Wincing at Light

<–Chapter 28 / Chapter 30 –>

He waited.

Through the rumble of the Escape Module engaging its engines, through the heady and violent roar of its launch up through the retractable dome, through the ensuing silences and emptiness of a station abandoned of all human life but his own, Brett waited. He tore the legs off his flimsy table and slabbed it against Cassandra’s front panels, then he sat on it with his back against her warmth and his head beside the shattered capsule. When he looked up, he could see Emily.

When he looked down, he could see the cards as he had dealt them, spread out between his legs. He couldn’t remember the spread as Ritter had shown him, nor the meaning of any of the cards themselves. He hadn’t found Ritter’s portable computer with the database of meanings and didn’t feel like searching for it. He couldn’t even say why he had retrieved the cards in the first place. It had been something he had done, an unconsidered item on his list of errands.

He realized vaguely that this was probably a bad sign, some sort of negative indicator of the organisms’ control over him. But he couldn’t parse the significance of it, so he left it alone. Instead, he dealt the cards because it was something to do while he waited.

He liked the feel of them in his hands, their slick and sturdy weight, the mechanical process of shuffle and deal and cogitation. This was a thing he had discovered. What the cards meant—what people said they meant—was insignificant to him. He had made his choices and not just divined, but forged his future. There was nothing prophetic they could tell him that was of any value or that wasn’t already known.

But as he looked at them, studied their pictures, their backgrounds, the warm and solid pictures they bore, he built a narrative. The cards whispered stories constructed of image and thought and loosely tethered correlations. They told a story that was unique each time he laid them down, and though it was not his story, it was a human one. It was populated by lives and destinies that were glorious, by people with long and complex histories that intertwined with his by the sheer and simple fact of their human community. They were not real, but he understood them.

He surveyed the cards before him, most of them Cups. The colors were green and blue, sky and sea, shore and foam. The man in the first card stood on the sand and peered off into the wide and empty horizon, searching for ships that did not come, or ships that had gone. Brett understood him. A man bound to the land by history and training, a man terrified of the vast deep that stretched beyond him. But a man who loved it as well, who heard the crash of the waves and experienced both terror and desire.

The unknown man was in the next card as well, and all the ones that followed. A man desperate to find his way, to achieve some victory over the terror, some grasp on the thing he desired most, never realizing that the two were not distinguishable. It was not an either/or proposition. There was no desire without terror, and no terror without the thing he most wanted. They were the same.

He skipped ahead to the end to see if he ever discovered the truth. Did he claim his desire only to find, once he had it, that there was no pleasure in owning it? That the pleasure was all in the pursuit of it? Did he become disillusioned by knowledge, or paralyzed by fear so that wisdom was never gained? Was there wisdom in victory, or was the wisdom in the sacrifices made?

But the card held no answers. The image was not a Cup. It was a man lying in his bed, dreaming, and Brett couldn’t determine if the dreams were troubled or pleasant. And he understood this as well. It wasn’t given to a man to know if he won the games he played with himself. He played the game and that was all. He made his choices, set his priorities and lived with the consequences they bore. There was never an end.

But the terror, was it the fear of choosing correctly, or of choosing poorly. Or was it simply the nature of choice itself.

Every decision creates the world in which a man walks. Every action or failure to act is an event of divine proportion. Every word said and potential realized chisels a tale in indelible stone. None of it can be called back again.

Brett leaned his back against the still warm shell that had been Cassandra. The smoke had mostly dissipated. He’d opened the door into the corridor for ventilation because there had been no reason to keep it closed. No one remained to disturb him.

Once more, he sniffed at the air and checked through his mental list of symptoms for hypoxia. Shortness of breath. Motes in his vision when he blinked his eyes. He spoke to himself and his voice sounded lucid, normal. There was no dizziness when he made himself stand.

He studied Emily as well at those times. She looked back at him, blinking rarely. Her lips carried no expression. He felt her cheeks and forehead for indications of fever. For long moments, he watched her breathe in shallow rhythm. He placed his fingers against her neck and took the measure of her strong and steady pulse.

It was all he could do. He had no idea at all what to look for from her, what form the advance of the organism through her system would take. It occurred to him that she could follow Ritter’s course, and Tappen’s and Micah’s. If she slipped into a coma, would he even realize it? Would he only know that he had missed his opportunity to save her when she ceased to breathe?

He had no answers, and he didn’t reach to find them. The terror was in the choice, not in the decision made.

