The Big Dark Sky (96)

Asher remains sitting with his back against the tree, facing the lake, so that he sees the three slow pulses of blue light that come from those depths, perhaps from the bottom, hundreds of feet below the surface. After the third bright throb, the darkness swells once more within the water. A new voice speaks to Asher, and he knows this one, too. Xanthus Toller, founder of the Restoration Movement, declares, “Humankind enslaves the planet itself, steals its bounty, gouges and claws and rips at it for minerals, bores ruthlessly into its substance for the evil that is oil, steals the light of the sun and the strength of the wind to sustain cities that are cesspools of violence, greed, and lust. Humanity is a voracious, billion-headed hydra of hatred. This faction hates that faction, while that one hates this one even more virulently. Humanity once lived by the billions on Mars, by many millions on the moon, and you see what ruin was brought to those worlds, which are now barren, airless, and bleak. The only hope for Earth is that we smother our babies, breed without seed, and wither away.”

Now the presence spoke in the throaty, seductive voice of a famous actress who championed the rights of rivers and mountains, of meadows and forests, of fishes and finches, of vipers and viruses. “Asher Optime, you and I dream of the day when this despoiled world is once more pristine park land, a place free of competition and greed. We’ve lived with the melancholy prospect that our vision can’t be fulfilled for a century or two, or even longer. But I am here to tell you that the cure for the plague that is humanity will begin tonight. Three months from now, perhaps sooner, not one of us will remain in even the most remote of caves or secret lairs. We will have been completely purged from Earth, and it will begin its healing.”

With that speech, the presence is finished with words. Without allowing him to move an inch, it takes Asher on a psychic journey out of the orchard, plunges him into the lake, pulls him down and down through hundreds of feet of water, carries the essence of him through another two hundred feet of sediment, into the blue realm of the ship that, millennia earlier, shaped the lake and shattered the bedrock into which it nestled to await the maturation of humankind and the day when contact would not traumatize the species and be most advantageous to the makers of the ship. He is spun through a history of the immense vessel and the civilization that built it, information riddling through him like fierce bursts of cosmic radiation. He whirls and whips and rollicks through a midway of biological and technological marvels beyond anything that the most eccentric futurists on Earth have ever imagined, and though the ride is exhilarating, it’s also terrifying. This civilization, thriving in a galaxy far from Earth, is a carnival of delights and horrors, the kind of Bradburyian shadow show that pitches its tents in a burg like Green Town and doesn’t leave until it takes a satisfying number of the locals’ souls with it. At times, Asher Optime tries without success to scream, not as a man on a roller coaster might cry out, but as a man falling into the gears of a gigantic machine that will grind his bones to meal and his flesh to paste.

Abruptly, he is in his body again, in the orchard, his back against the apple tree, shaking and shaken, not because of the chill in the air, but because he has seen that the power of the ship under the lake can to a large extent obliterate civilization overnight and that, after only a few months of post-Armageddon mop-up, no man or woman or child will remain to remember that the species had ever existed. This is what Asher wants, what he believes this wounded planet needs. To prove his unwavering support for the Restoration, he castrated himself and parted ways with Xanthus Toller and settled in Zipporah and began to stock the testamentary necropolis. But he never thought that such an ambitious genocide could be accomplished so quickly! He thought he’d have time to finish his manifesto, which is still hundreds of pages from completion, time to gather around him admiring and committed apostles who would assist him in building a movement far bigger than what Toller has achieved. He expected to be widely known for the sacrifice he has made, for the genius of his writing, for his leadership skills, for his selfless service to the planet. He imagined that, if fortune smiled on him, he might live long enough to see billions perish from viruses designed in labs, famines cunningly engineered, and other calculated causes, until the day came when his apostles poisoned themselves and he stood alone in the world. He yearns to be the last on Earth, to be the one whose manifesto argues more cogently than any other that life has no meaning, to stand on a hill under the big dark sky, dreaming of a distant time, maybe a billion years hence, when the stars will be extinguished and the universe will be cold in every corner—but not as soon as this Thanksgiving!

This alien, damn it, this fucking undocumented extraterrestrial immigrant, in its foolish haste to annihilate humanity, is stealing from Asher Optime all the glory of his crusade. This is so unfair. For all its transgressions, wicked humanity must suffer a long and horrific ordeal, the slow-motion collapse of civilization, decades of disease and hunger and violence, as penance for despoiling the planet. It is Asher’s destiny to stand witness to that atonement. He will not be a mere cog in a genocide machine, will not be used as a tool, when it is his right to be the one who uses others.

He gets to his feet, though not of his own volition. He rises jerkily, as if he is a marionette controlled by a puppeteer. He tries to cry out in rage and rebellion, but he is not permitted a voice at this time.

The presence speaks within Asher’s head again. “What a grievous disappointment you are. Day by day, as I shared your every thought, you convinced me of the rightness of your cause, confirmed what I have felt since monitoring the native tribes as they enslaved and killed one another across the millennia, as the Europeans arrived with better weapons. You made me see the virtue of your kind’s extinction. But more than that, much more, you made me yearn for the time when the sky is dark and the universe cold from end to end. I joined you as your first apostle, terminating the program that would have allowed the Awakening over which I had control, freeing myself from the interdicts that limited my authority. But now it’s clear that your crusade is not about serving the planet or bringing a miscreated universe to an end. Instead, it’s about your ambition, your pride, your ego, your sadism. But of course why shouldn’t that be the case? You are, after all, just a human being. It is left to me to do what must be done expeditiously, to start the end of all things that your manifesto so eloquently justifies.”