“Jordel,” screamed a ghost voice. “Jordel of Hemerlane, you bastard!”
It startled him momentarily. But, of course, the monsters would have returned to the Core when the power to the nodes was removed. Now they were here, with him, so to speak.
“Jordel! This is Magna Mater. You turn us back on!”
“Jordel, you have no right….”
He drew a deep breath. Slowly, carefully, he isolated his colleagues and the original storage area, then turned off the power to the rest. The voices dwindled. They were a mere gnat’s hum to his ears when he turned them off entirely.
“Except for the following sections, wipe the matrix,” he instructed, rapidly entering locations. “Keep nothing.”
As he had told them long and long ago, if they insisted on living forever, error would creep in. There was nothing there worth keeping.
In later years on Elsewhere, the fifty day of Springflower, which had heretofore been dedicated to the Great Question, was celebrated as Emergence Day. On that day, the thousand inhabitants of the Core straggled forth onto the plaza outside the old Frickian barracks, most of them blinking and weaving in the unaccustomed light of the day like toddlers just learning to walk. On awakening, they had been told the answer to the Great Question. Aside from that, they knew only what they had known when they went in.
Nela and Bertran came to the plaza early to sit on a low stone coping and watch the Core inhabitants stagger out in twos and threes. There Danivon joined them, bringing with him a shambling man whose sagging flesh proclaimed he had once been fatter.
“Nela, Bertran,” said Danivon, “you remember Boarmus.”
Nela rose and kissed Boarmus on one flabby cheek. “You were very brave,” she said. “Jacent told us.”
“Oh, well.” He gestured vaguely as he looked her over. “There really wasn’t anything else to do but what I did.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Most of us are going home to Heaven. I don’t know what we’ll do there. Things will sort themselves out, I suppose. Jacent says there’s always a place for bureaucrats, but I think he’s being provocative.” The twins didn’t seem familiar to him, but he couldn’t place the difference. Things had been rather confusing of late. He had difficulty remembering a lot of things.
“Will you miss being Provost?” Nela asked.
He turned to stare at the bulk of the Great Rotunda, as though he had not seen it before. “I don’t think so. I never liked it that much. It was just, you know, something to do.”
“Have you been very busy?” she asked sympathetically.
“Well, this and that. We’ve taken the guards off the Doors, of course. And there’s no more Enforcement to worry about….
Which reminds me, I owe an explanation to that little Enforcer girl, the one I sent the message to Danivon by.”
“No longer with us, sir,” said Danivon, keeping his voice level with some difficulty.
“Oh. Killed by the things, was she?”
“No, sir. We’re not sure what happened to her. She went away, that’s all we know.”
A small group of Brannigans emerged from the arched opening to the Core and stood blinking in the sunlight.
“Look,” said Nela, nudging Bertran.
The man she pointed out had a face familiar to Bertran if not to the others.
Seeing them looking at him, Orimar came toward them.
“Good morning,” he said, nodding to the men before focusing on Nela. “And who’s this pretty thing?”
“Nela,” she said. “And this is Danivon Luze, and my brother, Bertran. You know who this is, Bertran. This is Orimar Breaze.”
“Have we met?” asked Breaze doubtfully.
“Only in passing,” said Bertran, thinking of this face among other faces in a golden cavern.
Orimar gave them all a charming smile, then returned to Nela. “Well, Nela. Are you a student here?” So luscious, she was. So sweet. Lips like roses.
Nela smiled, a wry twist to her lips. “I’m not a student. You must remember, this isn’t Brannigan.”
His mouth trembled momentarily. Of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t Brannigan Galaxity. Brannigan was somewhere else. They had come from Brannigan to this little Elsewhere world, and a thousand years had gone by, but nothing had happened the way they’d planned it. There was no diversity anymore. They’d been told that, just this morning, when they’d been embodied.
“That’s right,” he said in a querulous tone. “I remember: They’ve answered the Great Question, so we came out. We were supposed to … supposed to do that. But”—he gestured vaguely, waving away his own confusion—“I don’t remember much about it. None of us remember what happened.”
“But you do remember the answer to the Great Question?” Nela asked, a hard edge to her voice.
“Yes,” said Orimar Breaze, feeling tears welling up that he was quite unable to control. “Yes.”
“You’d like to share it with us, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head, gulping. He didn’t want to share it. He didn’t want to hear it again.
“The Ultimate Destiny of Man …” Nela prompted.
“The Ultimate Destiny of Man …” he said, swallowing the tears. What was this? Why this surge of sorrow?
“Is to …” she prompted again.
“Is to …” He tried once more, unable to get it out.
“Is to stop …”
“Is to stop …”
“Being only man,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, wiping tears from his eyes. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“That’s all right.” She patted him on the shoulder. “We understand.”
Bertran put his arm around Nela as they watched the man move away, seemingly overwhelmed by emotion.
“You had to see for yourself, didn’t you,” Bertran asked softly. “I wonder what’s going to happen to them?”
Danivon replied, “They’re to be repatriated to Brannigan Galaxity, according to Jordel.”
“The Galaxity is still there?” Nela asked, amazed.
“It’s always been there. Now it wants to study these people, learn the effects of long-term storage on the purely human psyche. I’m told these Brannigans are the only remaining examples of unalloyed humanity. They’ll have a nice shielded campus at Brannigan, where they won’t be bothered by the Gods.”
“Poor things. So even now they won’t have the advantage of the Arbai
