As soon as she stepped into earshot, Keren asked me not about the people I met, but the lines they composed. I gave her the run down as quickly as I could, and she didn’t interrupt. At least, not until I got to Ctesibius, and their insistence to avoid using the first person.
“Were they having a hard time?” She brushed her eyebrow with one delicate finger, her gaze boring through the floor, deep into the frozen rock of Ceres, all the way to the stars on the other side.
“Obviously, yes. What do you mean?”
“Perhaps they were the most afraid of their persona falling apart.”
“Maybe.” I thought about the immense pressure former Ctesibius had put on them, and how angry I’d been at them for fulfilling the wishes of dying people. “Or maybe they were just under the habit of applying technical solutions to human issues.”
She looked at me, suddenly, as if my face let something on. “They’ve hurt you, haven’t they? Ctesibius.”
“It doesn’t make sense, does it? To say that they’ve hurt me. There is no Line Ctesibius, it’s just a bunch of people pretending.”
“And yet you’re angry at something they did. What was it?”
“It’s hard to imagine, but they must have waited for days with the plan at the ready-”
She laughed.
“What?”
“No one actually sat there and waited for days, did they, unless you consider those different people to be a single entity.”
“Yes, very clever.”
“And what were they waiting for?”
“For a chump like me to come over with a vessel they could hijack, and extort them in order to give it back.”
She whistled, low and long. “That’s the kind of initiative I’ve been thinking about.”
“They’re the reason I’m here!” My voice rose, my anger only half restrained. “I’m going to die because of what they did to me.”
“So you do believe in the persona. The line. You see it as a person.”
#
I ate, I waited, I stared at the ceiling and thought about what she said, then walked back to the dining chamber. I wasn’t angry at Ctesibius as an entity, only at the people who composed it. But which of them was I angry at? That Ctesibius that I never met, who set himself to explode with the fake detonation, just to make me think my skipper was gone? He could have spent those last moments in the comfort of the line, but he chose not to. Or Ctesibius’s First, who’d begged me for forgiveness? Second and Third, who’d done their best to accomplish something, anything, while processing their shock at learning how little they have left?
“Tell me more about them,” she said as she went around the corner. “What were they extorting you for?”
“They wanted to build a device that would keep a single person alive. There were some ingredients they had to bring from the inside. They wanted to take more of Anaxagoras’s people –“
“The ones that picked up trash?”
“Yes. But Ctesibius envied them for having more free time because of the technology Ctesibius created, and they wanted to put those hours back in their service, I didn’t really understand exactly how, but they couldn’t wage war with Diocletian in the way–that’s the exact reason Diocletian exist in the first place.”
“So, a stalemate.”
“Until they found out that Diocletian were stealing oxygen from their own. The ‘line’ wasn’t actually dying, they were initiating new residents as Diocletian just for appearances sake, and then taking the oxygen for themselves.”
She seemed surprisingly unappalled. “They didn’t want to die.”
“Nobody does, and yet the others respected that the newcomers didn’t want to die, either. Ctesibius found out about this, and tried extorting Diocletian to help them with Anaxagoras, but Diocletian refused.”
“Why?”
“I... Never actually found out.”
“Shame.”
#
“Have you met them, though?”
“Who?”
“Diocletian? Did you understand who they were?”
“They were two people, trying not to die. They weren’t really a line…”
“If they were pretending, honor their pretense like I’m honoring yours.” I raised an eyebrow, but didn’t stop her. She continued. “Diocletian was a line that didn’t want to let time change it. Why would they refuse Ctesibius’s offer?”
“They must have thought they could get more out of Ctesibius?”
“Could they?”
“They killed Ctesibius, eventually, so that must stand for something.” I suddenly found it very important to add. “But she promised me, when there was just one Diocletian left, that she would rebuild it as well. All of the lines.”
“But they couldn’t, could they? Tell another resident all of the memories the old Ctesibius had? Once the memories are gone, you have to accept that Ctesibius is dead.”
“Ctesibius can’t be dead, because it’s not a person. It’s a fictional character. A story.”
She stomped her foot, surprisngly upset. “But there is a memory, there are actions. Promises made and kept. Isn’t that…” She had a look in her eyes that I’d learned meant that she was contemplating whether or not she should say something, finally judging that it is still too soon, shaking her head, and moving to the next subject. “You mentioned another name, Pythia. They did a lot of talking, right?”
“And listening. They confessed the dying, and remembered more than any of the lines. But right near the end, Pythia confessed that they knew about Diocletian, about their oxygen theft, and kept their silence. They knew what was happening and didn’t tell anyone. I can’t forgive them for that.”
“Perhaps they believed that if they did good, the others would follow their example.”
