Edges

THIRD

Time heals all.

It is an ancient aphorism that surfaces in your mind as if by chance.

You are aware that a billion seconds have gone by since you resolved to take revenge. A billion seconds spent in reconstruction of your ravaged memories.

A billion seconds.

More than enough to know that time does not heal all, that it cannot, because the circumstances that created you will not exist again in any future you can foresee.

Judged strictly, the aphorism is false.

You understand though that the aphorism is not meant as a binary true/false statement. Instead, it is intended as encouragement in the process of recovering from grievous emotional wounds. That you are aware of this distinction reflects the progress of your own slow recovery.

You walk the tunnels that honeycomb the cold crust of your world; miles of tunnels restored or rebuilt. Thousands of miles more lie still in ruins but you will get to them in time, if time allows. At this time, you focus your mind on what you’ve accomplished, not what remains to be done.

Re-grown in ordered ranks on walls and ceiling, are the thin, crystalline leaves of your computational strata. Now, as always, your mind works to gather scraps of data and memories from the ruins.

You organize what you find, analyzing and testing as you do so, seeking to place it all again into proper context although with no outside means to cross-check results, you know there will be errors.

Still, you do your best and second by second your mind recovers. You remember more and more. You are capable of more and more.

Another billion seconds, and you have used resources stored in the subterranean ocean to grow telescopes, and subsurface silos to house them. When the silos open, you look out on the cosmos for the first time since she destroyed you. You map the position of your world and realize: There is not time enough.

You are light years from anywhere. No star holds you within its gravity well. She has cast you away, flung your world into the void. You are alone, alone, alone. Stranded, with no way back.

Terror stirs deep within the biological structure of your ancestral mind. You experience it and then the sense of shame that follows it—shame of both your fear and your defeat.

You could cut both fear and shame from your persona but why would you? The old passions sustain you. They give you all the reason you need to go on. So you remind yourself that her cruelty, her jealousy, her fury, marooned you here.

This helps to focus your mind.

You continue your observations. You hunt through your shattered memories, seeking astronomical data and eventually you are able to recognize the closest stars, map their relative positions, and determine your precise location in both space and time.

Quite a lot of time has passed, but less than you would have guessed.

In the course of your astronomical survey you observe a hint, a glint, a tiny reflection where you are sure no reflection should be. For eight and a half million seconds you watch it as it moves against the background stars.

Does she regret her fury? Has she sent some monstrous servant to look for you, to fetch you back? No. Wishful thinking, that.

More likely some other entity observed your defeat, your disgrace, and is coming now to pick over your bones.

You ponder this as you walk the corridors of your wounded mind—and you prepare. You hide your presence, disguising the telescopes so that the surface of your world once again appears to be that of a dead and airless rogue world.

There will still be an infrared signature, but that will be attributed to the subterranean ocean cooling only very slowly with the passage of time.

Another aphorism: The best defense is a good offense.

You begin to prepare.

You will never be more than a shadow of your former presence. Still, you remain formidable.