At night ... At night he had haunted Andrei Iorga as an uneasy girlfriend, ruined by jealousy, a mistress who pulls you in her claws and would never want to let go, suffocating with the possessiveness of her love. Likewise, the dream, an amalgam of images from which he remembered only some faded and incoherent flickers ... A tunnel and some strange creatures, which he struggled to remind, the sweat lion, but as he came back, the beings of the night were lost, and they were lost.

The thirty -two -year -old man got his hands on the edge of the bed in which Irene was still sleeping. Looking at his young wife, he wondered if he would love him again or if he would be forgotten, finding another to warm the sheets he left cold. He got up agitated, trying not to make a joke. There was no point in waking her up, but it was hard for him to deviate his mind from all those questions that have been fruit for some time. Irene was the light of his eyes, and the fact that he could have lost her forever torture him, but had told nothing to his wife, nothing to show him if he had not found it in their return house, or if the yala had changed and the keys given to another. He could not ask them to wait for him, when he had decided their fate as a judge who is sentenced to death. Ever since Irene had notified that, despite their love, he would leave, he felt like a horse, but in the depths of his heart he knew that there was no other way, not when the space has always shouted. Such an adventure was once alive, and Andrei Iorga had expected this chance, in which he had felt that life for an astronaut is empty without a journey in the dark abysses of the cosmos.

With a typile walk, he entered the gray-blue marble bath brought just from Carrara, and let go of the hot water, waiting for the shower's glass window to get over before entering the hot jet, an ordinary ritual for those moments when he wanted to enter the safe area. He needed her now, more than ever, having to forget what left behind. The time of concerns and refusals had long passed.

As it was washed, as if hoping that the pains would go with the water, the glass door opened and Irene appeared empty before him-the same gazelle body, with round breasts, which he had kissed so many times that he had lost the count, the long soft hair and the black eyes, which had been in the night, to all the enigmas of his world. That forgetfulness was now burning him more than any word that Irene could have said, for two reasons: in them he saw the love that his wife still wore, knowing at the same time that she did not have all those answers she had thought long ago. On some, only the space could whisper them ...

The woman joined him, but Andrei turned his back and continued his ritual as if he were alone in that cabin. Irene grabbed her in her arms, kissing her shoulders, and the tender movements of her lips were reborn the love that was ended. Although she still wanted it, she did not respond in any way to her calls, and finally she gave up and returned to the bedroom, leaving him even more than before. He wanted to take her over to his ceremony, but soon he had to reach the space, so he had only to accept his fate, knowing too well what his actions would lead. Irene wouldn't wait for him anymore ...

Half an hour later, he left the villa, haunted by the quarrel with it, who had only thrown in front of him about his indescribable selfishness.

- You completely forgot about our plans, our life, everything we lived and built together! And for what? For Kendara! The dream beyond nothing ...

Her last words were hanging hard, they had been harsh, words thrown with anger, which you would like to pretend to mean nothing, but which means everything. Her love was transformed into hatred, unable to understand the reasons why she was going to climb the rock: the desire to make part of the great adventures of the world, to be among those who had marked humanity, leaving her name in history, just as they had done so much, who had fascinated him since his childhood, when he had read about Alexandru Macedon, Vikings, colonizers, but also about the first man who had walked on the moon - Neil Armstrong. Here he will be like them, like him, entering the territories of Kendarea ... And Irene had not understood ...

He climbed in Bob-Mobil, a means of transport on the rails, at supersonic speeds, which would wear it from home to space in an hour, from where it will dissolve in the Great Universe, looking for Kendara, once discovered as Kepler-186f. At the order of the global Spatial Agency, bringing together the greatest powers of the cosmos, on that mysterious planet was set up new living places, as it had happened on Mars, Titan or Europe, to avoid a third world war, imminent due to overpopulation and lack of diet.

As the colonized territories were too few for a population that was growing, a decision had been made by which living areas similar to Earth would be inspected. If the tests were to pass, they will be inhabited. Only one problem had greeted the Agency - much of the new planets discovered were at the age of years, so that all the efforts had been directed to create a sufficiently fast and powerful missile to allow the journey to those worlds. Thus he had been born the Roc, so different from what humanity had seen before ... Then the period of the astronaut selection had followed. They had presented themselves with the thousands, they had passed with the hundreds, among them, and Andrei Iorga, entered the agency's ranks eight years ago.

