Legends of Lemuria E-Book

Scott Michael Decker

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

After the collapse of an ancient empire, Casper, Nadika, Jayani and Sharif each acquire a crystal with extraordinary properties.

Their minds and futures intertwined, the four begin a journey to find clues about the mysterious empire, and discover its secrets.

But in their search for Lemuria, have they unleashed powers they can't comprehend - or control?

Leseprobe

Legends of Lemuria

Galactic Adventures Book 3

Scott Michael Decker

Copyright (C) 2014 Scott Michael Decker

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2019 by Next Chapter

Published 2019 by Next Chapter

Cover art by http://www.thecovercollection.com/

This novel is a work of fiction. With one exception, this book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The one exception is Dr. Ananth Shanmugam, who suggested that I write a novel about Lemuria, and who has graciously granted me leave to use his name and incorporate elements of his persona.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

Typed by Joey Strainer

U.S. Copyright application # 1-1696907591

Chapter 1: Casper

“There's no such place as Lemuria!”

Casper was taken aback by the vehemence in his wife's voice. She acts as if I talk about it all the time, he thought, frowning. He saw the frown on her face and looked away.

“Why can't you talk about getting us off this mudball?”

It was a question she'd asked Casper many times. He sighed and couldn't stop his reply. “But I am talking about us getting out of here. If I can find one of their crystals—”

“You've never seen one of their crystals. No one has! Because they don't exist! You're impossible!” She threw her hands in the air and stormed out of their cube.

Casper looked at the empty doorway, wondering whether to follow her, knowing it never worked and only frustrated her further. There didn't seem to be any way to convince her.

He looked around their meager space. A prison cell on Karata, in the Orion Belt.

Room enough for a double-cot, a toilet-shower combo behind a partition in one corner, a vid fixed to an upper corner, half-obscured by a sheet of glasteel, a rusty sink that smelled of fouled food, a dispensomeal that sloughed them thick porridge three times a day whether they wanted it or not, and a worn blanket to cover themselves when they wanted intimacy, conjugal units twice the size of singles.

Getting a conjugal unit had been half the attraction of marrying her.

And probably half the reason she'd married him.

He looked into the shiny chromeplate above the sink. His looks weren't among his best features. Casper's build was squat and powerful. He stood five-foot-five, and his arms hung nearly to his knees. His forehead sloped backward from his thick brow and peaked somewhere behind his ears, and his thick jaw was outdone only by his protuberant lips and nose. The eyes peered back at him from under a precipitous brow, and in the eyes lay the spark of determination that he knew would get him out of this hellhole.

“Heard you and Kathag arguing again.” At the doorway stood Seamus.

Casper looked over and grunted with perfect troglodyte pitch. “She'll get over it.”

Seamus was wrinkled, his five-foot frame bent over with years of hard labor, his arms still bulging from under skin that might have sloughed off a snake, wrinkles wrinkled with wrinkles. “She might get over it, but she won't go with you.”

“Eh?” Another troglodyte grunt. I must be turning into a care-dweller, Casper thought. “Won't go with me? What do you mean?”

“When you find the crystals. She won't believe you can escape this place, and she'll refuse to accompany you.”

“Of course she'll go with me, old man.” Casper shook his head. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Seamus simply smiled at him.

At a level he didn't want to acknowledge, there was truth in the old man's words. Seamus seemed to know things others didn't, knew when the guards would change despite their irregular shifts, when the warden was leaving, and when another prisoner would soon be joining them. Casper relied on the certainty of Seamus's knowledge, but refused to acknowledge this latest assertion.

“Where are we digging tomorrow, Seamus?” Casper joined him in the corridor. His wife would be coming back soon and he didn't want her to see him with the old man, which sometimes set off another round of bickering.

Every six feet was another doorway. And no doors. The sights, sounds and smells of people's activities were the fodder of public discourse.

“Hey, Mirzet, our dispensomeal's not working, got any extra mush?”

“Aww, Balzac, couldn't you have dropped that load in the pit?”

“At it again, Ridjic? That's the second time you bucked your wife today! Give her a rest!”

Casper blithely ignored it all, as most of them ignored his and Kathag's bickering. “What's the word on tomorrow's work site?” he asked Seamus, the two of them heading toward the only common room on the unit, which at lights out converted to a singles-cube labyrinth.

“They've got their eyes on a promising seam near Muthur, northeast of Meru Mountain,” Seamus said. The old man glanced up and down the corridor, as if for spies. “It's got that resonance I told you about.”

Ever since his arrival at Magasca Prison, Casper had absorbed from Seamus every bit of detail he could regarding Lemuria, soaking up information and socking it away as he'd seen the squirrels do with nuts, hoarding every bit for the opportunity to escape. The “resonance” was either the old man's highly-tuned perceptivity or just a fanciful whim, but whatever it was, Seamus believed that something was there, like a magnet to an iron plate or a dog's nose to a scent. Casper had often heard the old man predict they'd find a seam of gold or a concentration of platinum ore, and his accuracy was uncanny.

“A crystal?” Casper asked quietly.

Seamus didn't respond, his gazed fixed to the corridor ahead.

Blocking it was the unit snitch, the Warden's enforcer, Tunsel. Behind him stood his buck-lick, Gorcos. “Now, Casper, what did I tell you about believing Seamus's lies?” Tunsel said. He was two inches taller and forty pound heavier than anyone else.

Casper saw his wife behind Tunsel, a smirk on her face. He knew where this was going, and he was adamant he wouldn't participate. “You leave Seamus alone!” He jabbed his finger at Tunsel's chest.

“What are you gonna do, sprout lasers from your eyes and lightning from your fingertips. Like a Lemurian?”

Snickers erupted from up and down the corridor.

“Go lick the warden's buckhole!” Casper dropped under the swing and launched himself shoulder-first into the bigger man's gut. He charged, carrying the thew-bound peabrain down the corridor.

Gorcos tripped him and Casper fell into a heap with Tunsel. Gorcos leaped in and the two-to-one fight was quickly over, Tunsel and Gorcos pummeling him into ground meat.

Casper lay in the corridor, barely able to lift his head.

All he saw was the backs of Tunsel and Gorcos, heading toward his cube with his wife.

Several pairs of hands hauled him down the corridor toward the common room. He knew he'd be spending the night in the singles' warren, Tunsel probably bucking his wife already.

