Come the Apocalypse, Part 1
A novella by Robert Hegwood
Introduction by the Author
“Come the Apocalypse” originated when I heard Brandon Sanderson and some friends joking about a throwaway story concept featuring sentient scents. The idea intrigued me, and I took it as a personal challenge. How could a scent know its world? How could it perceive? How could it create or preserve culture in the face of the fragility of its own being, destroyed by every shifting breeze?
My solution was that the scent would co-opt the neural architecture of any creature that smelled it. In this way, memories could be stored, moved, and restored in the creatures themselves. Each iteration of the scent would commemorate itself, its brief existence, in a poem, a commentary on its thoughts and observations as long as it exists. Over time, these creatures would perceive themselves as a multifaceted gestalt of one. But it was not enough to build a world. The whole point was to grow the idea of a sentient scent into a story, and that requires characters and with conflicting agendas. I needed two sorts of characters for the scent to interact with: 1) an audience stand-in, a person to filter what is seen, heard, and done in a way readers can identify with, and 2) those with a big problem that a sentient scent would complicate.
For these roles I found mother Xenia, a retired, fully human Orthodox nun taking on one final job scouting a new world for colonization, and the Gom, eager homesteaders of the stars looking for a new place to colonize. The Gom reproduce in a way that makes their neurobiology sensitive to the scent. Brood groups of mature elders collectively enpupate, dissolve into each other, then redifferentiate as multiple juveniles, each bearing some mixture of the parents' genetics, memories, and personalities. This ability to pass on ancestral memory is what makes them vulnerable to the scent and creates an inherent conflict. More profoundly, these three ways of being as either a sentient scent, a Gom, or a human allow this story to explore how the Divine is conceptualized in categories derivative of how each species knows and experiences itself. It also allows us, hopefully, to see the inherent truth of each conception, as well as its inadequacies.
On this particular planet in an outback wilderness, deep among the stars, three worlds are about to end. Thus the title: “Come the Apocalypse.”
Come the Apocalypse
THE WORLD AS IT WAS
The den smelled as it always smelled: a little floral, a little earthy, interlaced with the other scent that knit together all scents into one. She looked much like a blue pangolin: narrow skull, overlapping leathery scales, and a long prehensile tail. Three pot-bellied kits nuzzled in her black belly fur until translucent pearls emerged from beneath the mother’s skin. The kits churred as each secured its breakfast, piercing the pearl’s membrane with a nectar tooth and lapping at the milky liquid within. The little mother cleaned the leavings with a bifurcated tongue and licked her kits until they slept.
The mother cast her glance upwards through the hollow of an ancient tree where she had herself been born. She could feel a faint trembling in her feet, like legions of mound-myrs trooping just below the surface. The trembling grew until the tree quaked, showering the kits with dust. The kits locked their little claws into their mother’s fur, then hid their heads and wrapped their tails about them as the trembling grew into a rumbling that made their mother bounce.
She clamped the skirt of her belly-scales over the kits and dashed from the den. Outside, vermiforms, skitterers, stalkers, leapers, climbers, trundlers, racers, flickerers, and floaters boiled over each other as their world groaned all about them. Their sharp cries stung the mother’s ears like firethorns, and she scrambled into the broad limbs of the shuddering tree to hide herself in its dense foliage.
The binding scent was thinner in the high branches. Sudden gusts sundered it, then rolled the scent’s living suchness back into existence, over and over. Her mind pulsed: open and closed, wide and clenched, again and again as the scent shattered and reformed in the rumbling and gusting that made the very ground cry out. Something directed her four eyes upwards just before the light fled behind a great, hard shadow drifting above the sheltering wood.
The shadow in the sky passed over the steep hills that separated the wood from the encroachments of the western desert. It rumbled towards the east, where an unbroken grassland stretched far away like a sea of celadon. An image the little mother did not comprehend flashed through her tiny thoughts—another sea had lapped a white and sandy shore not so very far away; jade-colored blades rippled and writhed beneath the hard shadow in the sky.
