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A Brief Note from the Researcher
Only the Arquebus, By H. Beam Piper
Research Note Preceding The Unmethoding
Research Note Preceding Jiggle Juice and Cleavage
Research Note Preceding After Oil
Research Note Preceding The God of This World
Amaris,
Using the imagery from the scans of the drop cloths, (thank God you unearthed them! A low, poorly cataloged shelf, you say? Still, that old evidence shed must be a cavern. In any case, I still can't believe it--) I've traced the data sets.
The patterns are fainter - certainly less dramatic - than the ancient pattern from Event Z-A, but it is indisputable: they match. The Piper Event isn't just similar to Event Z-A: it is its echo, its mirror, its child.
The only question is this: is the mirror cracked?
Better put: is the child good?
The enclosed notes are what I've got so far.
Courage,
The Researcher
P.S. As you know, his last note closed rather famously with "I don't like to leave messes when I go away, but if I could have cleaned up any of this mess, I wouldn't be going away." But mysteries? He didn't say anything about mysteries!
Paratime – the practical application of technology to influence, police and manage alternate realities for the benefit of a society or societies. Coined by H. Beam Piper, Earthling.
Only the Arquebus, By H. Beam Piper
Researcher Note: Just after Halloween 1964, H. Beam Piper, the now-famed science fiction author and the writer of a "locked room" mystery titled Murder in the Gunroom was discovered dead in his own well-stocked gunroom, an apparent suicide. The manuscript to his unpublished manuscript, Only the Arquebus, disappeared. Piper had told an editor that the story was a historical piece: an account of the zero-sum game played between Ferdinand of Spain and Louis XII of France for the control of Naples.
That was a lie.
Only the Arquebus did involve a zero-sum game. It was historically accurate. The 16th century setting, however, was a ruse - a private joke from Piper to himself. Piper fancied himself a renaissance man from a bygone era. He also fancied himself a hero.
He wasn't wrong.
What follows is the unedited manuscript that appeared anonymously at our offices, wrapped in plain brown paper and smelling distinctly of Serene pipe tobacco smoke.
Clever. You jam dratted dopes – after all this time -- aw, blast it, can I write more plainly than that and still get published?
Anyhow. It wasn’t suicide, you idiots. It was a fistfight.
Rats, I’ll start over. But I’m not apologizing – not for “idiots” and not for “dopes.” There’s no point in Porto Rican rum, and even less point in trying to make amends with the truth.
Paratime ring any bells? The Terro-Human history? Of course not – because none of it ever came to pass, and none of it ever will. Read those “stories” and you’ll know why it had to go down exactly like this.
No one else was going to bother to save the world.
It isn’t bragging if I can back it up. So sit back and read.
It was 8:30 A.M. the sun streaming through the third story window: Bedtime in Altoona. I’d just gotten off my security shift at the Railroad, changed into my pajamas, smoked the last reserves of my sweet Serene tobacco, its conversation with me downright mellifluous.
The room they thought they found me in was, of course, the weapons room.
At my last inventory, the walls were lined with 138 firearms, not counting the ones in drawers, and a dozen sharpened swords.
A tube appeared in the center of the room, just as I’m cleaning Polly, my $5 Civil War noisemaker. Like a glass elevator, it rose up from the floor, the loose planks creaking, straining to bear its bulk. Out stepped a horse-faced fellow with stubby orange fingers, wearing a purple cowl swept back from his high forehead, and a cape running down below his ankles. Or fetlocks. God knows what he had under that dress.
He also held a clipboard, apparently a clipboard from the future, as it had buttons and spat paper with a stream of print on it.
Great. My first real live alien, and he’s a bureaucrat.
Of course, I shot him.
“Mr. Piper,” droned the bored alien, ignoring the pistol round that had cut into his flowing clothes and vanished. “I’m here to request an end to your literary ambitions.”
I fired another shot, right between the eye.
“Gloop,” said the eye.
“—In Blazes?” I said.
“Your guns are not effective. No, not even the 9 millimeter.” German engineering. Who knew?
I made like a dervish and slid an old Spanish poniard from its sheath, slashing the officious burglar at the throat. It cut the clasp of his cloak, whose collar he clutched against his chest, dropping the clipboard. He huffed.
“Only the arquebus fires at a sufficiently low velocity to both penetrate my flesh and remain long enough to damage vital organs, most of which are located in what you might call my skull.”
I shot a glance at the wall behind him. The ancient arquebus hung on its hooks, its brass ornaments tarnished, its patina allowed to spread unchecked for at least a quartet of generations. I’m not entirely sure I remember how to load it, and I sure as shooting know I don’t have the time.
“In short, your weapons are useless in the prevention of my mission, which is to persuade you to end your campaign against our greater designs for your people. If I can’t do that, my charge is, quite simply, to stop you.”
“Stop me.”
“Stop you.”
“From…writing stories?”
The sword clattered to the floor.
“Don’t be coy, Beam Piper. Both you and I are very well aware that your research into Paratime and your somewhat miraculous foretelling of the Terra-Earth history consist of far more than ‘stories.’ Unfortunately for our designs, you are just getting warmed up, and are, at our best calculations, as close as four months away from having a unified definitive, testable formula to express the truth of your theories to a wider public.”
“Oh,” I said, “You’ve got the wrong Beam Piper. I’m H. You know, as in Horace. I think you are looking for –“
And with that I leaped up, my arms stretched to the low ceiling, where I grasped the exposed steel rafter. Interlocking my legs around my opponent’s neck, I performed a stomach crunch that practically ruptured my own vertebrae. His long noggin drove into the rafter with a satisfying clang!
“—I-Beam Piper!”
His body dropped to the floor a split second before my sweaty fingers lost their purchase. I fell on top of him, losing my wind and all initiative.
He rolled me off like a firelog. I gasped, half-paralyzed from the drain of adrenaline, the other half just plain paralyzed. The dastard was sitting on my sciatic nerve. With a swipe of his stubby hand, he flipped my body over like it was a box turtle, and he the devil’s son.
“Henry Piper,” he said, exasperated, rubbing his skull, his cloak slipping off his shoulders like cheap burlesque. The weirdo’s got pajamas on underneath. My other pajamas. He’s a thief and a cross-dresser. The cloak, no longer touching his slick, greasy body lost its shimmering color and looked more like a painter’s drop cloth than the refinements of a government stooge. He straddled me, pressing down on my ribs with the weight of a mule. I could barely move my left hand. Everything else was pinned.
“Don’t call me Henry,” I said, gasping. “It ruins the joke.”
“Henry Beam Piper,” he said. “I’m here to convince you to reverse course. I can offer you three options.”
“I’m listening,” I grunted, quickly running out of lung capacity.
The glow from the elevator behind him pulsed with light, color and motion.
“Return with me through the portal. A foreign kingdom of riches and a harem of angelic concubines await.”
I’ll admit, I peeked. The red sunlight was a bit harsh, but the clothing was optional and the rum was Jamaican. The women were otherworldly, but thankfully in the two-eyed sense.
“Stay here. Abandon your sorcery and prophecy and live out your days quietly as you see fit-”
“But no writing.”
“But no writing.”
“What’s my third option.”
“Die here, seemingly at your own hand.”
“Right. Like anyone would believe that I, of all people, would do that.”
“They’ll come up with something. Your kind always do. Your ex-wife.”
I tried not to show the bristles on my neck.
“Aw, she’s a doll. They’ll be more likely to believe it was murder, but I guarantee you don’t have technology advanced enough to replicate her abbitoire.”
“Despondency, then, over your writing career. Your agent has recently died, and failed to tell you about a number of sales you’ve made.”
“Oh, that’s plausible. If reliance on an agent’s communications skills is a prerequisite for mental health, the nuthouse would be full of writers and the library would be empty.”
“What’s your choice?”
Well, I thought, they say everybody’s got one. I stuck my thumb where Phobos don’t shine. Old blue eye yowled like I’d dropped a mongoose down his flannel trousers, hot footing it a 4th down and long away from me. Even Frank Gotch would have scooted. So much for vital organs. Apparently Snoopy Gloopy had not anticipated my contribution of choice number four.
Still wheezing, I rolled to the opposite wall.
I went for the arquebus, hoping to awaken its ancient glory. I bet it hadn’t been fired in combat in 200 years. Loading it was going to be a bear. The alien knew this. I knew this.
But one thing I knew that he didn’t is the art of misdirection. Must be a trait peculiar to me.
Most people, and all the Martians I know, are unaware of the startling utility of a well-placed elbow.
Not counting my ex-wife, that is. She knew how to throw one. That’s who I learned it from, a couple of times.
