Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Latin, 'the voice of the people is the voice of God')

– Source unknown

A woman in a space suit waits in the airlock, staring at the man sitting behind the transparent pane. He’s too scared of her to stare back. He betrays himself, first and foremost, by looking away from the consequences of his actions, and the woman pities him, even as she sees his hand moving towards the touchscreen, clicking the commands that will kill her. At that moment, before the final key is struck, before the airlock opens, before she even knows what the outside looks like, she feels whole. She doesn’t regret anything, she doesn’t expect anything, and she can just observe the world as it is. The man in front of her is drowning in the pain of his own betrayal, and the woman accepts that she can do nothing for him. “I’m sorry,” she says.

He chooses not to respond.

Then that moment is over, and another one comes. Now she is sucked out by the gentle pull of vacuum and floats out into space. The starry sky is the first thing she notices. IT’s been a long time since she saw it for herself, the stars, the sky not black or grey but something entirely different, emptiness punctuated by light. Now she flies, focusing on the feeling of weightlessness, of rotation; a slow but wild motion. There’s a crater beneath her, and she’s so laughably small, like a mote of dust. She lands on one hand and allows her body to turn over into a standing position, and is pleased by the grace of the motion. She sees numbers running at the corner of her visor, but pays them no mind.

The little lights by the airlock’s door flash a bright white, and she sees that she’s not alone there—a dozen or so people in spacesuits just like hers are kneeling by a mummified body whose spacesuit was cut open. A figure stands with their back to the woman, a knife in their hands. They place it in a pocket in their suit, shaking, and the woman watches curiously as the others move closer to lay their hands on the figure, comforting. No one seems to have noticed her.

Then, through the radio receiver on her helmet, she hears their crude voices join into harmony—some singing confidently, others mumbling intermittently the words that they remember. The woman stands and listens, as they sing:

God full of mercy,

Who resides in heaven,

Find for her a rightful resting place,

On the wings of the divine,

Among the saints and the pure,

Like the incandescent heavens,

They shine on us

Let him string her soul in the string of life

And so, the merciful will hide her under his wing forever,

God is her residence,

Let her rest in peace,

And say,

Amen.

“Amen,” the woman says.

They all turn to her. The figure closest to her, the one who’d held the knife, looks startled. “You’re early,” she says. The sky becomes bright, and the woman can see the other’s face: light brown eyes set slightly too far apart in a dark, freckled face. When she smiles, there’s a little gap in her front teeth. The woman likes her immediately.

“Sorry, I guess?”

“No, I mean, it’s not your fault. They messed up the schedule. You were supposed to be here in a couple of minutes, and we should have been waiting to welcome you.”

“Well, I’m here now.”

“Are you ok, though? Newcomers tend to be… louder.”

The woman looks within herself. Yes, she is ok. She nods. “So, what’s the welcoming process?”

“First of all, there’s a question I need to ask you. Is your name Keren, by any chance?”

“It is,” Keren says.

“Well, that’s too b—wait, really?” The others exchange glances.

“Yes? That’s my name. What’s so weird?”

“We’ve been waiting for someone named Keren.”

“Why?”

“That’s the thing.” The other woman seems embarrassed. “We don’t exactly know. We were just told that every time someone comes, we should ask them if their name is Keren.”

A warmth spreads in Keren’s chest, like a pinch on the strings of her heart. It aches, but she doesn’t resist it.

“Peace, Keren,” the woman says. “Welcome to Last Day Town.”

Before Keren can answer, the others greet her and introduce themselves. She doesn’t remember any of the names, but that’s not what they do that for. Lastly, the woman with the gap in her teeth introduces herself. “My name is Edna; I’m the Supreme Elder of Last Day Town, and I’ll be your mentor.”

“Mentor?”

“I’ll show you around, show you the ropes, hear your confession.” She turns to the others. “The ceremony is over, Residents. See you in two hours.”