A ringent void parted the shadow; it was like an empty socket that budded a gray orb that looked like a great egg. Then a pillar of light shot from the orb. The pillar stood upon the grass that whipped and smoked in a cold fog. Like a stone bubble, the egg detached and descended until it settled, motionless, in the icy fog, and its grass-smothered light winked out. The trembling receded. Higher and higher, the hard shadow rose until it passed beyond the clouds.
In furtive starts, hundreds of thousands of small creatures remembered themselves and returned to their skittering, climbing, crawling, and trundling. The mother descended the tree, the other scent clinging to her tightly. She did not slink into her den like the others of her kind but instead crept closer to the giant stone-gray egg. She took cover between a water-worn stone and a weathered stalk of feathery sun-coral. Her belly scales relaxed, and she pressed out a few more milk-pearls for her babies to keep them quiet while she watched; the attendant mind who watched through her pondered.
A stone fell from the changing blue,
An egg abandoned in the grass,
Its shell cold and smooth as rain.
The earth shuddered to bear it,
And We were remade seven times,
Will the dread mother return
For what hatches from cold gray eggs
Laid in nests of bright blue fire?
We, Seventh Iteration
of the Shaken Dawn
A dark oval traced itself upon the egg, a seam whose margins receded from each other with a hiss. The lower lip of the oval poured downward into a gray incline that flowed away from a partially empty interior. A figure stood framed by the opening. It appeared about as massive as the young of one of the loping grazers native to the grassland. Unlike the grazers, it stood upright, a black obelisk bearing a pale, fleshy softness upon its upper extremity. And eyes, (only two); they were moist, brown eyes, like rich soil receiving the first drops of evening rain. The eyes closed. A horizontal wrinkle parted in the paleness below the eyes, its ends curving upward like the curling of a leaf. It breathed. The smell of the earth and the binding scent were inside.
Uncounted eyes, thousands of eyes, peered from behind leaves and from perches high and low. An aeon of memory was scoured in moments: nothing like this black figure had ever been seen, had ever been tasted. It had a mind and memories but was not the We. It was a non-serial self, so old, so separate, so strange.
O, Unephemeral, attend.
Here is a living mountain
Which to the eyes of all creatures
Remains unchanged forever.
But You alone do not change.
Before You mountains flee away.
They vanish like the morning mists.
In a day the seas cover them.
We, Seventh Iteration
of the Shaken Dawn
VISITORS
Mother Xenia wiped her eyes upon the sleeve of her ryassa, a voluminous outer cassock that transformed her silhouette into a black monolith. From beneath its folds, she withdrew a small icon, no larger than a half-tablet. It presented the Theotokos, the Holy Virgin, in a wine-colored mantle against a golden background, a mandorla filled with her newly incarnated Son floating above her heart, and behind her shoulders a halo of branching flames. The Unburnt Bush, it was called, a gift on the day of Mother Xenia’s tonsure. She kissed it and descended the shuttle ramp, holding it before her as she sang a Theotokion, an ancient hymn. At the edge of the wood, she found a tree with low, spreading limbs and a knobby trunk. Upon a protuberance facing towards the sea of grass, she settled the icon and kissed it again before making a prostration.
A chirp sounded in her ear, and she grunted back to her feet. She adjusted her com-bud beneath the veil that framed her face.
“Listening.”
“Beloved Mother.” The translator’s voice was overlaid by a flurry of clicks and tonal percussions like the playing of a three-note marimba. “Uplink is locked. All orbital arrays synchronized and actuated. Survey drones ready for deployment.”
“Deploy. Let’s get a good look at this place.”
A bevy of dimpled yellow spheres the size of chestnuts rolled onto the gangway, then sprang into the air on slender pencils of blue light. They sped away, each to follow its own mapping path through the watching wood.
The nun flipped forward a short wand from within the hem of her veil with a hooked finger. A 180º hemispheric display was splashed with a translucent blue silhouette of the wooded area at the edge of the desert. The tracks of the survey drones painted a detailed schematic in yellow, overlaying the blue.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Curious,” the tocking voice of the Gom replied. “Such interesting geometric clustering and distribution of vegetative life forms.”
