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  And what became of him? What became of the frightened child, Papa?

  He fled. Fled his home. Fled his memories. Fled so deeply within his mind, walling off the fear of the dragons such savage ones are who had come and slain his parents. He fled the Black Dragon whose name was Goth. Of the Goths. Whose home was the endless road called the stars. He fled so completely that in time even he forgot he was running, though he lived a long time and crossed the galaxy from one end to its other.

  And does he run, Papa? Does he always run from the dragon called Goth?

  He does, child… until one day he doesn’t.

  And then the student was falling. And if all that has happened before in the strange and bizarre tale wasn’t insane enough… then this part is the part that makes no sense to the rational mind. Because that’s where we’ve come to. To the part that makes no sense, particularly if you’re not insane.

  The void became real and opened out into reality folding in on nothingness.

  And a moment after that the student was vomited back out into reality, into spacetime, once more. Into some “other” place. Some “other” when. Whether it was real, or just a different reality, or something other, was not known.

  When he came to he was halfway up the pyramid at Giza. Egypt. The dark sprawl of Cairo in the distance, lightless save for the cook fires. And it could have been any time in the hundreds and even thousands of years that existed before electricity. But the ruined flying wing Airbus Luxliner that lay in the sand, half buried, told the student who’d once been a child of the post-apocalypse, that he’d arrived in the years after the Exodus, that this was some time he knew from his own past.

  Much of the Middle East had gone up in nuclear fire during those last years before the Brights had boarded their ships and hauled themselves up and away from Earth as if out of sheer embarrassment for the state of their civilization. He’d arrived in the years after that. And most likely before the discovery of the hyperdrive.

  When the lawless really ruled the world, and only small groups tried to hold the world together, tried to put out the fires by restarting civilization through farming and research. When the savage bands fanned the flames by burning down and looting the little that was left in the wake of the global destruction the Brights had fled.

  The ruined flying wing scramjet was proof of that. Some desperate pilot, avionics lost due to high-altitude EMP, had dead-sticked it into the sands between the ancient monuments and the burning city Cairo.

  He’d seen such sights before, in and around Los Angeles, and all along the other places of Earth where he’d spent but a small part of his long existence. He’d seen wreckage that would be salvaged for little more than metal, to house the survivors who would most likely spend the rest of their lives living near the wreck where they’d only been accidentally stranded by the happenstance of someone needing to annihilate someone else on that particular day at the end of the world.

  The pyramids of Earth were like the pyramids of the Ancients. Just like the pyramids they’d found on all the worlds hyperspeed had sent them to. That long-ago memory of the giant ship, an arc ship, the Moirai, on fire and burning down all around him surfaced like some ancient leviathan within the seas of his memories. And the memory showed him a dark figure, a wanderer of the stars, entering the un-enterable pyramid while the Lexington raced to get beyond the Moirai’s destruction. He remembered seeing the face of the pyramid on the curving plain of the main hab, folding in brick by brick… like a gateway to other places opening into the galaxy.

  Like a gateway into the void.

  And the Way of the Void was like a path between all the “other” places.

  In time the student stumbled down the stony face of the ancient Eygptian pyramid, bloody and cut, making the soft still warm sands below. When he passed the wreck of the flying winged airliner he could tell, by the pale moonlight, that it had long ago been abandoned. But not so long ago, as the remains of looted suitcases still lay strung out along the shifting sands like the flotsam of some wrecked ship. And nearby were the bones of those who had not survived the crash, or the looting that came after.

  In Cairo no one paid attention to his strange rags. Strange rags from the future. Rags ruined by a jungle, and a desert, and the many years in the temple. In a future still yet to come.

  In Cairo, after the world was ruined, everyone is in rags. New clothing hadn’t been manufactured in two years. Or ten years.

  “Eleven years since they left,” he was told by a street merchant in a crowded alley that passed for the bazaar. A bazaar that sold clean water. Cans of food not rotted or ruined by radiation. And of course weapons.

  The toothless man nodded at him and offered to sell him some water that hadn’t passed the purifications tests. At a discount, of course.

  Eleven years after the Exodus is the Now of When.

  Which meant that the pyramids that were like gates in the Way of the Void had brought him back in time. Back to Earth, before the whole mess began. Which was a strange statement to make, seeing exactly the mess Earth was in.

  So, asked that other voice inside him. What “mess” do you mean exactly?

  The mess of the Savages?

  The mess the Galactic Republic will become?

  The mess of your wasted life seeking a power that intoxicated you long ago?

  But the student was thinking about none of those things. He was thinking about his parents.

  He didn’t nail down an exact date, though he asked many refugees and people who swore their smartphones still worked, he didn’t know if they were still alive until he managed to force his way onto the UN air base beyond Cairo. For a moment, being back on Earth, it was easy to think that nothing, none of it, not even the hyperdrive, had ever happened. Or rather, would ever happen. But when he dominated the will of the gate guards, and the officer checking papers at the refugee entrance, he knew it had all happened. Especially the temple, where the Master had trained him to do such things as dominate the wills of the weak with a simple trick of forced persuasion.

