by Thomas A. Sieber
Translated by Michael K. Iwoleit
Prolog
On Enola’s last evening, as the west wind blows from the glazed craters left by thermonuclear blasts and dusk colors the grayness of the nuclear winter with a trace of pink, the Tardy Jon lies in front of his workshop and bleakly beholds the land that surrounds him. To the south, behind Mel’s Roadhouse, he can see the destroyed shopping malls and military installations of the corpocracy, drifting like deserted islands in an ocean of Chinese soy fields. A cratered road, patiently gnawed at its edges by proliferous vegetation for more than a century, meanders through the fields towards him, passing immediately below the disused railroad embankment on which Jon’s garage is located. A little further up the Befirczik, as the road is called, passes a cluster of oddly shaped cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, followed by some rundown villas with swimming pools full of croaking frogs. Beyond them the road leaves the village and disappears into the distance among gloomy hills and black forests.
On his right is the god-forsaken plain that has once been Francofort-Alamein. Sparse vegetation carves out a miserable existence here between black ponds and areas of extensive glazing. At night the wailing of unnamed creatures can be heard that leave tracks like human handprints in the mud. There are neither roads nor trails in this area and no wanderer who has his head on straight would dare to enter it. Only the sun, hidden behind veils of dust, feebly sinks down to the horizon here in the evening, as if swallowed up by the colorless wasteland.
Faced with this somber scenery Jon lets his head drop sidewards and peers at Enola. Through half-closed lids he watches her as she cooks and cleans the house and soon after shows up to work in the garden and when she’s finished with that she begins to neatly line up all the battered cars, gliders and scooters that stand about higgledy-piggledy in front of the workshop. And after all that is done she approaches him with a smile, kisses him, sits down on the grass next to his lounger and puts her head in his lap.
“It’s good,” Jon thinks, “that I have Enola,” and this is all that he thinks, nothing else.
This is how they sit for some time while daylight recedes and solitary drivers that pass by along the Befirczik gawk up to them. Jon is in a state of complete inner balance when something stirs up a thought in a remote corner of his brain that takes shape within fractions of a second and hits his indolence like a thunderbolt. A painful moan escapes his chest. Without opening his eyes he says to Enola:
“Baby, there’s another broken hover down at the road … it’s owned by Lax.”
Enola raises her head to look at him.
“The g-box is done for. Lax wanted to come by and pick it up today … damn it,” he babbles in a tone of voice that reveals his growing panic. Jon knows that to forget a job for Sam Laxdal is like forgetting to breath.
He stared dead ahead until Enola finally says: “Okay, I have a look at it.”
She raises in an elegant movement and is on her way down to the road. Halfway between, when she can see the hover, she stops and calls back up to Jon: “Interesting, one of the unbreakable 28ers.”
“Yes,” Jon mumbles, “unbreakable …”
“… and constructed for eternity,” completes Enola the sentence from a distance of hundred steps. Then she covers the rest of the way with a single boisterous leap.
The hover that usually floats two feet above ground sticks to the tarmac as if it had just smashed down from the sky. Enola opens the hatch that covers the g-box and knows immediately that nothing can be done down here on the road. She walks back to the workshop to fetch an external gravity compensator. Coupling it to the hover she manages to maneuver the vehicle up to the workshop. She immediately begins to remove the stasis field inductor, the central part of all g-boxes.
“Don’t worry” she calls over to Jon, “we’ll get it fixed again.”
“As long as you hurry,” Jon replies and stares uncomfortably over the tip of his shoes into the darkness.
#
Car wrecks are lined up along the Befirczik like a traffic jam in the realm of the dead, the skeletons of their previous owners lolling about worn out cushions and seat shells. Enola and Jon use the wrecks as sources of required spare parts. Enola flings the bones into the fields and tugs the vehicle with the tractor to the garage where it is cannibalized. Since there are thousands of wrecks for each running vehicle Enola usually has no problem to find a fitting part for even the most unusual model.
Laxdal’s hover, however, is an exception to the rule. There are actually no damaged 28ers because of the nunno which – like everything that is more complicated than a bike – was invented before the war and is meant to regenerate any conceivable damage on its own, provided that its a nunno from the prewar production, not a rip-off from the Chinese Union. Laxdal’s 28er is apparently infected with the latter and thus Enola begins to remove the corrupted components with surgical precision to replace them with healthy material.
To do so and to reach the stasis field she has to crawl so deep into the narrow opening of the drive unit that her whole upper body disappears into the hover at the end. As she opens the superconducting cover she realizes that two of the six projection coils are completely destroyed. The field flickers out unrestricted at these spots and almost reaches as far as the passenger compartment. Had Sam Laxdal and his gorillas known that the icy hell of the stasis had been reaching out its fingers behind them, they probably would have jumped out of the moving hover. Enola laughs at this thought. Then Laxdal’s eyes as he stares at her come into her mind and what he might do to Jon if the hover doesn’t run, so she hurries to proceed.
Enola’s work as a mechanic has earned her a legendary reputation along he Befirczik. The same is true of her beauty which is the reason why drivers below the railroad embankment crane their necks for her and sometimes severely crash into each other – or appear in the workshop with flimsy excuses and hang around until Enola kicks them out.
Jon, who is not much interested in beauties of whatever kind, hangs around on his lounger with a determination that could be of philosophical significance if his laziness wouldn’t be just as proverbial as Enola’s aloofness within a radius of hundred ghalvas.
#
Apart from substandard nunno Lexdal’s hover is equipped with a number of components so exclusive that even Enola doesn’t know them, among them a custom-built module that keeps the hover from being shut down by a so-called schempp, a device used by the Volunteer Squads for hunting criminals. Enola uses it to block vehicles for as long as she crawls around their innards.