“More than interesting, Third Parcel. That is still your name, right?”
“Yes, Beloved Mother. Until we stake claim here. The parcels will be named, and I will receive from it my new name.”
“Hold your horses, hotshot. I’ve not signed off on anything yet.”
The voice at the other end of her com-bud fell silent for a moment.
“Your metaphors confuse me, Beloved Mother. I see no sign of a maker for this site.”
“No sign? There is every sign. This is not some wild wood. This is a garden. Look at it—the patterns in the way the trees and shrubs grow, the terraces, their balanced asymmetries. This is not random. This was planned.”
“That is not definitive. There are no discernible paths except those made by local wildlife.”
“And look how those little trails intersect and flow along the larger geometries. It appears natural at a superficial level, like an old Earth tea garden, but it isn’t. This is quite sophisticated, not natural at all.”
“There are still no makers, Beloved Mother. There are hundreds like this out in the desert, only dead for centuries. This is the last one. If it had makers, they are gone. Long gone.”
Mother Xenia flicked off her display and turned back to face the shuttle.
“Don’t be obtuse, Third Parcel. Get out here. It is the mystery of this little lone wood that persuaded you to beg me out of my retirement. You Gom can’t homestead until I sign off saying this world as sentient-free and unclaimed.”
A second figure descended the shuttle’s gangway. It looked like a feathered fig waddling on seal flippers. A many-pocketed utility cope had been fastened below its ocular ring, a torus of translucent carapace that allowed the Gom a panoramic field of vision. Third Parcel sidled next to the nun and extracted a small tablet from a pocket with one of its three sub-ocular tentacles. Its toroidal eye rippled in waves of burnt orange roiled by little teal vortices. With a short burst of clicks that emanated from the nearest of its three tympanic membranes, it shoved the tablet towards the nun.
“Very pretty,” the nun remarked, seeing the vivid patterns in the feathers of a trio of obese Gom seated upon a common couch.
“Not pretty—well, yes pretty, but not good.” Teal waves accented by cobalt began to dominate the Gom’s eye. Its esophageal trunk dropped above the face of the tablet, and its many-fingered lips zoomed the picture to a bare patch in the feathers on one of the seated Gom. “The molt has begun. Too dangerous now to administer more inhibitors. The joining cannot take place in orbit. Disgrace is to permit the new ones to be landless, without name. Without belonging.”
Mother Xenia handed the tablet back.
“So you are telling me to get on with it.”
“Exactly so, Beloved Mother.” Third Parcel’s percussive tones sounded musical. “Just formality. Thorough. Honest. Also, quick. One day, two days, yes?”
“God willing,” said Mother Xenia, patting the Gom’s three-lobed lips as they folded their fringing fingers about the tablet and returned it to its pocket. “Walk with me. There is a lovely scent in the air, don’t you think?”
They followed animal trails deeper into the wood until they came upon a basin into which an artesian well emptied itself. It poured in thick gurgles from a cleft in a rock at the base of the low hills that separated the wood from the desert. The water spilled from the basin into a canal that ran into the wood.
A creature like a snail wearing a sea urchin had parked itself just to one side of where the water issued from the living rock. Third Parcel extended its esophageal trunk so that its feeding eyes, located just behind its lips, could make closer inspection. The snail-urchin retreated, making for a sheltering overhang of dripping moss. Third Parcel whipped its trunk away as if stung, then, ever so gingerly, extended it again while one of its sub-ocular tentacles fished a recording wand from a utility pocket. It held the wand near a lentil-sized dot where the snail-urchin had couched itself moments before.
Mother Xenia could see nothing but a discoloration on the stone until the Gom showed her the tablet, which displayed an enlarged image of the dot.
“Is that some kind of glyph?” Mother Xenia zoomed in on the image even more. Its lines were distinct, precise, as if acid-etched by a lithographer.
