The Last Human IV - 11 - He, Himself (Patreon)

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***

All this sand. If only he could break it apart, molecule by molecule, and turn it into something wet. He scooped up a handful of the white powder, and let it trickle through his fingers. Wishing. Contemplating. Dying.

What he would do for a single mouthful of water.

The tower pierced the horizon like a poorly placed nail jutting from the flat table of the horizon. Its single, pristine curve—without a hint of mortar or brick—rose a few dozen feet off the ground, too reminiscent of the Towers in the Cauldron to be a coincidence. But no spire, nor added-on rooftop, nor any completed structure adorned its top. Instead, the half-finished building ended with a set of steps that simply spiraled up into the air, going nowhere.

It gave Poire the impression of a broken bone, with white splinters left to tickle at the alien sky.

Or maybe, Poire thought, I’m going blind from dehydration.

The clay pot sat, waiting for him. A simple lump of clay, rough and nothing like the perfect smoothness of the tower on the horizon. He licked his cracked and scabbed lips, and found that his tongue was too numb and too rough to soften them. He reached for the cup with both hands, worried that his shaking fingers would accidentally tap into it, and spill the sacred liquid across the slightly slanted top of the mountain, and all that water would trickle down the flat planes.

Part of him wondered if it was really water at all—or some other awful delusion haunting his final moments.

He picked it up, and tipped it back, and the water stung his scabbed lips, and filled his mouth with soft, crystalline sweetness. The first swallow felt like knives were digging into his throat. The second, like needles. He drained the cup in too few gulps, and let the perfect coldness fill his body, restore his heart, his limbs, his very thoughts. He coughed and spluttered and resisted the overwhelming urge to vomit, and drank deeper still. Too soon, the cup was empty.

But where there was one cup, there must be more. And the Tower loomed, tantalizingly close on the horizon. Glistening rivers of silver mud crawled around its base, and Poire thought he could see little black shapes inching along their shining trails. Debris from the spiral trees, perhaps?

The trek down the mountain was easier, if sloppier. He clung to the ledges, and let himself slide down the steepest, smoothest plains toward the base of the mountain. He slipped off the last ledge, and plunged into a dune of white, too-powdery sand, and came up spitting and coughing out the dry powder. Even blinking the dust out of his eyes took a great effort, and for a long moment his body just lay there, refusing to crawl out. His tongue had already forgotten the sweet taste of water, and sat in his mouth like a dried-up chunk of chalk. Poire half crawled, half loped to the edge of the silvery, muddy river.

It wasn’t really a river, and certainly not liquid. Silver swirled along its surface in rippling patterns, but the main body of moved more like an elastic slime. Still, desperate, Poire scooped his hand into the river’s surface. It cracked as he touched it, like delicate shards of sugar, and bit at his fingertips when he squeezed it. Slimy droplets dripped down to the sand. And when he tasted it, he wretched.

Poire blinked up and stared around, wondering where he was. The mountains looked strange, unfamiliar. And the non-liquid dripped through his fingers, and he wondered if he had tasted it already. I can’t remember. He sniffed it, and winced and a spell of dizziness threatened to send him sprawling forward, and bury his face in the river of mud.

Despite his blurring vision, a line of black shapes caught his eye. He had thought they were much further off. Or maybe he had sat there, crouched over the mud, for longer than he thought. The shapes were near enough now that he could see their curving prows, the lines of rope hooking them together, hundreds of them. Boats. Each one, weighed down by piles of dark rocks, gleaming dully in the strange glow of the sky.

Where there are boats, there will be water. It was nonsense, he knew, but some part of his brain believed it so fully that Poire didn’t second guess himself as he climbed into the first boat, and lay down.

Poire didn’t remember fainting, only waking up. He had the sense he had done it several times since climbing into the boat. As if he’d spent a whole year here, waiting and enduring and hoping for water. This time, when he looked up, the tower spread a great shadow over him and left a dim counterpart in the sky. It’s half-finished roof was lost in the dizzying distance above. He thought he could see something else up there, a thin strand spiraling just beyond the multi-colored windows of the sky.

He pulled himself up the edge of the boat, and immediately felt the bile rose in his throat. He got sick over the side, spitting up nothing but strings of thin saliva. A breeze scratched at him with grains of white sand, as cold as ice, building up patches of salty white built up on his dark skin.

He should hate this place. He should hate everything about being here. But Poire couldn’t stop himself from smiling. Still alive. After what he had done—after saving them all—he should be a corpse, a dozen miles back. Then, another wave of nausea took him, and Poire’s stomach heaved and his heart struggled to beat in his chest.