“A little naïve, no?”
“Were they selfish in other respects? Were they assholes?”
“No. Pythia were nothing but kind to me. To anyone.”
“Just those people you happened to meet, then, happened to be naïve?”
I looked at her, saw that her lips curved like they did when she was trying to lead me to a point. “I don’t know who Pythia were before I met them. I can only tell you who they were while I was there.”
“See, you’re starting to get it.”
“Starting to get what?”
She let her head sway from side to side, smiling. “I don’t know who you were before you met them, but the Yossi that I saw preferred to get shocked himself than let someone else suffer.”
#
As soon as her belly swells, I fall in love with her even more than I did before. Just like it was with Ayelet - as soon as it became evident my baby was really inside of her body, my love for her grew more than I could have imagined. I worshiped her, served at the altar of her body, taking care of every single need, and making ones up when there were none.
Funny, that for thousands of days Ayelet was my entire world, the first thing I saw in the morning and the last at night, but these days I barely think of her. It feels like I should have more to say about such a change, but I don’t want to. I’d rather be with Keren, pregnant, yelling at me, half angry and half delighted, to stop asking her what food she wants, to stop trying to arrange the pillows for her. She isn’t sick, goddammit, and I’m driving her crazy with my nagging.
I apologize, and she forgives me easily. Curled up together, we quickly fall asleep.
“Good morning, Yossef Ben Ze’ev,” Peeps draws me into wakefulness, and I chant the words along with it. “You are to be provided with three meals…”
#
“Good morning,” I said.
“Morning. Do you want to know what happened when I landed on Ceres?”
“Desperately,” I said, and saw in her eyes that my honesty had earned me something in them.
“I was supposed to go back to my job here—a meditation instructor. That was my profession, before, and I thought my mind would turn back to normal, that this madness, that this single-moment-ness would pass, and for a while it did. There was a tomorrow again. There was a ‘next moment’ again. But that only made things worse. As soon as I got situated it became clear that this world was also ending–things just getting worse and worse, the trust being eroded until Ceres, as an institution, collapsed. Without cooperation, almost everyone would die. Even the oxygen we breathe is dependent on a governmental intuition. And there was nothing I could do about it, and I don’t know, maybe other people are better at denial but I just wasn’t, I couldn’t look away. I didn’t care about teaching crooked cogs in the machine to breathe through their nose and feel the trauma as it presented itself as a physical sensation. The money, the struggle for survival, it just seemed so futile. For a while I thought about getting myself one of those Recluse Asteroids, you know, just a hollowed-out rock, some life support and a solar panel, like people do now. But I couldn’t. I survived all of that journey, and for what? Just to be put in a box again? So there I was between two tigers—Either I lived in the single moment and admitted that by the next second tick I would die, or I tried believing in a continuous self that was going to die along with this dwarf planet.”
“Which did you choose?”
“For a long time I didn’t. I quit my job, burnt my savings. I didn’t care if I would run out of money to pay for rent and oxygen, get thrown out to another planet or vacuum. I partied a lot, I did too much drugs and looked for affection in places I knew I shouldn’t have.” She burst with laughter at that. “Don’t give me that face, you prude. I’m not ashamed of that, but I’m not proud either. I wasn’t afraid of how shitty I would feel afterward. I didn’t even feel bad for the girl that would wake up in the morning, not knowing where she was, feeling a certain shade of shit that she never even imagined on Mars. I realized that it really was her problem, not mine. And I stopped worrying about the world ending. It wasn’t my problem anymore.”
“Whose problem was it, then?”
“Someone else, someone who looks like me, has my memories and name, but isn’t me.”
“But she is you, no matter how you think about it.”
“I thought you wanted to understand who I am, and how I think is who I am, in the realest sense—I think about Keren as a person in a future, and I can’t control what she’s going to do, I can’t protect her. All of the world that I will ever see is here. All that I will be, all that I have ever been, is right now. These are the boundaries of my domain. This is who I am.”
#
“Okay, so let’s say I do agree with you,” I shouted out into the hallway before I could even hear her steps, timing it by how long I had to wait every day in the line before she entered the chamber. “How does that make me stop being afraid?”
She yelled back. “What makes you not fear death is practicing. You’d rather not think about it, and so when the end finally comes, you’re new to dying.”
“How can I practice dying?” I yelled, not caring anymore who would hear. “I only get to die once.”
“You never die at all,” she shook her head as she entered the room. “When you think about it. You never get to think ‘I am dead.’ At worst you’re certain that in a moment you won’t think anything at all, that the future will go on and you won’t get to see it or affect it. I can almost remember the horror of it, when it still used to scare me. What’s horrible isn’t what happens after you’re gone, because nothing happens after you’re gone: it’s the moment before. The suffering doesn’t come from being gone.”