The crowd disperses, leaving the two of them alone. They both stand silently for a while. A couple takes places by a board of either chess or checkers, trying to remember whose turn it is; a group with different tools sculpts, in rock, a crude shape that looks a bit like a person; others sit, talk, hug, and even dance in the shifting light. Keren looks up at the sky and realizes that the light is coming from a passing asteroid, pocked with damage from whatever mysterious adventures it’s been on in the asteroid belt, whatever encounters it’s had with other bodies that left it changed forever, or at least until it changed even more. “Wow,” she says softly.

“You’re really not afraid, are you?” Edna asks.

Keren pulls her eyes down from the asteroid and looks at Edna, who smiles in return. Keren looks inside herself, and sees in the vista of her soul, the tide of fear coming at times, going at times, like an ocean lapping at a sandy beach, taking nothing away. She neither fights nor embrace it.“I am afraid, actually. It’s just… not the thing I most am. You?”

Edna nods, a small, concise motion. “Not as much as I thought I’d be. And the praying helps.”

“And who are you praying to?”

“God,” she says, without a trace of irony.

“Really? I don’t think I’ve met anyone who prays to god before. Does everyone here do it?”

“No, not exactly. But I’m not supposed to talk to you about faith so soon.”

Keren finds it amusing that anything is supposed to be or not to be something when time is so short, when reality is so absurd. Then again, that has been the case for a while now. “What are we supposed to be talking about, then?”

“First, you confess. You get everything off of your chest, make peace. If nothing else, this is the place where we make peace.”

“Pass.”

Edna blinks. “Excuse me?”

“I already made my peace.”

“You don’t want to tell your story? People used to kill for that.”

What’s the thing Keren lacks—the thing that makes people love telling the narrative of their lives so much? It doesn’t matter—it’s enough that she doesn’t. “If I can forfeit that, I will. What else are we supposed to talk about?”

Edna tilts her head to the side, as if Keren’s subversion of her expectations pointed at something flawed in the worldview of one of them, and Edna doesn’t yet know who. “The law of the land, and the story of Last Day Town. Would you like to hear that, instead?”

Keren wipes the dust off of a flat rock, and sits down. “Yeah, that sounds interesting.”

Edna tells her the history of Last Day Town: how it used to be a lively place; how the Residents worked on projects together, from a spaceship that was never completed to long poems, passed from mouth to ear. The Residents couldn’t take away one another’s oxygen because of the way the suits were built, and they accepted their final day - until The Visitor came. He wasn’t thrown like the rest, but came around the asteroid to see for himself, and tell everyone inside what was happening here. But as soon as he came in, one of the residents figured they could get at his spaceship and stole it, giving back only after he promised to send back enough oxygen to survive for years.

Keren knows enough to understand that’s not the actual story, but also knows that myths know how to construct themselves, and don’t need her to interfere.

The story continues with The Visitor being ejected only to find out that the lines are completely gone—The same Resident that stole the spacecraft had taken The Wrench from it, and used it to steal oxygen from others, calling herself Vempress, and killed Residents to stay alive.

Keren’s heart soured, at hearing that. The day after Yossi left, she kept thinking about him. About what he was doing on the outside—whether he’d joined the line he’d hoped he would; whether he’d held it together all the way to the end. But she’d imagined Last Day Town as he’d described it, and, as is usually the case with the worlds we build in our own heads, it had nothing to do with reality.

Edna tells Keren how The Visitor prostrated himself in front of Vempress, giving her what every tyrant wants, and she adopted him as her mouthpiece to the rest of the residents. She even offered him oxygen, but he couldn’t accept it.

“Why not?”

“Because it was his fault things came to be the way they did. If he didn’t visit, if he didn’t lose The Wrench to the Town, the Resident that got hold of it wouldn't have become Vempress. He had to make things right.”

“Did he?”

