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Jamila Mubarak, longtime President of Earth, needed a vacation.
It was the worst year of the war so far. Feeling as helpless and deadweight as a marionette, she was impatient to escape the rioting crowds, the poisoned clouds, and the echoes of bombs too near in space and time. She ached to drown out the hungry cries of the orphans with the peaceful murmurs of otherworldly oceans.
So she was certain the people of Earth would forgive her for leaving them in the night before the new weapons tests, for packing her luggage and boarding a rocketship headed to the moon, toward the new Lunar Hot Springs. How could someone so heavily burdened resist the allure of the untouched paradise of the moon’s vast wilderness, the classical luxuries of its resort, or the temptingly toasty temperatures of its tranquil hot springs?
Be healed, the travel brochures declared, at the most sumptuous haven for the modern space traveler!
A promise of solitude. Of silence. Of true anonymity.
Jamila hadn’t had either for years.
She thought of those promises as she floated, face-up and naked, in the balmy springs, watching the stars glimmer and shimmer above her head, that a dark cavern of bright jewels. She thought of everyone she’d left behind, as she tried to avoid eye contact with the other swimmers. She’d come to the resort for anonymity, after all; to fade into the deep void of space, like a comet flying too close to the sun.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling that, even still, all eyes were turned towards her.
Perhaps, she told herself, they were watching the beginning of the Earthrise.
That far-flung orb, blissfully removed in both space and time, would soon start its celestial ascent, glowing sapphire and luminous on the horizon, lit by the radiance of a thousand alien suns. Jamila had caught it setting yesterday, for only a moment. It was the most marvelous scene she had ever witnessed. It reminded her of some turquoise pearl she’d seen suspended in the oceans of her childhood memories, from a time before the wars, before the dreadful sequence of deaths and disappearances that had placed her upon her formidable throne.
As she’d done in her childhood, she made a wish upon one of those flickering stars—to melt into the spring waters. To transform herself into something delicate and unseen; to become liquid sunshine. To float forever in space, needing no air.
Still, the people continued to stare.
But it was not the President of Earth they were watching.
Their gaze was fixed on the horizon. An expression of icy horror had frozen on every face.
Jamila followed their stares.
The lustrous blue pearl hanging in the sky had burst into flames.
Together, quiet and stunned, the swimmers watched the azure waters and green mountains blacken and become ash in the all-consuming inferno, the fires blooming into the black void like a lotus flower.
The blazes flickered soundlessly for a few moments before they sputtered and dimmed. The planet smoldered, a dark fading ember, a dying star in some faraway and surreal universe, now eternally out of reach to its children, the scattered seeds of a vanished world.
All that Former President Jamila Mubarak had desired was solitude. The boundless silence of space. The ultimate relief from her burdens.
She looked solemnly at the people over whom she was now powerless. Their gazes had, for the first time, turned towards her.
Now, she knew, they recognized her.
And that they, too, were blessed with anonymity. They would get the reward they deserved. There was nobody left to forgive them for what they were about to do.
She shivered.
The waters had grown suddenly cold, and so terribly lonely.