The ramp touches the ground, the dust riding up to meet Doctor Pacheco on the back of a hot, dry wind. It coats the visor of his helmet with an orange static. In one direction, his one good eye sees a storm cloud, running scared from what is coming quick the other way: the Fade. It’s especially ravenous here, rushing fast over the earth, as if this world is long overdue for being erased. Something has drawn it here, he knows. He sips from the helmet’s water tube, considers how much time he has. The escape vessel the barkskin hijacked lays in a trench not too far off. He can reach it, but he has to be fast. She could be clinging to life inside; perhaps a few bones broken, some pan-seared abrasions and bloody bruises, but still salvageable. She could also be torn to shreds, as useless to him as a pile of rancid meat, but that was a risk he had to take. He couldn't navigate the Fade without her, not for long anyway. He could stay in Phyrxian and be protected from the Fade by its shields, but then the Oisin and its precious cargo would be washed away.
“There's no alternative,” He says, catapulting himself down the ramp. He looks to his right, noting the conspicuous little hill with the flat top. The Fade has wrapped itself around it somehow, yet not consumed it. Curious. What sort of shield had that hilltop around it? What manner of being lived atop its sordid peak, with a force of will strong enough to keep the Fade at bay? These were questions he’d have to ask himself once he was done with the task at hand. Still, if the barkskin had survived the crash, she could have made her way up to the hilltop, to take shelter from the harshness of the sand storms and highland tempests. He curses under his breath, knowing how likely this could be, how the escape vessels were designed to withstand high-impact landings, how she could be in perfectly good health, her skin unblemished by bruise or hurt, drinking up sunlight. All that energy, untapped, while he was here, an old man, running through some god-forsaken wasteland with nothing but stale bread in his gut. He’d find the barkskin. He wasn’t about to die here. His life’s work would not be in vain.
The ground rushed beneath his feet, his cloak billowing behind him, molded into a razor sharp tail fin. The wind moving beneath the rigid cloak fabric, shaped that way by Pacheco’s mind, propelled him forward over the sand at a speed faster than his old limbs could typically carry him. The Fade crackled; he could see the stress fractures stemming from the oncoming gray wall, the lines spearing the air and earth around him. His cloak tugged at him if he strayed too close to one. Just as he could move it and shape it around with his mind, as if it were another appendage, it could warn him when he was in danger, or protect him were he not to react fast enough. A quick jerk at his neck told him he was being too lax in regards to the world around him, and that he had to stay focused on much more than just the barkskin.
“I’m too tired. I need food. Or blood."
Pacheco’s rations were just about used up. He had been stuck in the Fade for over a year now, crawling along on reserve energy, taxing Phyrxian for all the ship was worth. He couldn't believe his luck when he discovered the barkskin's trail, thanks in no small part to the Oisin's tracking beacon. Time did not exist in the Fade, though it did aboard a Helios-Hunter's ship, such as Phyrxian. It required a delicate hand, but Pacheco was confident he could maneuver Phyrxian so that it would slip in through the membrane between the world and the Fade at just the right time that the barkskin had escaped. Time was a sticky thing, though, and it looked as if he had miscalculated. How off was he? A week? A month? He’d have to get closer to the Oisin to see.
Damn, he was hungry. He'd reduced his daily allotment of food to a hunk of bread and steamed lentils. It was nothing near the amount of energy he had been drawing from the young barkskin girl. Spoiled for three years, Phyrxian too. She was seventeen, or so Oblong had told him when she was conscripted, in the peak of health. Cherished among her people, and Pacheco could see why: the large needles in each of her cephalic veins had never run dry. Without the blood of a barkskin, without the power she drew from the sun, there was no going through the Fade without risk of total annihilation. It required an exceptional amount of energy to make the ship a self-contained world, an entity with enough substance that the nothingness of the Fade would slip off it like oil on water.
Phyrxian’s skin was capable of a some photosynthesis, a less advanced feat of bioengineering that was similar to the science that let the Ma’atha drink from the sun. The ships snapping tendrils also drew water vapor from the air, which all went to keeping the magnetic dynamo at the core of the ship in perpetual motion. Phyrxian could fly within worlds on its own power, but it wasn’t enough to traverse the Fade with. The Ma’atha were perfect batteries, made in a time when yama science had been at its peak. Pacheco needed his back. He had used the last of Phyrxian’s reserve energy to get to this god-forsaken world, and recover the barkskin girl. He was utterly stuck unless he could salvage her.
