Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

The Last Day of Éternité - Year 3009 S.E.

Character name meanings

Éternité: Eternity in French

Kamal: Perfection in Arabic كمال

Jama: Council, assembly or congregation in Arabic جَمَاعَة

Abadia: Forever in Arabic أبدية

Imani: Belief in Hausa and Swahili, from Arabic

Khalud: eternity in Arabic خلود

Éternité's Star

Short stiff limbs take Éternité back to her conjured beach chair facing the expanse of water that went on forever, a still rink all dawn that only now begins to wave as winds pick up.

Breeze Point is Éternité's favorite part of Soliara and this is her favorite view.

Legs bend around sticky, cracky knees. She settles her behind down, and after a moment's peace gazing at roll after roll of white tumblers, she picks up a paper to read. The black and white of the airpage she sets against the clear blue sky and the obsolete crimson bridge motos soar high above and over, and she feels the present moment collide with the past and sweep off into a dream of future.

The children always expected Éternité to get grouchy about change, like she would be moaning about flying cars breaking the peace of the sky. Almost seemed to apologize to Grandma for the noises of modernity, the chaos of swooping vehicles and soaring businesses advertising themselves with dance music and pops of lightchromo fireworks. Didn't occur to them that nothing pleased her more than the three millennia of life she had seen roll by and all its pops, blasts, crashes and flashes. The revolutions of wonder tickled her pink. Always had.

The newspaper cracks and crinkles, pulling taut and folding. Block words fill her consciousness. Crisis. Crisis, the headline cracks at her. Pulling it taut again with a snap, she stretches it wide between crinkled fists.

The aged paperwhite skin doesn't bother her. Every few birthdays one of her daughters or granddaughters or nieces will offer to treat her to an eternal youth spell, to which she would reply, "I'm not a child; you won't catch me walking around in one of those childish bodies." This year the eternal youth treatment offered by Kamal, her eldest, came with a twinge of fear flashing in nervous eyes and a pleading voice.

"Mama," Kamal said, "You're making a target of yourself."

Target. Crisis. An age of threatening headlines and fearful words.

Beyond the newspaper, the waves of the bay hushed onto the sand and rocks as forcefully as ever. The crises Éternité had lived through were never termed as such; back in her day, someone in charge tried to calm the people down when society came to one of its many breaking points; back in her day, the whole populace agreed to whisper about shortages and loss, tragedies they all agreed not to talk about out loud.

Silence and mitigating terms smothered the fear of any crisis.

Leaders soundproofed the world against fear-mongering and outrage. The children today didn't know how lucky they were that they could scream at the top of their lungs; they didn't know they could be silenced, didn't know what silence was.

The children today hadn't seen hungry palms held out on corners, hadn't seen the true fear of unknown sounds and booms and crashes in the city night down some alley a block away you would never know the source of, hadn't seen what an age of true disparity looked like when a glance could tell who had and who had not.

Éternité's eyes had seen history take the lives of the loser only after the body shrank to skin and bones, wrinkled to an ancient unlivable specter, and that in a time of the peak of prosperity when to fade away to nothing was so . . . unnecessary. Éternité's gray green eyes had seen it all, and she wasn't giving up those eyes — nor the wrinkles at the corners of them.