Planet of Sarah

By David McGillveray

I had searched for lifetimes across worlds real and unreal, and now I was sure I had found her again.

An untouched planet turned below, curiously opaque to my ship’s senses.  Through the viewscreen I could see the surface was decorated with the blues and greens of life. Circling the world was a sparkling band of silver that shone in the light of the system’s sun, the remnant of some ancient cataclysm whose violence had only served to enhance its beauty.

It was the kind of place she would choose because it was the kind of place I would choose. So I told myself.

My ancient heart fluttered like a young man’s as I instructed the ship to enter the atmosphere.

***

Inside a virtual heaven we sat unclothed by an azure pool fed by a cascade of water that fell directly from the sky. Sarah leaned over the surface and regarded her reflection, her hair hanging in the water.

Even though we were already past our youth, every time I looked at her she still stirred in me that exquisite cocktail of feelings that felt like first love; of pride and excitement and admiration and lust and just pure thankfulness she had chosen to be with me.

Without looking up, as if knowing my thoughts, she said, “Do you love me, Tobin?”

“I will love you forever.”

“And will you follow me?”

“Always. Anywhere,” I replied.

This was the call and response of lovers, one of the little rituals that all couples have. She nodded, satisfied and took my hand. She turned to me, face so serious and beautiful that I couldn’t help but smile.

Sarah said, “I want to experience everything. Everything that imagination and technology can give to us. Endless worlds, endless newness. I want to feel every emotion as deeply as it can be felt. Tobin, I want to really live, without holding anything back, and I want to live it with you. Will you?”

“A journey together, then?”

“Yes, a journey. One that will last the rest of our lives.”

“The rest of out lives, you say?” I pretended to think until she squeezed my hand, hard. We grinned at each other like fools. “I say yes. Yes and yes and yes!”

She laughed and jumped to her feet. “Come on,” she said and took a few steps back from the water’s edge. I stood beside her.

“Now watch this!” she shouted. She ran and leaped impossibly high into the air. At the height of her arc she transformed into a great golden fish and dived beneath the surface of the pool. Not to be outdone I followed her lead, executing my own transformation with a thought and swimming down and down.

The sun shone through the water and made a cathedral of light. Sarah led me on through a network of grottoes each more inspiring than the last. For timeless days we explored these underwater palaces and then we went deeper, discovering reefs that spanned oceans and sunken cities where we lived like lords and ladies with the creatures of the sea. We swam with leviathans and found treasure in sunken wrecks. There was so much beauty, so much joy.

***

The ship set me down in a meadow near to where a river fed a great lake, drawn to a place that reminded me of somewhere else, long ago. I had been with her, then.

I found a path beside the river and followed it back from the lake for several kilometres, bounded on one side by a pine forest and on the other by the sound of water. It was a fine day, bright and warm, and I felt my spirit lift; I imagined I could taste Sarah’s scent on the breeze that rustled the trees.

After a time I sensed that I was being observed. I gave no outward sign but started surreptitiously stealing glances into the forest and quickly caught the movement of small figures darting from tree to tree. They were not subtle and I soon realised they were making little attempt to properly conceal themselves, like young children playing hide and seek. Indeed, I made out the odd barely-stifled giggle as they came closer.

“Tobin!” they sang.

“Tobin, Tobin!”

“Who’s there? You know me?” I cried out excitedly. It could only mean she was here somewhere. “Come on out and talk to me then.”

They came to where the path touched the treeline, three of them, and I gave a gasp. I had thought they were like like children, but closer up I saw their skin had an unnatural sheen. They were androgynous, naked and pale as if they had never seen the sun. Most unsettling of all, each of them wore my face. My own face, but empty of an animating spirit. Made things, I thought.

“Why are you here, Tobin?” asked the central figure, echoed in triplicate by its fellows. “Why, why?”

“To find Sarah. Do you know her? I lost her, you see. Is she here?”

“Not here, Tobin, not for you.”

“Oh no.”

“Not for you.”

