothing moved and nothing could communicate their story without masks.
But something was moving in the distance, raising a cloud of dust that floated, suspended, then fell slowly back toward the ground.
What is it?
Marja crawled, coughing, toward where the binoculars had fallen, picking it up and brushing at the lenses out of habit.
She came back to the window and sat, admiring the carpet of stars studding the heavens like winking gemstones; there was so much coldness and austerity there, but in that moment and in that solitude it was easy to believe that the universe had been made for her eyes only.
The universe was made and the atoms that were to become Marja Mentzer charted an unlikely and improbable path through eons and distances impossible to conceive. They made her and made her eyes, and reflected the glory of an infinite universe in them.
She managed a smile that threatened to collapse into nothingness.
There was, out there in the dead and sandy plain, a strange phenomenon of movement. She brought the binoculars up to her eyes, a ploy to distract herself; she searched the plains, scanned up and down, until she eventually found the trundling object.
What a familiar thing…
An APC, maybe a scout returning, Marja thought hazily, wondering if she should inform Jirani, but then suddenly feeling so very tired. She put the binoculars down then brought it up again and squinted through the lens, finding the license plate and sounding the letters out loud: 7Q2069PDF.
The correct thing to do would be to tell Jirani, but somehow she didn't care about any of it. Her hand dropped limply and the binoculars clattered to the ground. She gave herself up to unconsciousness and fell into an uncomfortable peace.