Asura stood on a vast plain where blue light fell like a silent rain of death. There was no atmosphere, no air to protect the exposed rocky surface. Though the lack of wind meant that there was minimal erosion, cracks formed over millennia crisscrossed the surface of the rock; some had grown large enough to be called crevices. The trickling of small fragments of rock down into those crevices appeared to provide the only movement in this world.
Everywhere there were signs that this planet had been subjected to incredibly strong radiation over a very long period of time. The radiation alert system on Asura’s necklace had been sounding at maximum danger level since she arrived. The discordant clamor of the alarm shrieked in her ears, an unwelcome call to action.
She took a step, and her foot sank to the ankle as the surface soundlessly crumbled beneath her. All the way to the horizon, the conditions looked the same. In every direction there was nothing but the faint curve of the horizon—no indicators to say which way was north or south. Asura knew that even if she did cross over the horizon she would find no remaining mountain ridges or deep valleys.
Over the long years, the powerful radiation had transformed the very material composition of the rock, grinding down mountains until they were nothing more than dust that filled the valleys and the ancient seabeds.
Even death had no shape in this place.
Peering around, Asura realized that no one else was there. With blue light streaming down across her shoulders, she stood alone at the end of the world.
Neither Siddhārtha nor Orionae had been able to reconstitute themselves on the other side of the conduit. For reasons Orionae clearly had not foreseen, it had taken longer than the coil could withstand for them to pass through the region of space filled with negative energy. Either that, or their transit had used more energy than expected. As Orionae had suggested, it seemed that at the last instant the circuit breaker had tripped, dumping the remaining energy into Asura, who was already passing beyond the negative energy zone. As for her companions—
She remembered Siddhārtha’s prediction of the sea of negative energy and shuddered.
This was what she was witnessing now: utter ruin made manifest.
Siddhārtha’s energy and Orionae’s energy—and whatever was left of Asura’s—had combined to power their last, desperate effort, and now she was left to discover for herself what her final objective should be. I could not have predicted that this would happen, she told herself. Nor could she ignore the terrible loneliness she felt in her heart when she considered her chances of fighting and defeating a transcendent, godlike being alone.
The glacier and the phantasmal city that had appeared within it were gone and would never be found again.
Orionae had mentioned a mistake, but could it be that this devastation was, in fact, what they should have been seeking? Is this our final destination, this small planet in the outer arm of the eighth quadrant of the Andromeda galaxy? With great unease, Asura set out across the crumbling surface, feeling as though she were walking not on matter, but on pure light.
She contemplated the blue light that suffused the surface of the planet and looked up toward the sky to find its source. First she saw the stardust, countless billions of swirling fragments in an endless dance above her. Then beyond it she saw that there was something more, pulsing behind the stars like an aurora there in the remote vastness of space—a great spiral of timeless light turning in the center of the sky.
For a brief moment, Asura stared, the brightness burning into her visual cortex, not understanding what she was witnessing. She felt herself part of a tableau, a tiny figure standing on a devastated planet beneath a white-hot whirling spiral—a perfect portrait of the end of the world.
I know what that is!
An icy tremor passed through Asura’s heart.
It was a massive spiral galaxy, coming from the depths of space directly toward the galaxy of Andromeda. Already the interstellar material of both galaxies were intermingling, each invading the other’s territory, emitting powerful electron radiation. Eventually, the heat trapped in the gradually thickening cloud created by the collision would rise to tens of thousands of degrees, then hundreds of thousands, burning away stars and spewing out vast nebulae. In time, the two spiral galaxies would combine entirely, and release all of their energy at once.
Later, once that energy had dispersed, all that would be left behind would be a faintly radioactive nebula and the slightest dusting of interstellar material. The tremendous volume of heat released into space would radiate in every direction, eventually vanishing into the far reaches of the universe altogether. Existence becoming nonexistence. Being becoming nonbeing. The simplest process of all.
Of course, the dispersed energy would not truly become nothing. But how much effect on the rest of space could such energy have—even if it came from so potent a source as the collision of two galaxies? What could you call its long-term result, if not “nothing”?
The residents of this planet had wrapped their great city in a near-perfect gravitationally sealed space, after creating another such space that surrounded the entire planet—effectively girding themselves in a double layer of protection. And yet, Asura mused, their gravitational fortress relied on a planet to anchor it. How long could this fastness last within the torrent of energy released when two galaxies collided?
The giant spiral galaxy above her was making its final descent, pitching off-balance with the weight of entropic death it carried, raining radiation down on its Andromedan rival.
Asura wished she could show this quiet world to Siddhārtha and Orionae. She now realized the nature of the mistake that Orionae had spoken of. The mysterious blue light shining on the glacier they had visited was filtered light coming through a gravitational barrier constructed around the planet—a barrier that should have protected and preserved its civilization. Yet nothing had been living there. What could live at minus two hundred degrees and below? The mistake had been a faint warping in the gravitational seal, or perhaps a slight error in their gravitational field generators that had allowed heat to leak out over a long period of time. By the time the planet’s residents realized what was happening, it had already been too late, and their home world was lost, buried beneath a thick layer of ice. And so the survivors had acted, raising another line of resistance, an even stronger gravitational barrier around their capital. It was they who had appeared, walking the streets of their phantasmal city. She wondered how long that civilization had lasted.