It seemed like she would never give out. He certainly didn’t think she’d have the temerity to escape. Barkskins were reared in the Coral Islands to aspire to being conduits, and not much else. Oblong and those who maintained order upon the Coral Islands saw to it that a barkskin education fostered nothing but obedient subjects and aspiring conduits. That wasn’t so much the case in Yama Dempuur. If he had conscripted one of her ilk back in the domed city, he was more apt to be stuck with a barkskin with an opinion. They ran too much amuck in that small city, given too much freedom. His last had been from Yama Dempuur, an ox of a man, but with a heart made weak from too much time spent in the ale house. Pacheco didn’t find that out until the barkskin had suddenly slumped over in his chair and died, the needles still deep in his arms. He had to escape from the gray nothingness and into the Coral Islands on nothing but reserve fuel. Pacheco still remembered the immense fanfare that greeted him when he arrived there.
“Pacheco, you’ve done it again!” Lieutenant General Oblong had said. Oblong was the man in charge of operations on the islands, but he and Pacheco went back quite a ways, all the way to the military academy. After landing, Oblong had invited Pacheco to his governor’s quarters, a large, spartan room on the top floor of a wide manse. “Not only do you ride the Fade on fumes with a dead barky strapped in to the engine, but you still manage to bring me my favorite candies from Yama Dempuur. Oh, you are a sport, you are!” Oblong popped a chalky purple cube into his mouth, and smiled a fat smile. He was an extremely short and stout man, especially when standing next to Pacheco, who was tall and twig-like. His stiff collar swallowed most of his neck, and he was constantly sweating. “What a ghastly sight that dead barky must have been to look at. I shiver at just the thought. You’re as brave as I remember, doctor. Bravo.”
Pacheco wasn’t one to waste time on celebratory pomp and idle talk. “Barkskins come and go, as do men. It’s the purpose which our lives revolve around which is of most importance. I’ve made great strides in mapping out the Fade, lieutenant general. I believe that I’ve found a path that will bring me closer to the center of the spiral.” The spiral was the framework of all reality. At its center was the spinning father and son, Helios and Hyperion, or at least it was until those from Ameshka Vega sought to harness the power of the gods for themselves. They failed, and unleashed the Fade, which had consumed most of the spiral and the once clear pathways between worlds.
“Oh, doctor, come now. You’re getting on in years. Haven’t you enough of this fruitless quest? Of this finding the way to the center?” Oblong and Pacheco were never friends, but they had risen in rank together, Pacheco through diligence, Oblong through well-timed handshakes. “Leave the probing of the Fade’s depths to the young one’s, Rolando.” Oblong had smirked then, before mopping his rhinoceros brow with a handkerchief.
“This is not about age at all, Oblong. There are bigger things at stake here than that. Island life has made you forgetful.”
“On the contrary, doctor. I’m not like Lacko. He spends his days elbow-deep in paint in his bungalow on the other side of the island, while I rule. Running the island has made me see the bigger picture. Do you
know what it’s like to be stationed at an outer territory, isolated from the rest of your comrades and kin, save for bottom-feeding soldiers and a has-been captain? It’s quite lonely, doctor, I assure you. By the way, have you seen Lacko yet? I’m sure he’d love to catch up.”
“I have not seen him, nor do I plan to.” Pacheco still seethed over his falling out with Captain Lacko. He called me a heretic, tried to have me discharged by the Parliament. Damn him, he should have been shipped off to the Coral Islands long ago. “The fog has advanced on the islands since the last I was here. It now spreads out in all direction, I see. I’d be worried the Fade would creep up on me by surprise. It’s already taken the rest of this world. Why we wasted as many men and resources as we did to save this patch of worthless rock and air is beyond me.”
“The Ma’atha say that this place is Hyperion’s favorite dream, and that he doesn’t want to forget it.” Oblong calling the photosynthesizing people with cocoa skin and white hair called what they called themselves did not escape Pacheco, who pursed his lips. Oblong went on. “I deal with fear of the Fade every day.” The Lieutenant General sniffed at the air, his lip twitching. “But it makes you wonder, that fear. Makes you analyze your mission, your convictions. Surely, after having been in the Fade for so long, you’ve wondered about these things too, doctor?” Pacheco had nothing but cold taciturnity for the Lieutenant General, who nevertheless continued.
“It’s quite alright, doctor, nothing wrong with admitting to a little fear in the face of uncertainty. You don’t have to admit anything to me, of course. But I know what it’s like to look into the face of nothing, to try and fathom something which is beyond comprehension. Nothing. Void. No man can think about such things after having seen them, and carry on as though all is chipper cheen.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“I do say so, doctor__”
“You can refer to me as Colonel, Lieutenant General. Our affiliation is through the military, and therefore I’d prefer you avoid using my civilian title.”
“Of course, Colonel. Forgive me and my ignorant sleight of tongue. It is only that first impressions are so very strong, and I still remember when you made a name for yourself as the flight surgeon for Captain Lacko’s expedition to the Atomic worlds.”
“That was decades ago, sir.”
“Your expertise on that expedition... you enabled our yama brethren to be able to travel the Fade for longer periods of time than ever before. Your expertise on hematology, the many ideas you advanced concerning accelerated plasma transmission, well... yama even today are still in awe of the magic you work with that brain of yours.”
