A Diamond Sky

I left the armor behind. I wasn't allowed to take it, but I'd have abandoned it in any case. Out here it might have meant my survival, made me strong and fast enough to reach one wildcat settlement or another. Not much of an existence, scrabbling in the nuclear glass pocking the new desert from the panhandle old Florida and for three hundred miles west.

Sheathed inside polymer muscles and clad in steel, I could have walked for weeks before the power ran out. That's what we were; mobile fortresses given protection from the rage of the people we were duty-bound to judge.

That's what I was. Living in the present means making peace with the past, I suppose. Not that I'd be doing much of that or for long.

I threaded my way through vast tracts of stone rent and thrown from their resting places in the earth where for millions of years they surfed the unimaginably slow tide of geologic progression. Strange how much violence could be rendered on the face of a thing as huge as a planet by something as insignificant as an atom.

The last boots I would ever wear thunked lightly against baked sand and glass, the miles drifting away beneath me. The heavy, reinforced fabric of my pants and jacket, designed to give even we exiles a fighting chance to live, whispered with the friction of my movement.

I was aware of everything. My body, so used to standing over those judged guilty and separated from the acts that followed by four centimeters of electronics and the culturally agreed-upon pretense that I had the right to judge at all, sang with every step. I was out here to die. No one had ever pretended otherwise. Knowing that, I drank in the sensation of sweat rolling down my face and the occasional whirls of cooling wind wrapping my body like a temperamental lover, only staying long enough to make me desperate for another touch.

I was given the pack and its supplies. The clothing. Everything an exile needs and nothing else. One of my former trainees had been the one to send me on the long walk, a grim-faced woman with eyes twice her age and a glimmer of compassion in them that two decades of service couldn't quite extinguish.

As her heavy footsteps matched mine, making the first ten yards of the journey west with her old commander, she spoke my name. When I turned to look at her, up into the tiny fraction of her face I could see through the raised visor, I saw a thing that gave me hope for all those I was leaving behind.

Love. Simple love. What a powerful thing that is. What other force could give a hopeless man strength, or a dying one the will to live?

She reached out a gauntleted hand and with impossible delicacy passed you over to me. I might have thanked her. It's hard to know. The surge of joy and sadness and wonder at that moment was too much. It wiped away all rational thought. I had you in my hands again. Or at least what was left of you.

That's where you are now, and where you will remain. I carried the gem made from your ashes inside the necklace you wore every day of your life, that gift given to you by your mother as inseparably you as the brown of your eyes and the rich bronze of your skin, wrapped around my wrist. It was the only part of you I had left.

You were so much more than your pieces and parts. All I have of you is memory and this heart-shaped silver locket made in a world even the oldest of us have forgotten. The glittering stone within, seated in its prison of resin and ceramic, holds nothing but the carbon of your body and precious little of even that.

The stone and the locket are you, and that is enough for me. Because I will remember. I will be perhaps the last person in the world to remember you. And I can't lie to myself about you. I loved you like fire, always consuming. You were kind enough to love me back with a wry sort of humor. Maybe you knew it was what I needed to live with the thing I had become. I will never forget the joy of you, found in moments mundane and magical in equal measure.

I will never forget the betrayal on your face as you stood judged.

The memory will haunt me for whatever time I have left. Even as I grasp the cool silver that is your casket, worrying it with my thumb as if trying to work life into the remains within, that day hums against those wondrous moments of happiness with a dissonance I can't unhear.

I am alive. For as long as that is so, a small part of you lives on. For as long as that is so, your killer is free. Odd that I should feel such guilt for following the law, yet it was speaking out against the unfairness of my duty that caused this exile. I knew the consequences. I think I wanted them.

The first duty is to live. Survival of the species; all other laws follow this essential tenet. To crave death is the worst betrayal of the civilization that kept us from extinction. Too many years of living those laws have ruined me, because I keep walking when I could better serve justice by laying down and simply stopping.

The water ran out some time ago. My head aches. The night is no longer warm at all, the cold creeps in to cramp my muscles instead of cool my skin. I used to think it was a kindness that you died before you could see the shards of me that act created. A life of purpose gone in an instant. No, not gone: undone. Every previous act, decades of harsh decisions and hard-fought meaning retroactively proved a lie.

I think now it would be better if you could see what I have become. It's only fair. You should have that satisfaction. Or maybe that's just what a man so flawed imagines you would want. Those memories still burn bright. You were always better than that.

I'm so far from home now. So tired. I blinked and realized the sky was clear. No leaden sheet of low-hanging clouds, no deadly storms of irradiated sand. Only the ground below and crystal heavens above, nothing at all between myself and the stars.

Oh, the stars. So that's what they look like. The books and recordings did them no justice. Here I lay, seeing the depth of them and the sheer, overwhelming smallness of what I have always been.

Maybe this is what I was always meant for. To take what little of you is left out beyond the ugliness and pain, and show you all the worlds. See? I opened your locket and let you glitter in the wan light of the stars above even as they shimmer back at you.

I'll lay here a while, I think. A bit of rest. You enjoy the view.

I think you would have liked it.