“Oh, really now,” a voice barked down at him, “I only just started. How long has it been?”

The voice was gruff, and hard, and old, and though he knew he had never heard it before, the speaker seemed familiar. Poire blinked, trying to clear his sight. An old man standing on the steps leading into the tower. A human man, tugging his fingers through a ragged, white beard. His brow was cracked with age, furrowed with disbelief, and his skin was the color of…

He wiped at his eyes, trying to make the vision go away. Instead, his vision only smeared that face across his vision.

That face. His own face, staring back at him. Cracked with age, dusted with sand, wearing a scraggly beard, maybe. But there was no mistaking the shape of his own nose, the outline of his own cheeks, the hard, judgemental glint of his own eyes staring back at him.

“You,” Poire croaked, “You aren’t real.”

“What would you know about real?” the Old Man barked back, “You only just got here.” He showed his teeth, not quite smiling, and made a disapproving clicking sound as he plucked and pulled at Poire’s naked skin, making Poire feel a sudden prickling of shame.

“Oh, stop. I’ve got the same one as you. More or less. We’ll have to get you one of these, then.” The Old Man plucked at his own clothes, a strange, silvery robe that glittered and flowed against his movements. When he lifted his arm to help Poire out of the boat, a mosaic of polygonal wrinkles rippled along the sleeve, and reflected a wild range of colors.

“Are you real?” Poire asked.

“What does it look like?”

Poire blinked, trying to get the blurring images of the Old Man to meld into one.

“But you’re me.”

“Wrong,” the Old Man shoved his freckled and wrinkled face in front of Poire, “You are me.”

“That’s not possible,” Poire said.

“Oh, wonder of wonders!” the old man clapped. “Finally, we are joined by a true genius of insight and induction! Destined for great things, this one is!” The old man threw his arms wide, far more spry than someone his age should’ve been, “Witness, and weep, all you small creatures! For a new god has awoken!”

His voice did not boom across the mountains, nor push back the cold breeze. It simply fell flat among that landscape of sand and mud, just like a normal human voice should.

“This is real, Poire,” he said. “This is you and me, stuck here, in a universe none of us should ever have come to. Alone. Just you, and me, and my tower.”

“Oh,” Poire said. “I see.” And then, he crumpled to the ground.

***

Water. It trickled over his lips, down his chin, and he opened his mouth. Smooth and perfect, and he wanted more. All of it. All of the water that could ever exist—he needed it all. Then, the trickle of water stopped.

Please.

He cracked open his eyes, and he, himself, stared back. The old man held a wet rag (made of the same silvery, tesselated material as his robe) in his leathery hands. Water dripped from his wrist, like perfect jewels.  Poire reached for the rag, but the Old Man pushed him to the ground. He was stronger than he looked. Stronger than Poire, at least.

“Please,” Poire begged. He couldn’t take his eyes off the rag, dripping with the first liquid he’d seen in … in days? Weeks? How long have I been through the Mirror?

“I’ve been thinking about it,” the Old Man said. “About killing you, that is. I wonder if any of them have done it. What would happen? If I cut your throat right here, would I disappear? Would all this—” he waved his hands broadly at the world, letting drops of that precious water fall into the gray sands—”Would all this disappear, too? Or would it remain, for the next poor little shit to come along, to start fresh?”

In a wild motion, the Old Man threw himself at Poire. A knife appeared in his hand, a small curved blade—perhaps meant for slicing fruit—with a strange, crystalline handle. He held it to Poire’s throat, close enough that Poire could feel the cold metal scraping, almost digging into his skin. Poire froze. Tried not to breathe, for fear of cutting himself on the blade. His heart hammered in his throat.

“I could do it, you know. I could break the wheel. Even if only for a single revolution. Think of all the pain I could save you. All the long years of nothing.” The Old Man sighed with some kind of self disappointment, and pulled the knife away.

Poire scrambled back, out of his reach. “You’re mad! You’ve lost your mind.”

“I’ve lost our mind,” he corrected Poire. The Old Man ran his wrinkled fingertips along the blade. Then gripped it with his palm, as if to crush it. It should have slit his hand open. Instead, the knife crumbled into dust, leaving only the handle to thump into the sand. “Now, come here.”

He snaked out a hand, and this time, instead of a knife, he was holding something that looked like a waterskin—the kind they had carried while walking the beams through Sen’s world. There was something wrong with the color of the thing, but Poire cared more that it was bulging with fullness. The Old Man bounced it up and down impatiently.