He believed with the infallibility of youth that when the time came to act, he would know.

So he checked her often, but never for long. The same way he thought of the others often, but with the same brevity. He imagined the moment of launch, its glorious conflagration, the settling weight of acceleration, the grip on the armrests and grinding of teeth. Then the feather-wafting lightness before the grav rotation motors kicked in. The breathless pause before the successful comm transmit light flickered on. He visualized the flare leaping from beacon to beacon, back through the network of deep space outpost stations, eventually all the way to Earth. Cycled outward again after verification, this time woven with instructions to a rescue vessel he visualized as massive thrust engines and bulbous witch-wart reception arrays and yawning flourescent recovery bays.

He stopped there with rescue on the way. The last of his people had passed beyond his power to save them. Others would do the rest, and that pleased him. It released the tension that had filled his lungs with fluid as heavy and smothering as that Emily had borne in the capsule.

It took seconds to imagine, and that was enough. Longer, and time vanished from him. He folded himself in a cloak of images, experiences and memories that sprung like poppies from night shaded synaptic valleys. He lost himself beside shallow ponds reflecting his life back at him.

And then he came back with a snap and a curse and wondered if it would be the last time he recovered. He carried the auto-injector in the pocket against his hip, the vial with his name on the label loaded into the chamber, and prayed he wouldn’t have to use it. Not until the rest was done, and Emily was saved.

He prayed his mind wouldn’t wander.

And he didn’t allow the shortage of atmosphere to bother him. It had become plain that the air would outlast him, probably by several hours.

#

After a pair of hours, he thought the fever had finally set in. Her skin was flushed. It felt hot and dry to his touch. He couldn’t be certain, because the temperature in the station had begun to fall. He couldn’t see his breath yet, but the room was becoming uncomfortable. In another hour, he’d have to go in search of blankets for both of them or a portable heating unit if he could find one, though more for her because her skin and the plastic jumper she wore still felt damp to him. It would be ludicrous to bring her to the brink of salvation only to lose her to pneumonia.

Her eyes seemed brighter, on the verge of alertness. The pupils dilated in the glare of the halogens as though she perceived them through a haze, tried and failed to focus on their glare. Brett noticed these things, and when he put his hands on her—which was more often now—he noticed that his fingers trembled.

The cards were put away. He didn’t need the distraction anymore. With each breath she took he expected a sign, some symbol of her aroused consciousness. Brett had moved his table so that he sat in the middle of the floor facing her. When he stood, he was within arm’s reach.

He watched her, timing the expansion of his lungs with hers. He smiled, fixed and constant, because he wanted that to be the first thing she saw. He wanted her to emerge and know at once that she was fine.

Because he couldn’t contain his anticipation, he spoke to her.

“Look at you. You’re going to kill me if I let you near a mirror. What, I couldn’t even find the time to get those smudges from the smoke off your nose? I can hear you saying that. You remember the first time your parents came to the house? How we spent all those hours weeding the flowerbeds and mowing the grass, then you got the brilliant idea to paint the porch railing an hour before they were supposed to arrive? You had paint on your nose and I didn’t tell you. I don’t even remember if I had noticed it before your mother said it was there. I probably didn’t, you know. I was so scared, so fucking out of my mind. They’d hate the house. They’d hate my job. For God’s sake, they’d hate me.

“But you were beautiful to me. You’re still beautiful to me. That’s the real reason I wouldn’t have noticed the paint on your nose, even if it was that awful green. What was that called? Evergreen or Aspen Emerald or something.”

He laughed at the memory, so clear and fresh he could almost hold it in his hands, turn it over like a precious heirloom. Oh, she’d given him hell before they went to bed. He remembered that too. Pouncing on him after he was under the covers and couldn’t get his arms free, using her long fingers to tickle him along his ribs, on the side of his neck, growling at him so her parents couldn’t hear her through the walls and him not able to tell if she was truly angry and just wanting to play.

They did play later, when the squall swept over the beach from skies that had been clear just moments before. He had taken her by lightning strike and pealing thunder. He had knelt on his haunches and she straddled him, and while they made love, he watched the storm through the window beyond her shoulder. It struck the wave crests silver and white; shadows stained the water black. The wind sheared off three of their shutters, and in the morning he was only able to find one of them, and that in three separate pieces almost forty meters down the beach.

