Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series (20 page)

11.

Bubbles.

Everywhere bubbles. Soft. Weightless. Caressing and shimmering and soothing. Vitreous bubbles touching and probing and kneading.

Healing bubbles.

He was in a cloud of bubbles, lighter than a feather wafting in a waterless sea, an ancient elixir meant to soothe and restore and enrich. No time. No pain. No worldly senses. On and on the bubbles fed him, sustained him, kept him from drifting off to that cryptic clarion cadence from afar, irresistible in its melodic hypnotic call.

Formless. No body. Only consciousness. He accepted his new state of being, and flowed with the bubbles, deepening the sensation of calm and peace and freedom. So soft. So light. No more heaviness. And no pain. If this was death, he accepted it. He yearned for it. All the religions, all the spiritual sects and cults and belief systems ever devised by man had to be speaking of this when they meant heaven. A warm, weightless place, devoid of hatred or anger or desire or hunger. Only joy and peace and overwhelming benevolence.

Yet nothing to be seen but bubbles. Flirtatious, even mischievous tiny translucent spheres bathing him in an endless stream of compassion. If he had died, he never wanted to leave this puffy, pastel wonderland. He wanted to continue floating in this ethereal stream, no longer afraid, even laughing at himself for being so fearful of death and all the changes brought with it. The unknown. He was fearful of what he couldn’t possibly comprehend. And now that he’d experienced it, the transformation of life to death, he took joy in his previous ignorance.

12.

He awoke fighting the shadows, on his back, kicking and clawing. He felt the milky viscous fluid encasing him in malevolent incarceration. He wasn’t in heaven after all. He knew where he was—back in the underground factory of gruesome corpses and withered bones. He was certain of it, certain the Guardians had never come. A hallucination. All in his mind. A well-thought-out, well-meaning dream of what Harvey really wished would happen. The encasement holding him immobile told a different story. He knew this sensation. The exact same feeling he had when trapped in the receptacle, his body paralyzed by the white liquid, his brain awaiting its larval invader.

He beckoned all he had inside, every last milligram of resistance. Now that he’d tasted everlasting peace and freedom, he had a profound and primeval need to survive, if for nothing else than to be the sole human left alive. He fought for his own soul, for his own life, for the human race.

Then he sensed something that siphoned off just a little of his anxiety. Warmth, softness, comfort, and, most of all, affection. Not the cold, rigid, body-forming containers on the conveyer belt. Another moment of clarity, as the fear was supplanted by guarded curiosity, and Harvey began noticing other things, things that assured him he no longer was in the custody of those tyrannical monsters.

His surroundings were the major giveaway. The subdued atmosphere, with its rounded construction and opalescent lighting seemingly from nowhere, signified an environment on the exact opposite end of the comfort scale compared to the dungeon below Cemetery Planet. Pillow soft and serene. Gently pleasing. No real walls, just a soft haze. If this was indeed the afterlife, he couldn’t tell, though a stabbing ache in his chest, pulsating down to his abdomen screamed something other than the hereafter. He winced, holding his ribcage, and as soon as he exhibited his discomfort, a turbulent funnel of bubbles appeared from nowhere, bathing him in soothing analgesics of some ethereal design.

He shuddered at the suddenness of it all. So absolute was the numbness that pervaded when the healing bubbles began caressing his body. He was undressed. He knew that now. And, as his other faculties began returning, he noticed other things.

Angelic beings of the highest magical order. Large, dressed in luminous clothing that seemed to both fit snugly and flow freely at the same time. Three of them, standing or hovering weightlessly—he couldn’t tell which—supervising his ascent back to health. They gazed at him with tremendous compound eyes. Two gigantic orbs consisting of thousands of smaller lenses, cells of visual stimuli all focused on Harvey, all reflecting only caring and kindness.

The only reason he wasn’t fearful beyond recognition was the compassion he perceived. Otherwise, these giant beings with insectoid eyes would have terrified him. He knew they had to be the Guardians, and the moment he thought it, the tallest one of the three nodded its noble head. Harvey had no inkling on the differences between males and females of the species. Seemingly, no differences existed.

Harvey stared at the creatures longer and harder than should have been deemed polite. He had to. Something inside compelled his eyes like magnets. Like a spell of persuasion, a seduction of goodness, he was drawn in spontaneously. He would have gazed upon these magnificent gods forever if not for a large oval opening, its blackness in sharp contrast to the brilliant interior. He studied the view, and was stunned to find the craggy, barren vertical projections of Mount Mausolus.

He sprang to his feet, surprised by the sudden revelation that he hadn’t actually been lying on a bed, but suspended by the whirlwind of strange, transparent little bubbles, or beads. The beads surrounded him as he ran to the view porthole, continuing to administer their healing tinctures, possibly at some atomic level. Harvey didn’t know. He was too busy to conjecture. Busy with questions about what he was seeing outside.

