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Page 21.
14. On The Run
 Jared managed to slip out of the assembly hall amid a group of police in riot gear. He made his way to an island of safety, where police were marshaling ground vehicles. Air cars came and went in a chatter of engines, flashing of lights, rushing of wind. Riot squads hastily gathered and formed ranks on the corners.
Jared knew his first duty was to be with Mbe at Center House. The police were busy and distracted. He was not even a delegate, but a simple staffer. He was unable to cage a ride, so he began jogging—his greatest skill in this universe, even greater than having sex with Lyxa.
The streets grew quieter as he put distance between himself and the seats of government. Behind him lay the Starmeer and Olympia House, Mbe’s office building as Exterior President. Not far away, still under the Dome, hulked the Interior Presidency, where Mbe also now held sway; or was ‘ruled’ the better term now?
Jared ran with purposeful strides, washed in cold and emptiness. The new millennium was a few hours old, and the world was going to hell. Cosmopolis—City of the Universe! It was starting to look like a hollow anthem.
Jared rested against a door frame. He wasn’t winded, but knew to conserve energy. He slid down and sat on the door step and folded his hands between his knees and thought, where have all my dreams gone? He thought, people’s lives are the mutation of their childhood dreams.
Why do I think in terms of millennia? Is death what they say it is? Is it peace and rest? What is life? Once, long ago, he had dreamed of moving through empty space at great speed, an Astral, a space sailor. But now I have a vastness and emptiness, and it is inside me, and it hurts. Is Ankhfire the answer? Is it blood, hot and unthinking, a death in itself?
No, he thought. No. This city was built by men greater than men. Greater than themselves. Curious.
He had filled himself with an empty dream, and when the dream disappeared, the emptiness remained.
He sat in the doorway and the doorway was the mouth of a dragon, stretched into a breathless O that might snap shut at any moment. Jared sat gingerly on the flat brown teeth-steps. What if there was a great war now. The new-millennium people would be dead.
The flat teeth were especially made to grind against each other. Jared tasted dread. If it happened, neither he nor any other human being would be left alive. Quasar bombs would rip the fabric of the galaxy asunder. Nothing would be left. The huge dragon loomed evilly in the night, glowering in the bleach-blue undertone of untruth of the dark sky.
Night was full of strange winds. Cold air blew out of interstellar space, cold of the parsecs and light years, cold of the stars and oceanic dust clouds.
Jared rose, looking upward. There were the stars, still. The horror of the Assembly Hall was passed, and there were the stars still.
A wind chilled his bones, a wind derived from no earthly source, a wind shallower than life, and for an instant Jared relived that childhood dream on the breast of the mind-sweeping cold: A vision of being an Astral, of moving through space at great speeds, of living in a small cabin alone in infinity, with the noises of soft machinery, with the light of the stars in the dark cabin otherwise lit only by a dim red transit light.
Instead, reality. He walked.
The days of the Academy of the Stars had been days of pomp and splendor…marching through alien cities under wild and stranger suns…maneuvers in the fields where grew all the breath and warmth of alien life. Lethe, Lethe, lost deep amid the star fields of denial.
Green, green, were the fields and forests of wonderful Lethe.
The days as a student in the Old City had been warm and hopeful. They had marched and laughed. Nothing like sunshine on a concrete expanse rippling with flags and white uniforms. There had been the eternal present of pompous military and civilian honors passing between gloved hands on the steps of this or that immense building.
Night was black and forbidding. The Olympia House stood in to the heavens, shrouding everything with its shadows, Olympia House of the prisoners; and gladiators not so long ago, and fights to the death.
Jared paused before a sign, Olympia House. The words were beaten faded into bronze. He touched the icy metal, ages old and black and eroded.
Dreams gone, here was the raw, green, ageless face of time on an empty street where the wind blew a piece of paper along the gutter and somewhere a pauper skulked near a trashcan unmindful of death and here and there a cat crossed the silent street.
Lowering his head the slightest bit as though he were diving into the sea, he pushed the door open and walked in. This was the Olympia House. Here he had once trained for the great sports that Mercury City had to win. The toughening given him here had put the victory Torch in his hand and sent him off over the Arch of triumph, running, the winner, for a little while a great name. He walked, and as he walked, he was walking in the past. He walked by silent, dark arenas, by gymnasia that smelled in their black, fathomless, whispering immensity of sweat and sawdust. Here, all was stone and metal and beaten leather.
Passing the pens, he heard the clangor of metal on metal, but he didn’t look inside because those had to be robots. Humans had gone out of vogue. Robots were the craze, because they hit harder and they smoked and burned and roared nicely while killing each other.
He stopped before a door that said No Admittance but his mind wasn’t on the door, it was on that day of all days when, during the galaxy-bright Mercurian night, he had run the Arch. Zillions had cheered his victory run from below, and the sterling stars had beamed down their unguessable messages.
Metal rang on metal.
He opened the forbidden door and stood within Olympia House.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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