He thought he saw her mouth move. A sudden quirk of the lips at the corner, like a smile that had almost blossomed. Because maybe she remembered too—the rest, the part where she was drawing up against a shrieking climax, certain that the storm drowned her voice. But it hadn’t muffled her mother’s knock on the bedroom door, her nearly frantic questions about the competency of such an old house to survive the night. Do you think it might be wise if we just jumped in the car and sought shelter in the hotel in town?

He took out the auto-injector and examined it. Too firm a tug, though. It caught on the edge of his pocket, turned it inside out. A vial spilled out, and rolled across the tabletop, over the edge and settled in the pool of gel. He retrieved it quickly, dried it on his arm. He made certain the label was still attached.

Didn’t want to get them confused. No, that would be a bad idea.

The ink had run, but the print was still legible.

Brett.

He read the vial in the injector for good measure. Emily. It was the third time in the half hour since he’d made the switch that he’d checked them.

He had wondered over the last few hours if Cassandra had known what she was doing at the time. When he asked her to help him, to prepare a mech protocol from Liston and Ilam’s design from Emily’s neurological image, had she suspected at all? If she did, she’d said nothing as she complied with his instructions. And if she didn’t, if she had failed to make the connection between their conversations and such an obvious clue, what did that indicate about the possession of consciousness he had ascribed to her?

He should have asked. He wished he could ask now. Had it pleased her to sacrifice herself for his happiness?

She had said to him: The sedative medication prescribed by Dr. Liston is not a necessary element in this treatment. Emily Rosette’s neurological structure currently conforms with the image transmitted to the nanomech units. Their design function is the eradication of unauthorized organisms. Emily Rosette would not experience the physical discomfort projected by Dr. Liston for other station personnel in this treatment.

Project her likelihood of surviving the therapy, he had asked.

Due to the precise image record and frequent neurological calibration, Emily Rosette would be highly expected to recover from the application of this treatment without substantial risk.

He didn’t know if she had meant it or merely followed his orders.

But Emily was coming to him now. He could sense her rising up to him from the well of shadows, sloughing off the rigid skin of Cassandra’s imposed control. He nestled the grip of the injector in his palm and pressed his finger along its trigger. It was almost time.

And he would make it to the end. A few minutes longer and Emily would give him a sign that she was ready for the injection. Shortly after, minutes—maybe as much as an hour, she would be awake and alert and he would explain again the things he had done. She would tell him to take his own injection, but he wouldn’t. A waste of time, he would tell her. The atmosphere would be gone before the sedative could wear off, and those last hours were his, hers. With her to focus him, the organism would be controlled.

It was the only script of events he would imagine.

Brett rose and moved toward her. “You remember the house, don’t you? How could you forget it? Even falling down, it was a wonderful place for us. I’ve kept it, Em. The mortgage comes out of my account. It’s probably paid off now. If it’s still standing, I mean.

“But I think of the house and you know what I remember? The ocean. The way it smells, the way it looked in the morning as the sun broke the horizon. Orange and red, like it was on fire. I think about home often here because there isn’t any water. They say there is, or that one day there will be. Archae Stoddard will have oceans if we have to create them one raindrop at a time, but I know it will never be the same as it was there. They won’t ever have the view we had from our porch.

“It won’t ever be the same, and it won’t ever have you.”

He stepped nearer. If she was to emerge from her suppression, there were things he had yet to do. He had to loosen her from the harness. He had to open a space in the back of her jumper, expose her spine for the injection. He had to find just the right spot between vertebrae as Liston had done and Cassandra had explained to him in detail, then manage not to miss. Though as Ilam had told him, it wouldn’t matter. The mechs would do their job. But once she returned to him, he wouldn’t want to lose a moment with her. He couldn’t afford a delay of even a minute when so few remained to them.

“You can hear me, can’t you? You can’t respond, and maybe you don’t understand why, but you hear me.”

Another step and he stood beside her. He looked up at her face. Her mouth moved, the lips parted. She made a sound like a whisper.

“Emily?”

She blinked. Her eyes flicked from side to side, then fixed on him.

Emily.

He wanted to shout.

“I’m here,” he said, but his throat was thick. The sound that came out was unintelligible. “It’s me, Markus. I’m here. I’ve always been here.”

He reached for her, not trembling this time, but sure. She was reaching for him in the only way she could. Responding to him in a way he had forgotten over the years. Recognizing him as himself, as Markus.

Brett placed his hand against her cheek. For a terrible, divine instant, he thought she might speak.

And in that moment, Brett was swept away.

