No Refuge

This piece was the capstone for a Creative Writing course. It is intertextual with Lermontov’s The Demon. In retrospect the prose was far too purple, but I prefer that to if it were prosaic.

No Refuge

On the heavens’ ethereal ocean,
rudderless, without a sail,
starry choices in order motion
calmly float through vapour’s veil;
—The Demon, Mikhail Lermontov

✸ ✸ ✸

The rain was unrelenting that morning.

Great clouds hung over the empty place, a city which in its heyday had been the manufacturing hub of the galactic sector. But it was a shell of its former self. Ever since the plague had hit, people had steadily been leaving. Only a handful of neighborhoods had remained populated—those which had brutally insulated themselves, erecting barbed-wire barricades, exiling the immunocompromised, shooting trespassers on sight—but now even they lay empty. For this morning an evacuation warning had been sent out: an Angel was on its way.

With a vanquishing on the horizon, the few neighborhoods still bearing life were sent into a panic, and after the frantic evacuation which ensued, a true ghost town remained. Throughout those neighborhoods, kettles whistled unceasingly, robomaids made beds never to be slept in, and holo-radios played to no ears. Unfinished breakfasts and half-packed bags littered houses with ajar doors, and a thousand epic stories could be told about the struggles to get on the maglevs or the looters who stayed behind, hoping some baroness had left behind her jewelry. But our story is elsewhere: in the Ninth Quarter, just east of the Eastern space-elevator.

The Ninth had emptied out four years ago, ravaged by a particularly pungent plague strain, and it certainly looked the part. The walls were decrepit, their paint peeling with age and dulling with rain. And oh how it rained! Today, the rain was a steady downpour. It pelted the tin roof of a pigeonless pigeon-loft, and made waterfalls of fire escapes. Debris-clogged drainage pipes could only be cleaned by long-gone sanitation workers, so the streets were rivers now, rising an inch a week, clattering with cans and buckets, with glass shards and neoplastic bags for fish. The rain seemed ceaseless. But then it ceased.

The rain did not end how rain ought to end; rain ought to fade gradually, in bits and bobs from various areas at various times, at the whim of carefree clouds. That fateful day, however, it vanished all at once. A gargantuan ivory airship, measuring sixteen by twelve kilometers, pregnant with death, having been dispatched from an eastern continent earlier that day, slotted suddenly into place above the city, chasing away nimbostrati like a leaf-blower dispelling lawn detritus. It was an Angel: a hulking mass of nanosteel, the only one on this backwater planet, colored a celestial white, here to vanquish evil. It hung above the empty city like an albino vulture circling about a corpse, but without any of a scavenger’s carnal joy—it wasn’t here for leisure, only duty.

But I mischaracterised both here and earlier—the metropolis was not empty. Even after the final exodus, the city held vestiges of life. There were street urchins who hadn't received the warning, recluses who hadn’t read their received warnings, the list goes on. The dregs remained. We concern ourselves with four of them—an archivist, a squirrel, a tree, and a griffin.

✸ ✸ ✸

The archivist slept like a stone, easily mistaken for a corpse under those thin white bedsheets. He slept in a small apartment passed down his family for generations, though it was little more than a glorified attic crowning the once widely renowned archives, what remained even now the greatest collection of Old-Earth ceramics in the galaxy.

His daily schedule was simple. Each morning he stumbled out of bed to his closet and donned his uniform. Then he’d roast coffee and peanuts and read for a bit on his balcony. After the clock struck fourteen, he’d do his route. Starting from the ground floor, he’d dust every vase, plate, and pot. Clockwise for even floors, counterclockwise for odd floors—if he felt adventurous, he might switch the two. After thoroughly dusting all sixteen floors, he’d pause for lunch before repeating the whole thing in reverse. Years ago, he might occasionally give a tour or perform a ceremonial duty, but that was no longer. Such had been his routine for the past twenty-six years of his life; he had never missed a single day.

The radiator aside his bed rattled and shook as if little demons with little hammers were running inside of it in a mad frenzy, playing a game of whack-a-mole wherein everything was a mole. And so he awoke, drenched in cold sweat. His comm-pad blinked at him.

Although his myopia was severe, the unfamiliar scarlet glow on his comm-pad pierced through the haze, and understanding immediately overcame him, although he struggled to discern any text. But he could make out, in a massive seven segment display, fifty-four—no, now fifty-three—minutes left. He knew what it meant. He briefly entertained the thought of fleeing, of rushing down to the subterranean levels and dashing westward through what were once the tunnels of the mag-metros, surfacing by the spaceport and taking a transport to safety. And he was confident that he could make it, having good cardio from the dozens of flights of stairs he climbed each day. But what would be the point?

