The Bronze Labyrinth, Part I
Author's Note: I know Gundam X doesn't fit into the UC continuity, but neither does it reallyfit into the Gundam Wing/After Colony continuity, which is the other option that FFnet gives. I apologize, but the UC category felt like a better fit for GX than the Wing one did. Also, FFnet's formatting is a bit strange, so sorry about that too. If you'd like to read this fic in its original formatting, please go to my fanfiction site (link on my author profile page). It's much prettier there :P
Gundam X and characters are property of Takamatsu Shinji, Sotsu Agency, Bandai, Sunrise and TV Asahi. "La Casa de Asterión" is copyright 1949 to Jorge Luis Borges. Read the short story in original Spanish or in English translation. Please do not repost without permission.
After War Gundam X
La Casa del Asterión
(The House of Asterion)
There were times in his life when he had wondered what it would have been like to grow up in a world that was alive.
He had been born before. He had no memory of what before was, had no recollection of a time when the earth was not grey dust and crumbling stone beneath his feet, no memory of a time before time, of a yellow sun or a silver moon or pale blue lakes like jewels set deep within rings of mountains older than the stars.
But that world had been alive.
That was before.
Not this - this world of new grasses and barely sprouting trees as high as his mid-thigh or the sun that came out from under the horizon line every morning to remind him that yes, there was really such a thing as morning and evening and night and the Earth was still turning. This world was living, but it was not alive. It was a shadow, a shred of ghostly hope, a tiny slice of memory.
It was after.
I. sus puertas (cuyo núero es infinito)
(its doors (whose number is infinite))
He did not remember when he first woke up.
There was fire, and there were stars, and there was something huge and blue and bright coming straight at him. But wait, that was only his dream. Something he'd dreamed. He had always had trouble separating dreams from reality, even as a child. Especially as a child, because he'd been too young to realize that the dreams meant something.
The first time he woke up, he must have fallen straight back asleep, because when he woke up again, it was dark and he was very cold.
He was alone.
Where am I? he wondered, and touched his hands to his face, only to grimace in disgust when they came away sticky with some dark substance - some liquid - that left a darker stain on the already dark grass by his side in the dim moonlight.
It was only later, when he woke up the third time, that he realized that it was blood.
He discovered three things very quickly. First, he had been bleeding heavily from the back of the head, from his right shoulder, and from a huge gash across his stomach. Secondly, because of his injuries, he could not sit up, and in fact the only position he could bear to remain in was the one in which he had woken up - on his back, staring up at the sky, blinking at the moon. And third, he could not move his legs.
Strangely, the third thought bothered him less than the first and second ones. He was not sure why, except that he knew he would probably die here, alone on this grassy field out in the middle of oblivion, and he wanted to at least sit up and look around him before that happened.
He did not want to die gazing at the moon.
He spent the rest of night in fitful bursts of waking and sleep, grasping in vain at dreams that he could not understand. When he was awake, the pain only came when he focused on it, so he did not focus on it, letting his mind drift, staring at the stars through half-closed lids and wondering what was so important about them.
The morning came and he found he was still alive. If he shifted his neck to the side just a little bit so that his head injury was not resting directly on the ground, he found that he could look to the left. It was not much, but it was a sight better than watching the stars wheel overhead. He did not mind the stars, but they disturbed him.
When the white sun came up he found that he was lying in the middle of a large expanse of nothing. There was grass, but it was dead. Patches of rock and sand made their presence known between these large rolling swells of dead grass, and the place where he lay was on a slight incline. There was little else. No signs of human habitation, just endless ripples on ripples of dead hilly grassland, marching onwards towards the distant horizon. He would have preferred even a single tree.
A few meters away, there was a crater.
This interested him for a reason he did not know, though he did know that craters did not appear on this planet of their own accord, and he raised his head slightly, just enough so that the pain from his stomach wound did not blind him.
The crater was deep and it was wide, and from the looks of it, it was recent. Its jagged edges and deep incision into the earth, and the rocks and debris and dead grass that littered its circumference spoke of the fact that whatever had crashed into the earth here had impacted violently. In the center of the crater, there was something that gleamed in the light of the new sun.