As Enola inserts the second coil her schempp is deactivated which causes both the g-box and the horizontal drive of the 28er to start up within the fraction of a second. The hover lunges upwards so fast that even Enola’s superhuman reaction capacity can’t keep her head from being engulfed by the black swirling of the stasis field up to her shoulders. Her hands cramp around the drive shaft that starts to rotate and pulls in her arms until it jams and gets stuck with a crunching noise. The control unit shuts off the drive only now – and then it fails. The vehicle sags and Enola’s feet touch the ground again.
Nothing of all this enters her mind anymore. With her upper body unalterably stuck in the hover’s innards, her head is outside of the universe. Her mind lingers in the depth of the temporal singularity of the stasis.
Time has stopped to pass for Enola.
#
Jon wakes up as a rude kick shakes his lounger. He opens his eyes to look up into an infuriated face: black mustache, bald head and sunglasses at night … Sam Laxdal!
“Finished … of course,” it slips out of Jon’s mouth reflexively even though the other man hasn’t said anything yet.
“I hope so!” Laxdal superfluously kicks the lounger one more time.
“We have already been wondering where you are.” Jon’s brain is slowly starting to work. He collects his skinny bones, gets up and starts walking towards the workshop. Laxdal, a short, stout man, passes him and stomps ahead with vigorous gaits.
As they enter the hall, he notices much to his sorrow that Enola still seems to be working on the hover. Strangely she neither replies to Jon’s questions nor shows any reaction to Laxdal’s increasingly louder yelling. The hatch where she is stuck is too narrow to let them have a look into the inside. So they helplessly go around in a circuit and pat on the shell here and there.
As some time has passed without any significance change of the situation they try to pull Enola out of the hover. Each one grabs a leg and pulls as hard has he can but the only result is that Enola’s coverall is torn apart with a harsh noise and they both sprawl like slapstick characters on their backs, each one with a pant leg in his hands.
While they stand up cursing and dust down themselves, Laxdal’s eyes get caught by Enola’s lower body that protrudes from the hover, only clad with a pair of socks now.
For a while they just stand like stuffed dummies, not saying a word.
Laxdal swallows.
“Listen, Jon, old chap,” he finally says. “I just had an idea how we could make a deal regarding the hover.”
#
Jon’s workshop is closed a few days later and it’s not long before his repair business is completely discontinued. Who, so his explanation, should carry out the repairs now?
Visitors appear that neither bring nor pick up vehicles. They hang about the railroad embankment instead before they disappear, alone and sometimes in groups, into the workshop. While they come from the proximity in the beginning, the draw area extends in the same amount as the secretiveness is decreasing. Soon it’s an open secret from Grubmar in the west over to G-Town which kind of service is offered in Jon’s garage lately.
Jon, who has pondered the whole matter in his current situation, has come to the conclusion that what he does is morally justifiable. Enola can no longer be regarded as a sentient individual. Her brain has probably been irreparably damaged – you could call her dead. Apart from that he tends to listen to Sam Laxdal in this matter who unswervingly claims that Enola has been constructed exactly for this purpose before the war …
So Jon spruces up his workshop and lets it shine in the light of red floodlights. The following words glow brightly in large letters above the entrance:
ALONE WITH ENOLA
The shed is later replaced with a house of the most elegant building style, then with a palace and finally, shortly before Jon’s death, with an ancient Roman style thermal bath in the center of which Enola and the 28er are placed under a grand marble dome.
1. Aetas Hominis
The robot named Enola and the hover of the type BARQ28 remained in possession of Jon’s family for eight generations. The Tardy Jon was succeeded by the Shady Ron and the latter by Dumb Don and his twin sons Tim and Tom. The Pale Tim died without children but Tom the Obscene had a son who went down into the family chronicle as the Generous Ned. Ned’s son was Carlos the Prudent One who for his whole life denied to be the father of his offspring, the Reckless Uth, but finally couldn’t help but to bequeath him the substantial family assets as well as Enola and the 28er.
The Tardy Jon’s dynasty finally came to an end with Uth’s son, the Unfortunate Rhett, because around this time most inhabitants of the village and the surrounding areas or rather of the whole country died violently due to the invading hordes of Jaunzer Hedronax who had left his ancestral homeland at the edge of the Pyrenees and started a bloody conquest of the European continent.
#
If Genghis Khan could have seen the Jaunzer’s atrocities he would have put his hands over his face, for Hedronax was the kind of men who ate the legs of infants like baloneys. He pulled a bloody trail across whole Europe and as he turned his aspiration and his armies towards Asia he met with little resistance there either.
The Russian winter had stopped many a conqueror but Hedronax overcame it by burning woods and houses, animals and humans so that his troops could warm themselves by the fires and eat the charred meat. The few who dared to oppose him were swept away by the ferocity of his visage.
It was not before he reached the gates of Irkutsk that an alliance of Kalmyks, Oirats, Tobol Tatars and the remnants of the Chinese Union’s forces managed to wrest a truce from him at terrible costs of life. Hedronax was still the undisputed ruler of the old world. And since Africa was almost completely depopulated, the American continent had disintegrated into hundreds of quarreling tribal territories and Australia and Neo Caledon had isolated themselves from the rest of the world, no one could keep him from letting Pope Innocent XVIII crown him humanity’s first Super Tsar – an event that was honored by erecting a four-sided pyramid made of ten million skulls, seventy meters long and thirty meters high, at the gates of the city. The year was 2378 Anno Domini.
As Hedronax was on his way back to the town of his birth, Argeles-sur-Mer, after this dreadful beet harvest, he traveled via the old Befirczik and passed Jon’s thermal bath on this occasion. He took a fancy of the site and of Enola, seized the thermal bath and stayed on for an extensive period of time.