“Old Gom ideograph, many centuries old. Some, like myself, still learn them for calligraphy.” Third Parcel’s sub-ocular tentacles coiled in on themselves and withdrew beneath the lightly patterned brown of its feathers. “It means ‘water’.”
Mother Xenia furrowed her brow.
“How did it get here? Have Gom ever traveled through space before our peoples met?”
“No, Beloved Mother. Not even in old stories. Never did we know the stars until humans found us.” The Gom turned the wand to the snail-urchin. “Species DRX4-98A008-N4l. Common gastropod. Eats algae. Stores various ingested toxins as a defense mechanism. We cataloged it years ago. It’s found all over the temperate forests of the northern hemisphere.”
Mother Xenia laid her hand across the tentacle holding the sensor wand.
“So, Gom have been here?”
“Automatons, orbital surveillance arrays, normal pre-settlement staging. All automated. We looked but didn’t touch, as the humans say.”
“Someone touched. But when? Back when your surveillance automatons came, or just a few moments ago?” Mother Xenia wound one of Third Parcel’s tentacles around her arm and walked with him back to the shuttle. “Let’s go massage a little data. I feel a headache coming on.”
She looked down at the dozen variations of jade green grass and the tiny budding flowers the color of mimosas and lilacs. She did not notice the swirling black vortices that spun through the red-gold of the Gom’s ocular carapace.
EPIPHANIES
The air hung thick and heavy with the other scent. The We had not thought so hard since the last of the neighboring enclaves were lost to the desert centuries ago. Non-serial corporeal mind. Words. So many new thoughts with names: Architecture, Engineering, Poems, Prayers… a name for this moving of the mind. Dancing, Propulsion, Starships, Cooking, Writing. Writing, an idea with possibilities begging to be explored. What a bulwark against the wind. All the strangers’ ideas were a bulwark, but this one exuded a certain hope… with a written word, a thought could persist a day, a year, even years beyond counting. Does a thought matter when the mind it flowed from has fled away? The We recalled a song first laid down by Wakened Among Stars Shimmering In Muddy Water, or rather a scrap of one. That iteration vanished on the morning breeze that dried the last salt-crusted puddles of the ancient sea.
One last bright morning in Spring.
One last stirring…[missing phrase]
The blood-gilled fish splatters mud.
A gust changes the sky into sand
And ourself from…[missing phrase]
The song had persisted, though part of it had been lost. The actual memory of it was thin, vague, yet it must have been; for the song, though imperfect, remained. If We had the writing of words back then, the song might have been etched upon a stone. Such gifts these strange minds offered in this, the last of the wide gardens.
Best of all was this mind that knew itself as part of a hive-nest called Gom. It lived on a vast scale of time. We would know thousands of iterations before this Gom knew one. Still, the Gom’s being was iterative, a cycle of collapse, metamorphosis, and rebirth as both itself and another. Not precisely the same, but enough so its mind felt more natural and more explorable. The moving monolith with the pink face—that one was a thicket, yet a thicket with curious blossoms within, a strange and compelling beauty for which We had no name.
We will learn.
CONUNDRUMS
“This is assuredly the last,” said Third Parcel, gesturing with a sub-ocular tentacle to an orbital display of the desert.
It showed the little bowl-like forest, twenty hectares of green at the edge of a vast prairie on one side and an impinging desert on the other. Third Parcel pointed out the desiccated pock marks that at one time followed the edge of the desert and now lay wholly enclosed with its shifting sands.
“Geological data suggests something big passed very close to this world. Rocked it. Changed its axial tilt. Thus, a once shallow sea is now a grassland, and a continent-wide forest is transformed into scrubby desert.” The Gom closed the display, its trunk drooping pensively. “It will take more time to be sure, but it appears the wobble peaked about two thousand years ago. In another few thousand, the sea should return.”
“Too late for our mysterious gardener,” said Mother Xenia. “The desert will own it long before then.”
The communications console chimed. Third Parcel opened the visual interface to see a close-up of the three-lipped mouth at the end of an esophageal trunk. The feeding tendrils curled and rippled in complex patterns, but not a sound was uttered. In the background, the marimba-like clinking and clocking of other Gom could be heard. Third Parcel closed the channel and exhaled sharply.
