Last Life in the Universe

from Nova Range

Originally published in Shoreline to Infinity.

We watch the universe fly by, a thousand years in transit. Stars erupt into the infinity of space, flickers through spacetime happening a hundred, a thousand, or a million years ago already. Planets implode, explode a lightyear away and the impact almost reaches us, and we prayed for it to, even if it meant the end.

            The ship navigates as if this is a tour, speaking in crisp tones, in fifteen languages, one for each of us. We turn it down, silence its voice. We listen to the ship's hum, to the machines that keep us breathing, that propel us further and further, so long that we have forgotten why we left. One of us knows. One of us must still know.

            The ship has a heartbeat we call Echo. She is housed near the engine. She is what keeps us alive, what holds our histories, personal and global, but she does not speak. She does not open her eyes but we see her smiling every couple lightyears. Like clockwork, we crowd round her tank full of oxygenated and nutrigenated solution and wait for her lips to spread, to curl, the lines of her face to pull back with ecstasy. Today she shows teeth, even, and we murmur in fragmented pidgin, though we all understand, already knew what we wanted to tell ourselves.

            She is beautiful, we say. She is perfect, we say back.

            We do not remember who or what she is. Her shorn head jacked into the machine, into the ship, and her body disappears at the waist into the hull. We imagine her legs, long and slender and soft. Her hands hang at her sides, drifting in the glass womb. She touches glass and if we are truly lucky we are there when it happens, pressing our face to feel the otherside of what she must feel, willing the sensation of skin on skin. Small pointed breasts with dark areolae, her skin so pale, like ours, from centuries without true sun.

            We passed the sun and many others. Dualsuns, bluesuns, redsuns, and decaying suns becoming blackholes, swallowing themselves and the planets around them. We have watched the universe expanding or contracting but we know not which.

            We do not speak and so our pidgin language goes nowhere as we stare into the infinite. Full of questions and simple nouns and verbs. Months, years in silence, listening to the metallic breath of the ship, the breath of Echo, speaking only to Echo in her womb, in our own languages, forgetting the plural, if only for long enough to whisper our forever love and admiration.

            We ask where we are heading and we say that we go in circles until where we came from heals and we say that we go towards the edge of the universe as explorers and we say that we go nowhere and we say that we are to find a new home and colonize and we say that there used to be more of us and we say that now there are none but us and we say this conversation annually as if caught in a recursive loop of faded and imperfect memory.

            Echo's eyelid flutters and our hearts stop and tears fall from us and we scream for an answer, for a reason. What does this mean, we say, Is she awake, What do we do, Will she survive, but we do not know.

            We do not know and so we discuss in our pidgin with flailing arms, our only means of communication. We only know how to ask because we have never had answers. We rage and we weep, we scream and we grow silent, ecstatic then sullen. We read our faces, a mix of horror and expectation, of resplendent love and dire dread.

            We split and wander the hallways, some to our room, to our bed to wrap in blankets and the comfort of our many hands and mouths and tongues, some to Echo to whisper and stroke the glass as if she feels, some press our ears to the wall and take comfort in the breathing of machinery thousands of years old imagining it is her pulse, and still some sit and stare ahead hoping our destination appears as suns die and planets grow past our window, through her eyes.

            She opens her eyes and time expands around us; every moment lasts a lightyear but takes us nowhere. We gape and we stare, our bodies in seismic commotion, pleading and singing and praying and hoping and dreading and hoping and hoping and hoping. She stares openeyed but does not see us nor anything beyond, as if the gauze of eternity is stretched across her pupils, inhibiting phototransmission, comprehension. We want to wake her, free her, but we want her safe, left alone in eternal repose.

            A schism within us, the we that wants her to wake and the we that wants us to wait. For days we debate in gestures and screams, in begs and wails. We stand and turn violent, a tumult against ourselves, ripping and thrashing, punching and kicking. The Wakers attack and the Waiters defend, a barricade of bodies before Echo's womb against the charge of fists and feet, and we begin to slough away, blood on our hands and fear in our eyes.

            Five of us dead and now we are ten. We shake and we cry, apologizing again and again, promising to never harm ourselves, to never raise hands in anger. We beg for forgiveness and forgiveness we give. We do not require retribution, and the fighting ceases, our blood cast everywhere, the dead mangled and broken, their consciousness fractured, never to commune with again. We cry as we load them into the airlock and send their bodies to drift away in the endless. We pray that they will reach a star being born and so be keyed into the genesis of a new galaxy.

