An End (40 page)

He knew of her beginning, those precious secrets held by precious few: ice, wind, blade. He knew. Maybe she saw it all: intersections in the night. Maybe she let him escape.

He said I looked like my father.

Joseph Windham was the strongest man in the world. I saw tears in his eyes once, that day that he left and I knew he would die only months and centuries later, in the cold of this, bathed in a bridge sea, bubbles of gelatin glass, the sound of cracking shell, an instant of

My father never trusted his path, chose to tell a small circle of his officers that which he’d seen in Mother’s eyes. He wanted them to distrust. He needed them to distrust, because he knew.

My father told him of

long summer bonfires, those stupid cushions we put around the fire that get wet as the air cools, sending everyone else off to play hide and seek so we can be alone, a cute girl throwing dandelions at me, the time when we first laid by the fire and i explored every inch of your face with my lips because we were both too terrified to kiss.

i could go on. i think too much. i wish things had not changed.

i still love you.

The child is dying. Younger and younger. The process speeds. Tears of frustration and fury. She begs.

This weapon is

The ice plain slipped toward night and

i win

I know now of a system of two stars, a species with two hearts who buried their god in the center of the world. I know of centuries of civil war, a fragile peace enacted by machine angels. I know of a woman from the edge of the worlds, trees that swam through the sky, an alien called silver, between times and whens. Silverthought. I know.

She could have talked, but she was action. She could have talked, but no one would have listened. She heard the whispers in her blood, whispers in her single silver heart, and she acted.

Berlin
, Kath, others. They had access to the lumbers, had access to the inexplicable resonance of flight and time. They helped her at first, wanted to make a difference, wanted things to change. They knew that their god was asleep, that machines were taking key positions in the power structure, that left unchecked, the machines could decide to replace biologic with mechanic.

and this heart, for

They never knew that she would try to kill them all.

His superiors found out about Berlin’s involvement after she struck, after she was captured. They had no intention of letting him off the damaged planet. He would have died in the cold and the dust if he hadn’t found the photographer Task and his machine lover Elle. They tried to stop it all, tried to warn Hannon of the contamination. They were caught in the phase flux and followed Maire’s exile craft to Earth, where it this all began in earnest, where eons of waiting culminates in a man, a gun, a child, a desert.

Forty thousand years she waited in that cave.

Task died soon after the crash from his injuries. Berlin’s hand was crushed, became infected. His mind and body toxic, but she didn’t care. She had all she needed: code. The planet wasn’t empty; she made men of monkeys.

The mind

Simmering until fruition, sleeping for millennia, sleeping with intent, letting her evolution spread. She recovered that which she had lost, recovered and augmented. She waited, taste of Berlin on her lips, in her blood. She fed from him as she would later feed from Reynald: soul, code, rebirth. Hibernation.

out of the reach of our sea

Believe?

that she walked through the impressionist streets a wraith, marveling in all that she had spawned: thousands, millions, billions. She looked for him, felt him there, somewhere, that old soul with the stigmata of white. She walked for years, seduced and ravaged, fed upon and found him outside of a jewelry shop, arguing with the mistress Hiffernan.

Followed, whispered as stars falling in the night sky, whispered to his blood and he knew, he knew. What. Futures and distances and silver. She whispered.

She waited for that moment, as she had lifetimes away. Hid through three major conflicts, hesitant, uncertain, but knowing that it was not yet time; the world could not yet produce what she needed for completion, for purpose, for infection. She waited until they made machines like men, and it began. With the painter’s help, it began.

Decades of construction, hidden from man. Angels and gates and tunnels. They fought their surface wars, struggled over black lines on a map, experimented with their atoms and their planets and their politics. She hid and built and waited.

In those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, it hurtled into damnation and spawned and its progeny spread outward and outward and consumed everything in their path, and before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained behind.

They would live forever. In the ocean of silver fire, Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the hereafter.

Honeybear! Honeybear Brown! Cuddliest little bear on our side of town! Honeybear! He’s our friendliest friend!

Lilith giggled like a child when I sang that.

My quarters on Arch were cramped. Everyone’s were. But she’d sneak in and we’d make love and talk for hours. Forbidden, but yeah. We didn’t care. Knew that someone might figure it out eventually, but didn’t care. Long before the resistance began to weaken. We’d spend those hours unshielded, wrapped in each other, talking and laughing about Honeybear Brown and memories. Other memories. Laughing so that we wouldn’t think. About. What we were doing. What we were sent out here to do.

She told me of life behind her gates and I told her of life outside her gates. What we remembered of a world now dead, of a time now dead.

We figured out how humans fit together to make one.