“Or terrified by it. They still refer to my work as black magic, as barbaric.” He said I should be discharged, that I was practicing some form of barbaric sorcery.
“Yes, well. Civilized society doesn’t quite know what to make of blood masks and blood bindings. But trust me, Colonel, you’re still a revered leader and yama, a man without equal.”
Pacheco had nodded in thanks, but accolades were wasted on him, doomed to fall on a pair of indifferent ears. Even as a young man, he only wanted one thing: to push further than any other yama before him. He wanted to find Helios, and then Hyperion in his mecha.The only way to do that would be to push himself harder than anyone else ever had. Pacheco never took pains to hide his ambition, or even his frustration at what he perceived as apathy and listlessness from his peers. He wore his megalomania like a full-on pachyderm pelt, beneath which his humanity had atrophied. Some even whispered that he never had any degree of humanity to begin with.
“We’re all committed to our mission, Colonel. But in times when you’re left staring at nothing but the very absence of reality, when the Fade has consumed your life without having actually consumed you, your mind wanders. I find myself thinking over the old stories, all those silly old myths our grannies used to tell us as children. And no matter what story it is, it all revolves around the Helios-Hyperion tale, doesn’t it? Everything. Two balls of perpetual energy, Father and Son, each in constant pursuit of the other, engaged in this sort of cosmic spin. It’s an incredible thing when a child can wrap its little head around the implications behind such a story, that two binary opposites can be in such a complete balance that one can never overtake the other, that their acknowledgment of the other is all it takes to affirm physical and temporal space. It’s how we understand who we are. Of course, we all reach that precocious little age where that story becomes nothing more than that, a silly myth. How can these two men, spinning around each other, possibly be at the center of everything, from the largest black hole to the smallest atom? ‘What a stupid story, mummy,’ the little rapscallions say. But then we say, ‘Here, child, read this,’ and we hand them a book of science, Sclaler’s Logic and Reductionism or Amesh’s Infinite Duality, and all those other scholarly, hot-air filled books. And then, lo and behold, we have a whole new generation of aspiring Helios-hunters excited to leave the walking city and traverse the Fade.
“But that youthful idealism and excitement has left me, Colonel. I’ve reached a stationary, reflective age. They’ve marooned me out here, don’t think I'm naive. This is where they send their tired old models, like me and Lacko. When you move through the ranks like I did, Colonel, the bastards can grow tired of you. Especially the young ones. It’s alright out here on the fringe, though I'm the farthest I've ever been from Yama Dempuur, forgotten by my compatriots. One day I’ll be washed away by the Fade and that’s it, there'll be an unmarked stone under a janjan tree which will be the only thing to mark the life I lived. What’s an old military man to do with his time while I wait for the inevitable, you ask? Well, I find myself revisiting old friends, the dreams I had as a boy. But it’s not that I have issue with how our science answers these questions. Helios and Hyperion, the nature of existence, all of existence reduced down to the same elementary, dualistic dance: I’d be a fool to have issue with that. That’s all proven, dust under the rug. What I do have an issue with, however, is that we yama, the inheritors of some supposed great dynasty, some great empire from the distant past__”
“Ameshka Vega,” Pacheco had said. “A name one should never forget.”
Oblong, who had wandered over to the eight-paned window looking over the bay, jiggled in his waistcoat, as if startled by Pacheco’s raspy voice. “Of course, er, yes. Ameshka Vega, quite right. Well, what I’m trying to say is that we accept all of Ameshka Vegan doctrine as absolute. All of it. We’re taught to believe that the Ameshka Vegan attempt to isolate and harness the powers of Helios and Hyperion, that their failure at doing so, resulted in the Fade being unleashed on all of reality and the end of time. It marked the beginning of the end of whole worlds, when the bridges our people had built to Helios and Hyperion were lost, consumed by the Fade.” Oblong’s watery eyes looked ready to pop out of his pear shaped head.
“Don’t you see? How we’ve come to aggrandize one botched event! How it has managed to pervade our cultural consciousness in every single way. We think we’re trying to salvage the past, but we’ve forgotten about the future. Time still exists!”
“In all due respect, Lieutenant General, it isn’t in dispute that time still exists. Of course it does. It’s only its growth which has been compromised.”
“No, no, no, Pacheco, that’s where you’re wrong.”
“Sir, don’t question me in matters of science.” Pacheco had scoffed, before realizing that he had even done so. In Oblong’s book shelf, there were works by fringe thinkers, literature that would raise any yama’s eye brows.
“Don’t forget your place, Colonel. You may disdain me, and fail to respect my standing, but keep in mind that I am still of a higher rank than you. Doctor.”
