Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [85]
“I need to tell you something,” said Jiterica.
That sounded bad. People said things like that when they were breaking off relationships.
He didn’t want to do that. Having had a taste of life with Jiterica, he couldn’t imagine it without her.
“Listen,” Paris told her, “you were right about my not liking Stave. I was jealous of him. But he’s dead and I should have put your feelings ahead of mine and…I don’t want to stop seeing you. I can’t.”
Jiterica stared at him from behind her faceplate. “Stop?” she echoed. “I don’t want to stop. I just want to tell you that I forgive you.”
Paris looked at her as if he had never heard the word before. “Forgive…?”
Yes,” she said. “And I hope you will forgive me for being so cold to you.”
Paris had never been so happy to hear anything in his entire life.
Brakmaktin wasn’t dead.
He didn’t know it right away. In fact, he didn’t know much of anything. Then, ever so slowly, his consciousness asserted itself, and he began to ascend. He escaped the embrace of the lava, the furnace that had melted his flesh and eaten his bones, and made his way into the calm, still precincts above it.
Were Brakmaktin still in possession of his eyes, he might have looked around and seen how empty his cavern was. Were he still in possession of his flesh, he might have felt anger as white hot as the pit.
And were he in possession of a throat, he might have scraped it raw with howls of frustration.
But Brakmaktin had none of these things. He was only an essence now, an awareness that he was different from all that was around him and had been even more different before his corporeal form was taken from him.
But his physical self would have fallen away from him anyway. That was the irony—and he could still appreciate irony—of the changes that had taken place in him when the barrier infused him with its power and majesty.
Brakmaktin had thought of it merely as energy, but it was infinitely more than that. It was life itself. Not the life he had lived when he was but a shell, but life as it could be, unfettered, unlimited, and exalted.
And now that he had been liberated from his flesh, he no longer yearned to multiply and continue his bloodline. It was difficult to remember why that had been of such importance to him.
But he still yearned—not as a parent, but as a child. For the barrier had given birth to him in its way, re-making him in its image, and his longing to return to it was more powerful than any sun in the vast, black void.
Rising effortlessly, Brakmaktin cleared the layers of rock above him and made his way through the atmosphere of the world he had tortured with his ambition. He might have been sorry if he were capable of sorrow, but that emotion had been denied him even before he touched the barrier.
As it was, he put his actions behind him, recognizing them as trivialities, and reached into the vacuum for the only thing in the universe that mattered to him.
He had been away, but he was going home.
Picard could have sent a communication via the ship’s intercom. However, his shift on the bridge was over, and he preferred to deliver the message in person.
It didn’t take long for the door to Serenity’s quarters to slide aside, revealing their sole occupant. “Jean-Luc,” she said.
“My navigator has located your vessel,” he told her. “Barring the unforeseen, we will reach it in a few hours.”
She absorbed the information. Then she said, “Come in.”
As the door slid closed behind him, Serenity looked into his eyes. Hers, as always, were so beautiful it sent a chill through him.
This moment was hardly a surprise—they had both known it would come. But it bore a weight for which Picard wasn’t really prepared, and he suspected that Serenity wasn’t either.
“We’ve been here before,” she said, “haven’t we? Parting ways, saying good-bye?”
“We have,” he agreed. “Except, as I recall, it was in a mountain meadow last time, with Magnia’s sun turning the sky ablaze in the background.