A veil of silence may be cast over what Hedronax did to Enola, for the Jaunzer was a cruel man in all respects. But while he was (to tell the truth) a rather courageous man he still didn’t dare to approach the stasis field so that considerable parts of Enola’s anatomy were not available for his cruelty. He became increasingly furious about it and finally, as could be expected from a tyrant, he grow tired of Enola and decided to get rid of her.
Hedronax’ concubines usually had a rocky road ahead of them in such cases that lead via dignitaries, officers and foot soldiers finally into the kennels of the hunting dogs. Since this career was not an option for Enola and Hedronax was aware of her resilience against stabbing and thrusting weapons he decided to blow her up. The leather covered ivory stool that he had placed next to the hover (the Super Tsar was small in physique) was removed and several sticks of dynamite attached between Enola and the vehicle body.
A huge crater yawned next to the hover after the explosion. Nothing was to be seen of Enola anymore and Hedronax went contently to bed, to embark on his journey home the next day. Since the Jaunzer had neglected the sciences his whole life in favor of an excessive dealing with weapons his knowledge of self-reproducing nano robots could be justly regarded as limited. He was thus quite astonished to see Enola’s backside sticking out of the 28er’s hatch completely unharmed the next morning.
He was even more surprised, however, as the dagger of his confidant, the future Jaunzer Arginatz (whose deviousness and unscrupulousness he had always appreciated), penetrated his back and pierced through his heart – a murder that was committed, as they say, in equal parts out of envy and thirst for power.
Arginatz had no desire to return to Argeles, so he stayed here and turned Jon’s thermal bath into the center of his empire. From here he reigned for thirty years and it was rumored that the aged Pope Innocent had married him and Enola one night as part of a ceremony that was highly unusual for Catholics.
The Eurasian Empire founded by Hedronax was to endure for almost thousand years. Since the Jaunzers didn’t show any inclination to foster art and science, a dark age descended. Australian researchers who sometimes payed a visit to the old world seemed like aliens to the common people and the Jaunzers let them be battered and pelted with whatever they could deploy.
Apart from a lamentable number of other things the knowledge of stasis fields and the nunno and especially artificial life forms got completely lost during that time. A solution of Enola’s problem – would it have ever been considered at all – had already become impossible for the first generation after Arginatz.
#
As the thousand years of the Jaunzers came to an end, the heirs of Hedronax, having become fat and sluggish, faded into obscurity. Grofatz, the fifty-eighth Jaunzer, had his body hair removed twice each day and assigned posts in the state based on a weird quota system that favored weaklings and imbeciles. It didn’t take long before younger peoples surged forward from all directions to challenge the degenerate descendants of the conquerors for their wealth and power.
A period of reordering followed that lasted further 300 years. Jon’s thermal bath was in turns occupied by Irish crusaders, Scandinavian axemen and finally by a hedonistic people from the Atlas valleys, related to the Tuareg. All of these groups, as may be assumed, weren’t much concerned with Enola’s rescue.
The religious wars that had already led humanity to the brink of destruction in the 21st century flared up again in the mid of the 4th millennium. Jon’s thermal bath was again overrun in turns from all points of the compass. The Disciples of Yann, a sect from the depth of the Carpathians, came first, followed by Greek neo-communists and then by the Kazakh devotees of the Great Gilfig who in turn were expelled by the trailblazers of the Holy O, originating from the Scottish hill moors.
While the communists celebrated excessively with Enola in the center of attention, she and the 28er were covered with huge blankets during the time of the sectarians to spare the believers the shock of being confronted with her bare backside (the rustling under the blankets at night indicated that the youths were not so repulsed). As the Holy O didn’t manifest himself at the predicted time, his followers proved to be as consequential as no other religious community in history and completely disbanded. The thermal bath was left without a fight to the sect of the Half Sisters who soon removed the blankets and declared Enola their martyr and patron saint.
Around the same time the Öiv (11), a radically ecological fraternity from a swath of land close to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, managed to locate the legendary “last laboratory” in the Vosges. The laboratory was around the same age as Enola. It dated back to the time before the first religious wars and was equipped with an artificial intelligence that helped the fraternity to develop a 100% lethal variety of the Marburg virus fifty years later which the Australian microbiologists weren’t able to counteract with a vaccine within the given time frame. The oil era was long past and the majority of the world population used sailing ships, bikes and oxcarts as means of transportation. It thus took the plague a while to spread, but once it had happened the great dying set in and this time is was complete and final.
All that was left of humanity was an Australian station on Mars – to the sorrow of its occupants not yet completely self-sustaining at that time – and a Chinese-Norwegian probe on its way to Alpha Centauri. It was meant to reach the star, orbited by a single desolate planet, 50.000 years later and it may already be revealed here that it didn’t discover any noteworthy things or events.
2. Aetas Telluris
After the homo sapiens had vanished, a deep silence descended upon the world. The changes that occurred – even the passing of time itself, it seemed – had slowed down to a natural pace. The tides, the changes of day and night, the lunar phases – none of these had changed, but the pulse of life still seemed to beat calmer than before. The seasons came and went like they had done in eons, only the human being, that transitory chronicler of a cosmic blink of the eye, had been removed from the run of events.
In autumn the cool smell of grass and wet earth that had once reminded children that it was time to go home drifted in from the fields behind the roadhouse. In summer the torrid sun parched the grass at the railroad embankment but no-one was present to long for cool water or the smell of a summer rain. And there was no music anymore (what really could be regarded as a loss) beside the sounds of water and wind and the bird songs.
The Earth gradually recovered from the wounds inflicted by humanity. Where things had been gray, new green appeared. The sky shone in the blue of bygone days. Shoals of fish returned into rivers and oceans, corals into the lagoons of the South Pacific. Isotopes decayed, greenhouse gases were chemically bonded and after the dust had settled, the stars could be seen again at night. There was only one law that life had to follow from now on: the natural struggle for survival that humanity had overcome and yet perverted.
