The world will be ash

When Gideon woke up, I was sitting at the entrance to our shallow mountainside cave, watching the sun creep up from behind the long, dull hem of the horizon. I’d been up for hours, studying every detail I could of the world, alert to flaws, on the lookout for clues. I rubbed the sand on the floor of the cave between finger and thumb, and it felt reassuringly gritty. I strained my ears to listen to every sound of the night, the clicking scurry of a scorpion, the manic whooping call of some wild animal. I wanted proof positive that what I was seeing was real. Either that, or it didn’t exist at all.

Gideon sat on a cold rock beside me and wrapped his arms around his knees. Whether he was real or not, it was good to see him so young, and alive and well. As far as my memory allowed, I had seen his grey-faced corpse only the day before.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” I said, shaking my head. The sun was beginning to ascend, hitting the wall of yellow light that lined the edge of the world. “I can’t do this.”

Gideon said nothing for a moment, and then asked, “What happened?”

“Quon knows we’re coming.”

“You saw him in your dream?”

I didn’t respond. How could I explain what had happened, that I had lived an entire lifetime in a night? In my mind, I was still that old man and I had felt every minute of every day for countless years. My back had straightened and my blood had warmed. My bones had toughened upon waking, but my will had not.

“It’s more than that,” I said. “What he did to me … I … I just don’t know. I can’t tell if any of this is real. I’ve been sitting here, listening to the night, waiting for the sun … hoping that when it finally came up I’d know. But it’s here now and I still can’t be sure.”

“What did you see in your dream?”

“It wasn’t a dream. It was a lifetime. I lived an entire life in a night, as real to me as all of this.”

I looked out over the desert, and my voice grew quieter as I continued. “I was on the beach. I grew old. I watched you die and I carried your body to your grave. After that, I woke up. I can’t entirely explain it—it feels like I lived a lifetime; it feels like I was only asleep a night. But now, I can’t believe in anything. You. Me. This place. My son. I want to believe it, but there’s nothing I can’t doubt. Nothing. And the worst thing is, I’ve seen the end, and it’s absolutely meaningless. All of it. Nothing comes to anything. Nothing means anything, no matter what we do. No matter what we hope for.”

“Whatever Quon showed you was to make you think this way, Mr. Kayle,” Gideon said. “He wants you to lose hope.”

“That’s just it,” I interrupted him. “I can’t tell if you’re really saying this, or if it’s him, or me. No matter what you say, I’ll never be sure of it! Whatever he did, it worked. I’m sorry, my friend. I’m not sure there’s enough left of me to go on.”

Gideon sighed. The sun was almost halfway up and the air was warming, taming the icy end of night. I went back all those many (imaginary?) years to Moneta, who had once made her choice. She had lost faith in the world, in memory, and ended her life. Her words slid into my jumbled thoughts: One day, even the sun will burn out and everything will go dark. This earth will be a rock. We’ll be ash. There’ll be no meaning behind us ever having existed.

“You’re right,” Gideon said. “There’s nothing we can’t doubt. But that has always been the case. And maybe this is all a dream. Maybe it’s always been a dream. But at least we still have a choice, Mr. Kayle—the only real choice—because if this is nothing but a dream, we still have a choice. Either we end it all … or we try to make it the best dream we can.”

Gideon stood up and rubbed his big hands on the sides of his shirt. His dark forearms were encrusted in sweat and dust. He swept his dreadlocks behind his ears. Bands of yellow sun and dark blue sky gleamed in his eyes. The dips and mounds in the plateau of desert sand threw exaggerated shadows towards us. In the far centre sat the black silhouette of Chang’e 11, looking like a crude replica of the beached whale we’d once found.

“Look, I don’t know what you went through. I would be a fool to pretend to understand. But whatever Quon showed you, Mr. Kayle, he did so because he is trying to stop you continuing. Think about it. Why would he want to do that? He’s scared of you. This Quon fancies himself a god, yes? Well, I don’t know much, but I have never known a true god to ever be scared of a man.”

