The Second Wave (22 page)

With that, Fatique leaves the room. Tom and
Phil share a look.

PHIL: If you correct me in front of the
General again, I will so delete your favorite elf character from
the game!

TOM: Repeating, Phil! Not correcting!
Besides, we have more important things to deal with now.

PHIL: Right.

A moment of awed silence. Then Phil quickly
grabs for the telephone receiver.

PHIL: I’ll call Gerald.

TOM: Tell him to start a call cascade! I’ll
race down to the cafeteria and tell Bobby in person. He just got in
a large shipment of those little chocolaty peanut treats!

PHIL: This is bliss!

TOM: Bless the General for sending Burke
away at just the perfect time.

PHIL: (solemn) Yes. Bless him.

FADE OUT.

* * * *

And then nothing.

* * * *

“They say
accept children with reverence,
educate them with love, send them forth in freedom.

“Here lies the freest of them all: our
daughter. The source of our hearts’ delight, the meaning of our
lives, the candle in our darkest night.

“I thank each one of you who have gathered
here today to give Eugenia the last farewell as we release her soul
into the vast universe and give her body back to the earth. I do
not miss a single face in this crowd. I truly believe that everyone
is here today, since most of you knew her.

“She was the youngest child in our village,
but also, admittedly, the loudest and liveliest. And had you known
her ‘ere we came here, you might not have recognized her spirit;
Eugenia used to be quiet and introverted. She didn’t speak, though
the doctors we went to see about her condition all said it wasn’t
for lack of ability. All her organs functioned perfectly; she
simply chose not to talk to us. Until we set foot on this planet.
For reasons unfathomable, something moved her soul here and
prompted her to speak.

“You may remember her unrelenting questions.
She wanted to know everything about everything, and she wouldn’t
stop digging for information, not even when you told her to go
away. She was pampered by us in this regard; our spoiled goddess,
as we called her.

“Always asking for more, ever curious, up
until her very last breath; the moment she walked too close to the
edge and fell down the cliff. Once again we wish to express our
sincere gratitude to everyone who jumped after her into the sea and
tried to save her. Especially young Monroe, who, I know, is blaming
himself for getting caught in an eddy and losing sight of her. Son,
it is not your fault. It was, as terrible as it sounds, as
impossible as it is to accept, simply an accident.

“As we carry our only daughter to the grave,
we will lay her to rest in a tomb made from the most beautiful
stones this planet has to offer. Let us honor her life by
celebrating her death. Let us be eternally grateful for this place
that awakened her spirit. And let us never forget what she was: the
first one to die, but the last one we will forget.

“We ask all of you to walk into the tomb now
and place the flowers and stones you collected beside her coffin.
If you wish to speak something, please feel free to do so. I have
no doubt she will hear your words.

“My wife and I will be the last ones to visit
her, then we will seal the door and withdraw into our home to
mourn.

“Before we part, though, I would like to
share with you a song Eugenia sang to her doll every night since we
came here. It is that you should remember her by, not the cold,
limp body some of you glimpsed that day. I’ll merely speak the
words she used to sing, because no grown up can sing off-key quite
as lovely as a child:

“The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

* * * *

They never found Eugenia’s body. It was
impossible to get through the fallen rocks and detritus. John was
relentless in his search, but even he had to give up at one point.
Still, Mayor Rochester thought it was adequate to hold a
commemoration and use this opportunity to tell the settlers
everything about her and about what he knew about the fate of the
first wave of colonists.

John didn’t attend the service. Peter was
reluctant to leave him by himself, but he also thought it was for
the best. He made tea while John was in is usual spot on the
couch.

“It’s not your fault, John,” he said quietly.
He put the steaming cup on the table and squatted down in front of
his friend, the better to look him in the eyes. But John averted
his gaze; kept staring out of the window, without really seeing
anything. There were no tears on his face. There hadn’t been a
single one, Peter recalled, since the accident. He softly placed a
hand on John’s knee. He remembered being in this place. His own
pain crept up on him, knocked on his mind, tried to sneak back in
again.

“I know it’s hard, I’ve been there. But,
John, you’re not in it alone. You have friends here who care for
you. People who mourn Eugenia in their own way.”

John’s only reaction was to turn his head
away.

“Don’t leave me standing on the outside,”
Peter pleaded.

There was no way to tell if John was even
aware of him being there. He looked exactly like Peter thought he
himself must have looked like when he was in that place a year ago.
Once more he patted his friend’s knee. Then he got up to give him
the time and space he needed to come to terms with everything.

He made it to the door, but then John
suddenly spoke. His voice was trembling and the words sounded
brittle. “I’ve never felt like this, Peter. Like I can’t even
breathe anymore.”

There were no right words of consolation in
Peter’s experience. So he went with the truth. “I know.”

“It is like a hole in the world, and
everything is empty now.” John still wasn’t looking at Peter but
kept his gaze to the floorboards.

“There isn’t a word strong enough to describe
the pain so people would understand,” Peter agreed.

John lifted his head to finally look at him
with glassy, unfocussed eyes. “Is that how it was for you when your
husband died?”

Peter thought of the pain that had somehow
managed to weasel its way back into his head and admitted, “It
still is.”

“How can you live like this?”

How indeed, pondered Peter. He was at a loss
for words. The truth was cruel, but a lie was deceiving and
therefore more painful. After a while he settled on, “You get by.
Eventually.”

Then he left to attend the commemoration.

John ghosted through the empty house until
night fell. He didn’t know what he was doing, he didn’t know how he
could stop doing it. All he wanted was to run away again, and yet
this time it seemed impossible. There was nowhere to go anymore. As
much as he all but yelled at his body to do as he told it, it
refused to move.