He groggily stumbled out of his bed and hobbled over to his closet—though not for his uniform. He parted the eight identical copies of the uniform to the side, their rusty coat-hangers screeching against the bar, and leaned down to pick up a dusty shoebox. It was rare for a dusty thing to remain dusty in this building. He briefly reached towards his night stand for his dusting brush, but he paused, shook his head with a grimace, and opened the box up, letting dust sprinkle upon his spotless floors. Inside was a revolver and six bullets. One of the bullets was in the cylinder already (from last winter, when he had been depressed and drunk). He dropped the remaining five bullets into the pockets of his pants, and they clinked together like wine-glasses toasting the end of something. Then he tucked the revolver under his arm and left the box on the floor, leaving the room.

He then trekked to the kitchen. Next to the sink was a jar of especially nice coffee beans, imported from the other end of the galaxy, which he had been saving for a special occasion. There would be no occasion more special than today, and so he indulged. He then groped in the cupboard for a cup; his memory was spotty, and he couldn’t recall where he had left it, but finally found it after two splinters and one lost battle with a stray vegetable knife. Wrapping his bloody hand with a rag, he poured himself a cup. And finally to complete his routine, he reached into the closet where he grew legumes, grabbing some peanuts from a jar below his trough and dropping them into his portable roaster.

Cup in one hand, roaster in the other, he headed down the hallway. He paused at the door of the stairwell which led down to the archives, longingly looking at the doorknob. Again, he briefly considered making an attempt at escaping. But he quickly dismissed the thought, instead sliding open the door to his balcony. It was oddly quiet. He sat down on a rusty old chair, placing his coffee on the nearby table. Beneath him was the Ninth, in all its former glory. His eyes were always heavy with nostalgia as he took in this vista. If one imagined the facades once visible on its crumbling walls, if one extrapolated the curve of the now half-gone arch, one might understand what he saw. He saw grandeur. But he knew it hadn’t lasted—and soon even the remnants would be gone.

Beneath him was a titanic canopy of green, through which nothing could be seen. Underneath that was a spindly little trunk and then thirty meters of rushing rapids, the thunderous crashes of which hurt his ears. Meanwhile, above him, a sheet of white stretched to the horizons, reminiscent of the recently departed clouds. But it had no texture, no depth—it was a featureless plane starkly contrasting the fuzzy subtleties of vaporous clouds.

The archivist, soul of all the forgotten, sat sadly above this bygone city, sandwiched between two reminders of neglect. Thoughts of days now vanished unfurled before him. Back when civilisation was found here, the reigning earl had once been obligated to visit biannually. What a ceremony that day would entail! And his regulars—the academics, the librarians, the postgraduates, even the tourists—oh how he missed them. The most recent duke—taken by the plague, alas—had even frequented the place. What had been his name…? Oftentimes, the archivist asked himself what the point of it all was. He was a caretaker of archives to which no one came anymore. For whom did he watch over it?

After a few minutes of silent contemplation, he took a bullet out of his pocket. As he loaded this second bullet into the revolver, he heard a scampering noise beneath him. The leaves in front of him rustled, and a little squirrel poked its head out. It hopped onto the railing.

✸ ✸ ✸

The squirrel, like the archivist, lived in this city as a hermit. Its compatriots had recently fled for the countryside, but it had remained.

It was a dim little thing, clearly forsaken by whatever god distributes genes. Animals have an uncanny sense to anticipate danger—before seismic events, mastodons flee; in the wake of a sandstorm, catmice bury; as volcanoes begin to bubble, neo-dragons fly away. The squirrel had no such premonitory sense. When the airship had stolen the sun, umbrellaed the rain, and covered the sky, its family had dispersed, understanding the omen. The squirrel, meanwhile, had slept soundly. Now, it scurried in the ruins of this dying metropolis, wondering where its people were. It was a mobile creature, and so searched high and low, wide and far. It climbed to the top of exterior walls—a small hop away from exiting the city—and scanned for its family. Not seeing a soul, it returned into what would be its grave.

While looking for its comrades, hopping between a series of terraces, the squirrel had been suddenly distracted by the smell of roasting peanuts. After tilting its head upward, sniffing to find a direction, it located the scent as originating from atop a beige-colored building. It scampered up to the archivist’s balcony via windowsills and fire-escape ladders, loose bricks and vestigial clotheslines, utilising an incredible pathfinding efficiency—not completed neglected with genes, then. And with a tendril-like motion, it vaulted atop the balcony’s railing, peering curiously at him.

