"We passed through a region of great pressure." Selerael hedged. "A distortion in space," she added quickly. "We barely escaped–”
“Very strange," Adam interrupted quietly.
* * * * *
Selesta, Selesta–to lose the ship was like losing a part of herself.
After the meeting with the colonizer, Selerael wandered about the ship aimlessly, lost in recollections.
She wanted to restore the ship, to save it. Instead, she would be the one to destroy it.
Before she did, she decided to remove the bodies of the explorers, to rebury them on Seynorynael. For a moment she hesitated, considering leaving them, here where Selesta had fallen. But wouldn’t they have wanted to sleep under the light of the Seynorynaelian star’s-rise?
She threaded her way to the dark corridors at the bottom of Selesta, where she had discovered Fielikor Kiel and the others so many years ago, preserved, frozen in time. Quietly, reverently, she entered the crypt, now able to imagine the day that her mother had brought them here to rest.
The bodies were gone!
The suspension capsules remained as Colonel Kansier had left them, clear blue-paned coffins with crystals of ice pressing on the surface from within, yet now there was nothing in them. All thirty explorers had disappeared.
Why?
After a minute, she remembered what had happened in that moment within the ring singularity of Kai-rek when all of the living mass on the ship had become energy. She had felt a living energy with her, sentient beings like herself swirling around her, freed, rejoicing, rushing past her and towards the oblivion.
But the explorers had been dead, she reminded herself, not living energy!
Yet when Alessia and Sargon, both of them serum creatures, had died, their bodies had turned into energy, an energy that faded into another place, another existence.
Why had the others remained in body for her to find?
No, her mind fought the horror, the recollection of her mother in the temple of Nippur, the recollection her mother had faced when she remembered her fallen comrades.
They had been trapped between the physical world and the tapestry of light all those years! And Alessia, she had feared the same ending, a universal punishment for those who would have dared to live forever, prolonging the physical burden forever without any of its joys, and keeping their souls from returning to the energy from which they had come.
The explorers alone of all the children of Enor were kept from returning to the tapestry of light, the paradise where Enorian souls returned at their journey’s end. They alone were barred the way back, neither in body, nor as souls freed of their earthly temple.
Until, in Kai-rek, they were allowed to find their way home.
Selerael left the mausoleum and wandered the ship, deeply immersed in her own reflections, until at last she found herself near the hold that contained the great Seynorynaelian forest. The trees, she had almost forgotten that they would have to be moved. She plunged through the doorway, looking around, but the illumination that had been cast from high above was gone, and she could barely discern shadows in the gloom.
A bright blast of light flicked from her finger at her will; she directed it upward towards the ceiling–
The forest was gone!
Selerael peered around, but there was nothing, only an empty cargo hold.
Of course, the mass-energy transformation! As they headed into the black hole, she had been unable to protect them. And now the beauty of that forest was gone, around which so many lives and memories had depended for the strength to go on.
When finally she emerged into the corridor outside, she was ready to let Selesta go.
The time had come to say farewell.
* * * * *
The colonizer found her sitting on the shore, watching the spindrift, heedlessly letting the mist saturate her skin.
"I know how difficult it is for you," he said; she followed his gaze to the Selesta. "But it will be re-born."
"You know?"
"About the time-loop?” His silver brow arched. “Yes. We could not mistake it. I did not tell the others of this world, but we of Enor came here before.”
“Before?”
“When we first awoke there was no life to sustain us in this universe. We landed on this world, but it was barren. I cannot be certain, but I believe that was when some of the life cultures escaped from our ship and began the development of life on this world, or accelerated it."
"Life cultures?" Selerael echoed. Life cultures?–Gerryls had been right! Then–was the Earth also a fragment of Enor?! “Poor Zhdanov, Vereda, Cameron–they searched and searched for answers and never knew. Your life cultures must have seeded the galaxies with life, but you yourselves interfered with the grand experiment where it seemed about to fail.”
"Yes,” the colonizer replied. “Every ship of Enor carried thousands of life cultures to develop the planets we found and make them livable. We did not often use them, only when we could find no viable planet.
"When we left, our ship's contained string singularity that had ripped space-time for our entry into a new universe drew us towards a nearby black hole singularity. The ship had calculated that for our survival it would orbit the event horizon, catapulting us into the future. With its success, we might return to find life flourishing by itself in the galaxy and a new home to sustain us.
"The ship did succeed, but at a great cost."
"I don't understand." Selerael protested. "You made it to Narana."
"Yes, because we were forced to." He saw her confusion, and continued. "It was not mere vanity and loneliness that made us willing to transform the race that had developed here. We could not reach another world."
"But surely there would have been other worlds upon which life flourished by the time that you emerged from the white hole." She insisted.
