17
Drake’s eyes opened, and he realized that he had eyes again. His vision came back along with the sensation of him falling into his body. The weight and solidity of his flesh and bone startled and confused him. He had blown apart, he had felt himself blow apart, and so how was he a whole man again?
Lornia stood there, her face shining and more honed and sharper than ever. Drake looked down at his body, his hands brushing against his chest and then lower. He gave his crotch a covert squeeze, unable to resist. Everything was in place it seemed. He glanced back up to see Lornia grinning at him. He said, “Go ahead and laugh it up. If you were a man, you would’ve checked too.”
Lornia said, “Oh, believe me, I was checking a few things myself when I came to.”
He blinked a few times. “Did that actually happen? It felt like I was being taken apart one piece at a time and then turned to dust. Was that just a hallucination or did it happen?”
Lornia nodded. “Yes, you did go to pieces, as did I. It happens in that kind of travel, I think. I felt all of my skin being peeled away, and it was so painful I thought I would die before it ended.”
Drake went to her and wrapped her in his arms. Their bodies collided together, and he felt again the familiar press and shape of her body against his. Desire stirred within him, and he whispered, “Where are we?”
She said, “Tralam. Only not Tralam. At least it’s not the one that you saw. This one is much different, but it’s also the very same.”
He didn’t know how to make sense of that. He knew that Tralam was a creation of the machine that was, in turn, an invention of that older race. How they had managed to re-make it after it had blown apart was a mystery, but he rather suspected that it had something to do with the weapon being drawn to Tralam, and Tralam forming around it.
He looked around. “It’s not falling apart. That’s something.”
“I think,” her tongue came out and wet her lips. “I think your kind never came to this Tralam. If they had, it would be changed and turned toward the way it was after they came.”
His kind.
Humans.
His lips touched against her temple. The fine blue veins there pulsed a bit below his lips, confirming that she was indeed alive. “My kind has done a great amount of wrongs to yours.”
Lornia said, “Mine did a great deal of wrong to yours.”
He stepped away, a frown between his brows. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to make love to her. He sensed that she was ready to talk to him now about her race, something that she had not been willing to do for so long. “What do you mean?”
She turned her head and looked around them. The hallways seem to wander on forever. The walls were high and unbroken. Rooms lay in all directions and uneasiness filtered through his system. They were there, but they were alone there. He had no idea how long he could live in a place where time did not exist. Would he be willing to stand it?
His gaze moved back to her face and his heart said yes. For as long as he could live and be with Lornia, he would need no other.
She said, “Walk with me.”
Her hand came out, and he took it. Her long fingers twined around his shorter ones, and he felt the warmth of his skin transferring itself onto her flesh. They began to walk, side-by-side, and down the long and echoing hallways. Again, that uneasiness came in, but again his heart said that it did not matter. That being alone with her for eternity would be no chore at all, it would be a blessing.
He said, “Your race created mine.”
Lornia said, “Yes.”
He should have been floored by that yes, but he wasn’t because deep down he had known that for a very long time. He asked, “Why?”
“We wanted slaves.”
That hit him hard, but he bore up under it. Slavery was an evil that had always existed and likely always would. Nothing seemed to change the need to own things, not even other beings. It seemed to be something hard-wired into every being. While some species and races had evolved beyond it, they still had slavery in their pasts; some of those pasts were distant and dim, and others were very close by. Slavery did still operate all over the universe, and he wondered if there would ever be a time when every single planet in every single system outlawed that terrible thing—and if it were outlawed, if it would truly be eradicated.
Slavery was a shameful thing but those who were determined would find a way to enslave others, and there were legal ways to own people.
The Federation had made slaves of all who had allied themselves with that organization after all, and they had done it by touting freedom and peace and the law.
“When your race left the other universe, you brought humans to the universe I knew?”
Her long hand waved in the air as if she were trying to conjure up a picture for him. “We brought all kinds of beings. Our universe has much the same life. Or did. It has changed, probably, over the centuries since I have been there. But yes. We decided to try again. To create life in a dead and uninhabited universe in order to escape the wars that raged on and on in ours.
“We were foolish. We were arrogant and stupid in our decision to flee the wars instead of trying to broker peace in our own universe. Not just because we honestly thought, and by us I mean my kind because again that was before I was born, that we had the ability to grow a universe from the darkness and make it one of light. We forgot what we had learned the hard way. That war will always be there.”