“What the hell does it come from, then?”
“From the resistance. The thought that torments you is that the thing you resist the most is going to happen anyway. It’s the helplessness that breaks a soul apart. Here’s a story that’ll break your heart–Pavlov, the one with the bells, would house the dogs in cages in his basement, and when he wanted them to get out he would run an electrical current through the wire. One day there was a flooding and the dogs almost drowned. After the ones that survived recovered, they wouldn’t come out of the cages even when Pavlov electrocuted them. As if they’ve learned, when the water rose over their noses, that nothing they do lessens their suffering, and stopped trying. The worst thing you can do to yourself is resist something that cannot change. It will break your soul.”
“So I should just give up? Stop trying to change the world so it won’t break me? That’s your grand secret to overcoming the fear of death?” I could understand where she was coming from, but I could help getting angry over that kind defeatism.
“It’s not just death: Any suffering you endure is caused by thinking about the future or holding on to the past.”
“It’s not like the present’s that great.” I gestured around the room we were in, the bare walls, the cold light.
“Isn’t it?” She rolled her shoulders, relishing the freedom of movement. “The food’s alright, the company’s pleasant. What’s not to like?”
Why are we spending our last moments arguing about the most frustrating topic we could find? “That I’m not going to be alive by next week—how about that?”
“See, you’re thinking about the future, and now you’re suffering.”
“No one can just stop thinking about the future. That’s just how people are!”
“Why are you so angry? I’m not the one killing you.”
My skin was hot and my voice was loud in my ears. Even the old woman was paying attention to me now. I shook my head.
#
“I’m sorry about before. I’m just trying to understand. How do you expect me to stop being opposed to the idea of dying?”
“I’ve already told you. You practice. Every single second.”
“How? It’s not like every day I experience my last moment.”
“But it is! You and I will never meet again, because the next time we meet, you’ll already be someone else, and so will I. All you truly have is the immediate now. Not even this day, not even this conversation. The breath you’re taking now, someone else will exhale.”
“So every time I start a sentence-”
“Someone else will finish it.” She smiled proudly. “You’re so worried about what the judge will say, but no matter what they say, it will be someone else hearing it. There is no Yossi, it’s just a bunch of people pretending.”
I was silent for a long moment. It was nothing but a coping mechanism, I thought, albeit a sophisticated one. Pretending she had nothing to lament losing, and nothing to regret. There was no guilt, no one to blame for past grievances. How could there be, if they were all gone already, like wisps of smoke? I understood, then. “I must seem crazy to you, then. Like the residents of Last Day Town seemed to me.”
She winked, making a clicking sound, to show that I did finally get it, and something in me was fulfilled, if only for being on her side.
“So that’s what practice is? I just think about it all of the time?”
“Imagine what it would be like to die, this very second. Like someone was about to cut your suit open right now. Really, close your eyes and imagine this was your last second. Let it wash over you, take you apart. But you don’t have to do that, not really. Take a breath in, and let it out. That’s all you can do. Try it now. Just listen to it, feel it in your nostrils, in the expansion of your abdomen. When you forget the pretenses of the future and past, free and safe.”
“It’s the opposite of safe. It’s the bleakest thing I can imagine. Wouldn’t it be better to pretend?”
Her eyes lit up as she turned to me. "Trust me, it wouldn’t.”
A comforting lie, and one that was tempting to believe–if all that I am exists right now, then there’s no future to fear from, no sense in feeling guilt over mistakes I’ve made a decade ago, not any more than a Ctesibius’s Third should feel guilty for the faults of First. But it also meant there was no hope to be had in the future, no comfort that things were going to improve, if I were gone as soon as this moment passed. And as soon as this moment passed. And this one as well. It meant that my entire life was this moment, breathing deeply, following a light square into my cell and looking back to see Keren’s hair swinging behind her as she walked, the tapping of her sleepers.
And then it was gone.
#
Our daughter has her mother’s eyes, and her mother’s hair, and her confidence, but she has some taken from me, too. Not the suicidal tendencies, or the disquiet—she’s inquisitive and wordy, and she has my clever eyes, the way I look at things. Not as wild as her mother, not as fucking domesticated as her father.
We give her everything we have. I get back to working on the haulers, busting my old back in shift after shift just so she can go to school. I come back on weekends and play chess with her, introduce her to poetry and literature, the craft of journalistic writing and critical thought. I promise never to let her fall into a pit without anyone seeing. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort. What else can you ask for, but for the effort to be worth it?
