Did it even really matter? Was there any difference between being trapped in an endlessly reiterating city and being stamped onto a metal plate—the fate the citizens of Astarta 50 had chosen in an attempt to evade their approaching destruction? Asura thought she could hear Siddhārtha laughing somewhere, perhaps inside herself . . . A smile rose on her lips, but it was a pitiful thing with no purpose, not the sort of smile that could be mistaken for happiness. Mankind had first developed civilization less than ten thousand years ago. She wondered how it had gone here in Andromeda. On this planet.
She saw no signs of a transcendent being attempting to stave off the destruction here. Even with his power and his plans, had the three of them not been awakened too late, to find Earth already transformed into a dead planet, nothing but a wasteland to greet them?
We should never have awoken. Her memories went back to that day when she had first met the man of Nazareth in that cold, wasted desert.
Asura.
She heard a faint voice that seemed to come from inside her own body. Asura spun around, looking for the speaker. The surface of the planet was as still and silent as it had ever been.
Asura.
Now it seemed to her as if the voice were coming from somewhere far beyond the surface, carried to her along rays of blue light through the barrier above.
“Who’s there?” she shouted into the distance.
“I have been waiting for you, Asura, but you did not arrive in time. Still, this is not your fault.”
She thought she detected the ring of deep sadness in the voice.
“Who are you? Where are you?”
Asura linked the brainwave detector embedded behind her right ear into her entire nervous system, scanning. She found nothing. The planet’s surface remained as featureless as a calm lake around her. She sensed that the level of the ground was slightly slanted toward the left—perhaps the remnant elevation of what had once been the tallest ridgeline on this world.
“Asura.”
This time it sounded as if the voice originated right next to her. Reflexively she jumped to a spot several meters away. “What are you?” Asura squinted but saw not even a shadow of anything around her, only the suffusing blue light.
“I did not imagine that we would meet in a place like this, in this way. For I am sure the record will show that we have never met before.”
Asura did not know how to respond to that. After a short silence, she heard the voice again:
“Asura. Do you think Siddhārtha understood the meaning of the ‘other shore’—the place to which the dead must pass? I was pleased when he sensed something lacking in the teachings of the Brahmin and harbored doubts about several of their doctrines. Follow the threads of those doubts, and they lead here. I chose you three, placed you in a long sleep, and kept you until such a time as I would require your services. I also placed within your minds several words, several concepts, you would need. Asura: ‘All’ is existence. ‘Void’ is Dirac’s sea. ‘All is void’ means nothing other than the fact that the sea of negative energy is the true mother of all existence. Asura, the ‘other shore’ is none other than a transcendent being or the world where that transcendent being exists. I wonder how you, Asura, understood the sense of separation, that desperate division we hear in the word ‘other.’ Siddhārtha was a signpost along the path. Orionae had memorized the letters written upon that sign. And you—”
“Yes?”
“. . . I regret now that ultimately, I have been little more than a bystander, observing the change passing through this universe, unable to affect it. I wonder how many people paid attention to those words I whispered into the collective heart of humanity, warning them of the destruction that would come? I regret that I was not able to take more decisive action.”
Asura screamed into the blue-soaked waste. “Why didn’t you just come out and tell us the truth?”
“I could not reveal myself, lest those powers who have always manipulated your world with the intent to bring it to ruin should take notice of me.”
“Yet they did notice, and in short order.”
“And so they worked to erase all signs of my warning. It is in mankind’s nature not to believe that misfortune and tragedy are approaching and to forget calamity after it has occurred. Ultimately, my passive strategy did not help prolong their lives by one minute. While the sun shone, they prayed for a good harvest in the coming year and adorned their altars, and when the storms and the floods came they thought only to raise their levees and protect their fields. When plague spread, they nurtured physicians and synthesized ever more medicines. Eventually, the land dried and the desert covered all, so they moved their cities below ground. When there was no longer any place on land or in the sea to support the growing of food, these places became wastelands and passed away, unmourned and forgotten. Humanity spread to Mars, Venus, and beyond, throughout the solar system, yet in the end their productive capacity always failed.
“Eventually, humanity became aware of the coming fall. They crafted robots and enhanced their own bodies with cybernetics—they searched for ways to escape to the outer reaches of the solar system. Yet what came of that, Asura? In the end, those bent on the destruction of the human worlds were victorious. Indeed, perhaps their victory was predetermined from the start.”
Asura stood on the slight swell in the earth that was the ghost of a former ridge, looking out across plains that now appeared to her as a seabed at the bottom of an ocean of blue light. This place seemed a poor destination for someone who had traveled so far, but in a sudden rush of resignation she accepted that she would have to make do.
“Asura.”
Asura shook her head. “What are you? What are you?”
The voice seemed to pierce her chest. “I am the Reincarnation King. I am the cakravarti-rājan.”
It took several seconds for the words to sink into Asura’s weary mind. “The cakravarti-rājan?”
“Yes. That is what the Brahmin monks once called me.”
The cakravarti-rājan—King of Kings who moves the world. Asura had once described the cakravarti-rājan to Siddhārtha. The details of that night were still vivid in her mind.