The House of Esha (RewindTheClassics22)

Part 3: Nighttide

Weeks, perhaps more than a month went by, daylight unhurriedly dwindling, and then Roddie announced that her brother had died.

She said this in passing, like one would announce a new restaurant opening across town. Maybe we should try it sometime and also my brother is dead. How does next Friday sound?

We all mourn in our own ways, and I would hardly dream of interfering in how Roddie coped with Madoc's death. He had, after all, been ill a long time. This was no shock and she had mourned him while he lived. Still, her nonchalant demeaner alarmed me.

"We will bury him below the house with our ancestors." She took me by the arm and led me there to watch as the servants placed a tilanthum casket into a crypt within the lowest part of the house. No natural light seeped into this dank place, not even during the planet's relentless summers. As we bid farewell to Madoc Esha, the lights flickered and then failed. My breath caught as dread spread through me. In my irrational mind, I imagined being trapped down here with hundreds of years of Esha corpses until my own body lay down forever next to theirs.

A few minutes later, the lights resumed, and we climbed out of the house's bowels into the main floors.

More stories, more music. Roddie tried to be upbeat, but her brother's passing seemed to be ever on her mind. She had rebuffed the effects of his death at first, but now her denial broke wide open.

"I wrote myself code," she said. "To make me care less. I shouldn't have done that."

"You're confused, Roddie," I said. "Humans aren't robots. You can't do such things."

"Haven't you been here long enough to know that I can?" She placed her head in her hands and wept. When she'd recovered, she spoke to me though her fingers. "I undid it. I want to feel it all while I still can."

I swallowed. "While you still can?"

"We're nearing the end." Roddie slumped over, resting herself against the couch's arm. "I can't tell you how grateful I am to have you here to witness it. Someone must."

"What am I missing? Why is it the end?"

"Well, it's only one end, really." She raised her head enough to turn her mournful eyes towards me. "In some ways, it's a beginning."

"A beginning? How?"

"Rodesha has gotten what it needs from us."

I was asking her more questions than she could rationally answer, but the inquisitive writer in me couldn't resist another. "What was it that it needed?"

"The same thing we need. The same thing we humans have always done. The same reason we spread ourselves across the galaxies."

"I'm afraid I don't follow."

"You will."

She refused to elaborate but instead asked that we read again about the human warrior named Briana who went up against the most sophisticated robot army of the twenty-second century and against all odds, defeated them.

"That's how you know it's fiction," Roddie told me after I'd finished the tale.

"How's that?"

"Because humans won."

"But we did win, Roddie. Yes, the story of Briana is fiction, but it's based loosely on the Mars Uprising."

"The Mars Uprising?" She lifted her chin. "Oh of course, but that was before."

"Before what?"

"Tilanthum."

After this conversation, a malaise settled over us. Basic tasks accomplished became great achievements. I slept and sat with Roddie. We barely touched the food that was prepared for us. And then, one day, the food failed to materialize.