“Over here,” said a familiar voice through the fog.

They dumped him near the far wall, the ceiling shrouded in darkness.

“Will he be okay, Dr. Dersop?” a voice asked from far away.

“Here, give him some of this, and he will,” said another voice.

A small glow illuminated Seamus's face. “Drink this, Caspar, like the good doctor says.” He held a cracked porcelain cup to Casper's mouth.

The hot liquid stung the cuts in his mouth, but soothed them too.

Weariness washed over him and took the last of his consciousness.

* * *

“Line up!” The kick in his side reinforced the order.

Casper ignored the grin on Gorcos's face and pulled himself to sitting.

“Guess who bucked the living Vishnu out of your wife last night, Casp!”

“Gork yourself into Tunsel's buckhole.” Casper got up and headed for the mess line, the singles' mess line, the conjugal units each having a dispensomeal.

The humiliation deepened, Casper galled by the thought of his wife bucking anyone else. Its having been Tunsel, the Warden's bucklicker, was like a knife in his gut.

“Feel any better?” Seamus said, looking him up and down.

Casper smirked. Physically, he was badly bruised, and he had a tooth too loose for his liking. Tunsel and Gorcos knew better than to beat anyone so badly that they couldn't work; the warden would have their hides for it. He tested his muscles, wondering what he would find at the Muthur dig. The sere, unforgiving planet surface was likely to present its own betrayals.

How the ancients of Lemuria had built into their crystals their amazing capabilities was a mystery long since lost in the collapse of their civilization. Before his conviction, Casper had dreamt of the vast universe he would find if only he might obtain even one Lemurian crystal, despite his having equally infinitesimal chances of untold riches. Casper knew all the crystals, triclinic to cubic. And the powers they possessed.

Daydreaming at night under the stars had given him hope amidst the squalor that seemed his family's fate, their two-room cube too small for him, his parents, his sister and his infant brother. The cube had been tucked on the backside of a towerblock housing eight hundred other families in similar two-cubes, the towerblock one amongst thousands, these beehives disgorging their effluent of workers four times a day. Like clockwork, one fourth rushed to work a twelve-hour shift, every four hours, their rotations set by the towerblock, Casper's parents manufacturing parts for extensibles, the same part every five seconds.

Casper had been working the line for five years, since he was fourteen, when he came home at one shift-end to find his father in the corner, rocking mindlessly, Casper's infant brother Jaupal in his arms. “They've taken your mother and sister.”

Casper didn't ask his father why. He knew what for. Their wages weren't enough to feed them all. Some wives and sisters stood at the intersections on payday. Some were put to work by the local police. Some purloined extra items from work or market. The risk and shame, he'd been told, seemed worth the moment of satisfaction when the belly was full and the family happy. He'd been beyond caring when his mother and sister had been taken. Kathag's being bucked by the Warden's bucklicker had stirred long-dormant resentments from when his mother and sister had been detained.

The glop of porridge into his plate woke Casper from his reverie. It was smaller than the amount he usually got from the dispensomeal, and smaller than the serving others got in the messline. He knew the amount was deliberate. He was beyond caring.

“You can have some of mine,” Seamus said, sitting beside him.

Casper wasn't hungry. “You need to eat, old man.”

“You need to find that crystal,” Seamus retorted.

The tight space at the table, elbow-to-elbow with people on either side, was also deliberate, Casper knew. I need to find that crystal, he thought. He knew that if he didn't, he'd probably do something stupid, which was exactly what had landed him here at Magasca Prison. Finished, he picked up his tray and shoved it through the window, joined the line for the transport, and boarded like the automaton he was.

Even as his father had begged him not to, saying there was nothing to be done, Casper had left their towerblock, his unpermitted departure instantly noticed, and had gone to the precinct. The station itself had been so packed that detainees were pressed up against the windows.

The fat-bellied officers had been no match for him, the power of his youthful, compact body easily overcoming these older, complacent buckholes. His demands for his mother's and sister's release had fallen on deaf ears. Combined, they'd buried him, tried him the next day, and sentenced him to life in prison and sent him to Magasca.

Casper got off the shuttle and joined the line for the extensibles, hoping his was half-operational. Equipment malfunction idled several extensibles every day. At least once per week, such malfunction led to a death. Not that tunnel collapse, rockslide, or armature failure didn't, but power loss inevitably meant that your oxy-gen failed too. And when your oxy-gen failed, then mine gasses seeped into your extensible, leading to increased delirium and a slow, agonizing death. Tunnel collapses, rockslides, and armatures failures were at least quick deaths.

Casper tested his extensible. The oxy-gen blew a stream of cold, fresh air at him. He extended his arms and legs. The machine clamped onto his limbs, and a helmet lowered over his head. He became the extensible.

The right armature begrudgingly reached the limit of its range. All five drills tested perfect, and the com crackled to life. The cervical collar worked perfectly, of course. Functioning both to keep his spine aligned and to discipline him, the collar was the one piece they fastidiously kept in working order.

With barely time for testing, the tram plunged them into the mine.

Casper tried to elevate his awareness as Seamus had taught him, the resonance of the crystals purported to reverberate with the harmonics of thought itself. The tram slowed every thousand feet to drop off a pair of extensibles and their human operators. He waited for the signal to indicate his assigned stop.

And waited.

The last stop arrived. His signal beeped, and Casper climbed off the tram, the extensible motors whining. He made his way deeper into the raw tunnel.

“Our relief at last!” Canpor said, his extensible hand slapping Casper's mechanical shoulder. “Watch that rock face there to the right. Sensor says it's stable, but you know the drill. Otherwise looks to be a decent seam. C'mon, Ramtas,” he said to his drill-mate.

“No secondary?” Ramtas said, her face lit up from below like a ghost.

“Tunsel doesn't like me much,” Casper said, shrugging.

The two of them went the way he'd come, leaving him alone, without a secondary. This deep in, with the nearest fellow miner at least a thousand feet away, oxygen scarce, and the mineface new, Casper felt a shiver course down his back.

It felt like a setup.

Focus, he told himself, turning toward the raw rock.

Nearby, an autoloader blinked placidly at him, awaiting his signal. It would wait until he'd dislodged enough raw ore before loading it up for processing.

Casper looked at the rockface. To the right it did look unsteady, but not for the reasons Canpor had cited. To Casper, a soft ethereal glow seeped from between the cracks, as though a bright light sought to explode from behind a curtain of solid rock. He blinked in disbelief.

