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Space was oppressive, enveloping, all-consuming. Space was a viscous black ocean, an unending chasm of echoing nothingness. Space was mocking, with its stillness and hateful silence.
If Kars could scream, perhaps he would have. What is an ant to a star—what is a god to everything?
In truth, the irony of the situation was this: the Pillar Men had no word for sin in their atavistic, forgotten language. There was fault, and there was transgression, but the people from beneath the Earth hailed to no one but themselves. The humans had a word for this, and it was hubris.
And the bitter comedy between the lines of Kars's effigial eulogy was this: he was born centuries before the flight of Icarus, and fell (or perhaps the opposite; it cannot be helped) in a similar fashion many centuries afterwards. It was his hubris—or so say the humans; the few who still remember—that drove him to pursue total conquest, though the victory had already been attained. So, it seemed, the kick to throw Kars's legs out from under him and send him falling up, up, up, had been delivered by none other by Kars himself.
As he drifted through the great expanse, jaw locked in a gesture of now-powerless animosity—though at this point the emotion was beginning to look more like its sister, despair, if one were to squint a bit—Kars thought of this, and the stars laughed.
Earth was gone, now; the blue planet was no longer visible among the sneering stars, the bits of space rock floating about as Kars did now. The Sun, however, remained.
For how long had he stared at the wretched thing, millennia ago, when he was called visionary and not iconoclast? Humans are warned not to look upon it, as if their mayfly lives or that extraterrestrial staring contest mean anything in the long run, and so were the Pillar Men, though to them the act would not bring irreparable damage.
And so Kars had sat for hours, looking out from the shade of his shelter at the blistering white pseudogod that denied his people everything. He had stared until the image glowed red in his retina when he looked away, stared until darkness had begun to creep into the periphery of his vision like thousands of writhing black centipedes, each clambering over the others on millions of tiny legs. Noon came and went. Neither the Sun nor the visionary dared look elsewhere.
Those days had long since passed, but when Kars closed his eyes—or when he had been able to, at least, when the anesthetic of space and the deadly cold of the void had not yet taken him completely—he could often still see the outline of The Sun there, in the sacred space behind his eyelids.
But even so: Earth was gone, far out of sight. Kars remained in the company only of stars. As it turned out, they were spiteful little things.
They took on the voices of all of his brethren, each life snuffed out back when Kars had finally—
Killed them. You killed them. Why? asked the stars.
They stood in my way, Kars thought. And he continued to think. He could do nothing else.
Picture this:
The culmination of his alienation comes in the form of blood dripping from the edge of a blade. It comes in the image of a man standing alone, surrounded by bodies.
So many, in fact, that they begin to blend together.
Go further back, and picture this:
Condemnation lives in multitudes, in the masses, in unwillingness to evolve. It is the beast with two hundred eyes, all narrowed and cynical; two hundred eyes to be gouged from their sockets—a small mercy for the observer and the observed.
Condemnation dies wailing, though the act is less painful than its life—or so thinks the victor. He alone writes the history, after all.
But that's no longer relevant. Go forward, forward—return to he who stands among the corpses. Yes, the aftermath—the beginning—that's where we were.
Picture this:
The man in the wreckage turns slowly, as if he is careful not to wake the dead, but this cannot be the case. He is thorough in all he sets his mind to. Lo, each body—a grotesque segment of the slain beast of denial—bears the same fatal (but not mortal; no, the Pillar Men were many things, but never mortal) wounds: a gaping chasm from the solar plexus downwards, a clean slice across the neck to remove the head. And so it is that each body is indistinguishable from the rest; anonymity in death is, perhaps, akin to being forgotten.
The victor takes a deep breath. (Here is where it starts. Here is where it starts to end.)
He feels the blood of everyone he has ever known run in rivulets down the plains of his face; he feels it beneath his fingernails, in the lines of his hands, between his teeth. There is only silence in that chamber beneath the earth—silence, and the dull dripping of ichor, the small splash as it joins the unfathomably vast red sea spreading across the ground.
Picture this:
The man takes a step, and then another, and all else follows. Each dies and is reborn, and time marches onwards: Kars the visionary; Kars the iconoclast; Kars the cruel and the ruthless and the relentless and the last.
