He stands atop Pallatnik Ch’nik, the tallest of the twelve primordial beasts. Its neck is like a rope loosely braided, three separate tubes looping in and out of each other on up to the head. Its body looks like five or six bodies mashed together, and quadruple as many limbs supporting it. Only a few of the legs are remotely functional. The remaining limbs are either crushed by the weight of the beast or drag behind it in broken and bloody piles, useless and half-formed. Pallatnik Ch’nik heads the army of misshapen beasts as they march across the bridge of red stones, for a destination known, but incomprehensible. The darkness surrounding the bridge is absolute, the only light coming from Moltep’s yellow eyes.
“Perhaps we are surrounded by true nothingness?” Pacheco says, scanning the pitch black expanse that surrounds the dusty red stones they walk upon. He feels he is just as much speaking to himself as to the beasts, that their thinking is coming together in some twisted way. “Then what is the Fade? It has form, momentum, energy. Why does it bring nothing? It is a concept made manifest, nothingness in action. The Fade reacts to reality by consuming it, much as the primordial beasts do. Perhaps it is just another form of chaos, destroying the orderliness of reality so that chaos can reign supreme once again?” He hocks up some phlegm, and spits into the air. “Damn it all, these are just speculations. I’ll never know until I find my way to the center of reality. But is this really the way?”
One of the beasts, a creature whose body is a combination of skin and gelatin and glows pink in the refracted light from Moltep’s eyes, emits a high pitched whine, stopping all the other beasts cold. “What? What is it?” Pacheco says. He peers into the low light ahead of him, but sees nothing.
“Why did we stop? Pallatnik Ch’nik, forward. Now!” The creature beneath him, the top of its head like a thick mat of moss, lets loose a small growl, but doesn’t move.
“Damn it all,” Pacheco says, but then he sees why the beasts have stopped. There’s a soft flash of light in the distance, like a mirror reflecting the face of moonlight. Something is moving in the darkness ahead of them on the bridge.The beast beneath him lets loose another growl, as do the other beasts, those whom are capable of manipulating air through any respiring orifice to make sound, that is. They are all tense, and Pacheco feels it too. It comes from a fear of the unknown, an emotion he didn’t know the beasts to even be capable of. Am I affecting how the beasts see the world? He wonders. And if I am affecting them in such a way, how are they affecting me?
The thought quickly evaporates when the shape’s structure ahead becomes more discernible. “It can not be. No, how could it possibly...” The structure is huge, meant to resemble the ancient world turtle of old yama mythology, with a cracked dome shell, a city-sized fish bowl through which a building-sized bullet has passed. The interior of the dome is dark and lifeless. Surrounding the base of the dome is a ring of dark metal, as black as smokestack spume. And while it had appeared to be on the stone bridge, it is in fact off to the side, too large by far to fit. The entire structure trembles as would a hummingbird stuck in sap, its synapses burst from beating its head against the tree.
“Yama Dempuur,” Pacheco whispers. It’s the great domed city, the last remnant of those who imprisoned Hyperion for their own purposes. He hasn’t seen it in what feels like a lifetime. The barkskin he had before the girl from the Coral Islands had been conscripted in Yama Dempuur, and that was long ago. The city had aged and decayed to the point that it stood as a parody to what it once was, a nightmare version of the seat of Yama civilization.
The beasts will not go any closer to the city, Pacheco realizes. There is something about it which they are truly afraid of. He feels something like a shadow’s cold finger run down his spine, eyes from the city, or maybe the city itself, watching, waiting. “Come off it, Pacheco.” He says to himself. “I must be losing it. On the bridge for so long, with no one to talk to but the beasts of chaos, it would be enough to drive anyone else mad.” A smile cracks across his face, as if a stitch stretched between his ears has burst apart, releasing a musty old laugh that has been dying to get out. “I must be losing it,” He says again, unable to stop laughing. He feels something slipping in his head. He’s beginning to accept wonderment on its own terms, to acquiesce to it. He wonders at everything now, all the ties of his rational world slipping away and becoming as weird and demented as the beasts who march below him.
Where had this bridge taken them, how much deeper into the spiral? The beasts wanted freedom, and the only way to get it was to go closer and closer to the center of it all, where the mecha of Hyperion presumably lied. The question most wracking his brain, however, was why the city was here, in the middle of a forgotten bridge to god-knew-where. Yama Dempuur had always held a tight orbit through the middling worlds, always staying a few paces ahead of the Fade. Perhaps it had strayed. The Fade could have affected it in some way, knocking it off course. It had happened before, where the great nothing had consumed the world of San’kaa Lo just as Yama Dempuur was about to cross through its border of perception. The city went through a turbulent patch, the wreckage of San’kaa Lo beating against its dome and hull, threatening to destroy it. It made it through, winding up far off course in a world at some faraway place along the spiral.