  The Lesson of Will, it had been called.

  “I’ll need to pass.”

  “Of course you will,” said the UN refugee officer.

  “I’ll need a new set of maximum clearance travel papers and a QR code for travel… direct to LA.”

  “You’ll need travel and QR codes direct for the Los Angeles Reclamation Zone,” mumbled the officer, unaware he was even saying such things. Knowing only that it was his desire to make such things happen as soon as possible.

  “And after I’m gone,” the student leaned close and whispered in the feeble-minded man’s ear, “you’ll forget you ever saw me. You’ll forget everything about me.”

  “I will forget everything about you.”

  Twelve hours later he was on a military flight across the Atlantic. It wasn’t direct to Los Angeles, but if the date was right he still had time. Time to reach LA. Time to stop his parents from being murdered. Time enough to change everything that would ever happen.

  His parents would live. He’d nuke every Savage ship, especially the Moirai, on sight. He knew these future events would happen, because he’d lived through them already—he knew where the Savages would set up their secret bases during the war. He would know their every move. And he wouldn’t let the Republic get away from him this time. He would stop all its foolishness. Prevent it from navel-gazing itself to death.

  For a moment, lying in the cargo net seat wearing a UN uniform, he tried to run through the implications of what would happen if he changed the past. If he rescued his parents from their fate, and somehow rescued himself from his own.

  What other things would he change?

  And what would happen if he did?

  Don’t ask such things, he told himself when his mind almost came unraveled as it considered the sheer volume of possibilities. Just do it. D
o it because you’ve been offered the chance to do it. And because you’ve seen the future and it’s not so great. And if there’s a chance to change things on your own, then maybe you don’t need the powers of the Temple of Morghul, maybe you just need a do-over.

  Maybe there’s another way.

  Part Three

  The Last Casualty of Knowledge…

  Is Everything You Once Were

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Casper found himself stumbling away from that high valley where the dead monster now lay among the tall grass. He’d gone forward to stare at the dead beast, his own chest heaving, fear coursing through him like a rushing river, to stand in awe of the dead behemoth. But when he’d turned back to look at the little creature called Urmo, the tiny beast that had saved him from being stomped to death or rent into a million pieces… Urmo was gone.

  Instead there was only the whiskbroom sound of the tall grass and the distant flutter and hush of the salty breeze through the high forest that surrounded the clearing.

  He climbed up onto a ridge, from which he could see down onto the desert plateau he’d crossed in the days and weeks before. It seemed such a vast and wide thing he wondered how he’d ever done it. How they’d ever done it.

  Everything, the entire world on which he’d left the galaxy to reach, was smothered in a deep quiet.

  He was suddenly afraid. Afraid not that there might be more of these same monsters in the forest all around, but afraid of the one called Urmo. The tiny creature he’d found in that jungle of his own insanity, now lost beyond the desert he stared down into. A creature who’d followed him across those seemingly endless sands, all the time unconsidered beyond being a minor nuisance. The same creature that had brought down the most fearsome alien—no, monster. Little Urmo had brought it down with those same powers Casper had witnessed all those years ago aboard the doomed Moirai. Powers he’d searched the galaxy for.

  Just like the prophetesses.

  Just like the Dark Wanderer.

  After the Moirai disintegrated in a mass of flaming oxygen and exploding hull plating bursting away in every direction, the Lex had shot free of the Quantum Palace, the old Dead Zone marked on the stellar charts, and just barely at that. Reina had secreted a navigational program that allowed them to exit—though any deeper inside the pocket universe and they would’ve been lost forever, or so Reina had grimly reminded them as the assault frigate spooled up and leapt free of the final blast wave of the massive ghost ship Moirai’s apocalyptic last moments. They escaped… and it ruined each of them—Casper, Reina, and Rechs—forever. They had witnessed the powers… something beyond the known and even hoped-for technological wildest miracles of the future. They’d witnessed something… “other.”

  Power.

  Powers.

  Powers he’d sought for years, scouring the depth and breadth of the galaxy. His journey leading here. Here on this forgotten and forsaken planet.

  And now he was suddenly afraid again. Just as he’d been, really, in the dark depths of the Moirai. Running from the Savages and the prophetesses of that damned vessel. He was so afraid that he forgot all about THK-133, who’d been batted aside by the monster like a mere toy.

  Now Casper was running. Running from the desert below. Running into the dense forest that clustered along the ridgeline. Running and trying to ignore the whispers filling his mind.

  He just ran, crashing through the feathery forest that was anything but. Being caught at. Torn at by jagged vines. Pushing through dense stands of thorn and creeping bush, and breaking out onto a trail that wound its way up along the jagged rocky outcroppings and steep draws, drawing him ever upward. He ran, ignoring what these trails meant. Instead running for his life in an almost mad and mindless state. Because all of this was an old fear. A fear from his childhood, what little there had been of it. And the whispers that kept whispering in every bush and tree and through his mind whispered the sound of someone being choked.

  And the sound it made… was Gothhhhh.

