Chapter 48
I’m seated in front of the door, wrapped in a nest of ivy that prevents me from moving. The twigs are woven around me, tight around my arms and ankles.
“We’ve risked our lives to bring you here, why are you not opening the door?” I hear a swarm of voices ask behind me.
I can barely move my head, but I manage to turn around. My army is standing there, seeking an answer.
“Leave,” I state, with an unexpected fullness in my voice.
“We are you, Iris. We cannot leave,” they reply.
“My family created you to ensure I’d meet their expectations. You are not me. You are the fruit of all expectations oppressing me. Now leave,” I repeat.
The men are surprised at my tone, and for a moment they are speechless.
“We cannot,” they insist after a pause.
Freedom, I think.
“I will open the door, but not for you. I will open it on my own terms and conditions. I said, for once and for all, leave.”
The men’s faces turn pale, their bodies shiver.
“Why?” they ask perplexed.
I stare at them coolly, without offering an answer.
Slowly, the men melt away. For an instant I feel a pang of pain, the liquefying shapes rise, with the glimpse of a hope in their agonizing eyes. The instant comes and goes, and when all figments of the army disappear in filaments of smoke I am alone in the forest, facing the door.
Loneliness, the book said.
I sense the twigs release their grip, and I slip off the nest of leaves that had imprisoned me. I stand up, and push the door.
I sense it yield. I push it again, and it starts to open with a screechy call of pain.
Before me is an endless mass of black space. My old home: The universe, vast, pitiless and endlessly thrilling.
On the bench of the door, divided by an infinitesimal distance from the precipice of blackness, is a bottle. It is familiar. I pick it up, and in it I see a deformed black embryo. Its blackness is not the same blackness of my space. It is dismal and revolting.
What I am holding in my hands is Uncle Ludwig’s embryo.
As I am looking at it, a faraway echo reverberates from space. It’s a kid’s voice, and it sounds sweet and innocent for this one moment.
I could have been your brother, if only they hadn’t killed me…
I look at the bottle, hesitating. Is there no goodness in this embryo?
A female voice calls me, its woeful tone resonating in the empty space.
Do you know how lonely I felt when they took my baby from me? Do you know my despair when Arthur made me sterile? Please don’t kill my baby, please Iris…
It’s the queen’s voice, the voice of a clone produced by a reckless nation to destroy my family.
Ruthlessness and destruction, I remember.
“You’ve gone too far, and now there’s only one action I can take,” I state.
I observe the bottle one last time, and then, with all the strength I have in my lanky body, I launch it in the abyss of the unknown. The place I call home, my element. Not Ludwig’s.
The bottle flows through darkness, twisting as if fighting to win its last chance, and then I hear a shriek, acute, prolonged, almost unbearable, and the bottle shatters. Ludwig’s embryo catches fire. His mother the queen is a cloud of smoke around him, I see her face appear, dissolve in a pained scatter of rage and tears, exploding as a firework in the darkness of the endless night.
Once the last ashes have burned into nothingness, silence falls.
Now that I have achieved what I had fought for and paid my dues, now that the royal family is safe, can I be happy?
I’ve given all I had. Have I gained the right to freely roam this desolate vastness where I need to loose myself and which I need to explore to feel alive?
Yes, Space is mine again. And yet a pang of sadness runs through me.
Reunion and love, the book tells me.
That’s my destiny too.
I landscape the scenery, seeking clues, but nothing is in sight. I take a deep breath, ready to leap into blackness, when a pulsating dot of light unexpectedly appears at an undefined distance.