“With all due respect sir,” Pacheco did forget himself for a moment. He was so used to his anonymity that military doctrine sometimes eluded him. “I apologize for speaking out of turn. However, you speak of science, and I feel I am more qualified than most to address certain
discrepancies you may have in your reasoning. Our civilization and what we’ve accomplished was hard won by many generations before us. Implying that my perception of time is wrong, when it is grounded in an elaborate and logical framework of knowledge and empirical evidence, is misguided. The Fade, for a particularly relevant example, is the complete antithesis of time and space. It’s existence, and the fact that everything consumed by it is lost, is proof enough that__”
“No, Pacheco. Listen! Worlds are still being created!” Oblong had grabbed Pacheco’s cloak clasp at that point, a moment in time that the doctor had remembered well. The cape instinctively tensed, ready to go razor sharp, but slacked after a moment, noting Oblong’s puddy grasp.
“What do you mean, worlds are being created?”
“The Coral Islands; they’re an insubstantial place, a barely realized world. The calculations done about its age and mapping in the spiral have been shoddy and speculative, at best. Still, I know that this world was made after the Great Schism. It came into being after Yama Dempuur rose up from the ruins of Vega Mardur.”
Pacheco had scoffed at that. “Regardless, sir, even if this world is younger than Yama Dempuur, it exists on the outside of the spiral. Time moves at a much different pace this far out than it does back home. It could be that the Great Schism wasn't actually felt this far out until long after the domed city had raised itself from the ruins of Vega Mardur. In fact, that would explain why it’s only half realized, with three paltry little islands and a fog that brings you right back to where you started once you sail through it.”
“But I’ve seen things in the fog, Colonel, things that make me believe otherwise. I’ve seen huge figures, giants or gods, running through the night sky. They’re beautiful and... terrifying... they look like the figures from those very stories, older even than the Ameshka Vegan myths. Do you remember?”
“I seem to vaguely remember the fairy tales my grandmother used to tell me. Of foxes and sleeping giants. Sir, you’re telling me that your, and you’ll pardon me for not having the capacity to find a better word, but your hallucinations, are the proof you have for the creation of new worlds?”
“But they’re not hallucinations, Colonel. The barkskins see them, too. They think that the giant figures are warring against one another, and trying to build new worlds of their own...” Oblong shuffled his feet. His knee high white socks were dingy, his governmental attire threadbare. “Well. Perhaps you’re right, and I'm being a silly old man. But still, Colonel, I can’t help but think there’s still something beneath all of this, some force still willing existence to...well, exist. It is still moving us along. If there weren’t, how could we even go on? How could we even exist without some force at the base of it all? How would we not just poof away, along with everything else? Nothing would change, everything would stagnate. Life would be like being buried alive, that last shovelful of dirt you choke on the moment when the Fade comes and wipes the slate completely clean.”
“Perhaps we’ve all turned into worms and learned to breathe the dirt,” Pacheco had said. Oblong took him in, seriously at first. Then a grin cracked across his jelly face.
“Did you just make a joke, Colonel? Wonders beyond wonders, I thought I’d never see the day.”
Pacheco had had enough. “Lieutenant General, I need a barkskin. I request that you confer upon me a barkskin of my choosing from the colony you have here on the Coral Islands. Sir.” Oblong had looked at him questioningly, sure that Pacheco understood what he had been saying but didn’t want to consider it as truth. When Pacheco didn’t offer anything else in the way of a comment, Oblong nodded, before taking him to the largest of the three Coral Islands, known as the crown of the atoll.
“Drenched in sun practically all day. You’ve never seen barkys as full of energy as these, I assure you.” Oblong had said on the ferry over. The boat was primitive, and Pacheco hadn’t seen anything like it in all his years. The roads of exchange were faltering between the worlds, and you could see first hand in the Coral Islands how the outposts were making due. Pacheco hadn’t ruminated on the boat for long, though, as the yama ferryman brought them up to the crown's shore and he saw that Oblong’s assessment of the island’s Barkskin’s was true. They were certainly a robust lot, and gave no grief to the yama handlers who herded them down the dirt path to the sand. The sun was strong here, much more so than the dying star fading over the savaged middling worlds Yama Dempuur wandered about in its shaky orbit. The barkskin’s were as dark as clay buried beneath the loam, their hair a shining winter white. They saluted as Pacheco and Oblong walked by them, from the oldest nan to the youngest child.
“What did I tell you?” Oblong was very proud.
“It’s impressive. You’re certainly making due with limited resources. However, do you not feel it is indecent that they are all barely clothed?”
“Indecent, yes. Barbaric, certainly. But the more sun their skin gets directly, the better. So we make do.”
Pacheco walked up and down the row of barkskins, squeezing the occasional stomach, inspecting every third or fourth ear. “I need one that won’t give out on me.”
“Well, how about this one?”
“Too stocky. Phyrxian’s engine is a tight fit, and I don't want to have to keep greasing him up,” Pacheco moved on down the row. He saw her standing behind two taller barkskins, and reached past their arms to take hers. He pulled her forward.
