A Just Farewell Read Online Free Page B

world.
     
    Twenty-four hours ago, she had felt young in
her middle age. Now, she felt old, and she feared looking into a
mirror lest she discovered that her lustrous, black hair had
overnight turned completely gray, or that wrinkles had gripped to
the corners of her eyes and mouth until her skin looked like
crumpled paper. She feared her body chased to keep pace with how
the weight of the world aged her soul.
     
    She had cleared her appointment calendar the
moment she returned from the emergency session of governors held on
the castle of New Paris and instantly retreated into her space
station’s grand opera and cinema house, a majestic work of
architecture that attracted guests from all fifty-one of the
castles orbiting old Earth. Kelly always loved escaping into the
cinema, and she considered the private sessions her title granted
her with the cinema’s large screen the only benefit of her office
she truly enjoyed. Whenever the stresses of her station taxed her,
Kelly found the time to take a private seat in the front row of
that cinema and watch a black and white movie of how Earth had been
before the rise of the zealot savages, to smile at one of the
colorful musicals films that celebrated a lost time. Kelly thought
it incredible that such music and dancing, such romance and love,
once existed on the planet’s surface. She would never have believed
it if the builders responsible for the great castles hadn’t
possessed the wisdom to archive the films that documented such a
time, and watching those movies filled with children playing in
green parks always gave her hope that the influence of the clerics
could one day be eradicated so that the old world of laughter and
mirth could be resurrected from the ashes that currently covered
ancient Earth.
     
    But she knew nothing could ever be recovered
should she give her approval for the ultimate answer. She knew that
the world that smiled upon her from the flickering, silver screen
would never be anything more than a projector’s light the moment
the castles instituted that plan that promised the destruction of
the zealot savages.
     
    Trespassing light flooded into the cinema as
the visitor for whom she waited opened one of the entrances behind
her to enter the dark theater.
     
    “I’m down here, General Harrison,” and Kelly
raised her hand to help the general as his eyes adjusted to the
darkness. “I’ve saved a seat for you down here in the front
row.”
     
    Kelly felt her grip tighten on her seat.
General Harrison had immediately answered her request for a
consultation. He had set off from the military offices housed in
the Black Rock space station the moment she asked to speak with
him, and while the general traveled to reach Neo Madrid, Kelly had
waited in her cherished cinema and done her best to calm her nerves
by focusing her attention on what the world had once been.
     
    “I’m grateful for your invitation to your
castle, Governor Chen.”
     
    General Harrison smiled very softly in his
crisp military uniform, the ribbons from his tours fighting against
the savages on Earth gleaming softly as the ghosts on the movie
screen flickered. Kelly stood from her seat, and she winced at a
dull ache that had settled into her knees, making her wonder if
such discomfort was yet another indication of the years the
decision facing her had overnight thrown upon her petite figure.
The general accepted her hand, and Kelly was surprised by the
warmth of the hand the general offered to her. She had expected the
general’s fingers to feel like stone.
     
    Kelly smiled. “I feel I should be thanking
you, General. You’ve answered my request very quickly.”
     
    “I wish I could’ve arrived sooner,” and the
general waited for Kelly to sit first before he followed, “but each
castle has a security checkpoint now that forces the space tram to
stop at every entrance platform. They put me through a security
scan at every stop. Even my uniform couldn’t slip me past the