pshoffman
patreon
The Last Human IV - 50 - The Elder and the Younger
🕑 Added 2024-10-18 21:34:56 +0000 UTC< First | < Prev | Next >
Poire frowned at the Boy. The Boy frowned at the rock. And the rock sat very still.
The Boy gritted his teeth.
“Is that what they taught us in the Conclave?” Poire said, “You have to relax.”
But the Boy wasn’t listening. His nose was almost touching the rock. Sweat prickled on his brow, and a vein stood out on his forehead. And the rock remained unchanged.
“You’re going to pass out,” Poire said.
“I can do it.” The Boy stuck his tongue out.
“You said that an hour ago.” But Poire couldn’t hide his smile. He’d forgotten what he was like—his younger self. Was I really this stubborn? Was I really such a fool?
But stubbornness was good. Building the Tower was a task that seemed to have no end, and the unpredictable elements of this bubble universe continued to rebuff Poire’s efforts. But now that he had found the Boy…
“Look!” The Boy thrust the rock triumphantly in the air.
“Quit waving it around and let me look.”
The Boy opened his palm. Poire leaned in, squinting. “Well?”
“This crack!”
“What crack?”
“This one,” the Boy said, “I made it. I broke the rock—with my mind!”
“Hm,” Poire frowned at the stone. At the Boy, sweating and panting from effort and swelling with pride. “You can do better.”
The Boy deflated. “How?”
Poire took the rock, and said, “In my hand, I hold Anu.”
He closed his hand around the rock, willing the subatomic connections to disentangle and rearrange themselves. New molecules formed and locked together, and when Poire opened his fist, the stone had turned to a rock of salt. With a squeeze, the salt cracked and crumbled between his fingers.
The Boy’s eyes were wide with wonder, and Poire chuckled to himself. It was nice to have such an easily-impressed audience.
“This salt is Anu,” Poire said. “And this, too—” Delicately, he pinched the salt with two fingers, and pulled a green, leafy stem up from the crumbled white powder until an apple popped free, its green and yellow flesh shining in the light. “This is Anu.” He prodded the boy with the apple. “And so are you. Every speck of matter in this place, every grain of sand, every cell in your body—all are made of the same matter.”
“We’re made from Anu’s dust?”
“Every single atom in this pocket, yes. Once, this was another universe. Like ours was. But Anu came, and turned it into itself. Rendering it lifeless, except for Anu.”
“Except for Anu?” the Boy looked up, as if he might spot Anu gazing down at them from the heavens.
“Think smaller, Boy. Anu is not like any being you know. Its memory is distributed perfectly. Its intelligence is fractal: every part contains the whole. Every atom contains all of Anu’s memory, its will, its power. Power which you don’t even realize you’re using.”
“I am?”
Poire poked the Boy in the stomach, hard. The Boy gasped, and Poire said, “There! What did you breathe in just now?”
“Oxyg—”
“And where did it come from?”
The Boy frowned. Took another breath, as if to test out his own power. Then, he beamed proudly at Poire.
Poire dropped the apple into his hand. “Now, turn this back to stone. Quickly. I need you to learn.”
“Why?” The Boy had a shrewd look on his face. The Boy knew that Poire wanted him to do more than survive. But I haven’t told him everything yet. Is it too soon? Then again, it felt like every second was another lifetime in which Anu could grow—devouring unknown universes, destroying untold existences.
Poire squinted at the Boy. Maybe the Old Man was wrong. Maybe he told me too little, too late.
“Follow me,” Poire said.
Together, they began the journey up the steps. It was a shorter journey than before, when the old Tower still stood, but the Boy asked more questions than Poire ever remembered asking.
“What’s at the top?”
“You’ll see.”
“Can’t you tell me?”
“No.”
“Why does the world keep flipping? Is it dangerous? Can you make it stop?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Waste of energy. There is no land, there is no sky, I’m not even sure if this is a planet, or a plane, or what. I only know that it changes.”
“What’s out there?” the Boy pointed beyond where the black, jagged teeth of the mountains lay. The sky dripped down in dramatic, almost tree-like columns, and where it touched the ground it blended with the landscape in dazzling spirals. It gave Poire a headache if he stared too long.
“Your guess,” Poire said, “Is as good as mine.”
“How come the Tower doesn’t fall when the world flips?”
Poire sighed. Normally, hiking up the steps was like meditation. He could start, and simply flow. But today… “Sometimes, the Tower does fall.”