Metal?
He shifted, trying to get a better glimpse, then hissed as the pain overtook him again, collapsed to the ground panting and sweating. It was getting hot. The shoulder wound seemed to have stopped bleeding, but the one through his abdomen had not. It was not the type of bleeding that happened when one cut one's finger, or even sliced through a limb with a knife. The blood was slow, dark, sluggish, and he knew that when it finally did stop, he would be dead.
He did not know how he knew. He just knew that it had always been that way.
The sun was stinging his eyes and he fell back against the dead grass, clenching his teeth and knowing that the end was near, yet how near he could not tell. He hoped it took him soon, because the sun was hot and the day promised to be long.
Saliva felt like wool in his mouth and he could not quite swallow, and his brain told him that he should be sweating, but when he lifted his arm, his skin was dry.
He did not remember when he fell asleep again.
II. y tal vez de locura
(perhaps even of madness)
When he woke up the next time, he had not been expecting to wake up, and so he started, tried to sit up, and found that he could. The fact startled him, and he made a noise, whether of surprise or of half-remembered pain, or of shock, he could not tell.
He was in a bed. The sheets were white and cool against his skin, and the pillow was stuffed with real feathers, as he found in surprise when he put a hand against it. The room itself was small but snug, the kind of room one would expect to find in a farmer's village in the middle of the rural countryside, with stout wooden beams running along the ceiling. The curtains were drawn. There was a faint smell of cedar in the air.
He was running his fingers through his hair when he heard footsteps.
"Good morning."
The girl was young and yet old, ageless with a smooth, round face and tanned skin and dark hair, of middling height and a stockier frame that indicated a life of manual labor. Something nagged at the back of his mind, telling him that he had no time to waste with these kinds of people, poor people, and he wondered at it for a moment before putting it gently aside.
"Where am I?"
His voice came forth in little more than a whisper, and when he tried to speak again, he found it produced the same result. His expression must have been a little more than bewildered, because the girl looked half amused, half sympathetic.
"Arphais. Heard of it?" At the puzzled look, the shake of the dark head, the girl smiled. Her teeth were slightly yellowed, but even. "Not surprised. A small village at the edge of southern old Spain is not quite the place to make the daily headlines in the world, is it?"
He was not even listening, running his hands along his stomach to find the wound bandaged, clean, and free of blood.
"I found you three weeks ago," the girl continued. "I was returning home, after they'd broadcast the news that the war was over and it was safe to go home...took a detour I probably shouldn't have taken but which was probably lucky for you."
He looked at his hands, knowing there was something very important about them, knowing that he had something he needed to do but could not for the life of him remember what it was.
"You seemed to have crashed - a mobile suit crash. Were you a mobile suit pilot?" The girl's eyes watched him closely, but the words rubbed no nerves, set off no sparks. Several seconds passed, then the words resumed. "Whatever the case, you've been unconscious for three weeks. I was beginning to think you weren't going to make it."
He considered his next words carefully before he spoke them, making sure they were really the ones he wanted to say, and then said them.
"I should have died."
"Perhaps," the girl said easily. "And perhaps not. How do you feel?"
He considered this again, carefully, thoroughly checking every body part before giving his answer, and when he did so, he wondered why he did not feel the sense of loss that he knew should be descending over him at the impending realization of what his answer meant.
"I can't feel my legs."
A pause.
"I'm sorry," the girl said.
He had expected no more, so he simply shook his head and smiled, making it certain that it was none of her fault, nor none of his, just something that had happened because that was the way of the world now. Maybe it had not been the way of things when it had been before, but this was not before.
This was after.
"Catarina," the girl offered, and it took him several seconds before realizing that it was her name. "Catarina Valerio." There was no offered hand to shake and she did not approach him, just the polite greeting, the telling of one's name to another. For some reason he was glad. He was not used to shaking hands. He did not know how he knew that. He just knew.
