Through A Dark Blue Lens: Chapter Seven (La Fin)

Through a Dark Blue Lens

Chapter Seven:  Color of the Glass

By: Peter R. Heaton

Anya woke alone.  The Wandering Eye was an empty museum--a tribute to some past she struggled to recall.  Snippets came and went, like breath frosting against the cheeks of winter.

Where would you go next?

The voice: an asteroid collision to her sanity; Anya stumbled, one hand reaching for her head, but no pressure could quiet the words crumbling through her mind.

Where would you go next?

Fumbling through the ship, she found the landing dock open.  Fresh air--Earth air, the sort that the bee-bops were always singing about--plunged into the bay of the Eye and Anya took a deep inhale.

The whisper of a memory came to her like the light from a distant star: Morse wishing farewell to Anya and another—someone she should remember but couldn’t, someone she kept imagining as her mother.  It was a silent parting, but not: Morse Murray’s eyes still recalling the saturnine ceremony; he. who they called Remorseless Murray, had wept alongside the monks of Mulrulrond for ten days and more.

Anya remembered it, too, but it was not the sight of the nearly-still babe being placed into the water-box.  It was the sound babe and box both had made as they broke through the brine beneath alabaster walls.

So there had been no need for words.

The voice interjected: Where would you go next?

The impact of the words fractured Anya’s thoughts, the memory collapsing back to reality:

Her feet had left the landing bay behind.  A single, pleasant sun stared down as Anya walked out onto a cobblestone path.  Before her small huts of leaf and brick-red mud flanked the street.

Pale figures emerged from dark doorways, clad in kaleidoscoped colors, begging for Anya to shed herself of her guilt.

Where would you go next?

Antonio asked her, in a drug-like stupor.  

Where would you go next?

Jolly Locks said, his voice as thick as venom, his chin like granite.  He smiled, knowing it was he who had poisoned her. A contagion she’d pass onto the others.  See ya around, kid, he’d said before she never saw him again.

Where would you go next?

The pale shapes followed her, procession-like, towards a house of stone.  A figure emerged, this one also in kaleidoscoped colors, but he was not pale, and he spoke in a familiar voice:

“Where would you go next?”

And his robe was gone and the other figures had disappeared and David was holding her, all worn and wrinkled and smiling.  

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“This is my place—no, our place now.” David said, looking at her in earnest. They sat on a sun-kissed overlook, with all of their world revealed to them.

Somewhere, nearby he crushed a boulder on a whim.  It gave him satisfaction to do that thing, in this place.

“How?”

“How? How a thousand times and none.  I am here now and so are you and that is all that matters.”

Anya shook her head, confusion beginning to fracture her mind, “No,” she said, the taste of fresh air like ash on her lungs.  “No,” Anya said, reaching out to touch David’s face. “You can’t be here. You’re dead.” Warm, living skin greeted her hand.

A look of mild surprise came over him, as he gently pinned her hand to his cheek.  “I am, am I?” David replied, as a dozen trees found existence behind him--growing from sprout to cloud-touched to rotting death, all before she could comprehend.

Anya’s eyes were drawn down to the mottled valley spread out beneath them.  It was a patchwork of colors: the sounds of a symphony frozen in time, distilled down to an ink and brushed over the landscape.

“Where is this place?”  It had been a sudden thing but somehow the vision had calmed her.

David smiled at her: “So many questions, baby bird, and you give me no time with which to answer them.”  He took her hand in his. It was an angry thing, all leathery and calloused and hot.  

He looks so much older, but he feels so familiar; Anya considered his hands, they were as she would have expected them.  How long has it been since our thoughts overlapped in the mindfield? she wondered.

David’s eyes grabbed hers, demanding attention.  “Do not worry, Anya, time has no meaning in this place.”

“Well, pick one then.”

He raised his eyebrows, uncertain.

“Pick a question and answer it.”

“Where we are: another space, and it is only you and I and whatever else either of us wishes there be—see:” and a frozen bolt of lightning came into life between them, as still of a thing as she had ever seen, but still buzzing—shifting imperceivably—or at least her eyes told her as much.  Anya stretched out a hand to touch it.

“I would suggest not.  At least until you have full control of this place.”

Anya looked skyward and as she thought it, a ship came into sight in the atmosphere, but it was not coming, it was going--going the other way.

Anya smiled as ion blue hummed out.  “Like the mindfield,” she heard herself utter.  A moment’s hesitation followed as she remembered what had happened there between her and David.  She glanced back at David. But this David could not be the real one, so she let the guilt wash away.  

He couldn’t be, could he?  A fire came into existence beside them.  Though here it need not be, it was fueled by things it ought not to be.

A minute of silence passed as the ion engines continued to glow, the ship preparing to jump atmosphere.  Heat from the fire warmed her in a way the sun could not. It smelled acidic but she did not care.

Finally, Anya asked him a question that had been gnawing at the crevices in her gray matter:

“What happened to Antonio?”

Someone stepped toward the fire and tossed a tube of plasteel onto it.  “While we’re here: whatever you want to have happened,” Anya had expected it to be her mother but it was not, it was Ezbelda Tin.

“I like to think he’s just fine,” Anya replied, smiling at Ezbelda, knowing she should not be here but understanding that what she knew did not matter here.

David smiled at her.  “Then fine he is.” He pointed up to the ship, still trapped by gravity. “Do you remember what you thought, that night, watching that ship leave?”

She traced the lines etched over his face like dry river beds.  He could not know. He would not know.

“Rats racing away from the plague,” he finished.

Anya remembered the night before she’d left old Earth.  The words came back to her, intermingled with the scent of gunpowder.  “I told you you couldn’t be real,” Anya responded. “David doesn’t know my thoughts.”

He smiled at her warmly.  “Didn’t I always tell you, baby bird?  I can read your mind.”

END

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