The archivist was taken aback. He hadn’t seen fauna in years, only flora—and in that case, only scrawny peanut flowers he’d grown himself or the gargantuan tree synonymous with the city. The little squirrel was a sight to behold indeed. His gaze affixed, he was frozen—so unfamiliar with anything moving besides his mirror’s reflection.

The squirrel made a move, hopping onto the table, sniffing at the air. It was no bigger than the coffee mug. It slowly crept up to his portable roaster, putting its paws onto it in a pitiful attempt to stand on two legs and get closer to the smell of the smoke, emitting from a small pipe on the top. The archivist’s stomach grumbled and he instinctively reached toward the roaster to satiate his hunger. But he paused midway, hand held still in space like God reaching toward Adam. Its eyes stared into his with pleading. Altruism won out, and so despite the archivist desperately wanting a final meal, he picked up the roaster and slid open its lid. As the aroma flooded out, delighting the squirrel, he poured the roasted peanuts into his hand and then gestured towards it. The squirrel hesitantly crept over to him, eyeing the newfound treasures.

It had never eaten roasted peanuts before. It had lived its entire life in a fallen colossus, unfamiliar with the fruits of civilisation. Scavenged scraps—bits of bark, small edible twigs—had composed its subsisting diet, and these roasted peanuts were an ambrosia so far above what it had ever eaten prior that the alluring aroma alone overstimulated it. But the squirrel, like the archivist, was altruistic on this day. It made the decision to hold off on eating the roasted peanuts, to bring them home and share them with its family—whenever they got back from wherever they had gone.

So, the squirrel tucked the peanuts into his cheek one by one, the mere taste having already sent it into a heightened bliss. After emptying the roaster, it prepared to depart. Before leaving, though, it felt obligated to thank the man somehow, so it gave a curt nod to him, waiting to see if he had registered the gratitude. The man nodded back, so the squirrel felt satisfied. With its cheeks inflated, it scurried back toward its home, stealing a furtive glance backward as it left.

Watching his newfound friend leave, the archivist smiled, saying a quick prayer to no god in particular, wishing the squirrel to escape the incoming Angel. His fate, on the other hand, was sealed. But by whom?

He fished a bullet from his pocket and held it up above his head, watching the artificial light produced by the airship above curve and radiate around it in such interesting ways. It reminded him of a Ming Dynasty vase kept in the atrium on the ground floor. Every eight days, for a few minutes during bi-dusk, the two suns of the planet would align such that their angles cut perfectly between arches and slits, illuminating the ovular vase in an indescribable way. He shuddered, thinking about the vase’s imminent fate, and slid the bullet down the chamber.

As he loaded the third bullet into the revolver, the squirrel scurried down a branch, back toward its burrow, nestled amid some roots of the tree.

✸ ✸ ✸

The tree was a contorted giant, suffocating in the park it had long since overgrew. From afar, it seemed an upside-down triangle about to tip over, a mass of branches reaching outward and upward from a thin trunk. But it was, in truth, glacial—its roots extended far deeper—it was, in fact, connected via root systems to every other tree in the city, like the rhizomorphs of Old-Earth’s Armillaria ostoyae.

In a grandfather’s time, when bioengineering was all the rage, the city’s Genetic Department had given it an unnatural ability to expand into every nook and cranny, to occupy every square inch of surface in the city. Hedge trimmers had kept it in check while the government functioned. Then, when they disappeared, the tree prospered. Outcompeting all other flora, the system pushed into every niche, monopolising photosynthesis through wholesale colonialism, no gardeners to keep it in check. Now, it was a labyrinthine tapestry of wooden sinews and fibers contorting through ventilation systems and drainage pipes, squeezing itself into pavement cracks and within the insulation of buildings. The tree was inextricably one with the city, and the two would die together.

A side effect of its genetic engineering was that it wasn’t edible. Some rodents could digest its leaves and xylem, but the tree was indigestible for humans. So, the archivist only ate canned soups and non-perishable foods, with the rare legume grown in a pitiful trough under a weak, flickering UV-lamp. Speaking of which, having given all the peanuts to the squirrel, he now returned into the kitchen with an empty roaster, hanging it from the still-warm UV-lamp. He normally would perform some maintenance on the garden—weed the trough, harvest any grown peanuts, change the oxygen-ion batteries, etc.—but there was no point today. Instead, he stared at the seedlings in the trough, lamenting that they would never produce anything. He thought back to all the wonderful roasted peanuts he had enjoyed. And then, with a heavy sigh, he closed the closet and loaded the fourth bullet into the revolver.

