Dust

DUST
A Short Story

“There are many kinds of things that are hidden within,
to find which human knowledge has to penetrate within”
~  St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae

"The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom of understanding."
~  Is. 11:2




CHAPTER 1:
EVANGELIST

         For one moment the smoke and dust hung in the air like a sleeping sea.  Then the shock wave hit and slashed through its tranquility with the furor of a shark pack.  Chunks of concrete blasted into the enclosure at high speeds and debris was scattered everywhere.  Time flowed unnaturally slowly, almost as if even the universe itself was shocked out of its workings.  In the quiet that followed the shock wave, the gentle rain of pulverized particles sounded almost soothing.  Then came the tschk, tschk  sound of metal falling on concrete, followed closely by the hellish roar of flash-bangs and hand grenades.  Through the still-settling smoke came black figures, their weapons chattering.  Time, restored to its normal pace, watched the figures as they hurled themselves through the opening in the wall one after another, sticking close to cover and moving very fast. 
         “Xavier, cut right!”
         The captain’s voice cut through his adrenaline like an electric shock. 
         “Yes sir!”  he whispered back into his mike side-stepping even as he acknowledged the order.  The reason was quite obvious.  One of the bloody Mercs had a SAW set up behind a half-demolished vehicle and was busily pouring fire through another hole in the wall.  Echo team was running right into it. 
         Switching his grip, Xavier raised his rifle slightly and his grenade launcher coughed once.  The grenade rose gently above the horizon then dropped swiftly as its rocket-assist kicked in.  It fell right behind the vehicle and detonated.  The gunner slumped forward, his head at a strange angle, as the dust settled on him.
         A pat on his head told Xavier that one of his teammates was leapfrogging past him.  He turned his head to check the man’s final position just in time to see another Mercantile soldier swing out of a nearby doorway and drop him with a shot.  Hardly thinking Xavier re-engaged his rifle action and cut down the Merc with a seven shot burst.  Dashing forward, he grabbed the soldier by the arm and dragged him to cover.
         “Xavier get a move on,” the captain screamed through the com-link.
         He ignored the voice and switched his mike over to an open channel.  “Medic, man down.”
         “Xavier, if you don’t ...” The captain’s voice was drowned out by the shrieking of two fighters as they raced by.  Black canisters detached from each of them and these exploded with a barely audible wump.  Fire fell from their remnants and rained down about the nearest building.  Dust and ash, hurled into the air by the heat, covered the compound with a dark cloud.
         Even before the jets had passed out of sight Xavier was on the move.  Dashing out of cover he ran into the fire.  The alarms and tell-tales on his suit went off, screaming at him to do something immediately to remedy the current situation.  Ignoring them all he ran through the heat and slammed into the steel door of the building with his shoulder.  Armor grated on steel and the cloned bio-muscles in his suit groaned, then the door gave way with explosive force and he was in.  “So far,” he thought to himself, “so good.” 
         Breaking into a run again, he hurled himself down the hallway.  “Xavier, damn you, slow down,” the captain bellowed, “that bloody machine is the only one we’ve got!”  Exactly at that moment, a mine exploded somewhere deep inside the building, and the floor fell in around Xavier.  For one surreal moment he hung in the air above a hundred foot shaft.  Then he plummeted down.  His helmet smashed into the side of the shaft and he remembered nothing more.

