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Page 17.
10. Death
 Now Jared must really hurry to reach Cyrus Mbe at the Starmeer or UGO.
The street was empty, more so than usual—almost scary, and he stepped back in bewilderment for a second—until he remembered the tradition: At midnight of the old year, streets must be empty, because now comes Death, to take away the old year and let in the new. Anyone caught on the streets between midnight and dawn of the year’s first day would be struck dead. That was the ancient superstition.
Now all was still. Jared walked as though he were in a dream. Loosening his coat because sweat plastered his hair and shirt, he let his feet walk of their own accord. “I was a child once,” he said to the ghosts around him. The cobblestones, flattened by long use, sounded hollow and muffled under his boots. Not a soul anywhere in the streets.
Death, with his scythe and his moldy robes, once frightened him. I was a child once. He had stood before a fence and watched a ship laden with ether food for the Voranniair-5 godpeople take off. He forgot where he had seen that. He had wanted so, so much to become one of the starmen. He had dreamed of shooting through a grand net of stars, in command of a great, silent vessel.
As in a dream, the cockpit lights would flicker and flash silently, and quiet radio traffic would crackle with routine self-assurance. He would fly among the stars, touching on planets here and there, maybe merging his dreams with those of beautiful, angelic humanoids making love amid alien fields.
He would sit on his shipmaster’s throne in the middle of the command module. Below him would be officers and crew of all ranks, milling about in orderly confusion, stern-quiet, while running a starship. He would let his throne rise high up, and all around him would be only a transparent bubble, and all he would see would be stars. There would be a bath of stars. Starbath. Stars and stars and stars, like a vast ocean. He would travel so fast that he would be bucking among the waves, and the stars would be like molecules, so tiny: But, in reality, suns, mighty, thundering suns. Waves would be hundreds of millions of light years high. There would be no measuring the might of a sea that could slap together such waves, but which were negligible compared to the depths of that fathomless, radio-torn sea.
Even more, though, he dreamed of being alone with the stars. He saw himself in a tiny ship hurtling among the galaxies. In his vision, he was seated alone in a command chair, looking at a window filled with stars. Inside the ship was only contented, quiet gloom. He saw soft buzzing and clicking of machinery, like music. He saw a red light blinking slowly, steadily, in a corner. Starshine, soft and dreamlike, touched random shimmering metal, softening surfaces to make them like rippled cloth. Starlight would shed not a light but a soft glow through the dark. That red light would seem distant and shrouded in fog.
He had never, though, been able to figure out just what sort of ship he had imagined. It seemed almost to be an extension of his very body. The red light was like life, almost, he wasn’t sure: It blinked slowly, and in the symphony of silences it had a deep, probing quality, like the insistent booming of a foghorn over a mist-shrouded sea. It seemed to sing of something invisible, something reaching like an interminable plumb line, and, again, like a cork rising forever and fast, from the depths of the subconscious to the air and the surface of the mind.
He snapped out of his reverie as he approached a street corner ahead.
The side street opened up into the wide emptiness of Olympic Avenue. The corner was close at hand, and Jared grew apprehensive; childish, but true.
Trash lay scattered and windblown on Olympic Avenue. This nameless street emptying on to the galaxy’s Sacra Via—its sacred way or capital street—was small. Weathered wall-masses leaned around it imposingly. Austere arches crossed and recrossed far overhead in the narrow chasm. Jared left the side street and stepped out onto the deathly still expanse of the avenue.
A fifteen minute walk ahead, he could see the broad, low portal where you entered the bubble dome. Olympic Avenue stretched through that portal, and ran on and on toward the ever-surrounding sea. Looking the other way an equal distance on the Avenue, he saw the park. He began walking. At the end of Olympic Avenue was a line of trees, where the periphery of the park began.
A vague childhood horror at his back, he mounted the curb and walked in the win between two tree giants. When religions were strong, people had been killed for doing what he was doing. “This is today, in the modern world,” he said, without conviction, looking at the broad, grassy plain surrounded by distant, hulking forest masses. No longer was there a black army in the forest, to come out and kill people, as legend said happened once during the early kingdom, by chance on a New Year’s night. That was where the legend, and the tradition, had come from, but this was today. Today the army wore white, and flew among the stars.
Slowly, Jared walked over the grass. He would be glad to reach the under rail, which would take him right to the Assembly Hall. Quickening his step, he thought he could see the dry, white lights of the station among the trees.
He stopped dead in his tracks because someone was standing in the path of the light, someone standing very still and swaying softly from side to side. In the act of stopping, Jared stumbled over something. He looked down, and it was a bit of broken wood. Strewn all around him lay the wreckage of the monstrous feast. Jared spotted one of the immense nymphs, now deflated, sickle-slashed, flattened on the ground under the trash and broken chairs. There was a heavy stench of spilt wine. It rose to Jared’s head, and, in a convulsive wave of fear, he stared at Death.
Death, small and bony, poked about in the scattered trash. His garments blew in the wind, and his scythe moved like a dark, slow pendulum. Jared was no longer sweating; the sweat had chilled and grew icy on his back and around his neck.
Death was there. Night light played around his feet like an aqueous current, pool of star flakes. Death moved about the deserted platform where Father Mercury had roared and slapped his thighs. A soft wind stirred his cold, mildew robes the way the wind stirs old curtains in and out of an open window.
Jared stepped past, remembering that he must make his appearance at the Assembly Hall. But he couldn’t take his eyes off Death. He thought of his lover, the princess. Lyxa would be oblivious by now. Opium hit her mind, rising up, tingling in a brief wave of exhilaration, and then there was peace. Dreams came. Not so for Jared, who sought action rather than escape.
The sky was filled with moving shapes: Ferries, liners, warships, barges of gas and metal…Stars, planets, space vessels docked in the bathing brilliance of stationary-orbiting platforms. Life went on, outside the mythology of death and rebirth.
The collective light of heaven blended into a soft gas enshrouding all objects salient over the darkness in a vague, ethereal light. Death glowed over of the darkness, a tiny scary form apart from both the dark earth and the light-filled sky.
Jared and Death stared at each other, in just one threshold moment between the old and the new. They stood suspended in time, between earth and sky. Jared could not, did not want to see the face, but stared at the bony hands that held the sickle. Probably some alien hired by the Recreation Committee. Jared gave a nervous wave of the hand, backing away. Then he wheeled and jogged to the subway, not to be late for the Assembly.
This evening, he’d seen Lyxa, and he’d seen death. He wasn’t sure which was scarier—or more real.
He passed through crowds of protesters outside the great hall. People were kept apart by police, who could barely restrain the fanatical Ankh mobs on one side, partisans of the Raskia federation on another side, and beyond them supporters of traditional democratic values that seemed to be vacuumed up by the hate and heat of lunatics seeking brutality in their demagogues, easy answers, quick fixes, hot talk, lies, and of course more violence. Simple, stupid people understood nothing about checks and balances. They comprehended nothing about tolerance or multiplicity. They only understood taking up cudgels and following a strong, brutal leader, a liar and a megalomaniac, a malignant narcissist, who had the gift of being a radio to communicate persuasively with their inner ox.
Jared commandeered a police escort, and entered the hall. There, he found a confrontation in progress that was yet more frightening, as his superior, President Cyrus Mbe, struggled to face down his opponents in the Starmeer.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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