So Mr. Longshanks goes down in a puddle of goo, and I get a hard little boo-boo on my funny bone. I put my knee into his throat, and then, with all the time in the world, a few slow-loaded bullets into his head.
That’s when the trouble started.
Suddenly, the goo starts shifting, and not in the way you’d think space-goo ought to go. It shaped itself, and in not too long, looked like an amateur version of myself.
I had been framed for suicide.
With the gunshots, amateur is all it takes. With half the head gone, what matters is my tell-tale pencil thin moustache. Who are they going to think got offed in my apartment, Walt Disney?
Suicide. What a laugh: I’m not even dead, and I can prove it as easy as I can show you how to fiddle the lock on the paint shop at the Altoona Works so you can cut through to the boiler without having to go back around the long way. But darn if I can explain my own twin, shot to corpse-state in the middle of the floor of my personal armory.
But that isn’t important.
What’s important is that I didn’t do what they had expected me to do: hop on the elevator, travel the stars, and set myself up with a Martian harem to live out my days in interstellar luxury, damning this thankless planet to its fate.
In hiding, I did a few things, worked something out with Salinger: I took his place, he took no one’s, so on and so on. I won’t bore you with the details. I’ll say this: there’s a darn good reason a Quaker named Milhous made it in to the White House. Too bad those Martians took their revenge on him when I never showed up for trial.
That’s why there wasn’t an Atomic War in ’73, and the thousands of years of history that followed after. I derailed the entire Paratime and Terro-Human timeline, rendered all my “fiction” into bunk and ended up making me an exile on my own planet, instead of a minor king on another.
I’m coming out now because I’m 108 years young, and figure it is a matter of minutes before my memory goes for good, if not my ticker. Always figured I’d go out in a hail of laserfire, but, as they say, even picked poison will kill you in the end.
Now, do you still think I’m some sort of doe-eyed copycat of that sissy Hemingway or as short-sighted as that poor kid Howard?
Researcher Note: In datafile 14, you may notice a "jitterbug effect" along the undulating waves of time and space that is first known to have expressed itself a mere five minutes from now.
Headaches, two of them. Left temple and base of skull. The hard, edgy kind he might soften at day’s end with effervescent water, drinking it the instant before the white wafers completely dissipated in the glass.
Not before then. Heath had nothing on at hand in the lab office, not even ibuprofen.
The first number was off by one-ten thousandth: headache one.
The second, by two ten thousandths: headache two.
The data set had gotten garbled. Heath had run the numbers a hundred times in the past month, fiddling about, re-checking Orland’s surveys.
The numbers were getting wilder than the recent temperature swings. In a week the city had gone from freezing rain to record heat. The swelter had nothing on the pressure Heath felt inside.
He hated soft science and hated the fact that he had to integrate it with his results to show any meaningful impact.
Autumn Orland, however, he kind of liked.
She was pretty, perky and professional. Not in that order, if anyone ever asked him. He’d worked fifteen years peered rarely with women and never with one so young and lovely. Even Heath’s wife liked her.
In short, he didn’t mind the excuse.
"Dr. Orland," he said, "Got a minute?"
Her hair was undone and in her face. She swept it back. "Sure, Mister Fidget – excuse me, my band just broke." Tossing the broken bit of elastic in the garbage, she ripped into a bag of office supply rubber bands. She bound her hair back into a loose tail.
"It was a new one, too, cheap things. What beans have I failed to count today?"
"Is that what I’ve become to you?"
"What, the gatekeeper who stands in the way of progress?" she said, winking. "Sure, but at least you are friendly about it."
Heath tensed. She wasn’t completely jesting. "The numbers. They really don’t complement the last run. They practically negate it."
"Yeah, about that. We maybe want to look at limiting the sample of the second data set, and expanding the margin of error."
"That’s – uh – not what I was hoping to hear."
She bit her lower lip and shrugged in a subtle apology. "Alexander thinks it is okay."
"So, what? Your data’s softening?"
"No, not really. Just sort of – I guess – retracting on its repeatability."
"Fancy way to say ‘softening.’"
"This is really common. Look at the statistical significance of the first phase. That’s what will justify the development of the drug."
And justify the grant money, she didn’t say.
"The second survey is supplemental," she said. "You’ve always said my numbers help us tell the story, but they aren’t the story."
She casually flipped the ponytail over the front of her shoulder as she cocked her head. Her hair loosed as the new band broke.
#
Alexander Lightman had been Heath’s comrade in science since the eleventh grade. Luck had brought them together as lab partners in high school physics. Alexander, better with girls than Heath, naturally gravitated toward biology while Heath buried himself in the predictable comforts of practical chemistry.
The office was frigid. The new HVAC system was on the fritz, wildly overcompensating.
"Think about that," Lightman said, rubbing his chilly hands, unintentionally looking like a mad professor in his lab coat. "Alzheimer’s. Hope. Because of us."
"You really think this garbage is going to make it through peer review?" said Heath.
"I know this garbage is going to make it through peer review. Our numbers, unmodified, are no worse – better, even – than Komisky’s. That thing sailed through."
"Komisky is discredited!"
"Debated, not discredited, certainly not invalidated, yet. His funding is in the bank and he’s moved on to bigger things. Which is what we’re going to do. Look, we aren’t promising the moon with this."
Heath remembered a time, just weeks ago, when the two of them had promised almost precisely the moon to their CEO. "The hell we aren’t. Our first round was off the charts. The buzz is that we have a freaking cure. I even started to dream it."
"Our results are positive. We can’t afford this one to get desk-drawered. You realize that don’t you?"
"Arguing with results. Great. Who are you?"
Lightman jerked his head back like he’d been flicked in the eye. "What do you mean?"
"Do you realize how crazy you sound?"
Alexander Lightman muttered something and breathed out, calmly. "I think I’m being rational, Heath."
"Really? We’re supposed to be uncovering a truth, not making one up."
"Too far. You’re stressed. We all are. At the tail end, you never tie it off in a neat bow. Always a confusing time."
"I’m not confused about anything. My numbers made sense. As soon as they run through your process, they make less sense, and when we combine those with Orland’s numbers, they now make no sense."
Lightman smiled. "Welcome to the multidisciplinary process."
"We were popping corks over phase one!”
"It happens. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to replicate results with so many variables. You need to get okay with this. We’ve got good results — really, really good."
"Unrepeatable science? Really? That’s a – ah, uh-uh – thing we need to live with?"
Lightman looked at Heath with the pity of a stranger. "Well, yeah."
"How do you explain the first results? Two standard deviations. Two. We ran them a thousand times – no one’s found an error. We had proof: clinical trials that practically cured the symptoms. God, Alex, we were weeping over the anecdotals! Weeping! And now what?"
Lightman shifted in his chair. "We had facts in April! Now? A handful of sand."
"Behaviors adapt. Wonder drugs deaden. Back in the thirties, some researcher proved ESP, until he repeated the trials. Sometimes these processes sort of retract."
Retract. Orland had used the same word. That pair shared a secret language. Heath’s stomach roiled. He waved his hand in the general direction of the faucet at Lightman’s eye-wash station. "I guarantee you the vinegar under that sink will produce carbon dioxide if I mix it with baking soda. Every freaking time. We don’t have enough evidence. Not even close."
Lightman scooted his office chair back, his fingers interweaving in the short spiky hair at the top of his head. "But enough to make us millionaires. Are you really going to deprive patients of the possibility?"
"Of a placebo? Because that’s what we’ve got."
"Whoa. We’re above placebo if we raise the margin by just a touch."
"I can’t believe you are going to --."
"Okay, but I’m pretty sure you are too. You really think this wouldn’t help pay for Teeter’s gene therapy?"
A hammer struck a nerve in Heath’s chest, sending a hot wave through his body. "You junk-science quack."
And like that, the corpse of a long friendship lay between the two, throat slashed, draining blood.
Now Heath had three headaches.
Time strained and contracted simultaneously during the dark drive home: street signs and electrical poles moved past slowly, while trees flickered by. Orland and Lightman’s "science" was retracting. Heath’s chemistry, for all its reliability, was inert as argon without their clinical results.
He briefly imagined a world where predictable facts began to unspool: dinosaurs spontaneously regenerating, disease spreading by telepathy, gravity slowly loosening its grip, the center of the world transmuting into gold, precious and annihilating.
Heath got home late, his wife asleep in Teeter’s bed.
Body ache. Stiff neck.
He rummaged through the bathroom for a box of effervescent tablets. Searching, he vaguely pictured the box, a sickly aqua, and recalled a stupid name: fizz tabs, buzz drops, something like that.
