The three obelisks had broken just above their bases and lay flat across the stones. Several of the buildings around the plaza joined them on the ground amid piles of rubble. Fragments of shattered concrete and dust rose in a giant umbrella cloud over the city. Aquamarine laser light still coursed across the top of the crowd that ran like fleeting shadows toward safety. Incredible explosions and gouts of flame rose upward, the sparks flowing like a river into the sky.
Siddhārtha had found his way back to the chamber of the leader. The leader stood like a statue, trailing a long shadow in the dim light. Siddhārtha wondered if he had even moved since his last visit.
“Leader. I believe I now understand the rebellion. And the cause of this city’s downfall.”
The leader slowly turned to face him. “You must have met God.”
“Yes. He said his name was ZEN-ZEN.”
“A great God, yes. Yet not even he could save this city from destruction.”
“Oh? As I see it, ZEN-ZEN has abandoned you.”
The leader chuckled, dark shadows playing across his face. “It is only natural. God was not ours to begin with.” With a sudden surge of emotion playing across his features, the leader advanced to stand in front of Siddhārtha. “Yet is it not we who support the city now? Are we not the engine of this city’s economy? Are we not her true citizens?”
That may be, Siddhārtha admitted to himself, but it would have little meaning to Shi. Shi was not interested in the people who felled the obelisks in the plaza, but only in the people who slept eternally, reduced to single data cards deep within the city.
“I’m afraid you have been abandoned, just like those who squat out in the rain.”
The Leader looked toward him, his eyes focusing on a great distance. “It seems that our time in history will not come for a long while yet.”
Siddhārtha left in silence.
✦ ✦ ✦
Red flames reflected across the skin of the ionocraft where it sat abandoned beside the building. Two figures stood in the shadow of a protruding section of wall.
“So you met the god in the deep.” Asura smiled, flames near her feet casting a flickering light on the lower half of her face.
“How did you know?”
“I can know things through your mind and through your eyes,” Asura said with a laugh, though it was unclear whether she spoke truth or not. “Which is how I have learned that the Planetary Development Committee is to the north, on a small plain surrounded by mountains.”
With the three aboard, the ionocraft slid above the smoke from the blazes in the city, heading toward the dark canopy above.
Outside, the vast silvery surface reflected the outline of the small pale yellow sun like a halo.
“Think those are the mountains?” Siddhārtha asked, pointing toward the ring of mountains on the horizon.
Ahead of them and on the horizon to either side rose dark mountains.
“What will we find on the other side?” Orionae wondered out loud.
“The Planetary Development Committee.”
“Those who act upon Shi’s directive?”
“The very same.”
“So is this thing called Shi also upon that plain?”
“Who knows?” Siddhārtha muttered.
“Both Atlas the Seventh and the Poseidonis the Fifth were as large as small mountains,” Orionae said.
“You’ve met them?”
“They said they came from the land of our ancestors, Atlanta. They tried experimental methods for forming their kingdom and were quite successful. The success of their experiments in Atlantis were to inform other planetary developmental efforts.”
“Atlanta, land of ancestors . . .” Asura muttered.
“Where is this place?” Siddhārtha asked.
“Siddhārtha, it’s—” Asura paused, crinkling her nose and looking up at the tiny sun. “It’s clear that the helio-ses-beta development attempted on the third planet of the Ai System was a failure.”
“As it was here on Astarta 50.”
Siddhārtha and Asura exchanged glances.
“So the Planetary Development Committee was unable to carry out Shi’s directive.”
“Humanity advanced into the stars, taking their wars and their incessant economic crises and their population problem, yet they could not dominate the Milky Way. They couldn’t even revive a once green land that had fallen to desert.”
Siddhārtha felt his chest tighten as though he were about to weep. “It seems to me,” he said after a moment, “that since the very beginning, humanity has been walking upon a path toward destruction. Everywhere is disease and disaster, death and conflict. These things have always been part of civilization, right by man’s side. I wonder if any human, anywhere, has truly been at peace from the bottom of their heart.”
Asura looked up at the rapidly approaching black shadow of the mountains and said nothing.
The small, pale yellow sun was about to slip closer toward the distant horizon, its weak rays striking out horizontally in bands of light across the land below them. They were passing over another flat surface, apparently an ancient seabed that was now completely dry. They had left the silver shield covering the valley far behind to glitter in the distance like a glacier. Beneath that, organisms that had long since given up being organisms continued their frail attempts to stave off their own doom. A civilization whose story of destruction had begun after history had already ended.