There were all sorts of safeguards around the walking city to prevent it from slipping into the nothingness that it had helped create all those years ago. One of those safeguards was a ring of automatons that hovered around the perimeter of the city, all their polygonal sides covered in mirrors that were capable of storing energy and refracting it in times of great entropic want. The colloquial name given them, tractors, possibly arose out of their function, which was to pull Yama Dempuur through large spaces of nothingness or negative space by releasing stored energy in the form of mirrored reality. Each mirrored side had in it the reflection of a bountiful land, presumably how many of the worlds had been when the spiral was still intact. That was how Pacheco remembered the walking city, the place he used to call home, where he had attended the Royal Academy as a young man, and found his calling to greatness. Now it seemed there were nothing but ghosts left. How long had it been here? How many years had he been traversing the bridge with the primordial beasts?
There is nothing about its approach that suggests movement, save for the soft dust cloud which billows around its pointed base. All is dark, thereby negating any point of reference to judge its speed by. Still, though the darkness has fat, sticky fingers, the tractor’s surface shines with the intensity of a small star, a brightness that seemed to be growing in intensity. Armand Von Leechpin, the beast whose body is like a frame of serrated, dusty bones in a blob of coagulated gelatin, belches a roar at the tractor as it nears. The other beasts follow Von Leechpin’s lead, each with their own unique grumble or shout. Nameless One erects its chitin body into a perfectly vertical line, its millipede legs waving madly around like windmill wings. Then the tractor stops, and the roaring settles to a pervasive growl. It’s at a distance close enough that Pacheco can see it is roughly his height. He must scrunch his face up into a squinty, shriveled prune, but his one black eye can discern a brilliant azure reflected in the tractor’s forward-most surface. It’s a blue like the sky above a verdant land from long ago, when no one thought that something like the Fade could exist, and nothingness was merely man’s attempt at conceptualizing the empty space between meanings. Beneath the blue in the tractor’s mirror is a gold light, like a sunbeam, which blinks as if caught in a lens. The whole reflection is like a summer field billowing in a toasted wind, when viewed through the eyes of a sleepy child.
“Colonel Pacheco,” The tractor says. It’s voice is a woman’s, warm and sultry, as if it laid out on a duvet of luxurious, plush velvet. Pacheco clears his throat, and the beasts grow completely silent.
“To whom am I speaking?” He asks.
“I am but a messenger, so my name is of little import. There is someone who would like to speak with you, good doctor.” The gold light on the tractor’s surface f
lashes softly.
“Someone? There are people still living in Yama Dempuur?”
“Yes, Colonel Pacheco. There are many beings still in the city, myself included.” The tractor seems to speak as if a laugh is stuck behind its teeth. And while the tractor doesn’t have anything even closely resembling teeth, let alone a mouth from which to speak, if it did, its collected assortment of molars, canines and incisors would surely be razor sharp and extremely dangerous.
“Beings, hm? Well, pray tell, who is this being who’d like to meet me?”
“I am not at leave to say. You’ll just have to come and meet him.”
Pachecho scoffs. “Him?”
“Already I’ve said too much.” The tractor floats completely in place, only barely perceivable wisps of cloud moving across the blue sky in its refracted image. “Now, come. And only you, if you please, good doctor. Leave the rabble behind you.” Though the words are delivered in the same sultriness as before, there’s a cutting edge behind them. Pacheco bristles at it, as do the beasts. They sense Pacheco’s want, and willingness to follow the tractor to whomever is waiting for him in the dead place ahead, and they are afraid for him. Such a strange, intimate connection, Pacheco thinks. But what is it they are afraid of? What is keeping these powerful beings from going any closer to the city? The voice projecting itself through the tractor seems to be aware of all this. It’s as if the reflection in the tractor’s surface is just a cruel joke, and beneath it is harboring a chaos that is just about to bubble over and consume them all. It’s saying, do you really want to see this, Pacheco? Do you? Are you that curious?
“This ‘rabble’ won’t go any further as it is, so you have nothing to worry about.” Pacheco says. He finds that his confidence is wavering, and there’s a doubt lurking where there had only been assurance before. “And as you have yet to identify yourself, I would offer you the advice of speaking with respect to a man of my ranking.”
At that, the tractor laughs, a mechanical, unnatural laugh. “Ranking? I apologize for ever calling you ‘colonel,’ colonel. It’s merely a function of habit. Rankings and any sort of distinction are long gone. The past is the past, as is the future and the present. There is only the end of times, the event horizon where the last semblance of rationality is about to melt into chaos.” The tractor moves slightly, and in its reflective surface, the blue sky briefly disappears. Pacheco’s senses are swallowed up by what the tractor’s new image, of unattached body parts and viscera, of color and pressure and overwhelming odors. It completely envelops him, but then, just as quick, it reverts back to the bucolic paradise. Pacheco can feel a cold sweat forming like a murderer’s hand between his shoulder blades.
