Firefly by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2008-03-10T04:00:00+00:00

XIV.

PILGRIMAGE

It was a beginning of cosmic proportions—grand and splendid. But I was tired of beginnings and the awe of the cosmos. I had seen them all before, in my dreams, induced by the drug that permeated my body and blood.

I was certain, then, that what we were searching for was an illusion. We sought answers, we looked for conclusions and consummations. We looked for ev­erything to fall into place like pieces in a jigsaw, to bring order and roundness to what we knew and believed.

But after that beginning—the beginning of time itself—I was certain that there could be no neatness, no roundness, no order to be brought forth from this chaos.

At first, the sequence blinded me. It took time to adjust Time, for my senses to cope with the new manner of flow which attacked them. I realized, very slowly, that what I was seeing was not the future at all, but the past. At an incredi­ble pace, millions of years to a single instant, the pages flew and flickered.

The very ground beneath my feet writhed and moved and changed its shape. Days and nights fled so quickly that there was only the barest flicker to show that day was not eternal. The sun’s path was a glaring rainbow stretching from horizon to horizon and moving rapidly back and forth across the sky as sea­sons were gone before they could be noticed. The only physical sensation of which I was aware was a bitter cold wind, which seemed to blow through and through me. It was not a real wind, but I could not guess what it might be. There was not the slightest sign of John or Joaz or Xavier.

Life began. I did not see it, of course. I regretted that such an event should pass by while I could guess that it was happening, yet leaving me unable to detect it. It was not the work of a moment, even at this breathless rush, but all I could see was turbid water, and that a long way off. All that lay around me was an expanse of desolate rock. Lifeless, yet moving. Forever shifting and quaking. I watched the mountains gather themselves, only to be smashed down again by the surge of the ages. But I could not watch the molecules forming and reforming, growing and replicating. Tiny, barely tangible colloids finding the secrets of im­mortality and metamorphosis.

I waited, alone, as far as I could tell.

I saw the world as a god might have seen it. But I was no god, because I was impotent, and no god may be impotent if he is to have meaning outside himself.

I had no alternative but to learn humility, and know that although Fate might not be an active, vital force, it was a state of mind which accurately con­ceived the manner of real events. In a few seconds, I was granted a vast range of experience without yielding the transience which could lend significance to my envi­ronment. What I saw meant something, for all that I could see hardly anything at all.

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