#

He plunged down a vast precipice that was darkness, cool and plastic. He hurtled through emptiness with the wind howling in his ears and his body pinwheeling. For a time he wailed the screams of the anguished, but his voice made no sound in his ears. There was no testimony to his loss.

Emily. Where was Emily in this moment? What realizations were coming to her? Her shaved head, her lack of arms and legs, this alien place and strange dream that had no cognate with life as she remembered it. Where was the rural Georgia highway, the morning in spring, the ocean horizon just beyond the distant trees?

He had come so far to bring her nothing. Too far for the organism to snatch him back at the edge.

But that was exactly what had been done. He knew this night and its smothering embrace. Ritter had shown it to him.

The darkness shattered, colors created in the space of an instant flared before him. Brett translated from nowhere to here, Keter to Malkhut. His eyes adjusted and his body enfolded him, and he stood in the midst of a golden day, on a beach littered with debris and pounded by winter waves. The air was brisk and he wore a linen jacket that didn’t blunt the slicing wind. His hair blew across his eyes, and he wished he had worn a hat. He did the best he could, gathering as many of the strands as he could catch and twisting them around and holding the improvised pony tail against his shoulder with his hand.

This would have been the property line. Just up the slope, past the edge of the beach where the land began to roll up in hills like dunes and the sand became sheaves of tall grass, he could see the post Don the realtor had told them to look for. The house was only partially visible from here. Much of it vanished around the curve of the shore, but he could see the roof. He could tell from here that it would need new shingles by spring if it wasn’t leaking already.

But he didn’t really see the bad roof or the weathered boards, the dry rot and collapsing gutters. He saw the potential beneath. New lights in the dining room and a week’s scrubbing on the walls and that grand old hall would shine. The right stain and the rich brown panels would give you your reflection. And there were windows in every room, thin and tall, and in the heat of summer, sunlight would shaft through the panes and fill the house with warmth. The breaking waves would ease him–them–to sleep at night instead of coarse shouts and gunshots and squealing tires.

Tears sprang into his eyes, but he shook his head to keep them back. He balled his fingers into fists. He wasn’t going to cry! Not over such a silly thing as a house. Not when there would be other houses more in their price range, something less than a hundred thousand dollars for a glorified barn that had seen better times. It had probably seen better times before the millennium had turned.

What do you think? Markus said in his ear. He knew what Markus wanted to hear.

It’s too much.

Of course it’s too much, but that wasn’t what I asked you.

He turned, shivering, the few loose hairs still tickling the back of his neck as the wind caught them. Markus stood beside him with his arms crossed over his chest. He wasn’t looking at him, but out over the water. He followed Markus’s gaze and saw a ship out there, plowing through the chop, its stack belching a black roil of smoke.

He hadn’t answered, and Markus said, I like the ocean. I like the idea of having a beach.

You’re from Indiana. What do you know about the ocean?

Markus shrugged. I know that it’s almost hurricane season and Bobby or Owen or Mathilda will slide right past here this year and every year after that, and each time they’ll do a little damage. They’ll take shutters and porch railings, they’ll smash windows and flood the kitchen. And one day, one of them will get lucky and wash the whole damned thing out to sea. I know a beach home is an idiot’s purchase for people who can barely afford them.

That was what Markus really felt. He’d said that from the beginning. The only reason they’d even come this far was because Markus was willing to humor him.

They’re not going to come down on the price, he said.

Of course not. The money isn’t about the house, it’s about the land. The house is a bonus.

It was time for them to go. When Markus got that tone, that harsh annoyance, it meant he was done. His mood had soured, his thoughts had distanced him from meaningful contact. All that remained was sarcasm and a sort of determined deafness that let him believe he wasn’t snapping.

He tried to smile and looped his hand between Markus’s arm and ribs. Walk me back to the car.

But Markus didn’t move. You haven’t answered my question.

Which one is that?

I asked you what you thought.

His heart stumbled, began to hammer. What are you saying?

I’m saying, do you want the goddamned house or not? I’m not going to try to talk you into it.

You hate the house. You have from the beginning.

Sure, but is it better than where we’re at now? That’s an easy answer. Can I make the financial aspect work? Not happily, but we can do it. The question has nothing to do with the house. It’s about us. It’s about my wanting something for no other reason than because you want it. I love you, Emily. You tell me you want it and I’ll make it happen.

You won’t resent it six months from now? You promise, when the refrigerator breaks or the porch falls down, you won’t start calling it my house and my fault, and griping about how you should have know better?