“What’s wrong, old man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” The tractor continues. Pacheco clenches his fists, and snaps his cloak back, punching his chest out. The beasts grow terrible and restless once again, waiting for the orders of their commander.
“I will not tolerate this impudence.” Pacheco seethes, and already the beasts are trampling forward. The tractor laughs, even as the beasts crush it beneath their great weights, the many mirrors shattering, breaking into tiny shards, cutting into the tough flesh of the beasts, viscous black blood spilling onto the ground, the blue and gold in the broken mirror fading until it matches the gray of the sand. Pacheco pants atop Nameless One, his muscles tight, as if he’s the one who has broken the tractor to pieces. Moltep looks at him, and in his yellow eyes, there’s a question, as if the beast birthed from the chaos wonders at what they’ve just done, at what secrets the tractor harbored which have now been lost forever.
“God damn it, the thing was a machine! Don’t you see? They’re toying with us. They send a tractor out to do a man’s job, and we showed them. It was nothing more than a machine, a simple machine. But now it’s just a bunch of broken pieces, just pieces...” Pacheco looks down from high atop Nameless One’s head, at the shards of glass covered in sand and blood. Most have gone completely gray, though there are several, the largest, which still have some of the blue and gold shining in their broken surfaces. Pacheco’s eyes widen, and he swallows dry air down an even drier throat. He scrambles down the Nameless One’s back, his cloak automatically opening up to correct any missteps he takes down, until he completely slips and it has to glide him down to the ground. Once on the ground, he falls to his knees by one of the larger shards of glass, its color almost entirely gone.
He takes off his gloves, then picks the shard up off the cold ground. He can faintly make out his reflection in its surface, his wrinkled dermis with deep crevasses and purplish ridges. His face is akin to an eternal twilight, the shard a dying day. He holds the shard so tightly in his hands that it cuts into his palms. The blood is thin and a light red, almost pink. He feels a wave of tiredness pass over him, from the crown of his head down into his chest, where it sits as heavy as a box of springs.
“I’m cursed,” He says, dropping the shard to the dead ground. He searches the bleach white skin cut open on his tattered palms, feels the sting of the blood meeting the air. “The worlds in the mirrors are gone forever, part of the past. It is now my lot to wander this purgatory for the rest of my days. Never again will I feel the light of the sun on my cheek, or breathe air freshly come in off the sea,” He’s surprised at what he says, because the words creep out of him as if they were part of some automated message, one that had been planted in him eons ago. They carry with them a certain nostalgia that had never been there before, gushing out as if from a severed artery. It’s a longing for a life that had never been lived, for the life he had sacrificed in order that others could live it. It sticks like phlegm in his throat, one that no amount of hacking will clear. “What is happening to me?” He laments. “I can’t lose it. Not now. Not when I’m so close.”
He looks around him, at the darkness that surrounds the stone bridge, and he understands what it is. It’s the bowels of chaos, and he’s going ever deeper into it. All his time traversing the Fade, all the time he spent aboard Phyrxian, it had all led to this. Now he was being digested, the chaos that wrapped around the bridge moving him along like a contracting intestine. In the process, it was squeezing out everything that made him who he was, all that constituted the framework of Pacheco. He had been so desperately and fragilely held together, he realized. The slightest provocation from the chaos on the outside of the bridge would cause the system of concepts, values and traits that he was made of to collapse in on itself. There would not be a trace of anything left. The city marked where he would finally be taken apart, his many pieces drifting away. And the beasts brought him here, they showed him the way. They knew what was waiting along the bridge, and what wrapped itself around it. Had they brought him here to destroy him? Was this all part of an elaborate, twisted ruse?
Yet they won’t go any further. Pacheco adjusts the shard in his hand, so that he can see his face reflecting back at him again. He can’t help but laugh at the anguish he sees. If the beasts wanted me done with, they would have killed me long ago. They want me to free them. He looks to Moltep, who stands above him.
“What waits for me in that city, Moltep?” He asks. “You know, don’t you? You all do. Tell me, please.” Moltep doesn’t speak, only looks at the much smaller man by his clawed nubs. All the beasts stare down at him, having gathered in a circle around the good doctor. Armand Von Leechpin, Cutlery Set, Warka, Pringo, Moltep, they gaze at him with knowing eyes. As he looks up into their faces and other formless features, he sees other beings past them, reflected in the aether above, in the darkness that bends around the bridge. They are other beasts of chaos, he sees, but from the chaos beyond the spiral, unformed and maddening for any normal man to lay his eyes upon. To Pacheco, however, they are a comforting presence, all of them his newfound allies. They’re watching him, waiting for him to do what he has to do.
“I must find out what’s in the city myself, is that it? This is part of this journey I must make alone.” Moltep nods his head, which is all the affi
rmation Pacheco needs. “Then I will see you on the other side, my friends.” Pacheco pulls a roll of gauze from a small pouch at his waist, and wraps his palm in it. The blood seeps right through, but he puts his gloves back over it regardless. He turns, and begins to walk towards the city, leaving the beasts behind him.
