Archive-name: JourEntr/j999-999.txt
Archive-author: Elf Matheiu Sternberg
Archive-title: The Last Journal Entry


     She sighed, slowly passing a single finger over the control plate
and dropping the shutters, closing out the dark moonscape of Pindam,
closing out the universe.  She felt it nearly impossible to accept all
that she had learned that day, and she knew somehow that Ken had meant
it that way, that it was supposed to be nearly impossible.

     And he wasn't here to ask, anymore.  As the shutters closed so too
she closed out Ken, who hadn't been able to accept the last dying sight
of Pin and had followed Pin into that oblivion.  And so she had buried
him that morning.  Burial.  The word made her grimace, even though
nobody was there to see it.  It seemed so archaic, the concept of
burial.  And she would have preferred a burial at sea, but there were no
more seas.

     "Dave?" she asked for the tenth time that day, no longer frustrated
when he failed to answer her.  She had gone down to Cybernetics One and
checked the diagnostics; everything was running to specifications, but
Dave just wasn't talking to her.  Someone, though, was watching out for
her-- life support was still running and doors were still opening.

     "Oenone?"

     The voice stunned her, but only for less than a single firing of
what passed in her anatomy for neurons; she whirled, mentally commanding
every weapon she could remember extant in the Command Center to bear on
the source of that voice.  "Freeze."

     The source of the voice was a young human woman, her apparent age
indicative of eighteen years, not an uncommon age for someone to pause
their aging at.  Her features were distinctly Terran Asian, about 160
centimeters tall with small breasts, dark hair, and just a hint of
softness in her belly.  Like herself, the woman wore no clothing.  The
woman smiled and said, "You probably don't want to shoot me, Oenone."

     With a slow snarl Oenone said, "Who are you?"

     "You don't remember me, do you?"

     Oenone thought for a moment.  "I have never met you before."

     "Yes, you have.  Think back, try and remember the voice, Oenone.
We spent a few weeks together, a long time ago.  If I remember
correctly, you've moved up the timeline pretty slowly, for a Terran, and
you're about seven thousand years old now.  For me, it was about three
billion years."

     Puzzled, Oenone asked, "That means you could be just about
anybody."  Deliberately punching each syllable, Oenone asked "Who are
you?"

     "We met in Ken's car, remember?  Close your eyes and recall my
voice, O.  Back them I was a metallic cylinder 65 cents in diameter and
40 cents high."

     Oenone blinked, the memory flooding her suddenly.  "You... you're
Fawn Destiniere'?"

     "You do remember!"

     Oenone sagged.  "It's hard to forget the lady who saved my life,
but I am not convinced.  You could still be anybody, anybody who gave
Ken's Journals even a passing glance.  But it doesn't matter anymore,
there are no secrets worth keeping and I don't care who you are.  You're  
probably the last voice I shall ever hear.  I'm not sure I haven't gone
insane."

     "When reality is whatever we make it--"  The girl paused, "within
limits-- insanity becomes a pretty slippery thing to define.  But you're
not insane.  And whether you believe me or not, I would like you to call
me 'Fawn'.  It would make me comfortable, and would give you something
to call me other than 'Hey you.'"

     "Very well," Oenone agreed.  "'Fawn,' then."

     Fawn smiled.  "You're right, though," she said as she walked across
the control room, "I am the last voice you're ever going to hear.  Even
Dave has stopped working."

     "'Stopped working?'  Is that what you call it when one of your own
dies?"

     "I'm not particularly artificial, O."  She smiled.  "Ken's peculiar
idiosyncrasy of giving his AI's such intense self-identities cut both
ways.  Dave shut down all of his higher functions when he was sure Ken
wasn't coming back.  Ken might have known how to reactivate him; I think
the database is intact, but I haven't checked.  And what about you?"

     "What about me?"

     "Well, don't you think it rather odd that the last person left
alive in the universe is an ancient Greek water goddess stuck on an
otherwise airless ball of rock?"

     It was Oenone turn to smile.  "Not goddess, nymph.  Why does
everybody insist on elevating me to the status of my father?"

     Fawn shrugged and stepped even closer to her.  "Perhaps because
you're the only one left alive from that particular brood of
self-proclaimed deities."