He found it behind an antacid bottle, flipped it open and pulled out the paper envelope, setting it on the bathroom counter. He filled a fresh glass from a new bottle of distilled water. He hated drinking from the tap.
He ripped the little envelope and dropped the white tabs into the glass.
The blue walls brightened. A blinding light reflected in the large mirror. A fountain of sparks, four feet high, rose up from the surface of the drink. From the hissing fire’s peak, dainty glowing motes descended, the snowflakes of summer.
***
Researcher's Note: Progress is not necessarily improvement. A bad idea advanced, after all, is just a bigger bad idea. A good idea can grow to mutated proportions and commit revenge against good intentions.
Of course, some things never change.
Ray’s rusted F-250 Superchief had passed through a half dozen owners before finally falling to him at an auction. He’d had the 2015 Ford now for a decade - bought the relic from an overextended collector who never got around to fixing it up.
The engine ran on pure gasoline, the cheap stuff. Of course, it was a pain to find gas wholesalers, and he had to keep a large tank supply on hand at his homestead on the nomad colony. He hassled with the task of filling the vehicle almost every week, but the beast would, as they say, get him where he wanted to go. Plus, sitting in the cab, he couldn’t enjoy a better smell if he stuck his head into an iron bucket coated with axle grease.
For the past five years, Ray had investigated a mysterious rattle in the engine, but had yet to pinpoint its cause.
Clutter in the cab included some oily wrenches, a laser-balanced ramset, an assortment of disposable electronic ink sheets, a hammer and some wirecutters. Twine and a tarp danced in the dusty flatbed, amidst bits of straw.
In short, the machine was, in all ways, a working truck.
Dawn hadn’t broken on the equator yet. In the blue-grey light, the nation-sized grass- and moss-covered steel platform stirred memories in Ray’s mind of Iowa. Home. The sweet breeze through the open windows smelled of salt, not corn gluten, but also fresh turned black dirt.
When the sun rose, the launch point for the old cable crawling into space became evident. Although the base of the cable seemed very near, Ray knew that the mountainous walled compound which anchored the space elevator lay nearly sixty miles farther away.
The only thing about the elevator that remained invisible at this point was the cable itself. They called it a “beanstalk.” Here, at the Earth-meet point, the cable was less than the width of Ray’s thumb. He couldn’t see it launching at an angle from the top of the compound, striking up into the sky like an Indian Rope Trick. A nearly nonexistent cable was responsible for the transport of nearly a million tons of freight every month.
The cable, known as “Granddad,” was also a relic, nearly twenty years old. It slowly fattened as it reached through the atmosphere toward an orbiting satellite anchor. Somewhere, high above, toward the miles-long tip-top of the beanstalk, its girth matched that of a factory smokestack. A marvel of nearly suicidal ingenuity, it had been the first elevator ever completed, and carried all the weight of theory, trial, error, bankruptcy, refinancing, failure and the dumb luck of crafty engineers.
While the modern space elevator was little more than an invisible ribbon: a microns-thin conveyor, capable of supporting a load of 300 passengers or 20,000 pounds or more of freight without snapping, this artifact started narrowly enough at the base, but as it crawled through the atmosphere, added a terrifying amount of bulk. It was a maintenance hog: demanding periodic “juice and jiggle” preventions in order to avoid spectacular catastrophe. No passengers allowed: only a pilot and seven tons of cargo, total.
Even that had taken its toll on the beanstalk. Its life was all but strained out, leaving the antique for a sentence or two in the history books.
This strange cable, an amalgam of nanocarbon, liquid silicon, organic wiring, microfiberglass and foam would eventually grow as thick as a tree trunk, then thicker, almost as wide as a small house, thousands of miles up, as it neared the orbiting counterweight.
When the battered Superchief finally pulled up to the unmanned gate, Ray glanced down at the old digital odometer that had just rolled over a lot of zeroes. “I’ll be,” he said as got out, stroking a dent in the door, “250,000 miles. You could have driven to the moon, buddy.”
~~~
“I’m on location,” Ray said, after thinking his phone alive. He stood in front of a monitor camera at the gate. “Dispatch?”
“Yeah, Ray. Dispatch. How you doing this morning?” The dispatcher sounded groggy. There must have been a shift change recently.
“Chuck? Is that you?”
Ray winced at the gurgle of coffee sliding down the dispatcher’s throat. The sloppy noise echoed in his head in stereo surround sound. The phone chip behind his ear caught everything: there was no escape. The dispatcher stifled (stifled, not silenced) a wet, difficult belch.
“Nope,” he replied, smacking his lips. “Chuck just went stateside for a few months. This is Leto.”
Ray nodded, running carefully through a good half-dozen expletives in his mind before settling for “Hey Leto.”
“It looks like we’ve got a stuck freight buggy just short of the satellite platform,” said Leto. “My screen says you’ll need to do a jiggle and juice is all, probably. The fibers are all giving positives, so they’re good.”
“Uh huh,” said Ray, waving at the gate camera, not bothering to correct the kid’s jargon. “Can you let me in first?”
“Oh, sure,” Leto said, then chuckled. “Ah, what’s the base number again?”
“Are you all right? I mean, come on, it’s Granddad, Leto.”
“Oh sure, yeah, there it is. Ah yeah, I see you,” said Leto.
Ray’s receding and unkempt widow’s peak, Bogart eyes, and narrow shoulders filled the lens. Leto, sitting in the comfort of the dispatch lounge three hundred miles away, opened the gate in front of Ray. Ray climbed back into the truck and drove through.
“Thanks,” said Ray. “I’ll call you back in a minute.”
Once inside the mountainous compound, Ray hopped out once more and approached a more welcome companion. The sleek lines and elegant architecture of the legs, cabin and cargo bay of the SpiderCat lit up as Ray approached.
He thought his phone on, and winked at the magnificent old linecrawler.
“Hey, Ray. Good to see you again,” whispered the SpiderCat.
“Hi, Miss Kathleen. You look beautiful.”
“Thanks. I’m hardly trying,” she said. She dimmed a few of her brighter lights to a soft glow.
Ray had grown comfortable with the phony seduction of the quirky interface, but he reined in the morale banter a lot compared to his peers. Even fourteen years after Rhonda’s death, he gained little solace, and too much guilt, in conversations with the opposite sex. Heart attack. How obvious. How treatable. How could he have missed it?
“Well, Leto says we’ve just got a juice and jiggle to do, so we may be home by sundown tomorrow, if you’ve got the speed,” said Ray.
Kathleen sighed. “Well, Leto’s an idiot for one thing. I hate how he screws up the terminology. Does he even realize what would happen if he tried to jiggle before juicing? That man is a hazard. And it sounds like he sent you the wrong trouble ticket. I just checked the cable.”
Ray’s stomach lurched. He rolled his eyes. “You’re kidding. That’s just great. What’s the real problem?”
“Power,” she said, “There isn’t any in the cable.”
“That’s weird. I don’t even know how that’s possible.”
“Well, it probably has more to do with some sort of alternator or packet clock timing problem. I hope they sent you with battery attachments because that cable is dead.”
“Uh,” Ray said, his throat tightening. “No. You don’t have them here?”
“Ray, you’re turning red. Please self-regulate. It sounds like we are going to be addressing some –“ Kathleen paused briefly, searching a massive database of English terms not known to be personally agitating to Ray “—complexities.”
Ray exhaled and said, “Yeah. That’s a nice word for it. I need to get a hold of Leto.”
“Leto,” he continued, “are you at your desk?”
“Uhm, yeah, right here, Ray,” was the reply of a man clearly not at his desk.
“You didn’t tell me to bring batteries, not that I would have had any to bring,” said Ray.
“There should be batteries on site in the inventory,” said Leto.
“Why did you bring me in on this instead of one of the base teams? They always roll with full equipment.”
“You were closer, Ray.”
“Uh, I drive a turn-of-the-century pickup truck, Leto. An equipped team on a ziprail would have been here about ten minutes before me. Now I’m going to have to wait for them to hand off a job to them?”
“No, Ray, I need you to go, and I need you to go now. We need that elevator platform moving as soon as possible.”
“I’ve got no batteries, Leto! The cable needs at least one to see if we can get the current back on.”
“Just do a quick patch and then move onto the platform and manually push it to the satellite. I’ll get a team to fix the cable power issue later.”
Ray squinted, perhaps to keep his eyes from bursting out of his head.
“Don’t send me into outer space just to push some freight. That’s a colossal waste.”
“Ray,” Leto continued carefully, almost whispering, as if someone might overhear. “It isn’t freight.”
“What do you mean?” said Ray.
“It’s people. You need to get them moving. Now.”
Ray covered his entire face with his hand, gently gnawing on the heel of it. He guessed at approximately twelve words that could instantly change his employment status for the worse.
