A Just Farewell (13 page)

A bearded face smiled at him. “We have a
glorious cape waiting for you, Abraham.”

Abraham’s eyes winked as the cleric
extinguished the match he waved before his eyes, and Abraham’s eyes
focused upon his surroundings as a fog lifted from his perception.
For a moment, he believed his mother stood beside his cot, that she
had survived the guns the unbelievers unleashed upon their village,
and that she had come to him holding a new cape of golden filigree
and symbols to announce his graduation into a man and a warrior.
The woman’s hair was the same color silver as had been his
mother’s, and her eyes might just have been the same color as those
hidden behind his mother’s dark glasses. But Abraham recognized
that the woman stood too tall, that her form was too slim, to have
belonged to his mother.

“The wife of your neighbor Harold wove that
cape for you, Abraham,” spoke the bearded cleric leaning over
Abraham’s cot. “I’m sorry, son, but your mother didn’t survive the
attack on our village. She remains buried in her home along with
your father, a proud resting place the Maker provided them in
thanks for her family. But Harold’s wife is also good with the
needle, and she did you great honor in crafting your cape.”

Abraham moved to sit up upon his cot so that
the cleric might drape the cape across his shoulders, but pain
flared from his abdomen, and Abraham couldn’t choke a cry. He
noticed that blood stained his tunic, and his fingers gingerly
reached for his stomach, where he felt the raised, thick threading
of his stitches. Moving his shirt, Abraham gasped at the red,
jagged wound that crisscrossed across his abdomen.

The cleric gently pushed Abraham back upon
the cot. “Take a breath and slow your heart, Abraham. The Maker
especially favors you. He granted us a very large bomb to implant
beneath your skin. We planted this one next your stomach, where it
will wait for the opportunity to strike the unbelievers and deliver
you into the Maker’s kingdom. Your appetite might be diminished,
and we must be careful to avoid infection. But with a little luck,
you will have your opportunity to carry the Maker’s battle into the
stars before either danger might hurt you.”

Another cleric chuckled at the foot of
Abraham’s cot. “We didn’t just slice open your guts. We also gave
you a wonderful earring, and it looks magnificent upon you.”

Abraham gingerly touched his right ear and
felt the earring’s smooth surface, cringing slightly to discover
that the lobe of the ear was also tender. He wondered about the
purpose of such an ornament. Ishmael had sported no earring after
earning his cape of manhood.

A third cleric, with a beard peppered with a
bit more gray, leaned into Abraham’s face. “Did the Maker grant you
visions while you slept?”

Abraham nodded. “He gave me wonderful
sights.”

The clerics gathered in the chamber smiled
and nodded towards one another.

“Can you describe them to us?” Another
cleric asked.

Abraham closed his eyes to calm some of the
hurt that emanated from the ragged incision of his surgery and
summoned what filaments of dream he could back to his inner
sight.

“I saw such wonderful skies,” Abraham
started. “I saw skies teeming with lavender clouds, with
fragmented, silver moons. There were skies filled with two, dim
suns, and when night rolled across those landscapes, strange and
unfamiliar groups of stars sparkled in the Maker’s heaven. I
dreamed of one world after another, and the castles of the
unbelievers floated above none of them to taint the ground with
their shadow. There were forests brimming with such strange trees,
filled with the song of shrilling creatures. Calm seas of turquoise
lapped against crystalline cliffs. Snow and ice filled the air of
some of the worlds of which I dreamed, while waves of heat lifted
above hot sands of other desert worlds. None of those worlds held
any of the ruin of the blasphemer’s tainted creation. Everything
was newly painted by the Maker’s brush. The Maker unveiled the
complexity of his creation while I slept, and I understood why
mankind so greatly offends the divine creator with each vain
project of his making.