Not a single moment passed for Enola all the while. Almost one thousand years after the last human had vanished from Earth and around the time when the inhabitants of the Mars station let go of the life that they had desperately clung to for such a long time, the marble dome of Jon’s thermal bath burst and buried Enola and the 28er under its rubble.
Exactly at the spot where Enola was now awaiting her further fate a furious ruler had once in distant memory captured his runaway wife and (before he let her be hauled back into his castle in G-Town) dubbed a homestead accidentally located close by as “Loveless”. The village that had grown around it was surprisingly still called by this name thousand years later as a nuclear stray caused the south-western mountainside of the nearby Herzberg to slide and bury everything north of the railroad embankment under a huge mudflow. Even in Jon’s times the event had been a century in the past and on the mud plain that was on the same height as the rail line hundred year old oak tress had grown to a sparse wood. They fiddled about the depth and darkness with their roots, between houses and vehicles and the bones of Jon’s ancestors.
Thanks to their regenerative capacity Enola and the 28er survived the collapse of the dome unscathed, but an enormous weight bore down on them. Since the floor of the thermal bath was destroyed by erosion and upward striving plants, the loose quality of the ground below (in conjunction with the nunno’s enormous density) caused the robot and the hover to slowly sag and approach the former ground level. After further thousand years they hit harder and slightly inclined subsoil so that they moved slowly, in geological timescales, through Loveless that has long since turned to dust.
Meanwhile Jon’s thermal bath and everything else that had ever been created by man crumbled to dust. As Enola and the 28er emerged from the elongated hill that had once been the railroad embankment two million years later the face of Earth had changed. The world seemed virginal like on the first day of creation. Tigers, wolves and bears, mooses and aurochses inhabited the surrounding areas that were covered with vast birch woods. The animals gaped blankly at the white thing that emerged and many a tusk and claw tested its quality. But since they could neither move nor eat it nor utilize it for building a den they simply regarded it as a weird rock and used it as a landmark or to apply odor signatures.
#
Time passed. The planet changed from a world of vast veldts to a jungle world and then to an ice world. The geological transformations weren’t very distinct at Enola’s location. At other places, however, they were, with the passing of the Platonic years, enormous. After twenty million years East Africa had separated from the rest of the continent along the Great African Rift Valley and opened a new Ocean. The Iberian Peninsula separated from Europe. Australia and New Zealand moved northwards so that North Australia was now located at the equator. The Black Sea was completely cut off from the Mediterranean now and the Gulf of Aqaba had opened up to Turkey. The Alps had, after fifty million summers, unfolded to a mountain range higher than the Himalaya in earlier ages.
Nature took its course, followed its old rules or invented new ones, spawned new species and obliterated others. After further fifty million years two species emerged, distant descendants of dog and elephant, who were equipped with limited intelligence. The latter lived settled and laid out huge tree plantations they cultivated with titanic tools, while the others were nomadic marauders that made life troublesome for the farmers. Both peoples didn’t advance beyond a primitive, semi-animalistic development level and it’s not necessary to tell more of them here.
Two hundred million years after humanity had perished the collision of Australia and the Japanese landmass had unfolded a circular mountain range that reached up into the stratosphere. It enclosed an ocean so deep that its black waters steamed from the heat of the Earth’s interior. It was in this era that for the first time an extraterrestrial people visited Earth. It was a race of cosmic philosophers whose main occupation was to contact the Düül, a hypothetical lifeform inside the stars that they were convinced existed and had a comprehensive knowledge of the universe.
The Gurú, as they called themselves, traveled in giant ships spacious enough to house their whole civilization. They used to stop off on habitable planets for a few thousand years, examined the mother star and used them as starting points for missions to nearby solar systems. They were small beings with blue fur and three legs as well as three upper limbs to perform profane tasks. On their delicate bodies sat an oversized head, shaped like a pointed cap, from which three tiny eyes thoughtfully scrutinized the world. On Earth they built a city with thousand spires on the slopes of the circular mountain range that reached from the seething depth of the black ocean up to the highest peaks and was called Trudevall.
#
As the Gurú discovered Enola and the 28er they immediately recognized them as ancient artifacts of a civilization long perished. They were familiar with the principle of stasis fields, so they – under the direction of their polymath Shedelkop Jurdenweil – just took tissue samples from Enola’s knee pit to analyze the nunno. Jurdenweil discovered that Enola’s genome was stored in every single of the nano particles that first assembled a substructure made of macro particles which in turn composed the pseudo-DNA of the nunno cells. This DNA was constantly compared with the code of the nano particles to correct deviations. The cells generated energy for this process by means of cold fusion of elements they got into contact with – from the ground under Enola’s feet and the air that surrounded her.
The Gurú concluded that the organism they had discovered was basically immortal and estimated its theoretical life expectancy at 1069 years, a number that – though absurdly large – corresponded rather closely with the lifespan of the universe as extrapolated by Jurdenweil.
Why, they wondered, had such an effort been put into something so trivial like a (as they had correctly assumed) means of transportation and its (incorrectly assumed) robotic driver? And what could have happened to their constructors – surely an advanced, ancient race? The question could not be answered with the available information. Philosophical implications could not be stated clearly and so the Gurú lost interest in such technical sophistications and turned their attention once again to the Düül.
#
The millennia that the Gurú spent on Earth were just a short instance measured against the time that had already piled up on Enola’s back. The sun had changed by now and a visitor from earlier times (or Enola herself) would have noticed that it was much hotter on Earth than during previous eras. Geological processes had an effect on Enola’s location too. The Alps were past their zenith and their giants peaks gradually leveled by erosion. The resulting sediment covered the northern areas which caused Enola to disappear underground a second time.
