A powerful shock wave fragmented Asura’s thoughts. Her enemy’s psychic assault was incredibly powerful—more powerful than any she had before experienced. She felt cold sweat running in torrents down her body. Her enemy had brought all of his power to bear in an attempt to destroy her, here in this corner of this cold basin—and not just to destroy her, but to expose her to a higher existence than her own, exalted and unbearable.
Searing pain ran across her shoulder. Without thinking, she probed with her hand and found a fragment of metal panel buried deep in her shoulder. She yanked it out. Fortuitously, the tip of the metal had damaged part of her secondary circuitry, sapping the effectiveness of the hypnotic waves directed toward her cerebral matter. This will be my last chance. Asura brought her gravitation-generation device to full power and closed the dimensional space where Maitreya was hiding. Negative heat entropy resulting from the adiabatic change shrank the closed space to a singularity in an instant—an infinitely dense, infinitely negative space, awash in a Dirac sea.
✦ ✦ ✦
The darkness thickened; only the lingering hot breath in the air told of the flames that had raged there moments before.
“Asura! Are you okay?” Siddhārtha and Orionae came running out of the corridor. Orionae had his emergency respiratory system cranked to maximum—he was breathing with his entire body.
“Our enemy is very powerful,” Siddhārtha gasped. “We were almost destroyed ourselves.”
For the first time in a very long while, Asura let herself relax.
“Jesus escaped west across the basin,” Siddhārtha told her. “We were going to give chase but were concerned about you.”
Asura smiled bitterly at Siddhārtha’s words. They were right to be worried for her. She had been on the defensive from start to finish and had only narrowly escaped destruction. Maitreya’s next assault would surely not be long in coming.
“Siddhārtha,” Asura said quietly. “Have you ever wondered . . . ?”
“Wondered what?”
“Wondered if, perhaps, we are working under someone or something’s orders?”
Siddhārtha raised an eyebrow.
“How about you, Orionae?”
Orionae shook his head in silence.
“As it so happens,” Asura told them, “just now in my fight with Maitreya I was held captive by a psychic attack and surrounded by a phantasmal army led by Śakra himself. He spoke to me from atop an elephant. He wanted to know who had ordered me into battle—who launched the assault on his world. He wanted a name.”
The three exchanged glances. It was as though the veil that covered their hearts, unnoticed until now, had peeled back, revealing something they had never glimpsed before: the idea of an entity supporting their minds and bodies from time immemorial—a power in opposition to the endless war that threatened to demolish their universe, a transcendental being that actually wanted to save their world from destruction.
“Have you ever thought about it before now?”
“At times, yes,” Siddhārtha admitted. “I wondered what power had fashioned us into cyborgs and placed me near the shore in that barren, lifeless land—and buried you in the sands. There had to be some design behind it all, or at least I thought there was. But whenever I tried to recall what it was, I found a complete blank in my neural memory web. The circuit had been cut, you might say. Perhaps as a defensive measure. And, seeing that Śakra had to resort to ordinary words in order to try to badger information from you, I would say that our designer’s plans met with perfect success.”
Siddhārtha turned to face the vast basin of the night, as though he might find the truth of the world buried within that darkness. “Do you have any idea who it might be, Asura?”
She shook her head. “I feel like I should, and yet—”
“Orionae?”
The cyborg philosopher tilted his head, frowning, then began hesitantly. “A long time ago, I heard of a civilization that believed in an evil supreme being who existed in opposition to their good god. I have visited the village where they believed in a god of night in opposition to the god of day. The good god is the sun god, and the sun itself, and eventually the god who is heaven—the heavenly father. I always thought that the evil god, the night god, was a purely allegorical being.”
Asura and Siddhārtha stared intently at Orionae.
“So the people who believed in an evil god believed in something other than, or perhaps even directly opposed to, the ancient god of the sun?”
“Yes,” Orionae said. “Or perhaps they realized that God was only a pathway to destruction and saw in the god of night the means to save their world.”
“Is this, then, the nature of the transcendent being who designed us, Asura?” Siddhārtha asked.
“I do not know,” she said. “Gods who administer death, sin, disease, and poverty have featured in the folk beliefs of many cultures. What do these gods mean? And to what end were they eventually abandoned and forgotten?”
“You are one of them, Asura,” Siddhārtha said.
“All right,” she said, “then it could be possible that my very existence is part of the effort against those beings that want to destroy our world. If that’s the case, then who sent me here? And sent me here to coincide with our enemies’ arrival?”
Orionae strode across the stones, hands clasped behind his back. “Your existence, Asura, was hidden from the people’s eyes by the religion started by Siddhārtha. I believe it was this transcendent being who opposed the destruction of our world that inserted concepts into that religion such as the idea that ‘all is void,’ and the story of how souls cross a river to reach the afterlife. Such details suggest the true nature of our struggle to the minds of humankind.
“Siddhārtha—” Orionae turned. “You believed your teachings could lead to an escape from the misery of life, a path toward enlightenment and freedom from the endless cycle of reincarnation. Yet you erred. Why should existence be a void? Is the void not a denial of consciousness itself? Your words were twisted and used against you by those desiring our destruction. I presume that the transcendental being, as a final measure, sent both of you into the far future, and that is how you came to be standing here, at the very entrance to our enemies’ realm.”
“Yes.” Siddhārtha nodded gravely. “There’s even a sutra claiming that Asura became a believer in the Buddha . . . Their ploy met with smashing success.”
Dark orange clouds stretched out across the sky. The air grew gradually colder as an ancient stillness wrapped around the ruins.
“When I looked out upon the distant gray land from those barren reefs, I saw shapes like mountains sliding toward the city ruins on the horizon. Many of them. That was the moment when I first realized how odd my situation was. Asura, do you have any idea what those mountainous shapes were? And there was another mystery—a large, black shadow that lay deep in the sea trench near the reef where I had been hidden. The fish, when there were still fish in the sea, were too frightened to approach. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that it bore some deep meaning for me.”
Asura turned her eyes to the distant clouds. “It is dawn. Another day begins—I do not know whether I will live to see night. We must leave here at once. But before that—Siddhārtha, those shapes you saw, could they not have existed in an alternate dimension? A warping of space beneath that troubled sky could have created a mirage, amplifying whatever was passing across the flats.”
“Perhaps,” Orionae said. “Whatever they were, they were looking for us—me buried beneath the dust of Tokyo, Asura ensconced in the desert sand, and Siddhārtha under the surging waves, all back when we knew nothing of our future selves. Though their repeated search attempts did not meet with success, it is likely that this was the time they first learned of our existence.”
“Then what was that thing sunk at the bottom of the sea trench?” Siddhārtha asked. “It bothers me. All the more so because we lack the means to go back and find out.”
Asura took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go. We need to take that sphere someplace safe.”
The three tugged on the glowing construct, enveloped in its gravitational barrier. They brought it out in front of the ruins of the crystalline building. “I see no point in returning to that city beneath the shield. Let’s go to the foot of that mountain range to the south. There we can examine how this sphere works.”
By now the orange light reached halfway across the plains. The sun still hung below the horizon, as yet unrevealed. In those fleeting moments between day and night, the three hurried southward, carrying the sphere between them.