“That was my couch-kin, Embankment Above the Seventh Ford. The molt has begun in earnest, and the crew is nervous. You know Gom are attached to the place they brood. Where one is born conveys inalienable rights of place. They don’t want the new Gom to bond to the ship.”
“Let me guess,” said Mother Xenia, “If the new brood is born now, they will have rights to ship shares?”
“Worse. The place where one awakens is sacred. It is your place, given by the Undivided. Ownership passes to them, not merely a share. We must prevent that. If they do not awaken on this land, they will awaken somewhere else far less hospitable, if they awaken at all.”
The nun swiveled in her seat and leaned forward.
“I’ve never heard of one Gom killing another deliberately. Ever.”
“Are the unformed yet Gom? Is one guilty of murder where one leaves survival to the Undivided?”
“Expose the new brood to an inhospitable environment they’re unlikely to survive? Barbaric! How awful.”
Third Parcel took on a studied deportment, its tentacles wrapped formally below its optical carapace.
“Awful only if this world is unavailable to them, Beloved Mother.”
Mother Xenia crossed herself.
“You can’t ask that, surely. If this world is another’s, I can’t just sign it over to you.”
“Show us this ‘another’, Beloved Mother.”
The tone of Third Parcel’s percussive rejoinder came darker and lower. The translator registered the change as an edgier, more insistent voice. It matched the bands of red and bronze chevrons marching around the Gom’s ocular carapace.
“There is one living garden, if it is a garden,” Third Parcel continued. “One tentative hint that there are, or perhaps were, gardeners. If they still exist, where are they?”
“I don’t know, Third Parcel. I appreciate the difficulty in which you and your fellows find yourselves. I do. But I must know for certain. What good is my bond, my professional expertise, my reputation, if I cheat when it is convenient? I am a nun. Do you know what that means?”
“An ascetic, I am told. You lose yourself in pursuit of the Undivided.”
“Yes, and how do I find Him if I make myself a liar?”
“What lie? There is no other one here.”
“That I am certain when I am not—that is the lie. Something is here. We just don’t know what. Surely you have not forgotten the glyph at the spring?”
“I have not forgotten.” Third Parcel’s trunk drooped, and the brightness of his optical carapace clouded over. “I must find food.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No, I am sad, frustrated, fearful. Humans cry. Gom eat.”
Mother Xenia rose and kissed Third Parcel at the base of his trunk.
“If you only knew what humans do when we are frustrated and in distress. You get the sweet tallow. I’ll toast us some sponge bread.”
TASTE AND SEE
New smells wafted from inside the shuttle. Sweet, warm, enticing smells that the little pangolin-esque mother had never encountered before. She drew closer, sniffing. There was a hissing, and one side of the stone egg opened. She hugged the shadows beneath the narrow overhang. She had watched the fruit-shaped thing and the pink-faced monolith go in this same way, right before the sweet smell. Now they exited again, followed by a whirring thing on six round feet. The little mother scrambled onto the gangway and through the opening. Once inside, she reared up on her hind legs to the full half meter of her height. A pale blue light flickered to life in the opening as soon as the strangers had cleared the ramp.
The little mother followed the sweet scent to an alcove. A couple of partially eaten crusts remained on a flat stone situated upon a ledge just beyond her reach. A giant folded leaf with tiny round feet upon its stem stood against another ledge in another alcove that faced this one. She dragged it with her tail to the ledge where the flat stone waited. With a little maneuvering, the mother hoisted herself onto the folded portion of the leaf. With a deft flick of her tail, the toasted and slathered crusts landed beside her like two glistening grubs. Her tongue darted over one, and she quivered with delight.
Another round of stretching and sniffing convinced her there was no more, but from her perch in the folded leaf she could see a shining wall above the other ledge. On that wall was writing and images like stars reflected in the water or the unscented face she saw when drinking. The other scent thickened.