They were around me now, shoulder height, looking up at me curiously with duplicates of my own eyes, parodies of my own expressions, touching me. My flesh crawled but I tried to be calm. “Can you help me find her?” I asked.

They laughed together, a curious high sound that set me further on edge. In unison they turned quickly. “Will you follow us?” they asked.

I followed them through the trees. They went quickly, but one always lagged enough behind, making sure that I kept up. Beds of pine needles softened our footsteps and the light darkened as it was filtered through the branches.

At length we came to a circular clearing. At its centre stood a single large standing stone carved with images I could not make out but which tugged at my memory. My hosts were all around me again.

“We don’t want you here, Tobin.”

“She doesn’t need you here, Tobin.”

“I won’t have you here, Tobin.”

The third of them lunged at me. It had somehow produced a blade in its child-like hand, a murderous look of madness on a reflection of my own face.

Despite the engineered resilience of my body, at times I felt my years. I twisted aside as best I could, not as fast as I once might have been, and felt the knife slice my skin just above the right hip. The made thing’s momentum carried it past me and I chopped at it with my hand, catching it on the back of the neck. To my shock it turned to dust as I struck, only the mask of my face surviving. It fell to the ground and rolled away before coming to settle gazing obscenely at the sky.

I whirled on the others but they had not moved. They were smiling at me.

“Goodbye, Tobin,” said one and then fell apart like its fellow.

“Wait,” I cried. “Please!”

“Look for her at the heart of the world,” said the last. It crumbled to dust before me, the mask of my face falling, empty and sad.

I put my hand to my hip. It came away wet with blood and dizzyness overcame me. I lurched towards the standing stone to catch my equilibrium but as I reached for it it cracked apart. On its surface I glimpsed images from my life with Sarah before it too turned to dust.

***

As angels we gloried in the photosphere of a star, lifted up by its light.

We were wild horses galloping across the steppe. We rutted in fading daylight as the sun sank and set the sky on fire. We lay in bliss and sweet grass.

Inside the atmosphere of a gas giant we swam as sentient convection currents, lost in vastness, free from all that we had left behind.

From the start I always knew that she was the impetus, always moving us on to the next adventure. I was happy to follow. Time passed in different experience, dreamlike, bounded only by our desires. We shared it all, Sarah and I. For decades we were content, more than content.

But everything gets old, even the new. And with time, I began to feel that my identity was bleeding away with each successive incarnation, that the change itself had become the thing rather than what the changes could give to us.

“Can we stop a while, just to be ourselves?” I asked her. We floated in a station watching the death-throws of a star counting out the last years of its life before nova. I tried to make a joke of it. “I want to be boring again, like you used to tell me I was. Just for a while.”

But she became angry at once. “You want to give up all this?” she said, making a sweep with her hand. “For what? For what we used to be? There’s nothing behind us, Tobin, only what’s ahead.”

I opened my mouth to try again but she cut me off. “You promised,” she hissed.

She wouldn’t talk more of it, turning her back and staring down at the frightening turmoil crossing the star’s face. I knew it had become a compulsion, all these evolutions, as she was a compulsion of mine. But her visions for our future became increasingly dark.

***

Thankfully I was molested no further as I stumbled back to the ship, holding the wound at my side. My body healed quickly, but I still needed time to rest and to think.

Later, I had the ship assemble provisions and a skybike from the components in the hold and began my journey. I was used to searching.

The heart of the world…

This was a good world, empty of civilisation but full of life. I traversed lakelands and forests and glaciers and great open plains. Many of these places reminded me of places we had seen together, when we were happy. I landed the bike each day before nightfall and made camp, and each evening it became my habit to walk a little way into the wilderness and call her name.

Only silence ever answered me, but somehow I still felt her regard. Maybe that was just my hope whispering at me.

I swung the skybike high over a coastline of white cliffs, grey waves pounding at their base. The sun was bright and I let the machine’s shields down to allow the wind to blow in my face, tasting its zest and its salt. For a moment I forgot everything and just enjoyed the experience of it, like I used to do.