He expected to find a terrible mess, a tangle of twisted tombstones, hummocks of pulverized rock and sediment. And machines. Those terrible machines he’d seen doing the dirtiest of dirty work. The transports and diggers and cyborgs, all working collectively like ants, busily robbing the planet of its deceased inhabitants. The last time he’d laid eyes on the landscape of this world, it was littered with those machines, filthy with the labor of evil industry. Now, though, the change took him by surprise and he had to struggle in order to process it all.

He was inside an alien craft, parked at the base of the great mountain. From that vantage point, Harvey saw the visitor station, glimmering in the distance like a treasure. And, indeed, he witnessed empty grave plots, crooked headstones, and mounds and mounds of soil. He also saw the machines used by the Unspeakable Ones, the DeepSix-built devices that aided and abetted the terrible madness. Now, though, the machines were idle. Those weren’t the surprises fluttering his pulse and speeding up his respiration. It was something else, something so strange and ethereal, he found it difficult to even accept such things existed. Yet, when he examined the tiny, clear and colorful beads surrounding and dancing excitedly about, he saw a similarity between them and the things outside.

Oval shaped craft, hundreds of them, of varying sizes and brilliant shades of cool colors, working diligently and feverishly. One had the task of removing a transport, on its side and dented, from its dusty resting place. Other, smaller ovals hovered nearby and plucked the caskets still attached to the belly of the transport. Corpses that never made it to the conveyer. Coffins were replaced into their graves. Graves were topped off with soil. Headstones were straightened to their original conditions.

In the innermost reaches of his soul, Harvey felt contentment, a glowing and warm beneficence of such purity his only logical reaction came as tears. And more tears. The Unspeakable Ones had been stopped. The ghosts of Cemetery Planet were free.

If Lea could only see this. He sobbed, and as he lowered his head, felt more than just the soothing beads on his skin. A Guardian, the tallest and stateliest of the three, placed a surprisingly soft palm on Harvey’s shoulder.

“Do not be sad,” the voice had a rapturous tone, like the sweetest of stringed music. “You have done a great thing. Brave. Very brave.”

“So the beacon,” Harvey said. “It worked?”

“We received the alarm. Thanks to your courageousness.”

He didn’t see the being’s lips move when it spoke. They were communicating with him by thought, the same as the emergency beacon’s blue glow.

“We know of all the hardships you have endured,” the being went on. “The Unspeakable Ones were a treacherous species. We never should have let them survive. Thank you, Harvey Crane, for helping rid the galaxy of its most insidious menace.”

“Then you killed them?”

The giant, gentle being folded its arms in a prayer-like fashion. Its two companions, standing on either side, did the same.

“We did what we should have done long ago. Now it is over. Thanks to you, Harvey Crane. The human race is fortunate to have such a fearless and resolute representative.”

Harvey knew he should have been elated. So many concerns. So many worries. He had no capacity for joy at that moment, despite the warmth and peace exuding from every particle in his surroundings.

“We are touched by your sacrifice. This is why we are restoring your place of memorial,” the being told him. “To honor you. To honor your bravery. This is a sacred place. These graves deserve to be treated with respect. And so do you, Harvey Crane.”

With a wave of its arm, an area a few meters away came alight in lilac pastel luminance. The shimmering mist separated like a curtain, revealing a mass of healing beads, churning and coalescing into a semi-solid state in the shape of a bed. On the bed’s surface Harvey saw someone familiar. Immediately he started running to the bedside.

“We have one last gift,” said the Guardian. “In honor of your bravery.”

No words, no language devised by human minds would have been sufficient. When he saw her lying there, cradled by the effervescent beads, youth restored, beauty intact, he broke into the worst fit of weeping since the day he was born.

“We have faithfully recreated your Cemetery Planet,” the Guardian told him. “Every grave has been restored. Every human body put back in its place…all but one.”

“Lea,” through his sobs he said her name. She opened her eyes. A gentle sigh. She rose to her feet, aided by the tender nuzzle from the beaded mass. She gazed at him and he at her. Lea. It was her. No ugly parasite. No holographic facsimile. This was the real thing.

Her facial expression changed from elation to concern. She opened her mouth and nothing came out. Then she tried again, forcing the sound from her throat. One single word.

“Harvey.”

They fell into each other’s embrace, surrounded by a cloud of tiny biomechanical gems. Behind them, the yawning porthole let in the first few rubicund rays of Piscis Austrini peeking over Mount Mausolus, filtering through the ethereal haze inside the Guardians’ ship. In the foreground, spreading in every direction to the far distance where mirage mixed with shadowy silhouette, countless headstones served as an ever present reminder that, in all matters of love and war, the dead would always rule on Cemetery Planet.

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