Perhaps not the last. Not now, at least.
At the threshold to aboveground, he pauses, allows himself one last glance at his carnage's aftermath. It occurs to him that maybe he is a little bit more like a god now, or maybe a little bit more like the world, the cycle, the inevitable.
Those who stagnate stand at the end of the line. Kars had simply given them a little push.
There is no night in space, and there certainly is no day. There are only the stars and the darkness and the cold and the Sun. There is forever in a minute, and a minute that goes on forever.
Kars, entirely helpless in the merciless hands of the universe, longed for something, anything to interrupt the agonizing stillness that surrounded his perpetual drifting. A great and excruciating pain, perhaps, like a knife twisted in the unmoving chest cavity of a god.
But the sensation never came.
There was only nothing, and that was a worse sort of pain in itself.
How many miles, now, stood between Kars and home? How many times had he wished to be anywhere back in the world? How many stars, exactly, had been watching him all this time, and how many tales of his undoing had they recited to one another as he passed?
Briefly, shamefully, he considered pleading with them, but that would achieve nothing, and Kars, even in the throes of not-death, was a man vain enough to consider himself well over begging.
He couldn't possibly be distressed, because there is no oxygen in space, and so there is no cause for one's heart to beat, and so on. Or so he reasoned with himself, weighing each side of the argument and theorizing and always thinking and thinking and thinking.
Once, he tried to stop thinking for a while. He cleared the slate of his mind and simply let himself be. The oblivion that overtook him was almost tranquil, like a thick, impossibly dark blanket.
Then came the stars, like sunlight filtering through holes in a roof.
Are you afraid?
(Yes, at this point, perhaps he was. How could he not be? All he had ever known was now a distant memory, another speck of dust in the unfathomably vast expanse of the universe, and the universes beyond that. So was he. Kars meant nothing.)
No, he answered. I have observed the fall of empires. I have tasted the elimination of my own.
A pause. Do you know that you were the last?
(Yes, he had figured as much. And who had held the hammer over the coffin, the shovel above the open grave? Perhaps Fate, perhaps not; regardless, that cruel irony remained engraved in the weathered stone of Kars's history, and it went like this:
Kars, seeking to elevate his kind—out of ambition or pride or solicitude for his brethren, though, was the question; more likely it was a combination of each—would be the one to destroy them. The extinction of that once hegemonic race had sprouted from intentions once progressive, sowed by one who had loved his people—or maybe just their concept.)
No, replied Kars, slowly. What of that fool, Santana?
The stars did not answer, and that was answer enough.
What is it you miss most of all? There was a hint of laughter behind the inquiry, only vaguely detectable in the hesitation between words. Kars, who had rarely minded waiting, was growing impatient. What do you wish to go back to?
(The howl of wolves well past midnight. His hand against the cold of the cave walls—how many people before him had made the same gesture, felt the same cool sensation against the lines of their palms? The reflection of the moon in still water, the dance of flame reaching deep into the night sky. The Sun, for the short time that he could feel it. Blood on the curve of his blade. Blood between his teeth. His feet on the ground, and the sky stretching leagues and leagues above.)
Everything—nothing you would ever understand. Leave me be.
The stars did as he suggested, and he was back to being Kars of oblivion, Kars of the exile, Kars of nothing.
Time went on—that is, time in a broader sense: time unrestricted by the turn of the planets, the pull of the Sun.
The stars did not speak again. It was Kars and billions of miles of open space; it was Kars and a profound loneliness that, it seemed, had never been felt by anyone else in the universe. Sometimes there was nothing but distant stars; sometimes there was a comet, or some other, faraway sun. Perhaps that was someone's sun, too, and perhaps they were oppressed by it as he had been.
His Sun was long gone, now, anyway. He could no longer differentiate it from the rest of the stars.
Let it be over, he finally pleaded. There is nothing for me here.
Nothing. Nothing. The word echoed back on itself, back from itself, and the concept folded itself into a neat little box, and the box was everything.
Let me die. Anything, please, just finish it now. Let me go.
The universe did not release him. The pages in the book of Kars's history kept turning and turning and turning and each of them was blank.
Let it be over. But it was not. Time went on.