Another few seconds, and then he realized he was supposed to give his name. What was that? he mused. A name, something so defining, and yet for some reason he could not seem to produce his own. He grasped for it in the recesses of his mind, tried to claw down to the depths to see where it had sunk, where it was hidden, and he could not.
"It's all right if you can't-" the girl began, turning away through the open doorway, and he held up a hand, made a sharp, cutting gesture with the fingers that said you shall not move because I have not given you leave to go, and she stopped as if she had been a machine, as if someone had flipped a switch and the power had been shut off. There was a fleeting startlement in her eyes. He was reminded of a flock of birds taking flight, and he dropped his hand as if he had touched something that burned his flesh, not even knowing where the gesture had come from, not knowing how he had made it so unthinkingly.
"Garrod," he said. "My name is Garrod."
III. pero el desvalido llanto de un niño
(but the helpless cry of a babe)
That was not truly his name, but he was not bothered by the fact, because in this world of after, the taking of a name meant as little as choosing what one should have for breakfast the next morning, or what color shirt to put on that day. He had mastered these simple tasks slowly over the next few weeks, as the pain and swelling grew less, as the bandages on his shoulder came off and healed into one long, crooked scar crossing the dark skin and looking like someone had tried to cut him with a pair of scissors and failed. The wound on the back of his head healed neatly too, except that there was a bald spot there for several months over the shiny, new scar where the hair would not grow. When it did grow back at last, it was grey.
He was frustrated, sometimes. Tasks that should have come easily to him, like holding a spoon or a fork, took him days to master. His muscles were weak and his nerves did not always wish to work like he wanted them to work. Catarina was patient with him, and for that he was grateful. He would not have been so patient with himself if he were her.
Catarina worked as an accountant in the village square, which meant that she settled people's accounts with many of the farmers who brought in their produce to sell at the market. It also meant that she rose before dawn to help the fishermen bring in the day's catch from their nets and returned after dark every night because she helped the local innkeeper cut firewood for the night's fire in the common room. Most people in the village had more than one job, she had said when he asked. It did not always used to be that way. But there had been the war, what had been called the Unification War, and so many of their young men had gone to fight for the New Federation and had not come back. Her eyes were hooded, hollow.
I see, he wanted to say, but he did not see. He had no memory of a war, only the vague sense that time was flowing by him in a strong, sure current, and sweeping him along with it even though he did not want to go.
Catarina did not press him, only brought home food for him, food and medicine. He could tell she was exhausted when she returned every night, but she did not complain.
He wanted to help. "I want to help," he had said to her the third night after he awoke in the spare bedroom in her small house, and she hadn't laughed at him, simply looked at him from where she was spooning his evening meal - a cup of broth - into a bowl by the fire, and said, "when you recover, you will."
He'd taken to thinking of recovery as an obstacle to be mastered, a challenger to be bested. He didn't quite understand why, but as he became able to sit up in bed for long periods of time without feeling faint and to feed himself at mealtimes, he realized that it wasn't just the recovery. He thought of many things in that way - something to be conquered, an enemy, something terrible that he had to defeat because only then could he know he meant something.
It was rather ridiculous, because right now, at this point, he meant nothing. He was a stranger in the town, a foundling without a past, without a name, a man who could not walk and would probably never regain the use of his legs. He had given up trying to move them by this point, resigning himself to the slight comfort that Catarina had said she would see what she could do about getting a chair for him to wheel himself about in. He didn't miss his legs, not really.
It was about the third week when he acknowledged to himself that the feeling of something missing was related to neither his legs nor the full use of his arms and fingers. The legs could not be helped and the arms and fingers were slowly growing stronger. It was something different, as if there was a fifth appendage that he once had and had suddenly vanished. He did not mention this to Catarina, but in bed every night he took to touching his lifeless legs with his hands, even though his legs could not feel the touch. The feeling of something missing was like that, only worse, because while he could not use his legs, he could touch them and know they were there.
The mysterious fifth appendage was not there.