For all their advancements in science and technology, the yama had never been able to concretely define the chaos that existed apart from the framework of Helios and Hyperion. It was there, that much was true, but it was incomprehensible. The yama saw their world through a reductionist lens, cutting any and all problems into smaller and smaller pieces. Theories proven true time and time again became a set of universal laws which underscored their science. Yet, the same was not true for chaos, which by its very nature could not be reduced down to a set of base theories. It was a something, just as the Fade was a something, which affected the rational world but could not itself be known. It was an insurmountable problem, or so it seemed, until “Infinite Duality.”
All history books told of the time when a young carpenter named Amesh had the audacity to put chaos up on equal grounds with the rest of the rational framework the yama adhered to, in a treatise his followers published entitled “Infinite Duality.” Amesh called for chaos to be a force that should be recognized and measured against. His thoughts were viewed as heresy, and Amesh was ostracized, dying a pauper’s death. But his thoughts, particularly “Infinite Duality,” lived on, until it was ultimately integrated into mainstream yama thought. The center of government, the parliamentary building, even rose up around the academy of learning which Amesh’s first followers built following his death. The new worldview provided a new framework from which to approach science, which then opened up new pathways towards greater accomplishments.
Helios and Hyperion could never have been reached had it not been for Amesh’s seminal work. The yama of old had built bridges between worlds, pathways that spanned what were technically endless spans of chaotic flotsam and jetsam. Or so they had believed. The bridges were actually an ancient latticework, almost as old as time itself, which existed long before the first yama even drew breath. Still, once the concept of measuring rationality against chaos was integrated into their thinking, once they were able to build a rational framework in conjunction with chaos and use it as a reference point against which they’d react, finding and traversing the bridges became feasible. Travel through the nigh infinite worlds made from the great dance of Helios and Hyperion was suddenly possible. That is, until they had attempted to harness the powers of the universe, of all of reality, for themselves, and it all fell to pieces.
Pacheco couldn’t help but think of all this while he walked towards the city. Though the city was truly an engineering marvel, he couldn’t help but view it as a pathetic reduction of what a great people the yama had once been. “And now it doesn’t even move. It’s a beached whale gasping for air, an ancient relic that vainly clings to life, whose creator won’t mercifully bring its boot down upon it for fear it might tarnish his soles.” Yama Dempuur, black as a line of charcoal on gray parchment, rises up on several crab-like legs over the dark horizon. Pacheco can still feel it watching him, can still feel eyes from somewhere inside. The tractor had said there was someone who wanted to meet him, a man, and that there were others inside. But who could possibly be living here, on a fading bridge stretched taut in a sea of chaos, like a lifeline between worlds that had probably already been consumed by the Fade. Where was he even going? Perhaps the tractor was just a play on his senses, some sort of sick joke from deep within his subconscious.
He snaps his head up at the noise, a reverberating boom coming from high atop the domed city. Pacheco instantly sees the source of the sound, though he cannot as quickly believe it. There’s a figure standing on a platform that juts out from the base of the dome. Its clothes are all white, and cover its ample girth from head to foot.
“Hello, what are you?” Pacheco mutters to himself. He lifts his hands to his mouth and calls to the white figure standing on the platform. “Colonel Rolando Pacheco, commander of the living ship Phyrxian and resident of Yama Dempuur, requesting permission to board.” Pacheco projects the words as strongly as he can. The white figure stays stock still. The only response Pacheco gets from his address is the quiet hum of the bridge. In times long past, one would approach the walking city and the tractors that circled its perimeter would come together to create a ramp from refracted rainbow light, which a person seeking entrance to Yama Dempuur could climb. But it seemed that all the tractors were gone. The only one Pacheco had seen had been the one with the sadistic grin hidden beneath its mirror facade, which Pacheco and the primordial beasts had broken to pieces in the cold gray sand.
“I guess I’ll have to do things the old fashioned way,” He says to no one in particular. He begins to run forward, his armor taking the brunt of the impact away from his joints. As he does, his cape opens up, and forms into the shape of two great raven’s wings. They flap hard once, twice, until Pacheco is airborne, ascending quickly for the platform above. The air quickly grows cold and thin once he’s several flaps above the bridge. Within a few minutes, Pacheco is above the platform. The wings snap into the form of a parachute, and he softly glides down to the figure below. As he comes nearer and nearer to it, the features become clearer, even for his one old eye to make out.
The figure is indeed a person, large and stout of frame. White cloth is wrapped around the entirety of its body, around each limb, even its head. It resembles the way in which the barkskins would prepare their dead, wrapping long strips of thin cloth around the entirety of the deceased’s body and then applying a viscous glue with horsehair brushes, sealing it forever. It moves its arm up in greeting, but rigidly, slowly. There’s a slit where two cavernous eye sockets lay beneath a strongly sculpted brow. Orange pinpricks, lights like torches twinkle in the dark holes.