“Oh yes, she’s in great shape, that one. Good choice, good choice,” Pacheco noted the pronounced muscles in her stomach, the corrugation of her ribs as she breathed in, good, strong breaths. Her breasts were as curved as two waning moons, but Pacheco could still see her striated pectoral muscles, like a taut rope between her cleavage. She was thin, yet sinewy, like a loaded trap. Her hair was white and in thick dreadlocks, with pieces of purple and orange fabric woven in. Her eyes were steel gray. They moved between his one good eye and the patch, then looked away altogether.
“I’ll take her.”
“Very good, Colonel. Very good, indeed. And how shall you be paying?”
“Credit, of course. How long until a provisional ship comes out here?
“I’m not sure, Colonel. It’s been three months, I believe, since the last. The bridges aren’t as well traversed as they once were, I’m afraid.”
“Well, I’ll pay you generously.” He looked at the barkskin girl. Her hair covered most of her face, and hung down over both her breasts, covering the areoles. He noticed that her entire body was smooth, and her lips full. She was shaking under his gaze, unable to meet it with her own. The row of naked barkskin’s continued to stand at attention, but all their eyes were on her. Their placid looks had given way to concern and anger. Some of them had begun to hum, and rock back and forth on their feet.
"What are they doing?"
"I... I don't know."
“Well stop them, damn it.” Oblong had motioned to the five yama handlers, soldiers who had herded the Ma’atha down to the shoreline. They had quickly stepped forward, brandishing long steel poles with electric tips. Even with the threat of force, most of the Ma’atha would not move. They had continued to hum, those who weren’t before joining in, and stared at the barkskin girl whom Pacheco had chosen. One of the handlers brought his pole down on an older man’s back, who instantly crumbled under the blow. A Ma’atha woman had screamed, but the others seemed unfazed.
“Don’t hurt them, damn you!” Oblong had yelled, but the handlers were green, inept or a combination of the two, and didn’t seem to comprehend how to deal with insubordination without using brute force. All five handlers began swinging their rods. A woman got cracked in the face, a spray of blood and teeth arcing through the air. One of the Ma’atha men, young with a chest like a tree trunk, grabbed one of the handlers by the collar and started punching him in the face. Other Ma’atha joined in, and within a few seconds a full-on melee had erupted.
“Stop! Stop!” Oblong was shouting to little effect. Pacheco decided to act ins
tead. His cape shot out in four different directions, the fabric wrapping around the necks of two Ma’atha and two handlers. It lifted them up from the ground, all their feet kicking in the empty air. The fighting began to let up once everyone saw what Pacheco had done.
“Put them down!” A man’s voice had shouted, from up at the top of the hill. Pacheco remembered looking up, and seeing the Scholar for the first time. He made an impressive sight, a barkskin in formal yama attire. He had a cravat at his throat and wore a double breasted linen coat, the fringe coming down to the tops of his knees. He came down from the precipice he had been standing on over the beach, and walked straight up to Pacheco, who had by then had put the men back on the ground. His face was as brown as his brethren, and handsome, but his white hair was only an inch or two long, made wavy by wax. He had looked right past the colonel, without so much as a salute or how-do-you-do, and nodded at the barkskin girl.
“It’s done,” He had said. He put a hand on Pacheco’s shoulder then, and looked into the man’s eyes with a gentle sadness at complete odds with the stern power he had commanded atop the hill. “Be strong, sir.” He had turned, his coat tails streaming behind him as he went back up the hill path. Without a word or a second glance, the Ma’atha followed after him, leaving Pacheco and Oblong alone with the handlers and the one barkskin girl.
“What was that all about?”
“That was the Scholar, Pacheco. The barkskins revere him. He’s their unofficial leader, with access to hidden knowledge. Or so they say.”
“So they say,” Pacheco had repeated, wondering at it all. He had turned to the girl whom they had left behind. “Come. You’ve been chosen for a great honor.” He waved his hand to her, but she didn’t follow, not immediately. These barkskins are not how I left them. He had thought then. They are more willful, more aware. If only he had knew how this insubordination would only be the beginning of his series of misfortunes. With her lower lip under her teeth, the girl finally followed. He thought maybe she was merely stunned at having been chosen. How wrong he was, how frustratingly wrong.
Not long after the transaction was completed, Oblong’s face contorting into a slathering grin upon acceptance of the doctor’s very generous payment, Pacheco took leave of the Lieutenant General and made his way back to his ship, his new barkskin in tow. He was done with the Coral Islands, hopefully for a very long time. Oblong had ordered his men to clean Phyrxian’s engine bay while he and Pacheco were at his quarters. The two yama cleaners saluted him as he walked along the dock back to Phyrxian, which was floating in the water, its tendrils whipping about the sky. One was so young his face was still pocked with acne, while the other was ancient, with a vacant face and liverspotted hands. The best and brightest that the yama people had to offer, Pacheco had thought. Yet, they had cleaned the mess from the prior engine conduit exceptionally well. All the crusted body waste and puss from the deceased barkskin’s seating sores had been scrubbed away, leaving a sparkling conduit’s seat under the dock’s bright lights.