A month after Catarina had found him, he had progressed steadily enough with his recovery that he would now spend most of his days outside in the garden around the house, helping prune the shrubs and harvest the tiny herbs and vegetables that made up most of the garnishes and nourishment of their simple meals. Catarina had procured him a wheelchair. He didn't know from where, but it was electric and wheeled as well on rocky soil as it did on the smooth wooden floorboards of the house, and he was grateful to her. Sometimes when it was cloudy, he would sit out on the small front porch, a blanket over his legs, just gazing up at the sky.
He never looked up at the sky at night, especially not when the moon was full. A week and a half after he had been well enough to get out of bed for the first time, he had been stargazing and the full moon had come out from behind the clouds, and a spike of pure terror had shot through his heart, and he had called frantically for Catarina, screamed her name till she rushed out of the house to see what was wrong, and begged her to take him back inside because the moonlight frightened him.
"It's all right, Garrod," she had soothed, smoothing back his hair with her hands, which for all their hard calluses, were comforting and gentle. "No one can hurt you any more. The war is over."
He wondered if she felt sorry for him, but she did not seem so. He never found out how old she was, or where the rest of her family lived, because it seemed impolite to ask these things if she did not volunteer them, since she had the courtesy to leave him and his ruined memories in peace. She introduced him to the rest of the village as her cousin, who had been a pilot in the war and lost his memory and whom she had taken in.
She had come home early one afternoon to find him working in the rose garden she kept on one side of the house, which was set somewhat on the outskirts of the village but not entirely isolated, had come through the wooden gate set in the tall wooden fence and caught him whacking furiously at a vine that was stubbornly refusing to come loose, swearing at it. He'd noticed her and dropped one arm.
"You're home early," he said, by way of greeting.
"You don't need to be so violent with the bush, you know," she said in return. "It's only a plant."
He didn't answer, because it was again about how everything was a trap, a challenge, a battle, to him, and how could he explain that to her? She was not like that. So instead, he said, "It's how I'm used to doing things."
That night they had vegetable soup for supper, and she closed the shutters because it was a full moon night and he did not like to see the moon, nor the moonlight. He had looked at her sitting there across from him, over the wooden table that separated them, and she felt his eyes on her, stopped, looked back at him. And for a split second, something flickered, and the girl's face transformed into another face, a man's face, angular yet smooth, young, eager, her eyes changing too into someone else's.
"Olb-" he said, and reached out one hand.
But before his hand met skin, she moved, and the illusion was gone and he was simply staring at Catarina, the girl who had rescued him when he did not want to be rescued, with one hand outstretched to touch a face that was no longer there, and then he felt a blazing anger worm its way up from wherever he had stored it, because he knew the anger had always been there, even though he did not know why.
He raised his hand back, and then he slapped her.
The bowl in her hands clattered to the table.
She did not ask why, did not cry, did not even look shocked, simply sat there till the red mark on her cheek had faded to a smarting pink, then gotten up from the table, pushing back her chair, picked up her bowl and went over to the sink to wash it.
"Why?" he demanded harshly.
She turned on the tap. The sloshing of hot water filled the kitchen, and she rinsed, turned off the tap, carefully placed the bowl on the rack to dry.
"Look at me!" he said, infuriated, and she turned around, fixing her eyes on him with the pink mark still on her cheek. "Why don't you ask? Why don't you want to know? Why don't you care?"
"I care," she said softly. "But I don't ask because you do not care. What good would it do, Garrod?"
"That's not my name."
"I know," she agreed mildly. "I know it's not. But it suits you, doesn't it? It's enough for now."
"I don't want it to be enough," he growled. "I don't want-"
She came towards him, picking up his half-finished soup from the table and carrying it over to the sink in a kind of ghostly déjà vu. "Sometimes, Garrod, life isn't about what we want. Life can't be about what we want, or we would live our entire lives chasing the moon and never catching it."
He flinched. He couldn't help it. He knew she could tell, even if she had her back to him.
His heart hurt, as if that was the place that was scarred from the amputation of his mysterious fifth appendage, and something moved inside of him like he almost remembered it used to when he had something to say but didn't want people to hear it, only wanted one person to hear it, one person who...