What a curious shining wall. Taster of New Things searched the memories laid down by the most recent iterations of its predecessors. The two strangers had busied themselves at the spring. The glyph was gone, a mystery for the strangers. The Gom’s mind was occupied, easily searched. The cogent scent insinuated a fleeting memory, the sight of the bright wall over the ledge. “Computer”… a thing-name floated up, the center of many associations. Now, what are its uses?
A TIME TO GATHER
Mother Xenia tapped at the images and data tags that sprang like fleeting ghosts before her as she and Third Parcel picked their way around the base of the enclosing wall of the wood, a lunette of steep, shrub-covered hills that stood hunched with their backs to the desert.
She halted before a black pip descending on a gossamer thread from an overhanging branch. It looked like a starveling pine needle until the needles raised themselves to probe the air like questing tentacles.
“One of your sort, I suppose,” Mother Xenia said.
Third Parcel referenced his bioform catalog.
“Not precisely plant or animal. A composite. This is a new variant. More common in the southern hemisphere. Its limbs are proportionally longer than the others on record. Thermotropic.”
The nun pulled back the sleeve of one arm and extended her finger towards the tiny waving tentacle, which oriented upon its heat and reached out.
“Is that wise?” asked Third Parcel.
“Is it toxic?”
“Probably not. Still, new variant. We are not certain. How curious.”
“What is curious?”
Mother Xenia withdrew her finger.
“I think it made limb-sign.” Third Parcel coiled and relaxed two of its sub-optical tentacles over one another. “Open.”
“Open what?”
“Limb sign highly contextual. Open a container, conversation, window, even open line of reasoning. It may be nothing. Open is a simple sign, easily made as an unconscious gesture.”
Third Parcel relaxed his tentacles, shaking their three terminal digits a little as if to be rid of an uncomfortable feeling.
A com signal chirped from the beetle-shaped utility wagon that followed them. Third Parcel opened the orbital channel of his com-set and was besieged by furious tocking and bands of wildly undulating colors, mostly dark purples and cobalts slashed with vivid yellows and reds. The multiple translator tracks made a garbled mess of it to Mother Xenia’s ears. She had never seen a Gom blanche before, but the blotchy cinnamon of Third Parcel’s trunk for an instant faded to dusty rose.
“The molting—it’s happening too fast. Crew panicked. Jettisoned the Gom habitat. It descends. Minor damage. Churning Brook Second Parcel tried to stop them. Begged them to wait. Injured. Unsecured at release. Yellow Meadow helps. Frightened. Medic, not trained to direct a landing. I am trained for landing… somewhat.”
Mother Xenia crossed herself and grabbed Third Parcel by the hem of his utility cope.
“Can you talk him down? They’re desert side. The last thing we need is to risk a grass fire from undissipated heat shields or sparking dangly bits.”
“Yes, Beloved Mother. I think I can.”
The Gom’s trunk swung around, its feeding eyes scanning the ground while its body tilted back so it could scan what little of the sky was visible.
“Forgive an asking. Humans climb better than Gom. Take the cart up there.” Third Parcel gestured to the ridge above them. “Activate its homing beacon, then send it into the sand. Yellow Meadow can fix on it. I will return to the shuttle and establish a virtual helm link. Land safe.”
Mother Xenia initiated a terrain accessibility search. The heads-up displayed four potential paths she could manage with the utility cart. The fourth and furthest offered the gentlest incline. The cart would only need assistance at a couple of points before cresting the ridge. She clicked her tongue at the cart and told it to follow as she struck out upon the narrow trail that skirted the base of the enclosing hills.
She was very sure an active intelligence was at work in this wooded enclave, but what sort evaded her. Scans had shown that the springs tapped aquifers over three hundred meters deep, each by a bore so precise it had to have been machined. The trees, shrubs, grasses, land corals and other quasi-vegetative forms were all ordered in interlocking plots. From overhead it looked much like a fractal of a Mandelbrot set. From one perspective, it appeared natural but managed. From another perspective, it appeared a minutely calculated geometric collage. It shouted “mind”, yet nothing tangible said more than "garden”—no dwellings, no outbuildings, no structures of any kind, unless one counted animal dens.