Then it was gone.

“You must believe,” Seamus said, as though he stood right there.

The glow returned and Casper got to work.

He drilled until the drill bits glowed red, hammered with the two-ton hammer until the right armature failed, and then set the charges.

The blast brought down the ceiling and buried the extensible. Casper worked his left armature free, but the rest was hopelessly buried under tons of rock.

He had just enough time before they rescued him, the ceiling collapse triggering alarms. He uncovered the escape hatch, felt the chill to his bones as the frigid air rushed into the capsule, and wiggled from the extensible.

Bare feet and hands on rock sent spikes of cold toward his heart. He had perhaps thirty seconds before hypothermia set in. The glow was all around, and he saw it there, embedded in the newly-exposed rock:

A crystal!

A blue-white varietal, as big as a cherry, so bright he almost couldn't look at it.

He scrambled across the new-fall, the surface treacherous and unstable, and put his hands on the crystal.

The universe spread before him like a sandbox, galaxies like grains of sand. Time swirled around him in the spiral that it was, the inner coccyx looping out to spiral again toward the inner end, engines of creation giving birth to galaxy after galaxy, black holes gorging themselves upon them until they burst from being so turgid.

Casper pulled the crystal from the rock and scrambled back to the extensible, no longer feeling the cold, the blue glow outlining the bones of his hand through his palm.

He climbed back into the extensible, its com squawking at him. Pulling the hatch closed, he worked himself back into position, then pulled the helmet back down over his head. What do I do with it? he wondered, They'll take it if they know I have it, he knew. His clothing offered no concealment, barely adequate to cover his nudity.

There was only one place. The size of a cherry, the crystal wasn't uncomfortable, but the cold felt as if he had an icicle in his buckhole, and he'd have to become accustomed to having the urge to evacuate. He hoped he didn't really have to evacuate between now and the time he returned to the cell block. He didn't know what he'd do then. He couldn't think about that right now.

“Casper, what the buck's going on, do you read?” Tunsel, the warden's buck-lick.

Casper realized he was shivering, and his teeth chattered as he tried to answer. “C … c … ceiling collapse,” he managed to say.

“Are you all right?”

Not that you'd care, oaf! Casper thought. “Shook up, but intact. Extensible's a wreck.”

“Extraction crew is on its way.”

There would be questions, but he wasn't concerned. Tunsel would be asked why Casper was alone. But Casper didn't care. Not anymore.

What about Kathag? he asked himself.

What about her? he answered, and dismissed her from his mind.

Extensibles ran up through the dusty tunnel and swarmed around him, carefully excavating just enough rock to extract his extensible from the rubble. Only the left armature worked, the legs crushed beyond recognition.

“I'll take him back,” Seamus said, his face just visible through his capsule shield. Seamus's extensible grasped Casper's extensible around its middle with a pair of alternate armatures and lifted.

The track was ruined, and the tram was out, its track twisted like shoestrings. Seamus would have to carry him with his extensible.

The com traffic monitored by the warden, Seamus said nothing untoward as he hauled Casper back along the mineshaft. “Thought we lost you, boy,” he grumbled.

The swaying motion was oddly comforting.

Seamus set him on the tram. “Eh? What do you mean? Of course, I'm going with him. The boy's just been in a mine collapse!”

Casper only heard one side of the conversation, and that through the capsule glasma, the sound muted.

“Buck you for putting him out there by himself in the first place, Tunsel. I'm goin'. Got it?” Seamus grinned through the glassplate, setting his extensible down across from Casper.

The tram picked up speed, the other cars full of ore.

Casper saw Seamus's lips move. No sound. Of course.

“Did you find it?” the lips asked.

Casper grinned and nodded.

“Where is it?” the lips asked.

“My buckhole,” he replied with his lips, making no sound.

Seamus chortled, nodding, and slapped his extensible with the hand of an armature. “How big?” the lips asked.

Casper held up a thumb and a forefinger to indicate its size.

“What color?”

“Blue.”

“That'll be a hexagonal.” Seamus nodded. “Timefold properties. Speed-of-light limitation overcome. Intergalactic travel, if that's what you want. You'll get off this rock at last.”

At the mineshaft entrance, Seamus carried him to the extensible bay. They both climbed out of their machines, the basecrew cheering when Casper emerged unscathed.

“You must have had a mineshaft canary watching over you,” Tunsel said.

Casper looked at him. No one knew what a canary was, just that it was purported to save miners. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“Back to work, you buckholes. You, too, Seamus. I'll deal with you later.” Tunsel scowled at the old man. “Come with me, Casper.”

Casper and Seamus exchanged a look, and Casper followed Tunsel to the medical office.

“Fit as a fibble,” Dr. Dersop said, he too a prisoner. No one asked why a doctor would be in a place like this. No one asked about another's offense, and rarely was it volunteered. Sometimes before someone's arrival, the newcruit's crime might be spectacular enough to set tongues wagging, but it was rare to know.

“What's a fibble?” Casper asked.

Doctor Dersop shrugged. “No one knows anymore. Just an expression that means you're okay. Slight hypothermia that'll go away with a little rest.” Dr. Dersop turned to Tunsel. “He'll go back to work tomorrow morning, Tunsel. Not a moment before.”

Tunsel puffed up, as if about to object. “All right, Doctor.” He turned to Casper. “Transport won't be here for another four hours. Find a place to park your buckhole and stay out of trouble.”

“Yes, Sir,” Casper said.

Tunsel stomped out of the doctor's office.

In here, the noise was muted. Out there, a cacophony of machinery wouldn't allow him a moment of rest. “Ever hear of Lemuria?” Casper asked.

Dr. Dersop snorted. “Just a pile of buckshit,” he said. “Some enterprising scientist of Old Earth made it up to explain the similarity of species on Madagascar and Sri Lanka, said the only explanation for the similarity was a continent in the Indian Ocean that had once linked the two islands, a continent that sank. The legend persists to this day. Don't listen to old man Seamus, boy. He'll just get you in trouble.”

“Can I use the toilet?”