“It does?” The Boy’s eyes went wide, and he stared over the edge. “Only sometimes?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” the Boy went blessedly silent as he thought about this for a moment. And then, “Why do the mountains move like that? Are there birds here? PlantS? I thought I found a spiral tree thing in the desert, but it’s bark was like chalk and it started to bleed this purple stuff, and it smelled like iodine or something. Do you know what it was?” And so on…
No wonder the Old Man stopped answering my questions.
Eventually, they reached the top, and Poire groaned as he sat on the highest step, and leaned back, and gazed at the bright, almost blinding, colors of the window-pane sky. Each glassy frame, filled with dazzling color, and outlined by black strands carved organically across the warped dome of the heavens.
The Boy hadn’t said anything for a while, so Poire looked over. His younger self narrowed his eyes so they were almost shut against the brightness and color.
“It takes some time,” Poire said, “But you get used to it.”
Up here, without the haze of sand, the emerald greens and fiery topaz and honeyed pinks were crystal clear. He lifted his hand, but the ceiling of the sky was miles away.
There was movement up there. A shape, like the body of great and powerful serpent, slid behind a dark red window. Dark drops flecked against the window’s membrane from the other side, blooming into colorful stains, so close Poire felt like he could reach out and touch them. As it slid past, the serpent’s body did not appear in the next window—it simply disappeared.
“What was that?” the Boy asked.
“I am made of Anu, but I do not know Anu. Not really.” Poire frowned. Have I said that before?
“You think,” the Boy said, “That’s Anu’s body, up there?”
Poire shrugged. “The Poire before me thought so. He said that Anu was more like a colony. Many beings, living as one. He said that even though each molecule contains the greater whole, Anu had to begin somewhere.”
“And it began up there?” The Boy shielded his eyes with both hands, soaking in the sky. So near, and yet… “So the sky… you think it’s like the shell of an egg?”
“If it is,” Poire said, “We’re not the ones looking in.”
The Boy chewed on this idea for a while, staring at the sky that trapped them into this world. Then, and Poire was pleased by this, he figured it out. Most of it, anyway.
“You’re building a tower to reach Anu?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Poire bared his teeth, his face pulled tight in a hungry grin, “So we can kill it.”
“But,” the Boy said, still scowling at the sky as he thought about what that meant, “But we’re made of Anu. Wouldn’t that destroy us?”
“Yes.”
The Boy looked into Poire’s face, and saw that his elder self had already worked through every implication. And yet, the Boy was just like Poire. Just as stubborn, and curious, and unwilling to simply accept the unknown forces that pulled at his future.
“You think this will save them?”
“If we do nothing, they will die. Anu is already destroying our universe. It has already killed our kind. It will take everything else—everything we ever had.”
“What if we can’t kill Anu? I mean, you’re not the first Poire to be here, are you?”
“We must keep trying.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
Poire stopped.
“What if we’ve been here before?” the Boy said.
“We’re not living through a loop…” Poire said, the words strangely familiar on his lips. “Though, sometimes, it feels like it. You wouldn’t understand.”
“But I’m you.”
“And you’re not ready.” The Boy started to argue, but Poire held up his hand. “I know this, because I wasn’t ready. A long time ago, when I was like you, he tried to tell me. I didn’t believe him. I wasted so much time trying to find the answers on my own. You don’t trust me, and you won’t until it’s too late. I can’t let this chance slip.”
The Boy frowned up at him, defiant. And why should he trust me? Poire thought. He doesn’t know anything yet.
Why am I so stubborn? Poire let out a frustrated sighed. And, at the same time, so did the Boy.
It was so absurd, Poire started chuckling. And then, the chuckling turned into a laugh that rumbled up from his chest and burst from his lips.
Stubbornness, if he thought about it another way, was something of a gift. Eolh? Poire wondered. Could Eolh have made it this far? Khadam certainly had the will, but she might have gone mad when the physical laws changed every waking day. Would anyone else have made it this far…?
Poire stopped laughing.
“What?” the Boy asked.
“It might be dangerous. Then again, she survived.”
“What?”
“An idea,” Poire said. “I don’t know why we didn’t do this earlier. Follow me,” Poire said.
***
The glow came from the pools, bathing the walls and columns in ethereal blue. The air smelled of stone dust and pure water.
Poire kneeled, and gestured for the Boy to do the same. He took the Boy by the back of the neck, and pushed his head under the water. For a moment, the Boy struggled, but for all his youth, the Boy’s strength was nothing compared to the Poire’s. Was I really this weak? Poire knew he was losing his muscle with age, but it seemed the long years of laboring over the Tower had made him stronger than he realized.
