Chapter 31: Babylon the Great

I watched him there. Floating in the sky behind him, I watched him. I wasn’t sure if he could see me or not. I was awfully far away, but I knew Caleb’s eyes were good. His mind was elsewhere, though. Even if he could see me, he wasn’t concentrating on me.

So I drifted there, in the sky, about a mile behind Caleb. He stood on the edge of the roof of a skyscraper which faced the desolate wasteland before a giant throne-shaped mountain. The city ended where Caleb stood. A seemingly endless expanse of skyscrapers ground to a halt at that building, leaving a wide berth for the wind-whipped dusty plain. Below me the city rose up to its amazing heights. Massive towers stretched on behind me and to my left and right for as far as I could see. The empty, dust-covered streets, the brown, corrosive wind that slid slowly through the alleys and between the constructs by which mankind had once sought to reach the heavens. Most of the buildings were eighty stories high or more. Structures whose architecture could leave even the most traveled wanderer awestruck at their elegance and brilliance. The brown dust that swirled between them, coating them constantly with its perverse presence, seemed almost a living incarnation of corruption living within these hallowed halls. The dust covered every inch of each building, every meter of the statues and gargoyles and monuments which reached outward from the walls toward the heavens. All were cast in gold, lined with silver, plated with diamonds and emeralds. All were desecrated by the dust, entombed permanently in this lightless hell.

Above the city the dust gathered in thick brown clouds, swirling constantly as the atmosphere tried its best to cleanse itself. Nequiquam is a Latin word, an adjective, used to refer to an action that is not only done in vain, but done so much in vain that it achieve an epic degree of uselessness and therefore becomes legend. Thus did the planet try to fend off the curse that its inhabitants had brought upon it. Nequiquam did it struggle. For all eternity would this place be bound by its past, by its mistakes, by its pride. Forever would this city seer the skin of those who entered it. Forever would it sleep under the dust, a pitiful shade of its once great existence. Fallen, then, is Babylon the Great.

“This shining city built of gold . . .” Even across the distance and through the dust storm I could hear Caleb speak those words. He was speaking to me. He wanted me to come closer and so I obliged, drifting quickly across the expanse of what should have been decayed and collapsing structures, held in place by the dust.

I drifted right behind him, only a meter or so away and off to his right a little. He didn’t turn, and I could tell that his eyes were locked straight ahead for once. He was staring at the throne, thinking.

I said nothing at first, acclimating myself to the new, fresh streams of dust that blew across my fur from the barren wastes before us. It was difficult to imagine that Gaustal could ever find out about this place. Still, I believed it was possible. I would cause it to be possible. That’s what I had to do.

“Why did you give them the last map piece?” I asked, looking at him now. Caleb was silent. The question could not have been unexpected, and yet he didn’t have an immediate answer to it. Either that or he felt that the answer should be obvious.

“Come on Caleb, you’ve got to tell me. You had the rest map and not even I knew that you did. All you had to do was keep silent about it and you would win the game. Period. End of story. What the hell made you give it up?”

“I’m not sure,” Caleb replied. That couldn’t be it. There had to be something more. Caleb never did anything without being sure of why he was doing it. At least, he never had in the past.

“Mew, there’s something very strange about her. Kari is an odd child, to be sure. In spite of everything I know, and everything that I’ve always believed in, for some reason whenever I talk to her I feel like she actually has a chance,” Caleb said. He was speaking in a low monotone. He wasn’t even sure if he believed himself when he said that. In that moment it began to dawn on me that Kari actually had a strange effect on Caleb that no one else had managed in almost twenty years. She could actually make him doubt himself, and as much as I wanted to exploit that to the best of my advantage, I had to wait until the right moment, because the trick would probably only work once.

“So, then do you think you’re beginning to see things my way?” I asked him, shifting my weight in mid air.

“No. I most definitely am not agreeing with you. Instead I think I am starting to agree with Kari,” he explained.

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked, somewhat lost on how Kari, who didn’t even know what this game was, could have an opinion on it.

“It means that she sees the world through a different set of eyes than we do. To be honest I have come to pity her for how little she understands about what she is getting herself into.” He finally turned toward me. If Kari had a weird power over him, his eyes had a weird power over everyone else. You couldn’t help but think he was reading your soul with them. “I have realized that attempts to view everything in terms of the good that it can do in the world. She even sees you and me and the power we possess as things that can improve the world. It is true in some ways. We do have that power, Mew. I have not changed my course; rest assured of that. I will do so, however, with a new understanding of what exactly I am protecting.” Caleb looked away again, back at the throne. It was a sad twist of irony in many ways that the world’s future would have to be re-determined here, in the place where it had been determined so very long ago by such very different people. It had to be done though, regardless of whether or not Caleb was on board.

“You still have one question, I believe,” Caleb continued, still looking away from me. “I gave her the map piece as a gift to her. She sought to help the world by eliminating the current Chaos avatar and so I enabled her in that regard. At this point I don’t feel I have the right to prevent her from achieving what she wants with her life. I do still plan to prevent you, though.”

“So you are going to let them kill the chaos avatar?” I question, still skeptical that Caleb would actually let that happen. “Beyond that point there is no precedent. The chaos avatar is a being outside of time, he’s lived through every cycle, even through the cataclysms. You’re actually willing to risk that?”

“I am,” Caleb said simply, still not looking at me. “They’ll have to do it themselves, though. I will not help them, and I will prevent you from doing so. Having no quarrel with him ourselves, we have no place in killing him.”

“I have a quarrel with him. He keeps resetting the universe,” I contended.

“And nobody ever said that doing so was innately wrong,” Caleb countered. I couldn’t possibly disagree more, but his mind was set. In the interest of avoiding a fight with Caleb that I was certain I could never actually win, I left silence to stand for an affirmative reply and floated backward, away from him and into the city. I wandered in the dust-strewn streets for a few hours, trying to imagine what the city must have been like at its height. Did the sun gleam off of the gold and jewel-clad pillars? Did the streets bustle with the constant sound of business happening? Were the monuments glowing with the reflections of happy onlookers? Could any of that have ever been real?

I teleported away, back to the ship, to see if Sablin had finished her work on the map.