“Colonel Pacheco,” It’s the same sultry voice that the tractor had spoken with. Pacheco’s cape cracks open, and he spears downward towards the platform. His mouth is open, his tongue heavy on his lower lip. “You were the voice I heard through the tractor, from out along the bridge. What is the meaning of this?” The tips of his cape have shifted into spear tips, pointed purposely at the tall woman standing before him. She stares back with a mercurial gleam in her orange eyes. “Yes, yes, that was I. I sent that octagonal hunk of junk out to meet you, though I didn’t think you’d smash it to bits like that. You’re not much one to appreciate relics, hm, Colonel?”
“Relics? The tractor? The last I left Yama Dempuur, tractors were a fairly new technology, several decades old, at the most. How far in the future are we?”
“You certainly don’t listen very well, Pacheco. Is that the secret to your success?” The shrouded woman walks forward a few steps, the platform rumbling beneath each. The platforms were sized to fit an entire regiment shoulder to shoulder, but the hulking woman makes the area seem too small for the two of them. “I told you, speaking through the tractor, of course, that the past is the past. It’s gone, buried. So is the future and the present. We’re at the end of progress, Colonel, the end of civilization. We’re on a bridge, suspended between the end of all worlds. Isn’t the view grand?”
“Grand? Just looks dark to me. Though there are beings lurking in the darkness who know full well I am here. So should you try to cause me any harm, you or the other beings you hint live now within Yama Dempuur, then there will be quick retribution from my comrades. I think I’ve made myself understood.”
“You have, colonel.”
“Tell me, if this is the end of worlds, then where are Helios and Hyperion? They should be here, or at least Hyperion, lying dormant like some great sleeping statue in his giant suit of armor.”
“The answers you seek are inside the city.” Pacheco looks past the large figure with the sultry voice, into a cavernous door with weathered edges, and darkness down its gullet. “That’s all very cryptic. Who, or what, awaits me beyond that
door?”
“I’d rather not spoil the surprise,” It’s the same sort of sadistic sotto voce the tractor had earlier, the predatory hunger that was just barely concealed by her velvety tone. It’s like the white fabric around her mouth conceals a dozen rows of gnashing teeth.
“Damn it all, I don’t have time for these games. By the authority of Colonel Rolando Pacheco of the_”
“I’ve heard all that nonsense already, Pacheco. Remember? The tractor?”
“Yes, and that didn’t end very well, did it?” Pacheco’s cloak billows open again, like a bat stretching open its wings. From far behind him, the primordial beasts can be heard, their growls the sound of a blast furnace out of a black earthen hole.
“That’s very impressive, colonel. Taming the primordial beasts to your will. I’m sure it was no easy task.” There’s a modicum of awe in the figure’s pinprick orange eyes. “However, I’m aware that they will not come any closer to the city. They fear what’s inside. And as far as issuing orders, this is not your ship. In this place, I am the authority. And you will listen to what I say.”
“Oh? And just who are you?”
The large figure reaches up to her face, her hands stopping atop the shawl over the lower portion of her face. She seems to hesitate with it, as if uncertain on whether to remove it or leave it in place. Her hands drop again to her sides, as if she’s decided on the latter. “I am Empress Drinkwater.” She says.
Pacheco notices his heart beat has quickened, though he’s not sure why. His shoulders rise and fall like rolling river waves, when a boat has passed through and churned up the waters. He can feel the beasts subtly growing and shrinking in unison with his breath. “Empress?”
“Yes, colonel. The last of Yama Dempuur. The last remnant of Ameshka Vega.” She turns her back to Pacheco, and looks up towards the dome, its surface smooth, dark and dusty. “Look upon my works, good sir, and tremble. Tremble at the thought that this was once the center of a great people, the cradle from which we arose and built an empire from one edge of the spiral to the other. You were born within these walls, were you not?” Pacheco nods. “As was I, my children and theirs. This is still home. Though we’ve generations between us, that much, at least, has stayed the same.”
“This is not my home,” Pacheco says. “This is a ghost.”
“A ghost is still connected to what it once was, for is that not what makes it a ghost in the first place? It’s inability to shake off what it was in life? This is Yama Dempuur,” Empress Drinkwater says. “As it will be after we are both long gone. It is beyond us.” Pacheco nods, not disputing the fact. Hers is a philosophy perfectly keeping with his own, that of being a piece of a greater whole. It was just such a concept which kept him going, which kept his doubts in check. For if he was just a man, then what claim did he have to live a selfish, indulgent life? If purpose was indeed an arbitrary concept, as Amesh had proposed all those years ago, and science had grown to accept since, then why not utilize it as a tool to serve a power greater than himself?
