I stare at Nyx for a long time. Then I stare at the ground. Then I walk to the wall of dirt and put my hands against it. I think of their small bodies—their eyes, their mouths. The dirt vibrates. The blue light and song at my head reverbs. And then here they are, two cherub-like kids, one squatting, one standing. What’s left of my heart, shatters.
Nyx lies down on the ground. The children do the same, as if being put to sleep by their mother. The blue light and song emanating from me does not save me from being emotionally gutted. But soon the children have lost their forms to color and sound: water.
They become water.
I stare at the unusual graves. I put my hand into a small stream forming. I stare at the graves of the beautiful young men, too, gone green with nature. Life and death marking the same spot. “How many men are there . . .”
“Thousands,” Nyx says quietly. “An army.”
I close my eyes. For reasons I can’t explain, I see Olms—so many Olms they make their own mountain. Behind my eyelids, I see strings of light going from the Olms to all the stars in the sky. Then I see just two Olms, curled and wriggling in the palm of a woman’s hand. The woman is whispering. She is beautiful.
I open my eyes. I look up. “How many children?”
“Many.”
“Will any of them . . . have life? Real life? Human life? Or was my role on Earth simply to condemn them all to dirt?”
“Most of them will have ‘real life,’ as you call it. Some who are regenerated will become elements. Like water. Some will be for the population, whatever that turns out to mean. But that’s not the point right now. Look, it’s pretty simple,” Nyx says.
“How is this fucking simple? You want me to witness these humans—if they really are alive—you want me to watch them devolve right in front of me? How is that not murder?” I feel once again like pure destruction. My blood feels thick in my forearms and legs.
“Not at all,” Nyx says without alarm. “You are giving them a reason to live. You are giving them back their sacred relationship to the planet and the very cosmos they came from.”
To be human. What if being human did not mean to discover, to conquer. What if it meant rejoining everything we are made from. The song in my head pulses in a single ear-shattering note, then silence. Like an auditory exclamation point.
“I can get you up, if you can kill their future up there. They’re all that’s left of a self-centered species. They aim to destroy us, suck out what’s left of Earth’s resources. You have to choose. Your past is there. You know it is. You have to reenter your own story. And it will likely cost you this thing you call ‘life.’ But it will save your beloved Leone. And much, much more.”
Leone. Like a word untethered from a body.
“What do I do?” I say, the wind still around us.
“Give me your rib,” Nyx says, moving toward me.
“Excuse me?” I touch my own skin.
“Your body. We need it. A piece at a time. Engenderine.”
I stare at the hand that’s missing a finger. If my body carries something better than a self, I surrender it. Nyx lifts my shirt. Pushes a fist inward. Fleshward. I try not to flinch and then I lose consciousness. When I come to, Nyx is gone again and I’m just my wounded body, sutured where a rib should be and face in the dirt. But the dirt is vibrating. I stand up inside sound, the song amplifying in my head, on the ground, up into sky.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The ugly audacity of pomp brings bile up Christine’s throat.
The thunder of CIEL’s orchestral pageantry shakes the walls around Christine and her players as they fill an anteroom next to the pre-execution theater. “For fuck’s sake,” she mutters. They would have to endure some horrid musical preamble, and no doubt several empty idiotic speeches, before her own show could get going. Ah. Now she recognizes the tune: It is the “Theme of Ascension.” Which is, more accurately, the goddam dirge that was created for the celebratory moment of ascending to CIEL. To be followed, no doubt, by the “Crescendo of Dematerialization.” After your fiftieth birthday, and poof—back to shattered DNA strands and space junk. With a soundtrack.
Trinculo’s so-called trial was to happen in trompe l’oeil, its image appearing over and over again in holographic bursts. It would be broadcast in corridors and common rooms and walls in our CIEL quarters.
Christine had been granted a performance as part of the spectacle of Trinculo’s execution, though gaining permission did take some bribery of various guards and under-administrators. In the end Christine was able to convince them that she could provide a superior companion show for his death.
The silver spider swings and leaps in great arcs, drawing her attention to the performance space, which faces a cathedral-size window with a giant T-square covering it, the horizontal beam slightly higher than center. Beyond it, the horizonless ink of space and the dots of dead stars. How has she never seen it this way before? It is a goddam cross.
Her line of little rebels ready themselves feverishly. At that age, their cheeks seem to almost flush. But she knows she’s just wishing it. Their eyes yet blaze, though. They still have identifiable necks and cheekbones and scapulae. Lips not yet distorted or spidering around the edges. Her now-favorite, the girl with the epaulets, the girl—or she has decided it is a girl—with the aqua-hued skin, shoots orders at the others.
“Leave any thoughts of a future in this room. The future is . . .” Nyx risks a glance at Christine. “The future is dung. A compost heap masquerading as life, floating in space without reason or purpose. The old are the only endgame, and they reek of rot and pus.”