The night... The night had haunted Andrei Iorga like a restless lover, ruined by jealousy, a mistress who pulls you into her clutches and would never let you go, strangling you with the possessiveness of her love. So was the dream, an amalgam of images of which he remembered only faint and incoherent flickers... A tunnel and some strange creatures, which he struggled to remember, because of the sweat, but as he came back to his senses, the beings the last few nights faded into oblivion, and his thoughts turned to the journey he was about to undertake.

The thirty-two-year-old man clutched the edge of the bed where Irene was still sleeping undisturbed. Looking at his young wife, he wondered if she would still love him when he returned or if she would have forgotten him, finding someone else to warm the sheets he left cold. He stood up agitatedly, trying not to make any noise. There was no point in waking her, but he was finding it hard to get his mind off all those questions that had been gnawing at him for some time now. Irene was the light of his eyes, and the fact that he could lose her forever tormented him beyond measure, but he had said nothing to his wife, nothing to show how much it would hurt him if he did not find her in the house anymore them on their return, or if the yala were exchanged and the keys given to someone else. He could not ask them to wait for him when he had decided their fate like a judge passing down a death sentence. Ever since he had informed Irene that, despite their love, he would be leaving, he had felt like an executioner, but deep in his heart he knew there was no other way, not when space had always been calling him. Such an adventure came once in a lifetime, and Andrei Iorga had been waiting for this chance for years, during which he had felt that life for an astronaut is empty without a journey into the dark abysses of the cosmos.

He tiptoed into the blue-gray marble bathroom just brought in from Carrara, and turned on the hot water, waiting for the glass shower window to steam up before stepping under the hot jet, a regular ritual for those moments when he wanted to enter the secure area. He needed her now, more than ever, having to forget what he was leaving behind. The time of worries and denials is long gone.

As he washed himself, as if hoping that the pain would wash away with the water, the glass door opened and Irene appeared naked before him—the same round-breasted gazelle body he'd kissed so many times he'd lost count, her long hair velvety, and the persistent black eyes, with which he had fallen in love, because one evening, when the moon was hidden among the clouds, it had seemed to him that in them lay the solution to all the riddles of his world. That oblivion now burned him more than any words Irene could have spoken, for two reasons: in them he saw the love his wife still had for him, while knowing at the same time that she did not have all the answers he had thought that he had seen them a long time ago. To some, only space could have whispered to them...

The woman joined him, but Andrei turned his back and continued his ritual as if he were alone in that cabin. Irene took him in her arms, kissing his shoulders, and the tender movements of her lips revived the love that wanted to be extinguished. Although he still wanted her, he didn't answer her calls in any way, and finally Irene gave in and went back to the bedroom, leaving him even more tormented than before. He wanted to start over with his ceremonial, but he had to reach the spaceport soon, so he had no choice but to accept his fate, knowing full well what his actions would lead to. Irene wasn't going to wait for him anymore...

Half an hour later, he left the villa, haunted by the quarrel with her, who had thrown at him only reproaches 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 nothingness…

Her last words hung heavy, they had been harsh, words thrown out in anger that you'd like to pretend meant nothing but meant everything. Her love had turned into hate, unable to understand the reasons why he was going to board the Rock: the desire to be part of the great adventures of the world, to be among those who had marked humanity, thus leaving their name in history, just as so many others had done before, hoping that in this way he would gain his immortality... So many times he had told his wife about the great journeys of mankind that had fascinated him since childhood, when he had read about Alexander the Great, the Vikings, colonizers, but also about the first man to walk on the moon — Neil Armstrong. Here he will be like them, like him, entering the territories of Kendara... And Irene still didn't understand...

He climbed into the bobmobile, a supersonic rail-based transport that would carry him from home to the spaceport in an hour, from where he would dissolve into the great universe, searching for the once-discovered Kendara under the name Kepler-186f. At the behest of the Global Space Agency, bringing together the greatest powers of the cosmos, on that mysterious planet new habitats were wanted to be established, just as it had happened on Mars, Titan or Europe, to avoid a third world war, imminent due to overpopulation and lack of food.

As the colonized territories were too few for an ever-increasing population, a decision had been made that habitable areas similar to Terra be inspected. If they pass the tests, they will be inhabited in turn. There was only one problem the Agency had encountered—most of the newly discovered planets were light-years away from Earth, so all efforts had been directed toward creating a rocket fast and powerful enough to allow travel to those worlds. This is how the Rock was born, so different from what humanity had seen before... Then there was the astronaut selection period. They had presented themselves by the thousands, passed by the hundreds, among them Andrei Iorga, who joined the ranks of the Agency eight years ago.