"I don't mind, Garrod," she said quietly, coming back with a cloth to wipe down the table as he stared at her, eyes and mind and senses all confused, seeming to see a different person in her face every time he looked.
"No," he returned. "You don't mind. But I do."
IV. la casa es del tamaño del mundo
(the house is as big as the world)
It had been summer when he had come to Arphais, and the autumn passed quickly and turned into winter even more quickly, so quickly that it seemed like he had not even noticed the seasons passing until one day he put back the curtains in his room and discovered it was snowing.
The spring came slowly because the snow was slow to melt, but it came all the same. Catarina had been home more often during the winter, but he had talked little to her, content to simply sit in the same room with her and mull over the gaps in his memory that teased him whenever he was still and silent enough to pay attention to them. When the ground had thawed enough, she came home one day with a basketful of seeds, and he was occupied for the next week or so with digging little holes in the garden and dropping the seeds carefully into them one by one. It was good work, meaningful work, busy work so he did not have to be left alone with his thoughts when she began again to leave early and come home late.
The man Catarina introduced him to halfway through the middle of March was hardly old enough to be called a man - he was only eighteen, another ex-mobile suit pilot, a Federation soldier who had made it through the second war and come back home once again to act as the village blacksmith. She introduced him because one night she'd come home and reminded him of his promise to help once he had recovered. He had been somewhat amused that she had remembered that particular episode, but she was Catarina, and she remembered everything.
The man's name was Masao. It was a Japanese name if he had ever heard one, but then again, in this world of after, ethnicity meant as little as what kind of sauce one preferred on one's food. Masao was soft-spoken, yet every word he did speak had an edge of iron to it, a sharp point that could, he believed, if directed at some target, be more deadly than any physical weapon.
It was this kind of man who would change the world, he knew with certainty, though he did not know where the certainty came from.
He began helping out Masao in the shop. He could not do much because of his limited mobility, but he carried out the buckets of coals after they overflowed the furnaces, chopped wood, ran meaningless errands through the village so that other villagers became familiar with his face. They liked him, he could see, though there was something strange about that to him, as if he was not used to people liking him.
The village pub and inn had electricity, central heating and cooling, and a large videoscreen, and on his off hours he would go there to have a beer and chat with the few villagers who had taken a liking to him and to watch the one news channel that Arphais got because it was so isolated by the Spanish coast. It was strange, this technologically deficient village in an era of such great technological strides, but the villagers did not seem to mind this at all. Catarina made her own candles, and before he started working, he would make sure there was always at least one lit in the window of the house so she could see it as she was walking down the road home. Now, they arrived home together, she pushing his chair because the house was too far from the village proper to justify running the batteries on the chair, and they lit the candles together.
He wondered sometimes if he was falling in love with her, but pushed the thought away because it stung him. The word "love" twisted something, peeled at the scar around his heart that made him remember that he was still missing something. So he did not touch it.
It was his second month of working for Masao that the blacksmith first mentioned the Newtypes.
They had been cleaning up after work, scrubbing the tables and the floors, putting out the fires and rising the big tubs, putting away the tools. Masao had been talking about the next day's work, musing about how someone's new car had thrown its hubcap in the way a blacksmith of old would have spoken about someone's new horse having thrown its shoe, and he had not been really listening until he was in the middle of hanging up his apron on the wall, and his ears caught the word, threw it back at him as he sat, not knowing what else to do but catch it.
"What?" he said.
"I said Newtype," Masao said, and there was the look in his eyes of ah, yes, you understand too. "You faced her too, didn't you? I can see it in your face."
He shook his head woodenly. Masao grinned easily. In the dim light of the dying fires, he looked like a jackal, white teeth gleaming behind parted lips. "You don't remember, but that's the power of the word. Once you've faced a Newtype, it's imprinted forever-"
"Don't say that word," he said, almost too quietly for even himself to hear, and Masao frowned.
"Pardon?"