It actually had a door. Surprised at that, Casper carefully extracted the crystal, then rinsed it off. It glowed, but now with a muted light. Washing his hands, he discovered he did have to go. How am I going to keep this secret up on the unit? he wondered. The singles' bathrooms consisted of a slot in the wall. At least the conjugal cubes had a half-screen. Now, he didn't even have that. His flicker of sadness at Kathag's loss was quickly extinguished, his relationship with her at best a silent begrudging tolerance, at worst a mutual buckfest.

Gazing at the crystal, wondering how to keep it a secret, Casper asked it, “What can you tell me?”

The crystal brightened and then dimmed.

As if it's responding to me, he thought. Pulling his pants back up, he washed and picked up the crystal.

The universe leaped into focus.

Overwhelmed, he thought about the Milky Way galaxy. The view shifted, one point expanding, the familiar barred spiral a much easier object to grasp.

Crab Nebula, he thought, and the view shifted yet further, the oval nebula along the Perseus Arm filling his sight.

Puram constellation, he thought, and the view arrowed toward one of the “Crab” legs. Karata, he thought, which was both the name of the primary and the single inhabitable planet in orbit around the fiery yellow sun. Four other planets also orbited the same sun, Karata a baked stone just ten million miles from the primary, and three gas giants farther out than the occupied planet.

The hot band of desert around his world's middle was dark, just a few glints to indicate it was occupied. Toward the poles the infrastructure increased, as evidenced by swatches of glitter. Casper reveled in seeing the night side of his birth planet from space.

What about other planets? he wondered. Jaffna, for instance, he wondered.

The view lurched precipitously beyond the Crab Nebula to a tenuous string of stars, where a young blue star rushed at him, orbited by a tan planet swathed in green. Groundward, he thought, and the forest canopy rushed at him, a river coursing beside a mountain. Staying focused on it, Casper gasped as it moved closer. Beside the swift-moving river, a hamlet stood beside the road, as though to guard the bridge that spanned the rushing waters.

Closer, he thought, and the bridge rushed at him, at one end a woman who turned to look right at him. He swore he heard her gasp.

Pounding on the door startled him. “You all right?”

Casper dropped his pants and sat on the toilet. “Just a little constipation. Be out in a moment.” He grunted gratuitously.

“Just checkin',” the doctor said through the door. Then his footsteps faded.

Casper sighed and attempted to relax, not wanting to hurt himself when he put it back in.

It did not go in lightly.

He secured his pants around his waist, washed again, and left the toilet.

“Exam table's available if you want to nap,” Doctor Dersop said from the other room.

Casper found the exam table. In moments he was asleep.

* * *

The door crashed open and Casper was off the table and on his feet before Tunsel reached him.

“This way.” Tunsel grabbed his collar and threw him through the waiting area and out the door.

Casper stumbled and fell down the ramp, puckering to keep from excreting the crystal.

They were already lined up. All his fellow prisoners, except one.

Seamus, on his knees, near the smelter loading chute, Gorcos standing over his shoulder.

Tunsel clopped Casper before he could regain his feet, then dragged him bodily toward the spot where Seamus knelt.

“Your attention, everybody,” Tunsel said, his voice echoing across the yard. As though three hundred miners hadn't already given him their undivided attention. “You're here today to see what happens to fools who spout foolery and fools who drink it up. Seamus, you stand convicted of spouting foolery and your sentence is death.”

“Buck you til you're raw, Tunsel!” Seamus spat.

Tunsel nodded to Gorcos, who grasped Seamus at nape and waistband, and hurled him in one motion into the smelter chute. The machine chunked and slurped and spun back up.

Done so fast that Casper could only stare.

“Casper, you stand convicted of listening to a fool spout foolery—what the buck are you doing?”

He'd dropped his drawers and was crapping on the ground. His fear sent his excrement shooting out in a stream, and a bluish stone plunked into the puddle. Casper grabbed it and whipped his closed fist toward Tunsel. “Away!”

Tunsel blinked into oblivion.

Casper pointed his fist at Gorcos. “Buck you, too!”

And Gorcos vanished.

Casper looked at his excrement-splattered crystal, then looked around at Tunsel's other henchmen. “What are you still doing here?”

Five fled but one charged Casper.

He pumped his fist and the bucklick popped out of sight.

Casper grinned at the rest of them. “What of the rest of you? What are you waiting for? You're free.”

Kathag stepped out of the ranks. “Five hundred miles of desert between us and the nearest city, and we're supposed to walk? Tunsel was right. You have been listening to foolery.”

Some of the others laughed but edged away from Kathag.

“Of course,” Casper said. He dropped his gaze to the crystal. The capitol city of Nadu came into focus, the lush green valley nestled in the Poothigai Hills a haven for the very wealthy. “Send them all except her,” he told it.

They were gone.

He was alone with his wife. The whore, he thought.

“What of me?”

“What about you?” And he imagined the bridge on the planet Jaffna.

“I could go with you.” She seemed small and insignificant, as though deflated.

Wrong, Seamus! Casper thought, but he'd decided by now that he didn't want her along. He wished he'd been able to offer Seamus his freedom. “I condemn you to a life sentence of guilt, shame and remorse,” Casper said, closing his hand around the crystal.

And vanished.

* * *

Casper caught a glimpse of greenery then lurched right back to the minebase. What happened? he wondered.

But even Kathag was gone, the minebase looking deserted.

Dr. Dersop emerged from the infirmary, his hands folded across his stomach. “Come over here, boy.”

Casper didn't think of disobeying. He glanced around again before stopping in front of the Doctor.

Dr. Dersop eyed him suspiciously. “I thought you were acting odd during the examination. What's that in your hand, boy?” The hands folded across a tumescent stomach looked incongruous, as though he held his abdomen together.

Casper felt reluctant to open his excrement-slathered hand.

“Kept it in your buckhole, eh? Smart.” The head nodded slowly. “A cherry-sized hexagonal, blue probably, eh?”

Casper nodded and opened his palm. Shit sloughed off the marble as though unable to stick, the ball glowing softly, brightening in time with Casper's heartbeat.

An eyebrow rose, and Dr. Dersop's gaze leaped to Casper's face. Dr. Dersop suddenly looked unwell, sweat breaking out on his cheeks, his skin turning a sickly yellow, his gaze become unfocused, and his throat working as though he struggled not to vomit.

“Are you all right?”

“Nothing an old man can't handle.” Still, the Doctor swayed on his feet, blinking in clear distress.

“You'd better lay down.” Casper took his arm and led him back into the infirmary. He helped him onto the exam table in the back office, the Doctor never removing his intertwined fingers from around his middle.

