in my dreams i still see them. we said goodbye to them as they flew away into a starry cosmos. it all went by in a hurry, the last thing i remember was a swift decision, a rapidly closing door. they were together again. they had never really been apart.
then what? they drop off my radar. for a while they wander aimlessly on the same heading they left on. let’s call it west-southwest into the galaxy, against the currents. they stop at most stars along the way though usually don’t stay long. once or twice they park on a world for a lifetime or more, but always eventually they are back on the road.
who are they now? we never got to know them in the form they took the last time we were together. when that door closed they had new and different forms from what we had seen. on that world they could fabricate new bodies and breathe old souls into them. theirs were built differently than most. built to last longer, to regenerate. eventually all things break down and die but if they choose, they could be reborn again. and they do. they live and die and return. by my reckoning they’re out there for thousands of years and choose rebirth at least half a dozen times before we see them again.
but really, who are they now? the next time i see them come into focus they are together on a barren world, looking at the eroded ruins of some ancient city almost completely erased from history. one taller one shorter, one thinner one wider. both possessed of some ineffable lightness like they are not quite of this or any world, though the taller one more so. if you watch them together for a while the short one seems older, wiser. except in any but the most dire of disagreements the taller one usually defers to her. but when we see them they come to us as peers with the same rank, same uniform. plenty of people have a hard time telling them apart. they are our two captains.
how do you tell them apart? they are known by so many names and they don’t call each other anything because they have been alone together for so long. i have them down as D (the shorter one) and N (the taller one) in the notebook. that’s not quite how they sounded in my ears though. dee and enn. they’re walking around the ruins. it’s like an offworld national park to my eyes. there’s old trails around the ruins. some places have signs talking about the story of what happened here. the first ones came here this or that many years ago and founded the city but a promise was broken and/or the world turned and became the desolate waste we’re standing in now. it’s like a desert midnight, but high noon.
when i find them, dee and enn are trudging around this place for some reason though they don’t seem to be in any particular hurry. they have some kind of protective gear on but don’t seem to care about atmosphere or radiation. they softly crunch on stuff like old ash coating every surface. the ruins are just odd shapes jutting out of a mostly flat landscape with a few hills. the city was immense, we can’t see the edge of it from down here and the highest point looks really far off. the captains parked their ship down in the valley, respectfully far back. i’d guess it’s been a couple hours hike for them to get this far. they occasionally stop to consider some ruins. they’re mostly melted away now, or buried under the ash. whatever process destroyed this place was almost total, and long ago.
now i have the power to read their minds of course, so i can tell you something of why they’re here. dee is looking at the outlines of the ruins against the midnight-noon sky and thinking about life and death. she is preoccupied by a thousand year-old question like an immortal dog worrying at a bone. she doesn’t talk about it any more, there has been no need. they have come here to this star system to look for an answer, though she doesn’t expect it will be the only answer. her quest may never be complete. enn meanwhile has been playing in the uneven gravity and jumping off rocks. she is on the same quest but until the next objective is met there is nothing really pressing. who knows how long that could be? this seems like it might be the right place though.
they are out here, unbothered, slowly making their way toward a massive crater, slumped and partially filled in. it’s hard to guess standing overlooking the edge like this, maybe three miles across to the other side. the worn-down sandblasted diagrams on the signs imply there was a lot of city here inside this circle. against what we already thought was a barren landscape, this stands out as utterly scoured. the captains don’t say anything, they lean on each other at the overlook for a while, then turn back to their ship. there’s nothing to see here, just an austere unforgiving planet. nobody even comes out to visit the park really, whatever motivated someone to put up the signs they haven’t been back in a long time.
it seems like whatever made the world turn the way it did, everyone had to leave. looking at it now it’s hard to imagine any other way. i guess it was a nice place once, beautiful and vibrant. a young growing city at the dawn of a new age of promise turned into whatever this place is. we missed it. maybe it would have been about the time we last saw the captains, about when they first set out. that seems about right. time is working against them on their quest but there’s no need to hurry yet. they are still in the mindset of travelers. they chose this place to visit.
on the walk back to the ship they don’t know they are being followed. someone else was out here, concealed. actually yeah let’s call him ash for now. in a couple hours when the captains get back to their ship, ash will introduce himself. he draws himself up out of dust into a sparkling form about person sized and shaped so he can speak to other people. looking at him is like looking into pure sand falling into the surf, a dirty rainbow foam. some sort of dust foglet being. the captains seem remarkably calm about it, i don’t know the new dee but back in the day she would have been ready to throw down if startled like this. i guess this isn’t the weirdest thing they’ve seen by now so they talk to ash like he’d just stepped up to chat with them on the trail.
ash says they’re the first people he’s seen in something like two years by his calendar. truly nobody comes around here anymore. he tells them it’s been a couple generations since this place was last used for faith or history. it used to be a monument to the first people but people now are discouraged from traveling out here. the unspoken rule is for the planet to be left to slowly erase the last evidence that anybody was ever here at all. there is another planet of the first people now, another founding city. the only ones ever, according to the people who live there.
so what brings you out here? enn is asking because dee doesn’t have to. ash is fluttery, theatrical, noncommittal. he says he came here to try to commune with the original people who came here. he says he’s old but not that old. mostly he just lay around as dust, blanketing the old ruins. sometimes the wind would blow and take him to other places. he let it carry him to learn where he would end up. he hoped to wash up somewhere with interesting archaeological trash. maybe some tiny relic survived. and did he find anything? no. he won’t commit saying to how long he’s been here. the captains guess it’s been quite a while. i’m not sure how exactly he asks them for a ride but we all know that’s why he chose this moment to appear. of course they let him come along.
so now we know about three. we could all go back to the ship now and see who else is here. i can see four others here in this time with them, or soon after. maybe we talk about them next. because i keep seeing them all. i don’t know how long exactly, is it four years or more now? swirling and inexact, but consistent. the same cast of characters, the same star system, the same quest. the captains are out here still, in the unknown universe.