Leto said, “Ray, you are going to have to be flexible. You’ve got to fix it without batteries. I’m sorry, yesterday’s inventory reports showed that there were still three in storage, but I see now that they were removed late last night.”
“The oxygen stores are draining. You need to get that platform up to the satellite and the reserve tanks one way or the other, or –“ Leto stopped, but Ray knew exactly what Leto was thinking, because Ray was thinking it too:
Or people die.
“How many people are we talking about?” said Ray.
“More than fifty, plus the pilot. No more than sixty.”
“So there are five dozen human beings on an overloaded, incompatible platform with gerryrigged oxygen supplies and, for whatever reason, three extra nanobatts. Who’s up there?” said Ray.
“Pleasure Knights and Bollywood types. They wanted to take a freight line because they didn’t want to get caught and stopped. Of course, actually paying for a passenger cruise would have been too burjoyzee or however you say it, they said. They put a lot of pressure on me,” said Leto.
Yeah, thought Ray. A lot of pressure, and a little bit of money probably didn’t hurt either. Pleasure Knights were a leisure class, dedicated to senseless adventure and high-risk games of chance.
The Bollywooders were bored Enviromakers of the highest order: wealthy entertainment executives and artists. The fools had put their lives at risk on a childish lark, but Ray couldn’t go so far as to say that they deserved to die.
Besides, Ray was a nomad.
The international attention from a disaster on his watch would pin him. He looked down at his shabby employee photo and imagined it broadcasting on a constant loop on the MoonStream, to a cacophony of jeers and judgments. At best, it would mean he’d be promoted up to a desk, like Leto. No more space climbs. No more excuses for staying abroad, no way to avoid home, hearings, St. Petri Cemetery.
“What are they planning on doing up there?” asked Ray.
“I don’t know. They didn’t say.”
“Who’s the pilot? I need to talk to him, Leto.”
“No can do, Ray. I’m sorry. I’ve been trying since the alarms went off. Nothing. We only had a nanoconnection along the cable for communications, because the platform wasn’t equipped with a voice transmitter.”
“Because you wouldn’t want to communicate on an open space frequency with an illegal transport, right? Because, yeah, that would be stupid. Genius.”
Leto ignored the sarcasm. “I’m sure it’s because of the power problem in the cable. Once that is back up, we can probably talk to the pilot then.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this right away? Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Leto, do you think I’m an idiot?”
Leto’s silence provided his most honest answer of the morning.
Ray took one look at the hull of the great SpiderCat. “Kathleen, you better load up.”
“Aside from the batteries, there’s not a lot else that can possibly come in handy that I don’t already have on board.”
“Well, be creative. And, since you’ll have plenty of space, throw in my truck. I’m going to find that rattle, I swear. I may as well get some useful work done while we are crawling.”
“Uh, I don’t know about that,” said Leto. “Only authorized transports, Ray. You know the drill.”
Ray cut him off. “You know it, too. Not one more word out of you, and maybe we both get to keep our jobs. Load it, Kathleen.”
Ray boarded the SpiderCat.
Even from close range, the cable was invisible. On the launch pad, the massive SpiderCat looked something like four-legged lima bean. Its magnetic paws wrapped in prayer around seemingly nothing. The nothing was, in fact, a thin strand pulled taut and stretching to heaven.
The string, a carefully woven braid of nanocarbon, flexible silicon and microscopic strands of fiberglass, bore the weight of the entire space elevator system. As thin as the cable was at the base, Ray was well aware that the cable alone contained lethal tons of material in high tension. If it were ever to detach from its platform or counterweight in outer space, the collapse would be spectacular and catastrophic, not just for him.
Launch was quick and nearly silent. Lift-off: a common miracle.
“Wow,” said Ray, straining against the instant increase in gravity, “I really have to lose this paunch. My weight is killing me.”
“Oh Ray,” said Kathleen. “I think you look great. Have you been working out?”
As they coursed along its line, eventually stabilizing to the point where Ray could engage the body cart and slide himself back to the cargo bay, to work on his truck. He had a rattle to hunt, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the people on the cable.
Granddad was obsolete: cobbled together with a variety of materials, each material compensating for what had, at one time in the somewhat brief history of functional space elevators, been technical shortcomings in other materials. Unlike nearly all the other working freight and passenger elevators, the cable was not a micron-thin ribbon, nor was it completely carbon.
Soon, it would be decommissioned. But this was a political challenge that no one wanted to take on. The public was downright romantic about Granddad: It had been the first one that worked. Taking it down would be a technological challenge, but a social nightmare.
Ray figured that was why the stowaways had converged here and taken the clandestine flight when every last one of the passengers had plenty of money. They could have flown in luxury on any one of the eight passenger elevators around the world quite easily. Instead they decided to indulge in a little pop nostalgia and revelry at the expense of an aging international monument.
Gravity continued to slow Ray down, and he never found the rattle. He did fix a headlight that had twisted, and realigned it. He thought to remote the lights on and off to test them, but he took too much pleasure from old fashioned button-pushing.
He’d do it when he was back on earth, when he could flick the beams on with a turn of the wrist, lighting up a field of wild grass at midnight.
The SpiderCat began to shudder and slow, so Ray returned to the cockpit even as he became completely weightless. The converted freight platform was now within sight, although its inebriated passengers were not. The beanstalk had widened to a ridiculous proportion, so that the crawler scaled it surface, like a fly on a wall.
The problem was not obvious at first, but as he looked closely at the cable stretching in front of the cockpit, a shadowed area on the surface drew his attention.
The blood drained from his face.
It wasn’t a shadow on the cable.
It was a hole – big enough to be a grave for an elephant.
Cleavage.
Full-blown, red alert, industrial catastrophe, cleavage. Without immediate repair, the beanstalk could snap at the slightest twist, crashing to earth with the weight and terminal velocity of a super meteor.
“Kathleen?”
“I see it. The organics are trying to close that gap. They don’t realize that it’s fifteen feet long.”
“That hole is huge. What happened?”
Ray’s eyes ran along the massive gash, wrenched and widest in its center, as if it had been split with a hatchet.
“I think the stabilizer on the modified transport must have been poorly calibrated for this much widening,” said Kathleen.
“What?”
“The balance arm on the party bus whacked into the cable as it grew fatter.”
“We’ve got to fill that gap. Now.”
“I agree, Ray. But this thing isn’t a quick fix.”
“Start blowing foam.”
“No. The hole’s too big. Granddad shouldn’t have survived this. Foam is for breaks of centimeters of space and grams of mass, not a tomb for a king. Blowing that much foam will just collapse or float away, and bog down those poor organics in the process.”
“Can you hold it together?”
The question made Kathleen laugh a little. Ray had only amused a computer once before. That incident had not ended well.
“No. My magnet makes me unstable for full brace work. Besides, if it comes down to me holding a 20,000 mile tower together at its weak point, the strain will simply snap my arms off.”
“How about steel? Too heavy?”
“Not for a temporary fix. Enough steel in the hole would give Granddad enough structure to re-circuit over and also give him the ability to power up again. A steel patch would last long enough to get the people home and either a full repair or a demolition crew back up here. It’s not ideal, but it may be the best chance.”
“Good. Let’s do that.”
“Nope,” she said. “I can’t spool enough steel in there to fill the cut, at least not in time. It would pour out like toothpaste before I could get it stable, fastened and taut. I need a bunch more plates than I’ve brought, and they’d have to have a much larger surface area, even if I did have enough of them.”
“Now you are just playing hard to get,” he said.
“Never for you.”
A great yawning, wrenching shriek tore through the cabin. Ray’s heart leapt and he looked around in shock, gripping the still quivering arm rests.
“What was that?”
“An audible. My sensors are telling me that the cable continues its disintegration. That noise was a sonic interpretation of what it might sound like were it not in the vacuum of space.”
“Thanks. Don’t do that again.” Ray’s lips felt glued shut. The most horrible sound he’d ever heard just told him that his borrowed time had just come due.
An unshakeable image closed in on Ray’s mind; of drifting, then accelerating, to his death, alone in the world and entombed in an artificial intelligence flailing helplessly upon re-entry, then plunging, plunging and shaking apart. His stomach lurched, and he was grateful for the harness around him. It at least gave the illusion of stability.
“The truck,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“The truck. Put it in. Cover it with cable netting. Heck, fasten it with my ramset if you need to. Blow whatever foam you can in the gaps. Pop the hood and regulate the cable relay from its old battery while you are at it.”
“Ray.”
“Kathleen? Just put it in.”
The SpiderCat hummed. Ray didn’t need the monitors to tell him that Kathleen was already drawing open her cargo doors.
