A Just Farewell (4 page)

“The attack on our rockets have put all us
governors on edge.”

General Harrison nodded. “And that’s a good
thing. I was thankful for the scrutiny.”

“Do you think they can reach us in our
castles?”

The general shrugged. “I don’t know for
sure, but our castles are too delicate for any uncertainty. One
bomb, detonated at the right location, could bring an entire castle
burning into the atmosphere. We didn’t think the savages could harm
our rockets, and yet we’ve just lost five transports filled with
innocent civilians trying to retreat a world not yet conquered by
so much hate.”

“And you think the ultimate answer is the
only thing that can protect us?”

“I do.”

Kelly pressed a touchpad hidden on the arm
to her theater chair, and the black and white movie on the screen
vanished. “Did you suspect I was the one who voted against that
proposal?”

“I might’ve guessed your name after a few
attempts.”

“You must think I’m weak and naïve to
hesitate to give my approval.”

The general shook his head. “I think quite
the opposite. I think it showed that you have the conviction to
follow your heart. It’s a shame that more governors don’t have your
courage to vote according to their true conviction when presented
with a proposal of such enormity.”

Kelly’s fingers again tapped at her armrest
before the cinema’s projector hummed to introduce new ghosts to the
screen.

“I hoped to show you something,
General.”

The greatest achievements of humankind’s
creation flickered upon the screen – photographs of the magnificent
artworks and structures long ago razed upon the planet and stolen
from civilization. Beautiful temples, churches, mosques and domes
graced the screen. Pyramid peaks stretched high above jungles and
deserts and reached towards the sun. Tall spires stood upon giant,
granite arches, with windows of stained glass to tell tales of
magnificent creatures and gods that once tumbled through man and
woman’s imagination. There were photographs of pious monks turning
massive prayer wheels while snow-covered mountain ranges in the
background silently listened to their prayers. Golden calligraphy
shimmered across the screen, holy words carved and scribed by
master craftsmen. There were so many photographs brimming with
bells and organs, with instruments shaped to sound wonderful
music.

Kelly and the general silently watched the
images glow upon the movie screen. Great oil canvasses and
watercolors reminded them of how a brilliant world’s colors once
burned before madness set all the forests on fire. There were such
graceful and powerful sculptures that through marble captured the
male and female form. Fine jewelry bent and shaped by lithe fingers
sparkled like the very stars. There were great chalices shaped from
glass. Strange statues of metal and steel stood in the middle of
great, green gardens of fishponds and topiary menageries. Kelly and
the general exchanged not a word. They hardly breathed. They
watched the great creations, and they envied those who lived in the
world before the clerics and the savages murdered and destroyed
everything they feared was never created by their terrible
Maker.

General Harrison was the first to speak
after the last image faded from the screen. “Angkor Wat.
Teotihuacan. Thebes. The Vatican. Westminster and St. Paul. The
Blue Mosque. The Buddhas of Bamiyan. All of them beautiful. All of
them incredible.”

“So you know what humanity was once capable
of creating.”

General Harrison nodded. “Perhaps once,
Governor. But all of those great works are destroyed. All of them
lie in ruins. All of them pulled down by the savage tribes. All of
them judged by the bearded clerics as blasphemies and affronts to
their Maker god.”

“And do you believe such things can never
again be realized on Earth?”

General Harrison instantly answered. “I do
not. I assure you, Governor Chen, Earth is forever lost. It was
lost a long time ago. We can only do our best now to insure that
the zealotry responsible for destroying those great works or
architecture and art never reaches the stars.”

“And we do that by employing the ultimate
answer?”

“We do. One world will be lost, but consider
how many other worlds might be saved.”

Kelly’s fingers tapped her seat’s armrest.
How did she arrive at this moment? What decision had she ever made
that placed such responsibility in her hands? She had aspired to be
a great gardener of the castles. She had only hoped to make her
family and neighbors proud by doing all she could to insure that
their gardens orbiting the remains of the old world thrived so that
the population that escaped the savages didn’t starve. She had only
wanted to play a part in the research that would discover the means
to transplant tomatoes and potatoes into alien soil, how to
increase protein yield so that settlers could thrive on moons and
planets very different from their native Earth. Yet somewhere along
the way, she had become a governor. Something strange, and
horrible, happened so that she sat in the front row of her beloved
cinema and decided whether or not she would destroy an entire
world.

“Is it guaranteed?” Kelly turned to the
general. “I have to know that without a doubt that nothing about
those savages will survive. Your proposal must be failsafe, because
there won’t be anything else left to us if we fail to destroy so
much fear and hate.”

General Harrison paused. “I don’t think a
perfect guarantee exists anywhere in this cosmos. But I know that,
sooner or later, that the tribes, or their zealotry, will reach our
castles and pull them down. I believe those savages will burn even
our colony worlds if we fail to extinguish them when we can. I
believe the ultimate answer gives us the power to do just
that.”

“I want you to show me again how it will
work.”

“I thought you would,” and General Harrison
peeked over his shoulder, as if checking to make sure no savage hid
in the heavy shadows. “Remember that what I’m about to show you
remains classified. Don’t forget the oath you shared with your
fellow governors that no one would mention anything regarding this
plan.”

General Harrison removed a small hard drive
from an inner pocket of his crisp uniform jacket. Governor Chen
quickly opened a panel on her arm rest and inserted the drive. The
projector winked once as it accepted the information upon that
drive and waited for Kelly to command it to play the general’s
proposal upon the screen.