The Bobmobile stopped. It had finally arrived at the launch port in Houston. Get out of the vehicle and enter the spaceport headquarters. Almost everyone involved in the mission had arrived, with the exception of Juri Karkov and Madeline Lowe, the other two members of his crew. About a month after preparations for the mission had begun, the two had gotten into the habit of being late, each time appearing one after the other at a short enough distance that people became suspicious. Everyone knew they were in a relationship, despite the fact that they never confirmed it—it wasn't hard to see the teasing and insinuations they made to each other, often even during training. If some said that they would get married when they returned from the mission, Andrei did not think that it was something serious, but rather a relationship that involved a lot of love and little talk, especially since none of them believed in love, which they said was just an illusion born to give meaning to humanity. But he had not agreed with the two. To be honest, he had not liked him from the beginning, with their beliefs that completely contradicted his, who until yesterday had sworn his eternal love for Irene. He wouldn't have admitted in his head that love cannot conquer all or that maybe, indeed, it is a delusion. He didn't know either... He had contradicted them so many times that he had lost track, and he thought it inconvenient to prove them right, especially since he would have done anything to have been assigned to another team, not to that odd couple, who would probably be more concerned with other and other games of love, and not mission. But he will endure anything for his dream…

He started for the locker room, walking down the long corridor, lost in his thoughts. Entering the room, he looked for his closet where he would leave his clothes to put on his astronaut suit. The room, with symmetrically placed benches, hangers and wardrobes, was in complete order and silence. The loneliness of the room reminded him of the loneliness he would experience in space... Then he told himself that it was not time to think about such nonsense, he had to keep his mind on the mission.

He stripped off his blue shirt and black cloth pants, carefully placing the clothes in the closet. They will wait for him in that locker room for ten years, maybe they will be the only ones waiting for him if Irene leaves. And surely he will. Have some clothes waiting for you! At least humanity will know his name and then it won't be so bad...

As she put on the suit, the pains seemed to fade, and when Madeline, the woman with the tousled red hair and eyes as green as acacia leaves, made her appearance, she was distracted by the geologist who looked like a lioness out for her prey. Ten minutes later, Juri, the biologist, nonchalantly walks into the locker room. With Juri everything was easy, relaxed, like a foray into the realms of opium, although the man had never used any kind of narcotic before.

"Ready for the mission?" he asked as soon as he started to take off his clothes.

Otherwise we wouldn't be here, Andrei kept his thoughts to himself.

- Normal! Madeline replied with a smile on her face, winking at Juri as she pulled her overalls on, and Iorga remembered the first smile Irene threw at a rock concert where they had met.

He left the locker room immediately, and when the other two finished, they headed to the launch area. Unlike the onlookers who had arrived to see them depart (all sorts of officials and press making sure that news of the mission reached all corners of the globe and the new colonies), the ship awaited them, silent and as wonderful as the mythological bird it had been after baptized.

Andrei looked at the ship with eyes of a lover. His beloved Roc! How long he had waited for this moment, the moment when the dream becomes reality, after all those hours of simulations, and training, and preparations, and the moment was not at all what he had imagined. The happiness of going into space was crushed by the abandonment it produced.

Madeline Lowe and Juri Karkov entered the aircraft first, exchanging a word or two, excited about their impending entry into history, Andrei following them in silence. Then the cosmonauts took their positions, checking their suits for any sealing problems. As they fastened their seatbelts, the radio gave them the conditions for leaving Earth from the control tower. Everything was fine.

— Received! Andrei communicates to the ground team.

— Roc-1, you have the go-ahead!

Andrei gave the start commands, soon the ship took flight, more skillful than any bird. As they ascended, the cosmonauts got caught up in their thoughts. Madeline remembered her caged cat, Shanina, who had been named after a Russian sniper who had fought in World War II. She hoped that her mother would feed her every day, as she had promised when she announced that she was going to space. Initially, she had asked her to take her to her place, but there was no discussion, being categorically refused on the grounds that the old woman, as Madeline jokingly called her, did not like the hair that cats left around the house. If the Englishwoman was full of worry, Juri tried her best to relax, the trepidations always creating a state of tension in her, even in the simulator, where she had often tried to forget them in more pleasant ways. Now she imagined herself far away from that place, with Madeline, on an abandoned beach, entering the meditative state she usually practiced at night before bed. Andrei, on the other hand, had remained focused on the mission.

Soon they sank into the deep night. Andrei looked at the immensity of the darkness with a fascination he had never felt before, not even when he had fallen in love with his wife. There, in the middle of nowhere, where others would have been scared, he felt at home, experiencing a deep peace that he had been looking for for a long time...

The three astronauts unbuckled their seat belts, taking their positions to check that everything was okay on board. After half an hour of checks, they determined that the ship was heading to the predetermined coordinates and communicated their conclusions to the control tower.

— I received all your data, Roc-1! said the man from the control tower. In a few hours you will go into hibernation, he continued.