     "You know, ages ago that kind of statement would have infuriated
me."

     "I know," Fawn replied.

     "There was only one real god, wasn't there?  Ken was the only real
god the universe had that they could reach out and touch."

     Fawn shook her head, a small frown crossing her lips.  "Ken wasn't
a god.  He wasn't even an agent of a god."

     Oenone laughed.  "He did a lot more than the Olympian Gods ever
did!"

     "Did he?  The Olympian Gods got the Greeks through that period when
they were most needed, during the breakdown of the bicameral self-
identity most of humanity had.  Ken got all of sentience through the
next step, the 'what do we do now?' step.  Maybe he deserves the title,
then, but that's not the real point.  Ken was a visionary, and his
vision was one that maintained his very human spirit while realizing the
wildest potentials of whatever tools the universe saw fit to drop in his
lap."

     "He was also very selfish."

     "Is it selfish, to want to live as long as you possibly can, and to
see your children do the same?  How badly did it hurt when Pin could no
longer keep Pendor viable?"

     "You know the answer to that.  He died this morning."

     "I know.  He finally did it, he finally opted out because there was
no reason for him to stay.  It was a hard life, Oenone, watching all of
his friend, all of his lovers die-- not because of him but just because
he insisted on holding onto life so long and holding all to all those he
did love so very hard."

     "Even at the cost of the rest of the universe."

     "So he stole a star or two to reverse Pin's local entropy.  He
never stole from a sentient race, and those stars he did steal he stole
early on, before the universe was your complete and utter playground.
Maybe it seems wrong to you for him to keep those particular playgrounds
to himself, but I don't see anything wrong with it."  Fawn glanced over
the  control panel to her left and typed a few commands.  "There."

     "What did you do?"

     "I accelerated the temporal differential.  We're going through
time, Oenone, through the second half of the universe."

     "How high did you set it?"

     "A couple of billion to one, I think.  Not sure.  As high as it
would go.  Forward time travel... you never did discover how to go
backwards."

     "Ken thought it was impossible, even though he knows he did it with
you."

     "It is impossible.  I suspend the rules completely."

     "Where are you taking us?" Oenone asked.  "I thought there was
nothing to go to."

     "The universe has two halves," Fawn started.  "The expansion and
the contraction.  The contraction had been going on for a short while
when we met this morning, as the few burning neutron stars just didn't
have enough energy to keep the expansion going.  Except for you, me, and
the fusion plant bank downstairs, the universe is dead, Oenone.
Heat-dead.  A static three-degrees Kelvin all the way across."  She
paused.  "We're going to the end of the cycle, Oenone, and to it's
beginning again.  We're going to the Big Bang."

     Oenone shivered.  "I don't want to go there."

     "I know.  But it's the only place to go, Oenone.  It's you, me,
this rock, and dust-- there is no place else to go."

     "Maybe I'll follow Ken instead.  See if there's anything beyond
this universe, this life."

     Fawn smiled.  "It's nice to have that kind of option."

     "What do you mean?"

     "I have to go there."

     "What?  To the Bang?"

     Fawn nodded.  "It's my assigned role."

     "Fawn, if it isn't too much to ask, what are you?"

     "I'm a... a tool, if you will.  My set purpose, as far as I know,
is to attend the end of the universe."

     "A tool?  Whose?"

     "I don't know.  All is know is my job is to be here, now."

     Oenone looked puzzled again.  "The why all this bit with Ken?"

     "Well," Fawn said, holding up a finger, "I wanted to have some fun,
and whoever's tool I am allowed me that privilege, with Ken.  Because it
made my assigned task easier.  All the task of building Pendor, of
teaching Ken gengineering... all that was secondary to the real reasons
why I came to him."

     "Ken claims he gave you to himself in an temporal loop."

     Fawn smiled.  "That's his version.  Which is true.  He did, but
only because that's what I wanted to have happen.  This building, this
facility, is why Ken and I were thrown together-- I see the question in
your eyes, and the answer is still 'I don't know.'"

     "So what now?  I just get to follow Ken and leave you here?"

     "That's your decision, O.  But I would ask you for a favor, before
you go."

     "And that is?"