He didn’t, it turned out. While he tried to conspire with the residents behind Vempress’s back to kill her, they took the Visitor’s example and conspired behind his back, making his conspiracy fail so that one of them could become her right hand. And so, when Vempress was distracted by the ecstasy of torturing the Visitor for his betrayal, the Residents sabotaged her jetpack. Not killing her, but sending her away. The problem was, she had already disconnected his oxygen tank.

“So he died,” Keren says, the grief in her voice thick to her own ears. “And he wasn’t even the one to beat Vempress, in the end.”

Not exactly. When she flew away, she’d dropped her tools. The blade and gun were a no brainer to destroy, but The Wrench, the one that had allowed her to take oxygen from others, could also allow the Visitor to reconnect his own. They disposed of the person that became Vempress, but in his last breath, the Visitor was the one to destroy the tool that let her become what she became. “And that’s the moral of the myth,” Edna says, speaking to herself as well as Keren. “That’s why we cannot afford to be cruel, cannot afford to be unkind. Even here. Especially here. Because this place will take your sanity and tear it apart, and no one should be judged for going insane under such circumstances. Instead, we should hold each other fast from falling into the pit in the first place.”

Keren tries to imagine the man that she met in the line of the dining chamber, the man who didn’t even try to stop another from spitting into his food, enduring so much when it meant helping someone else. I’m so proud of you, she thinks, knowing that there is nothing that he would have liked to hear more. Tears flood her eyes. She takes a deep breath, shakes her head. “He did it. He managed to leave something behind.”

The woman smiles again and waves her palm, miming a salmon swimming upstream. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“A little bit. He said he would try to leave something worth remembering, but I thought he would tell the story, not live it. Now all that’s left of him is that story.”

“More than a story. Do you know what the wars of mankind are almost always about? Laws. Sure, resources are nice, but the real war is about who gets to decide. Right, wrong, fact or fiction. It isn’t only that history is written by the victors – they become victors in order to write history. Last Day Town is no different. The visitor gave his life so that we could have The Four Commandments and One.”

“Commandments? Like in the bible?”

“Sort of. Here they are - No killing: that one’s self-explanatory. No stealing—possessions can only be given. No stealing of oxygen, or even talking about it, unless you’re introducing it to someone, like I am doing right now you. Note that this is stated separately from both theft and murder. He used his literal last breaths to make that distinction. Next up: No leaving this crater, right around the airlock, on pain of silence. You see that sharp edge where it turns into a plateau? If anyone goes over that edge the only one that is allowed to talk to them is the Supreme Elder, and she is allowed to kill anyone else that does. That’s more of a punishment than you can imagine, that silence. Do you understand these commandments that have laid down upon you, like they have been upon me?”

“I understand them,” Keren says, though she doesn’t accept them, yet. “But that’s only four.”

“Good. Here’s the exciting part: If a Resident wants to change any of the rules, they can, but they must be willing to sacrifice for it—the only way to change the law is trial by combat. If a Resident has twelve hours or more on them, they can propose a new law. The Supreme Elder either accepts, or passes the challenge to the Second Elder, who also chooses whether to accept or pass. If every single resident of Last Day Town passes, the new law is accepted. If not, the challenger fights for the new law.”

“Do people actually do this?”

“I never saw it, but if God permits, you might get to see it in your lifetime. What could be more exciting than watching a society change?”

Keren considers her options. Whatever she is to do with this day, she isn’t going to hurry anywhere.

“You don’t have a lot of time, do you?”

“How rude: you don’t just ask a lady how long she has to live!”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“No, no: I jest. It says an hour and forty seven minutes.”

“Then would you like to confess to me?”

“Why?”

Keren shrugs. “I’m curious.”

Enda laughs.

“What?”

“This is really strange.”

“Is it so weird to be curious?”

“Not that. This is embarrassing but, when I was first offered to confess, I made something up. I was too ashamed to tell the truth. I’m a really good liar, but I’ve regretted it ever since.”

“That is funny.”

She explains to Keren how they will isolate each other from the rest, turning off their radios and touching their visors to each other, but just before they do, she hesitates again.

“Maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t want to take away from that smooth equanimity of yours.”

What could this woman say that could possibly shake Keren? She is pleasantly curious. “Come on, Edna,” Keren says. “We ain’t got all day.”

#

The Shadow-Man, for that is the name Edna had been given, is tired, the kind of tired sleep won't fix. A single explosion, a single medicine shipment lost, was all that was needed to send the prime minister into a rage, and after the rage came guilt, to an almost suicidal degree. He’d sent word to some wannabe journalist about Last Day Town itself, in some hope to turn the tide against himself. Against the whole of them.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

She disposed of the journalist, of course. If she hadn’t the entire structure would fall, right on her silly little head. She knew, when she sent the police to his location, that she would have to go, sooner or later, for defying the will of the ruler, even if it saved them both. And there she was now, ready for the new shadow man to have her as his first victim. There wasn't any other way for this to play out.

She pours herself cognac, half a glass, just like her grandmother taught her, sets up a chess board if only to look at the light shining off the real wood and seem smart, even to herself.

She’d asked him, before, why weren’t they bypassing the airlock’s safety features, rigging it so they could ‘exile to Earth’ people without any oxygen in their suits, or without suits at all.

Don't waste your time on it. Not what I’m paying you for. He shouted it to the entire office. As long as they die out of this asteroid, I don’t mind if they take their time. Then he laughed, and the Shadowman laughed along. God, how pragmatic they thought themselves to be. But the guilt was already there, wasn’t it?

She doesn’t have time for that now. A decision needs to be made.

The Shadowman received two messages. Attempts at communication would be more accurate. One appeared in her computer as if on its own, with no sender or source, the other was left where she would eventually go looking.

Her screen turned black, the letters appearing in white. No introduction, no apology for the interruption. It started with a paragraph about her favorite bird, the willow warbler, and how it was discovered that their singing patterns were not hardwired into them, but taught, bird to bird, and people had taken to create whole flocks of them that courted each other with motifs from Mozart and Paganini. Why, the anonymous sender wrote, when nature chose the song randomly, we deemed it just, but we were appalled when it was a person who chose the song, even if the birds' singing was all the better for it? Why apologize for teaching birds what songs they were allowed to sing?

She sighed. The parallel to her own work was glaringly obvious, and the choice of the warbler specifically testified to an intimate knowledge of her. It was a strong opening, perhaps too strong.

It was not written by a human being, those lines were enough to show. If it were a Ceresian that hacked her computer, they wouldn’t have taken their time like that. It was Earth, what was left of it. And how has that machine learned to talk, if it was not our own voices, digested and regurgitated to us, a complex echo of our entirety as a culture? The rest of the message offered sanctuary on the greying planet, not that it could be trusted. Once she is thrown out, it said, an Earth-bound drone will come out of hiding and pick her up. All she had to do for it was accept, and once she is on Earth she will advise the machine on matters of Ceresian politics.

It had a lot of computing power, it confessed, but it didn't know how to think, not like her. And it needed to manipulate people. She had already made the decision to defect to the winning side, in the small arena of Ceres. Why not make the same move on the interplanetary scale?

The insinuation was clear–If she refuses, she admits her life was a mistake. If she accepts, she gets to feel proud of the decisions she'd already made. A clever manipulation, albeit a little rough. Maybe it really does need her to conquer the rest of the solar system. Maybe it’s faking that need, and as soon as she got to Earth she'd be interrogated for every single piece of information she knew, tortured with a patience only a machine could muster, then disposed of.

The other message was a single file, the only one Dina Arnon uploaded to a secure server, even though she had in fact wanted it to be found. Her little attempt to poison the air supply failed, and her partner was caught with a briefcase full of highly dangerous psychoactive chemicals, (trying to cause some sort of mass hysteria, perhaps?) but she had evaded being arrested, evaded an assassination. From whatever hole where she hid from the police officers swarming the tunnels, she wrote:

Dear Shadowman,

I am losing.