“You're in pain, and you're sick.”

“Of course I am, boy, of course I am.”

Casper eased him onto his back, noticing how turgid his abdomen was. Then it struck him. “You're dying.”

Dr. Dersop nodded, then grinned. “We are all, but yes, my time is soon. I've been waiting for you.”

“Me?”

Dersop nodded. “Go wash your hands, and I'll tell you.”

At the sink, lathering up, Casper looked over his shoulder.

Dr. Dersop was peering down at his distended abdomen and holding it tightly with his hands, as though to restrain it manually.

Rolling the cherry-sized crystal between his fingers, Casper stepped back to the table.

The glow between Dersop's fingers startled him.

“Let me see.”

His hand trembling, his sweat thickening, the Doctor pulled up his tunic. Instead of a watermelon-sized belly bulging pregnantly, a single fist-sized knot just below the solar plexus strained against the abdominal wall, the blue crystal underneath clearly outlining veins and tissue.

“It's gotten worse just today,” the Doctor said, his voice now a rasp, his breathing rapid and shallow. “Because of you.”

Casper felt the smaller blue crystal in his hand become warm. “Because of this.”

Dersop nodded. “When you sent everyone to Nadu, I felt it like a stab in my gut, and I knew. I had to bring them back, by the way. I didn't want the authorities to become alarmed before we're finished here.”

“Finished doing what?”

Dersop grinned. His distress profound, it looked more like a grimace. “They'll certainly investigate the five deaths and one disappearance, but a mass escape would bring far too much attention to Magasca Prison.”

Casper counted only four deaths: Tunsel and two of his buck-licks, and Seamus. The scream and crunch of rock grinding crushwheels returned vividly and Casper felt sick. He shook it off and looked at Dersop.

And realized.

“You were waiting for me so you could die.”

Dr. Dersop turned his head toward him. The wistful smile said it all. “I'm nearly two hundred years old. I dug this crystal from a shaft near Taen Maddrai, a platinum seam whose ore concentrations sent the sensors into an ecstatic frenzy. When I found the crystal, it burrowed into my abdomen, made me sick for a week.” He lifted himself to an elbow, his face yellow and dripping with sweat. “You won't have a week. The platinum mine is played out, and the empty shafts are bunkers now, secret ones, retreats for our overloads if we revolt. Go there until you recover: Find it first to know its place, and then come back. Quickly, boy, I don't know how much longer I'll last.” He lay back down, gasping.

Casper raised the crystal to his eye. In its facets, he saw the surface of Karata from space, zoomed in on Taen Maddrai, located the network of mineshafts below the surface, followed a branch outward and saw the outfitted bunker at the very end. Impressed by a mere glimpse the palatial accommodations, Casper brought himself back to the exam room with a snap. And looked at Dersop.

The eyelids were lowered at half-mast: the sallow skin sagged off the bones like a loose-fitting tunic. Sweat pooled on the exam table. The breathing was rapid, a shallow stridor, the wheeze a fluid-filled lung. The face twitched involuntarily, as though Dr. Dersop were deep in dream-stage sleep.

“Why didn't you leave when you found the crystal?” Casper asked.

The eyelids opened slightly. “Couldn't. Wouldn't let me.”

He could tell Dersop was fading fast. “Why didn't you help your fellow prisoners at least?” he asked, suddenly angry. Between the crowded towers, the foul sweatshops, and the cruel prisons, Casper felt the injustices like a knife to his gut.

His sister and mother. His father and infant brother. Kathag and Seamus. As surely bound to their fates by the oppression of their society as by their draconian laws and tyrannical leaders, who lived in sated splendor on the backs of the populace.

“I did,” Dr. Dersop said, his voice a whisper. “I kept them healthy.” A small smile crept into his lips.

And stayed there, his face a fixed rictus.

The abdomen burst and splattered the walls with entrails.

Casper wiped the smear clear from his eyes in time to see the fist-sized crystal rocket toward him. It lunged into his gut, and he brought to mind the bunker at Taen Maddrai. He dropped to the floor, but instead of hard, cold tile, he landed on soft, plush carpet and passed out.

* * *

When he awoke, Casper found he'd vomited and voided all over himself. Thankfully he hadn't choked on his own vomit, as some did when they drank too much.

He was a mess.

Even as the smell and feel of feces and emesis struck him, so did another bout of nausea and diarrhea.

Why is everything leaving both ends in a hurry? he wondered, looking for a bathroom.

The inlaid tile and gold-plated mirrors frames seemed too immaculate to use. His being in the room besmirched its sanctity. He found the excretory, a generous porcelain basin whose hand-carved ivory seat declared itself too ostentations for his grimy behind.

The urge struck again, and at least his stream of feces landed where it needed to, his vomit splashing across the floor.

Doubled over the toilet, face to his knees, his fists clenched, runnels of sweat dripping off him, Casper wondered how long this would go on.

The cherry-sized crystal in his hand glowed softly.

He straightened, sitting up to look at his abdomen, afraid that the vision of the other, larger crystal plummeting into his stomach wasn't a nightmare.

The hole was a half-inch across, the crystal surface visible through the contracting wound. He swore he could see it getting smaller, the skin red and inflamed at the very edges, but looking perfectly healthy all around.

He wondered how long he'd been unconscious. He guessed not long.

Of course you feel sick, he told himself, feeling the approach of another bout of expurgation. He wretched and voided, the volume this time significantly less. How long will I have to do this? he wondered, recalling Dersop's saying he'd been sick for a week.

Casper groaned, wondering if he'd survive a week, no food or water and his body emptying itself at this pace.

He shook his head, despairing that he'd not survive, his body likely to succumb to the paroxysms of nausea and diarrhea, if not from dehydration and electrolyte depletion.

Easing back on the toilet seat, he looked again at the wound to his stomach, the crystal embedded just an inch or so below the sternum. In his right hand was the small crystal, which glowed warmly, emitting a comforting blue light.

As did the crystal inside him, outlining veins through the skin.

Brighter than it had been.

He pulled the smaller crystal away, and the glow of both crystals faded. He recalled Dersop's saying that his bulging abdomen had gotten worse because of the smaller crystal. Somehow they're linked, Casper knew.

He brought it closer, and their luminance increased. Slowly he decreased the distance, bringing the cherry-sized crystal closer and closer to the perforation in his skin, the fist-sized crystal growing brighter and getting warmer.