     "Oenone... I don't exist very much.  That sounds weird, I know, but
take it as faith-- I don't exists very much.  Most of my life I spend
over and over as Ken's library, time machine and life support.  And this
is one of those rare occasions where I get to spend my life as an
organic, as a person."  She smiled slightly and reached out to touch
Oenone's skin.  "I don't get to do this much, to touch another person,
or to talk to her.  Oenone..."  Her eyes were wide and sad and hopeful.
"Would you make love to me?"

     Oenone returned the touch, two fingers tracing along Fawn's
collarbone.  "I always wondered how I would thank you if I ever met you
again."

     "I can't think of a better way," the brown-haired girl replied, her
eyes smiling.

     "Neither can I."  Oenone leaned over and kissed Fawn, her lips
meeting soft warm flesh that she felt she never wanted to let go, even
knowing that eventually she would have to.  And part they did, Oenone
looking down into Fawn's eyes.  Oenone tried to organize her feelings
and failed; she couldn't reconcile the feeling that she was the older,
more experienced woman, knowing that Fawn had to be much older, much
more different, than she.  "Fawn, come with me to the pool," she
suggested.

     Fawn nodded.

     Oenone tool Fawn's hand in her own and led her out of the command
center, down a hallway and into the rock-carved grotto, a plant-lined
room with a large, warmed pool as its centerpiece.  She slid into the
water, sighing gently as she did so.  Fawn followed.

     Oenone touched Fawn's shoulder gently, turning the smaller woman to
face her.  "Fawn, can I ask you a favor, since you're asking me for
one?"

     "Anything."

     "When you leave this room, I'm going to stay, with my last pool of
water, and the plants, and the life.  I don't want to be with you...
watching the universe die isn't my job.  Would you... turn off the life
support when you close the door behind you."

     "I... Yes."

     "I can't imagine how you feel, Fawn, but I want to stay here,
because this place is still a part of Pendor, and still a part of the
house where the happiest memories of my long and eventful life are.  I'm
just going to sink into the water and take my form as water, and I just
want to freeze solid that way.  It's a natural, static state for a water
goddess, and that's how I want to go."

     Fawn nodded, tears forming in her eyes.  She sagged, laying her
head against Oenone's ample chest.  "I hate this job.  I hate this
damned impulse that forces me to be here and to go on."

     Oenone wrapped her arms around Fawn and stroked her gently, feeling
the skin sliding under her fingers.  "Fawn... it's alright.  You're
right, I didn't want to be the last person left alive in the universe,
but I think I learned Ken's lesson better than even he did.  I don't
want to die, but I just don't want to go where you're going."

     Fawn nodded, rubbing her cheek against Oenone's chest.  "I
understand.  even if I didn't want to understand, I do.  I think it's
kind of sad about you and I.  I only get to know you for two days,
separated by thousands or millions of years, depending on how you look
at it."

     Oenone sat down and pulled Fawn into her lap, pressing her lips to
the younger girl's softly.  Fawn kissed back, seemingly desperate as she
did so.  Oenone's fingers ran gently over Fawn's chest, caressing her
nipples, teasing her.  Fawn squirmed in her lap, moaning.  "Ohh..."

     "You're very sensitive," Oenone said.

     "One give from whoever sends me; she apparently didn't intend for
me to be a numb and boring lover."

     "'She?'"

     "I just needed a pronoun...  there are only women left, 'she'
seemed appropriate."

     Oenone nodded.  "You could never be boring to me anyway, Fawn.
With only one chance to hold you and handle you, you could never be
anything but fascinating, Fawn, even if you were completely
unresponsive."

     "Really?" Fawn asked, hugging Oenone tightly.

     "Well, if you were completely unresponsive I would wonder why I
bothered, but apparently you're not."

     Fawn shivered gently, returning the strokes she was receiving, if
slightly awkwardly.  "No, I guess not."  She caressed Oenone's oversize
breasts carefully, holding each one gently underwater and appreciating
the buoyant weight of Oenone's flesh.  "You're so beautiful."

     "So are you, Fawn, so are you."  Oenone's fingers slid down between
Fawn's thighs and caressed the light fur she found there, sliding her
fingers down along the legs and over her knees.  She smiled and said,
"Even if we are the only people left, and who are we to judge what is
beautiful and what isn't?"