We made our way across the desert under the full sun. The further we walked out into the open plain, the further we were from the refuge of the mountain. There was no place to hide, to stop and recover from the heat. The ground beneath us was hard and cracked. My feet were blistering in my shoes; my tongue was swollen and dry. Chang’e 11 broadened across the horizon with every step we took, rising ever upwards and outwards, but my thoughts dragged behind me like a heavy rock I had been cursed with carrying.

(So see if you can pull yourself together, Kayle—it might be a tall order after a lifetime of dashed hopes and broken hearts—but if you can, and there’s anything left of you, stop by Chang’e 11)

I fought my way through the lies of the past, retraced my steps to the beginning of my journey out. As I looked back on the sad slippage of life on the beach, the disease, the death, that night’s lifetime began to reveal itself as a forgery. The memories of my return to the beach were weakening and vanishing, time was contracting and regaining normal proportions. It was easier to pick up where I had left off before the life Quon had grafted onto mine. Gideon had been right. It was a lie.

(Someone will put you to the test in order to find your son. He may try to deceive you, as he does to all people of the indomitable Now, and you should be prepared for that meeting, when it comes. So I’ll tell you)

Quon had done it because he didn’t want us coming—but why? I searched for a reason. It was there, I knew, a thread woven loosely through my experiences, one that I only needed to grab and pull taut, if I could just find it. Moneta’s connection to Anubis, Anubis to the family of robots, and the family to Jai-Li. What had been the point of it all? If Shen had planned all this, as Father implied, what outcome did he hope for? Why had he gone to the effort of guiding us through these many back doorways, simply to help a man he didn’t know find his son? There had to be something more to it, something bigger. There was something Shen was expecting of us that we were not expecting of ourselves.

(Time is the great divider. Relentless. Incorruptible. It weeds out the meaningful from the meaningless, and over enough time, the funny thing is, even the most meaningful of things become meaningless)

Gideon and I kept walking, edging across the hot and sterile land, coming ever closer to the mountainous vessel. Gideon gave me a bottle of water and I sipped from it. The water did nothing. We were burning up. The earth seemed to harden with every step, straining my knees. My mind tumbled with memories.

(You see, my father was the CEO of a corporation called Huang Enterprises)

Though it was still far ahead, we could now make out the details of the vessel’s structure—thick and immense black plates of wrought iron welded crudely to form what appeared to be a giant mechanical armadillo. There was nothing remotely refined about its design. This monstrous machine, created to haul millions of kilograms of raw ore across the universe, was now a castle from an ancient era, a religious site awaiting its pilgrims.

(And my father, as head of this monster, was the Ozymandias of the empire. King of kings, a wrecked colossus. A fair enough comparison, I think, considering the anticlimactic outcome of it all)

Rough stone walls had been built around the perimeter to form a type of citadel—to protect the vessel from the world or, perhaps, the world from the vessel. Two sealed iron gates hung in the centre of the jagged wall, supported by two massive obelisks on either side.

I felt my knees go weak beneath me, and stopped to bend over and breathe. Gideon put his hand on my back, though I could tell he was faring no better.

“We can’t stop,” he said. “Not here. We’ll die if we stop.”

“Andy,” I said, panting. “I need to find Andy. That’s it. Then we go home.”

Home. What home? All I knew was that wherever we were, and wherever Andy was, it was not and would not ever be home. Home was peace, wherever peace resided.

Gideon turned and helped me up to stand, adding, “Then we go home.”

(I ran into her, just as I’d imagined, and then I cried. She asked me what had happened. She asked me where I’d been, but I said nothing. She kissed me on the top of my head, rubbed my back in circles, and said to me the words I’d hoped to hear, but at that moment they sounded like the most impotent little words I’d ever heard: It’s okay, sweet pea, everything’s going to be all right)