Asura blinked. She found that she was in a place suffused with a curious thin light, like twilight, and a crystalline stillness that seeped into her heart. Life and death, even the flow of time, were encompassed within her. She understood that while she was still taking part in a change immeasurably vast, she had transcended far beyond that change as well.
Asura realized that now she was the cakravarti-rājan.
It was at that moment that she heard voices talking far off in the distance. The sound was fainter than the wind, yet it crept inside Asura’s mind. Though she had no way of telling whether these voices were actually speaking or communicating by some other means, the words were intelligible inside her.
Asura stilled her mind and listened intently.
“It was a failure.”
“A great failure. In order to destroy an agglomeration of high-energy particles, it is necessary to add another factor—one that enables the collapse that is a necessary part of the process of creation and transformation. Yet because particulate clouds are quick to react to change, and the reactions can sometimes be quite violent, we would have to be doubly cautious how and where we inserted this collapse factor.”
Another voice interjected.
“Yet if we made a mistake in our elimination procedures, the high-energy clouds generated within the reactor would eventually permeate the reactor walls and escape into the world.”
“I did not expect such strange reactive structures to emerge from this cyclical energy state.”
“Reactive structures—should we not call them life-forms?”
“Extremely primitive life-forms.”
The voices grew gradually fainter and more distant until they left Asura’s mind altogether.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Wait! Who are you?” Asura called out into the streaming blue light. But there was no answer, no sign or shadow of response in that blank landscape as far as she could see.
The cakravarti-rājan too was gone.
She wondered what it all meant. Was all the change she had witnessed just part of a greater change, which was in turn a miniscule revolution in an even larger transformation? It seemed to Asura that no matter what its scale, change had one face only.
A sudden feeling of tremendous loss descended upon Asura. Now she must face the truth of her situation—wherever she turned, however she advanced or retreated, she would be alone. There was no way back to what had been, and in front of her stretched another ten billion days and one hundred billion nights.
✦ ✦ ✦
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
The sound of the waves rolling in and rolling back out has echoed across this world for hundreds of millions of years, a long reach toward eternity.
Not once in that span has it ceased rocking and crossing this blue world, sometimes gently, sometimes powerfully; stormy as the morning, calm as the deep of night.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
The sea rolls in and rolls back out. One hundred billion shimmering stars rise between the wave crests, only to sink back into the vastness of the waves with the first dim light of dawn.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
Time that knows no haste flows over the waves as they roll in and roll back out, through night and into day and into night again.
Ah. Those many hundred billion days and nights.
How I long to return—
The peace and tranquility Asura had known there seemed painfully distant now.
Yet there was no way back to what had been, and in front of her stretched only another ten billion days and one hundred billion nights.