General Harrison nodded. “The objective of
the ultimate answer is the complete obliteration of the
tribes.”

Kelly sighed. “At the expense of our
Earth.”

“I say again, Governor, we lost the Earth a
long time ago.”

Kelly tapped her armrest and the projector
whirled. A glowing image of Earth floated upon the center of the
screen. The Earth diminished as if the camera retreated from the
blue planet as icons representing all fifty-one space station
castles blinked into the display. The tram lines and conduits that
linked those castles together retracted into the space stations as
each castle drifted into a precise location to surround Earth like
terminals in an otherwise invisible cage. A soothing, feminine
voice suddenly arrived to explain how the positioning of those
castles represented the final preparation the remnants of a
civilized humanity would need to take before the ultimate answer
would save them from the scourge of the savage tribes that
conquered the old world below. The voice explained how all of the
castles’ non-essential systems would momentarily divert power so
that beams of light would knit the space stations together and
encase Earth within a deadly spider web. The voice didn’t waste the
effort to attempt to explain the science behind the process, for
the governors didn’t need to know how the ultimate answer really
worked; they only needed to understand the scale of the proposal’s
destruction.

The spider web of laser light grew brilliant
and pulsed before delivering ripples, rings of bent space and time,
into the heart of the Earth. The planet shimmered as one ripple
after another constricted upon it. The familiar land masses
contorted into strange shapes, pulled and stretched by the massive,
unseen forces that flowed through the very fabric of existence.
Then, in the time it took to wink, the great planet Earth, once
home to millenniums of life and civilization, collapsed upon itself
into a single mote of light, which pulsed once like a distant, new
start before simply vanishing from the heavens as if it had never
ben, leaving all fifty-one space station castles alone to encircle
empty space.

“There’s not a single chunk of debris.
There’s not even an asteroid cloud.” Kelly sighed.

The general nodded. “There will be nothing
left that might endanger any of the existing castles.”

“But where does it go? What happens to
Earth?”

“I don’t think any of the engineers and
scientists responsible for the ultimate answer know,” the general
replied. “Perhaps the small, black hole that exists for only a
moment delivers the Earth to some parallel universe. Or perhaps,
the Earth simply ceases to exist all together. What matters is that
the planet will no longer exist as far as we’re concerned. What’s
most important for us is that the tribes will no longer threaten
our survival, and that the savages will never deliver any of their
zealotry and savagery to any of the stars or worlds that wait for
us.”

Kelly stared at black, empty space on the
screen where a glowing planet had been. “And now the decision
whether or not to go ahead with that proposal falls upon me. One
way or another, I must decide.”

“You must. If you refuse vote, you decide to
spare the Earth and the savage tribes, a choice I believe only
keeps us in danger.”

“I’m as afraid of the tribes as anyone else
who’s ascended into the castles, but how can I vote for this? How
can my soul live with? Do the tribes not have children who might
offer us all hope? Do any people deserve such a punishment?”

“The tribes deserve it,” answered the
general. “What if I could prove to you that the tribes are
irredeemable? What if I could show you that they’re no longer even
human, that they’ve devolved into a kind of virus?”

“How would you do that?”

“You will find another file on my drive
currently installed into your system. Run that application, and I
can explain.”

Kelly easily located the file, and a quick
double-tap with her fingers upon her armrest executed the program.
The silver screen winked a moment before revealing a view of a
dimly-lit chamber whose earthen walls suggested it to be
subterranean. The camera’s angle was very low to the ground, and it
moved about the chamber as if mounted to a pair of wheels. General
Harrison removed a small remote control device from another of his
jacket pockets, and his fingers rotated the small joysticks as the
camera focused upon a young boy nestled into the dusty blankets of
a cot.

“What am I looking at? Who is that?”

The general twisted the joysticks, and the
image settled upon a half-dozen large insects scuttling about the
floor, their shells painted in vibrant colors and illustrated in a
variety of patterns.

“The men and women in castle intelligence
have little difficulty in infiltrating the tribe’s hovels,” the
general chuckled. “Our camera is mounted upon one of the large,
burrowing cockroaches so common now on old Earth. The tribes will
never suspect we watch them through such small eyes.”

“You control the bug?”

The general nodded. “We’ve fused small
circuitry directly into the insect’s nervous system. It’s tedious
and time-consuming work. But it’s amazing work. You can control the
creature’s movement, and you’ll have access to all the little
tunnels the creatures burrow to connect all the hovels together.
“

“And what if someone squashes my friend
beneath a boot?”

“Then you flip a switch on that remote and
access the eyes of another bug.” The general cycled through the
eyes of the cockroaches that scurried about the floor. “They’re
very easy to operate, and they’re smart enough to hurry back into
the shadows the moment you set the remote control aside. They’ll
make no noise, though their sensitive ears will eavesdrop on the
faintest of whispers. The men and women in intelligence burned the
midnight oil trying to decide the best place to drop our little
spies, and everyone thinks this village is the perfect place, and
that that boy provides the perfect subject.

“The boy’s name is Abraham, and he’s not
even ten years old. Still, despite his youth, we’re confident that
he will soon suffer the torments and pass through the trials that
will show you the full measure of the tribes’ depravity. Spend the
next month watching that boy through the eyes of our bug friends.
See what that boy will become. Then cast your second vote regarding
whether or not to execute the ultimate answer.”

“Will you accept whatever vote I cast?”

The general sighed. “I can’t promise
that.”

“You believe the threat to be so great that
you would consider breaking your vows to the elected
governors?”