The cherry crystal fit neatly into the depression.

The universe exploded into his brain, and the Milky Way zoomed toward him in a rush, the barred spiral blazing in all its glory, and his vision rushed toward the Crab Nebula on the outer Perseus Arm, the fuscous cloud of a gas giant's remains strewn across several parsecs in its dying explosion, a burst that had been visible from the homeworld of his race, Terra, at a time when his forebears took such events as portents of impending apocalypse, little knowing that future generations would occupy worlds inside the very detritus of that explosion.

The Crab Nebula expanded into his vision, the right lower crab arm growing larger, and finally zeroing in on a planet whose middle was a band of desolate desert but whose poles were capped with lush, green, temperate forests. Beneath one stark, baking plateau lay an abandoned mine with one branch of tunnels converted into bunkers, but not just bunkers, palatial suites with all the comforts and luxuries of the privileged people who'd built them, and in one of those bunkers was a man who looked as out of place as these palatial bunkers looked in an abandoned mine.

And Casper snapped back into his body, a curious freedom now infusing him. Not a freedom as though he might go anywhere, although he knew now he could do just that, but another kind of freedom.

A freedom from want. From pain. From distress.

He no longer felt nauseous nor diarrheic.

What happened? he wondered, looking down.

The smaller crystal lay perched in the socket created by the wound where the large crystal had perforated his abdominal wall.

Further, it looked inert, its glow having dissipated. The larger crystal no longer glowed either, but merely sat quiescent, also inert, comfortably ensconced inside him now, exerting no pressure at all on his emptied stomach and bowels.

His soiled clothes half off him, he shed them completely, and stood to look at himself in a gilt-edged mirror.

The thick, compact frame of a body accustomed to hard labor looked like that of a God, but the tousled black hair on the Neanderthal head, with its prognathous jaw and sloped forehead, gave him the aspect of Kubera, once envisioned to be the chief of all evil living in darkness, a hideous dwarf but still one of the eight guardians of the world.

And the center of his abdomen was a small bulge with a milky blue nodule at its center, a second navel.

Under a tunic it won't show, he told himself with a half a hope.

He looked around at the mess he'd created, knowing a similar one awaited him in the next room.

Why don't I feel nauseous anymore? he wondered, Dersop having needed a week to recover.

He didn't have the smaller crystal, Casper thought, deducing that his inserting it had quelled the gastrointestinal distress. He considered removing it to experiment, but rejected the idea. Instead, he set about cleaning up the mess he'd created.

The bathroom was easy, all the surfaces either tile or porcelain, its extravagance impressing him even more as he worked. The blunt fact that elimination had been accorded its own room was as befuddling to him as it was amusing. Elimination had always been a semi-public event, a topic of family concern for one's health and neighbors' derision for the quality, quantity, or odor of one's output. But these people gave it its own room!

The carpeting in the other room was far more problematic, requiring his exploration of the premises to find the appropriate materials. In doing so, he discovered that the other room and its adjoining bathroom were part of a much larger suite with four units attached to a common space that would easily fit thirty convicts.

Who would need so much space? he wondered, the amount as galling as it was ludicrous. He noted as he passed from room to room that he tended to walk along the walls, as though afraid to move into the open areas.

It required conscious thought and effort to overcome that inhibition.

He did the best he could with the emesis and excrement embedded in the carpet. The smell was still pretty rank, but that too would dissipate with time. In a chest of drawers, he found clean clothes of better manufacture than he'd ever seen.

The shower controls baffled him for a few minutes, but soon he was luxuriating under a warm spray. He tried to recall having taken a hot shower. And could not. Cold sponge baths in dirty, scaly water had been the best they could manage in the two-room cube he'd shared with his parents and siblings. Splashed water from a foul-smelling sink was all they'd had on the cell block at Magasca Prison. He was clean to the point of shriveling when he finished his shower.

The clothes were a bit loose but serviceable, particularly since they were far finer in make than anything he'd seen.

And his abdomen didn't look swollen or misshapen at all. Tighter clothes might have emphasized the slight bulge under his solar plexus.

In his search of the premises, he'd gone through the kitchen, seeing a dispensomeal that had far more features than the glop-spewing one he'd shared with Kathag in their conjugal cube. Casper returned to it now with a vague idea of getting food.

But I'm not hungry, he thought, staring at the machine.

It stared back at him, as unblinking as he.

How long he stood there and stared at the dispensomeal, he couldn't have said.

It wasn't a conscious process. For someone who'd experienced privations throughout his life—of food, water, space, clothing, learning, and finally freedom—Casper had built up quite a tolerance for need, especially unmet need. The coping mechanisms that he'd developed to stave off those needs were considerable.

And now that some of those needs appeared to have dissipated entirely, Casper now had to cope with deeply embedded coping mechanisms whose suppression of basal signals like hunger and thirst had so dominated his subconsciousness that, suddenly bereft of those needs, the coping flailed with utter worthlessness and uselessness.

Why aren't I hungry? he finally wondered, having suppressed the feeling for such a long time that its absence left a hollow hole in his soul that he'd forgotten he had.

Freedom from want.

Casper slid down the wall to the floor, eyes on the dispensomeal, wanting to feel hungry, wishing he could feel hungry, desperate to feel hungry.

He dropped his gaze to his abdomen.

Of course, he thought. Even if I tried to eat, I'd just provoke another round of nausea and vomiting, the crystal now occupying the space where his stomach had been. If I don't want to eat, he wondered, what do I want?

Casper looked around the luxurious suite, convinced only that he didn't want to stay here.

Chapter 2: Nadika

“Father,” Nadika asked, “how long until the Lemurians return?” She secured the last screw and looked up from the repairbot.

Her father, Governor Prasad Weligama, cleared his throat and looked at her over his spectacles, one lens green and the other blue. “Nadika Weligama, how dare you question the wisdom of ancient Lemuria!”

“I wasn't questioning them at all, Father. I was merely asking,” she said lightheartedly, more so than she felt.

The question had niggled at her for more than a year, since the brigand attack. The depredations of time and intermittent attack were all around her. The flowers in the garden flaked paint from their metal petals, the pop-up gnome beside the waterfall only popped halfway out of his hole, and the waterwheel at the base of the falls only creaked back and forth now. And for every half-working item within range of her vision, she could list ten others in need of overhaul or repair.