He had wasted too much time listening to Oblong’s pedantics. The man’s laziness and insistence on finding reasons not to do things were the very reasons he had been assigned to such a barren outpost as the Coral Islands in the first place. That, and his crazy ideas. Of course time had stagnated. Was that not the very problem he had dedicated his life to solving? The Ameshka Vegan ancestors had disrupted the spiral just over four hundred years ago, in an attempt to harness its power for themselves, and shape reality to their whims. A bold plan, to be sure, but there was not much Ameshka Vega couldn’t do at their height. To harness the spiral, however, they had to capture it, which meant discontinuing the spin and separating Father and Son. How to separate them without grave consequences, without disrupting the delicate dance upon which time and space depended? The great mechas were made to do just that, two giant suits of armor which could contain Helios and Hyperion but still obey a yama’s hand.
Something went awry, though history forgets just what that was. The most widely held belief was that the timing was off in the capture, for Helios and Hyperion had to enter into their mechas at just the exact moment. The capture of Hyperion went without a hitch, but Helios was botched altogether. The spiral was broken but only the Son had been confined to his mecha. The balance of all reality tilted. The forces of the spiral actualized the other, all the science and stories said so. With Helios and Hyperion violently ripped apart, they went blind and senseless with nothing to reinforce the framework of worlds they had built together since the spin began. Time came to a halt and things began to fall apart. From the stagnation that came about, the Fade was hatched, and started to consume entire worlds. Ameshka Vega was one of the first to go and succumb to the Fade, becoming nothing but a glorious memory. The yama became wanderers of the fragmented world they’d been able to salvage, setting their city beneath a dome and crafting a set of legs which could always stay a step or two ahead of the Fade. Thus was birthed Yama Dempuur, one of the last vestiges of Ameshka Vega.
He runs across the orange sand, trying against all hope to make it to Oisin before the Fade. He had been good to her, and for what? He’d dressed her in a loose fitting dress, before strapping her into the engine. He had even laid a towel beneath her, a cushion against the hardness of the seat. He’d been warned in the past of ever softening on a conduit, called soft. They were supposed to know their place, to look to it as a duty, which both they and the yama had to do. If they saw a yama show emotion, the illusion would fade. A barkskin might become unruly. He never cared about all that, thought it was stupid, based in speculation instead of experience.
He remembers how she started to shake when he tightened the second set of straps around her shins, a moan welling up behind her pursed lips. The knuckles on her hands were as white as her hair as she gripped hard to the arms of the chair. Kneeling, he looked up, into a face barely discernible through the layers of hair.
“I want to go home.” She whispered. He stood up over her, the binding finished. Three straps per limb, plus the three around her torso.
“We are going home,” He said, grabbing a pair of gloves from a table behind him. “And you’re going to take us there.”
The gloves were made special for a conduit’s hands: the middle and ring digit each had nylon straps stretching from their tips to a chain link in the floor. This kept her from flexing her wrist, from potentially shifting her arm enough so that the needle would miss her cephalic vein entirely. Despite their conditioning, the size of the needles was enough to make any barkskin reconsider everything they’d learned.
The needles had whirred as they got into position. They were like skeletal arms attached to a motor that hung from the ceiling, the metal coated with a chipping, beige paint. Pacheco adjusted the angle of injection, made sure it was level with a laser balance, and then sat back and watched as the needles made their way through the air, slowly moving for the arms of the girl. The sound of the hydraulic engine which powered the needles’s arms was deep, and vibrated like a thousand hummingbird wings. Surely there were quieter ways of constructing such a simple machine, but he didn’t mind. He had never once seen a barkskin who hadn’t screamed the first time the needles were inserted, and this particular one wasn’t one to change that. At least the machine would drone it out some.
Phyrxian had taken off quickly into the Fade, and Pacheco was once again off, in search of the center of Grid, the loose map the yama explorers had made in the days following the Great Schism. The Coral Islands were an unfortunate detour, as their proximity to the edge of the Grid had skewed his initial trajectory. It took him some weeks to get the calculations back to where they needed to be. Yet, even in that time, the barkskin remained as vital as ever. He had been impressed: almost all of her brethren had noticeably weakened after the first week or so of having their plasma drawn out of them. The only change he had noticed was that her initial timidity had given way to a quiet indignation. She brooded and stared at him, occasionally spitting a
t the chain links which held her hands firmly in place. He didn’t pay her any mind though. He was close, he could feel it.