"Perhaps. But as I said–we could not reach them. For while the ship emerged from the white hole, the cosmic string singularity that had brought us safely in and out disappeared. And with it, the skeleton, the anti-gravity thrusters, and some of the infrastructure of the Enorian flagship also disappeared.
"We thought perhaps we had made miscalculations, that the ship had passed within the event horizon and that by only a miracle and the efforts of the Zariqua Enassa we had managed to escape before being crushed. With our ship crippled, running on auxiliary engine power, we could not make it further than this world. When the ship crashed here to become our Havens, it was clear that it would never fly again."
"But where–" she asked, and stopped. Where had the heart of the Enorian ship gone? She didn’t need to ask any more.
The Enorian colonizer's sad gaze had drifted to the Selesta.
The Selesta–and the cosmic string now within it.
The Enorian cosmic string had not gone anywhere in the black hole, but it had warped to another time!
It had warped to the Selesta, to the loop in time that contained the ship, from the beginning of the ruins to the end of their journey in Kai-rek.
Chapter Twenty
In the few short years that followed, the Enorian descendants and crew that remained by the shores of Lake Firien completed the task of stripping the ship. The hull plates that had survived were used as building materials for the new settlement, as were the other surviving analyzers, holo-monitors, and other ship innovations.
All of the botanical life and animal specimens on board the ship had disappeared with the Seynorynaelian forest. Even Vereda's cherished hydrogardens had vanished.
Once everything had been removed from the ship, only the metal skeleton that had once been a part of the Enorian flagship remained in memory of the great ship that had once dominated the galaxies around the Great Cluster. Selerael had used her telekinetic power and energy to blow the remaining interior apart unti
l nothing but the barest remnant of infrastructure remained. Then she buried the unusable fragments under the sands, next to the few remains of Enlil and Sesylendae that had already been interred.
The settlement by the shores of the lake thrived, though only a few thousand of the crew had remained by Selesta, forsaking it to the lure of the great city Ariyal-synai. After a year had passed, the survivors' story of the strange woman who had brought them from their home world spread among the inhabitants of Narana, though, like the Enorian survivors of Lexcar, the black hole Kairek seemed to have moderately dimmed their memories of their former lives. With her mental abilities, Selerael had helped them to adopt the way of life of their new home as she had so often before.
A generation would pass before their children grew to adulthood, and the older generations themselves never really learned to speak the language of Narana, similar and yet different from their own. But from the newcomers, a few words entered the Narana language. The influence of English, Russian, French, Japanese, German, Norwegian, Chinese, and the other Earth languages found its way into the language through the descendants from Earth; most noticeably, the human names endured, for the people of Narana had gone by only one name before the coming of the Ferai-lunei–their brothers from the sky.
The confused histories of the many newcomers, however, did not survive the language barrier very well. So many stories were told and repeated that in time the accounts mingled, and after many generations, were to be remembered only in children's stories.
But for a time, rumor of the former leader Selerael flourished, and the city of Ariyal-synai sent word that they wished the leader of Selesta to become the leader of all people. Yet Selerael declined, insisting that her people had not intended to disrupt the Narana way of life. The inhabitants reluctantly accepted her refusal but were determined to honor their new brothers and sisters.
Their common belief, though its origins were lost to history, was that the Naranans had come to their world in a similar way. Their ancestors had told the tale eons ago of their journey, and their descendants had long awaited the arrival of their brothers and sisters, lost in the galaxy. The Naranans thought that their own future would include a flight to the moon Nanshe, that the moment neared when they would reach out and seize it for their own, and a time would come when the entire race would again reclaim the stars.
For now, they made a gesture to honor the newcomers, and their leader. Sobrin had told them that when they had found this world, it had reminded the leader of her ancient home.
The Naranans wanted to rename their world after the great leader's land, but no one had been sure what it had been called. So the Naranans chose the name of the settlement where she lived and renamed their world S'enor-inn-ayel.
* * * * *
Ah, the open air! The freedom! The abundant beauty that knew no ends, no bounds, and lived here under the open sky! Adam and the others who had spent their entire lives in Selesta reveled in it. Firien seemed as familiar as the Seynorynaelian forest, but there was almost no end to it, as there had been no end to the stars throughout his life. Here, he dwelt between both worlds, able to glimpse a thousand stars he had passed while firmly rooted in the solid earth beneath his feet.
After a few years, he carved out a place for himself within the land itself, a dwelling on the outskirts of the settlement, by the northern shores of the lake, beyond the weather-safe ring. His mother often visited, but lately she had begun to disappear for brief periods of time without word to anyone. The colonizer, his friend, also visited, but the Enorian continued to avoid his questions of Enor's past and its achievements. “The more answers I give you, the more questions you’ll ask,” the colonizer always replied, ending the matter. Nor would he speak on the subject to Selerael when she accompanied Adam on visits to the colonizer's home. Enor’s legacy had to fade–or there might be consequences to pay.
