Elysium: Book Six of The Liminality

Chapter 45: Killfire

Zeke never fails to surprise and impress me. He's frail. I've never seen his walls so thin. Even his central pillar is looking kind of withered. But he's still giving us nourishment and still responding to my requests to get us out of this damned void. It doesn't feel like we're even moving but I know he's covering scads of space looking for a way out.

The void we're stuck in seems limitless and borderless. It feels like a trap. One way in. No way out. But Zeke has a knack for finding shit. It's like the whole universe is imprinted in him somehow. He is a primo navigator.

We're drifting and there are no interfaces like forever but Zeke leads us straight to the tiniest seam, just a minor ripple in the corner of our field of vision. We slip through and we're not even in the tunnels of Root where we entered. We're in another void, but this one has so many interfaces it's like swimming in an ocean of aurora borealises.

We cross one interface and then another. And another. And it seems like a dozen more. Until we're drifting down over a planet with a very big lake that some wish was a sea and others argue actually is a sea. That's a committee assignment I'm glad I walked away from.

"So what's this place?" asks Dad.

"It doesn't have a name. Yet."

"Looks like a shit hole down there."

"Nah. It's okay. A little barren. I mean, they're working on it. The air is fresh!"

"Any people here?"

"Yeah. Some. There'll be more when the ark comes."

"Just the one ark?"

"I think so."

"Jeez. That's like one cruise ship to populate all of Australia."

"But it's safe here, Dad. It's well protected."

"From what?"

"The Powers-That-Be."

"Safe from God?"

"No, they're not God. They don't seem very godly. God-like maybe."

"Are things really this fucked up?"

"Yeah.'Fraid so."

We land at the edge of the lake. There's a mountain now along the shore where there used to be just a low hump of that weird cuboidal gravel. It's got some pretty awesome cliff faces and there's even something that looks like a tree on the summit. Someone's been playing around. Experimenting. Whoopee!

Zeke unfurls and we step out onto the grey cuboids that is underfoot everywhere. Here, some of it has clumped together seamlessly to form larger rocks and boulders. I can see that there is potential for it to eventually create a kind of spontaneous bedrock. I just wish it wasn't all that same boring shade of battleship grey.

"You ever try any weaving, Dad?"

"You mean like macramé?"

"No, Dad. Weaving. Making stuff out of roots or ... in this place ... blocks. Here, let me show you."

I lift Bern's cane and point it at the shore. A little swirl at the blocks and I get a bunch to stick together. I'm thinking I can make a dock we can sit on and dangle our feet in the water, but these blocky things are quite a bit more resistant to my will than roots. I give another swirl and the clump lengthens a couple more.

"Wow. That's pretty nifty. Looks like a turd."

"This is nothing, Dad. You can make this stuff into anything you want with a little practice. Pizza. Golf balls. You name it. This material here is kind of new to me, but there's probably folks who could teach us how to work with it. We could build a house!"