These were the thoughts that had propelled him through decades of service to Yama Dempuur and the Ameshka Vega legacy. But now, beyond even the end of all worlds, on a bridge suspended between the infinite roiling forces of chaos, Pacheco couldn’t help but wonder what good holding on to an imagined concept like purpose was. For if chaos was from which all came, then was it not natural for to all eventually revert back to it?
Whether such was the case or not, it ultimately didn’t matter. There had been a drive in him which had clouded all other pursuits, and had brought him to where he was. It had been a long and odd journey, but he was so close. He would find Helios and Hyperion, he knew it. He had focused on it like a painting, behind whose frame chaos swirled like a pockmarked wall of hungry termites, hidden from view by just a thin piece of canvas. He had focused on the picture like his life had depended on it, for it had. It was his life’s work to unify all of the painting’s disparate entities, and it had brought him all this way. Had he gone too far, though? Was there a limit to what one man should do?
“Come, colonel,” the Empress says. “Someone would like to meet you.” She turns, her great bulky shape disappearing in the cavernous door at the back of the platform, its worn edges leading into the domed city. Pacheco takes one last look at the primordial beasts, who stand in the distance, silent sentinels, their enlarged forms illuminated by Moltep’s glowing eyes. He wonders whether he’s making a mistake by going in alone. Something certainly doesn’t feel right.
“There are some things which I need to do alone,” Pacheco whispers to himself. “This Empress knows something. She must.” He turns and runs through the doorway and into the domed city.
There is no sign of the Empress in the corridor. All is dark; there is only the sound of his footsteps reverberating around his head, wet splish-splashes barreling down the hall ahead of him. The air smells of mildew and old machinery. Pacheco instinctively reaches into one of the pouches at his belt, and sparks a flare to life. “Fool! Put that out!” The Empress seems to come out of nowhere, and knocks the flare out of the colonel’s hand. It lands in a blanket of shadows, behind a tall, looming machine, like a box or cabinet which rises to the ceiling. The glow of the flare sputters until it is quieted, as if the weight of the shadows had suffocated it. “There are certain things here that should not be alerted to our presence.”
“Certain... things?” Pacheco says.
“Yes, dark things. Light brings them out. So be wary,” It takes a moment for Pacheco’s eyes to wholly adjust to the darkness, for it’s like a swollen body taking up the entire space, not merely light absconded. But when his old, tired eyes do finally adjust, he finds the Empress staring at him with her tiny, glowing pinpricks of orange light. She begins to move down the corridor once again, and Pacheco follows.
“Why is it so dark? There should have been enough luciferase in the bioluminescent lights to keep the entire city lit for centuries, without any need for concern.”
“The lights you speak of faded to dim filaments long ago. The city is dead, colonel.” With the Empress brusquely rushing ahead of him, Pacheco relies on the swish of her wrappings and the heavy pounding of her feet to know where she is moving torward. The world has been reduced to percussive sounds and the pervasive odor of disuse and decay. He feels the Empress round a corner, and suddenly the wet ground starts to shine with a faint gray light. The ground is littered with inky puddles, gathered like storm clouds on the opposing side of a dawning day. Last bastions of night, harbingers of the morning, they lead towards an angled arch, through which the darkness ends, and dim light begins. The Empress slows her pace as the shadows cut out, and her white strips of fabric catch more and more of the light to reflect.
The two pass under the arch, and come into a large room. It’s a geodesic dome, with semi-transparent hexagons in the metal framework, through which one can see the great cracked hole in Yama Dempuur’s obsidian shell. Arranged around the rounded edge of the room are a series of steel stairways, lifting up towards the top of the inner dome like tree limbs bent over by a winter wind. Rust flakes from the stairs and machines crackle under their feet. Pacheco throws his head back, his eyes wide in vertiginous wonder. “This is... one of the engine rooms.” He says. “This is one of the great turbines. Yes, I’d know it anywhere.”
“Oh, but it’s been quite a long time since these lot have worked, old friend.” The voice comes from the furthest side of the geodesic dome, past a towering turbine. The good doctor recognizes the nasally intonation immediately, the mocking tone, although it now sounds as if it’s wrapped in a thin layer of static, as if it’s being broadcast from a radio transmitter a solar system away. It’s the voice of a man who he’d seen not too long ago, their last meeting arguably the seed from which his series of misfortunes had sprung in quick succession. He had been stationed in the Coral Islands, a colony near the edge of the spiral, and had bestowed upon Pacheco a young barkskin girl with dreaded white hair and st
eely black eyes, who’d somehow escaped from Phyrxian’s dermic needles and then, later, hi-jacked the very same ship.
“Oblong,” Pacheco says, up to the shadowy eaves.
“Yes, Rolando. Yes, yes, it is I, in the flesh. Er, to some degree, at least.” From out of the twisted steel stairways floats something like a half-finished zeppelin caught in electrical lines. It moves toward Pacheco and the Empress from out of the gloom. Its girth is riddled with a system of pistons and pumps that expand and contract like organs thumping with life. The color washes out of Pacheco’s face. He chokes a bit, as the machine fully comes into view. He sees the shape of the man strapped into the middle of the machine. Oblong. Only his upper torso is visible, the rest subsumed by the great machine. His hair is greasy and lank, his skin a jaundiced yellow.