From the corners of the cockpit window, Ray looked out and saw her deceptively languid tendrils extending and reaching, almost discretely, behind her, into the bay.
He stared on video as the braces on the Ford 250 Superchief automatically unlatched. Simultaneously, Kathleen’s tendrils caressed the frame of the truck and then pulled taut.
At zero gravity, the truck seemed to float away. In fact, the tendrils held it secure, guiding it into the cold shade of space. The stale odor of coffee in the tweed upholstery would neutralize forever. No boot heel would again catch in the rusted patch beneath the accelerator. Never would the spot-weld between the bed and cab whine in outer space.
In a minute, the vehicle reappeared before Ray’s eyes, and this time, in the flesh. Ray had expected to see wheels, axles, a duct-taped muffler as the truck passed in front of the window.
Instead, he saw his truck from above, in all its ancient glory. Red and rust. Straw streamed slowly like confetti suspended in the flare of a camera flashbulb from the flatbed. The engine’s mysterious rattle would be cured by cosmic silence. A desperate urge to think on the headlights, beaming them forever into the distant reaches, overcame him, but he refrained. Wasteful to drain the battery.
The truck made a gentle turn as Kathleen lowered it into the grave. Her tendrils held it in place as she unspoiled and tacked cable over the wound. Spurts of foam began to flow into small spaces. In two hours, every trace of the truck had vanished.
The sun vanished behind the horizon, and the world was dark. Kathleen’s lights came on without Ray asking.
“Thanks, Sugar,” he said, staring at the huge mechanical scar.
“Power’s back. It worked. What say let’s go?” she replied. Even Ray could tell she was laying on “soothe” mode with intent.
“Yeah. Let’s go. I need to talk to someone. Then break his neck.”
The passenger platform was a monstrosity of dangerously cobbled life-support systems and dangling luxury add-ons. It took Kathleen an hour to build a functioning seal for docking. Ray crawled through into an opulent stylized lounge that had one point been a fuel holding tank.
Ray’s fury had drained into a stony irritation by the time he finally could address anyone in authority. Aside from two two-hour naps, he’d been awake for thirty hours.
A small man with a perfect global accent wearing a translucent tuxedo and dazzling red cape approached. He took one look at Ray’s greasy jumpsuit.
“Welcome to the party, my good visitor, but I’m afraid you’re underdressed,” he said. With his chin tilted up, he literally looked down his nose at Ray.
Ray scratched his stubble, then with his thumb scratched his head. “People could have died.”
“Oh, we absolutely live to die! My pilot assures me that we could have made it back down without too much trouble.”
“I guess. If not having any power on a collapsing cable isn’t trouble, then you wouldn’t have had much. Take me to this pilot. I need to tell him how to get home.”
“That’s quite all right. I bought the best there is. I doubt he needs you to draw him a map.”
“You are really incredible, do you know that? Do you realize you may be going to jail?”
“Yes, well,” said the host, “you do realize that incarceration is all the rage now. I’m hoping to get put away in the Pyramid at Rekyavik. I hear the warden is simply amazing!”
“Look, Mister…what’s your name?” said Ray.
“Oh, really. You couldn’t afford it,” the small man replied. Ray hadn’t seen him blink once since he’d met him.
“Listen to me. You take me to the pilot or I swear I will start socializing with each and every one of your guests. Neither one of us wants that.”
The small man blanched. Prison and death were one thing – but losing face in front of his party would ruin him.
“Certainly. Right this way. Please, just don’t say anything to anyone we might see along the way.”
The small man led Ray through a few occupied chambers. Some travelers, deep into their cups, were oblivious, others recoiled at Ray’s messy hair, sloping shoulders, and general dinginess. The small man strained a smile at those who took notice.
Mercifully, the pilot was not far beyond the initial rooms. His cap was askew and he stank of something quite foreign to a rogue spaceman – high-end liquor.
The pilot stood and sloppily kicked his heels. “What can I do for you occifer?”
Ray spoke with a weary growl. “Captain, I don’t need to tell you what a mess this is. I just want you to know that you cost me more than you will ever know, and the last thing I’m about to let you do is kill off all these people I’ve just spent two days trying to save.”
“I am all eyes. Or ears,” said the pilot. He drummed his console absently.
“Listen carefully. Detach the stabilizing rod so you don’t hack the cable again.”
“That’ll make the ride bumpy. Umpy.”
“Uh-huh. Just do it. If you don’t, I’m going to send my SpiderCat on top of you and rip it off.”
“Okay. Detach stabilizer.”
“Then go to the terminal point. Juice up at the nuclear bank, and then make your return descent at half-speed.”
“Juice up. Half-speed.”
“Do this, and try to remember why you became a pilot in the first place.”
“Oh yeah. The glurls. The gurs. The girls. Anything else I can do you for?”
Ray shook his head, and turned to go, then thought better of it.
“Yeah,” he said, “Why’d you take the three batteries on board with you? This ship obviously doesn’t need that much power.”
“Light show. It wasn’t that great. We should have left them behind.”
The host hurried Ray back through the chambers, but new parties had started up, crowding his exit. The beautiful people in their crystalline fedoras and digitally sculpted bodies stared at Ray with a mix of wonder and titillation. He was mostly clothed, and sloppy at that: a true novelty, the likes of which most hadn’t seen in some time.
As Ray passed through the final room before the warm and isolated confines of the SpiderCat, a young woman wearing nothing more than delicate body cosmetics approached him. Impossibly thin silver strands adorned her neck, waist, ankles and wrists. Two thin, faint tears left streaks on her cheeks. Her hand shook as it pressed flat on her collarbone. She stepped over what may very well been the overindulged corpse of one of the revelers, and held her hand out to Ray, palm up.
Ray jerked back, as if she were not human, but an electrical discharge.
“Thank you,” she said. Her accent was soft and low, “My Dad would be…I’m so sorry. Thank you.”
“It’s okay, just go home,” said Ray. “Find some different friends.”
“Please, take me with you. I don’t want to stay on this stupid platform.”
“No. I can’t do that. I’ve given some very simple instructions to the pilot. You’ll be fine. Enjoy the tour and the party and the view. Just go home to your dad, and never do anything this stupid again. Please.”
Still shaking, she took one timid step toward him. She wrapped her arms around his waist, burying the side of her beautiful face into his chest. “Thank you,” she said. Through a denim shirt, his skin could felt the muffled vibrations of her milk-smooth voice as if she’d been breathing on his bare flesh.
Ray uneasily raised his hand to comfort her, but realizing her shoulders were naked, instead patted the back of her head. As she broke the embrace, he took the briefest moment to inhale, smelling her hair. No scent of liquor on her, just corn silk and earth.
Ray hadn’t been that close to a woman in fourteen years. Fourteen years, two months, five days.
Then he left.
After boarding the SpiderCat, the return trip was fast, although Ray made sure his eyes were closed when they first embarked. He couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the cruel and faceless bandage covering his truck. His mind returned, again and again to the image of the F-250 tangled, like a locust in a web, inside the cable.
In less than a full day, the great mountain of the compound on earth appeared.
“Hey Kathleen?”
“Yes, Ray?” said the whirring SpiderCat.
“When we get back down is there any way you can give me a ride back home?”
“Sure, Ray. Anything for you.”
Heavy dice crackled.
Playing since Full Earth without one spectator, now his arm rolled through a mob. Competitors lost fortunes. He piled them high, swatting the sevens in low gravity.
Food ran out.
No more drinks.
His dry tongue tasted LunaCrete, a symptom of the launchport disaster. House band, down to one: a pretty trumpet player who finished with a dazzling flare then sat right down on stage, her shoulders heaving.
He sweated, certain to die a trillionaire.
On August 33rd, 2100, Rex Randall Koreth knelt in prayer before the Cray-Cry, its tiny, old-fashioned lights glowing like altar candles. That day, his humble mission was to be Glory’s usher. He prayed, just a little bit, for death at day’s end, because no other day could ever be as great in the entirety of his remaining life.
Of course, the regular calendar called it September 1st, accounting for that century’s Leap Year bug. That had been the grave debate between the elders; whether the 33rd fell on the secular 1st or the secular 2nd. The Church had split over it, and now the heretical Seconders were well-armed and holed up in their separate compound, awaiting Judgment.
Those people didn’t matter to Rex Randall. He had already forgotten them in his fugue before the Cray-Cry, the gateway to the holy of holies, the Tomb of the Resurrection. The interface was clunky and charming, a wireless reader from the dusty, depressed 2020s or so. The artifact transported him to the time of prophets, inspired him to more deeply appreciate the fatherly plantings, the epic vision, of the holy avatars. Even the three-score crowd, on their knees, kowtowing behind him in rhythm, went unnoticed.
