* * * *
Directly below Sabrina was a gargantuan ball of shining gas, collapsing in on itself and erupting outwards with a burst of color. The blast enveloped her with all the rush of energy yet none of the disintegrating heat.
All that surrounded her, all that blustered in a stellar sandstorm as if passing through her atoms, was a wave of various elements as she had never seen them before. It seemed to literally take her breath away.
A hand glowed on Sabrina’s shoulder.
“Glorious, isn’t it?”
The hand was joined by a humanoid figure that appeared like a section of the stardust flying into a distinct position bit by bit, as if camouflaged. It had no face, yet, androgynous as it was, its shape was as perfectly beautiful as any body could be non-sexually. It was suspended in a Jesus pose, given the absent gravity.
“It’s not real,” she said when her voice finally returned. “Neither are you.”
“It – and I – can be as real as you want them to be. If that’s what makes beauty true for you, then so be it.” Her temperature skyrocketed for a lightning flash’s time.
Sabrina cursed up a storm.
“You see my point. You’ll never have total reality when you wanna see the process that gives birth to the solar systems themselves. Fact is stranger than fiction, but it’s also more depressing.” The last of the star-stuff blew away, sticking it to physics. Now Marshall was a mostly black entity spattered with some red, yellow, white, blue, and orange, flying around behind Sabrina. She turned to see him outlined against a gas giant close enough to monopolize her whole field of vision.
“Why do you want me to see true beauty? Couldn’t you keep me occupied as easily with some kinda torture, some inferno?”
“I just did, for a split second. Those lights are nature’s levels of hell. But if you’d prefer something like this …”
They warped onto a planet orbiting the same star as the first one. A volcano, prevailing her view of the surface, vomited lava in a spanning Independence Day sparkler against a backdrop of sulfuric acid clouds. The CO2-dominated air cooked her skin until her cry of pain earned Marshall’s pity.
“This is Venus.”
The translucent being nodded, resting his arm on Sabrina’s shoulder as she recovered. “I fear this is precisely what Earth is destined to become. The runaway greenhouse effect evaporates the oceans and bakes whatever life hasn’t been polluted to death.”
“It can’t,” she said as they blinked over to a clearing in a forest whose canopy let only the slightest specks of sunlight reach the ground. “I won’t let it!”
“Is that right?” Marshall sat cross-legged, and though he had no eyes, his gaze had the same soul-penetrating effect a human look tends to have on a liar. Soon, however, he relaxed. “Maybe you will honor that promise. If so, it’s a wonderful ambition – the only one that could drive me to these drastic measures.”
He read her puzzled look. “Look around you, Sabrina. It’s soothing, pure. I dare say, divine. Not technology, but its human masters, have ravaged it. We did not learn. We did not listen. We did not exercise control over our silicon servants, and in a spiritual sense, we came to serve them. Do you see where I’m taking this?”
“Yes,” Sabrina breathed.
“They call people like us, people who dare to challenge humanity’s dominion over what nature has created equal to us – they say we’re romantics. Anti-progressives. Loons, at best.” He whisked them to a mountaintop enshrouded in snow, upon beholding which Sabrina almost couldn’t breathe in her awe. “And they just might be right. But that doesn’t make our vision any less profound.”
So why are you ravaging the human factor of nature with your nanotech? she thought, but the tranquility of it all silenced her. Besides, she had a plan. No way was he going to subdue her spirit.
“This is why I’m not leaving you to roast indefinitely on Venus. If I did that, we’d both lose. I wouldn’t have someone to help me stop this planet from killing itself. Uriah’s a lost cause, and the people you lived with on the moon are so out of touch with the cosmic perspective of things, I couldn’t rescue their minds if I tried. You have a connection to the natural order that even I lack.”
“Yes, er, about that … Marshall, do you mind me asking if you have a brain?”
He chuckled as the summit turned into a beach, the chill into sunbeams. “Well, you sure do! Yes, I have surrendered my physical body for the second time in my life, but I still live on. That’s why your little peace treaty wasn’t much help.”
“Oh.” She looked down in disappointment, seeing how her hair and clothing had changed to fit the scenery. Good.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that, well, I wanted to …” Sabrina faced the ocean-blue specter with the most convincing look of longing she could muster. “Marshall, it’s just so sad that you’ve never known true love with a human. I know about Jane. She sounds magnificent, but can she ever replace a person?”
He sat speechless for a while. “I have known love. Unconditional love, even. That’s the kind of love you can only find in a family. But I’m still a human in mind, in the only sense that matters, and humans are frustratingly stupid creatures. We think we’ll get the most happiness from relationships with people we can least trust – ‘lovers.’ And we’re right. We just don’t seem to get as many endorphins as we should from those who really will love us forever.” He started to transport them again.
“No, don’t,” she begged. “Can we stay here?”
Marshall shook his head. In a second they were in a car at about the same hour of night as they were in reality. Rain poured with unparalleled intensity. They were clogged in traffic that remained stationary as far as the eye could see both ways, at least in the brief moments the windshield wipers relieved them of the blindness to the outside. Sabrina had a throbbing headache, and the vehicle smelled like a messed diaper, probably because there was a shrieking baby in the back seat.
“We’d most likely never have to live through this,” said Marshall from the passenger seat, “but if we did, would you love me here as much as if we were both looking at a glistening sea?”
Well played. She took her hands off her skull to face him. “Yes.”
“You’re lying, but that’s okay. I didn’t expect you not to. That’s why I made Jane. She can give me the best of both kinds of love, not despite her inhumanity, but because of it.”
There were so many things she could tell him. That he was a coward, that he missed the whole point of trust by putting it in someone who couldn’t make free choices, that by helping Uriah Jane had betrayed him anyway, that the joy of love was in giving it rather than receiving it.
But prudence took over. “I may be lying now, but if you give it enough time, I could say yes honestly. That’s only if you’re willing to do the same.”
“Oh, I am, believe me.” Now Sabrina found herself in the same car, but it was broken down and stranded on the side of a dusty road. Rolling down the windows didn’t help make the triple-digit Fahrenheit temperature any more bearable. She pined for water, but it existed only inside her and in her sweat. The infant was asleep, which was only as comforting as she imagined it to be.
“If you are, then tell me, can you feel this? Are you suffering with me?”
“I guess you’ll just have to believe me when I say I am. If you don’t, then you’re just proving my point.”
She looked at him lazily, thinking. “I’ll trust you if you show me the body that’s doing the suffering. Right now you’re like a ghost.”
He showed it, and she embraced it.