✸ ✸ ✸

The griffin clawed at the bars of her cage, trying to escape. Her mother had named her Tamara. Tamara had never known her father—just his name: Gúdal. She was the culmination of two great bloodlines, the product of a great mare and a great stallion, created under the watchful eyes of biologists and veterinarians and gene editors. Destined for a depressing life in captivity, her life had taken a wonderful turn when, a fortnight before the plague infected the city, some environmental committee had decided to release a handful of griffins into the city, to strut about like the peacocks of Old-Earth.

Tamara had been one of the lucky few chosen, and those subsequent years had been the best of her life. She saw the sky for the first time. It was liberating. After the plague hit, the griffins had been forgotten about, and she had been free to do whatever she wished. Each morning, she’d awake on whichever rooftop she had chosen the night before. With a few powerful beats of her aquiline wings, she would soar into the air, ascending into the clouds, dashing and swooping wherever she so wished, enjoying a mostly emptied city.

But then, a month ago, she had ventured too close to a still populated quarter, a bastion of humanity which maintained strict animal control policies in fear of contracting the plague from them. She had been shot with a net mid-air, and she had plummeted down to the ground, wings entangled. The tree had luckily broken her fall, and she had gotten away with just snapping her left wing. But they had never treated the wound, electing to simply throw her in a building for quarantining animals. Dried blood still coated her left shoulder, though it was invisible on her blood-red feathers. And so, after a taste of freedom, she returned to a life in captivity, fed rehydrated potato paste and kept in a tiny cage where she couldn’t even extend her wings to full length—not that she could extend her left wing.

She had languished in this squalor for the past few weeks, becoming accustomed to the routine: twice a day be fed slop, rot the rest of the day. The monotony had begun setting in. But this morning, something changed. Unlike our aforementioned squirrel, every last animal in the building had realised something was amiss when they awoke, something wrong in their bones. The keepers had been mid-way in their feeding of the beasts when they too began to panic, evacuating with haste.

And now, the animals were alone, left by their jailers to await their fate. They attempted escape, scratching and clawing and pawing at their chains, making all sorts of guttural noises. And after futility set in, they’d go silent for a few minutes before starting it up again. They moaned and screeched at unpredictable intervals, for differing durations, with differing frequency. Suddenly, though, every animal’s silence synced up, and the whole place was transcendental.

It was during this silence that Tamara glanced upward through a skylight into a majestic canopy of green. She moved around, craning her neck, hoping to glimpse a cloud or the sun. But no matter what, she couldn’t see the sky. What she did spy, however, was far more meaningful. Her excellent eyesight spotted some movement on a far-off branch, and she focused in, spotting a quick brown blur—a squirrel. It was free—so unlike the rest of them, shackled down below. Tamara looked around the warehouse, at the hopelessness strewn about, hearing an utter silence of resignation. She wished the squirrel the best of luck, hoping that the little creature was making a beeline for an exit, that something, anything, would make it out of this wretched place. It disappeared out of view.

And then the silence broke with a howl, and then buzzes and scurries and whirrs—the discordant chorus of the doomed—resumed. A spider worked at its web. Lizard families brawled, and a snake in three great coils gathered against a dimming heat bulb. The griffin clawed at a particularly rusty bar, intently working away.

Elsewhere, the archivist was leaning back in an old armchair, staring blankly into space, rolling a bullet between his fingers, feeling the cold and sleek exterior, imagining what his brains would look like, splattered on the wall behind him. His stomach rumbled—he would die on an empty stomach. Then, he loaded the fifth bullet into the penultimate chamber.

✸ ✸ ✸

Meanwhile, the squirrel peeked its head through the canopy, looking upward in search of the sky. Its view was obstructed. The slab-shaped behemoth remained hovering a few kilometres above, blackening the sky with its cream-colored body, priming its plague-cleansing instruments.

On one of the planet’s icy moons, in a nondescript triangular room within a nondescript triangular building, three faceless bureaucrats simultaneously inserted their activation keys into ports on the chalk white walls. In the center of this room, leaning against a control panel, their superior twiddled his thumbs, loudly chewing on a nicotine derivative. Each took off a great white puffy jacket and hung it on a spartan hook implanted into the wall near them. Then, nothing else to do but wait, the four stared blankly into space, shifting their balance from one foot to another, counting tiles on the wall, picking at their nails and, arms crossed, drumming their fingers against their ribs.

