430: A Human Society

Ziggurat #345

"This is nothing," the specter said, waving its ghostly hand, presumably to indicate the tower around them. "It is the final effort to preserve a beacon of light in the growing sea of darkness. If only you could have seen what it was like before. But it all came to nothing."

"What do you mean?" Lamont asked. The question came out as something of a gasp; he had been unconsciously holding his breath while he removed his helmet and retracted the hood of his vacuum suit. But the air was good to breathe, and refreshingly cool against the perspiration on his face.

Their guide's eyes turned upward, and Lamont followed them to see that the navigation sphere was descending silently from its nest in the domed ceiling of the shuttle, their fish-eyed reflections looking back at them from its chrome surface. It stopped in its usual place, roughly level with Lamont's chest, and the mirrored facade scattered into a cloud of countless glittering particles. The particles did not arrange themselves into their usual cylindrical plan of the tower, however. Instead, they coalesced into many other ghostly spheres, hundreds of them, with smaller spheres orbiting larger ones and all of them circling around the dull gray projector at the center. The scene took up the entirety of the shuttle's interior, enveloping them.

The apparition gazed at this other projection for a long moment, its expression haunted. "Imagine," it said quietly, "civilization at cosmic scale." The thing's voice, no longer heard through Lamont's helmet radio, now sounded more natural, despite the fact that it emerged from the sphere floating obscurely in the specter's chest.

"Many hundreds of worlds orbiting many dozens of stars, a vast and rich society that thrived for untold millennia, its origins now lost to time. A human society."

With wide eyes, Constance watched the projection as it swirled around her. Occasionally a ghostly sphere would collide with her body, dissolving into a nebula and then coalescing into its previous shape on her other side. "Humans?" She whispered. "Like us?"

The apparition nodded. "There were others as well, naturally. But she had a special regard for humans. We were the apple of her eye. Under her care, we were able to reach our full potential, spreading far and wide, accomplishing wonders."

"Excuse me," Lamont asked his spectral counterpart. "She?"

The apparition looked at him as if the answer was obvious. "She was the overseer. The caretaker. The Nurturer Omega. She guided and mediated our civilization, facilitating peace and a common purpose. When she left, we tried to maintain it, but the collapse was only a matter of time. Systems fell into disrepair, trade routes were lost. There were wars and invasions, struggles for power. Societies that had flourished for many thousands of years fell into barbarism, as it were, overnight."

"What was she?" Lamont asked. "And if you lot were so lost without her, why did she leave? Where did she go?"

"Away," the apparition answered forlornly. "Out into the vastness of the night, beyond our reach. More than that, we know not."