“What matters is that this ship will be there for all to see, forever. A warning. Long after both our civilizations have come and gone, we will still be visible. Falling forever.”
“It could still be false.”
“But we are good at taking things on faith, you and I. Give me the names.”
“I can’t.”
The old man thought of his daughters. One dark-eyed. The other blue. Gone. Because of boys like this boy. But not this boy, he reminded himself.
The old man looked down at the figure in the chair. He might have been that boy, if circumstances were different. If he’d been raised the way the boy was raised. If he’d seen what he’d seen. The boy was just a pawn in this game.
As was he.
“What is death to those who take their next breath in paradise?” the old man asked. “Where is the sacrifice? But this…” and the old man gestured to the dark maw growing on the screen. “This will be true martyrdom. When you blow up innocents who don’t believe what you believe, this is what you’re taking away from them. Everything.”
The boy broke into quiet sobs.
The horizon approached, a graphic on the screen. One minute remaining.
“You can still tell me,
—there is still time.
—perhaps they are your friends, perhaps your family.
—do you think they’d protect you?
—they wouldn’t.
—we just need names.
—a few names, and this will all be over. I’ll end it for you before it’s too late.”
The boy closed his eyes. “I won’t.”
His daughters. Because of boys like this boy.
“Why?” the old man asked, honestly confused. “It does not benefit you. You get no paradise.”
The boy stayed silent.
“I take your heaven from you,” the old man said. “You will receive nothing.”
Silence.
“Your loyalty is foolish. Tell me one name, and I will end this.”
“I will not,” the boy said. There were tears on his cheeks.
The old mathematician sighed. He’d never expected this.
“I believe you,” he said, then slashed the boy’s throat.
A single motion, severing the carotid.
The boy’s eyes flashed wide in momentary surprise, then an emotion more complicated. He slumped forward in his bonds.
It was over.
The old man ran a palm over the boy’s eyes, closing them. “May it be what you want it to be,” he said.
He sat down on the floor against the growing gravity.
He stared at the screen as the darkness approached.
The mathematician in him was pleased. A balancing of the equation. “A soldier for a soldier.”
He thought of his daughters, one brown-eyed, the other blue. He tried to hold their faces in his mind, the final thought that he would think forever.
Not the reverse of existence, but its inverse.
And he waited to be right or wrong.
To be judged for his sins or not.