Shortly afterwards the crusade of the Kraan began who came from the Magellanic Cloud in their javelin-shaped spacecrafts to set the galaxy on fire. The peace-loving Gurú were among their first victims. Their civilization spacecraft was destroyed without warning exactly at the time when they had managed to communicate with a free-floating Düül. Most of the Gurú living on Earth who had survived the first wave of attack died of horror when they realized what was happening in the orbit. Others desperately invoked the Düül for help.
The Düül answered to their prayer by singing:
Once I rode
on the Big Bang’s surges,
saw matter and radiation decouple
particles, stars and galaxies emerge
Drank the light
of thousand stars,
dreamed at the shores of faraway quasars
and swam in their plasma oceans.
Now I walk
in dark realms
where cold, dust and ice make me weary
and creatures born of mud.
The dust, the ice, the flesh
are just ashes while all is changing,
alive for just a fleeting moment,
so please stop screaming, I don’t care
And with this it retreated.
#
Trudevall became the headquarters of the Kraan within the Vega sector. They built a colony on Earth and burrowed deep tunnels to exploit the resources of the planet for constructing their armada. They had little regard for the inhabitants of the planet that were either enslaved, eaten up or wiped out – almost as it had happened during the age of man.
As the millennia passed, Trudevall turned from an outpost into a fortified garrison and finally – when Earth was already located deep within the Kraans’ galactic empire and of no strategic importance anymore – into a sparsely manned station.
It was not before further ten million years had passed that Enola, due to wide-ranging geological transformations, emerged into daylight again. The bulk of the Kraan forces had reached the Andromeda galaxy by then which had approached the Milky Way to the half of their former distance. The administrative center of the sector was moved to Tau Ceti and Trudevall was abandoned. Enola was thus probably spared quite some hardship, for the Kraan were three meters tall humanoids who resembled humans to a remarkable degree and surely had realized, other than the Gurú, what it was that protruded from the 28er …
It may be mentioned that the Kraan race was, thanks to a weird quirk of fate, extremely long-lived. But even in old age they didn’t acquire wisdom and temperance and thus continued to conquer and ravage other worlds. Their warmongering and greed soon pervaded everything near and far like a force of nature or, actually, like the primal forces of the universe itself, and whoever crossed their path was crushed.
#
As the tectonic movements gradually came to a halt, a super-continent formed along the equator one more time, similar to Pangaea in prehistory. Enola was located in the border area of this continent, at the bottom of a tropical shallow-water ocean. Here she was in the middle of colorful corals, anemones and parrot fishes and was eyed by sharks and sea turtles which calmly faced the coming eons of their existence. Meanwhile the stations of the Kraan by the black ocean fell into ruins. The ravages of time ablated the peaks of the circular mountain range and Trudevall, the legendary city of the Gurú, was gone.
One and a half billion years after Jon a second technical civilization developed on Earth, spawned by a species that emerged from the mixture of several amphibious species. The race that inhabited wet bunker-like dwellings was composed of numerous genders whose appearance and character had nothing in common. As a collective name for their species they used a term that may be translated as “the Polymorphous Ones”.
In a long evolutionary process of several hundred million years they had developed a considerable but sluggish intelligence. They moved – as individuals and collectively – only rarely and were anxious to preserve the state of things. External factors that had an effect on them usually changed faster than the Polymorphous Ones could react. This way they built up, over millions of years, an empire that was not without technological splendor but they ended as a low vassal people of the Kraan and were satisfied in this role.
Around this time the Milky Way collided with the Andromeda galaxy and formed a giant elliptic galaxy. While the orbits of the stars reorganized, the solar system moved outwards and came to rest at the edge of empty space, further away from the galactic center than ever before.
The lifecycle of the sun that changed its inner chemical composition caused the temperatures to continuously increase. One of its effects was that shallow-water oceans gradually turned into swamps and finally disappeared completely so that Enola was back on dry ground again one day.
As the Polymorphous Ones caught sight of her, the backside that protruded from the hover reminded them of a gikk, a bipedal scavenger of that time. This animal had no upper limbs but two huge head bulges and between them an upright mouth and above it a single black eye. Since the gikk was devious and sneaky and discharged a terrible smell when it felt threatened it was shunned by all other animals and so the Polymorphous Ones shunned Enola.
#
The civilization of the amphiboids progressed without ever reaching a peak. Their soulless intelligence increased, similar to the growing of plants, in a steady curve that finally reached saturation level and at no time made the leap of a divine spark. As the sun’s luminosity further increased and the climatic conditions deteriorated they fled with their cylindrical ion spacecrafts into the cosmic depth and vanished from the course of history.
By now the temperatures in summer went up to almost 80°C. In the tropical or sub-tropical areas no water in liquid state could be found outside of the oceans. Life on Earth inevitably came to an end. Infernal storms roared in the atmosphere and it became so hot that each day another species perished.
Although the sun beamed brighter than ever before, the days were gloomy and foggy, due to the water vapor and the ubiquitous dust. A few tens of thousands years later, Enola was surrounded by receding oceans, dried up plants and a fauna of metallically gleaming crossbreeds of reptiles and insects. They resembled the crabs of earlier ages but were of considerable size with antennas of several meters length. They lingered motionless in the last muddy ponds by day and fought and devoured each other by night. Thus the long afternoon of Earth ended.
3. Aetas Solis
The sun’s radiation pressure further increased in the following eons that lasted hundreds of millions years and deprived Earth of its gas envelope and thus of all life that was left. The moon had long since disappeared and the sun was a blazing ball of fire on a bare sky that resembled the sky of Mercury now.
The nunno of the 28er still fulfilled its function and kept Enola a prisoner. So the earthly sky in this last stage remained unseen since no race – not even the Kraan – would ever visit or even colonize Earth again.