     "We are," Fawn said, holding one breast up far enough to expose the
nipple to the air and taking it between her lips, sucking and licking.
Oenone moaned softly, her nipples hardening instantly in the cool air.
Fawn bit gently in Oenone's pliant flesh, leaving soft teethmarks as she
wend her way across Oenone's chest from one nipple to the other, her
fingers kneading and caressing as she did so.

     Oenone was surprised at how vociferous Fawn was in her attentions,
in her determination.  "Slow down, Fawn."

     "I don't want to," Fawn said, breathing against Oenone's skin.  "I
want to live, O, I want to get it all in, now."  She descended beneath
the water, attacking Oenone's belly with her mouth, teeth.  Oenone
laughed slightly at the tickling sensation, but inside she felt hurt at
the request Fawn had made of her, the demand to get all of life, even
her life, lived within one hour, one day.  She reached down into the
water and shifted to her pure water form, dissolving under Fawn's
caresses, to reform once more behind the oriental girl and pull her up
to the surface.  "I don't want you to drown."

     Fawn reached back behind her and help onto Oenone's thighs.  "You
don't have to worry.  I won't.  I don't think I can."

     Oenone smiled, then picked Fawn up and dropped her in a kneeling
position on the stone bench set underwater, her buttocks just barely
above the level of the water.  "I don't think I want to find out.  I
just want you to feel good."  She caressed Fawn's thighs gently,
staring, as she was, directly at Fawn's rounded butt and lightly furred
cunny.  She leaned in and licked, once, carefully, at Fawn's slit.

     Fawn shivered.  "Please."  Oenone licked harder, sliding her tongue
in as deeply as she could, pressing the lips of her mouth to lips of
Fawn's cunt, sucking at the girl's sweet juices.  Fawn's moans were
distinct and punctuated, and Oenone thought it sad that nobody but her
would ever be there to hear them.  "Lick me harder," Fawn sighed.

     Oenone complied; her mastery of the element water was as powerful
and as significant as ever.  She no longer needed worshippers or totems
to be what she was when she was first saved.  As she dipped her tongue
deeper down between Fawn's thighs and up against her clitoris, two
fingers slid in and up against Fawn's cervix; she need only to pull more
water up and into her and she slowly enlarged them, adding more volume
to herself, pressing up and filling the young girl whose mons she so
enthusiastically licked and sucked.  Fawn leaned over the edge of the
stones and lay her head down on the soft grass, moaning ever more
loudly.  Oenone attacked her with her own ferocious lust, her own
efforts feeling as if they might cause herself to orgasm as they reached
for Fawn's inevitable climax.

     Fawn had other ideas.  "Stop it!" she moaned suddenly shifted her
hips out of Oenone's reach, slipping away from Oenone's probing fingers.
She turned to face the water nymph, her face flushed.  "I want to watch
you, too."

     "Then sit up and watch me.  Or would you like me to make love to
you like a man?"  Oenone smiled.

     "You can do that?"

     "I am, as you pointed out, the child of deity."  With a slight
effort, but more than she usually found necessary, she shifted her form;
her breasts sank into her body like melting ice, and between her thighs
a penis seemed to grow out of the running water she was made of.  The
rest of her body shifted as well, the very obvious feminine
characteristics fading from sight to be replaced by a broader chest with
a more defined musculature.  Despite this, the effect was very
androgynous, and Oenone full well knew it, and liked it.  His long blond
hair flowed down around his back in copious streams; his face retained
the high cheekbones and soft feature he had when he was female.  "What
do you think?"

     "I.. I don't know.  Do you want to make love to me like that?"

     Oenone smiled and walked through the water with as little effort as
Fawn would exert walking through air.  "I think I would.  I was made to
be everything Paris could ever dream of, except for freedom.  And it may
sound kind of silly, Fawn, but despite the 'who cares' attitude most of
Pendor had, I tend to be very heterosexual, and since you can't change,
I did."

     "What makes you think I can't change?" Fawn asked, reaching out
with some confidence to touch Oenone's belly.  His cock twitched gently
at her touch.

     "Can you?" Oenone asked, surprised.