“Good morning, Yossef Ben Ze’ev. You are to be provided with three meals…”
#
“You said I should respect Diocletian’s pretense like you’re respecting mine,” I said, just as I’d rehearsed. “I’ve been waiting for two days to ask you what that means.”
“Today we’re supposed to talk about the lines, aren’t we? Not about what I think.”
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“What does it matter? Why should we care, when there’s so little…” It was my sixth day in the prison. As far as I knew, people rarely got more than a week.
“Here’s your answer,” she said. “When newcomers reach Last Day Town, they are burdened with a line’s story, tasked with making sure today goes on as a smooth continuation of yesterday.”
“But why should they accept that burden? The lines aren’t their responsibility, even if we pretend that they are real.”
“Do they have anything better to do? I mean that literally. They could keep tending to their own story, but their own story is ending.”
“Don’t they deserve exactly that? To accept that their story is ending, instead of distracting themselves with a made up one?”
“For some reason it’s very hard for people to think about their story as over. Do you know what Corpse Pose is?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a pose in yoga. You should try it sometime. You lie down on your back and let everything go loose. You imagine that you’ve died and now you’re floating aimlessly in space; that your life has already ended, and everything that seemed so important to you is gone, worn away by time, and doesn’t matter anymore. It’s very relaxing.”
“I saw a lot of people practicing corpse pose in Last Day Town,” I winked at her, trying to make her laugh again.
“Harr harr,” she said, wrinkling her nose in dismay but then snorted with laughter, despite herself. A warmth spread through my chest, something faint, delicate, but it was there. “All stories are made up,” she continues. “Even the real ones. But it would be more fun to make a new one, together, like you and I made here.”
“We didn’t make anything up, though,” I said.
#
“Didn’t we?” She replied several hours later. “With our little rules telling us when to speak about what, are we not the same? Waking up every day with yesterday’s questions, trying to come up with better answers? Even when there’s little time, the best thing for residents to do is find something you can do with other people, for other people.”
“In theory, maybe. But in practice, even when they worked together, they hardly seemed like they shared some camaraderie. They threatened each other with violence, they made it illegal to use their old name, or even just refer to their former lives on the inside, and scolded each other for thinking of themselves as individuals. And that’s when things were going well, when there’s no conflict with other lines. They pretended to be cohesive.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’re for? If it means not sinking into despair; isn’t pretending the right thing to do?”
“Not when it’s thrust upon them.”
“Thrust on them by whom?”
“Those who came before them.”
“And who thrust that on them?”
It was obvious what answer she was looking for – Anaxagoras, Pythia, Ctesibius and Diocletian themselves. But it wasn’t the correct one. “There had to be some people at the start. Someone started the lines when there weren’t any.”
“And why do you think they did that?”
“Perhaps they didn’t want whatever flavor of madness they developed to die with them.”
“As do we all. But why didn’t they want it to die?”
“Because they thought it would be better for the residents.”
“Ah, you see how it turns around? Poor lines, created just to serve the residents, poor residents, enslaved by the lines. That’s what it must have been like when people still believed in gods. And who needs a god more than those who have no time left?”
We were silent for a relatively long moment. “Maybe you’re right: no matter what they’ve done before, they got to be away from it, to play a part of something greater. It’s still unfair, but in the end, when death came closer, they chose to play along. No one could coerce them, and each generation chose to keep playing along.”
She nodded slowly.
“Is that what you’re doing? Just playing along?”
“That’s for tomorrow. We have rules here, you know.” She smiled that winning smile of hers, a sage. “Bon appetit.”
“You too.”
As soon as I entered my cell I lay in my bed and tried, for once in my life, to practice yoga. I let my arms fall to my sides, my body pressing into the hard mattress. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be dead, for my body to fly coldly in space, or thrown into the chasm with the rest.
I didn’t like it.
#
I disapprove of our little girl moving outwards, to Europa. It doesn’t matter that she’s all grown up now; I still don’t want to see her go. Keren pretends to have no opinion on the matter.
“It’s not what it used to be! Or would you rather I go down to Mars? I’m a pretty good shot,” our daughter says, and winks, just like her mother.
“Don’t even joke about that!”
“Earth, then?”
“Will you please take this seriously?”
“Mom, Dad’s being hysterical again.” She rolls her eyes, and Keren tries, and fails, to hide a smile. Every time she smiles it accentuates the happy wrinkles on her face, from all of the times she’s smiled before.
“I’m sorry that I don’t want you to be a slave to some former Earth billionaire.”
“But I’ll be alive! Garik and I were already approved as class B immigrants, so we get a permit to have one child. Don’t you want your grandchild to know what an ocean looks like? It’s a paradise compared to here.”
“They’ll grow up a slave, too.”