She’d tell me stories that she made up and dreamt: rain and marbles, paint and coffee. A betrayal, time, people wrapped in monsters, flying machines through yesterday, stealing souls and sometimes taking time, taking time to sit on a rusty swingset next to a mountain, something buried beneath, tunnels and stars.

Sometimes her stories scared me.

She told me about Nan. She missed her like I missed my mother.

She’d hide behind the pillow, quickly peek out,
Hunter!
, and I’d laugh like an idiot. She’d do it again; I’d laugh again.
Remember me like that. Please don’t forget me. Us.

I don’t know what she saw in me that she didn’t see in the others. I don’t know why she let me in. Never felt so vulnerable, such surrender. Never let anyone that far in before, and now

We found such beautiful stillness in those moments, just Us. None of the confusion of our purpose, none of the war, the flight, the silver. Those are the moments that I remember when I close my eyes. Hers is the face I see. Hers is the heart I feel beating in my own chest. Quickly, now. Accelerated. Because

Exhale.

I now know that at the end of the war, Jean and my father found the entrance. I know that Maire sent Whistler to transport them to her, and I know that she changed them. They would be the first of many.

I know she whispered to them in that voice like wind and

They oversaw the Fleet modification, the construction of the Compounds on each continent, the mass-production of angels. They readied the populace for the realization that they had a greater purpose, and that purpose involved submission, war, sacrifice. They were the men people blamed when the female babies started dying, and the world realized that it would all end within a generation.

End set in motion, Maire placed my father on the flagship of the advance force she sent to Hannon’s system. She hid Reynald in a military hospital, and sent for him when it was time to create Lilith. Their daughter, my Love, the Catalyst of the Sixth Extinction.

Berard’s story broke an already-broken heart. How some could have known and not acted... I know that the silver was strong, but how could they not have killed her? Why must I be the executor of that act? After so many have died, after this extinction complete, silver now seeded throughout our known universe, dripping beyond into times and times, after such loss, after I’ve killed my

Berard assured me that the galleon was running as fast as it could from my pursuers. We’d find someplace out there to hide. Had to. Failure was no option. We ran.

We failed, of course.

The hardest part is the fact that I’d gotten used to the idea of forever.

i do know, and you know, too...

Please rest now, knowing that I’ll join you soon enough. Be still; wait for me.

Three destroyers, a corvette, and something still coming at us through the stream... They arrived in-system with a flash and my heart sunk. Galleons couldn’t outrun Fleet vessels in real space. We knew that; they knew that. Galleons have few if any weapons. We were unarmed, outrun, surrounded.

Funny how time pauses in those moments, in this moment, how the mind calms, the clouds recede, all becomes clarity and truth. I knew in that moment that we’d be separated, but our paths would converge again. Someday, somehow.

Whistler was surprisingly polite.

There was nothing we could do. The corvette docked. We met them in the hangar. Berard, his officers, myself. Lilith stayed in the sick bay.

Seeing Seven wasn’t like looking into a mirror.

Hello, Hunter.

I remember a print of a painting. Not the mother, as everyone knows, but the mistress, although I didn’t know it at the time. Animal rug. Wolf? White dress, white girl. She looked so sad. Eyes empty like

Whistler held his hand out to shake mine. I didn’t accept. He grinned and let his arm fall to his side.

He explained that Seven would be my replacement. I wasn’t to be killed, but sent away. I hadn’t expected that. He asked where Lilith was and I said that she was hidden on another galleon, although I knew he could feel her, knew that he would find her.

The destroyers outside opened fire and took out one of Berard’s other two galleons.

Still hidden?

They directed me to the corvette, took me outside to the waiting surprise that had arrived in-system. Something big. I felt Lilith’s touch, her fear, her desperation. I tried to reassure her but couldn’t. I didn’t know how long it would be before I saw her again, if ever. Tried to reassure myself but couldn’t. Just tried to stop thinking, the dead painter on one side, the ghost of myself on the other, draped in black, eyes cold and

It arrived with a silent fanfare, a machine the size of a solar system, something special Mother had created just for me when she realized what I was doing, when she realized that I had a little more resistance than my father, that I had thrown her jihad off-track if even for a little while. There it was: Machine, and it scared the hell out of me.

Too tired to fight, to weak to resist. The silver onset had done more than ravage my body.

please don’t let this

They’d take Lilith from Berard’s ship and place her on another destroyer. Seven would become me. He would ensure that the jihad moved forward, ever forward, spreading the silver amidst, eventually making it to Hannon’s system and ending them all.

The corvette was but a particle to Machine.

Penetration, insertion, docking. They took me to the center.