With his hand still on the Boy’s neck, Poire bent over, and pressed his own face into the water.
Shining with color, Anu’s limbs soared overhead and underneath and beyond sight. Branches cracked and split and grew to the edges of existence, and beyond. They dripped with dewy bubbles, and in each drop hid unknown universes. A nearby branch ripped open with a thunderous crack, and splinters of pure light showered through them, flurrying away in a breeze that Poire couldn’t feel. Certain splinters seemed to lodge in the void and catch fire, burning new breaches into new universes. Inevitably, new branches split and forked and clustered around the breaches, testing at the newborn Scars. Ripping them open. Drinking from them all the matter of some unfortunate world.
“Let us go deeper,” Poire said, and with his thoughts alone, he propelled the two of them into the nearest Scar.
From just outside, they could see it all. All the stars and celestial bodies, all their orbiting planets. All the civilizations, mighty and ancient and burgeoning with life, snuffed into insignificance. Places and cultures and lives that Poire had never imagined before, carelessly blown away like so much dust.
Poire brought him back to Anu’s beginning, and he showed the Boy all the drops of dew which contained all those dead universes.
Then, he said, “Let me show you our universe…”
The first Light dam rose up to greet them. And inside, Poire could just make out Emorynn’s face, looking back. Looking at him.
“The first vision, when the Prophet met Anu. This is the moment when humanity first woke up—”
Poire let his mind go as the flood of knowledge filled him. All of Anu’s knowledge, everything it had ever done and would do, poured into his mind. And he laughed.
But a spluttering, choking sound cut short the vision. Something was wrong. Poire surfaced and found the Boy drowning in inches of water, even though Poire no longer held him. The Boy had collapsed with his head in the pool, and his lungs inhaled and vomited water, and his limbs jerked him in a mad dance. Poire yanked the back of his shirt, heaving the boy out, but when he turned him over, the Boy’s eyes rolled up as if he was trying to see the back of his own skull.
“What is this?” Poire asked, trying to hold the Boy still. “What’s wrong?” The Boy jerked and writhed and bit his own tongue so that blood mixed with the froth, choking him. Poire looked up, only to remember that he had no one to call for help. No one, but himself.
Panic rose in his throat, surprising and unfamiliar—he’d spent so long out in these wastes alone, he’d forgotten fear, urgent and sharp, felt like. Okay, he tried to calm himself down. What can I do?
Poire tore a chunk of stone from the floor, and willed it into a soft piece of rubber, and slid it between the Boy’s teeth to prevent him from biting off his tongue. He rolled the Boy onto his side, and laid his head in his lap, and shoved down the fear as he whispered over and over, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Just breathe.” He wasn’t sure who he was saying it to.
Frothing and gasping, the Boy’s lips quivered like he was trying to say something but couldn’t remember how to form words. His eyes stared into nothing, and his head jerked back, reacting to something only he could see. Poire called to him, but the Boy didn’t react.
What have I done? What am I supposed to do?
For now, he could only restrain the Boy until his hands ached. Slowly, the spasm’s lessened, until the Boy was only twitching. Blood from his nose had smeared across his face, and more dripped from his palms where his own fingernails had clawed away the skin.
Poire tried to clean him up. From the stone, he made a pillow and a blanket, and brought him water, and tried to clean him up. For hours, he talked to him, but the Boy did not respond. A day went by, and nothing changed, except for the aching in Poire’s bones from sitting for so long. In the end, Poire had to drip water down the Boy’s throat, just to keep him alive.
Is he alive?
The only sign was the pulse beating in the Boy’s throat. Hours turned into days, and still Poire did not leave his side. He tormented himself with questions that he couldn’t answer. Some dark, mercenary part of him wondered if he should leave the Boy to his death. You’re wasting time. What, after all, was one life against the destruction of Anu?
But the Boy had his own face. It was never really a question.
Poire took him down the Tower, and made him as comfortable as he could. He spoke to the Boy, and tested his reactions every so often, and told him of the world, and gave him water and soup. He waved his hands in front of his face, and whistled and snapped and poked his forehead hard. The Boy never blinked. Poire had to close his eyes for him. Sometimes, he would look over, and see the Boy had opened his eyes again. What are you staring at? He wondered.
One day, Poire spilled soup on the Boy. The Boy flinched. Another, the Boy swallowed a spoonful of soup on his own.
Sometimes, his fingers twitched. Or his breath stuttered, like he was living through a dream.