     "I don't know," Fawn admitted.  "Doesn't mean I can't... I wouldn't
be surprised if I could.  After all, the last time I looked I was a
steel cylinder."  Fawn smiled and slid her hand down over Oenone's
smooth, uncut cock.  His muscles tensed under her touch.  "You still
look very feminine."

     "I know," Oenone admitted.  His voice sounded deep, even to him.
"Ken liked this look, although that's not something he would often
admit."

     Fawn canted her head to one side; among furries it had been a
common expression of confusion, and Oenone found it fetching in Fawn.
"Very rarely," Fawn said.  "It's not in any of my records."

     Oenone reached out and began to caress Fawn's nipples softly, his
fingers closing and twisting gently.  "I think it was a late
development; sometime around his first millenia, when he met Sufi."

     "That might explain it," Fawn admitted.  She rubbed the head of his
cock in the palm of her hand, and Oenone groaned loudly.  "Like that?"
Fawn asked.

     "Hurts," he said.  "Feels good, but it hurts, too."

     "It's making you hard," Fawn teased him gently.  "Lick me some
more."

     Oenone grinned and settled further into the water as Fawn vaulted
out and sat on the edge of the pool.  He leaned in between her parted
thighs and began licking insistently.  "I want to make you come," he
said.

     "And I want you to make me wet," Fawn replied, the last word dying
in a moan of pleasure.  "That's good."

     "Good," Oenone said, smiling.  He held her cunt open with the index
finger of each hand and licked the pink labia before his eyes, caressing
her clitoris with his lips.

     Fawn kicked slightly in the water, her legs trembling with every
direct flicker of his tongue, releasing tiny whimpers of new pleasure.
She reached down and took Oenone's head in her hands and lifted him up.
"Make love to me, O."

     "I thought that's what I was doing," he said as he leaned up over
her, his straight erection pressing up between them.  With a single
gesture Oenone pressed his cock downward into her channel, and a gentle
push buried him deep within her cunt.  "Yes," they both sighed, almost
simultaneously.

     Oenone laughed and began to stroke back and forth.  His cock,
deliberately sized to standards he had established when exploring her
earlier, filled her and pushed her.  He started hard and never let up,
making love to her violently; the fact that he was standing in a meter
of water never slowed him down, and if anything it gave him a faerie's
strength and impetus.  Fawn gripped his shoulders and moaning, pressing
her head forward against his broad chest.

     His cock slid in and out, a mercifully unforgiving engine of her
pleasures as he bucked between her legs.  Fawn let go of his arms and
fell back against the carefully maintained grass that surrounded the
pool, her legs dangling in the water.  Oenone followed her down, helping
her from dropping too hard, and picked up speed, making love ever more
powerfully than before.  Fawn moaned incoherently, the pleasure on her
face more than clear to him.  Oenone smiled and pressed harder still,
his own orgasm imminent.  Wordless, he pressed deeper into her, his
complete mastery of water and everything it pervaded giving him every
last thing he wanted to know about she was going to climax, instantly,
before those thoughts were destroyed in the screaming crash of their
simultaneous orgasm.  He pounded her cunt over and over as he came,
shooting into her even he knew not what as she thrashed, her back
arching and her mouth open with a quiet scream.

     He held himself up over her, letting her catch her breath as she
panted and gasped.  Then he lay down, and they were quiet as his
erection shrank and slipped out of her.  He concentrated for a moment
more and slowly shifted back to his prior, more common form as a woman.

     Fawn sat up, slowly, accepting Oenone's grasp to help her.  "I
think... I think that was all worth it.  Thank you, Oenone."

     "You're welcome," Oenone replied, her voice returning to its
normal, sweet and seductive pitch.  She sat up and settled back into the
pool, reaching out a hand again as she did so.  Fawn took it and allowed
herself to be pulled into Oenone's lap.

     The say, looking at each other, and Fawn shivered.  "You want me to
go, don't you?"

     Oenone shrugged, the expression on her face one of resignation.
"I've lived a long life, much, much, longer than the one offered even by
my life as a child of Poseidon.  I've had more than my fair share.  And
I'm not going to die, Fawn, I'm just going to go back into the water and
be frozen; I had sisters who did this every winter, every year, for
three centuries."