The rest of the letter is long, and written badly, hastily. Edna can almost see the woman looking behind her shoulder as she types down whatever she thinks. She explains her dream, to change the minds of people. To Let them decide for their true selves. With half of her stash confiscated, she can't hope to affect a big enough block of the population. She is lost. She has lost.

Dina doesn't even know what kind of help she is asking for, but she is asking for it from anyone who would listen. She dares not ask her allies for help, knowing that it will set the Shadowman after them. So why not go straight to the source?

Love, she signs, and Edna can’t help but read it as an imperative, Dina.

The shadowwoman downs her cognac, and writes a set of answers in her head. Two for the lifeless intelligence, two for the honest terrorists.

First set:

To the machine - I accept your offer. Come take me away.

To Dina - I'm sorry. We’re all just trying to survive.

Second set:

To the machine - Go back to the hell we shouldn’t have summoned you from.

To Dina - You don't have to change everyone's mind, my dear. Those who are being stepped on will get on board as soon as the boot gets off their neck. It's those who are doing the stepping that need to clear their head, see things anew. I've deleted your presence, as much as I could. Some police officers might notice, but the cameras won’t auto-recognize you. I wish I could have given you any passcodes, but all I can give you is the location and time of the prime minister’s pool-party, next week. A pretty-eyed girl like you shouldn’t have much trouble getting in, even with that bulky suitcase. Good luck.

The Shadowman sighs, pours again, drinks again. She picks up a black horse-figurine off the checkered board and thinks about chivalry.

She wishes she could have hidden herself like she could Dina, but she can’t–her successor won’t be fooled so easily. She can only decide what to do with her remaining time. But she’d already decided which set of messages she wants to send, didn’t she?

#

“Do you think she’ll make it?” Keren asks as they turn on their radios, thinking of the kindergarten teacher she’d once met, who introduced her to the group she ended up blowing the prime minister’s shipment with. She really did have pretty eyes.

“Maybe, maybe not. But I dare hope.”

Hope, you coward, is what Yossi said, the first time Keren met him. And she did. She tried. Perhaps, if people like Dina tried, things could still change, inside. A small world like Last Day Town could be saved, so why not a big one?

“And that hope, does it make it easier?”

Edna scoffs. “I wish. It makes it harder. You see, I’m not afraid for my own life. Not really.” She sticks out her tongue, as if to make light of it all. “The oxygen will run out, I’ll choke, and this body will shut down. But will I be gone? I’m a cloud of many thoughts, and while a precious few might be endemic to this specific person, the majority of them are commonplace. There is very little that is unique in Edna Bernstein, and the rest is shared by many. Most of what you are is the shared parts, not the unique parts. And the shared parts will survive my death. I don’t fear death because I’m mostly immortal, just like you, and if I leave a few ideas here, then I won’t die at all.”

“Then…”

“But if Ceres dies, all the parts of myself that I loved so much won’t be kept in this leviathan, in this one true God that is made out of all of us combined. That’s what made it so scary. This Dina, she wasn’t afraid to die, and she wasn’t afraid to change herself, or the world. Ceres has to die in part, or it will die whole.”

“Just like we did.”

“Just like we did. And it comforts me, a little, to know that it’s not just in my hands. That I can trust others to take some of the load. That’s what I did here, on my last day. Prepared to die.”

“And are you?”

“As I will ever be. And you? Do you think that you could find, within you, a way to pray? A belief to hold the pain and fear at bay?”

“No,” Keren says. The word is quiet, but there’s more than enough power in her lack of hesitation.

“Nothing?” Edna asks.