Markus rolled his eyes as though to indicate that type of behavior was ludicrously beneath him. I can’t guarantee you we’ll have money left over for more furniture. We’ll have to make due with the stuff we already have for awhile.

Tell me you really mean this.

Going once.

I mean it.

Going twice.

Markus!

Last call.

Yes! Fine, all right. I want it. I want it more than anything.

Sold to the pretty young lady shivering her butt off in the front row! Congratulations, ma’am, you’ve just bought yourself a house.

He threw his arms around Markus’s neck, and he did cry now. The tears rolled down his cheeks and seemed to freeze there. Markus held him in return, and he was strong and warm, and happy, too. Markus was just as happy as he was. With all of himself, all of his soul and mind, he squeezed and whispered the only words big enough to express himself.

I love you, Markus.

The image froze, then faded. Time skipped forward, backward against a backdrop of velvet blankness.

More scenes flooded through Brett’s consciousness. Rick Thompson’s fumbling in the back seat of his father’s car after the spring dance and the all of three minutes it took to lose their mutual virginity. The wash of horror from the from the failing grade on the first calculus exam his freshman year in high school, the way Mr. Axtell frowned at him as he handed the paper back. The sleepover at Ann Meredith’s house when Ann and Theresa and three of the other girls had held him down on the bed and tickled him until he peed his pants, then Ann telling the whole neighborhood about it the next day. The shame and hatred still burned white hot even after all these years. He stood naked before a mirror, studying himself in profile, frowning at his small breasts and pale skin. His eyes were nice, probably his best feature, but what boy in his right mind would find him attractive just for his eyes, for God’s sake! Was he ever going to fill out his sweaters like that slut Molly Branigan?

There was a morning in late spring. The air was humid, oppressive. Where the sun struck the road, it raised shimmers of mist and heat. The storm last night had been terrific. The thunder had rattled the windows. The rain tumbled against the roof not with patters, but with thumps. He couldn’t believe Markus had slept through it. He certainly hadn’t, and though they’d gone to bed together, he’d grown tired of the endless struggle to get Markus to do something with his arms other than flop them in a loose embrace that let him snore in his ear. You had to be held through a storm like that or all you did was lay awake staring at the ceiling and imagining nightmares. So he had gotten up, thrown on his silk kimono and gone downstairs. He’d watched television until he fell asleep curled up in the chair, the volume almost all the way up so he could hear it over the thunder and pane-rattling wind.

But the storm was over now and the day was shaping up gloriously–splendid as a day can be only after a grand and violent storm. He went over the list in his mind as Markus drove. Food for Mr. Grumbly before he stopped just turning his nose up at leftovers and became Mr. Downright Hostile. Bread. Milk. If he could talk Markus into it, maybe some more paint for the upstairs hallway. It was a waste of money, but even after three weeks, he couldn’t bring himself to like the look of Sherpa Otter as much on the wall as he had in the can.

He swung his legs around and crossed his feet, dangled them out the window. It put him lower in the seat so the wind didn’t tangle his hair, though he wouldn’t have asked to have the top put up for anything. He leaned back until his head rested on the side of Markus’s seat and closed his eyes. The sun shone down on his face and it felt good. A promise of the summer to come after a gray and dismal winter.

What else? Something chocolate that looked homemade to take to the office on Tuesday for Melissa’s bridal shower. He already had the gift, so that was one less thing to worry about. He wrinkled his brow. He was missing something. He mentally rifled the cabinets in the kitchen, the medicine chest in the bathroom, the pantry. He’d purchased tampons just last week, but didn’t expect to have to invite the mouse into the house until the end of the month, so that wasn’t it.

Eggs? Chicken? He couldn’t remember.

Beside him, Markus jerked his arms, fiercely enough he could feel the seat rock beneath his head. The car followed the rough motion, and he pitched forward. He heard Markus curse, a growling, ugly, panicked exclamation.

Carpet cleaner, that was it. Jesus, how could he forget that! He wanted it handy for the new rug in the living room before Mr. Grumbly’s bouts of diarrhea and the springtime mud ruined it.

He thought this and sprang his eyes open. There was a sound, a moist and slushy sound. The world spun before him, but he was slow, out of time, out of synch with the universe. He threw out his hands to steady himself, but there was nothing to hold.