King China, his three wives (Faith, Hope, Joy) and the hundred Men of Renown lay sealed in the freezing chambers, perfectly preserved for the Day Foretold. The last one to go into the chamber, Ted William Clamping, had been asleep almost exactly 100 years.
Rex Randall kissed the weighted board resting on his open palms three times: once to turn it on, once to open the operating system, and a third time for blessing. He began to enter the Chapel codes that he’d memorized over the last several months, not otherwise knowing a single thing about computer programming.
Perhaps that is why they had selected him: he was the perfect vessel, impossible to tempt with extra knowledge. Or perhaps because he had stayed loyal through the Bad Times, when funding for the Tomb of the Resurrection ran into the red and bankruptcy threatened the severing of electricity and the liquidation of the facility through foreclosure. The heavens had provided an unlikely patron in the form of, of all things, a secular historical baseball re-enactment society, interested in collecting some of the Men of Renown. This had caused the First Split—the protests of the heretical Anti-Remnants grew so violent that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had become the wrath of God on them.
Traditionally a quiet man, Rex Randall had argued lucidly from scripture that the sale of a handful of historical avatars had no bearing on their prophesied resurrection. They would get up just as King China had foretold, whether they emerged first from the temple or from some shabby Hall of Fame of the world. The Separate Six, as they became to be known, would rise, a precursor to the wider miracle.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, they had picked him because he was not afraid to lie for the truth. His ancient tablet contained something other than the access codes. Hidden in its casing was a dispenser of endrites. In olden days when language had more flair and self-consciousness, they had been called nanotechnology neurobots, nano-neuros, nanobots, and all sorts of other semi-clever guttural, tribal, quaint sounds. Now that they had proven to be practically useless on living tissue, endrites had been relegated to the annals of quack science.
This was his last, sinful concern before he tapped in the request for the injectors to engage the Resurrection process. Rex Randall saw no irony in the idea of enabling the miracle through stolen technology.
Other Cryogenic releases had occurred before now, but all of them had been secular, most of them for the purposes of study and cell harvesting—none fulfilled the old promise of resurrection.
Because of the few attempts at restoration, all horribly faulty, Cryogeny in America had come to a complete halt; the only facilities left standing were a few religious holdouts. Aside from the Tomb of the Resurrection, only the Christ Is Lord Burial Preservation, Buddha's Bliss, Scientology II Suite, and the Mormon Temple of Integrity were left in the country, and two of them were fairly obvious tax shelters and little else, with no ancillary eschatology.
Rex Randall bowed low and shuffled inside a dingy office space with rotted carpet and a wall of darkened casks. An antique office chair lay disabled and cobwebbed in the corner. The floor cleaning robot had gotten hung up in its wreck years before, unable to return to its charging port, and it lay there, dead. He hit the light switch even as the endrites coursed through the walls of the elaborate intravenous system, on their way to the rapidly warming corpses of the gods.
The Damasio Principle—that nanotechnology can only impede, disrupt or destroy living neurotissue—did not apply to the dead. After all, one of the hallmarks of death was a breakdown in the spaces and matter upon which the vitality of a man works. Endrites, it was believed, might just bridge those neurological spaces, and aid the resurrection process.
He shut, locked, and bolted the door. What remained of the moldy carpet stuck to the bottoms of his lightweight Hooves and stained the hem of his priestly robe. The room smelled of rancid milk.
The long wall was lined with morgue doors four high and thirty across. They were already warm to the touch.
He opened the first one and slid the long drawer out.
Resurrection was timed so that the bodies could be managed by a single acolyte, in accordance with the scriptures. According to Doctor Sewer, the elder priest and source of the illegal endrites, the system had been built to allow a thirty-minute window before the bodies of the sleepers began to suffer irreparable damage, but that was the maximum. Rex Randall had to move quickly.
He slid the metal plate at the top of the body-length casing and exposed the face. The freezer-burnt stench filled his nose and his mouth tasted of spoiled medicine. Skin that were it a more vibrant yellow would be sallow stretched across the hard edges of the skull, peeling in layers of crust.
The latches unlocked, the hatch opened, and the rapid thawing body lay completely motionless—thin and contorted.
Rex Randall was very much aware of the promises made so long ago, that every single one would rise again. But he had also been at the most recent Council of Prophecy, where the clarified vision of King China revealed that, while all would live in spirit, only a remnant would stand. Rex Randall had, in fact, affirmed the vision of his brother as a shared one. The improvement of scripture wouldn’t have happened without his vote.
Still, the disappointment hurt.
A dead mummy was not the Promised Hope—and success on the first drawer was not too much to ask, he thought. One part of his mind worried that the Seconders might not be purely evil, and he squashed that thought. Another part worried that the fast thaw was fatal, not heroic. He squashed that, too. Time was ticking. He had to move to the next, leaving the dead Man of Renown exposed on the open drawer at his knee.
The body above was better, its blue tones taking on a fleshier complexion within seconds of exposure. He checked the heart with a small, handheld stethoscope.
Nothing. He thought he saw a twitch in the thumb, but maybe he’d bumped the drawer with his hip.
The blood-salting seed of creeping, cosmic panic, planted by a ghostly finger, nestled into a furrow in his heart.
Dead.
He opened the next drawer, unleashed the body. Again, nothing. He moved down the line, opening drawer after drawer, weaving through the aisles, gagging on the crypt’s humid, intensifying stench.
Between two columns of open drawers, he lifted the hem of his gown across his mouth, and spit into the cloth, desperate to taste anything but the gas of useless tin and the grave. He just wanted out. Yet he wanted nothing but to die, alone, sealed in, never having to face the crowd of sixty brothers and sisters, their eyes alight with the fervor of the happily deceived.
His shoulders shook, and tears came down. Then a hand reached beneath the hem of his robe and clutched his naked leg.
“Derry Derry Derry gluaschon Derry Derry DERRY,” whispered a raspy voice from the bottom drawer behind him.
He jerked, snapping the man’s limb askew. The corpse jittered from the drawer, falling to the floor like a sack. Rex Randall backed against the opposite drawers, his flesh kissing the others.
Another moan. An arm three rows down shot up, striking the drawer above. Some stayed motionless, but others began moving like hens on a hot roost. Another body fell from the top row, bones snapping. The head broke off of the first one he had opened as it tried to sit up.
Rex Randall jerked the doors open; some of the bodies were smoking and damaged in his delay. The noise grew louder as he went. He opened a drawer that was lined only with five heads apiece, and then another containing only sets of shriveled brains. Among the brains was one labeled “Ted William Clamping.” He’d never had a chance. All of these remained motionless, even as some of the earlier bodies had learned to crawl.
As the noise intensified, chants from outside the room could be heard. The awaiting Faithful had begun to rejoice in anticipation.
Finally he made it to the executive section. Most of these were empty, having once contained the famous funders of the church: Hall of Famers, whose bodies had been sold to other groups.
But a cluster of four were filled: King China and his three wives. Rex Randall opened them blindly, his body slapped with icy sweat, his own bones tired, his blood pumping. The first case contained Faith, shrunken, eyes bulging in a natural expression of serene beatification. The second was empty. The third contained, presumably, both Hope and Joy, though the only evidence was a heap of decayed bones and a pair of cloven skulls. The final, and uppermost, was King China’s.
The noise died down as the resurrected stopped saying anything, stopped doing anything, one by one. King China’s drawer slid open heavily, and his body was revealed to be most lifelike.
A huge man of intense appetites, stretched out on his back he seemed to be the size of a piano. He had lived during an era before the diabetes vaccine, the Halocline Revolution, before cigarettes were healthy and carbohydrates known to be poison. A few inches shy of seven feet tall, even in death, even showing the wear of crippling age and obesity, King China was a physical wonder.
Someone’s long nails tapped against his respective drawer and then fell silent.
Rex Randall took the King’s hand, thick as a porterhouse, refrigerator cool. He kissed it, wiping his drying tears against the fleshy fat ridge of knucklebones.
“Rise up,” he begged. “Forgive me,” he whispered.
He looked upon the dead face, full of life. Faint age spots and smile lines and cheeks as full as a chipmunk's were shockingly familiar: King’s image had been everywhere in their cloister from time immemorial. Rex Randall knew that mercurial smile with the tiny upturn more than he knew his own father.
“Rise up,” he begged again. A leg in the shadows kicked, a final spasm in a silent room.
Minutes passed.
Rex Randall looked at the barred entrance door, the fervor outside it reaching an apocalyptic pitch. His hands shook. King China didn’t move.