Bob-Mobil stopped. Finally, he had reached the launch port in Houston. Descended from the vehicle and enters the headquarters of the space. Almost everyone involved in the mission had arrived, except for Juri Karkov and Madeline Lowe, the other two members of his crew. About a month after the preparations for the mission had begun, the two had gained the habit of delaying each time one after another at a short enough distance to get into suspicion. Everyone knew they had a relationship, despite the fact that they had never confirmed it - it was not difficult to observe the teasing and insinuations, often even during workouts. If some said that they would return from the mission, Andrei did not think it was something serious, but rather a relationship that involves a lot of love and a little word, especially since none of them believed in love, which they said is just an illusion to give meaning to humanity. But he had not agreed with the two. To be honest, he did not like them from the beginning, with their beliefs that contradicted themselves in his own, who until yesterday swore his eternal love for Irene. In the break of the head it would not have recognized that love cannot overcome everything or that it can indeed a deceit. He didn't even know. He had contradicted him so many times that he had lost the string, and considered inappropriate to give them justice, especially since he would have been attributed to another team, not to that strange couple, who will probably be more concerned about other and other love, not mission. But he will endure anything for his dream ...

He started for the locker room, traveling the long corridor, caught in his thoughts. By entering the room, he was looking for his closet in which he would leave his clothes to wear his astronaut suit. The room, with banks, nails and wardrobes placed symmetrically, was in full order and silence. The loneliness of the room reminded him of the solitude he would live in space ... Then he told himself that it was not time to think of such stupid, he had to stay with his mind.

He stripped off the blue shirt and black fabric pants, carefully putting his clothes in the closet. They will wait for ten years in that locker room, maybe they will be the only ones who will wait for him if Irene leaves. And it will surely do it. To wait for some clothes! At least humanity will know his name and then he will not be so bad ...

As he dresses the costume, the pain seemed to fade, and when Madeline, the woman with red hair and green eyes like the leaf of acacia trees, she appeared, her attention was distracted by the geological one who came to conquer her prey. Ten minutes later, Juri, the biologist, enters the locker room with nonchalant. At the juries everything was easy, relaxed, as an incursion on the realms of opium, although the man had never used any variety of narcotic.

- Ready to mission? he asked, as soon as he began to take off his clothes.

Otherwise we were not here, Andrei kept his thoughts for him.

- Norm! Madeline replied with a smile on her lips, making Juri's eye as she was pulling her combination, and Iorga remembered the first smile thrown by Irene at a rock concert where they had met.

I immediately came out of the locker room, and when the other two finished, they turned to the launch area. Unlike the viewers arriving to see their departure (all kinds of officials and the press who took care of the mission information to reach all corners of the globe and in the new colonies), the ship was silent and as wonderful as the mythological bird after which it had been baptized.

Andrei looked at the ship with eyes. His beloved rock! How much the moment had expected, the moment when the dream became a reality, after all those hours of simulations, and training, and preparations, and the moment was not as imagined. The happiness of departure in space was mourned by the abandonment produced.

First they entered the aircraft Madeline Lowe and Juri Karkov, who changed one or another, excited about the imminent entry into history, Andrei followed them in silence. Then the cosmonauts took over their positions, checking their costumes so that there was no sealing problem. While set their seat belts, the radio was heard the instructions of the control tower that communicated their conditions for leaving the land. Everything was okay.

- Received! Andrei communicates to the team from the ground.

-ROC-1, you have the agreement for take-off!

Andrei gave the starting orders, soon the ship was flying, more masterful than any bird. As they rose, the cosmonauts caught themselves in their thoughts. Madeline remembered his tanned cat, Shanina, whose name had been given after a Russian sniper that had fought in World War II. He hoped that his mother would feed her daily, as she had promised her when she had announced that she would go in space. Initially, she had asked her to take her to her, but she had no discussion, being categorically refused on the grounds that the old woman, as Madeline said in a joke, did not have at heart the hair left through the house. If the Englishman was full of concern, Juri was trying hard to relax, always creating a state of tension, even in the simulator, where he had often sought to forget about them in more pleasant ways. Now he imagined far from that place, together with Madeline, on an abandoned beach, entering meditation, which he usually practiced in the evening before bedtime. Andrei, on the other hand, remained concentrated on the mission.

Soon they sank into the deep night. Andrei watched the immensity of darkness with a fascination he had never felt before, not even when he fell in love with his wife. There, in the midst of the nothingness, where others would have been scared, he felt home, living a deep peace he had been looking for for a long time ...

The three astronauts cut off their seat belts, taking over their positions to check if everything was on board. After half an hour of controls, they established that the ship was heading for the predetermined and communicated coordinates their conclusions to the control tower.

-I received all your data, Roc-1! the man from the control tower was heard. In a few hours you will enter hibernation, he continues.

- Received! Andrei replied, thinking how they would wake up shortly before his destination.

