The Lifecycle of Suns Ch 6: The Patience of Angels

"What do you think we will find?" It seemed the most pressing question to Zed and one he had been resisting asking. Though he wished otherwise, Shana couldn't have more or better answers than he did. He did not have the ego to be the center of the mystery into which he had been assumed.

He passed the gleaming haunches of an angel and refrained from the desire to lay his hand against it. They were tangible, beyond ecstasy in the vacuum of other sensations.

Other ghosts would look at Shana perfunctorily, noting her unusual nudity. Only the Repeaters did not see her.

The ghosts would not look at Zed as though the angel's conjuration of matter had warped him. How strange it felt to go from a folk hero to a nonentity. Something in him had changed, he knew for sure, though he could not say with confidence what this might be.

"I'm not sure anymore," she answered, "if I ever was. I could tell you that it is our unfinished business, but I don't know what that means, if it applies to me. We will see something we have not in thousands of years. What is the worst thing that could happen?"

This misfortune did not happen or did not happen yet. He did not know what the worst thing would be. He took her hand in his, as much as that could happen, and held it. There was no pressure or heat. There was nothing there, but it was enough that he could pretend there was a connection.

It was unnatural for the dead to escape the cycle of vanishing and reappearing. Shana's substance grew thinner, but she would not relent. Even as she might have reappeared when she woke, there was a gamble after all this time awake.

They were closer now to an answer. Not merely since beginning this all, but ever. In life, in death, in this fragile between. This might be the answer to it all, might justify this seeming eternity of waiting.

Or it could be nothing, but it would for once be a nothing that they had sought and earned. It was a nothing that could suffice.

After another day below the ground, Shana called his attention to it. The dead became fewer, more addlepated, and the spaces where none tread grew more pronounced. In a tattered suit with an ocular lens mod, one contorted himself between the vacancies. What would he say had she asked him his reason? He would justify. He would have a reason, born the moment she wondered but otherwise forgotten the instant he was clear of them.

Zed had been counting each they passed: two hundred by now with no clear end to their pilgrimage. Yes, there were more angels and fewer of them, but they had yet to reach the point where the dead must abandon the land. When they found the focus of the angels, they would be the only ghosts present. He would carry her if he had to, pull her over the variegated limbs of the angels.

Into the fifth night, the other souls grew from a thousand to a hundred to a scattering.

"Are you okay?" Shana asked one, a trim middle-aged woman in a timeless, mid-calf black dress.

"Oh yes," she said at once, starting to turn away. She halted. "Or no. I'm not okay. I'm not sure where I am. I was recently somewhere familiar. I don't recall where that might have been if you can believe that." She offered a quick laugh, one without humor or confidence. "I don't suppose you'd to help a girl figure that out, would you? This place is the strangest I've ever seen."

Shanna told her that she was dead, that everyone was dead, which the woman took well.

"Oh yes," she said, "I knew that on some level. Have I been dead long?"

Shana wasn't sure what to answer for this one, so she didn't, and the woman walked away.

It was the same with the other stragglers Shana queried while Zed kept at an unnoticed remove. They didn't know they were dead. When Shana explained, they did not seem surprised, and they all said they thought they'd been somewhere familiar.

Zed doubted, in the entirety of this existence, that he ever felt he'd ever been anywhere familiar. In the memories he did have -- not the memories the angel put in him -- nowhere was familiar. He remembered rising the first time. He did not remember dying. Yet these souls remembered having been somewhere familiar and had his envy.

By this point, Zed was resigned to the idea that only Shana would ever let herself see him. It felt like the caverns, surrounded only by colorless, eyeless creatures who could not register his presence.

"Is that the sun?" asked a ghost, half his body the shining black of a machine, pointing at the glow on the horizon.

"Yes, for a long time," said Shana.

The ghost studied the glow. "I don't know that I've ever seen it before. Will it rise soon?"