After a few minutes, an alarm buzzed twice, indicating that the computer deemed any more delay too risky, and that the probability of the plague spreading further outweighed any imperative to hold out for those still evacuating. The room’s lights glowed a ghastly scarlet, and the superior hawked and spat the alkaloids onto the stainless grey floor. He flipped open a glass cover which shielded a small, unremarkable black switch, casually flicked it on, and slowly turned his head around the room like a barn owl. Each of the three key-turners nodded. With practiced synchronicity, the three turned the keys.

Approximately twelve microseconds later, a tall antenna atop the airship briefly glowed red before returning to its usual non-color, a state which it had held since seven weeks earlier when the Angel had cleansed the plague from a small town on an eastern continent. A crackling chain of electromagnetic impulses relayed the signal throughout the ship, and an internal computer took measurements and calibrated instruments before sending an activation signal. Across the underside of the ship, arrays upon arrays of artillery began to glow like a thousand biblical eyes. An infernal rumbling shook the sky, the city, and the earth below.

Understandably, the archivist was struggling to load the sixth and final bullet. Each time he tried sliding the bullet down the final empty chamber, his trembling hand would fumble it, and it’d fly down to the floor. Then, on the quaking floor, it’d slide around in unpredictable zig-zags and bounce up and down, and it’d take another minute for him to secure it in his hands. He sighed—five-sixths odds would have to do. He closed the cylinder with a satisfying click, and then spun it with all the passion he could muster. He tightly held onto the armchair with one hand, and tightly gripped the revolver with the other. The archivist raised the barrel to his temple and, squeezing his eyes shut with a wince, pulled the trigger.

Elsewhere, the squirrel was in its hollow in the tree, dividing the roasted peanuts into little piles for his family—six squirrels, including himself. There were nineteen peanuts, a terrible number for clean division. The squirrel didn’t know this, obviously, but his heuristic attempts at doling out six equal piles kept failing. So, after some strenuous mental calculations, he decided that he needed to get rid of one extra peanut. After some more thought, he decided that he deserved it—his find, after all. The happiest he had ever been, he picked up a roasted peanut and spun it around in his little paws, examining every pore and contour, taking in the gorgeous smell, relishing the depth and vibrancy of its tawny color. He held onto it tight, for the surrounding hollow shook with a fury, and the six piles he had so carefully separated had become one again. But he was too focused on the treat in his paws.

Meanwhile, the griffin had broken a talon with her scratching, and was cradling her bleeding claw against her breast. The cages in the pound had been stacked atop one another under the assumption that the earth wouldn’t shake. The earth was shaking. Cages toppled down. Terrariums fell to the ground and shattered. It was pandemonium. The griffin, a strong beast, was held in a heavy tungsten cage, and so her cage was a point of stability in the sea of chaos. Around the griffin screeched and roared and howled a thousand frenzied animals, crafted by man, doomed by man. Tamara remained silent.

✸ ✸ ✸

The hammer released, flying towards a chamber with unknown contents. The squirrel raised his paws to his mouth, salivating, excited to eat its roasted peanut. The griffin, resigned, curled up on the floor of her cage, resting her head on her feathery tail. And then Heaven opened.

. . .

✸ ✸ ✸

And so the city was gone.

A low grumbling shook the earth as the alabaster aircraft activated its engines, swooping off to the next sinner. In its wake, the ruins of the city rotted with the sickly odor of forgotten dreams and uneaten peanuts. Amidst scalding steam stretching for miles, one could, if one squinted, just barely make out an auburn feather fluttering down to the ground like a helicopter seed. The occasional neocement foundation jutted out from the rubble, still hot to the touch, sticking up like a grave marker. But on that circle of tombstones, no one now weeps.

The nauseating emptiness above the city sat untouched for a bit, as if it were sacred, representing what had once been. But then a small puffy cumulus calmly wandered in, pausing for a few minutes above what was once a cathedral, before floating away. And then a few wispy cirri followed, hanging above what was once the Ninth, before they too left, chased away by a gigantic cumulonimbus, measuring twelve by sixteen kilometers, pregnant with precipitation, having been formed over an eastern ocean before sliding into place above the city, chasing away the little ones. It was a hulking mass of water vapor, eggshell-white. It hung above the necropolis in silence for a brief moment before unleashing its torrents. The rain was unrelenting.