“People say that they don’t believe in anything, but they believe that time flows forward, that they’ve lived their life, that they’re going to die. People suffer from believing that there is an I, and that I is going to be gone. You, Edna, overcome that fear by framing things so you won’t be gone when the oxygen runs out. I, on the other hand, don’t think one can die at all. Where we are, the future is not, and where the future is, we are not. The person who was saying the last sentence is already gone, and the person saying this sentence will also be gone soon, as well as the person listening to it.” For a moment, a warm memory floods her, of Yossi in the dining chamber, trying very hard to look like he understands what she’s talking about, and she lets it come and go. “Poof. The very last moment isn’t any different than any other moment, except that you might choose to use it to imagine death and think about how much you don’t want it to come. The worst feeling you can have is knowing that the thing you fear most is coming—but it’s not. It’s an illusion.”

“I just wonder if it’ll work like you think it will, when the timer runs out.”

“Not my problem. My only duty is to discern honestly between truth and lie. It’s not my job to curate ideas based on their usefulness.”

“Funny. That’s exactly what I thought my job was. To make sure bad notions won’t contaminate Ceres.” Something in her face hardens, and when she speaks, she sounds like she’s pushing the words out by force. The shift in her mood is sudden, but that’s how it is, sometimes, with this sort of thing. “I personally gave the command to have people arrested, tried, and thrown out here to choke. Dozens, hundreds of people, who were in touch with the wrong people, even if they didn’t come across any sensitive information, all under the excuse that I was keeping Ceres united against a greater threat. Even you, Keren… Tagor, was it?” She looks at Keren, eyes torn open, then looks down, her helmet between her palms. “God, you must hate me so much.”

“What was your mistake, Edna?” Keren's voice is stern, but not cold.

“What does it matter? It’s in the past, isn’t it?”

“You regret it now. Reconcile it, now. What do you regret?”

“I wanted to keep Ceres alive. I really did. To make it better,” The Shadowman says, still looking down at the rock. “But I stayed in the shadows, like a coward. The things that remain of you aren’t what you say, but what you do. That’s why people followed Moses and his laws, and why The Visitor managed to change Last Day Town. I didn’t only ruin my own life, but hundreds, God, perhaps millions of lives. And in all honesty, I can’t say for sure that I made anyone any safer for it. How could that be forgiven?”

So that’s what my killer looks like, Keren thinks. Pained, remorseful, tragic. No surprises there.

“Like this,” Keren says. Edna raises her eyes from the rock floor to meet Keren’s eyes. “I forgive you.” It is the truth.

Edna starts crying. “Thank you.”

“Thank you. You’re a great mentor.”

“Really? I sure tried my best.” She reaches out to hold her hand. “You know, I’m kind of glad that we never rigged the airlock so it will let us throw people out without suits, or without oxygen.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I got to talk to you. Even in this place that is literally the stuff of nightmares, God resides here, too. Perhaps it is a little god, and still it was my holy honor to see its face. Now it’s time for me to fuck off.”

Keren squeezes both of her hands. “Don’t you have a little longer?”

“I do, but I don’t want to seem like I waited for the last minute.”

“So you’re really not afraid?”

“Of course I am. But I have to put on a brave face.” She winks, and the tears stick to her eyelashes. “Lead by example, for once in my life, instead of just talking big.” Keren nods, and Edna nods back. “Hey, everybody!” Edna shouts to the others. “I’m good to go!”

“Taking an early leave, huh?” a woman calls back. “Nothing like exercising the illusion of control.”

“We’re only as good as our mentors,” Edna says, and shrugs.

“Then will you also recite a death poem?”

Edna consideres it for a moment. “I forgot about that.” Her brows knot in concentration, as if she’s trying to recall the exact wording, and finally she nods. “Yes.”

They huddle around her. Hug her. She hands the knife to the person who called back to her—a small woman with curly hair all about the inside of her helmet, who takes it with an agonized expression. Edna takes a deep breath, her hand in Keren’s fluttering like a fragile, winged thing and when she speaks, there is only that moment, and nothing else. She quotes:

For from man thou came, and unto man thou shall return.

“Is that Yehuda Amichai?” Keren asks.