He had been in the Pyronic Room when she had escaped. Even through his cloak, which had been wrapped around his naked body like a cocoon at the time, he could hear the ship’s alarm. There was a problem with the engine, that much was clear. He snapped awake quickly, the cloak billowing out and settling on his shoulders as he dressed himself in his heavy black armor. He marched quickly down to the engine room from the meditation chamber, and at first couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The towel on the bench was crusted over with blood and excrement, but it was the seat which commanded his attention: it was empty. The cephalic needles were askew at awkward angles, the tips broken off, the metal singed. A trail of blood spatters snaked away down the corridor to the cargo bay. He had not even been in a transient state for an hour, by a look at the clock; a few more minutes, and his daily meditation would have been over, and he’d be back in the engine room with her. She had been planning her escape the entire time. But how?
Pacheco’s cloak straightened out behind him. Like a hawk, he glided down the hall, the drops of the girl’s blood passing like a bread-crumb trail under his hooked, gray nose. The barkskin must have been reserving energy, but how was that even possible? The engine was designed to draw out as much energy as possible without killing the conduit. It was an efficient design that carefully calibrated how much power the barkskin was capable of, and how quickly she could regenerate. She had to be kept weak enough that she couldn’t overpower the system, which she had somehow done. Perhaps she had recovered quicker than the engine had anticipated?
“Escape Vessel 4, Oisin, loaded and initiated.” Phyrxian had said over the ship’s loud speakers. He had glided faster. The blood droplets had no more use as a trail. He knew where she was. She had entered one of the escape ships, about to launch herself out into the Fade.
“Phyrxian, cancel Oisin launch sequence,” Pacheco said. He passed the glass wall with the echeverias and desert trees growing behind it. She had come far and fast for having lost so much blood, though he did note that the trail did seem to taper off, the droplets becoming fewer and farther between.
The ship had not answered. “Phyrxian, stop the Oisin!”
“I am sorry, Colonel, but the Oisin has left the docking bay.”
Pacheco felt the blood rush to his head. The docking bay and the escape hatches were right before him at the end of the corridor. He stopped in front of hatch number four, behind which he could hear the Oisin disengaging from Phyxian’s locks.
“Phyrxian, re-lock the Oisin!”
“I am sorry, Colonel, but there would be extensive damage to both the Oisin and to my docking port. The life form in the Oisin would also__”
“Manual system override, voice code ‘H255LK Violet.’ Close the god damn escape hatch!”
“Voice code invalid,” Phyxian said.
Pacheco stared up at the ceiling, at the bodiless voice that floated around him, denying him. “Phyrxian, manual system override, voice code ‘H255LK Violet.’”
He could hear the Oisin’s boosters engage from the other side of the door.
“Voice code invalid,”
Pacheco’s fist pummeled the door. He knew the Oisin was pulling away, it’s boosters blooming to life. Fiery flowers propelling a steely, egg shaped bulb into the vast infinitude of the Fade. Once free of Phyrxian and its gravity, the Oisin’s boosters would shut off, its magnetic engine sustaining its momentum through the Fade. The barkskin would no doubt be able to guide the ship to wherever she meant to go, maybe to the center of it all, if she so desired. She was, after all, quite capable: she’d built up a store of energy, withholding it from the engine and essentially fooling a foolproof system; she’d broken free of the needles and harnesses, reset Phyrxian’s computers, hijacked a ship, all in less than an hour. He punched the door again, his armor taking the brunt of the impact, but his bony knuckles still reeling from the force.
“Damn you!” He had screamed. He punched the wall again and again, leaving a dent as wide and deep as his head. “I’ll find you! I’ll get you back! You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
It did not turn out to be an easy task. It was long, tedious work to redo what had been undone in so short a time, but he was tireless. The road to Hyperion was a long one, never straight and always curving. Most of the time, the way forward required a repeated retracing of one’s steps, a constant peeling back of familiar old layers, of finding another world, another path that hadn’t been possible before. Navigating the Grid was precarious and confusing, particularly when there was literally a great, gray nothing that was gradually eating it all away. The only way to keep things in perspective was to keep to the maxim that ‘all was one, all the same.’ At the core of everything was the spiraling Father and Son, Helios and Hyperion, their never-ending chase, where each affirmed the existence of the other, what gave time and space their reality. What fools like Oblong didn’t understand, was that without that spiral, there was no forward momentum, no chance for change. How could there be, when the one force couldn’t know itself without the other? Thus the worlds had faded, the unimportant fringe elements first, like a puddle of gasoline, evaporating into a gray memory. Then that memory, too, would go.
The barkskin had failed to destroy the tracking device on the Oisin. All the escape vessels had them, like Phyrxian’s own umbilical cords. As he emerged from the Fade, one entire year in his time, he saw the Oisin, right where Phyrxian said she’d be. And so he landed, exhausted from using his own blood to propel Phyrxian through the last bit of the Fade, but knowing that there wasn’t much time before the Fade swept through this wasteland and wiped it clean.
He was watching the Fade come as he ran. It’s passed the butte, wrapping around rather than engulfing it. It’s a most curious thing. He’s seen the Fade act erratically before, though it was rare. It could very well crash in from all sides and consume the hill. Time would tell, and soon.