"I said, don't say that word!" he snarled, and made a grasping motion with his hands, as if reaching back for some old, old memory dredged up from somewhere, hands on the control stick of a mobile suit, finger on the trigger, shooting to kill. Masao's face went white.
They stared at each other, and then he finished hanging up his apron and let himself out of the shop.
Catarina found him over a mug of freshly brewed beer in the pub, morosely slouched in his chair staring at nothing outside the window. She didn't say anything. She merely waited till he finished the drink and then wheeled him home.
They said we were not needed, he thought to himself quietly that evening in the light of the flickering candles as Catarina sat in a wooden chair by the window, knitting.
You can't understand the pain of someone who has power beyond human limits...who is not needed.
"What?" said Catarina, and he realized he had said the words out loud.
"Nothing," he murmured. "I was thinking."
"That didn't sound like thinking to me," she said, putting down her knitting and staring at him. "That sounded like a memory."
Perhaps it was a memory and perhaps it wasn't. What it was, he didn't know, except when he went to work the next day, Masao moved cautiously around him, and it was he who had to laugh and remind Masao that weren't they friends? And Masao said yes, of course, and things were all right again.
V. quizó yo he creado las estrellas...
(perhaps I have created the stars...)
Spring turned into summer and the seeds had planted became young seedlings and then tall young plants, fresh and green and vibrant, and Catarina began talking excitedly about the soups and stews and dishes in which the autumn vegetables could be used. He knew only how to cook a little. She tried to teach him, but he was clumsy around the kitchen. His chair only barely allowed him to reach the counter, and he could not reach the utensils. So he contented himself to doing chores around the house as she cooked, putting away books, papers, things.
He didn't know why the idea came to him, one night as he lay in bed, that it was time he started watching the moon again. He remembered what had happened the first time he tried to watch the moon, and he shuddered. But all the same, the closed shutters were a beacon of light in his vision, tempting him with their dark finality, by the very fact that they were closed to him.
He lay there for about a week, resisting the thought, and then one night he could bear it no longer, sat up in bed and carefully cracked open one of the wooden slats.
The moon was full again that night.
He gazed into its bright eye for a count of three, feeling his heart freeze, feeling the dread trickle down his spine again, knowing that the light of the moon meant something to him, something terrible, but not knowing what that something was. It pounded at his head and he slammed the shutter closed, falling back onto his pillows.
That night he cried himself to sleep.
The next night he tried again, and the night after that, and the night after that, until one night he sat and opened both shutters and let the moonlight stream into his room without flinching. The moon had been something else to overcome, after all, another battle to be won. He still feared the moon, feared the emotions it awoke inside of him, because it was the sole disorderly thing in this world he had created for himself since awakening here, a world where he was the master, the controller. He could not control the moon.
When Catarina came home one night to find him on the porch, blanket on his knees, gazing calmly at the stars and the moon as if he had been doing it all his life, she did not comment. He didn't expect her to, but as she passed him, going into the house with the scent of roses trailing behind her, he turned and grabbed her arm with one hand.
She stopped and stood very still.
"What do you think of me?" he said.
The words did not come out like he wanted them to. He had wanted it to be a calm questioning, an inquiry for the facts. Instead, he felt his voice tremble, felt a sort of desperation grip him as he waited for her answer, and he hated himself.
"Please let go of me," she whispered at last.
His hand dropped back to the armrest of his chair and she passed from him into the lighted rectangle that was the doorway of the house.
Why can I not speak when I want to speak? he wondered. Why can I not say the words I want myself to hear and that I want others to understand?
"I'm sorry," he had offered later at the dinner table, the words sounding lame again in his own ears, and she had smiled, and that was enough.
VI. ...pero ya no me acuerdo.
(...and I no longer remember it)
Autumn passed with a ripple of red and gold and the scent of burning leaves, and then winter, and spring came again. He could not imagine a time when he had not been with Catarina, had not been here in his house in the sleepy village in the middle of the nowhere world, had not been a blacksmith's assistant, had not been in a wheelchair and been unable to walk.