In the distance, the Ferrous Wheel squeaked obstreperously when used; now it was so rusty, Nadika had changed its name. The rocket-drop waved useless cables in the wind, its rockets having long since broken loose. The empty rails of the comet-coaster ended abruptly in mid-air. The galaxy needle pierced the sky with one lift dangling precariously by a single chain. Some of the attractions had fallen apart by themselves, their pulleys and winches worn and rusty; others had arrived at their demise through misadventure, the victim of malicious destruction by roving bands of miscreants. The repairbots had done what they could, but they weren't able even to repair themselves. Without replacement parts or simple supplies such as paint and lubrication, most of the machinery wouldn't last.

Nadika sighed, not sure why she and her father continued to keep the place running.

“We were granted this sacred purpose and obligation,” Governor Prasad said, speaking as though addressing a courtyard full of followers. The steel flowers and half-visible gnome listened with attention as rapt as Nadika's. “The Kings of Lemuria passed down to us the blessings of a verdant planet, full with clement climes and bountiful food, rich with fascinating amusements and scintillation displays of wonders beyond imagining. These amusements were entrusted to us to maintain until they deem it wise and fit to return. Their powers were legendary: They could make themselves weightless, or transmit themselves across the galaxy in seconds, and it was rumored that they could even stop time.”

Nadika waited for him to go on, his oratory as bombastic as it was grandiloquent.

But he'd stopped. “It's time we enter the temple and pray.” He stood to his full six-five height and moved across the garden.

Carrying the repairbot, she fell into step beside him, just a few inches shorter than he. The ancient script described their forebears as more stout but less tall than they, an effect attributed to the “point-eight” gravities of their world, Bentota. Nadika wasn't sure of the link between these gravities and how tall and slender her people were, the scripts asserting that engineers knew such things. The engineers who drove their trains were given to little speech, except perhaps to exhort passengers to board and disembark. Occasionally, the one working train might be heard, its whistle piercing the afternoon air, followed by the admonition, “All aboard!”

Nadika followed him into the temple, the building once brightly painted, but like most the structures, the paint had long since flaked away to expose the bare wood or steel underneath. Atop the temple stood turrets, their onion domes still proudly proclaiming their people's fealty to their Deity, the supreme God Fallah. Some domes remained intact, they too having suffered the depredations of time and vandals.

Inside, a spider web of scaffolding soared overhead, steel girder laced through with the rays of sun penetrating the ill-repaired domes. Hanging from the girders was a hemispherical pendulum, a solid black half-shell against the ceiling, a mere blot, as though light would not penetrate nor reveal the fuscous object.

Nadika set down the repairbot and knelt on her prayer mat. Her father was adamant about praying toward the Sacred Mountain five times daily and had been known to chide her for days if she missed just once. Sometimes, she sought reprieve in repairs that took her far afield, where without his scrutiny she might pray or not as befit her mood.

Mostly not.

And he'd harrumph and scowl if he didn't see evidence of prayer at the knee of her skirt when she returned from her forays.

The bot she set down skittered off and climbed the wall, pulling itself into its cradle.

Adorning the walls were figurines in varied dress and some undress, whose faces ran a gamut of colors, whose bodies varied from plump to slim, short to tall, and in between. On either side of the alter stood statues having the likeness of Nadika and her father, deep-brown skin like tanned leather, the male's bearded face looking oh so like her fathers', and the female's skin so soft and silky brown. These two lead figures were distinct from the other figurines in one other way: each wore a crystal, the older man with a heart-sized crystal dangling at his breastbone, the young woman wearing crystals over her eyes. Their beatific faces were turned toward a nodule on the wall which, although dark now, would burst with brightness in just moments.

Once, Nadika had rushed toward the temple too late to pray, and had stopped outside the door, stunned at the sight she beheld. The onion dome and tower had sprouted spears of light in all directions, the beams either hitting an amusement or reflecting off a series of mirrors until it hit its intended amusement.

Since then, she had watched the hemispherical pendulum and the nodule surreptitiously from her supplication. Had her father caught her, he would have punished her roundly. The light was beamed at the pendulum by the nodule on the wall, she'd seen, and once she got the opportunity, she'd examined the nodule more closely. Like its larger cousin dangling from the ceiling girders, the nodule was hemispherical—what she could see of it—and looked to be opaque except when alight. She couldn't tell by touch or sight what material it was; it felt too smooth to be glass and exerted little friction when she stroked it with a finger.

As she prostrated herself to the flashing God, Nadika cast an eye toward her father.

On his face was a scowl. He jerked his gaze toward the alter, and she knew he'd admonish her for weeks for not giving Fallah her full attention.

Chastised, she felt her cheeks color and wished briefly she were rid of this annoying ritual.

Brilliance flooded the room, and Nadika trembled, afraid that Fallah would smite her for inattention, as the scripts attested the Almighty did for infractions far less severe.

She glanced to one side and saw a beam of light lance the repairbot from the overhead pendulum. The repairbot lit up briefly and then shut off. Nadika hoped it had charged this time, the battery having drained two days ago in spite of its being in its cradle.

The brilliance died, and Nadika sat back on her haunches.

“Praise be the Spirit of Fallah,” her father said, and he was echoed by the pantheon of figurines adorning the walls around them.

One voice squeaked out of time and off pitch.

Nadika looked toward the figurine. Its mouth moved jerkily and its eyes twitched with a strabismus. The repairbot skittered from its cradle, swinging from the girders over to the figurine, and got to work. In minutes, the bot had the figurine back together, then it whistled a sequence of tones.

“Praise be the spirit of Fallah,” the figurine said, its mouth moving normally, its voice pitched almost identically to the others, and the eyes managing the mechanical equivalent to a smile.

Her father left the temple abruptly.

Startled, Nadika followed him.

Outside, he whirled on her. “How dare you keep silent during the sacred incantation?!”

Stars exploded in her left eye, her head spun to the right, and a coppery taste burst in her mouth. Nadika spun and stared at him.

“Oh, Nadika, I'm so—” He reached for her.

“Fallah blast you to hell for all eternity!” she roared, then stalked off, blinking back her tears, nearly trampling the half-exposed gnome before finding the path.

She heard his voice behind her, but kept going, disbelief and betrayal threatening to send tears down her face.