The incline up the slope was manageable, but her body was still that of a woman nearing eighty. Modern medicine mitigated many of the infirmities of her age, but they did not erase them without questionable therapies and prosthetics. She paused mid-slope to catch her breath and looked up to witness a bright thread streaking across the sky, probably some ejecta from the hurried separation. The habitat could not be far behind. She helped the utility cart over an obstructing stone. When on solid footing, the cart scurried on, giving her room to leverage herself over the same rock and continue up to the ridge.
Her com-bud erupted in garbled tocking. The translator’s capacity to convey expressions of fragmented Gom frustration resolved essentially into two words: "shoo” and "intruder”. She steadied herself on a waxy-fronded shrub at the ridge line.
“What’s happening? Status update, please.”
Third Parcel did not answer. She set the homing beacon and directed the utility cart into the scrub-festooned dunes. She scanned the canopy below her before picking her way down into the melange of odors that hovered just below the tree line, then struck out for the shuttle.
A TIME TO ATTEND
A high-flying creature, distant cousin to the pangolin-esque denizens of the small forest, saw the fiery object that hurtled towards where it flew. The fire-ball missed, barely, but the turbulence rolled the flyer from the sky. The creature dropped a long while before righting itself, then settling into the treetops to recover. The other scent slipped into its nostrils, connecting with the neural tissue of its olfactory sensors and uniting itself to the whole neural apparatus of the creature. After resting a moment, the flyer launched again, just high enough to see where the blazing thing had landed. Close to the horizon, a thin black ribbon unfurled into the sky.
A TIME TO BREAK DOWN
Mother Xenia had just gained sight of the shuttle when the treetops behind her erupted. An undulating cloud of flying creatures burst from the canopy and swept towards the grasslands. By the time she set her foot to the gangway, they swarmed back to fill the trees with a cacophony of nervous squawking, then leapt into the air again, speeding out of sight over the grasses.
She found the energy-gate down. Third Parcel was nowhere in sight, but the shuttle was not empty. An armadillo-sized creature covered in overlapping scales sat in a chair, its muzzle buried in a pastry that it consumed filling first. Its hooked fore-claws looked formidable, like that of a sloth or small anteater. It did not startle at the sound of her voice. Rather, it looked up, sniffed, and continued emptying its treat.
“Cheeky rascal. Tell me now how you got in here.”
The creature did not answer. It scratched at its belly. A white ovule appeared briefly before being dragged back down by a tiny prehensile tail amidst small insistent squeaks.
“So you’re a mother, and you’re feeding them that?” Mother Xenia pointed at the pastry. “Of course, there is no denying the Gom are exceptional bakers. May I?”
She eased closer to the console and noted that the little mother seemed disinterested in her proximity. The nun tilted the monitor in her direction, eye-synced, then asked for Third Parcel’s location. A red dot blinked at the base of the ridge nearest the yellow dot that indicated the utility cart’s coordinates.
“Hail him.”
The signal chirped but garnered no response. Telemetry indicated that the habitat descended directly above the cart, though it was still too high to be seen with the naked eye. What was Third Parcel up to? He needed to be at the comms console, not out sightseeing. Without warning, the yellow dot arched back towards the grass-facing side of the little forest, bouncing down the incline on shock-shields. Mother Xenia crossed herself furiously when she saw the descent track of the habitat adjust to follow the blinking yellow dot… to Third Parcel a few hundred meters from the forest.
“Sweet Holy—what now?”
The little mother just stood upon her hind legs, sniffing for another pastry. Unsatisfied, she dropped from the chair and propped against a food locker, knocking at it with the hard curve of her claws.
Mother Xenia could hear the distant rumble of the descending habitat. It would land in the grass much too near the forest. She grabbed a fire extinguisher, only to be intercepted by the small creature’s claws, which hooked the hem of her cassock and drew her back towards the food locker.
“Seriously?”