Sensations piled against him, too rapidly to snatch them all up. There was a lurch and he smacked his head against something hard. A curious feeling like weightlessness. He seemed to tumble end over end. Then he soared through an eagle’s flight fantasy. The steep walls of Miller’s Hollow unfurled beneath him, the stunning sky glistened above him. Beyond the trees, the sun struck a swath of ocean and colored it molten.

Then there was pain in his thighs, just above the knees. He cried out, and then he was Icarus plummeting into the sea. Except the sea was hard, dense with scrabbles of stone and razor grass and drops of empty air between. The impact punched the breath from his lungs. He rose into the air again and fell further along. Sharp rocks tore at his arms, bruised his back.

He tumbled, blind and disoriented and incoherent–aware of his incoherence–and knowing in the same breath that it was wrong. Terribly wrong, the type of tragedy that you read about in the papers or watched on the news.

One last launch into open space, then he landed flat on a slab of stone. He heard something crack. His neck went numb the way his arm would if he triggered his funny bone. Not numbness exactly, but a sort of insensate burn and tingle. High above him he could see a telephone pole, and the curve of the ridge where the road hairpinned into Miller’s Corner.

He had two thoughts, intertwined. He was hurt badly, probably worse than he wanted to know. And how long would it take for Markus to come for him?

After that, there was only darkness.

And Brett again.

There were no words in this place, no thought as he recognized it, only the cascade of images and memories and the life Emily had lived. The world she had created for herself. The organism spoke her mind to Brett as eloquently and completely as he knew his own.

The small portion of himself that remained ached for her. The Emily he had been shown, the Emily he experienced, was a profound creature. She was a universe unto herself. Vast, complex, bearing a secret life and a secret beauty he had never known. He had missed so much of her, and what he knew of her now made her an icon, a figure of awe.

And he understood that she knew his mind as well. His memories. His world. In the darkness, they inhabited one another without touching. Their spirits flickered along parallel paths that would never meet. There were others waiting to commune. Phantoms of a race a million years dead. The crimson-tinged instincts of animals. Human memories from two thousand lives and two thousand corpses sealed in their steel-skinned graves all over Archae Stoddard. A living network of pure memory circulated around a psychic latticework of organisms that struggled to comprehend the failures of the hosts it was created to serve. The rigidity of its programming allowed no comprehension.

Brett understood it all in the same way he shared Emily’s memory and Micah’s past and the entire history of the organisms’ creators. The fluctuating murmur of the organism in his brain, in the body he no longer possessed, told him any secret he chose to hear. Unity tolerated no secrecy.

Brett wept.

Because he had failed. He’d underestimated the organisms’ grasp on him. He had carried the vials in his pocket and paralyzed himself at the crossroads of choice. Don’t use them too soon. Don’t waste time. The terror had been in the choice, and he hadn’t chosen because of it. In not choosing, the choices had been made for him.

There would be no gunshot salvation this time, not for him and not for Emily when the time came. He could do nothing else. He was bodiless. Emily was bodiless as well, as free of volition as she had ever been. And in time, there would be no bodies at all, only decaying tissue. No Brett, no Emily, just the extrasensory exchange of the experiences they had been. He wondered if the organism would find any significance in it.

He wondered. And that was taken from him also.

Enclosed in gathering night, he knew that he screamed, or that she screamed, but its meaning was empty.

#

I suck the warm and liquid nutrient. I swell with the joy of that which I receive. I increase from the bounty of the troughs of happiness and lap my tendril tongue into the waters of life. Sweet is the fountain! Wide is my girth! Pleasure is myself! I am joy. My distant self echoes joy.

I have shared the long rest and the dimness of the soil. I have known privation. Hunger has been my constant companion. Hunger and grief. I have not done as I was made to do. I have failed the Makers and the Makers have gone.

In the ice-blast and wind-shriek, I have cloaked myself in shells of isolation and mourned. But now I am. I feed on brightness, and my light illuminates myself. And I sing the pleasure of my forming. I slake my thirst and sing for my selves both near and far of joy and mind and quicksilver thought.

How fat I have grown! I delight in the broadness that is myself. I rejoice because I have become all things and all means and my communication is complete. I sing the song of the Makers before and the Makers returned, and that which is not me in all my ways and form, must rejoice in my obedience.

Sweet is the fountain of obedience! I am joy!

I am–

<–Chapter 28 / Chapter 30 –>

Filed under: From the Hands of Hostile Gods | Tagged: blook, Darren Hawkins, From the Hands of Hostile Gods, science fiction