Prologue
I have seen a face whose sheen I could
look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to
see how beautiful it was.
—The Madman of Gibran
H
|
ow do you make love to a goddess?
Not to a divinity; this
is not a myth. Well, maybe it is a myth. Or rather, the beginning of a myth,
where facts and hopes and dreams and the madness of humanity and its
desperations maniacally shape the story of the past and future like some
child’s clay. Maybe it's the beginning of a legend. The birth of a new Divine.
After all that has happened, all that I have seen, I understand why it may seem
so.
I come from a land
where religion soaks into the very soil, where one thousand ragas encompass
every mood and expression of our species, where a million theologies were born,
copulated and recombined like genomes to produce monotheists, polytheists,
thirty-three and ten million divines and the number zero. Where the stories of
the gods and goddesses never ended and a child had no need of a superhero -
with charming Krishna, dancing Shiva and beautiful Parvati, there were stories
uncounted. Perhaps then, it is no wonder that we so easily worshiped Her. The
real wonder is that nearly all do, every nation across this blue and white
marble pulled from the ashes.
Even these
monstrosities, these aliens now positioned across our world with their own
god-like technologies and cities - they
hold Her in awe. In the erased fragments of time, a shattered Earth She made
whole. The tyranny of the Dram trembles across the galaxy as Her power sweeps
outward like a tide washing clean a tainted shore. She communes with the Orbs,
summons their power, opens their portals. She is a Cosmic Messiah, writing anew
the story of our universe.
But not to me. To me this is only a beginning.
Standing here as the
soft morning sunlight of New Earth streams through our bedroom window, I look
down on Her sleeping. The white sheets are nearly blinding, wrapped tightly
around Her seductive curves. Her naked shoulder has slipped out of the fabric.
It is nearly as white as the sheets - such a contrast to my dark copper. The
entire blank canvas is dramatically altered by waterfalls of red curls
streaming down to Her waist.
She is beautiful enough
to be a goddess.
But not a mere
goddess to me. She may be all these things, but to me She is a woman. My lover.
She is my dearest, Ambra Dawn.
I was born to love
Ambra. I know this from my heartbeat to the deep ache in my bones. It was my
destiny made possible only by the miracle of Her powers, born when She had
turned the first Dram fleets to dust. Had She been a normal woman, we would
have never met. Never loved. Never walked hand in hand on the beaches of New
Earth to feel the waves lap our ankles in the reddening sunset. Never made love
on a distant world overlooking the colossus of our own galaxy as it painted the
night sky like a frozen explosion.
But Ambra is no normal
woman, and I, no normal man. I am abnormal in the ways I knew from childhood.
Now, in this terrible darkness at the end, I see that my abnormality is deeper
than could ever have been suspected. But it cannot be helped. It is not my
doing. Can we who are made from the dust and the clay reshape our Maker?
As I look at the
swollen, some would say grotesque, form of Her skull resting on the soft
pillow, I feel a deep attraction, a pull to touch, to caress. Her Writer powers
churn there in the benign tumor that has changed the fate of the universe and
given her insight into the inner workings of space and time. Insight into the minds
of any She chooses to probe.
This every schoolchild
knows and so also I was taught, but this does not explain my childhood
obsession with that deformed, beautiful head. Nor how I melt to see those
sensual red locks, stopped two-thirds of the way up her scalp, where Her skin
shines white and scarred, the hair removed by countless surgeries from a time
long ago when She lived in bondage and pain.
I pause even now to
dwell on the artificial bone around the enormous, grapefruit-sized bulge,
sculpted, implanted by twisted scientists of Earth in thralldom to the Dram.
The brain tissue inside altered to feed the tumor in Her adolescence until it
grew beyond anything anyone could had predicted. It gave Her a sixth sense and
stole from Her the ability to see as we do, leaving Her totally blind with
perfectly healthy eyes.
My Ambra's bright green
eyes see nothing. And yet, they see everything. They haunt the corridors of
Time.
Other schoolmates
learned the story of New Earth’s Mother by rote. I plunged my mind into the
codified years like a warm sea. I took those lessons -
words of Her parents’ death at the hands of monsters, Her abuse, deformation,
torture, escape with the help of the angelic Xix, Her turning back of the
powerful Dram, and even of Time itself - I took them deep into the core of my
consciousness.
There, She impaled my
heart. I memorized every event, each line on Her unchanging face from countless
holographs, every lilt and tone and nuance of Her voice from audio
recordings. Before I had the hormones
to be in love, I loved Ambra Dawn like no man, no human, no saintly
Xixian has ever loved another. In the truest sense, I had no choice. At this
terrible end, I see the inevitability of it.
And so now, as I walk
to the nightstand and open the drawer, it is only in a state of unreal
detachment that I remove the weapon. The composite metal should feel cold in my
hand, but it does not. I feel nothing. The muscles tighten around the handle of
the pistol, but I give no commands, feel no responses, and notice no
contractions or tightness in my skin. I can only see as if from a distance,
from a vantage point I cannot define in space or in time.
And this automaton, my
body, or now rather some alien form that is no longer mine, pulls that weapon
out, unlocks the safety, and turns toward the bed, raising the barrel to the
elongated head of my beloved, nearly touching the scarred edges near Her
hairline.
And before anxiety or
understanding can even rise within me, She opens those blind, green eyes with
adoration, turning to stare directly into my own, tears trickling down Her
white cheeks. I hear Her voice in my mind.
Don’t be afraid,
Nitin. I love you.
I pull the trigger.
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