— Received! answered Andrei, thinking how they would wake up shortly before their destination.

With all the checks done, Juri made his way to one of the portholes, walking through the ship made possible by a system to keep the gravity inside at the level they were used to on Earth. He contemplates, for his part, the immensity of the abyss through which he would float for a long time, the mysteries of overwhelming darkness, realizing that, no matter how many simulations he had done before, only the cosmos could truly prepare him for its infinite expanses...

Juri moved away from the porthole, looking at Madeline with the animalistic lust of a man who wants to forget his fears in the smooth skin of a woman. Andrei recognized that look, he had experienced it so many times with Irene, whom he used to hold in his arms when the days seemed terrible to him and kiss her long neck until she got tired of him and sent him for a walk, only to then catch her by the hand and look into her consuming eyes, and she slowly undress and take him into her warm arms.

The Russian approached the Englishwoman and gently touched her right arm, and Madeline again flashed that smile that she only showed to him. Andrei had already begun to think if he was not mistaken about them, and would have continued to do a whole process of his conscience if he had not been abruptly interrupted by Juri's thick, baritone voice:

"How about a meal before the long sleep?" he asked Madeline.

Without thinking, the geologist accepts, moving with the biologist to the dorsal area of ​​the ship. As they walked away, the two linked their fingers like a teenage couple hiding from the teacher, and Andrei immediately understood what was going to happen behind the Rock. If their games had already begun, then things would be much worse on Kendara, where they would share a capsule while their research lasted. He shook his hands nervously, remembering Irene's last words: You love space more than you ever loved me! If only he understood how different the two were to him! To hell with his suffering! To hell with their happiness! Damn it!

"Wait for me!" I'm coming too, he said.

"Are you sure you're done checking?" Juri asked, clearly unhappy with the turn things had taken.

- Of course! Andrei confirmed.

"Come on, then!" Madeline said, slightly out of hers too, but feigning honeyed kindness.

The three of them set off in search of the last meal, if it could be called that, for for several years good Terrans were to be artificially fed in hibernation modules. As they advanced towards the food supply, the ship advanced through the ancestral vacuum of space. All that immensity could easily drive you insane if you didn't have enough brains to keep yourself strong. But the Agency had prepared them well and thickly for that very moment when the darkness would overtake them.

As they ate, silence fell between them. It could be seen that Andrei's presence completely displeased Madeline and especially Juri, who could barely control the nervous trembling of his legs, clenching his fists from time to time and throwing evil grimaces, which whispered that one day Andrei would pay him, but Iorga completely ignored both of them, looking towards the darkness that had always attracted him and behind which he had always hoped to find out what was hidden, just as he was now looking through it for that mysterious planet hundreds of light years from Earth.

"Soon we'll be in the grave," Madeline tried a joke to lighten the mood.

Neither man seemed to hear her.

"What about you guys?" she asked, setting aside the empty food wrappers she'd been munching on moments before.

- We're advancing through nothingness and you're burning with macabre jokes, especially since you know that we still have about half an hour until we get into those hells, said Juri, clenching his fists even harder.

- Come on, don't pack! Someday we will all scatter like grains of sand in the wind, Andrei said.

- We also have a philosopher with us, Juri addressed him in a whisper.

"Just don't be afraid," Madeline suggested coyly.

"Honey, do you know me as a fearful man?" asked the Russian.

The biologist had many faults, but fear was not among them, so Madeline remained silent, though one thing was certain: space could play with anyone's mind. Or was it that cramped place where they would lie like that in a long coma, until the day Kendara would show up in their way…

They gathered up the empty packages and ejected them into the cosmos, where they would float along with other waste, traces of man's passage through the universe. They made one last contact with the base on Earth, which confirmed that they could enter hibernation at any time. Once their orders were received, they moved into what appeared to be awaited by some pharaonic coffins transformed by technology, each with a green button waiting to be pressed to pave the way for a long sleep, the longest they had ever had.

Juri, with his figure transfigured, was the first to give the command to open the capsule. Looking inside her, his face twitched, but after Madeline approached him and touched him on the shoulder, just as Irene had touched Andrei on the morning of the departure, the Russian lay down in the mode that would cool his body and feed him, to bring him alive to his destination.

Madeline followed, who, before ducking into the capsule, looked at Andrei and smiled at him in a friendly way.

— Easy sleep, until we meet again! she hated him, and then the lid closed.

Left alone, Andrei looked around again, surveying the silent cosmos. Silence reigned, the silence that would accompany him once he entered his own hibernating lair. Finally, he joins the two…

***

Time passed and passed and passed, and at the appointed time the capsules opened, and the three cosmonauts emerged one by one from the modules that had held them still. Although many years had passed on Earth, sleep was as if they had been an anesthesia during surgery. They looked, indeed, more unkempt, but the weather didn't seem to have left its mark on any of them, except for the beards Juri and Andrei had grown.