As all the checks finished, Juri went to one of the hubs, walking through the ship being possible due to a system of maintaining gravity inside at the level of the one with whom they were accustomed to Earth. It contemplates, in turn, the immensity of the holes by which he would float for a long time, the mysteries of overwhelming darkness, realizing that, whatever simulations he would have before, only the cosmos could truly prepare him for his infinite stretch.

Juri moved away from the hub, looking at Madeline with the animal's animal lust who wants to forget her fears in a woman's fine skin. Andrei recognized that look, had lived so many times with Irene, whom she used to catch in her arms when the days seemed terrible and kissed her long neck until she was tired of him and sent him for a walk, and then grabbing her hand and looking into her eyes, and she was in her arms.

The Russian approached the English and touched it slightly on the right arm, and Madeline again threw that smile that only showed him. Andrei had begun to think if he did not deceive them.

- What about a table before the long sleep? he asked Madeline.

Without thinking, Geologa accepts, moving with a biologist to the dorsal area of the ship. While they were moving away, the two chained their fingers like a couple of teenagers hiding from the teacher, and Andrei Pricepu were as soon as he would happen behind the rock. If their games had already started, then things will be much worse on Kendara, where they will divide a capsule as long as the research will last. Clasped his hands nervously, remembering the last words of Irene: You love space more than you've ever loved me! At least he would have understood how different the two were for him! Damn with his suffering! Damn with their happiness! Damn it!

-Wait for me! I come too, he said.

- Are you sure you finished checks? Juri asked, obviously dissatisfied with the turn that things had taken.

- Of course! confirms Andrei.

- Come on, then! Madeline said, slightly removed from her, but mimicking a honeyed kindness.

All three started in search of the latter meals, if they could have been called that way, because for a few years good terrans they would be artificially fed in the hibernation modules. As they advanced to the reserve with food, the ship advanced through the ancestral vacuum of the space. All that immensity could easily pull you to madness, if you didn't have enough mind to keep you strong. But the agency had prepared them with a peak and thickened precisely for that moment when the darkness would take over them.

As they ate, the tranquility slammed between them. It was seen that the presence of Andrei completely displeased Madeline and especially Juri, who was barely mastered his nervous tremor, clashing his fists from time to time and throwing evil grimaces, whispering that one day he would pay them, but Iorga had completely ignored them, what he had to look at what he had to look for. Hide, just as he was now looking for that mysterious planet for hundreds of light years of Earth.

"Soon we will enter the grave," Madeline tried a joke to relax the atmosphere.

None of the two men seemed to hear it.

- What's with you, boys? she asked, leaving aside the empty food packaging from which she had taken a few moments ago.

"We go through nothingness and you burn you with macabre jokes, especially since you know that we have for half an hour until we get into those devils," Juri said, clutching the fists even harder.

- Come on, don't pack! Once upon a time, we will all waste the sandy threads in the wind, Andrei said.

"We also have a philosopher with us," Juri addressed to the zefleme.

"You're just not afraid," Madeline Sugăgalnic suggested.

- Baby, do you know me of a fearful man? the Russian asked.

The biologist had many defects, but the fear was not among them, so Madeline was silent, although one thing was certain: the space could be played with the mind of anyone. Or it would have been the narrow place where they would lie like in a long coma, until the day when Kendara would show them.

They gathered the empty packages and ejected them into the cosmos, where they would float alongside other waste, traces of human passing through the universe. Contacting for a last time the base on Earth, which confirms that they could enter the state of hibernation at any time. Once the orders were received, they moved into the module in which they seemed to be expected by some pharaonic coffins transformed by technology, each with a green button waiting to be pressed to open their way for a long, longer sleep.

Juri, with his transfigured figure, was the first to give the order to open the capsule. Looking to her inside, her face was wandering, but after Madeline approached him and touched her shoulder, just as Irene had touched Andrei in the morning of departure, the Russian was lying in the module that would cool her body and nourish it, to bring it alive to its destination.

Following Madeline, who, before she threw himself in the capsule, looked at Andrei and smiled friendly.

-Easy sleep, until we see us again! She hated her, and then the lid closed.

Standing alone, Andrei looked around again, researching the silent cosmos. The tranquility was reign, the tranquility that would accompany him after he had entered his own hibernating gossip. Finally, he joins the two ...

***

The time passed and elapsed and elapsed, and at the appointed time the capsules opened, and the three cosmonauts came out of the modules that had kept them. Although it had been good years on Earth, sleep had been an anesthesia during surgery. They looked, indeed, more carefree, but the weather did not seem to have been tracing any of them, except for the beards they had grown to Juri and Andrei.

"You look like two young guests," Madeline said in a joke.