“It is.” Edna smiles. “Now ask yourself–why does the fact that you recognize it makes me like you even more?” She turns to the woman holding a knife beside her, and nods. “Do it.”

Keren doesn’t look away. She doesn’t think as much as suddenly know that if each moment is separate then they are flowing neither forward or backward, and their order is an illusion created by our memories. She might as well imagine the flow in reverse: One moment the woman doesn’t exist, but in the next she does. Not much different than birth: oxygen atoms coming from far away in space, absorbed by this woman’s lungs, entering her bloodstream, reviving her mind. The knife touching the separate layers of her suit, connecting the folds, locking the air inside, raising the pressure as the suit tightens; the woman spending twenty-four hours in the suit, dropping back into the airlock, and spending a life in the shadows, giving commands that she knows are wrong, studying ornithology and mythology as a hobby, growing young, forgetting how to write, forgetting how to speak, growing smaller and more feeble until finally separating into a sperm and egg cell, the atoms going back and playing their games, dancing their dance all the way to the beginning of time.

She looks away, and her eyes meet the oxygen timer at the corner of her visor.

#

Estimated oxygen time: So little.

Keren puts her palms together, praying for an anchor to pull her back to the present, and almost in answer the Residents start to sing, the harmony like a wave washing over her, engulfing her. This time, she understands a little better what the words mean. She joins in.

#

After her mentor is taken to her final resting place, just outside the small crater, a new arrival comes, screaming and kicking, still space-borne, and is quickly tended by the same woman who cut Edna’s suit open, the current Supreme Elder. All of the residents, Keren included, introduce themselves, but the newcomer seems entirely unimpressed. The Supreme Elder dismisses them, and Keren goes around talking to the chess players, listening to the poets and storytellers. All of them make the same jokes, struggling with the same fears. None of it holds her attention, not really. Eventually, she sits at the edge of the crater, in the company of no one but the dried and frozen former residents and the stars, preparing for a day of staring at space and musing. Not an entirely bad day, all in all, albeit a bit boring.

Something moves out on the plane, catching her attention. Something that looks more and more like a person in a space suit making their way towards her. Isn’t it forbidden to leave the crater?

The figure moves strangely, above the ground without dropping to step on it, and incredibly fast, growing from a hint of a spacesuit to a man with separate limbs and the stick he uses to propel himself. Keren thinks he’ll go over the entire crater in one leap, but instead he releases a lasso to drag behind him, catching on to a rock and stopping mid-space with an audible “oof!”

He lands hard just outside of the crater and looks at Keren, who looks back in silence. He’s tall, with a bushy beard, straight Grecian nose, and large, intelligent brown eyes. He winks at her. It’s charming, if bizarre.

Quickly the rest of the residents notice him and come to the edge. The Supreme Elder comes forward. “I know you,” she says. “You were here when I arrived. You left in order to search for something—you and someone else. Did you find what you were looking for?”

His face is pure pride. “It took us hours of searching, but we did. Treasures of strange culture and technology. It was easier once we figured these out.” He taps the metal stick against the rock. Keren notices then that his hands are with thick mittens made of patchwork suits.

“Where’s the other one?”

“He went ahead. Wanted to see if he could make it far enough to see the sun. I remember you, too, you know—I was only two hours here when you arrived. I remember you cursed very creatively. Look at you now, the Supreme Elder—though I’m technically more senior than you are.”

“A seniority you forfeited by leaving. You should have returned here for your last minutes. Instead, you’re going to spend your last hour ignored, by the law.”

“The law? Seriously?” He looks at Keren again, as if to say, can you believe these people?

“The law is what stands between order and chaos. It’s the reason you got anything explained to you at all. It’s the reason you could take the time to choose whether or not to break it, and I will not hesitate to do what it takes to keep it upheld. Don’t you dare diminish it.” Her tone is level, but her fists clench. There’s a knife in one of them—the same one that cut Edna out of her suit.