But his eyes never changed. Unfocused and distant, they never closed on their own. Only opened.
Uncertainly, Poire felt that he could continue work on the Tower. He found a new rhythm: up the steps, and down, check on the Boy, and grab another sack of stones before heading up again. The Tower grew painfully slow.
Up. Down. Check. And so on and so on…
And then, the storm came. Poire was near the waves of mountains when something high above changed. Two of the membranous windows had merged, emerald and ruby, their colors swirling into each other, their movements going faster and becoming more violent the more they mixed. Eventually, the membrane burst—breaking open more windows in a chain reaction that carved a two-sided wake across the sky. Black outlines peeled from the sky above, twisting into organic columns, wreathed in lightning that seemed to rip the air out of itself. One of the black lines crashed toward the ground. When it touched, it let out a boom that blew sand so high, it became a cloud that covered the horizon.
Poire started to run. The ground bucked and trembled under his feet. Sand slid and thickened, becoming almost liquid. It sucked at his feet and he willed it to turn to dust, to air, to anything that wouldn’t hold him back. Behind him, an ear-splitting crack made the world lurch. Another black, twisting column had found the earth, and broken something beneath the sand. Something foundational. The dunes were blasted away, and violet geysers sprayed into the atmosphere. Lightning crawled vibrant, flashing trails through the ascending mists.
Poire’s joints screamed, his sandals flew off his feet, and still he didn’t look back until he reached the doorstep of the Tower. Above, the windows of the sky were breaking open. Becoming one.
Poire had left the Boy inside, laying at the bottom of the steps. But his bed was empty, and his cup was knocked over. A wet footprint led out of the Tower.
“Poire!” Poire shouted, as if he expected an answer.
Outside, the horizon was moving. Mountains and dunes had been swallowed by a wall of sand, miles high and sweeping with a dark fury toward the Tower. Lightning crackled in its voluminous depths, illuminating the vast columns that hung like black bones, holding up the storm. Vortexes, narrow and uneven and monstrously tall, spilled down from the broken sky, as if pulling the wall of sand behind them. They gyrated their own slow, pendulous dance, kicking up sand and stone shrapnel and ripping lightning from the air.
And there, in the distance, was the Boy, stumbling toward death.
Poire ran after him. The earth trembled, the sand liquified, and he willed both to change—to become hard, flat platforms of stone that rose up to push his feet, and throw him across the dunes. With great, bounding steps, Poire flew, his muscles burning and joints protesting every step of the way.
Poire slammed to the ground behind the Boy, kicking up clouds as he slid to a stop. “Get back!” Poire shouted at him, his scream lost to the gathering roar. The winds ripped at their clothes, unbalancing Poire, making him almost weightless before tugging him back, and then weightless again. Errant, flying scree and sand slashed at their faces, but the Boy seemed not to notice. Poire pushed on, lifting his arms of his robes to block the Boy from the wind. Something hard hit Poire in the back, making him gasp and stumble. “Get back to the Tower!”
The Boy stared through him. Lines of blood ran across his face where the sands had cut open his skin. The Boy tried to walk forward. Poire pushed him back. The Boy started forward again, when the ground jumped and threw them both down.
Then, the sands started to sink. Spidering cracks drank the oceans of dry dust, as the earth below broke apart. And when the ground below began to hiss, Poire grabbed the Boy by an arm, and hauled him backward. The disappearing dunes slid deeper into the earth, revealing the widening cracks. Sheets of hot vapor geysered up from the gaps in the ground, flaring like firelight before being sucked away by the torrential winds.
And still, the Boy fought back, like a machine set in motion. But years, centuries of hauling the stones up the steps had turned Poire’s grip into iron, and he heaved the Boy toward the Tower.
The wall of sand flooded in. An ocean, inexorable, taller than any mountain. And before it, marched the spinning vortexes. As the sands curved overhead, new funnels poured down, inhaling the dust and debris and lifting the cracked earth and, finally, flinging shards of rock across the barren ground. One swelled before them, dancing down from the heavens like a celestial cobra mesmerizing its prey. It did not touch the earth. Instead, the barren landscape cracked and surged up to meet its body.
Poire, almost weightless in the winds, threw both arms around the Boy, and threw them both to the ground.
Stone met wind. The dark funnel, flickering with threads of lightning, shredded the stone in an explosive spray of rock and bullet shards. Massive boulders spun slow, absurd circles around the vortex, before slowly tumbling out. Some sailed back into the wall of sand. But not all of them. “No!” Poire shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the thunder, which had nothing to do with the lightning. A great chunk of broken earth slammed into the Tower’s peak, pulverizing the highest walls and sailing right through.