“Forgive me,” he whispered again. Then he retrieved the tablet from the folds of his robe. He flicked the laser-razor on and gently began to cut the skin at the base of King’s neck, just as he had been instructed to do should the King not stand on his own.
The chant outside rocked the room, its heavy thrum seemingly strong enough to beat the hearts of the dead. Rex Randall took his time, and lovingly removed the flesh from the Familiar Father’s flawless skull.
He took the skin, its eye sockets a pair of spectral holes, and walked to the exit. He carefully slipped the massive face over his own, and lined the sockets over his own eyes so he might see out. He tucked the edge of the holy mask under his collar. One last adjustment, a deep breath, a new prayer, then he unbarred the door.
He swung it wide and stepped out.
The crowd screeched and writhed, mad with ecstasy.
Researcher's Note: From this data sample, one can make the leap that things didn't decline because religion dragged it down. It is quite often the other way around. Bad magic, bad philosophy and bad religion each assume a perfect state of pre-existence for themselves, even in their respective gravest states.
After all, why else, in their failings, would they ever acquire the modifier "bad?"
Hunting deer with a homemade seven-dollar machine gun on the ancient I-80 Ridge was not as fun as he planned to make it sound when he arrived back home, but at least he got a good nap in. The woods and prairie flowers blushed with autumn, but the day was warm. Any cooldown stood at least a week away.
"Autumn hair, autumn eyes, autumn glow and winter's heart," the Poet had said of him at youth commencement three years ago. He had gotten a game-saving tackle the night before, and had aced all sorts of tests leading up to commencement, so the cryptic, unresolved Commission had gutted him. It still ate at him, almost every one of the thousand days since.
Beautiful fall days were the worst reminders of the indeterminate prophecy.
Theobaldi Hayek sat up, stretched and rose to his feet. He hoisted the wide steel handcart behind him. The grassy crater in the long stretch of road had a rim of concrete scarred with grey-black streaks: the ancient marks of explosives. Back when whole concrete could still be found, scavengers had blown up sections of highway. An old crater had filled in with grass and provided him a bed.
The sun was six hand-widths above the horizon:
he had enough time, barely.
The wide band of cloven hoofprints soon ran down the other side of the ridge. Theo glanced across the trampled prairie to note that his putative prey was nowhere in sight. He broke from the deertrail, and continued east.
In less than an hour the old highway led to a massive earthworks ramp. He'd been daydreaming or he would have noticed the cracked and grassy concrete plain to the north first: it had buildings, old style, on it.
The Cougar's Haunt.
Theo's pulse took off like a stallion to a mare. His mouth went dry as he dropped the handles of the wagon. He touched the gun to make sure it was there, and slid down the side of the ridge, bypassing the ramp that led only to the ruins of a bridge. The empty settlement had survived the century, once occupied by a notorious militia, now abandoned to a population too far removed to scour it, save for the rare explorer or young (and foolish) ghost hunter.
Once on stable ground, he unslung the machine gun and crouched through the grass and cracked plates of concrete. He patted a long smooth chunk like a talisman. It was dry and a little rough, like sand. Though, intellectually, he knew better, he had expected a substance oily and alien, a sheen of petroleum, binding it. It wasn't much different than tiny bits of gravel that covered I-80.
He picked his way through the ruins, making a wide circle around the main building, an angular structure with huge windows, all shattered, a few with boards left in them. He nearly stepped on a faded sign. Theo bent down and ran his hands across it. Although dusty and buried in the dirt, its texture was smooth and slick.
Plastic.
"Worl Larg Truc" spelled out in bubbly letters. The rest of the sign was broken or obscured, but it was fairly well known that the Cougar's Haunt had, at one time been the largest stopping and refueling center in the world for trucks. Theo wasn't sure why trucks needed special stopping places, as from what he had seen about old world vehicles, trucks and cars were the same thing except that trucks had a bed like a wagon that was exposed to the air, while cars had rows of seats for passengers.
Theo tried to break a piece of plastic off to take home, but it didn't give. He idly thought of dragging the whole prize with him, but it obviously wouldn't budge from its burial site. He circled the barbarians' lair, one eye to danger, the other to treasure. He found a molded foam cup with the bottom gone, but he had dozens of those, all in better shape, so he left it.
Without consciously realizing it, he spiraled inward toward the shattered, gaping entryway. The light only carried into the cavernous structure hundred feet before fading into darkness. Theo stepped in through a shattered window.
The floor was nearly all dirt, but Theo found spots that were exposed to the old tile. A few odd metal structures remained, the remnants of shelves for dry goods or perhaps books. Mostly the room was bare. In the semi-darkness stood a counter, cracked with holes punched into it, and places where ancient artifacts may once have lay. Back along the wall were many alcoves and more counters. One counter still had a huge adding machine still embedded in it.
Theo climbed over the counter and pried it. It didn't move. The buttons, those that still remained, were mashed irreparably into the machine. He saw a flicker in the corner of his eye and turned around.
In the room directly behind him, a candle was burning. He took a firm grip on the gun, and considered the possible ricochet environment.
He stepped in to discover that four candles were lit and they surrounded a household altar. Theo looked around and listened, expecting a lunatic or beast to drop from the ceiling. Confirming that the room had only one entrance, and nowhere else to hide, he knelt to take a closer look at the little shrine.
His breath went out. The image of woman, impossibly sad and degraded, struck him. She was naked save a few scraps across her chest and loins, kneeling in desert sand. She clutched her tousled hair with one hand. The other pressed against her bare hip. Theo was surprised at his hunger for her even as he felt pity. She was alien to him, unlike the sisters he had known in their modest, bright blouses and long blue jean skirts. He could not tell if its subject was created by an artist from a forgotten era, or if it was an old-style photograph. He hoped the former, because it disturbed him to think that a real woman, little more than a girl, really, had once found herself in such disastrous straights.
He had never understood the wisdom of the proverb: "like a golden ring in a swine's snout is a beautiful woman trapped in indiscretion," but it came to him now. He imagined a spirit behind her body: the girl dangling, her arms akimbo, chained against the moist, invisible snout of a godlike hogshead.
Sand stuck to her brown thighs. If it was an image of a real woman, she, and whatever cruel fate she had met or, worse, pursued, was now lost to history. Theo knew that the best thing was to demolish the shrine and end the sweet blasphemy. Instead, he gently lifted the image from its home, folded it, and secreted inside his shirt. Then he pulled the shrine down, and put a candle to its wood planks.
He heard a noise outside the room and stood, his knees popping. His eyes adjusted slowly from the candlelight. He stepped backward against the wall. He took a step into a soft spot on the floor, and felt the wall creak. He stood motionless. Another creak. An orchestra of plastic, both heavy and light, echoed. He crouched down, finger shaking against the trigger, and stepped gingerly through the door.
The axe swung too high.
Measured for a walking man's chest, it cleared Theo's head by half a foot. Theo hit the floor, half-blind in the bad light. He couldn't get bearings or position to fire, so he rolled against the far door jamb. The man with the axe hoisted it and brought it down like he was splitting a log. The axe smashed off the jamb and Theo fired, still lying on his back. Even from such short range, the burst of bullets sprayed into the ceiling, instantly shifting the melee from silent to deafening. The Axeman fled, the odd bits of bottles and touchscreens and other charms dangling from piercings and chains in his flesh and clothing, his eyes wild. He leaped over the countertop into the main room.
Theo stood, fired a one-second burst while walking in the man's direction, then took a covered position at the counter, his heart pounding. He wondered how much he had left in the magazine, wished he hadn't left the spares in the hand cart. The cheap gun was okay for tagging massed deer, lousy for precision. He bitterly regretted losing his shotgun.
Theo shifted, putting his hand on a drip of liquid. At first, he thought it was his own blood. It wasn't.
"Hey," he called out, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and tried to force out something deeper. "I got you. I don't think you need to die for this. Let's--" Theo didn't know what to ask for. Would a call for truce show weakness? Would a threat just sound stupid? Had he really hit him at all?
"How about we all settle down and stop trying to get ourselves killed?" It was a firm, calm and familiar voice. The ropy silhouette of a lean man with a machete in one hand and high-beam flashlight in the other came from the entrance. It was the Poet, Prophet Matt. Theo's adrenaline gave way to shame.
The Axeman stood up from his hiding place just on the opposite side of the countertop, and ran, the axe clattering to the old tile. Matt walked over to the counter, flicked off the light and held out his hand.
"Come on, Theo. You're all right."
He sheepishly took his hand and climbed over the counter.
"What do you think of the World's Largest Truck Stopper? Find anything interesting?"
"Nuh-uh."
Climbing the ramp back to highway, Theo told the Poet that he maybe had shot the Axeman.