He knows she won’t survive this if he can’t get her out. So he runs even faster, flies, his cloak pushing him forward, like a fin on a plane. He caps the edge of the crash furrow, and descends on the Oisin like a bird of prey. He feels his heart speed up as his eye alights on the cracked escape hatch door on the ground. He feels sick, and has to stop, lean over, and spit. The phlegm is black and clotted. His depressurized body, engineered to be so because of the harshness of the Fade, was grossly unsuited for the cephalic needles. Yet, what other choice had he had? This barkskin was making his life one of desperate measures.
The escape hatch is coated with a heavy film of dust, its concave shape making it look like a bowl of orange clay. Above, like the black hole beneath his eye patch, is the open space where the hatch had once been. His cloak snakes up to it, grasps the inner frame, and pulls his armor encased scarecrow of a body up and in to the Oisin.
He scans the small enclosure of the ship: plastic bottles, medical supplies and life vests are all scattered about, a loosely weaved quilt of survival supplies. The pilot’s bay window is coated in dust. This ship must have been here a few months, at least. Pacheco makes his way up to the pilot’s seat, its back to him, his fingers skimming the cold metal wall, his bowels like a snake being pulled into an ever tightening knot, some little child’s slippery, chocolate hands peeling off scales with curious enthusiasm.
“Hello?” He says. He has no time for this, yet he cannot make himself turn the chair right around. He takes a breath. The air tastes like frayed wool on his tongue. The Fade is closing in.
“Barkskin, you’re coming back with me...” Pacheco says, turning the chair around on its pivot. Empty. Not even a tear takes up residence in the its fabric. He turns, sensing her, feeling he will see her behind him, ready with a shovel to bludgeon him with. But no, nothing, only the black, creaking space of the Oisin. He wants to curse, punch the wall, but knows he hasn’t the time: the Fade is close, and if he doe
sn’t make it back to Phyrxian, well...
Then he hears it. Phyrxian’s engines.
“Is the Fade so close that Phyrxian is initiating it’s emergency escape boosters?” Pacheco asks himself. Yet, such a thing was impossible without him onboard. The ship still had enough juice to throw up it’s shields, stand it’s ground while the Fade passed through the area, wait until he came back and issued the command to leave. Pacheco leaps out of the open hatch, his cloak mushrooming with the air as he parachutes to the ground.
“Good god, no...” Pacheco says. The boosters are sending chunks of incinerated earth up into the sky. Orange and brown, a cloud of bilious sienna, a fiery tree trunk with Phyrxian its fat, black fruit. He winces at the hot wind, then realizes that he should not just be watching Phyrxian take off, but running to catch it.
Each of the old doctor’s footfalls are like a hand clapping on a paper sheet, and the space in his ears is pushing out, trying to depressurize. The world is about to completely come apart. He feels something pop in his nose, the fast trickle of blood on his upper lip. The great gray wall is so close, he can see blades of grass as they disappear into it. It’s nearer than Phyrxian, which is still a few hundred yards away, and airborne. He stops running. The air is hot from the rockets, but he wants to watch the great black ship, see it from this angle, perhaps for the last time. He whispers a goodbye to his ship, then turns and runs the other way, back to the Oisin. He hasn’t any more time. The escape vessel is his only chance, the only refuge from the Fade. Phyrxian’s boosters go quiet, but it hovers in the air, trembling within its invisible electromagnetic force field. One of Phyrxian’s tendrils disappear into the gray, then another, then another. The inky strands act as a lubricant for the ship, easing the transition from world to the nothingness. Then Phyrxian will glide through the Fade, effortlessly, as it was made to do. It will escape, leaving its pilot behind, in a world about to fade away, as if it had never been.
Pacheco jumps through the hatch door, just as a crack splits across the ground, where he had just been standing. His cloak becomes as thin as the needle arms aboard Phyrxian, and bolts down to where the hatch door lies in the sand. It brings it up, and attaches it back to the frame. Pacheco rushes up to the console and starts the engine up. It takes a moment, during which Pacheco’s heart sinks. But soon the controls light up, violet and red beneath a layer of dirt. He brushes it off with his gloved hand, finds the switch for the Oisin’s electromagnetic field.
His body suddenly feels light, with the familiar insubstantiality that comes from being in the Fade. His timing had been off, and his old body had almost fallen apart out there. Perhaps Oblong was right, that the wandering of the Fade should be left to the younger, sharper cadets and Helios-Hunters. The outside world slowly retreats from the pilot’s window, gradually replaced by gray geometric shapes, which, in short order, melt together, until the highlands have disappeared entirely.
This wasn’t over. Not in the least. He’d get the Oisin airborne and out of the Fade. He’d hunt down the barkskin, strap her back into the engine, bleed her dry. He’d get to Helios and Hyperion yet.
Chapter VI: “Yama Dempuur”