            Years, decades, a century goes by in silence and Echo stares forever forward. We sit as if in vigil, waiting for her to acknowledge us, to press her palm to glass and speak. To speak only one word. One word in any language, even one we do not know. We wrap arms round her and imagine the pulse of her fertile life, the life that powers us always onward towards the future. We listen to the heartbeat in different places, the hull, our room, the bridge, the kitchen. Our ears pressed against the walls, eyes closed, holding our breath, listening to her, the hum of machinery guided by Echo.

            A century of silence since the great violence. We watch galaxies born, galaxies die, stars rot and worlds splinter. Constellations align and write their names across space as we watch suns refract and time bend round blackholes. We watch the gravity of an infant world growing like a blastula, constantly becoming more and more until it will settle, and maybe life will be lived there. Maybe they will send their future into the stars to travel forever and we will meet them and tell them who we are, what we have seen, and our Echoes will speak, hand in hand, and we will all smile, together.

            Whispers begin as we watch Echo. Old whispers, a century old, and we shout them down with our own blood that still stains the walls, the floor, our hands. We speak but we do not listen, cannot listen, for the words are not ours to share. We forget our pidgin from disuse, from locking inside our heads. We read faces and stare at the movement of lips and we are afraid once more and we are outraged once more and we are begging no no no and we are stepping towards Echo and we are holding us back and we are attacking and we are defending and we are kicking until a head caves in and we are screaming and crying and we shiver and we fragment and fissure and we attenuate and we collapse upon the hull and our blood stains and we take our hands and bind them and Echo watches but does not see that this is all for her.

            And we are four and we are bleeding. In days we will be three but for now we cast the bodies out to the infinite sea of space. There are less tears and less screams and there is no talk of forgiveness.

            We are tired and we are three.

            We do not talk and we avoid proximity. The blood spotting Echo's chamber, smeared across the glass of the womb she sleeps in. She smiles and we hold hands and see in our eyes that we can last like this. We promise never to violate again, never to strike or dismantle.

            We comfort ourselves, mouths and hands and fingers and tongues, our flesh knotting together and we whisper, We can be like this forever, and we see Echo smiling at us, for us, and never shall we part.

            For a lightyear, we were wrapped together and a song grew inside of us, a dance for all of us forever to share. We return to Echo and sing for her, to show her what new evolutions she brings. She smiles and we believe it is for us. When we dream it is of her mouth and her legs that we have never seen, of her skin that we have never touched, but we feel her nipples in our mouth, her tongue and her lips surrounding and swallowing us. We feel her in our dreams and so we cling to one another while we remain awake, bathing in the glow of her womb.

            The stars have all faded for us and the universe, the galaxies evolving and decaying have lost all interest. We sit before Echo and wait for her. To do what, we do not know. We wait and we watch and she smiles and it is enough.

            For a century or more, a handful of centuries, a millennium, perhaps, we watch her as we speed always onward to the universe's edge or center. We hold hands and we sing our song for Echo, our Echo, our love in the glass. We press our bodies against her, searching and praying for her warmth, to draw her infinite gaze towards us, if only for a moment, a millisecond, less. If only to show her that we are real, that she is ours and we belong to her, and so we stay, ever vigilant. And we wait.

            Her eyes go wide and bubbles erupt from her mouth, shocked open in a maddening array of emotions: fear and panic and dread. Our song dies in our throats and our dance corrodes and we rush to her and she pushes her hands against the glass and we reach for her, pushing us away, wanting to be the one, and she looks at us and screams again and again in a silent cry from within her womb. We must free her, we say, We cannot, We must, She will die, So shall we, We cannot, We must we must we must, You cannot. And she watches our bodies collide and our skin rip and our limbs break and she screams louder but we cannot hear but the tears rain from us and the blood cascades from us and flowers upon the walls and the floors and Echo pushes against the floor, struggling against the bind of her womb and her legs lost to the heart of the ship, and she yanks on the jack and her eyes close tight, her face collapsing, shipwrecked, and we stop but we are now two and soon to be one as we bleed out but we watch her struggle against pain, gasping in the oxygenated liquid, reaching a hand to us and we smear our blood to meet her, and she sees us but we are now one and the bodies decompose so fast that years may have gone by and we stare into Echo and she stares into us and I cannot leave or even look away long enough to remove the festering biomass at my feet for she cries to me and my life drains out my eyes one tear at a time until I can take no more and I pound on the glass till my skin fissures and breaks and I take a chair from the dining area and beat the glass again and again until my arms give out but a crack forms, bisecting her face, Echo, my Echo, and she smiles and it is all I need and I swing again and again, the cracks spiderwebbing, the glass weakening, and I can hear her, Echo, my Echo, her voice telling me, Please please please, and I swing again, collapsing in a rush of warm sticky liquid, and then a gasp so loud it shutters my heart and mind.

            And I see her. My Echo. And she sees me.

            And she screams.