Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 4
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
“For the next hour we will be in zero gravity as we complete an alignment orbit that will take us onto our descent vector into Landing. You are free to unfasten yourselves and float about the cabin, but please be mindful of the passengers who elect remain seated.”
Yeung chose to stay in her seat. Around her men women and children unfastened their restraints and drifted about the cabin. Many uttered delighted sounds. Yeung noticed that those who remained seated had the bored look of frequent travellers. She herself didn’t enjoy space travel and felt nauseous almost immediately. She took an anti-sickness patch from the dispenser in the back of the seat in front of her and slapped the adhesive side against her neck. Its effects were nearly instantaneous; there was a moment of lightheaded dizziness and she no longer felt like vomiting. Her stomach settled and Yeung did her best to relax.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot announced a short while later, “In a moment we will be switching the ceiling viewer to transparency and you will be able to see Midian and Heruba overhead. Toward the back of the plane you will be able to see Heket. Fifteen minutes before we make our final orbital insertion, we will ask you to return to your seats. Until then, please enjoy the freedom of being weightless.”
Yeung tried in vain over the next hour to fall asleep. But she couldn’t and so contented herself with closing her eyes and floating against her chair restraints. Finally the pilot announced the return-to-seats. Not long after the ceiling turned opaque and the drop back into the atmosphere began.
The roar of jump planes launching into the sky mixed with the low rumble of an approaching thunderstorm; the acrid scent of machinery, thruster exhaust and fuel competed with damp, earthy smells of forests, grassland and rain. It was early in the season for such a storm Yeung knew, but not unheard of. She remembered from childhood how the fiercest storms were always out of season. Her pod was waiting for her as she left the skyport’s arrival hub. Her luggage had already been stowed in the cargo compartment. She climbed aboard, confirmed her destination and then began the trip out to the east of Landing, to the borough of Plains Watch.
Following the Schism, when the Faithful of Terra Nova broke ground on the New Queen’s Temple, the palatial compound had been built atop the highest hill at the edge of Gray Valley, the desolate land that bordered the Great Stone Plains desert. The Temple had been built away from the city so that it looked down on Landing, dominating the horizon from afar. A thousand years’ worth of sprawl had left the Queen’s Temple guarding the county of Plains Watch: housing compounds bordered by dense parkland and four lanes of pod-roads back to Landing. The Old City District, of which Plains Watch and four other boroughs were part of, was home to most of the Family lands. Acshah had grown up in Plains Watch, her formative years spent in Landing. Yet She didn’t feel like she was heading home but into an enemy encampment. Home was back in New Bangalore; home was with Kalden.
The pod joined the highway and hundreds upon hundreds of other computer controlled pods racing along the thoroughfare. Yeung had programmed the pod to take the scenic route from the skyport and so they had just crossed through the county of Overlook Knoll and into Northwest Landing. Six lanes east and six lanes west rode between the towers and spires of the city ahead. The architecture was shaped around the roadway. On the ground below smaller sets of recessed and magnetized roads were navigated by local traffic. Wide pedestrian avenues banked the pod-roads and buildings, squares, parks and malls. The highway above reached a broad circular junction, connecting the East-West lanes with the North-South. Beyond the switching point were a series of exits allowing local traffic to debark and thru traffic to continue. Yeung’s pod switched deftly into the southbound lanes and was soon riding over Basecamp Park.
The park stretched for five kilometres in all directions, right through the middle of the Old District. The Acoma River ran through its southwest corner before hair-pinning its way back to the east. Basecamp Park was home to the Original Settlement Preserve as well as the Bug-Ship Graveyard: home of the wrecks and relics of the ships that had landed the Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand Settlers on Midian all those long centuries before. The park was also home to the remains of the First Temple, destroyed during the Schism. Yeung had once enjoyed long, leisurely days and nights in Basecamp Park as a young woman. It was her refuge from the Family, the Temple, from life. As her pod raced past the park Yeung longed to be seventeen again; carefree and running through the park with friends and lovers. Nineteen years…over a hundred seasons…had passed since she’d last felt at home in Landing.
The pod was slowing as it descended an exit ramp. Rocky hills rose to either side of the roadway as Yeung headed along the route into the lands that belonged to her House. The green and purple grasslands were broken here and there by rocks and small shelves of granite breaking their way through the ground as the hillside gave way to the Lesser Mountains, tributary peaks of the Blue Mountains to the southwest beyond the river. Soon Yeung’s pod crossed onto Estate territory, heading inexorably closer to the House Compound, and her Family home. The compound included almost twenty buildings, including ten homes; equipment huts; a farm and a gathering hall. The pod left the road and crossed through the gate of the high-walled compound. All too soon Yeung was pulling up the drive to the front doors of the palatial home.
