He had been waiting so long, but there was nothing. After a thousand years of silence, he began to worry that the message had arrived at some other place, a place he was not, and he exhausted himself in a frantic search, staring into the faces of foreign suns and the hearts of far-flung galaxies, never certain that he hadn’t just missed it, that his chance was gone. Then, gradually convinced that the moment of contact had passed while he had been away from his post, he turned back in a frenzy to examine every inch of the globe for hidden meaning, from the sand of the deepest seabed, to the shape of the night sky in every season and from every conceivable vantage point.
He had never heard of his kind going mad, but after that came a dark time—years of delirium and confinement, and being cared for by small, short-lived beings while he raved and prophesied. They scuttled around him, retreating from his gaze, and shying away from the things he sometimes whispered to them about themselves. Once, he stared deep into the eyes of one of his warders and listed the man’s every deed and misdeed from childhood, as the other inmates and caretakers looked on in horrified silence. That one tried to kill him later, in revenge, or to preserve some last petty secret. But the man died himself instead, gasping in ecstatic agony as his soul was forced from his body, the syringe dropping to the floor with a distant clatter.
He came to himself in that moment, and realized the truth: the message had been lost, or had never been sent, and it was up to him. The confining jacket dropped away from him as he bent over the body of his would-be murderer. It was the work of an instant to free the man’s blood from his body, and then he was daubing it in crimson swirls and gouts on the padded wall. When he had finished, he stared at his work: a message; a vortex; a door. The message said: The time is now. Come home. The vortex beckoned, the door gaped. Without a backward look, he stepped through.
Behind him, the door closed. The vortex quieted, and the message unraveled. The room was still; the corpse pale and cold. A forgotten masterpiece dried slowly on the wall.
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