He tries to shrug nonchalantly, but frustration shows in the movement of his shoulder. “Fine, whatever. One hour here, one hour there; don’t let them talk to me, if that’s what you think is right. But at least let me tell you what I saw.”

“No.”

Keren turns to the woman. There is something dark in her greenish eyes, mournful.

“Why the fuck not? What do you care?”

“I can’t let you leave a gospel behind. Out here, that’s the closest to survival we can get.”

“It isn’t about me. I don’t care if nobody remembers who I am. There’s so much to find out there, so much we could make. Don’t they deserve to know?”

“Not if it breaks them apart, no,” she says, her voice as grave as stone. “We have everything we need right here. What do we need progress for? It starts with something small like a stick and a glove, and before you know it people are stealing…” She stops before saying the word. The faces in the crowd show varying levels of agreement, from certainty to confusion. Some are curious, others don’t see what the big deal is.

“What’s stopping me from just saying it now?”

“I’ll kill you,” she says, and turns half a glance towards the rest. “We all will.”

Keren isn’t sure that they will. She won’t.

“You will try.” He shifts his grip on the metal rod in his hand. “You’re officially the Supreme Elder now. If I kill you, I can change the law and make it legal to go outside, can’t I?”

“Rule changes can only be decided in combat, not spontaneous murder. You’d need at least twelve hours on you to call for it, which I know you don’t have.”

Just above The Returner’s head, a red star shines, and Keren thinks of her mother and her love, her desire for Keren to live her life unbound. “I have more than twelve hours.” She hears her own voice, so confident and truthful, as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it is.

Every single face turns to her. The Supreme Elder grimaces. “Honey, why get involved? You still have the rest of your day ahead of you.”

“I want to be free,” she says simply. “I want to see what he’s talking about.”

The Returner smiles, a warm and lovely thing.

The Elder tsks, visibly grinding her teeth. “The Formers made these laws for us, made this town for us, so we won’t have to suffer what they went through. You’re free now, to do as you want—in here. And you’d throw it all away on a whim?”

Keren glances at the red planet again, and something inside her blossoms. “Enough talking. I challenge you, Last Day Town’s Supreme Elder, to a duel in order to instigate the change proposed. If I win, whoever wishes to go out may do so, and this man will be exonerated of all crimes, and teach what he’s learned. Do you accept, or pass the duty to the next elder in line?” If the Supreme Elder forfeits, and the next does as well, Keren might get what she wants without anyone getting hurt.

“I can’t pass this burden to anyone else,” the Elder says, her eyes lowered, her fingers fidgeting around the knife. “I accept.”

The crater is silent for a while. A large ship enters the sky, a black, gleaming leviathan, carrying behind it a drag-net full of metal that gleams breathtakingly in the sunlight. Keren lets herself forget about the concerns of the world for a moment, but her attention shifts when someone hands her a club of steel rebar, and a crudely ripped patch of suit to hold it with. She wraps it around the base of the weapon to create a handle and closes her fingers around it.

The weapon is heavy and short, with round edges filed smooth, so cold it has a bluish hue, that it hurts to hold even with the extra layer of insulation. She notices the contrast between it and the knife that the elder wields, another manifestation of the system’s, any system’s, natural tendency to resist change.

“Careful,” The Returner says. “Steel’s as fragile as glass at these temperatures.”

Is that right? She leans towards a nearby rock, and with a flick of her wrist whips the baton against it, breaking a fragment off and leaving a sharp edge behind. She inspects the glasslike blade under the golden light, and grins like the first human to ever fashion a stone axe.

The Elder’s eyes open wide, and her grip tightens around her knife. She beckons Keren to the center of the crater and says a few ceremonial words, but Keren’s so focused now that the words don’t quite reach her. The residents circle around them, and the returning man watches from the edge of the crater, leaning on his stick. She might die, but that’s always true, isn’t it? All songs are death songs. As she walks towards the center of the circle she makes up her own death song. It goes like this:

In this now in time

A bird chirps another’s song

Spring among the stars