It flew out of the sun to disguise its assault. I had drifted into my own thoughts and before I could react it was on top of me. Huge claws scraped across the metal of the vehicle’s side and I was buffeted by the beating of massive wings. A fearful screeching filled the air as the thing disengaged and began to come around for another pass.

As I wrestled to steady the skybike, I glanced around me until I found my attacker. A creature out of myth! An enormous eagle bore down, claws and wings outstretched and fury in its red eyes.

Frantically, I tried to evade it but the bike was not agile enough and the eagle clipped me with its claws. Pain roared in my shoulder. I lost control of the bike and it began to tumble, its engine stuttering and failing. The great falcon harassed me in the air as I fell but didn’t come close enough to strike another blow. The damage done was enough. The world spun about me.

I retained enough awareness to engage the bike’s emergency system and I was encased in a sphere of impact gel and ejected into the air. I fell to earth no more than fifty metres back from the clifftops and lay there winded and scared as the gel drained into the grass around me, mingling with my blood. A moment later the skybike crashed some way away from me, crumpling like a butterfly under a giant’s hand. Smoke drifted into the air and I saw the great eagle gliding above, the sun glinting on its wings. I was terrified it would come for me but it circled once, twice and then turned away. I swear I heard her laughter in its cries.

I salvaged what I could from the wreckage and made a meagre camp. Still shaken, I lay down to rest and I felt a terrible desolation overcome me.

“Sarah, where are you? Please don’t play with me like this.”

As night fell, I stared up at the glittering river of diamonds that was the planet’s rings. On the horizon, a volcano exploded.

***

We loaded our minds into artificial bodies and were sealed into a reinforced capsule which was fired into the maelstrom around a black hole. We span quicker and quicker within its accretion disk, sucked ever closer to the event horizon, while tremendous stresses were brought to bear on the capsule. We felt every moment of it, the power and immensity of the hole, our own helplessness, the final tearing of our own deaths. In the last instant, these memories were transmitted back to where we waited on a satellite outside the danger zone. Back in my own body, I fell from my couch and vomited on the floor while Sarah exulted.

We spent two years as junkies in New Nairobi on Old Earth, only pulled from our fugue when the woman I had paid rescued us after the agreed time. Sarah took this as a huge betrayal, her mood turning black the moment she understood what I had done.

“How could you do this? Don’t you see it’s not real now? It’s ruined.”

“We might have died,” I protested. My body was wasted, the skin loose and bruised. Again, she turned away from me, her starved frame shaking with fury.

Sarah found a primitive world where tribes of men warred with one another, as we are wont to do.

“We will direct them,” she said eagerly, a hunger in her voice I had come to recognise and dread. “We will be gods of war! There will be battle and victory and defeat. We will be cursed and worshipped, believed in and forsaken, fought over in holy wars. Tobin, we have not yet been gods.”

“Do you want the death of thousands now?” I said, my turn to be angry, “All to be sacrificed on your altars? These people are not for you to play with just so you can feel something. What’s happened to you, Sarah?”

She responded to anger with anger, her fury boiling over in an instant. “You will do it for me!” she shouted in my face. “This is what I need to stay alive! Or don’t you want that?”

“Sarah, I love you, but I won’t be a part of this. I can’t be with you when you’re like this.”

“You said always and forever! Always and forever! You don’t break promises to the one you say you love.”

But I did break my promise. I knew she had been consumed by her need, that her passions had turned to madness. She scared me now, she was no longer the girl who had dived into the pool. I didn’t stay to help her. Instead, in my weakness, I walked away.

***

I took it as a sign. I walked inland for several days across moorland and into hilly country, keeping the plume of the volcano ahead of me. It gave me time to remember.

After I left her, I tried to return to something like a normal life. I tried to settle in places, to form stable relationships and set goals. But there was a big part of me that had loved the adventure, the transience, the change. That was what Sarah and I had shared from the start, before we had even begun. So despite my intentions, I found myself never staying, always moving on, leaving people behind.