It was not until Andrei that the beard had left the woman. Seeing again as he had been on the departure, he remembered Irene who used to get over him in the bathroom, looking at him as she was shaving, every time as if she did it for the first time. It was about to cut the blade, surrounded by the same stupid worries. Irene. Had he already forgot him? It would be better for her, now that the voice of Kendarei is also louder, stronger than any word of his wife ... Kendara! Only end with shaving and see it, and reach it ...

After finishing, he joined the control room of the other two astronauts, who fed with some dehydrated fruits. He surpasses and approaches the command painting, looking through the hublou to Kendara, more fascinating than the Blue Planet, a potential other cradle for the earthly civilization, one that will be the first to set foot (as Neil Armstrong), the place for which he had given up on him as much as he was in love. Kendara had hypnotized him and would not have been the voice of the Russian to wake him out of reverie, he would have remained in a long trance ...

- Did you make the communications to the base? he asked.

"Immediately after I left the hibernation," Andrei replied, turning to the juries.

- How much do we have until assocolization? He wanted to know Madeline.

Andrei returned to the command table, accurately checking the hours, minutes and seconds. Before responding, with sparkling eyes, he threw Kendare's eye. Then he addressed Madeline.

"Eight hours, twenty -two minutes and fourteen seconds," he said.

"We would have time," said Juri low voice to the Englishman, and he was innocent, rising and looking at them.

Andrei clenched his fists, the temples trembling nervously.

- There is less until our entry into history and the only thing you care about is to find a room like two young people who stay away from your parents! he screamed.

"It's not my fault that you left your wife and you will have to endure your loneliness," Juri said, pulling Madeline after him. If you are unhappy, I do not see why we are too ...

- Beast! What do you know about my happiness?! Andrei asked, clutching even more.

- Nothing, but I know about ours ... so who are you to get? said the Russian. Come on, Madeline!

Andrei was silent, looking at his own feet. If he dreamed of Kendara, maybe they really loved each other in a way he could not understand, just as the biologist and geological would probably not have understood his love for that distant planet, but now that he was still feeling his territories.

"What I know," he said.

And even when he said those words, Juri repeated the exhortation to Madeline who remained on the spot, with the face of horror, target to the main hub.

Beyond him, he had appeared something that brought with a black hole from nowhere, interposed between them and Kendara, so dear to Iorga, since he had learned that he would visit her. That phenomenon, which reminded the pilot of the tunnel in which his dreams usually ended, pulled them to the final night when the light has no escape.

Andrei quickly approaches the command desk, trying to get in touch with the control tower and deviates the ship from his trajectory. He was in vain. The energy emanations emitted by that strange phenomenon had become more and more powerful, making communication systems fall. They were drawn to nothing ...

- Do something! Juri and Madeline shouted, both terrified.

"We have no solution," Andrei said, who had surrounded the ruthless universe.

Shortly before they penetrate the full darkness, Andrei looked a last time to Kendara, the dream beyond nothing, as Irene had said, the one who would never materialize. Humanity will not know his name for the first step taken on the planet that will remain a chimera, Kendara will not forever be the love worn, and the whole earth will talk about them as another strange disappearance.

Then his beloved planet disappeared, but the two teammates were a few steps away from him, holding in his arms like a statue of love and dissolving easily, like the thought in forgetfulness. The entire ship was slowly destroyed, and with her and Andrei evaporated the impossibility of fulfilling, the remorse to have left Irene for a destiny that would not be fulfilled. Then the memories are lost one by one, and the material body blushed slowly, and suddenly the being that had been.

Andrei, Juri, Madeline, the ship ... everything had disappeared.

***

Argotrath, the one who lies in the dark, had flown all night in sleep, turning from one side to the other, caught in his dream. When he woke up, he crawled with the help of the tentacles on the stone he had slept, through the dark cave where he had lived since. As he moved, the pictures of last night were still giving him to be: a strange vehicle, strange creatures and a tunnel - the end as so many other ends ...

The gong sounds, and his reverberation entered the cave through the system created by the leaders of the ivory city. That was the sign that the day of work would start soon, and the subjects had to get out of their burrows and go to the distributed places. He did not want to leave his cave, because Argotrath loved darkness like nothing else in the world, but the debts called him.

Argotrath crawled to the light. As much as he could detect ... as he came to light, the reality of his existence was taking over him, and his dreams were dissolved in forgetfulness, just as he will disperse, for he was only part of the dream of Kagen, the one who created and one day will wake up. And then the world and Argotrath will no longer be, like the beings of the latter ...

We are beings made from Kagen's dream ...

(Inscription on ivory city temples)