“My dreams never felt so real, for a warm
breeze tickled across my face while I stared at each world the
Maker revealed to me. Capes of our fallen warriors fluttered
everywhere in such wind, and I could easily and instantly read the
histories of their battles in the designs and symbols sewn so
beautifully into the fabric, telling me that the Maker himself
guided each stitch that glimmered beneath so many strange stars and
moons. My sleep was so short, and yet the Maker showed me his
designs in a span of eternity. I watched our peoples arrive on each
of those worlds, carried in great, metallic arks beyond anything
the unbelievers ever lifted into the heavens. Through our hands,
the Maker erected new cities, composed of spires of glass and
crystal whose inner glow pulsed to a great heartbeat. None of our
future people lived beneath the ground. None of our coming kind
needed to seek shelter from the blasphemers’ guns. Our victory
against the unbelievers was complete, and the Maker gave us worlds
far more lovely than anything we could dream after we cleansed this
home world and provided him a great, clean canvas for his
touch.”

“Praise be to the Maker.” Tears streamed
from the eyes of every bearded cleric gathered at Abraham’s bedside
as they whispered their beloved chant.

No matter his pain, Abraham also smiled.
“Praise be to the Maker.”

The cleric with the beard peppered in gray
leaned again into Abraham’s face. “Such dreams tell us how the
Maker truly blesses you, son. Soon, you will heal well enough from
your surgery, and we will cheer you and pray for you as we watch
you leave our village to walk to where the unbelievers’ great
rockets rise. You will beg for the opportunity to live among their
people. You will tell them that you turn your back on the Maker’s
compassion. Tell them that you are without father or mother, that
you don’t have so much as a brother or sister to count as family.
It will not be easy for a man as devoted to the Maker as you,
Abraham, but you will beg for a seat on another of their rising
rockets. Call us whatever names you must. Cast even the name of our
Maker in derision if it’s necessary. The Maker will understand, and
he will know your true heart.

“The unbelievers will no doubt pity you and
open their world to you. Foolishly, they will see you as only a
child. They will arrogantly believe that they save you by taking
you from this earth. You will wait as that rocket takes you into
their castle. Thank the Maker, Abraham, the moment you enter those
walls. All you must do is pinch the lobe of your right ear, and
that will tell us that you have arrived in the home of our enemy.
We will cheer for you, and we will detonate that power implanted
within you, and the explosion will be so great as to pull that
castle down from the sky. You will feel nothing before feeling the
pleasure of the Maker’s kingdom. In a wink, you will earn the
Maker’s eternal love and take revenge for everything and everyone
the unbelievers have stolen from us.”

“Praise be to the Maker.” Abraham
smiled.

The cleric nodded and tenderly squeezed
Abraham’s hand. “Now rest, our warrior. Heal so you may walk across
the ruin to reach the unbelievers in their purgatory. You make all
of us very proud, and you please the Maker.”

Abraham did his best to settle into his
cot’s comfortable cushions as the clerics left that chamber deep
within the butcher shop so that the child they molded into a martyr
could have his needed slumber. Abraham found it much more difficult
to fall into his dreams. None of the clerics’ medicine coursed
through his blood to force his eyes to close, and pain burned along
his abdomen’s incision at the slightest movement of his fingers or
toes. But Abraham patiently bore the discomfort, and he closed his
eyes to recall the wonderful sights the Maker gifted to his
previous round of dreaming. He had nearly fallen back into those
dreams when he felt something scurrying atop his legs. Opening his
eyes, Abraham was not startled to watch that burrowing cockroach
with the orange shell painted in strange swirls crawl upon him
before reaching his abdomen, where it paused to seemingly consider
the red stitches that ran along the skin.

The bug repulsed Abraham. The bug reminded
him how all that a man’s hand might craft without the Maker’s
presence was doomed to be ugly abomination. Abraham saw such
incredible worlds crafted by the Maker within his dreams, and all
of them taught him how his practice of painting bugs with the
colors stolen from his mother’s loom was a vain and empty pursuit
of a child, a wasteful practice of a boy whose ignorance failed to
recognize how the Maker had crafted even the lowly cockroach
according to his intended design. Abraham’s work with the orange
paint and the brush had perverted that creature and had turned it
into a broken vessel that provided a space for the great devil’s
essence. He had behaved like an unbeliever.

Abraham batted the orange bug onto the
ground, and he winced as he stood from his cot, his mind still
dizzy from the medicine the clerics had administered to numb his
body during his surgery. The orange bug didn’t retreat as Abraham
gingerly stepped towards it. The bug failed to scurry for any
concealing shadows. Rather, the bug merely waved its pair of fine
antennae as Abraham lifted his bare foot before bringing it down to
squish the creature’s innards into the floor.

