I woke.
Alive. Breathing. With a patched up leg; hurting, but already almost healed. I took in my perceptions at once: the undersuit I was still wearing, the responsive foam beneath me, the walls of molded regolith. Less than four hours had elapsed since I’d almost died, unless someone had tampered with my sense of time. I was likely still at Castello’s Castle.
Aster Sebai. Who was she?
I could recall a face to that name. No, more than one face.
“I’d like to apologize for that earlier misunderstanding.” Arienti stopped in the door and looked me up and down. I was momentarily distracted by flashbacks of other faces, male, his earlier faces.
How did I know? Bellugi never showed them to me.
“Why did you spare me?”
I took him by surprise. “You still don’t know!”
Faces, names… fragments. What do they mean?
“Your failsafe probably hasn’t kicked in fully yet. I should leave you to it… but I’m curious.” He sat in a chair across from my bed. “It’s such a long time since we’ve last met. I wonder what happens when we meet again.”
His words made no sense to me. But I remembered seeing him before. Flirting with a stranger amidst the freezing clouds of Saturn. Watching him fall into the endless pit of the gas giant’s atmosphere.
A starship, one of the first built outside the Solar System. A different face this time, and behind it the same man, alive and well.
“How could I have gotten someone else’s memories?” I spoke. But even as I was saying that, I already knew full well that wasn’t the truth.
Looking down at the pleading man, she felt nothing but contempt. “You deserve even worse,” she’d said and pulled the trigger.
A year after the first one, the second of the men responsible for Feven’s death lay dead at her feet.
The sayings were right. It was much easier the second time.
There were still so many to be hunted.
Aster Sebai. How long have I not been her?
Arienti was observing my reaction with the mild curiosity of someone watching an animal perform a circus feat.
My head hurt. My vision blurred. In my mind, images spun in a carousel of memories.
One recurrent theme: death. So many dead.
“What have I done?” I whispered. My voice broke.
What am I? Have I really done all this?
My own past was a mystery to me. Fragments, pieces, scattered without any apparent order.
“Aster,” Arienti said. He rolled the name on his tongue, tasting it perhaps for the first time in decades or even over a century.
I’ve had many names in the past. Aster Sebai had been the first, and Erin Taiwo was only the most recent. It wasn’t even from the same language as my original name. Had it ever meant something for me? Or was I just cautious? I couldn’t remember.
Just flashbacks of my life: Mercenary, informant, shifter, influencer, adventurer, gambler. I had been every last one. Up until the moment the weariness set in. Then I became something else again.
But I always knew. Had access to the memories of the past, should I want to. I mostly did not.
What made me forget?
I shivered. Arienti leaned closer, deep fascination in his face. He extended a hand and touched my cheek. I flinched.
He chuckled. “Relax. It’s just intriguing to watch this transformation.”
“We’ve met before.”
“Yes.” His eyes gleamed. “Care to go for a walk while I help you piece your past together?”
My headache was fading, and my leg felt better. I pulled myself up. “Let’s go.”
I felt my strength return as we slowly walked through the corridors of Castello’s Castle. Finally, we reached the observation room. From its tower, we could see the bleak land everywhere around us.
Arienti spoke: “Long ago, you started hunting me. You tried to kill me on Saturn. I took the fall but was rescued by a lower-level airship. A fortunate fate—or someone else’s calculated plan. We were both onboard the Shiva, but I managed to avoid you when our awake times overlapped. Then we crossed paths again on the way to YZ Ceti. You remembered me, but laughed off our old incident. We became lovers during the journey. I even told you about what I’d seen on that godforsaken moon. It excited you, of course. You told me that you’d finally found someone who didn’t bore you abominably. But that doesn’t tend to last, does it? I promoted exploration of the YZ Ceti system and tried to put together an expedition here, but my resources were depleted, my influence limited. It was all too slow and intangible for you, I suppose. We went our separate ways. I don’t know what you hoped to find on the other side of your journey, but I hope you haven’t found it.”
I shuddered. “Why is that?”
“Because simply reaching our goals is the most unsatisfying thing that can happen to us immortals.”
“So you picked a goal you can never reach.”
“Oh no, not never. That would be foolish. Not exciting at all. No, my goal may take me many more centuries, even millennia, but it’s far from impossible.”
It still didn’t seem his style. I would expect him to engage in power plays, in feats of senseless adventure seeking, but this seemed too noble a pursuit for someone like him.
“Why do you do it?” I pressed on.
“Because it’s beautiful,” he said simply. “Look around. Don’t you see?”
I gazed at the barren landscape ahead. It was strange, alien even. Eerily beautiful, yes.
I only realized he was speaking again when he shook my shoulder.
“Sorry,” I snapped out of it. “It really is beautiful. Staggering, actually.”
“So you understand.”
“I’m not sure.”
“It surpasses us. Whatever we find here, a clue to the Ramakhi’s past or just a fascinating system, it’s something vastly bigger than us. I think it’s the only thing I can appreciate after the centuries of human trifles. I’m bored by humanity. Bored by petty fights and intrigues, bored by risking and gambling, bored by relationships, by culture, by everything. It fades and only leaves a bad palate. I’ve shifted toward things that have been here for eons and will be here eons after we perish. That’s what’s really interesting. It lasts.”
Arienti surprised me. I didn’t expect to find such a philosophical spirit in him. He had been so pragmatic, as long as I could recall. But then again, I hadn’t seen him for centuries.
Eyes still on the big game of deciphering the Ramakhi’s fate, he found solace where I could not.
Our lives are fleeting. Our thoughts and feelings, even more so. But I couldn’t look upon the stars and planets and forget that I was human. However fascinating and grand I could find the Universe, I was too absorbed in our mayfly troubles.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t bear it in the end.
The emptiness was unbearable. A gaping hole where her identity had been.
So many dead. Their deaths no longer meant anything to her. She wasn’t sure when the moment had come that she continued hunting them down just out of inertia. Everything else, gone.
She eventually tracked down everyone connected to the hospital bombing. Then she focused on war criminals from the ensuing civil war. Finally, on those who enabled it in the first place.
Antonio Arienti. The arms supplier.
This one was good, covered his tracks almost perfectly. But she had plenty of time.
He was on Mars.