“Good god, Oblong. What is this? What has happened to you?”
“Well, it would seem they’ve attached me to some sort of machine, now doesn’t it? Yes, and quite a big one at that.”
“They?” Pacheco’s eyes shift over to the Empress, who stands like a statue, her small orange eyes locked on the small figure of Oblong in the great machine. “What have you done to him?”
“Relax, Rolando. She’s not the one who did this. I’ve been like this for some time, you know. Centuries upon centuries. The ‘they’ that I speak of would be our descendants, as it were. Though, to be fair, I am given an awful lot of the credit for getting the whole thing started.” Pacheco clenches his fists, so tight that the armor clacks and clinks.
“Damn it man, what are you saying?”
“Ho oh, no need to get hostile. We are on the same team, are we not?”
“According to this woman here, as well as what I’ve seen of Yama Dempuur, there isn’t anything left of our once proud city at all. All that’s left is an ancient ruin that is barely running on fumes, and a half-wit soldier who could barely keep his pants up the last I saw him, now strapped into some infernal machine. So whatever team you speak of, I think has long since crumbled to dust.” The Empress shifts her feet, and there’s a banging from the edge of the inner dome.
“Now, now, now, Pacheco. Let’s not say things we’ll end up regretting.” Oblong says.
“Master, should I dispose of him?” Pacheco turns to look at the Empress, his cape stiffening. The loose cloth has hardened into eight sharp points, like stabbing spider legs. The points turn towards the Empress.
“Dispose of me? You insolent wench, you have no idea who you are speaking to!” Pacheco leaps forward, his cape slicing at the Empress’s face. The sharpened point tears away the white bandages that cover the Empress’s mouth, and then the other spider legs quickly stab at her body. Pieces of white fabric flutter through the air and through the rust cloud Pacheco kicks up upon landing. Pacheco expects to hear screams of pain and anguish. His one eye widens in confusion when he hears laughter instead.
“What...what are you?” He says, looking up into the towering figures face. The Empress pulls the remainder of the torn bandages away, revealing a body made of a vermillion-hued stone. There are scratches where the cape sliced and stabbed, under which are huge pockmarks, like the craters of explosives. There’s a faint echo of a face, but its grace and tender lines are cut up like a field for ploughing.
“Behold, Pacheco. The Empress Drinkwater.” There seems to be a tinge of sardonic humor in Oblong’s voice, which Pacheco can’t help but find similar to that of the Empress’s.
“She’s... a statue.”
“Yes. A relic. An idol. Tell me, have you ever heard the story of Ozymandias?”
“Ozymandy... no, I cannot say I have.”
“No matter. It’s a story from a faraway world, where it was, perhaps ironically, nearly forgotten about. Ironic, because the story has proven to be rather prescient. A traveller comes upon a statue in the middle of the desert, of a forgotten king. At its base is an inscription which reads... erm, Empress, would you mind?”
“It says, ‘look upon my works and tremble.’” The Empress says, her voice sounding more robotic than when she was wrapped up.
“Quite right. Now, this idol you see before you, she was built by Lyra Drinkwater, the Empress of Yama Dempuur, in homage to herself. Between you and me, Pacheco, she was a rather ineffectual ruler, obsessed with establishing her legacy with statues and academies and the like, while the people were hungry. She failed to notice the rebellion tip toeing around under her nose. The ruling parliament at the time seized on the unrest of the people, and deposed her. Riots broke out, and the people sacked their own city, but mostly what the Empress had built. Many of her statues were utterly destroyed, but some were redesigned by the parliament to be law-keepers of the city. They got rid of the military and took complete control of the city. Things began to fall apart quickly, people died. Eventually, I was all alone, just me and a few of these statues. She’s the only one who still works, Pacheco.”
“She is a machine, then,” Pacheco says.
“Perhaps that is what she has been reduced to, yes. A machine. But she was once so much more: a symbol, if you will, for a higher power. For our way of being. For the past we were trying to reclaim, and bring into the future.”
Pacheco chuckles to himself, his armor rattling like old bones on a copper wire. “And you keep her around because you have no one left to talk to, hm? Because you’re all alone?”
“Alone? Not quite.” Oblong feebly wipes the hair from his face, revealing laugh lines around his red-crusted eyes. “I’m aware you dug up some creatures of chaos. Well, even so, there are beings that now live within the domed city which you couldn’t even begin to wrap your head around. And were you to even try, you’d more than likely go mad. They’ve been here for a long time, since perhaps we were both young men.”
Pacheco scoffs. “Please, Oblong. I’ve been searching for Hyperion for a long, long time. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe the spiral had wasted its time in spitting out. Twisted things..”