* * * * *

Chapter 11 – In the Wink of an Eye

Governor Kelly Chen didn’t bother accessing
the miniscule cameras of another one of her bug spies’ eyes after
the boy crushed the orange bug she employed in considering the type
of humankind that remained upon Earth. The choice no longer felt a
very complicated one to her. It felt tragic and terrible. It was
indeed sad and irreversible. But the weight of that vote pressed in
front of her lifted from her shoulders. As General Harrison had
told her, the world had been lost a long time ago. Those who called
the orbiting castles home had just done their best to deny it.

Kelly tapped at the armrest of her theater
seat to open a straight channel to General Harrison’s home castle.
“This is Governor Chen. Is the general in his office?”

“It doesn’t matter, Governor,” answered a
calm and kind voice. “The general’s instructed us to reach him
immediately, no matter his location, in the event that you should
call. One moment please.”

Kelly listened to a few beeps before the
general’s voice answered. “Have you reached a decision, Governor
Chen? Or, is there anything else I can do to help you in your
deliberations?”

“I need nothing else,” Kelly replied. “They
made the boy into a bomb. Were you aware that they were going to do
such a thing?”

“We had our suspicions,” the general
answered. “He’s not the first boy to be crafted into such a
weapon.”

“Then we’re certainly not going to let him
get anywhere near a rocket launch facility, are we General
Harrison?”

“All sentries currently posted on Earth have
strict instructions not to allow anyone walking out of the waste to
near any of the rockets.”

“And in the future?”

The general sighed. “The tribes have their
reasons for turning children into bombs. Maybe not tomorrow, and
maybe not next year, but sooner or later, the chances are good that
someone will again let their guard down and pity some girl or boy
who comes crawling out of the old world’s waste begging for a
chance for a better life with the remnants of civilization up here
in our castles.”

“I’m ready to vote. The choice doesn’t seem
very hard after watching it all.”

“I’ll notify the other governors,” spoke the
general. “I’m sure you could use a little rest from it all.”

“Thank you. I could.”

Kelly dreaded the thought of counting all
the hours she had spent the last few weeks sitting before the
silver screen of her castle’s cinema, alone in the surrounding
darkness while spying on a fallen world’s barbarity. That silver
screen was meant to be a backdrop for laughing, young romantics
falling in love, or for sweeping, historical epics of Earth before
humankind spiraled into so much superstition and dogma. Watching
the bearded clerics pummel and shape children into weapons felt to
her like a perverted use of projector light. She was tired, and her
eyes itched for all the hours staring at the screen. Yet Kelly once
more tapped her fingers upon her seat’s armrest and summoned one of
her favorite classics from the castle’s vast film archives. Soon,
music and dancing once more filled the cinema’s air.

Governor Kelly Chen was surprised that she
didn’t feel the smallest urge to cry.

* * * * *

“May I offer you something to drink,
Governor?”

Governor Chen shook her head. “I’m afraid
I’m not very thirsty.”

The server nodded and turned to silently
continue through the maze of governors crowding the viewing deck
aboard the space station castle of New Paris. Kelly wondered how
any of her peers could eat cheeses and caviar and drink bubbling
Champaign and red wines moments before they would witness the utter
annihilation of humankind’s homeworld. She harbored no doubt that
she made the proper decision, that she had voted in the only way
that secured human civilization and gave it a chance to flourish on
distant, new worlds more incredible than even the one about to be
lost. But as clear a choice that vote proved to be to Governor
Chen, she couldn’t imagine how anyone kept a thirst or appetite
when they thought about all the history and promise that was about
to vanish. Perhaps, those governors, like General Harrison, had
long before recognized that Earth was lost, so that they had more
time than did she to come to terms with the consequence. She had
only wanted to help her castle learn to grow tomatoes as
efficiently as possible. She had so reluctantly chosen to pursue
her term as a space station governor. Certainly, she had never
dreamed that she would ever gather upon a viewing deck to view
Earth during its moment of destruction, a moment she believed
couldn’t be avoided.