And there was the guilt and the longing and the missing of her. Every morning when I woke it was is if there was a psychic tether binding us together, tugging at me. She had been my life and I came to realise I wasn’t really much without her. I think I needed the validation of her, as well as everything else. I rode a deep depression down and wallowed in it. I’m not proud of it.

It took a long time to work through my feelings and to understand what I must do. I had to find her again, to make it good. I searched and searched. Where to even start in an infinite universe? But this time I never gave up. Even her absence gave me purpose.

Still I searched.

The hills rose to become a low mountain range. As I climbed the volcano loomed above me and I saw it was not alone, but part of a line curving away in both directions, rising like defensive towers above the ramparts of the mountains. I felt a conviction that what I sought lay beyond that wall.

I could smell their breath in the air now, the sulphur and chemical tang. I had to skirt around areas where the ground became hot underfoot or where noxious vapours puffed from cracks in the rock. I climbed on, aiming for a spot where the barrier of the mountains sagged between two of the volcanic cones.

Exhausted and much diminished I finally topped the wall. I was still battered from my encounter with the eagle and had sustained further minor injuries on the climb. My clothes were ragged, my hair in disarray and my face streaked with dirt and dried blood. I thought I must look every inch the penitent pilgrim I had begun to think of myself as.

I still had the strength to be stunned. Before and below me, stretching almost to the limits of vision, was a lake of fire, a vast crater filled with lava the colour of blood bounded by a ring of volcanoes that even as I watched began to spout black clouds and fountains of molten rock in uncanny unison. Beneath them I was tiny and exposed. I knew I could be snuffed out at any moment.

The heart of the world.

“Sarah!” I shouted into the air. “Is it you?”

Shapes and patterns swirled within the lake, forming and dissolving, hinting at meaning. Heat washed over me, the angry sound of the eruptions rumbling like a judgement.

“Sarah, I’m sorry. I’ve come back to you. I made a mistake. Will you listen?”

My answer was a stirring in the crater. Waves of lava crashed against the rocks below, showering red rain. Out in the centre of the lake a hump began to build, like a bubble expanding before it bursts.

I peered into the trembling air, wiping sweat from my forehead with one hand.

Something enormous lifted from the surface of the lake, rearing upwards like a cobra, petals opening, turning towards me. The thing was composed from living lava, fluid, its edges indistinct. I cowered under it like a bug curling under the magnifying glass of its scrutiny.

A face formed there, a face I knew, the one I searched for.

“Sarah,” I gasped.

The face flowed and distorted, unstable, eyes deep red, mouth opening in a silent scream.

“We can be together again. I want us to be together again,” I shouted.

The face on the surface of the lava flower broke apart and coalesced again, steadied. A huge voice boomed over the surface of the world, seemed to emerge from deep within it, like the thunder of a great heart.

“You said always and forever,” it said. Sarah said.

“I know, I’m sorry. I was wrong. I know I hurt you, left you alone when you shouldn’t have been alone. I want to make it right if you’ll let me.”

She drew closer and I felt my skin burn. My clothes began to smoke.

“Please, Sarah.”

“Tobin,” sighed the great voice. Then she drew away, towering high above me. “Tobin.”

She sank back towards the surface of the lake, fragmenting.

***

This time I stayed with her. In time I hope her madness will heal and she will return to me as I have returned to her. I think she knows that I am here and that I will watch over her. I hope that is a help.

I used the material of this world’s rings to rebuild a moon in Sarah’s sky. Now I orbit her, calming her with my gravity, my face always turned towards hers.

——–//——–

David McGillveray is the author of over seventy published stories of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, The Daily Tomorrow and many other magazines, webzines and anthologies. He was born in Edinburgh but having betrayed his country now lives in London with his family, where he likes walking, attending obscure gigs, curries, Guinness and lots of other things. His story collection, Forgotten Dragons, Plastic People, is available on Amazon.

Planet of Sarah was first published as an audio presentation in StarShipSofa Podcast Episode 705 in February 2023.