Meanwhile life flourished for a short while on the neighboring planet Mars. It was here where a ship of the G’rill landed one day and a colony of these docile descendants of insects was created. The increasing warmth had released gases bonded in the ground and on the poles and thus created a respirable atmosphere. The gravity of Mars was a little lower than on the G’rills’ home planet and so offered, in combination with the hot and dry climate, perfect living conditions.
Honeycomb, hive and hill colonies were built and the race grew and thrived. One day, hundred generations after the G’rills’ arrival on Mars, an explorer called G’rill- X’Ais flew to that dead desert world which circled the aging sun in third position. He discovered Enola and the 28er at the edge of a huge plain covered with dust and debris and he realized that he was dealing with an artificial organism whose age was beyond all estimates. So he loaded her into his craft and, as was the nature of the G’rill, exhibited her as a curiosity and for general appraisal in the garden of his house, close to a flat chain of hills that had once been Olympus Mons. The G’rills’ time on Mars passed peacefully and full of harmony. The life they led on their new home planet was good and marked by happiness and satisfaction. Their civilization was nonetheless subject to the ups and downs of existence. Stretches of land were devastated by natural disasters now and then and settlements had to be abandoned or moved. The latter happened to the settlement where G’rill-X’Ais’ house stood. As the increased frequency of sand storms impeded transportation it was moved closer to the spaceport and Enola and the 28er were left behind. The place was not settled again before three thousand years had passed. Enola had once again disappeared under ground by then – this time under the red sands of Mars.
#
G’rill-Hut sat on his porch and looked out over the wide Martian plain that extended before his compound eyes. He enjoyed his existence and his, from now on, ensured livelihood that was based on transporting capsules with olfactory messages back and forth between the dwellings of the G’rill. He accomplished this by means of a “locopedler”, a vehicle with two wheels and numerous pedals that were arranged in a complicated pattern so that all of his eight feet could be placed on them at the same time. The locopedler was painted yellow and G’rill-Hut wore a yellow wrap that he changed thrice a day so that no adhering odors could mingle and no ambiguous or even insulting messages came about.
His house, where the explorer G’rill-X’Ais had once lived in, had been splendidly renovated, thanks to his new job. G’rill-Hut was especially proud of the extensive porch that had been built according to his instruction. The used material was so smooth and hard that the leg tips of his queen G’rill-Ham, when she walked on it, made the most charming tripping noise that you could imagine. It sounded like a young, scarcely hardened shell that clittered in an alluring manner when G’rill-Ham stepped over the tiles.
The only shadow on G’rill-Hut’s happiness was a mysterious object at the far end of the porch that stubbornly resisted all efforts to get rid of it. It was connected to a bulky thing that for the most part had sunk into the ground. What protruded was of pale pink color and shaped like two humps, as if somebody had pressed two G’rill eggs against each other. G’rill-Hut had no idea what it might be. And he was also not inclined to excavate it – who could say how far the object reached down into the ground?
It could not be destroyed. G’rill-Hut had tried it in any conceivable way, even by placing explosives between the two humps and detonating them. The superficial removal, however, was each time followed by a spooky regeneration process that restored the original state within in a minimum of time. Hut had finally made a virtue out of necessity and used the thing as a stand for his locopedler.
And so the years passed. As G’rill-Hut’s body began to slowly keratinise and his queen could only produce a dull bumping, he looked back and found that things had not gone bad for him. His progeny comprised 8,743 children and apart from a few hundred bum drones that pointlessly hang around the spaceport all of them had got somewhere. So he came to the conclusion that it was time to sit down at his place on the porch, look up to the sky and regard one last time the giant elliptic galaxy in whose outskirts the solar system was located now. He listened to the clicking and clittering sounds of his favorite symphony and with its last notes the sheen of his compound eyes faded out forever.
#
Even by cosmic standards the G’rills’ civilization on Mars lasted long – up to the last eon of the fourth billion years since Enola had been trapped in the stasis field. Since the G’rill had more faith in their resilience than in their adaptability they neither changed themselves nor their society in any considerable way. As descendants of insects they were able to resist the most adverse conditions but even for them the day came that they had to give up the fight against the increasing temperatures. As the sun became ever brighter and the atmosphere thinned out more and more they left Mars and heavy-heartedly began to search for a new home.
With the G’rills’ departure Enola entered her final stage of utter loneliness. Earth had long been a dead planet with temperatures of up to 400° C but now it became so hot on Mars too that it could no longer support life. Over time all life forms that the G’rill had once brought along from their home planet died an increasingly lonely death.
Finally only Enola was left who, for the time being, remained trapped under G’rill-Huts porch since the glass plates that covered the hover were remarkably stable. Besides there was no erosion in the thinning atmosphere and the Sun’s tidal effect wasn’t strong enough to cause geological changes. G’rill-Hut’s house thus outlasted millions of years and it took millions of years more before the solar radiation and the last Martian storms had uncovered Enola and the 28er again.
#
The loss of an atmosphere and the stop of the planet’s rotation made it seem as if even outside of the stasis field time was standing still. The stellar constellations still changed on the nightside but G’rill-Hut’s house was located of the side of eternal day. The only perceptible change here – even though in degrees beyond human assessment – was the steady increase of the sun’s luminosity while it advanced towards a cataclysm that would destroy the inner planets.
It was a few billion years after the G’rill had left Mars that the sun – as astronomers on Earth had predicted eternities ago – reached a new equilibrium state between gravity and radiation pressure and inflated to a red giant star thousands of times larger. The exterior areas of this newly developed red giant reached far beyond the orbit of Venus and the enormous protuberances that shoot up from its surface almost reached Earth. Viewed from Earth the sun’s red wall of fire occupied almost the whole sky and the planet turned, like at the time when it formed, into a blazing ball with a molten surface.