"You look like two young Santa Clauses," Madeline told them jokingly.

Only when Andrei trimmed his beard did he think the woman was right. Seeing himself again as he had left, he remembered Irene who used to come over him into the bathroom, watching him shave, each time as if she were doing it for the first time. He was about to cut himself with the blade, surrounded by the same stupid worries. Irene. Had he already forgotten it? It would be better for her, now that Kendara's voice was drawing him louder and louder, stronger than any word of his wife…Kendara! Only to finish with the shave and see her, and get to her…

After he finished, he joined the other two astronauts in the control room, who were feeding on some dried fruit. He passes them and approaches the control panel, looking through the porthole at Kendara, more fascinating than the blue planet, another potential cradle for Earth civilization, one he will be the first to set foot on (like Neil Armstrong on the moon), the place for which he had given up so much and which whispered to him that it was waiting for him like a lover in love. Kendara had hypnotized him and if it hadn't been for the Russian's voice to wake him from his reverie, he would have remained in a long trance...

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

"Right after I left hibernation," answered Andrei, turning to Juri.

"How long until we reach maturity?" Madeline wants to know.

Andrei turned back to the dashboard, carefully checking the hours, minutes and seconds. Before answering, eyes twinkling, he took another look at Kendara. Then he turned to Madeline.

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

- We would have time, Juri said in a low voice to the Englishwoman, and she laughed innocently, standing up and winking at him.

Andrei clenched his fists, his temples trembling nervously.

"It's not long until we enter history and the only thing you care about is finding a room like two young people avoiding their parents!" he roared.

"It's not my fault you left your wife and you'll have to endure your loneliness," Juri told her, pulling Madeline after him. If you're unhappy, I don't see why we should be too...

"You bastard!" What do you know about my happiness?! Andrei asked, clenching his fists even harder.

"Nothing, but I know about ours… So who are you to meddle?" said the Russian. Come on, Madeline!

Andrei was silent, looking at his own feet. If he dreamed of Kendara, perhaps they really did love each other in a way he couldn't fathom, just as the biologist and geologist would probably never understand his love for that distant planet, but which was now closer and closer, because he could already feel the touch of his territories.

"What do I know," he croaked.

And even as he said those words, Juri repeated the call to Madeline who remained standing, her face frozen in horror, aimed at the main porthole.

From beyond him, something had appeared that brought a black hole out of nowhere, interposing itself between them and Kendara, so dear to Iorga since he had known that he would visit her. That phenomenon, which reminded the pilot of the tunnel where his dreams usually ended, pulled him towards the final night where the light has no escape.

Andrei quickly approached the control desk, trying to contact the control tower and divert the ship from its course. It was in vain. The energy emanations emitted by that strange phenomenon had become increasingly powerful, causing the communication systems to fail. They were drawn to nothing…

- Do something! Juri and Madeline shouted in turn, both horrified.

- We have no solution, Andrei told them, who had capitulated to the merciless universe.

La puțin timp înainte să pătrundă în bezna deplină, Andrei privi o ultimă oară către Kendara, the dream beyond nothingness, as Irene had told him, the one who would never materialize. Humanity will not know her name for the first step taken on the planet that will remain a chimera, Kendara will not know her love forever, and the whole Earth will talk about them as another strange disappearance.

Then his beloved planet was gone, but his two teammates were only a few steps away, holding each other like a statue of lovers and slowly dissolving, like thought into oblivion. The whole ship was slowly being destroyed, and together with it, Andrei evaporated, crushed by the impossibility of fulfillment, by the remorse of having left Irene for a destiny that would not be fulfilled forever. Then the memories were lost one by one, and the material body slowly gnawed away, and suddenly the being that had been was nothing.

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

***

Argotrath, who lies in darkness, had tossed and turned in his sleep all night, tossing and turning, caught in his dream. When he awoke, he crawled with the help of the tentacles from the stone he had slept on, through the dark cave where he had lived since he was born. As he moved, the images of last night still flashed through his mind: a strange vehicle, some strange creatures, and a tunnel—the end like so many other endings . . .

The gong sounded, and its reverberation penetrated the grotto through the system created by the rulers of Ivory City. That was the sign that the working day would soon begin, and the subjects were to come out of their burrows and go to their assigned places. He did not want to leave his cave, for Argotrath loved the darkness like nothing else in the world, but duty called him.

Argotrath crawled toward the light. How he could loathe her… As he came to light, the reality of his existence took hold of him, and the dreams dissolved into oblivion, just as he would one day dissolve, for he was only part of Kagen's dream, the one who created the world , the one who sleeps and one day will wake up. And then the world and Argotrath will be no more, just like the creatures of the last night...

We are beings made from Kagen's dream…

(Inscription on the temples of the Ivory City)