She explained with what gentleness she could that none of the dead saw more than the glow of dawn and dusk. The man stared, distraught, as though Shana herself had stolen noon.

If these ghosts had Zed's answers, they would not be here, closer to the focus of the angels, yes, but on the dead Earth at all.

They came to ghosts who suggested that they shouldn't keep walking onward. They didn't know why, only that it did not seem like a promising idea.

The closer they approached, the more vehement the ghosts became.

They came to the place where the angels made it impossible for Shana to forge a path. There could be no subconscious pretense then that one did not know what was happening.

Zed hesitated until the fact of this was apparent on Shana's features. He would not force her, but neither could he go on without her, he decided when she stopped. He would never tell her as much. If he did, she would demand he go on for the both of them, but he could not stomach this. Without her, he would still be assembling piles of rocks while Renee told a stranger she loved him. Either Shana escorted him, or he abandoned the pursuit. Alone, he could gain nothing he wanted.

She put her hand in his, tense, her expression one of fear and nausea. He wrapped his hand into the seaweed coat of the nearest angel, pulling both seven meters to the height of its lap.

Shana made a show of not looking below, only toward Zed as he guided her across the peaks and valleys of these sacred, apathetic creatures. She had a smile for him when he questioned if she was sincere about not looking below her. "It is something I saw on an old cartoon. If I don't know about it, I cannot fall."

This was the last night they would have. Zed almost said this, but that would be cruel. It would invite a conversation about turning back, and they could never do that now. Zed was pulled toward this conclusion, swept away in a receding tide. Once they climbed the hillocks of these creatures, they had inexorably committed.

As though she knew this thought or that they needed to navigate around burl in the woody flesh, she held him more tightly.

She was not swept away on this tide, but she had dived in after him.

After hours of this hike, Zed saw darkness above the heads of a distant host of angels, inexplicable and fascinating, tinged with blue fire. The closer they came, the more massive it showed itself to be.

"You see that?" he asked, uncertain she could.

"I wish I didn't," she assured him. "I don't want to go there, Zed. There is a reason we shouldn't go further."

This was fear, strange to see in someone who had been until that moment fearless. "Is that true?"

She sat upon the angel's horned knee, rolling the question around, wondering the relevance of something being true. "It is what I am feeling, and there must be a purpose. But, no, it is not true. Well," she revised, calming herself, "it is true that most in me does not want to go there, but that seems like a reason we must."

They were fewer than five kilometers from solid ground. He wanted this to be his fear alone, his desire alone. She would not grant whether that was correct.

So far from where there had once been cities, the air was quiet. He did not have to hear the lamentations of those who murdered before the world fell to this. There was an eerie peace in spending so long in death rattles to have them abate. He was grateful but warier.

"I feel so thin," Shana admitted a few hours before dawn. "The angel might have fortified you for this journey, to see what you must see, but I haven't rested in a long time." She embraced him, two bubbles in the bright of the moonlight, a shifting sheen to them. "You'll wait?"

Zed began to say he would.

"No. I am telling you not to. I know the direction you are going. I'll meet you there."

He began to tell her that he needed to wait, but she said that was why she needed to do this.

In his arms, she glowed brighter than anything he had ever seen. She would not be back. He wished she had moved on, that coming even this far had quickened her way to a better path, but he couldn't know. She was gone to him forever, no matter the method, and this was the first time he recalled ever mourning.

He wanted to vanish as though to go after her, but it might be suicide. If he dissipated now, after what the angel had done to him, he did not know that he could return. That treatment may have destroyed the continuous part of him. The angel had not fortified him, as Shana had thought. He had been given a ticking clock. He did not even have the time to understand the depth of this loss. It was all most pleasurable. He hurt so much for her lack; it was like feeling something at all. Her unfinished business could not have been helping him with this. That was vanity. He had exhausted her to the point of nothingness.