Due to the extreme solar wind the sun and Earth both lost mass so that their distance initially increased and the temperatures on Earth slightly decreased. But very soon the red giant’s enormous tidal forces caused the Earth to steadily lose height and finally follow Mercury and Venus into the hell-mouth.
Mars, however, survived the disaster and even though its surface was hellishly hot it was outside of the area where rock melted. So Enola escaped destruction and instead endured in the dust of Mars that, in the red light of the giant star, shone from within.
#
The helium burn of the sun lasted for eight hundred million years. It had brought disaster upon the inner planets but it also provided the moons of Saturn and Jupiter with the required heat to melt the kilometers thick ice shields above the sub-glacial oceans. From the depth of the planet spanning ocean of Europe chemo-synthesizing mollusks rose to the surface and discovered that there was a whole universe beyond the confines of their world.
On Titan, too, life stirred that had once arrived in comet fragments and slumbered in the ice for half an eternity, but within the given time frame it only developed up to the stage of primitive multicellular organisms. So only the descendants of the mollusks managed to leave Europe before the sun turned into a white dwarf and the shockwaves of the planetary nebula swept across the planet – and before the cold of space seized the planets, never to give way again.
4. Aetas Lucis
While the sun burned faintly in the distance and the twilight of Mars engulfed Enola, the galaxy was located in the Virgo galaxy cluster which in turn had reached the center of the Great Attractor in Scorpio. New generations of stars were born in the universe, more and more stars with a long lifespan but low luminosity. With each generation the percentage of light elements further diminished and with it the number of nurseries for new stars decreased.
At the same time the accelerated expansion of space caused a steady decrease of the density of unbound matter. The cosmic background radiation approached absolute zero and more and more matter turned into dust and dark bodies. The light began to fade.
If Enola could have looked up to the sky, one hundred billion years after the G’rill had ceased to be, she would have noted that there was more and more darkness between the stars. Finally the time came when no new stars formed anymore, no islands of decreasing entropy in the steadily increasing disorder of an aging cosmos. The metallic dust of the last supernova scattered in the void or was swallowed by black holes. The universe was only lighted by the longest-lived stars but at the end even these vanished and the age of light was over.
5. Aetas Tenebrarum
In the eternal night that followed light was only a distant memory, a temporary phenomenon in the early stages of a cosmos whose true state of existence was inanimate space and all-embracing darkness.
Occasionally a flash of light brightened the universe when a planet or a burned-out star was devoured by a black hole, one of those ever larger and increasingly numerous incarnations of gravity that dominated all processes now. Even the white dwarf that had once been the sun met its end, after it had completely cooled down, in one of those black monstrosities. But Enola even survived this event since Mars had long since left the solar system at that time and moved alone with her and the 28er through the eternal night.
This journey through darkness, on a chaotic trajectory that miraculously led Mars neither into the gorge of a singularity nor on a collision course with another celestial body, took so long that numbers and time spans lost their meaning. But it should be mentioned here that time still passed.
Due to the continuous expansion of the universe the temperature had dropped so low that humans couldn’t have created such a cold not even in their best laboratories. As the temperature of the universe was only a fraction of a trillionth degree above absolute zero and the era of light and heat seemed in retrospect like just a short repercussion of the big bang the decay of free protons – and hence the decline of fusionable hydrogen – had advanced so far that the nunno of the hover stopped all processes that were not strictly vital for life. The stasis field flickered one last time and died out.
Enola woke up.
#
Cold and darkness surrounded her, a complete absence of any kind of energy and a silence that seemed to extend into infinity. As in a dream that slowly took shape Enola noticed that she was pinned with her head downward and that her arms were stuck. Fragments of memory returned. For a moment she thought that Jon was lying in front of the garage, waiting for her but she soon realized that this wasn’t the case and that she was at a completely different place.
The gravity didn’t correspond with Earth but rather with Mars. Enola’s stored this fact while her brain continued to work. There was no trace of an atmosphere and the temperature was so low that it only could have been created by artificial means. After thinking about it for a while she came to the conclusion that she was in simulation tank, most likely in Neo Caledon where they had facilities for this kind of examinations. The thought, that Jon would make such efforts for her repair amazed her and filled her with gratitude.
So she waited for a while.
After nothing had happened and nobody had noticed her vital signs for quite some time Enola decided to free herself from the hover. Her nunno had fused with the 28er at the arms and the hip which filled her with a dark foreboding. She strained her synthetic muscles and rose with all her power. After several attempts she managed to pull her upper body out of the entrails of the car, not without severing her arms at the elbows and tearing a gaping hole into her side. While the nunno regenerated the damaged parts, Enola just stood there and pondered. Then she walked out into the black wasteland of Mars.
Enola had surely not been constructed for scientific or intellectual tasks but as a companion for humans on a physical and emotional level. But still she was equipped with a knowledge and an analytical intellectual capacity far superior to any man. Apart from that she was able to take measurements of highest precision with her body’s own sensors. After a few steps in her own light she had already assembled all available information and measurements to a coherent whole and a conclusion forced itself on her so terrible that it would have killed a human faster than the vacuum or the coldness of space. The result of her examinations was so monstrous that Enola mistrusted her own perception and conceived numerous tests to check if she didn’t suffer from a hallucination. As she had convinced herself that the things and conditions around her were real she paused and didn’t move anymore. She had realized where she was – and when she was.
#
Even the most hardened Kraan would have turned his weapon on himself under these circumstances and men like Laxdal or Hedronax would have cried for their mothers in tears before perishing of fear and madness. Enola, however, just stood there and while she emitted the last light in the darkness at the end of the cosmos she looked across the ashes of all that has ever been. The cold dead matter seemed to her like a fifth element, the stuff the hell was made of, that awaited each universe and each lifeform at the end of all being.