So his feet carried him aimlessly around the
living room, and his eyelids drooped to shield him from the garish
daylight. Nightfall was a relief. But his mind didn’t give him any
rest, even when his limbs were already sprawled uselessly on the
couch once more. It provided him with an endless cascade of
memories. Not just memories of Eugenia. Recollections of his entire
existence. The lives he had lived, the lies he had told. The people
he had left behind. The stench of the creatures that haunted his
dreams, the feeling of frozen toes in the snow and always, always
the cupboard the sisters used to lock naughty children in.

For the first time in his life he understood
that however far he had come, he had never really left that
cupboard. Somehow, deep inside, he was still a scared
twelve-year-old, crouching in the darkness, waiting for someone to
open the door. There was no way out.

That night when John came into Peter’s
bedroom, Peter didn’t push him away.

* * * *

A sound that ripped apart the universe.
Flames exploding into life all around.

It was over in an instant and she was back in
the darkness again. Back where she belonged. The headache gone, the
colors, as well as the sunlight, out of reach.

All that was left were her memories of
him.

It was all she would ever need. It started
and ended with John, it had always been him. The man with no name,
who dreamed of terrible things, and who couldn’t find it in his
heart to stop running.

Reliving every moment they had spent together
and every beat his heart had made, she decided it had been worth
it; even if he, like everybody else, was going to leave her now. He
was all that mattered. He had wanted to take her with him, and that
was all she’d ever need to know. It wasn’t important whether her
people worshipped her; the only thing that was important was the
knowledge of what could have been.

All the stories he had told her, all, in
fact, but one. The stories he thought were nothing but a colorful
array of tales, nothing at all alike. When in fact they were all
the same; they were always stories about him and her. He just
hadn’t acknowledged it, yet.

She wondered if her people had a word for how
she felt. As much as she sought, she couldn’t find any vocabulary
strong enough to express how it was between the two of them. She
pitied them, briefly, for their loss; but then thought it
fitting—the two people who had no name shared a feeling that had
none either.

For a moment she was happy.

The next it wasn’t enough. She was missing
one last story. John’s last tale. And she suddenly found it
impossible to go on existing without hearing it. The thought
tainted her happiness. She tried to shut out her people’s voices.
They told her nothing she wanted to hear. It was John’s mind she
needed, his voice that could bring order into the chaos of her
feelings. But all she found was hurt. However clear and strong he
had been, his mind was dull now, apathetic, it was finally
unrecognizable from the rest.

It was so sinister a realization, it bore
deep down into her soul and hurt like nothing else could ever hurt
any other living thing. In the darkness she cried out in pain. And
in surprise. It choked her. It crushed every thought in her mind,
it was far worse than the headache. It wouldn’t stop, and in her
heart she knew it would never stop as long as she still remembered
him. Tears streamed down her face, hot and bitter, because this
time it was all her fault. She was to blame for his destruction.
How could she go on existing with so heavy a burden on her soul?
The answer was she couldn’t. Without him there was no reason for
her heart to resume its beating. If only she could make it all
stop. The noise in her head. Her people’s feelings that drowned out
her own. Her mother’s pain she felt resonating through her bones.
It was far too much for her to bear. She began fighting it.
Somewhere in the vastness of the universe surely was a place where
she was allowed to feel nothing, hear nothing, remember
nothing.

With a scream that ripped through her body
like a tidal wave, she felt everything withdraw. Like a sea
retreating to the ocean, her mind was suddenly drained of the white
noise that had always been her perpetual companion. It became less
and less until there was nothing. With the utmost effort she opened
her eyes. If possible, the darkness was even blacker then. And she,
severed from everything, sunk on her knees, because nothing held
her upright anymore.

Eugenia fell. The Goddess was mortal
again.

The mountain crumbled into itself after the
last explosion and buried the cave inside. The falling rocks
carefully avoided the shielded figure that stood in the middle of
it, who was under the protection of something so old that even the
ancient stones remembered it. They left a void, just big enough for
the figure to stand in.

When the protective field dissolved and
Eugenia fell to her knees from the sudden severance, the void had
but little air left in it to breathe. Perhaps as a parting gift,
rocks began to shuffle to the side as if touched by an invisible
hand, so she wouldn’t choke to death so soon after she had regained
her freedom. A path cleared for her, one she followed obediently;
there was nowhere else to go.

Her eyes were used to the darkness now. It
was difficult to make her way out as she walked, but not
impossible. It was cool though, she noticed, and it became colder
with every step. Wearing only her light summer dress she shivered.
Soon enough the sun’s warm rays would warm her skin, she told
herself, and soon would she feel John’s breath on her face again.
The thought made her forget her aching body.

She felt nothing. Heard nothing. Either her
people were gone once again, or she couldn’t feel them anymore. She
tried to reach out to life itself, but she couldn’t find it either.
She was alone. For the first time since she could remember, she was
truly alone. She shivered again, out of fright this time. It was
her fault. What had she done?

The stones only cleared the way so far, after
that she had to use her hands to dig herself out. It took long, but
fresh air was already coming in in harsh gusts. Outside the wind
howled. More and more light fell in through the cracks she made,
until finally one last rock rolled to the side, and Eugenia climbed
out.

The planet’s surface had changed radically.
Where there once had been trees covered in moss, now stood black
skeletons, clawing at a blue, spotless sky. The earth was covered
in something white that was soft but cold to the touch. Snow, she
recalled. It was what her people used to call snow. It covered the
ground, the rocks, the passageway to the sea. So the explosion had
indeed been successful in a way. There were jetties reaching into
the deeper waters. Abandoned-looking boats were tied to them,
covered up to protect them from the snow. No one was about. It
looked like a foreign place completely.