Strange New Worlds 2016 (30 page)

“I’m not sure how I’m going to end
Epilogue
, but I refuse to live any longer in darkness—and I won’t leave those characters like
that either.”

For a long time, doctor and patient sat in silence. Manning studied her patient for
what felt like an eternity before she finally spoke. “Perhaps your characters don’t
need you anymore. Perhaps you’ve outlived your usefulness.”

“Excuse me?” Of all the things Russell expected to hear, this certainly wasn’t on
the list. I-I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

The doctor sighed and spoke as if to a child. “Try to follow along. When you wrote
Tears of the Prophets
, the Pah-wraiths possessed the Orbs of Time and Wisdom among others. Did you ever
stop to think what they did with that access?”

Russell shifted uncomfortably. Was she still trying to change his mind? He found himself
trying to understand and answer the question at the same time. “What they did? Th-They’re
characters . . . I don’t know—it served the story, moved it forward.”

Doctor Manning smirked as she removed her glasses. “Let me tell
you
a story, Benny.” She stood, turning her back to her patient as she moved toward the
gated window in her office. “You’ll like it. It’s a story about the power of the written
word. A species that existed outside of space and time discovered that members of
their kind had influence over their future through their writings. What they wrote
became so.”

The afternoon sun delivered an uncommon April heat despite the ceiling fan that struggled
in Manning’s office.

Manning stood in front of the window as she spoke, allowing the sun to bathe her in
its warmth. “These few strove for peace and harmony, but others feared this power.
They were hunted almost to extinction.”

Manning noticed a group of ants, moving to and fro along the windowsill with purpose,
yet oblivious to the larger world in which they existed.

“The few survivors saved themselves by escaping to the one place their enemies could
not follow,” she said, not taking her eyes from the ants. “They fled into their own
written word. They wrote themselves into a new plane of existence where space and
time existed in a multiverse of universes.”

The doctor turned and smiled at Russell, but he noted that the smile didn’t quite
reach her eyes. He shook his head in disbelief. “I must be dreaming.”

Doctor Manning laughed. “You are more right than you know; the dreamers dreamt and
it became so.” Slowly, almost seductively, the doctor walked along the wall where
her degrees hung, admiring each. “But once in this new multiverse, they forgot who
and what they were. The creators lost themselves in their creation. They went on to
fall in love, raise families, start and end wars, but what endured with all of them
was their passion to write. So they continued to imagine and to write and, of course,
because they wrote it, it became so.”

Doctor Manning stopped at the globe on her desk across from Russell, offhandedly spinning
the blue sphere before speaking once again.

“Eventually, their writings became history, and from history stemmed religion and
from religion, fiction.” Manning moved to lean on the front of the desk, shifting
toward Russell, moving into his personal space. “Now, of course, they’re long gone,
having forgotten their own immortality, but every so often in this universe a member
of their lineage becomes a writer and dreams, and because he writes it, it becomes
so.”

Russell didn’t understand why his doctor, his friend, was doing this to him. This
wasn’t a dream . . . it was a nightmare. “What are you saying?

Manning snapped back: “You’re a scribe, aren’t you? You’ve told me often enough how
alive these characters feel to you.”

Russell shook his head in denial. He’d never told anyone about his experience in the
ambulance with the priest. He’d almost convinced himself it never happened—until now.
“Nia . . . Doctor Manning, I only said that because it’s all so vivid to me, but as
passionate as I’ve been about my stories I know they are fiction. The Pah-wraiths
aren’t real.” He shrugged. “They’re just characters.”

“Actually we prefer
Kosst Amojan
.” Doctor Manning smiled the smile Russell had seen a thousand times before, the smile
she had rehearsed so well. “Pah-wraith sounds so . . . evil.”

The author could feel the walls of reality crumbling around him. “This isn’t . . .
possible, what you’re saying is . . . insane.”

The doctor returned behind her desk, no longer concealing the contempt in her voice.
“How pathetic. Prometheus’s small mind can’t accept the scope of his gift.” She pushed
a hidden button under her desk. “We should actually thank you, because of you we became
aware of the true order of things. Because of you we were able to travel to this time
and possess Doctor Manning. Because of you, the future is now ours.”

Russell struggled to hold on to some remnant of sanity. “But I’ve written about the
past and the future—how?”

Ignoring the obtuse perspective of the question, the Pah-wraith allowed her hate to
flow. “You dare create gods and then imprison us. Now we return the gesture.”

On cue, orderlies brandishing nightsticks rushed into the office. “Doctor Manning”
performed masterfully, tears streaming down her cheek. “Put him back in isolation.
Take away anything he can use to write with. There’s nothing more I can do for him.”
She wept. “He’s insane.”

Nurse Richards smiled while massaging his knuckles. They ached, but damn if it didn’t
feel good to get reacquainted with Russell’s face. “That bitch upstairs done cut you
loose now, boy, you back where you belong.” Richards smiled as he thrust the nightstick
back into the leather holster on his belt.