She headed for the east exit, where the sign thanked her for her visit and encouraged her to come again soon, the one working figurine saying something similar in Tamil. The flat, weed-infested access promenade offered no sanctuary. On the far side was a promontory, where a group of well-known characters from the park's major attractions beckoned to non-existent passersby, encouraging them to see “The Most Extravagant Theme Park on Bentota.”

Nadika climbed to the top and nestled herself in between Beruga the black bear and Praveen the panther, and there, she wept disconsolate sobs that she couldn't hold back any longer.

* * *

Nadika saw Sameera coming from a long way away. She crouched even lower between the two figurines, not wanting him to find her like this. He won't understand, she thought, knowing there was nowhere to go.

She'd wept for twenty minutes, then had stared off into the distance for another twenty minutes, wondering what she'd done in a previous life to deserve such a miserable rebirth. Her father would have been shocked to learn of her thinking, devout in his faith in the afterlife.

But Sameera wouldn't. The child of another establishment owner, Sameera Botha spent most of his days as Nadika did, tending to an amusement park whose attractions functioned sporadically, if at all, and struggling to slow the inexorable degradation with inadequate materials and not enough time.

“Hi, Nadika,” he said, stopping at the base of the knoll.

“Hi, Sam,” she said, trying not to look at him, not wanting to acknowledge that she'd been crying.

“Uh, I'll go away if you want me to.”

It was exactly what she wanted, but she didn't have the heart to tell him. He'd be crushed, and she liked him too much to do that to him. “No, I don't want you to do that. I don't know what I do want, but not that.”

Sam looked at the ground, shuffled his feet, looked off into the distance. “Can I come up?”

“Sure.” She nodded, still not looking his direction.

He scrambled up on all fours, and settled on the far side of Beruga's hind leg, peering at her from under the fake fur belly. “Argument with your father again?”

She sighed and nodded. “This time he slapped me.”

Sam caught his breath, his eyes wide. “What did you say to him?”

Nadika scowled.

“Uh, I mean, uh—”

She sighed and waved it away. “It wasn't anything I said or did. It was this.” She gestured over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said, looking glum.

That's what she liked about him. He knew what she was talking about, without her having to explain it. “This” was the constant struggle to keep things working and the constant slide into disrepair of everything around them. And her father's helplessness to stop the slide was as much at cause in their dispute as Nadika's irreverence and apostasy. Nadika felt the same way as her father, hopeless in the losing battle to keep things working, and helpless to stop it.

“And then I asked him when the Lemurians were returning.”

Sam grimaced and nodded.

“I could throw myself off the Sacred Mountain.” Softy she began to weep, not out of despair that her world was literally crumbling around her, not even out of betrayal that her father had struck her, not even at his punctilious rigidity in observing the tenets of his faith.

But because she was losing faith.

Sam moved next to her and pulled her close.

“I don't think they are coming back.” And she wept anew, letting go of all those balmy evenings in which she and her father had sat atop this hill under a sky full of stars and tried to guess which constellation or star was Lemuria, the home planet of their forebears, or what day of the year they'd appear on, or what they'd be wearing, whether they could still understand their language, and how different they would look from Nadika and her father.

Letting go of the lifetime of work she'd devoted to keeping “Bentota World” operating in anticipation of their return, work that she'd started even as a toddler barely able to hold herself upright as she teetered away from her mother's knee.

Nadika recalled feeling disconsolate like this only once before, when her mother left and her father tried to explain to a three-year-old what death was, and why sometimes people had to leave and couldn't come back. By the time she was five, Nadika had finally understood that her mother wasn't coming back, and that's when she'd wept, disconsolate, much as she was doing now.

Because the Lemurians weren't coming back.

Even at five years old, Nadika had known loss, and she had turned her attention to the amusement park, much to her father's relief. She realized now, at age twenty-two, why she had thrown herself so assiduously into the work of maintaining Bentota World.

Because if she worked hard enough, the Lemurians would come back.

And might bring her mother with them.

Sam's arms were strong and solid around her, but Nadika couldn't be consoled, because if the Lemurians weren't coming back, then neither was her mother.

* * *

The stars were bright above them, the Crab Nebula looking more like a burst cocoon than a crab from within its raveled edges. Nadika had always wondered why they called it that.

Hours had passed since Sameera had joined Nadika on the promontory. A chill wind had just picked up, the breeze not cold, but Nadika hadn't eaten since noon, and except for Sam's arms, she had little to protect her from the chill.

“Your father will be worried about you,” Sam said.

Nadika nodded. “And your parents about you.”

“I'm glad you're all right,” came the soft voice of her father. He stood at the base of the promontory, his approach having been silent. “May I speak with you, Child?”

Alone, Nadika knew. “Of course. It's time for Sam to go anyway.” She stood and helped him up, then adeptly climbed down to her father.

“I'm so sorry, Nadika. I shouldn't have struck you. I feel terrible that I did that.”

She took his face in her palms. “Apology accepted. I feel terrible that you did that, too.” And she kissed him on the nose and pulled him to her. “But I understand. We've both been under strain lately.”

“And we have conclave tomorrow evening,” he said, sighing. “I just want to be a good host.” He looked up into the darkness. “You'll join us tomorrow evening, Young Sam?”

“Certainly will, your Excellency. Do you need us to arrive early to help with preparations?”

“You're certainly welcome to, and it would be a blessing to have it. Thanks for offering.”

“Oh, and Negomba Grove sends word,” Sam added. “They're in the middle of a bumper harvest and won't be able to come.”

Nadika felt her heart sink. She'd been looking forward to seeing her distant relatives—Governor Gayan Kitul, his wife Piyumi and their small clan—whom she hadn't seen in a whole year.

“I'm happy for their harvest but sad they won't be here for the gathering.”

“So you can show off your exemplary daughter.”

Her father grinned at her and nodded. “That too. I'm so proud of you, Nadika.”

She smiled, the cold night air no match for the warmth he instilled in her. “Thank you, Father.” She wrapped herself in his arms.

“We'll see you then, Sameera.”

Nadika waved to Sam as he departed, grateful and wishing she could have at least hugged him. Her father would have frowned upon such behavior.

They walked back into Bentota World, the park more brilliant at night, lights adorning many of the attractions. She'd never seen it with all its lights working, and she could only imagine how magnificent it must have looked. She sighed, feeling helpless to restore the amusement park to its former glory.