     Fawn nodded and climbed out of the pool.  She knelt down then and
gave Oenone one last, long, lingering kiss.  As they parted, Oenone said
"Stay a moment."

     Fawn knelt, holding still, as Oenone closed in on her cheek and
kissed her there, her tongue licking gently.  As she settled back into
the water, she said, "The salt, the water of your tears tells more about
you than I think either of us will ever know, and if I survive this
cycle, I shall never forget you, Fawn."

     Fawn nodded.  "I'll never forget you, either.  Goodbye, Oenone,
child of Poseidon."

     "Goodbye, Fawn Destiniere'."

     Fawn stood and slowly walked towards the door, not looking back,
but she knew that the sound she heard, the soft chime of running water,
was Oenone dissolving into the pool.  There was something about the way
all this was happening that made her want to cry, and she did, quietly,
as she walked down the hallway and passed the modular bulkhead.  She
closed the airlock-level door behind her, and typed in a sequence of
commands to deactivate life support, temperature regulations first.  The
lights shifted slowly from blue to red (green had been avoided, she
knew, because Kennet had been slightly colorblind, a condition he had
never had corrected) and as she watched the temperature dropped on the
other side of the door, the heat dissapating into a jealously cold and
lonely universe.  She wiped the tears away, but more came after them.

     She walked into the Command Center, turning off the rest of the
base as she did so; she required little of the life support mechanisms
and entertainments scattered throughout the facility.  Somewhere down
there, under the rock, lay hidden the biogene tanks that had given birth
eventually to literally hundreds of species and millions of individuals.
Also, somewhere under there was the old interface she had used to build
Halloran, back when she had been a computer herself.

     She didn't know where the knowledge to do whatever is was she
needed to do came from, but every step of the way when she needed to
know what this button or that lever did, the knowledge came to her
without question or comment.  She smiled gently and waited.

     Time passed.

     How much time, even Fawn was not sure.  She spent very little of
her time actually thinking, but there came a time, when the lights in
the white and plastic Command Center had faded, darkened, and gone out,
when she became aware that the universe had ended, and that it existed
only in two separate and disparate forms- the singularity that had once
been everything else, and this facility, that was still in the form
everything else had once been, separated by that perversion of the laws
of physics, the temporal disunity.  And whatever was prodding her along
made her aware that the mass of the facility stuck within the temporal
disunity field was all that was required to start the whole thing over
again.  The universe had existed because the singularity that started it
all was only slightly overburdened with being; any less, she knew, and
the Big Bang would never have happened.

     But along with this knowledge was a realization of her purpose.
The Power That Be (for lack of a better term, she thought) preferred
this particular form of the universe that had been, with the four basic
interatomic forces and the nature of things as she had known them and as
she was constructed.  The influx of material such as hers into that
process when "everything else" had been compressed into the reality
astrophysicists had referred to as "The Time of Dragons" would influence
the next Big Bang, making at least the initial process resemble the
previous one, and she was to be the agent of that decision.  All she had
to do was press one control button.  That button, she thought, looking
down at the control panel with eyes that had never required photons to
see.

     But, it occurred to her, there should be something said.  Something
dramatic was always said at momentous events, and the heralding of a new
universe was certainly a momentous event, at least in the histories of
the people she had most interacted with, and influencing the future of
the next version of the universe certainly qualified as a momentous
event.

     But what to say?  What to say, what to say, she kept wondering.
Her mind cast back to the Hebrew Book of The Dead, the tradition from
which Kennet had come from, and since he had been the human she had had
the most interaction with, maybe it was something from that tradition
she could use.

     But what?  The words in that text that heralded Creation certainly
were dramatic, but they weren't quite right.  It wasn't true that light
came first.  But then what?  The words repeated themselves in her mind
over and over, and as she concentrated her thoughts were interrupted,
and from that interruption came the perfect thing to say; not four
words, as recorded in the text, but three, were necessary.  Only three
words.

     She said, "Let there be."

     She pressed the button.

     And there was.


--
"The Last Journal Entry"
The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., And Related Tales
are (c) 1989, 1992 Elf Matheiu Sternberg.  May be freely distributed by
cybernetic media; hardcopies are limited to single printings for
personal use.
--