He wished he would’ve gotten the idea to smash the boy’s face against the men’s room
mirrors when he started instead of at the end. Didn’t matter none now. The Negro janitor
would be blamed for the bloodied and broken mirrors, and it would come out of that
coon’s pay.

“What’s a-matter, boy?” Russell’s silence bothered Richards; even after breaking both
his hands the boy barely cried out. “I thought you a writer? Where’s all them fancy
words now?” Russell looked like he was someplace far away; he’d have to work on that.
“You know, boy, I can think of a word to describe you, and it sure as hell ain’t
writer
. Welcome back to isolation ward four.”

The hall echoed with Richards’s laughter as he locked the padded cell.

Benny Russell stared at his hands—hands that had caressed Cassie’s beautiful face,
that were the instruments of his imagination, that had created worlds far beyond the
stars. Yet so much had slipped through them.
Could it really be true?
Could what he created—those people and places—truly exist in the future? If they
did, then he had condemned them, condemned . . . everything to an existence of eternal
damnation.

A dim ray of light reflected from the shards embedded in his broken hands. He couldn’t
let anything else slip through his fingers. Hope was still in his hands. Slowly, painfully,
he realized what he had to do.

The flames rushed across the pages like a beast starved for the words that would feed
its madness. The Pah-wraith watched in silent rapture as the boxes that contained
the future relented against the onslaught of heat and dissipated into ash. The gesture
had no impact upon the already written history, but it was a powerful precursor. Soon,
in the twenty-fourth century, the same would be said for every planet, every ship,
and every soul in the universe, consumed in the flames of the
Kosst Amojan
for all eternity.

The Pah-wraith smiled and an instant later appeared inside the darkened isolation
cell of her creator, her prisoner. He looked much like the way she’d found him all
those years ago: huddled in a corner, his back to her, unaware of her presence. As
she watched from the darkness, she realized that he was doing something.

He was writing.

Quickly the Pah-wraith raised her hand to do what she’d come for, increase the temperature
in his brain, leaving him a vegetable for the remainder of his life.

Suddenly, a column of energy slammed into the Pah-wraith, forcing her through the
pads on the wall and into concrete.

“Get away from him!” Ben Sisko looked down at his hands, unsure of what he had done
or the nature of the cerulean energy emanating from them. Then, as if looking for
answers, he walked over to the man in the corner who was writing on the floor, a man
he knew but had never met: Benny Russell.

The Pah-wraith stared up from the rubble, enraged. “The Sisko—no matter, dreamer and
dream will die at the hands of the
Kosst Amojan
.” The Pah-wraith stood, unleashing a firestorm around her, incinerating, consuming,
and obliterating everything except for the small corner where Benjamin Sisko stood
in front of the man who continued to write, oblivious to the battle that waged around
him, because of him.

Sisko watched the flames tear apart the room. Concrete became ash, steel liquefied,
yet he felt no heat, heard no sound save the steady and rhythmic beating of his own
heart. The enraged
Kosst Amojan
was screaming at him. Flames shot from her hands and eyes as she attempted to destroy
him. He pitied her.

“Enough.” The Emissary of the Prophets raised his hand and the firestorm and Pah-wraith
stilled, frozen in a chronon of his creation. Sisko walked through the suspended inferno.
“I finally understand what I am, I understand . . . everything.” He looked into the
hate-filled eyes of the possessed woman. “This isn’t your fight.”

Sisko touched her, releasing a finite amount of anti-time, and she disappeared, receding
to the period before the Pah-wraith possessed her. In her stead was a writhing form
of energy.

“I understand now why the Prophets never destroyed you—how could they destroy their
children?!” Sisko felt its hatred and the inferno slowly recede as he absorbed the
mass of energy into himself.

A faint voice called to Sisko from the corner, calling his name, “Ben.” The Starfleet
officer rushed over.

Benny Russell looked up into the face that was so like his own, the face that had
lived the life he had dreamed of, a life of prosperity instead of prejudice, hope
instead of hatred. “I had to know for sure. You . . . exist—the future I created . . .
it’s real.”

“Yes, it’s real.” Benjamin Lafayette Sisko looked down at a face so much like his
own, yet unlike his, which wore the ravages of racism, bigotry, and segregation. “It
exists.”

Russell had so much he wanted to say, but there was no time. Instead, he held Sisko’s
hand and smiled as he spoke his final words. “When I made you the Emissary, I always
thought it was of Bajor. But I was wrong. Now I see who you were truly meant to be
the emissary of—”

Gently, as if placing a baby to sleep, Ben Sisko laid Benny Russell’s head to rest.
Next to the body were strewn passages written in the only thing the author had to
write with: his own life, his blood. The last section caught Sisko’s attention.