The itch came unbidden one night as he did his daily moon watching. It was a waning moon, and he had been staring at it with his chin in his hands, contemplating it, and suddenly his mind whispered to him.
It's time to go.
He sat up in his chair, wondering where that had come from, but it had gone, whatever it was, and so he resumed his study, hardly remembering that it had been there at all.
But it was there the next night, and the next.
It's time to go, it said to him, and he would look around the porch, at the small, cozy, familiar house behind him, at the familiar gardens around him, at the familiar village down the familiar path, at the familiar trees of the familiar forest, and feel the scar on his heart begin to pound like it would burst.
The next time it came again, he ground it to a halt, stood firmly in its path, and asked it, why?
There was no direct answer, just the light of the moon, which by this time was just a few days after the new moon, tiny and dim in the sky, but yet for some reason the old terror did not come and he simply suddenly remembered there was something very terribly important about the moon, and it was because of the moon that all this had come to pass, why he had ended up here of all places, in a village and a household where he was never meant to have been.
He knew Catarina recognized something was different, but as always, she said nothing, simply came and went about her business, kept him company in the evenings, shared meals and jokes with him, and left him to stew in his own deep contemplative thoughts. He dared not ask her what she thought. That encounter last summer was burned deep into his memory.
And the moon waxed and he thought, and at last the night the moon was truly full, he met her as she came up the stairs to the house, and said, "I have to leave."
She did not brush past him like he thought she would do, simply looked down at him and smiled, and said "I wondered when you would say that."
She bought him a train ticket the next day to the nearest large city, helped him pack a suitcase full of clothes and food and his savings over the past two years, made sure there were new batteries for his chair, and took him to the train station. Masao lent them his car, saying he was sorry to see Garrod go, but in the depth of his eyes, there had been a sort of relief, as if he was glad the ghost was passing out of his life and on into another part of the world.
He did not know where he was going, only that he had to go. That much the moon had told him that night, that there was business yet unfinished, duty yet left undone, and in order to find peace with himself and what he had yet to do, he could not stay here.
Catarina stood with him on the train platform watching the shiny new bullet train pull in, helped him get on and put his suitcase next to his chair so he could reach it easily.
"Do you have enough money?" she said.
"You know I do," he replied, knowing that at last this was goodbye and suddenly not bearing to see her go. He looked up at her, hoping to see she was still smiling, so he could know that she would be all right and perhaps she would be waiting for him when he saw her again, whenever that would be.
But she was not smiling. There were tears in her eyes, and without warning, she dropped to her knees beside him and kissed him, a long, hard kiss on the mouth. He froze at first, not expecting it, then let his eyelids flutter shut as the kiss ended almost before it had began.
"Goodbye," her voice said above him, a songbird trilling, a wind's soft breath in the trees, the whisper of stardust.
When he opened his eyes again, the train doors were hissing shut, the conductor's voice was on the comm announcing departure, and she was gone.
There were no certainties in this world.
There had been no certainties in the world of before either, but at least the earth had been old then, the world of a hundred million years in the making, carefully formed and shaped by civilization after civilization, each giving its own unique, irreproducible stamp which had been part of the evolution of time.
But now, in this new world, a world of change that was too fast and too far, there were even fewer certainties. Waking up every day knowing that the sun would rise was no longer even one of them, for who knew when such a war would come again, a war that could block even the sun and make the cloud's rain turn to ashes?
But at the same time, this was the only world he had ever known. It was not the world of before, but it would do, because it was not his choice to make when he would live and when he would die, only that he was alive and he was searching for something.
It was a world of renewal, a world of rebirth, a world where hope would spring from the cracks of the dried earth. There had been a war, and many people had died, and now the war was over.
The after world. The after war.
Because there was no before. There was only after.
¿Como será mi redentor?, me pregunto.
(What will my redeemer be like, I wonder.)
¿Será un toro o un hombre?
(Will he be bull or man?)
¿Será tal vez un toro con cara de hombre?
(Could he possibly be a bull with the face of a man?)
¿O será como yo?
(Or will he be like me?)
end part I