Poire leaned forward, snatched it, and darted back out of his reach. He couldn’t figure out how to open the cap, so he bit it until it cracked and tore it off. The Old Man grimaced, and said, “Really? I thought we were more civilized than that.”

Poire didn’t care. Nothing mattered. Only this, the sweetest substance in all existence. Water.

“You’re going to be sick if you keep drinking that fast.”

Poire chugged, and the more he drank, the more he needed to drink. He gulped and tilted his head back and swallowed and—

His stomach squeezed. Poire crawled over to the river, and got sick all over the ground, his hands and knees sticking in the mud.

“Oh, yes,” the Old Man sighed, only a little disgusted, “I did the same thing. I forgot about that.”

Poire wiped the spit and sick from his mouth, heaving and crawling and caked in mud like an animal. He had never been so wretched and humiliated and lost in his life, not even when he first woke up in the dark tunnels beneath the Cauldron.

“I really do envy you, you know,” the Old Man said, tugging his fingers through his beard. “Look at you. You don’t know anything. How lucky you are. This must seem like a wondrous new world to you, doesn’t it? Oh, but I’m going to help you. Yes, I am. I will tell you exactly what you need to know. And then, I will envy you no more, because you’ll be like me. You will know how helpless it all is.”

Poire reached for the waterskin again. Heedless of the mud, of his nakedness, of the brutal nonsense of this world. There were still a few mouthfuls left, and they tasted as sweet as ever. Already, his vision was clearing, and his thoughts were too.

“Why?” The Old Man continued, answering a question Poire hadn’t asked, “Because of this damned curse I can’t ever seem to shake. Hope,” he spat the word out, as if it were a foul insult. “I still have it. After all this time. And I need your help.”

“With?” Poire croaked.

The Old Man pointed at the tower behind him.

Poire frowned up at it. There were four shadows now, branching off the top of it. And four more, stretched across the white sands at the bottom. What light cast those shadows? He saw nothing, but the segmented panes of colors that cracked the sky.

“Why?” Poire asked.

The Old Man thought about it for a second. Then, he shoved a finger into one ear (overgrown with wiry, gray hairs). His robe looked like a mixture of chrome and glass now, and when the sleeve slid down Poire could see the dark, freckled skin of his wrists and forearms. The Old Man dug in his ear for a moment longer, took out his finger, inspected it, and then flicked something away into the sand. Poire grimaced his disgust, but the Old Man seemed not to notice.

“You ever met an alien before?” he asked.

“I—” Poire started.

“The answer is no. No, you have not. All of our avian friends, and the cyrans, and all the xenos back home, they’re not aliens. They’re like us. Our children, maybe. The offspring of the Makers—little science experiments left alone for far too long. You have never met an alien before. Not a real one.”

“Have you?”

The Old Man’s eyes—Poire’s eyes—went wide with a terrifying glee. A mad grin split his face, and he showed all his teeth. “Not yet. But I found it. We found it.”

“What?”

“It’s right here, Poire. You’re sitting in it. Wallowing in it. Breathing it in. And here’s something, here’s something you don’t know yet. It’s me. And it’s you. And you and I, we’re going to find it. We’re going to go up there,” he pointed a gnarled finger at the top of the tower, “And pop our heads in, and tell it exactly how we feel.”

“How—” Poire started to say. He was going to ask How do we feel about it? But stopped himself. This older version of himself was barely holding himself together, and Poire thought that asking about this alien, or whatever, would only open the floodgates.

But there was a glint in his bright, wide eyes. And a hungry snarl to the curve of his lips. Clearly, his madness didn’t require Poire to ask any questions at all.

“And then,” the Old Man said, “We’re going to eat it. Piece by piece. Starting with its still beating heart. And no one—no one ever—will die again. Do you understand?”

Poire, in fact, did not understand. He was further from understanding than he had ever been. But the Old Man was staring at him, mad glee written on his face, as if he had just given the greatest plan known to humankind.

“Well?” the Old Man asked, his feet squelching in the mud.

“How … how long have you been here?”

“What?” A different wild-eyed stare.

“How long? How many … uh … years?”

“Don’t you ask me that. Don’t you ever.”

“Twenty years? Forty?”

“Longer.” He chops into the wood. “And longer still. But, you’re going to help me, aren’t you. That’s why we came all this way. And once I’ve shown you how to make it—”

“Make what?”

“Everything,” he grinned, his teeth as blinding as the sun. He picked up a fistful of sand, and let the grains trickle through his fingers. “From nothing. Everything.”

The Old Man deftly spun on a heel, and marched up to the tower’s steps. He called over his shoulder, “Come now, young me. It’s time we made you a god.”

***

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