CHAPTER 2:
EVANGELIZED

         Xavier woke with a terrible headache.  He could not remember what he had been doing or why, but he thought that it had been important.  He tried to look about him, but it was dark, very dark.  Unsure of what to do, he tried to examine himself, to make sure that he was all right.  His hand was clenched in a fist, and light was leaking through his fingers.  He relaxed his fingers and a tiny spark of light rose out of his hand.  It hung above his palm like a small globe, spinning, shining, complete and yet somehow, still potential.  The moment he saw it Xavier knew that he was meant to do things with it.  At that same instant he realized that the light would respond to his will, it could be formed into anything that he wanted it to be.  Yet, concurrent with this epiphany, he realized that if he chose to change the light, he would be doing it violence.  He recognized somehow that by altering the light he would be loosing something about it forever.  Even as he recognized this the light dimmed, as if it were being eclipsed.  It was so willing, so tractable.  For a moment his will hovered in the balance between the unknown, intrinsic quality of the light and thousands of half-imagined good things that he could will the light to be.  Then, without conscious reason, he chose to leave the light as it was.  It brightened again in his hand, as if a cloud had passed over it.  Xavier felt relieved, as if some great brooding heaviness which he had been carrying had dissipated. 
         His choice made, Xavier turned to examining his surroundings.  He was alone in the dark, suspended in a formless void.  Yet, even as he comprehended the existence of the void, Xavier began to discern shapes within it.  Wherever the light fell, strange things twisted and writhed, their shadowy forms swaying as if in some strange dance.  His curiosity moved, and he found himself among them.  Their weird shapes seemed to distort as he grew closer, and for a moment Xavier had the horrible sensation that he was trapped among monsters of the deep.
    Suddenly, Xavier recognized the nearest of the figures.  It was a tree, about thirty feet tall and well-proportioned, swaying in the wind.  He could not make out much else about it but its outlines at first.  However, as he looked at it, the tree changed.  It was not that its form changed, rather his eyes, or some other power of sense, seemed to have grown more capable of seeing it.  First, the tree gained color, starting with its grey-green trunk and ending with the green-yellow of its crown, then textures became clear, the smooth pattern of its trunk contrasting with the rough surface of its leaves.  Finally, the details came in, until even the small yellow flowers that grew upon its highest branches were clearly visible.  With a start Xavier realized that he was surrounded by such trees, and what is more, that he could see many of them clearly.  The darkness seemed to have fallen from his mind, and in its place was a strange certitude about the things that he saw.  There seemed no adequate way to express it, save to say that the yellow was really yellow and the flowers really flowers.  They could not possibly be anything else.  Yet with this certainty came a burning knowledge that this was not all there was to know.  Straining harder, Xavier was startled to note that the light in his hand had grown in size and brightness.  He could scarcely endure looking at it, so bright was its core.
    Turning from the light he became conscious of the fact that he could better see the tree in its luminosity.  Raising his hand he approached the tree again, and as he did so everything seemed to fall into place. The colors and textures, which before had appeared to constitute the bulk of the reality of the tree, now were slightly faded and unimportant.  In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Xavier felt that in the clarity of the light, he saw the tree for the first time.  It was as if he had gotten a hold of an important piece of a puzzle and had found the place where it fit. 
Nonetheless, at the same time he felt that he had lost something of the glory of the tree’s color.  Remembering how beautiful the colors of the tree had seemed before he had seen the tree, Xavier tried to bring the light closer to one of the branches.  As he did so, the colors seemed to come up out of the tree, almost as if he was regressing back into his previous state.  He swiftly moved his hand away and the colors faded as the tree seemed to come back into its wholeness. 
Even as his hand fell to his side Xavier felt a kind of misery come upon him.  He could never fully see the tree, he realized.  Either its color or its wholeness would be lost to him, no matter how he looked at it.  Somehow he knew that even if he had been able comprehend the whole tree, he would be unable to look upon any other tree while he was looking at the first, and this seemed, if possible, even more unbearable than never fully seeing one.  Lost in thought Xavier wandered through the forest, stopping every so often to look at some new thing.
His wanderings eventually brought him to a clearing in the center of which was a small hill.  On the crown of the hill stood a bare tree, its twin branches stark against the lightening sky.  A radiance descended from the tree and passed over the grass towards Xavier.  A sudden fear fell upon him and he stood rooted to the spot.  Then the radiance passed over him and he was caught up into the air.  For one terrifying, wonderful moment he saw the entire forest.  In that instant he glimpsed the order of the wood, saw that it was in fact a garden, shaped like a sunburst, with the hill at its center.  For a split-second he saw not one, but every tree, literally aflame with color, and he knew them wholly as trees and wholly as colors.  He knew that every tree has a face, and that every face was turned to the hill.  Then the light overwhelmed him and he passed out.

EPILOGUE:
EVANGELISM

         The shriek of his suit alarms jarred Xavier from his stupor just in time for him to feel his leg jerked nearly out of its socket, through the power armor.  He found himself hanging upside down, halfway down the shaft he had fallen into.  His leg had caught on a loop of cable, breaking his descent and nearly breaking his leg.  Clutching at its broken walls he slowly worked his way into an upright position. 
Two minutes later found him slowly climbing the wall, dust from the building settling around him like flecks of diamond in the low light.  A soft moan, barely audible above the noise of the battle caught his attention.  In a hole in the opposite wall he saw an arm, and the sleeve of a Merch’s battle dress.  Swinging over, he pushed aside the debris and threw the man over his shoulders.  The power in his suit was almost at zero when he reached the top, but he threw the other man over first before hauling himself over.  A faint warbling from the suit's sensors was all of the warning that he received before another Merc stepped around the corner, a rocket launcher slung over his shoulder.  He stared at Xavier, then at his wounded comrade, then back again.  Deciding that discresion was the better part of valor he raised the launcher and took aim.  The warble became a scream as the rocket locked on to Xavier's power armor.  For a moment the veil of the world seemed to draw back and it seemed to Xavier that he saw once again the great garden and the tree in the center of the garden through the dust settling over them all.  Then a single shot rang out.  The rocket launcher fell from the man's hands and he fell lifeless to the ground as the power in Xavier's suit failed all together.

Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.