Cracks shot down the mortar and bricks that Poire had spent so many ages building up. The structure began to tilt. His thoughts raced. I can fix it. All I have to do is— Another boulder slammed into the Tower’s base, taking away half the wall as it bounced across the earth, rolling out across the wastes. Poire could almost hear the cracking sound of all his work coming undone. High above, the steps that spiraled up toward the heavens were already beginning to drift apart as the Tower swayed.
Shards of earth slung against his exposed body. Pelting him, cutting chunks in his flesh even as he bowed to shield the Boy. Something stung his thumb, and a wetness painted the back of his hand, but he did not look.
But Poire was beyond pain. Beyond anger. Beyond sense or reason. The wall of sand ripped at his back, attempting to abrase the skin from his bones. Black columns hung from the sky like twisted spinal cords and another funnel poured down, gyrating like an evil tongue as it lapped toward his Tower.
He stood tall. He raised his arms. He did not shout. He merely poured all his will into a single word: “Stop!”
And it did.
Everything did.
The ground froze in mid-tremble. The cracks held still, and the geysering vapors hung in perfect suspension. The tornadoes suspended, and a lone chunk of earth hovered in the air, its broken edge scraping the corner of the Tower.
Even the lightning, which etched searing lines in the wall of sand, glowed in perfect stillness. There was no sound, save for his own heaving breath and the beating of his heart.
Am I dead?
He felt the wetness on the back of his hand. Blood dripped down his wrist and pattered on the sands. Something felt stiff. Wrong. A wet gasp brought his attention to The Boy. His eyes were open wide, as usual, but this time they were focused on Poire.
“Boy?”
“What—” the Boy said. Then, his face filled with terror. “What is that?” he croaked in a voice, unused to speaking.
“What is what?” Poire said.
Poire followed his gaze, down to his own stomach. A stone shard was lodged in Poire’s gut. Only then did he feel the pain. It bloomed out in waves, bringing Poire to his knees. Poire coughed and tasted blood. He gritted his teeth as the pain sharpened, and sharpened again, and when he thought it could get no worse, it stabbed inside him until his vision darkened. Poire touched at the shard, and a scream shot from his lips.
“What do I do?” The Boy was wide-eyed and afraid, his own face made wild by the criss-crossing cuts from the sand. “What do we do?”
“It has to come out.”
“You’ll die.”
“It has to.”
Poire sucked down air as carefully as he could, hyperventilating as he worked up the courage. He put both hands on the shard, and was about to rip it out, when he remembered.
Air.
He willed the shard to become weightless carbon dioxide. The stiffness in his stomach softened, and the torn flesh slumped, and blood began to gush. Poire thought he could see inside himself. Is that my intestine? The thought brought bile to his throat, which only made his agony worse.
Poire squeezed his eyes shut, and swallowed hard, trying not to breathe too much. His lungs burned, somehow worse than the pain.
“Okay,” he swallowed a shallow breath. “Okay.” Trying to remember everything he’d seen in the Seeing Pools. Lessons of anatomy and medicine and biotech blurred in his memory. Poire cupped the wound, trying to hold back the warm gush of his own blood. He grabbed a fistful of sand, and hesitating, he plunged it into the wound—willing it, at the same time, to become soft tissue. Every grain felt like a rusted nail, digging into his gut. He screamed.
The new flesh wouldn’t stick, wouldn’t bind. Not at first. But he pushed it in harder, and willed it to change again, until it stemmed the flow of blood, and the wet tissue dried into place.
Immediately, he knew it was wrong. His innards were damaged, or the new tissue wasn’t right. But, for now, it was enough. Poire fell to his hands and gulped down air, and a smile split his face when he realized it hurt less. Enough that he could breathe. He dropped to the ground, laying on his back, and basked in the lesser pain, staring up at the ruined sky. Still tornadoes hung in the air. Floating stones and spires of bursting rock and jets of vapor—all frozen in stasis.
I did this, he thought. All this.
And yet… he had almost died. Despite his newfound power, he had never felt so small. How frail and fragile his life-thread was. At any moment, it might be cut.
And then, who will save them?
His eyes drifted toward the boulder, frozen in mid-flight. The Tower, missing half of its lower wall, leaning drunkenly toward the unmoving wall of sand.
Poire gritted his teeth, and—gasping—fought through the pain as he pushed himself up. The Boy was awake. And I’m alive.
There was work to be done.