Gray Michael was out the door to greet her, as she knew he would be. He had the hale and ageless features that came at the end of a True Blood’s Third Age; not yet a hundred and his face was smoothed and stilled. Once past Third Age, men and women of the True Blood stopped ageing. Acshah was the baby of the family, not even forty yet. Mother was four hundred and eight Father three hundred and twelve; neither appeared except in Acshah’s mind any older than Michael. It was strange being back here watching her brother run down the steps of the house to the waiting pod. She felt uncomfortable, as though she were stepping backwards into a life and a role she no longer wanted. Michael’s expression was stern, not even concealing his bitterness towards her. She hadn’t spoken to him in months and now she was home because their father was dying. Their father, whom Acshah realised she hadn’t spoken to in three years; not since her last disastrous trip back here.
“Acshah,” Michael said. The embrace he gave her was forced, stiff; the muscles of his arms didn’t relax as they encircled her; nor did Acshah’s shoulders loosen under them. She pulled away first, not wanting the awkward contact to last any longer than necessary.
“Michael; what happened?”
They went around to the pod’s storage compartment, which opened as they reached it. Even as Gray reached into the compartment to pull out Yeung’s luggage she could see the pained look on his face and despite all the animosity between them, despite Michael’s superior, judgemental attitude towards her, Acshah felt nothing but empathy at his grief.
“It’s ARS,” he said.
Abortive Regrowth Syndrome was one of the few diseases that could strike down someone of the True Blood. It was a throwback to earlier Human history when chromosomes in human cells were limited in the number of times they could divide by microcellular compounds called telomeres. The reason Old Blood Humans grew old was because their cell division was limited. True Blood Human cells could reproduce indefinitely, allowing them essentially to live forever. With Abortive Regrowth Syndrome, the ends of the chromosomes formed nodes that corrupted cell division. Once ARS took hold, its victim would degenerate and die rapidly. The agonizing process took a matter of weeks, sometimes only days. It could strike anyone of the True Blood, at any time after they stopped ageing. It was not common but neither was it rare enough; between two and five per cent of the True Blood population would develop ARS within a few hundred years of the end of their growth cycle. There were no warning signs, no genetic precursors, no treatment and no cure.
“Oh no,” Yeung said, “How long has he-”
Gray shook his head as they started up the sloping ramp to the front doors. “Not long,” he said, “He’s going very fast; a day or two, unless the pain gets much worse than it already is. Then...”
He didn’t have to finish the thought. Father had always been strong, determined. But in the face of the sort of agony that accompanied ARS, many patients opted for self-euthanization.
Acshah felt dizzy as she walked up to the front door; Father was going to die. She’d never expected it to happen; yes, it was a possibility, a probability even, but death among True Blood Humans was so uncommon now as to almost be remarkable. Even not speaking to him after all this time, after the countless arguments and conflicts, Father had been such a presence in her life that it was horrifying, incomprehensible that he was about to be gone forever. There hadn’t been a funeral in the Yeung Family in hundreds of years; the last death had been Yeung’s mother’s parents and they both died from injuries they’d sustained in a pod-car accident.
Coming back here, seeing the manor, the grounds, smelling the scent of the wild Midian jasmine that grew on the property, hearing the echoes of the entrance hall’s floors brought back so many conflicting memories. It seemed all her life she had been at odds with her parents. All the times her father yelled at her, pious in his anger towards her; all the cold, stern lectures her mother had delivered to her in private audience in her rooms uplevel. Acshah had grown to hate her mother’s rooms; the balcony outside, the large desk and volumes of books. She hated the overstuffed furniture and most of all the religious iconography: old, two-dimensional pictures of Bloom Margaret, Benedict Jack and other officers of the Old Ship; statues of the Rai’ha, the Queen of Light and Sorrow and Princess Gabrielle the Hope and the tomes of Nai’Marak prophecy, scholarly works analyzing the alien texts and scale models and images of the Old Ship. But at least Mother took her aside to calmly speak to her. Father had always been angry, loud, authoritative and very public when disciplining her.
But there had been so many good times, as well; Playing on the grounds with her brothers and sisters and cousins; Landing Festival presents and parties; birthdays and friends; walks through the woods during Wet Spring. But Acshah found that most happy memories of her home ended not that long after adolescence started, when she first realized that she wanted no part of the Priesthood of the teachings of the Way. Coming back for Father’s death as Michael led her up to her old rooms and seeing how little had changed in this house Yeung knew that this was one of the last times in her life that she would come to this place; it was no longer home and she no longer felt any connection to it.
“Where is he?” she asked as they reached her old rooms.
“Asleep,” Michael said, “The doctors set him up in mother and father’s bed suite.”
“At least he’ll get to die at home,”
“Kelley and Jacob will be arriving in a while,” he said, “We’ll have coffee on the back terrace when they’ve settled in. Later, when father’s awake, we’ll go up and see him.”
“All right; I need to get settled in, as well.”
“We’ll call you when everything’s ready for coffee.”