* * * * *
“You’re happy here, Adam?” Selerael asked one evening, having made the journey north from Firien City to visit her son.
Adam nodded, looking out on the dark waters.
“I’ve found home.” He said, with more feeling than he intended.
“Home, Adam? Are you certain this is what you want?” She asked, drawing alongside him.
“Yes, mother,” he laughed. “This is home. I see it, I feel it. You don’t need to worry about me–I know you’ll leave soon.”
“As long as I know that this is what you want.”
He laughed. “Never certain of who I was, where I was going, or where I truly belonged. But, mother, I don’t need an answer for all of the questions any more. I’ve found contentment at last.”
He put an arm around her and held her near, wishing she could do the same, knowing that she could not.
* * * * *
I don’t want to go, but now, now I must, Selerael thought.
Adam and Falia had been married. Selerael tried not to feel out of place, tried not to feel that her son didn’t need her any more because he had Falia. She knew that her son would always need her as she would need him, but both of them knew that Selerael had to leave. Like it or not, they had both more or less accepted that Selerael had a greater destiny yet to fulfill; as resentful she might have been about her duty, Selerael took care never to show it. And she managed to muster only happiness for her son on this, his wedding day.
At the same time, she had mixed feelings about it, about the necessities of life that pushed everyone further away from whatever it was that people really wanted to do.
It seemed not so very long ago to Selerael that the colonizer's daughter had grown to adulthood, when Falia’s Enorian heritage had begun to make itself known; time had little effect upon Falia’s youth. The guests saw a woman young in form and in heart, but not in experience or in years.
Falia and Adam had formed a slow attachment only after half a human lifetime. His stories of travels across the galaxies had always fascinated her and the other young children; as she grew older, they had for a short time drifted apart, before Adam had ever developed any partial feelings towards her. For a time, Falia had gone off to the Kilkoran Sea but returned several years later to Firien. Then, some time after she had returned, Adam found her image and conversation gradually taking hold in his most serious thoughts.
Nevertheless, when Adam realized he cared for Falia, he had pursued her with a determination that didn’t fail to kindle her heart; Adam’s love for Falia had nothing to do with his past regrets and more with a clear understanding that he couldn’t live his life without her.
For one thing, she understood him better than anyone else could. Adam’s companions from the time when Selesta crashed to Seynorynael had grown old. Their children now had families of their own. Falia had also begun to understand what it was to be a living anachronism, as had all of the half-Enorian children. Only two now remained, yet Falia was the youngest, and perhaps the last.
The colonizer seemed pleased that Falia and Adam had fallen in love. His own wife had passed on, and he had feared he might not live to see Falia settle into another life. His own time had nearly reached its end.
Selerael was immersed in thought as Adam approached her, so much that she did not notice his presence.
Mother, am I destined to destroy the Seynorynaelian Empire–an empire yet to be born? Or–or will I fail, as so many others have before me? She wondered, leaning against the balcony of the colonizer's home where the wedding had taken place. Her eyes reflected the bright lights of the evening sky. She heard laughter from below, where friends who had come to the ceremony continued to dance and celebrate.
Does the singularity truly exist? Or was it no more than a symbol? A symbol of knowledge, or truth, or understanding, or the will to survive?? Where had the legend of the singularity come from?
And can I–can I destroy the time-loop if I must when the time comes?
r /> "What troubles you, Selerael?" The colonizer suddenly interrupted her thoughts. She half-turned to watch him, but he approached and stood with her at the balcony, smiling benevolently at the pair below, his daughter and Selerael's son.
"Your destiny approaches," he said softly, his eyes unwavering but sad.
“Yes, I feel it catching up with me." Selerael lowered her head to rest her chin on the balcony. She understood that he would also be leaving.
"Both of us must let go of the present and move on," she added.
"Yes.”
“I want to stay here.”
“I know, child.”
“There are so many things I don’t understand. Things that make no sense to me.”
“Selerael, why do you still wish to maintain that time must always be linear?" He asked, shaking his head, seeing that she still questioned so many things, just like a human being, as though she didn’t accept that she wasn’t one of them. "There is no real end and no beginning, even though your own perspective forces you to believe this. The universe moves on and begins again. There is only Time and Matter, which need each other to exist.”
“I–know that.”
“Yes, I see your thoughts. Time does betray us all in this dimension in taking life from our bodies. Does it not seem fitting that it must make its own amends in another, and be a friend to us there? You still doubt, clinging only to logic, to your rigid beliefs concerning scientific impossibility. The universe ends and is reborn in a circle–it ends again and returns to the same beginning–why do you not suppose that smaller loops exist in the fabric of space-time outside what we recognize as the normal flow of forward time? Do you deny what you have learned because they have no origin or end known to you? Mass and energy are the same–where one disappears, another is born. Mini-singularities and centipede holes permeate time and space–even control the lives of human beings–