“But they’ll live! Would you rather we die here? I want something of myself to survive, don’t you?”
Of course I do, I think. God, of course I do.
“Good morning, Yossef Ben Ze’ev. You are to be provided with three meals… “
“Yes, Peeps,” I muttered. “I get it.”
“…Your court date has been appointed for today. You will be summoned to board a train after the third meal of the day.”
There was a silence then, a ringing in my ears that drowned out the rest of the message the rest of the message, the threats and the countdown. Even as I stood in the square and walked, still that silence followed me. Isn’t it strange that I was surprised when the moment actually came?
#
I couldn’t think of a way to tell her our game would be over today. What would it matter if I told her, aside from darkening the mood? May as well not.
“So why do you do anything? Why even put that spoon in your mouth, if it’s going to be someone else that gets to enjoy it?”
“Did you try… just breathing?”
“I did.” I actually had. “But my heart… every time I tried to just sit down and breathe, my heart started going crazy, and I had to stop. I think the electrocution fucked with it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your heart. You’re just afraid.” She let that hang in the air, just for a moment. “I was too. When you first come to that conclusion, when you finally accept it, it’s horrible news. The worst news that you can get—you’re going to die very soon, and there is nothing you can do about it. You find yourself fearing death every second, facing that resistance every second. Knowing that you won’t be here the next time the clock ticks, you can’t breathe, and it doesn’t matter that you can’t breathe because you’re going to die anyway. What can you do with that little time that you have? You can’t save yourself. You can’t enjoy yourself in that last moment, because any joy turns to ashes in your mouth. But because every moment is the last you have, it also becomes hallowed. Blasphemous to waste.” She laughed, the kind of laughter you can only have when everything is alright, and when I heard it, for an instant everything really was. “Do you know what I ended up doing?”
“I can’t even guess.”
“I started volunteering at a hospital. At first with terminal patients, but I ended up spending most of my time in the psychiatric ward. Do you know how real psychotics are? There’s no bullshit. People who don’t know how to pretend, or don’t want to. If they did, they wouldn’t be there. Like this one guy, who got into a mining accident and had a tear in his suit. It took his buddies an entire minute to seal him off, and the life support pumped as much oxygen as it could to keep some survivable pressure. He was in a comma for seven months, and when he wakes up he doesn’t even remember anything, not even his own name, if that even makes sense to call it his name anymore. So he’s figuring out how to be a person. A grown man, balding with a pot belly, trying out new personalities like a teenager. At first he doesn’t answer when I ask him if he wants to play ping pong, or do yoga with the rest, and every day I try and ask him, because it’s worth it, because he’s really there, even if he doesn’t answer. Until one day he looks at me and says—Will I get to look at your ass while you bend? And I tell him, very frankly, that I want to slap him right in his face. And he’s like, My face? Why? And I’m like, Yeah, because you’re being annoying. And he stops to think about it, very seriously, and says - Then do it. You see, he thinks that if that makes me happy, and that’s the only thing he can give me, then he should endure it. And I realize that he had a beautiful side in him no one ever gave him a chance to show.” She started crying, beautiful diamond tears sticking to her lower eyelashes, and I thought to myself that she really is a little insane. “You must think I’m crazy.”
“I’m thinking one of us must be, but I haven’t decided whom.”
She smiled, still crying, and it was so beautiful it shattered my heart into sharp, frozen little shards. “We said no bullshit.”
“You are. Crazy, I mean. But you’re not wrong.”
#
“I learned a lot from people I thought were crazy; maybe you can too. Here’s another teaching moment. The comma guy had a habit—every time he would practice a new position in yoga, and be shit at it, because that’s what practice is, he would tell us about all of the space ships that he has, and all deals with Earth he made, and ships waiting to pick him up for a weekend in Europa. A guy who won’t brush his teeth if you don’t watch him, bragging about ships. And that’s when I realized, even this guy is trying to solve it in a second.”
“Solve what?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You’re trying to solve it right now–how imperfect it all is, how much better your life was meant to be, how pathetic you are in comparison to who you thought you would become. And just like you, he feels it, more or less intensely, and he wants that feeling gone right fucking now. He makes up these lies just so no one would see how confused he is, how little he understands of what the fuck is going on, and it’s hilarious how obvious it is. The problem for the rest of us is that it’s not so easy to see how ridiculous our lies are.”
There was a sudden pressure, her accusation putting me on the backfoot. “And what about you? Do you see through your own lies?”