“Thanks,” Yeung said. Michael left, closing the door behind him. Yeung put her bag down by the chair and walked from the front room into the bedchamber. She wanted to sleep. More, she wanted to wake up back in her apartment in New Bangalore.
♦♦♦
She had had a strange dream. In it, Mother and Father were in their bed suite. There was no bed in the main room. The dressers, the table and chairs and the desk were all there. In the center of the room instead of the bed were two ornately carved chairs, tall-backed thrones which sat facing each other over a map of the city of Landing hanging in three dimensions between them. They were speaking in hushed voices to one another, but Yeung couldn’t hear what they were saying. As she tried to get nearer to hear what they were saying she realized that they weren’t speaking at all. And yet she could hear their voices. Suddenly they turned as one to look at her.
And then she woke up. The quality of light had changed. The sky was growing lighter again as Heket looped back north and toward the end of the day. She knew from where in the sky it was now that this was late afternoon. Midian would soon cross to Heruba’s night-side. Acshah sat up in bed and untied her hair. Everyone would be out on the balcony. How well she remembered family traditions and habits. She dressed in a light cotton dress and a warm sweater, relieved that the Family didn’t require formal dress for such things as coffee on the terrace.
Her brothers and sisters were all there as was her mother. Kelley had arrived but Jacob was held up, she was told, because of a defective rail on the podways. They were gathered on the terrace overlooking the back lawn of the compound. Mother, Michael and her sister Nadi were dressed in the black and gold vestments of the Priesthood worn over dark blue tunics. Only a few of her siblings weren’t dressed in the clothes of the Priesthood or the Acolytes. Those who weren’t wore emblems of office within the religious Society of the Way. Acshah was the only person here who wasn’t wearing either vestments or an emblem. The looks that some of her family gave her made Acshah feel all the more out of place and unwelcome, all the less connected to them.
Mother came over and embraced her.
“Welcome home Acshah,”
“Thank you,” she replied.
Mother pulled back and regarded her. Acshah felt immediately uncomfortable under the strange, knowing gaze. It was all too familiar; like the questioning, probing gaze she’d had in Acshah’s dream. Acshah watched her mother walk off towards the coffee service set up to one side of the doors into the hall.
Not all of her family were unsympathetic or hostile with her. One of her younger cousins, Gray Santino, was eager to catch up and find out what Acshah had been doing; her older sister Katherine had already told her she wanted to take her out to the city after supper. Every now and then she caught her mother looking at her as though she were analyzing her, studying her, looking for some hidden fault or quality that she, herself did not understand. Finally one of the Acolytes from the Temple working at the manor as a nurse came out to announce that Father was awake. The family gathered into a tight cluster and Mother and Michael led them uplevel to their father’s deathbed.
The suite was easily big enough to accommodate all of them. However, the cousins, aunts and uncles would come in after, as was custom; now was for immediate family. Despite her animosity towards him, despite knowing it was ARS that was killing him, Acshah was unprepared for what she saw: Father looked so small lying there in bed. His skin was chalky and pale, hanging weakly against his face. His hair was matted, his eyes yellowed and cloudy. A dark, angry redness seeped under his sallow skin, ugly and cruel. He looked old...it was as though he had no True Blood and was as ephemeral as an untouched Old Blood Human. Acshah and her brothers and sisters paid their respects to Father and sat with him as he struggled against the pain, against death, to be with his children one last time.
He’d always been stern with her; always disapproved of her choices, of how she lived her life. There was nothing left of his old anger, none of his usual contemptuous disappointment in his gaze. What was there was the sort of sadness and regret that Acshah had always imagined the dying felt towards their wayward loved ones. She was horrified that she didn’t feel some measure of emotion for him, but looking at him, she saw him defeated, broken, regretful and afraid. And in her heart she could find no feeling, bitterness, contempt, pity or love for the dying man in the bed.
Father struggled against the pain and the medications to look at his children. When his gaze rested on Acshah, she felt him staring at her with that same, strange look of perplexed contemplation she had caught Mother using back on the terrace. Finally, Father lowered his head back down on the pillow and went back to sleep. After a quiet moment Mother said, “You go down; I want to stay here with him for a while.”
Acshah joined her siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins in the downlevel sitting room. Jacob arrived and went upstairs to see Father, before returning to the terrace. Acshah hadn’t been the only one who’d been absent from the Family manor for a long time, though she was the only one who had no duties with the Temple to justify the distance. There were many bittersweet reunions as they waited together, whispered conversations as everyone caught up. Over fifty people; baby cousins, nieces and nephews...older relatives and close cousins the same age, all welcoming one another even as they awaited the inevitable. Some, like her nieces and her younger cousin and her sister Katherine were glad to see Acshah; others, like Nadi, Jacob, and Michael were uncomfortable, coolly indifferent. Dutifully, and if only to distract herself from the tension in the room her presence – the wild child, the rebel, She who had denied her Father – was causing, Acshah tried to participate in the general conversation going on among those who were friendly to her.
