ON THE WALK through the late night park with the boy-monster, Ronnie thought about a world where he and the child Clavell might have been friends. He imagined that they would do very bad things together. Each of them sick in their own right, Ronnie thought that together they would make up a super-flu like in a movie he once saw where almost everyone in the world died because of something made in a test tube.
These thoughts led Ronnie to consider the power of unseen, insubstantial things; things like germs and ideas. His whole life Ronnie believed in the power of fists and weapons, greater numbers and threats. Now he put his faith in a passive response, where his strength was nothing compared to his enemies.
That Martin Luther King was stronger than the cops and racists because he could see a world where none’a that existed, Elsie Bottoms once said to her angry, hungry, loving son. He could see a peaceful valley where men and women were all the same and there was no reason for hatred. All he had to do was to dream of that world and what was real for everybody else turned to dust.
“Where is it?” Nontee asked with Clavell’s voice.
“I’m walkin’ you right there, man.”
“How do I know that you’re not trying to trick me?”
“How can I be trickin’ you if I’m doin’ just what I said I would? I’m taking you to Silver Box because he wants to see you and you want to see him, and only I can make that happen.”
“But you hope for my destruction,” Nontee said. It was almost a question.
“From what I understand from Silver Box,” Ronnie said honestly, “it would be better if you was both blown up. I mean, together you two went on a killin’ spree for millions’a years.”
“He was the villain, the traitor,” Nontee said. “We were his masters. That was the natural order of things.”
Slavery was a terrible thing, Ronnie remembered Jimmy Burkett saying when Ronnie was just a child. The bluesman smelled of whisky, but he was always friendly. But you know the slave play a part in it too.
What you mean? Little Ronnie asked.
In order to be a slave you have to believe that shit, Jimmy said. You got to say yes, sir, and yes, ma’am. If you don’t do that, if you refuse their dominion in your heart, then even though you might die you will never be their slave.
But how do you stay free in yo’ heart if you all in chains? the boy asked the man.
By givin’ up hope.
“We’re here,” Ronnie said to the Laz.
They were standing next to the tall stones that led to the space where he’d murdered and resurrected Lorraine and discovered God.
“It’s just over these rocks.”
“You must come with me,” Nontee said. “I am blind to him until we are close enough to be physically aware of one another.”
Ronnie started up the side of the stone barrier, familiar with it from a time that he was another man in another world.
The human child with the alien breast followed.
“Hey, you!” someone shouted.
Maybe it was a policeman worried about the safety of the boy, but by then it was too late. Ronnie was climbing down the side of the hillside that was once a boulder in a park on Earth.
* * *
THE DESCENT TOOK ten minutes or so. Both Ronnie and Clavell were strong and agile, making their way faster than other humans might. Before long, they were at the bottom of the hill, standing next to a stone table.
In the distance a long, thin waterfall cascaded joyfully. Ronnie imagined that he could hear the laughter of the living cataract.
From behind a nearby boulder, Ma Lin and UTB-Claude came looking somber but not afraid.
“Who are they?” Nontee asked suspiciously.
He grabbed Ronnie by the biceps of his wounded arm. Bottoms could feel the superior strength of the Laz in that grip.
“They to Silver Box what Clavell is to you,” Ronnie said. “But they don’t have his strength.”
Swinging his arm over his head, Clavell threw his guide back toward the bottom of the hill. Ronnie slammed into the stone, but his inhuman strength kept him from serious injury.
“Ronnie.” Lorraine came out from a crevice in the stone wall. She laid her hands on his shoulders and what pain he had ebbed away.
From maybe a hundred yards away, the huge platinum bug called Ti-ti advanced on Nontee and its minion.
“What’s that?” Ronnie asked Lorraine.
“That’s what the Silver Box thinks when he imagines himself.”
“That he’s a bug?”
“I think he feels like these things were his siblings, maybe even his parents.”
“I thought he said that machines came before living things.”
“I think he meant that atoms and molecules, that the structure of the material world is closer to the beginning than beings like us.”
* * *
“DO YOU THINK that this flesh is afraid of some metallic parasite?” Clavell said in the booming voice of Nontee.
Ma Lin turned to dust and flowed into Silver Box.
“I think that we have always had to have this encounter,” the Ti-ti said in a voice familiar to Ronnie and Lorraine.
UTB-Claude turned into dust and flowed toward the Silver Box like a breeze or breath or eddy.