  Fear had taken hold of him, and there was no reason in this, even though his mind screamed at him that this, what the little creature wielded, was precisely what he had come looking for all along. This was the end of the quest. He had found the answer to all the problems he’d never been able to solve. What partnership, diplomacy, and war had never been able to address, he’d fix with raw power. Not because he was mad. Or power-hungry. But because he wanted to save them all in the way he’d never been able to save his parents.

  His whole life had been that of a viewer watching a disaster unfolding. Yes, he’d tried to save what could be saved. But what had he really saved, in the final tally? The galaxy was on the edge of ruin. Some force from the Outer Dark beyond the galaxy was headed this way, if Reina’s last transmission was to be believed. All of it, all of everything they’d fought for and built, was spinning apart.

  And now, he’d finally found the power to fix everything. This was the end of his quest.

  Except it was really the beginning.

  That would become clear soon enough. And more so in the long and hard years to come.

  He followed the trail that led through the jagged little hills. It was little more than a grassy track that wound alongside the steep inclines of the upper reaches of the tiny mountain range, and soon he found a narrow pass that let out onto the other side. The breeze, which had been shaking the trees back and forth in gusty breaths, now turned into a gale as air from the other side of the range was forced into the small tube of the pass and rushed to shoot out the other side. And in it he smelled an ocean, and iron, and rust, and stone, and tropical flowers, and even the scent of a thousand tallow candles scented with something exotic like sandalwood, all guttering and adding their scents to the wind.

  He smelled time.

  A lot of time.

  He had to lower his head to cross the pass to get to the other side, and what he saw stunned him more than anything he’d ever seen in his very long life. What he saw took the breath from his lungs and changed everything he ever thought he understood. And now he knew, as old as he was, that he’d come to this planet as a mere child. The universe was now a much bigger place than he’d ever imagined.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Casper saw the Temple of Morghul.

  It was massive in its entirety, though it was really made up of hundreds, if not thousands of ancient structures. Large and small towers stood alongside small pyramids and oblong ziggurats. Sprawling, crumbling-columned pavilions stood before enigmatic structures that could have been anything from necropolises to libraries. But the rough shape of the entire place was circular, with concentric rings of roads and fat walls tapering near their tops, guarding all the rings from inner to outer.

  Through one section of this massive complex, a tropical river had washed away the buildings and structures in its path, even battering down the mighty walls that circled the inner districts of the place. The river originated from the terminus of a waterfall beyond the city, falling off some higher peaks closer to the mist-shrouded coast beyond. Casper could see it from here, its fall seeming slow and luxuriant as multicolored hues shimmered forth from the chaos at the end of its descent. The falling water and drifting river were the only things that moved.

  In the center of the temple complex rose a circular tower that was more a squat funnel than tall defense. It was open at the top, roofless, and it reminded Casper of some kind of hunter-gatherer village oven more than a tower. Except that its sides were innately carved, and it was at least ten stories tall. It looked like the kind of place where ceremonies and sacrifice were carried out day and night. As though some perpetual dark smoke should be drifting up from its open mouth into the sky at all times.

  This had to be the Temple of Morghul. And in time he would find this to be true. Much to his sometimes regret in the hard years to come. But this fantastic find of a vast temple comp
lex that held the power he’d crossed beyond the galaxy for… this was not what stunned him. What stunned him and left his mouth agape lay beyond. Out in the turquoise and translucent aquamarine shallows of an ocean that washed up along the temple’s outer coastal walls.

  It was the ships that stunned him.

  The graveyard of starships. That was what left his mind reeling.

  Hundreds of interstellar craft the likes of which he’d never seen in his two thousand years of spaceflight. And in among only some of these were ones that seemed known to him.

  There have been others, he thought as he looked out at the wreckages above and below the water. Others, even from your own galaxy, that made it here. Seeking what you sought.

  Had they found it?

  Would he find Reina’s ship here? Would he find her?

  There were massive behemoths of ships out there in the ocean shallows. Ships far bigger than the Rama-class generational ships of ancient Earth. One of these ships in particular was shaped like a mighty crescent that must’ve spanned sixty or eighty kilometers. One wing of that crescent lay submerged beneath the ocean waves, out in the depths. Towers had collapsed all along the top of the crescent, though there were still many standing along the upper line of the massive hull. No ship like that had ever been built within the Galactic Republic.

  In the shadow of this massive ship were other ships like globes, and some ships shaped like starfish. And in all of these he could see missing hull plating, or some collapsed drive system. Or even ancient glass, still reflecting the dying red dwarf’s light, reflecting amid the wreckage. He could spend lifetimes wandering their abandoned decks.

  These are ships from other galaxies.

  And there were so many others, too. Ships that seemed to defy practical ship design as the best of the Republic understood it. Ships that seemed fragile in their interconnected rings linked by a spindly central spine. All of these resting for eons in the gentle surf that rolled in slowly from beyond the breakers and the reefs. Schools of multicolored fish swam in and among the ruined hulls and collapsing drive systems, and lone predator fish, large enough to be whales, moved in lazy patterns in the bays created by the clusters of ruined metal, idly hunting their prey.