The End Has Come

These other ones, they floated forward and fought and experienced great traumas and great chapters of violence — until at last they found an extraordinary place to rest.

“Stop,” Pea says softly.

All of it was sliding into place in her mind, all of it was making sense. Disparate pieces coming together to make a whole idea.

“Stop saying they,” she says. “Say we.”

The voice, after a pause, complied. The voice obeyed her, like she had obeyed the voice.

WE. WE FOUND OURSELVES AN EXTRAORDINARY PLACE TO REST.

Not only was the planet they had found habitable, it seemed to function as a kind of battery, a radiant and living thing on which the long-suffering people could feast and thrive. The people settled there, and they grew. While the ones they had left behind teetered and scraped, their cousins underwent impossible feats of evolution. Generation by generation, they achieved wild leaps in potential. Disease was eradicated. They fought no more wars. Death was destroyed. Their population grew and grew.

and then you know what

“I do,” she whispers.

then you know what happens next

This smaller voice Pea of course now recognizes as not external but internal — it’s her, it’s just her, her own good sense, pointing out what she always should have known. She writhes in her body, knowing what is coming, fearful of what is coming.

But the story continues, getting closer now to the nub of it, the horrible center.

These others are now a race apart, a different species. They have grown so quickly, and so spectacularly. They need space. They need endless space. No one ever dies, and logically, algorithmically, they know that they need all the space that they can find. They need all the space that there is. And so they set out across the universe, filling the skies of distant planets with the lights of their ships, one by one. Destroying populations at a sweep, seizing worlds instantly.

Except for one.

“Ours,” whispers Pea.

“Yes,” says the God voice, a voice that is suddenly smaller, more intimate, more conversational. A voice that has sidled up beside her, almost intimate. She understands at once that this voice can be anything it wants to be. Be or do anything. “Our ancestors deserved more. Our cousins.”

For their cousins the conquerors devised a wild idea. A hoax — a con — a mercy.

“We gave them this gift of God. They were to have not just death, but a reason to die.” God’s voice, no longer booming or rolling, but cajoling, explaining. “Not just death, but a purpose in dying. A calling! A benefice!”

Pea keeps her eyes closed. She feels tears burn paths down her cheeks. All of it. All of her life. Everything and everyone she’d known —

“Think of it, dear child. Other planets we destroyed in a sweep, but your people — our people — got two generations of knowing that God was waiting for them. Two generations without terror, without regret. Two generations looking upward and onward instead of into misery.

Pea is crying, alone but not alone on this ridiculous love seat she has created, and she is ashamed because she isn’t crying for her parents, and she isn’t crying for her world — she is crying for herself. “What about me?” she says now. “Why am I different? Why did I escape?”

“We don’t know, Pea. It had taken the rest of us many generations, on a different kind of soil and under a different kind of sun, to become what we were. And here you were, all along. Like a fairy caught under glass. You were here all along. You are special, Pea.”

She stands up. “I don’t want to be special.”

“You are one of us, Pea.”

“I don’t want to be one of you.”

LOOK! The voice booms again. It is a hive of voices, a thousand voices. LOOK! — and Pea rockets up into the air, and she doesn’t know if she’s doing it or if it’s being done to her, but the thousand voices fill her head again, LOOK!

She hovers in the air and can see all that she has done, in three days, she has rebuilt every building, remade every surface. She has borne a whole dead planet into a living world.

YOU HAVE BUILT YOUR OWN FUTURE, DEAR CHILD.

“No —”

Pea misses her parents. She misses the world as it used to be. But the future is here, it’s coming now, the future is always rushing closer — the future was starting already — the sky was filling with lights, and the lights revealed themselves to be ships, the undersides of ships crowding the horizon.

And then the future begins.