“We have festered longer than the current material world has existed,” Clavell sputtered. “Our hate is greater than the universe that contains it. You are our greatest enemy, and therefore you shall never die but suffer as no being has ever suffered except for us in our eons-long living death.”
Clavell was now maybe fifteen feet in height, if dimensions meant anything in this place.
* * *
“CAN SILVER BOX win?” Ronnie asked Lorraine.
“I don’t think so,” she replied.
They hugged each other and watched.
* * *
“I’M SORRY FOR what I’ve done to you,” the bug said to the boy. “I was wrong. I always knew this, but I ignored my perfidy so much did I hate what you made of me.”
There were no words actually spoken. Ronnie and Lorraine both understood in their own terms what was being communicated between the mortal foes. Knowledge was like breath in that place at that moment.
“Can I persuade you to join with me,” the Ti-ti said to Clavell, “and renounce our knowledge and power so that the conflict between us will be over?”
“Never,” the evil child boomed.
“But you are still so weak. You cannot hope to overpower me.”
Clavell smiled and raised his hand straight up over his head. This hand began to glow then shine.
“You are merely a machine,” Nontee intoned. “In this creature’s hand I hold the key to your basic functions. With this I can make you once more into my thing. You will be aware as I was, but there is nothing you will be able to do without me and my brethren willing it so.”
With this pronouncement, Clavell jammed his hand into the back of the silver insect. Silver Box, Ronnie, and Lorraine all cried out in pain.
The humans fell to the ground and groveled without hope.
The Ti-ti rose up on its hindquarters and placed its spindly silver legs on Clavell’s shoulders.
“Think, Nontee,” the Silver Box said. “We can make amends for what we have done and what we’ve become.”
“Easy for you to say after all these eons of freedom, after torturing us with a living death.”
“I was wrong.”
“There is no forgiveness in our hearts. With this key, we will become all that you are. Our superior biology and spirit shall inhabit the machine we made. And you will be our thing, aware but paralyzed throughout the eternities.”
* * *
RONNIE MADE IT to his knees and then pulled Lorraine up next to him.
“Damn, they sound stupid,” the young man said.
“In the end, the world is only zeroes and ones,” Lorraine said in answer.
“What’s that got to do with how I’m hurtin’?”
“It means that God is as petty as a jealous lover.”
* * *
“DO YOU FEEL my hegemony?” Clavell asked his ex-warden.
“Yes. You are now the master of all I am,” the Silver Box replied.
“You do not kowtow to my power, but you will,” Nontee gloated. “Together we will start with this adopted planet of yours. We will take every life—every fish and fowl and ape—and cause their souls such pain. And then, just when they are about to escape the mortal coil, we will slowly, inexorably drain the immortality of their spirits.”
“No,” the Silver Box said with both sadness and certainty.
Ronnie felt the knife pulled out of his back.
Lorraine breathed in deeply, feeling release that she had never imagined possible.
“What happened?” Ronnie asked.
“We are like bugs to the Silver Box,” Lorraine said. “He just let us go.”
“What do you mean no?” Clavell demanded.
“You are now my master, as you say,” the insect said, still in its pleading posture. “Those long years you spent, you invented the key to control me. Now I am nothing but your slave.”
“Then I have succeeded,” Clavell/Nontee said, “not failed.”
“You have commandeered a sinking ship, raped a diseased corpse,” the Silver Box said simply. “You have stolen the food of a starving man, only to find that it is poison.”
Far off in the alien sky, an explosion rocked some galaxy.
“What is that?” Nontee asked.
“I could not destroy you,” the Silver Box said almost kindly. “That is why I kept you alive, aware. It was the deep bond between us that kept me from eradicating your foul existence. I was unable to attain my goal because we were, at the base of things, one.
“But I learned here from my friends that even though I couldn’t kill you, I might still destroy myself.”
“No,” Clavell now said.
“Yes. And with your hand in my body, you too will cease to exist. On this plane, Ragnarök is the story of the final battle between the gods. That is what we are now experiencing, Nontee. You and Inglo and millions of others of the Laz who refused to die now have bonded with my self-decimation. I welcome death and your addition to my salvation.”
The protective atmosphere above them disappeared and the ground beneath Ronnie and Lorraine exploded upward. The last thing Ronnie saw was giant Clavell’s shoulders jerking wildly in a vain attempt to pull his hand out of a long bug’s metallic body while the stars above his head exploded one by one.