A chill passed over her when she noticed the thickness of the strange scent and the intensity of the gaze of the little mother knocking on the locker with one claw and tugging at the hem of her garment with another. It looked from her to the locker and knocked again.
“Who are you?”
Head cant.
“Do you understand?”
Nod.
“My name is Mother Xenia.”
The creature stopped knocking and dropped to all fours. It made a disappointed guttural gurgling and glanced about to determine the best way to move around the pink-faced monolith. Mother Xenia relented and fetched a stick of string cheese, tossing it onto the gangway just ahead of the creature, who sniffed it judiciously. The ground shook, and the sky darkened as the habitat descended. Positioning thrusters blasted the ground below the habitat with columns of cold blue light. Whipping umbilicals torn from their receptacles sizzled and popped, sending a lacework of purple coruscation racing across the hull and down the landing stanchions as they extended. The little mother snatched up the cheese in her jaws and fled. The resinous grass ignited into a bright crackling fire that spread between the six landing struts in rippling sheets.
Mother Xenia exhausted the fire extinguisher on the conflagration nearest the wood. She knocked down the center, but flanking fires leapt into searing walls of churning flame. That was when she saw Third Parcel with a canister of volatile cleansers spraying the grass just ahead of the inferno. His optical carapace was black as coal. She could see his feathers smoking in the heat. He was heedless.
“No! No! No!” she screamed into her com-link. “Habitat channel. Open. Yellow Meadow, release external fire suppression. Do it now, Yellow. For God’s sake, do it now!”
She peeled off her ryassa and began to beat down the flames.
“Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.”
The acrid smoke enveloped her. More than once she had to beat down fire that kindled upon her sleeves, the flowering of embers she had flailed from the earth. She did not hear the “thunk” and “whoosh” of the cold cloud that billowed out of the underside of the habitat. It spread in a suffocating blanket two meters deep until the fire subsided, leaving a blackened arc like raven’s wings stretching out towards the little forest. At its center was the smoldering ruin of a small utility cart.
Mother Xenia retched, her mouth full of ashes, but forced herself to her feet. The fire had licked at both the shuttle and a few of the landing struts of the habitat, but the damage was mainly cosmetic. Third Parcel was nowhere to be seen, and the gangway had not been lowered. White flakes of ash kept falling on her face and shoulders. She brushed them away and turned to face the warm breeze blowing from out of the grasslands.
A rampart of racing flames and black smoke stretched across the horizon. Here and there, flaming spindles spun high, then collapsed back into the general inferno. Before it, racing even faster, fled a stampede of leaping grazers the size of mountain elk.
A TIME TO DIE
The monolith meant well. A flyer rising on a thermal off the back of the encircling hills took note of the approaching holocaust. It would overleap the fire break that had been extinguished too soon. Long before the setting sun, hot winds would scatter this iteration beyond recovery. All the memories of centuries would perish, most of them at any rate. Where could the little leapers and gnawers and burrowers flee to? Some of the flyers and larger runners might escape, but what mind would ever live among those memories again? We are the last. It would be as if We had never been. The monolith had a word for this, a word of abysmal desolation: apocalypse.
Come O swift apocalypse
Devouring incandescence
Come scorching, come searing blast
Come O ash of songs unsung.
O Great and Unephemeral
Remember that here We were
Green beside the flashing sea
Where once it vanished so do We.
We, Second Iteration
Of The Far Burning Sky
Check back next week for part 2…
About the Author
Robert Hegwood is a retired educator from Southern Mississippi and a subdeacon in the Orthodox Church. He graduated with Honors in Creative Writing from William Carey College decades ago and writes mainly in the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy, or fusions between the two. His fiction is grounded in following out strange ideas to explore their implications for a story and for their world should they be true. You can find some of these stories on his Substack, The Carouspell. Besides writing, Robert enjoys learning about wild foods and medicines, gardening exotic (read “impractical for his hardiness zone”) fruits and vegetables, and serving as needed in his local Orthodox parish. He shares his rural home with his son, three dogs, a cat, and the occasional visiting possum.
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I loved this. It gave off serious Speaker for the Dead vibes in my mind.