She shook her head, dismissive but not judgemental. “Do you know how fun it is to be a meditation teacher? Not only do you pass on the most important tools humanity has ever invented, but you’re meditating all day long. Before teaching, I would always fall back into caring about the mundane. But as a teacher, you have to go over the lessons all of the time. You know what really ruins people’s lives? Shame and guilt, over the things they’ve done. The memory that exists now, determines who you are. That’s the only thing I have to teach—when you look at your memories as the recorded actions of a familiar stranger, well-meaning but oh-so-confused, you can forgive them. The moment you accept that, you are free. And that’s why it’s so great teaching this stuff—I have to learn them every day, myself.”
I was not yet convinced, but there was something in what she said that rang as true. Did Pythia know this? Or whoever it was that started Pythia, did they know… A pain pierced my chest, like icy water, like a cold wind. It felt like something was finally finding its place; something finally starting to heal. It hurt, yet somehow I was glad that it did.
“So, have you forgiven yourself for ending up here?” I asked.
She smiled, proud. “I didn’t need to.”
#
“Why? What did you do?”
She cocked her head. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Do you still want to know?”
I nodded. “Of course I do.”
#
It is by accident that Keren finds out another volunteer at the hospital, a kindergarten teacher by trade, is a part of a terrorist cell, and Keren asks to join on her own volition. Why wouldn’t she? She has nothing to lose. Once they trust her, they tell her of their greatest finding - that the prime minister is getting direct shipments from Earth. Not Ceres, but the prime minister, personally. Packages of eighteen and a half kilos, once a year, dropped by an Earth probe high above Ceres, protected from direct sun-radiation by its shadow, and picked up by a tiny drone only hours later. If they weren’t looking at the weight differences, they would never have found it. Still, they don’t know what it means.
It comes to Keren in a flash of inspiration, as she is watching a video of the prime minister doing push-ups in a rally, under a standard Earth G and at the advanced age of eighty-five, when most Ceresians crumble from the accumulated exhaustion of a life of being overworked. Perhaps because she is a scholar of the fear of death, the way it ruins people, she can see Earth’s strategy—toppling the relatively stable Ceres by giving the prime minister immortality, but only as long as he keeps the position, and watching him risk destroying everything for a chance to stay in the position that keeps him alive.
Buying a drone is relatively easy, but tampering with its safety controls, making it collide with another in orbit is extremely challenging. Her cell sacrifices a lot. Risks a lot.
As far as anyone can follow its motives, they expect Earth won’t send another one until next year, seeing it as a personal failing of the prime minister and punishing accordingly.
It won’t kill him. It would just stop him from being immortal, sentenced to live like the rest of us, and not more. As humble as that sounds, that little explosion, captured by a passing vessel, shown on a tiny screen in the cell’s headquarters, is the most glorious thing Keren has ever seen.
#
I whistled appreciatively, but she waved her hand, still smiling, as if to shake my appreciation away—why should she be proud of someone else’s memories?
“Does it make sense to you, though? Do you understand why I bother to get out of bed?”
“Because when there is only the now, nothing stops you from doing what feels right. And it felt right to push Gil, even if it would hurt later.”
She nodded, and smiled that warm smile of hers. “I’m glad you finally understand.”
“I do. Someone could, theoretically, live like that. But I can’t, and I don’t believe you do. I think you’re so afraid of being afraid you’ve annihilated all possibility of success. But there is a reason to get out of bed, even if you don’t feel like it. There are people who need you. Future you is one of them. Will you just abandon them?”
She looked into her slowly filling bowl, and frowned. “I really want to convince you, you know. I really want you to see that it’s not just philosophy.”
“Why? Why would you care what I think about your life?”
“I don’t care what you think about me, you idiot,” she said with a chuckle. “I wanted to live in the here and now and fear nothing. I want you to become free.”
“Maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t want to be free, if it means never trying. We are here to bind ourselves to things.”
For the first time she looked at me with something that wasn’t welcoming, and it startled me. “How the hell are you going to bind yourself to anything? Don’t you see that it's all crumbling? The Solar system, this…” she touched her own face, her neck, and there was real terror in her eyes, unsedated. She shook her head, tears welling in the corners of her eyes. “No. I can’t let you drag me back.”
I thought of Pythia’s poem, of the blood that flows through many hearts, and I realized something, like a lightning flash, and started talking, trying to express the thought before it was fully formed.
“I’ll show you, when you’re in Last Day Town.”
“I don’t we’ll be there at the same time,” she said, confused.
“When you get there, I’ll also be there.”
“How so?”