She had the option of deactivating herself but the idea of ending her existence here and becoming part of the lifeless dust infused her with a reluctance that she couldn’t justify and that surprised herself. She didn’t know fear and solitude had always been part of her existence and so she accepted the burden of being witness of the end of all things and of enduring loneliness as had never been experienced in the history of the universe.
#
For a long time she just randomly wandered about Mars. She always returned to the 28er, the only link to her previous life, but never stayed for long. After she had managed to reactivate the on-board electronics of the hover she found it primitive in a way that was even more depressing than her situation on Mars. Her conversation with the control unit was limited to insignificant aspects of the traffic situation, the ground conditions, energy costs and sometimes the weather.
“Due to the low outdoor temperature it is not recommended to leave the vehicle,” the hover said. Or things like: “Considering the available resources, extended rides are not possible. Please augment the energy reserves immediately!”
On one of these occasions it announced: “36% of the nunno structures are degenerated and need to be replaced.”
“Oh, shut up!”, Enola said.
When she didn’t walk she simply rested and got lost in memories and conversations with herself. Her own nunno too showed signs of decay. In various spots of her body adenoids developed that assumed the shapes of organs or limbs. On the left upper arm two new noses grew, from her back a third arm protruded and in her hip a new head developed that inaudibly screamed into the darkness all the time. After she had walked round the planet countless times further walking became impossible as one of her legs began to grow uncontrollably and was soon several meters longer than the other. So she sat on a stone, her chin resting on a fist and escaped reality in her thoughts as the world was no longer a material place but a concept of infinite anguish and hunger for life.
This was the longest part of Enola’s journey into eternity for now she was conscious – although this state, due to the lack of sensory input, could hardly be distinguished from being in the stasis. When she didn’t think or remember things from an earlier world she basically didn’t exist at all.
“I think, therefore I am,” she summarized and burst into a laughter that had the sound of beginning insanity.
#
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and Enola, who sat nude and disfigured by the nunno’s adenoids in the dark, reached the point when she became convinced that only divine power could bring light into the darkness and renew creation and even though she wondered where there may be a place for gods in this dead universe she began to pray.
Around her time passed in an inflationary manner. The black holes, the final stage of matter, had themselves begun to dwindle and the universe filled with the photons of their decay. Only a few randomly straying celestial bodies such as Mars were spared from the annihilation of all matter and information. With this final process the matter density of the universe approached zero and at the end it seemed like there had never been something like time at all. Space-time collapsed into a single point of unimaginable energy density and a new cycle began.
In the inferno of a new beginning Mars and all other celestial bodies and entities that had survived up to this point perished. The streaks of their remains, no longer of baryonic nature, permeated the new cosmos long before matter and radiation had separated there. Of the four fundamental forces only gravity affected them and so they – though dark and invisible for all eternity – gave shape to the new universe.
6. Aeternitas
During that infinite moment that followed on everything and preceded everything diffuse light seeped into the darkness as if the space surrounding Enola was enclosed in a glowing sphere with cracks through which light penetrated the blackness. Any causality and order of things was lost. Chains of thoughts entered her brain in an inextricable tangle and in the void before her adenoids of the nunno grew out of nowhere and fused with her. Following a blind flight instinct she set her deformed body in motion towards a small rock formation but whenever she looked up the rocks seemed within her reach one moment and unattainably far the next. She finally gave up and feebly sank to the ground.
Above all an infernal noise rose, a cacophony of voices and songs. The boreholes of space-time cracked open and drained into eternity and the voices of all those who had ever lived, thought and talked, in all places that had ever existed and ever been reached by Mars or would be reached in infinity were suddenly assembled here. Enola thought she heard trumpets and the singing of angels, mingled with the screams of the damned, eroded by their own malice, and she couldn’t tell anymore whether these voices were real or products of her own mind.
She thought that she was tired now and should sleep for the rest of eternity and a primitive part of her mind that unswervingly clung to the principle of cause and effect put this thought into practice. While the deactivation code spread through the nunno and her body and her memories vanished cell by cell, she suddenly had the impression that one clear sound emerged from the chaotic noises and she heard a lonely voice singing:
Here at the endpoint of all times
I must admit ashamedly,
that those I have looked down upon
knew more than I will ever see.
Aynstain and Hi-Sennberg,
Jurdenweil and X’Ais,
petty little creatures but
great-hearted and wise.
I am, it seems, the opposite,
this much I have to state
’cause until yesterday I thought
contraction is our fate.
However, now the curtain lifts,
the comedy’s next act impending.
The missing audience again
escapes the actors understanding.
And while I am inclined to say
it’s been a waste of time
I’m not here to bemoan my way,
forever and a day
in slow wailful decay
where nothing’s meant to stay
at least have taught me how to rhyme
As the words of the Düül died down, Enola died too and she smiled and spoke: “Let there be light!”
And in the beginning was the Word.
Originally published as “Enola in Ewigkeit” in:
Nova 25, Amrun, 2025
Thomas A. Sieber was born in Gelnhausen, Hesse, in 1967 and works as a research physicist, among others at CERN. He began writing in the late 1980s and has published short stories in anthologies and magazines such as Nova and phantastisch! In 2015 he became closer involved with InterNova’s sister magazine Nova and joined the editorial team as its nonfiction editor that he remained until 2023. A selection of his best short stories is planed to be published later this year in the book series Cutting Edge, edited by Michael K. Iwoleit, an imprint of InterNova’s host publisher p.machinery.
Translator Michael K. Iwoleit was born in Düsseldorf in 1962 and lives in Wuppertal today. He was educated as a lab assistant and studied philosophy, sociology and German philology. Since 1989 he is a freelance writer, translator, editor and critic mostly in the science fiction field. Apart from his literary activities he has also worked as a copywriter for advertising and IT industry. He is the founder and editor of InterNova and was the co-founder and long-term fiction editor of its German sister magazine Nova.