It was a thousand meters to the dome, guarded by the grandest angels. Closer, there were no seams or rivets to it. He knew this material or its ancestor. A city could have fit in there. In the dome, he saw his reflection for the first time. The structure looked like the ghost of the sun, a blue phosphorescence over it and otherwise dark.

Angels covered the edges of this a hundred thick, obscuring the dome from the ghosts. None of the dead would come here, would witness this. Zed would not leave this spot again, he knew, and it didn't matter. He had come searching for an ending, and he had found one. This was the closest to satisfaction that he would be allowed, the sacrifices for this experience the greatest he had paid.

Having died once and woken as this, he couldn't hope for a second chance. He couldn't fathom what form that might take or where, but what could it matter?

Zed could not associate the angels with any level of caring for the dead, and this attitude was little changed for the living. Yet here they were, a bulwark against the ghosts, keeping the dead from even seeing this vast enclave.

He touched the dome's side, which was cool despite the oppressive heat of the rest of the world. He rested his hand on the wall. It was like the box, the same impossible composition, or a touch more refined. It was like the ships that stole away humanity, only more advanced, perfected. If he could have figured out the box, could have freed those books, he may have known the trick to this, but he could not. His hands barely penetrated before meeting an insuperable resistance. The gates were forever closed to him. He had spent so long enveloped in apathy and indifference. Being in the presence of something so far beyond his ken made him know he was impossibly small. He did not deserve the honor of this, but he had it all the same. That was why the ghosts would never find the dome. This was a place where the dead did not belong.

Did life persist within? The world was so hostile outside this slick black bubble. Zed did not know the science by which a wall would have protected those within. This could have been a relic, a place for those who survived the exodus and prospered as they could. It did mean that it remained populated at the end of the world. There must be worse planets out there, some of which those who had escaped the Earth had now infested. The technology could not have left with them. Some remained here, Zed knew, to be certain the rest could leave. Would they not have vouchsafed for themselves a life raft? Humanity was altruistic, giving of themselves almost to the point of death. They were not usually suicidal.

As he touched the wall, the lion face of the angel nearest him flexed its nostrils. He did nothing more but make clear his acknowledgment. There was nothing for either of them here.

The angels closest to the dome were a different breed. They seemed more alive if that was the right word. Four spinning wheels, which were neither alive nor dead nor were they machines, clung to their side.

Maybe it was enough that humanity had not been wholly consigned to the gamble of the stars, where they would sleep an eternity before waking or dying in the heatless vacuum. Those left behind had found this solution, had recovered. That was not the nature of the living, of humanity. They persevered. And they wanted no reminders of death. That, too, was a characteristic of the living. Whatever this material was, if repelled the dead, was precisely what the living could contrive. They would defy physics to settle a new planet, but they would make no preparations for death, inevitable as it was for all who had been born.

Were the living in a conspiracy with the angels? Could humanity have understood hideous divinity surrounded them?

Was this why there were stories of the angels but no one who admitted to having seen them? Did they either die within the cave or find the angel and evaporate? There was no evidence either way. It wasn't as though the dead could leave behind corpses. There was a chance that he was the first ghost to have ever gotten this far. He wasn't sure it mattered. He was here now, and the world had not yet ended. Even if this dome was nothing more than a casket, humanity had lived long enough to have built it, a home and not an ark.

This temple had lasted through the millennia, perfect and untouchable. He felt the deja vu the quest provoked, as though he had done this all before uncountable times. Was this what it was to be a Repeater?

He pressed his face to the dome, not to push himself through -- he had given that up as impossible -- but in hopes to treat it as a window. If anyone lived within, he would be able to see some spark of light, some electric blue flicker. He found none.

He searched for stones that he could make a cairn, taking his time to replicate the dome. He pulled stones from other piles, ones that may have been accidents or may have once been domes of their own.

The most enormous sun he had ever seen burned free the horizon. He raised his hand to the sky, but it did no good. The growing light poured through his fingers.

Zed's brightness came close to exceeding its fiery glow.