I closed my eyes and saw a waterfall. The shape is constant, even though the water keeps changing, old replacing with new. Along the stream, falling from the edge of a cliff down to endless space, fish are swimming as hard as they can. The slower ones are carried away with the flow and thrown into space; the faster ones eat and shit and even breed, all while swimming. Surviving. The water changes, but the fish are the same. That image was a map of the world, I knew, but not one that I could explain, nor one that I could show to anyone who didn’t already see it. I opened my eyes, and saw her looking at me, waiting. “I will die long before you make it to Last Day Town, that’s true, but as long as there are Residents, something remains. Whatever we say, whatever they hear…” My voice sounded as if coming from far away. “…Is a part of the Town itself. I’ve heard poems made up by people who had been there days before, recited by those who believed in their worth. Like fish swimming up the waterfall, welcoming the new water. If I do something worthy of remembering, if I write a poem beautiful enough for people to pass on, it might still reach you.”
She shook her head. “I’m here now, wouldn’t you rather stop dreaming for a second? Be with me this instant, when we’re real?”
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but the speakers boomed before I could.
“Yossef Ben Ze’ev: You have reached the termination of your detainment period. Follow your light square to your designated train on gate number three. You are reminded that if you leave the premises of your guided area, you will be neutralized. If you fail to board the train, you will be neutralized…” At the end of the corridor, the train howled.
“We still have time,” she said, and I turned back to her.
“For what?”
She took one step towards me, then another. Her hands reached out for mine, slowly, and I watched without moving as she brought them closer; until her skin, soft and warm, was just close enough to warm mine without touching. Slowly, she stepped even closer, her almost not brushing against me, rose onto her toes, and before I understood what was happening, brought her mouth close to my cheek and mimicked a soft kiss. The smell of her hair stunned me as she put her head just above my shoulder, as if she had all the time in the world, and put her arms around me. The smell of real human hair, not citrus or flowers but sweat and oily skin, the smell of a live human being. The radiated warmth of her body against mine.
How long has it been since I’ve been touched? I thought, and also, does this count?No, don’t think about that: be in the now. Be in this one moment—it’s all you have, and it’s enough. It’s really enough. I wrapped my arms around her, careful not to touch. A warmth flooded everything, and I drowned in it, unresisting.
“Well,” she whispered, her breath warm against my neck. “This is nice.”
This. This is the moment I’d like to remember.
#
Not the slow walk towards the dock, the single train, the walking into the little booth from which I was supposed to witness my own process—all of this I could afford to forget.
I sat on a courtroom chair, and leaned against a wall, confined to a little transparent booth so narrow I couldn’t fall from the chair, even if I was unconscious. I assumed it was an option they prepared for.
The room was about as large as the dining chamber, but where that was made of bare rock and was vacant but for a single machine this one had walls painted in a nice, calming shade of blue, and decorative furniture, which already set it apart from the prison. Behind a wood-colored desk sat a judge, his eyes oscillating from the screen in front of him to the two attorneys standing and arguing, all in ceremonial gowns.
No one seemed to regard that I entered the room. Judging by the fact that it was the defense currently speaking, the trial had been going on for a while already.
The only thing that identified my defense as such was the fact that the man speaking referred to me as his client. Other than that, the content of his speech held no resemblance to a defense: He admitted that the video evidence of the murder of a fellow Ceresian, which took me a moment to realize referred to Pythia’s First that Second and I had killed together, could be understood as nothing but ironclad proof of my guilt. As supportive proof of my corrupt nature, he brought up my former charge of libel, of which I had been found guilty eleven years ago.
And not falsely. After a week of almost active repression, the story surfaced from the depths of my memories, presented to me like something new: I had spent a long time seducing a whistleblower, over a safety protocol breach in asteroid ice mining; cheap tethers that would often break and send people flying into space, then having them retroactively blamed for negligence. Contrary to our agreement on her staying anonymous, I ended up releasing her name, though I could no longer remember what it was, and the video of my interview with her that I had taken without her knowledge. Being one of the system’s designers, essentially a murderer, I didn’t feel like she deserved any mercy from me.
Ayelet not only warned me against it, but vetoed it, which was her right. It wasn’t just my own life I’d been risking. I'd told her that I would delete the woman’s name from the piece and delete the video, but every time that I’d tried to I just… Ended up leaving them there, for next time. At the end the time had come to send the article, and I’d done so with hands shaking and eyes closed, knowing that the moment I released the video and name, there would be no taking it back, having taken that risk for both Ayelet and Tsur along with myself. Remembering the story, I couldn’t understand how someone could do such a thing. It was me that had done it, and still.
The whistleblower, (what was her name?) had been brought to court, fined and fired even before she was released from detainment. No one bigger was brought down. She was left to financially starve, the fine too heavy to recover from. So she’d sued me for libel, and sent me a video message as she did. I remembered what her eyes had looked like, darker than dark, framed by sleepless-pale skin and hair the color of exposed copper wire, and dark as they were there had been a fiery hate in them. She’d bitterly mocked that since I enjoyed her videos so much, I should enjoy that one as well. Dvora, that was her name. Dvora Ilan. She had sued me and, to my shock, won.