“I know what you’ve seen, Rolando. The creatures which live in the shadows of Yama Dempuur, beneath the cracked dome and forever dark sky, are something entirely different. Tell me, Pacheco, in your travels, have you ever seen evil personified?”
Pacheco eyes the man in the machine skeptically. “Evil isn’t something you can tangibly define, Lieutenant General. It’s a completely arbitrary concept, just as good is.”
“Ah, of course, but when it takes such a firm hold in the collective mind, in all the people of Yama Dempuur, then it does take form, Rolando. Creatures of such irrational want and pain. They’re like black suns, who will burn up anything that comes close enough to their darkness. Shadows, Pacheco.”
“Hostile environments breed hostile creatures,” Pacheco says, his one eye scanning the dark edges of the geodesic engine room he stands in. The dark spaces seem to shimmer and oscillate, like purple light splotches on the back of an eyelid. “But don’t bore me with this talk of good and evil. We’re not children.”
“We’re not,” Oblong says, his body spazzing in the machine. The pistons sputter, and his head jerks to the side. “No, we’re certainly not.” There’s a rattling from somewhere in the shadows, metal scraping on stone.
“What is that?” Pacheco asks.
“It’s them. The shadows. They know you’re here,”
“Oh?” Pacheco clenches his jaw and looks about the dark room. He won’t let fear consume his thoughts. His mind is transported to the Pyronic Room aboard Phyrxian, and he is instantly calmed. “Have they been expecting me?”
“You’ve really developed a biting wit since the last I’ve seen you, Rolando. But to answer your question, yes. Yes, they have been expecting you.” The tubes in Oblong’s head make suctioning noises, and his body starts to shake again, as frail and weightless as a poppet. Then the weary eyes, rimmed with red, gaze up through the long hair that covers most of his face, and straight at Pacheco.
“Damn it man, what happened to you?” Pacheco says.
??
?I’ll tell you all about it. Don’t you worry now. Let us walk together a ways. I have to show you the way forward. You are more close to the center of reality than you would ever think. But you must listen to me, for I know the rest of the way there.”
“Then tell me, Lieutenant General. Please,” Pacheco opens his arms entreatingly. “I must put things back to order.”
“Tall order for one man, even for one such as you, Pacheco.”
“Well, I count on the beasts to help me.”
“Ironic, don’t you think, that you’re utilizing the forces of chaos to help realize your dreams of restoring order?”
“Not in the slightest. The fact that I have dominated the forces of chaos, and have conscripted them to my cause, is evidence that the force of reason is greater than its antithesis.”
“Ah, but Colonel, nothing is greater than it’s antithesis. All is equal, as our esteemed Amesh said in his famous treatise, ‘Infinite Duality.’”
“Amesh and his book are just part of some children’s tale. He never harnassed the power of the primordial beasts, now did he?” Pacheco’s statement is capped off with a rumble from beneath the domed city, a tearing roar of twelve cacophonous voices. “Did he, Oblong?! Now, tell me: how do I find Hyperion!”
Oblong’s body spasms again, the tubes jerking sharply in conjunction with the pistons and pumps of the larger machine.
“Oh, I’ll tell you, old friend,” Oblong says, his voice as light as swamp vapor. Oblong beckons to Pacheco with a gnarled old hand as the zeppelin-like structure begins to rotate around.
“It’s been so long since I’ve spoke to someone other than that statue back there,” Oblong says, as the two make their way towards the other side of the dome, leaving the Empress behind. “And hearing your voice, I’m reminded of the man responsible for the uprising, his name also Drinkwater. He was the descendent of the Empress, and responsible for the downfall of Yama Dempuur. A precocious zealot, just like you, Rolando. Compulsive and driven, yet with something just a little off about him. Some sort of sadistic twinkle in his eye,”
Oblong’s floating machine stops at the edge of the geodesic dome. One of the hexagonal panels is a door, which slowly opens up before Pacheco, creaking like a fugue of rusty springs. The sound masks the pounding of steps coming behind him. Pacheco turns around just in time to get a stone fist to the jaw. He feels it come unhinged, then all goes dark.
The machine hovers silently above the fallen Helios-Hunter, save for the occasional sputter from the air pumps. “That was quite a hit, Empress. I do hope he is not dead.”
“He is not, sir. He still breathes,”
“For your sake, you had better hope so. He would not be pleased. He’s been waiting a long time for Rolando to visit. Come, pick him up. We must get things ready.” The Empress picks Pacheco up in her massive arms, and follows Oblong as he passes through the dome of the engine room and out into the city.
“You’ve come a long way, friend,” Oblong says to the comatose man behind him. “I knew I’d see you again. He told me,” Oblong goes into a fit of seizures, as if the man is fighting against the machine he is imprisoned within. The Empress walks behind him silently, her orange eyes illuminating the path ahead into Yama Dempuur, the city of dark and shadows.”
Chapter XV: “Sounds from Space”