The judge, another one, then, had claimed what I’d done was a classic case of fraud, and to this day, I haven’t figured out if the statement had been made earnestly, or in order to punish me for shoving my nose. The lawsuit had cost us more money than we had, a couple of years’ worth of sleep, and what might have been a budding journalistic career.
But Ayelet, God bless her heart, hadn’t left, not then. It was a betrayal, and I could not understand how she forgave me for it any more than I could understand how I’d committed it. It was only after Tsur was gone that she’d left.
How could I have not thought about that all of last week, all of those years? How good had I become at forgetting? The escapism artist, Ayelet had once called me. But my mastery of the art could stand to improve a fraction further, if I pretended these mistakes were someone else’s, like Keren did. There was my last ounce of self-respect—this shame, this guilt, were mine. I might have distracted myself from the past, outright forget it when I could, but I will not pretend it was not my fault.
Not that it mattered anymore. In its closing argument, the defense didn’t request any sort of leniency, and in fact stated that I should receive the most severe punishment possible by law, which drew a bitter, barking laughter out of me. I didn’t expect the defense strategy to get quite so creative.
Why would they put on the charade of this being a real trial? For whom? There was no one here but us.
There wasn’t much longer left, but it didn’t sadden me. I felt light. The judge struck his gavel, once. He didn’t look like an evil man, nor like a just one; he looked like someone who knew exactly where he was, and what the demands on him were. He glanced at me, and in his eyes was the clear knowledge that he was the rubber stamp for a legal murder. If he’d ever had an opinion on the matter, it had been worn smooth by a torrent of death sentences that had been given out, with or against his better judgment. Another cog caught in a rotting system, I wanted to believe, but it was hard to absolve someone who was about to sign your death sentence.
He didn’t look at me when he spoke. “Before the verdict is decided, and having heard the proceedings, would the defendant like to address the court?”
“Pass-” I began to say, before suddenly recalling the promises I had made to Diocletian. “Actually, yes. A woman with the identity number 486..” I paused only for a second, before Diocletian’s mnemonics kicked into place. ”...513298, and a man with the ID of 197243265, asked me to protest on their behalf. They felt their sentences were unjust and asked me to submit an official appeal. I would like to use this opportunity to claim the closest thing I can to an official demand to reevaluate their verdicts.” I sounded so dignified, despite how meaningless it all seemed. It wouldn’t matter, would it? If that information really is as volatile as Pythia’s memories claim, the Shadow Man couldn’t let Diocletian back in as it would be solid proof of exactly the thing they were trying to hide.
The judge’s brow furrowed, and he turned to his screen. He asked me to repeat the first number and I did, as the judge tapped the touch screen a couple of times, as if punching in the numbers. The prosecutor leaned familiarly on the desk, and casually told the judge that he had seen that part in the video, a woman and man killing someone to take their oxygen.
I found that description lacking, as it didn’t include that Third was entrusted to Diocletian, and trusted them. The word kill did not carry enough weight, but I chose not to waste any breath on that.
The judge’s eyes opened wide as his finger finally stopped, and he raised both of his eyebrows. The appalled expression his face contorted into as he understood where it was that he was sending people gave me a glint of hope, but that hope did not survive the judge’s indignant exclamation of disbelief that a criminal would result to such inhuman measures against their fellow Ceresians.
I proceeded. “They’ve been there for a while now, haven’t they? I believe they’ll still be there if you send someone to pick them up. People become very resourceful when they have to. That’s all I have to say.”
The judge claimed to have noted my remarks, but an appeal on the result of one trial cannot be submitted while another one is taking place, and that I am welcome to submit my appeal after this trial is concluded. He continued to the verdict, that I should be exiled to Earth, boarding the first available shuttle.
“What do you mean Earth?” I lost my composure, my voice rising. “Nobody’s getting off Ceres. We just watched the video. You can’t even say that aloud, can you?”
At that point the two attorneys started yelling about contempt, demanding that I respect the court and the Ceresian judicial system in general, furious that I’d dared accuse them of throwing people to their death. They were more emotionally affected by the words than anything I’ve done. The judge had, in contrast, turned pale in silence. A small victory, but it brought me no joy–even if he understood, the Shadow Man had him under his sight, pinning him into place. Keren would have pitied him, wouldn’t she? I could imagine it, but I couldn’t quite feel it myself.
I closed my eyes, tried paying attention to my breathing. I needed to stay focused: I had quite a day ahead of me.