"I suppose that's his problem now. The idiot attacked you, after all."
"Have you been following me?"
"Easy to follow as much racket as you make. Nice gun, by the way, that handle plastic?"
Theo perked up and smiled proudly. "No, just polished wood. Randall's homebrew varnish."
"Looks plastic."
"Thanks," he said, even as he admired the full-blown, true-blue plastic of the big flashlight that hung at the Poet's belt. He also had a hard plastic canteen.
"Why?"
"They thought you might be making a bridge run. Heck, I did too. I know you were upset about not making an apprenticeship."
"I wasn't making a bridge run," Theo lied, shaking his head. "I said I was going deer hunting. Sheesh."
"Uh-huh. Find a lot of deer in the Truck Stopper, did you?"
Theo paused. "I got sidetracked."
"That's one hell of a sidetrack."
They were back on the ridge and near the handcart. Theo used a final, tired burst of energy to jog ahead to grab it and began the slow trudge back home.
"Hey," shouted the Poet, standing, his eyes slits against the low-hanging sun in the west. "Wrong way."
Theo looked at him, incredulous. "Where are we going instead?"
"To the bridge. Bring the cart."
Theo stepped lively, unable to hide a smile.
Sunset came quickly and they set a quick camp on the ridge. The Poet's long fingers made swift work to unleash the light foam bedroll and blankets while Theo unloaded the firewood he'd added to the cart that afternoon. The autumn sun was too low and cool to use the glass lens, but Theo secretly impressed himself by getting the fire going on the first match.
"I could have walked for another hour or two, easy," said Theo, lightly feeding the newborn fire.
"Yeah, well, I was done," said the Poet stretching himself against the backpack he'd laid at the head of the bedroll. He unlatched a metal clasp behind him and pulled out a long thin can, and then another more typical soup-style can. "And hungry. My wife set us up quite nicely." He reached in one more time and pulled out a bundle of charred metal. He patted the ground next to the collection, and Theo picked them up and unfolded the portable grill, setting it over a corner of the fire. "Anyhow, we're half an hour from the River. We'll save the view for sunrise."
The bear steak and beans were fresh and hot. Theo couldn't remember the last great meal he'd had, but he wouldn't forget this one. The Poet's water had stayed cool all day in the canteen, and he broke out some canned cherries for dessert.
The night cooled and the Poet told him an old story about the Phantasm in the Machine and how, when the Phantasm learned how to fly, he realized he had been human all along. Theo hadn't heard it since he was a kid. He stared at the newborn stars, and pictured the Phantasm in their clusters.
"I felt like a ghost. I still do."
The Poet knew he was talking about Commencement Day. "Because you didn't get an apprenticeship?"
"I'd be a Journeyman by now." Married, he thought. Making money. Surely not haunting the stomping grounds of his youth, hunting deer, working odd jobs for the church. An afterthought, a cautionary tale, a Letter Z.
"A Journeyman what?"
"You tell me. Gunsmith, architect, butcher, engineer, ag. I scored high in almost everything, except culinary and tailoring."
"Is that what you want to do? One of those?"
"Better than Journeyman Nothing."
"It's unique not to get one."
"Yeah, unique. Like being born without a leg."
The Poet laughed so loudly that it startled Theo. "You could have gone into comedy."
He thought of the endearing misfits at the community theater. As much fun as they seemed to be having, they lived communally and relied in large part on church subsidies. It was no different than his current position, but more public and with a much greater degree of foolishness. "Oh, yeah. That's respectable."
"You spend far too much time thinking of yourself."
"You didn't tell me anything."
"I told you plenty."
"I'm sorry, Poet –"
"Matt."
"Matt. I'm sorry, but do you have any idea what it does to someone when they are left out like that?"
"Some idea, yes."
"I don't know anyone, except old derelicts, who lives without a Commission."
"Who said you have no Commission?"
"A real Commission. One with –"
"What, an income? Status? Since when did that ever matter to you?"
That stung. Theo had always been proud of the fact that the rules that everyone seemed enslaved by had no hold on him. He used to drive the quarterback crazy, breaking from defensive schemes to make plays of opportunity on the ball. He always intrigued girls, without trying, and he never ran for any office or paid attention to politics, but if he wanted people to do something, he could make it happen when it suited him. The last three years had been a desert, all because, when it came down to it, yes, the pathetic, stupid, mortal Commission mattered.
"It doesn't. It didn't. But a real Commission is a baseline for a person to find opportunity. Without it, I can't get to where I want to go."
"Looks like you are going exactly where you want to go. The Mississippi."
"You want to go. I was going to be home by sundown."
"Uh-huh. Then next week, when you track the herd a little farther, and then a little farther and then a little farther, you would somehow never head over to the River, just to see if it is true?"
"Sure, fine. But I know it can't be crossed. I just don't know why we let things come to this. Is that wrong to want to know about this world and why we insist on being so self-reliant when there's so much to be gained over there?"
"Independent, not self-reliant. We trade, after all. Import, export, communicate. So no, of course not. But there's a difference between being curious and becoming an oil-chaser like your friend with the axe."
"No friend of mine."
"Right. Yet he helped you as a friend should. He showed you the cold embers of decadence and what a man looks like when he falls oilbound."
Theo shifted, brushing bits of concrete gravel away from under his legs. "So monks? Amish? How can I be anything like that if I have no work, no Commission?" He shivered.
The Poet sighed and turned down the broad, covers. He lay back and closed his eyes.
"Two under one blanket stay warm," said the Poet.
"How can one?"
"Good. A chord of three strands."
"Is not easily broken."
"Good. Don't forget that hating oil is the same as the worship of oil."
"How Zen."
"Hardly."
Theo fell asleep, his left hand secretly pressed against the image of the woman folded into his shirt.
The early morning sun bloomed across the wide, curvy prairie and in less than an hour the sparkling, running sea of the Mississippi River appeared at the bottom of the high hill they summited. Theo looked across to Civilization, to Modernity, to Illinois. It looked just like the rural wilds he'd been travelling.
They made short work of the long hill and stood at the ruined bridge. It spanned most of the river, with sections of it in decay, and a large gaping hole at the middle.
"There it is."
"I can't believe we let it fall into such disrepair. I can't believe we didn't keep it up. We are so close to all of it: airports, real cars, computer networks," he said, and then in a hushed, trailing tone, "Chicago."
The Poet smiled, and carefully picked his path across the massive bridge, carefully avoiding weak spots and open air. Theo followed, and then over took him.
They made it to the high breezes at the center of the bridge. The gap was fifteen feet across, a long jump, one that he wouldn't have taken even when he ran track. A thin girder still connected the two sides, making it possible, if risky, to crawl across.
A small bundle lay on their side of the crevasse, a long rope attached to it, its end dangling into the gap, swaying above the drop.
"Did we just fail to prioritize when the economy collapsed? How could we let ourselves cut off the rest of the world like that? We couldn't afford a maintenance crew? How short-sighted."
The Poet pointed to some old grey-black scars on the ragged edge of the concrete.
Theo paused, a realization dawning. Looking into the deceptively slow moving current three hundred feet below, he dizzied. "They blew it up? Why would they want to cut us off?"
"We blew it up. My grandparents. Your greats." The Poet picked up the bundle and loosened the tie. He pulled out several soda bottles that had been emptied and filled with bits of plastic. "Ooo. Zip-ties. Those are great."
"We cut them off?"
"On purpose," said the Poet, smiling just a bit. He took some bits of woodwork from his pack and stuffed them into the bundle. "Anything you want to add? I like to keep the little trade going."
Theo shook his head, distracted. "We cut them off?"
He felt young and stupid, and too old to feel so young and so stupid. The Poet began to tie the bundle back up.
"Wait." Theo reached into his shirt and pulled out the crumpled, folded picture. His voice came out shaky and artificially pubescent. "This is theirs. Send it back."
"The Truck Sto—"
"They had a shrine to it. I pulled it down. Burned it. But I," he shook his head, his lungs filling with silence.
"Good for you." The Poet unfolded it. "Quite a temptation, I see." He flicked the paper into the crevasse and Theo's heart fluttered downward, as it did. The dingy colors of the woman spun, blurred and drifted beneath the bridge, out of sight, inevitably toward the great swallowing river. "The people on the other side don't need it any more than we do. Besides, they make new and glossy ones by the millions in their factories."
He finished off the knot, spooled the other end of the rope into his hand, and tossed it to the other side. It landed with a heavy clatter, several feet from the edge. He threw the end of the rope, hard. Unlike the previous toss, the entire rope landed on concrete.
The Poet brushed his hands against his jeans and clapped. "Well, I'm going back home. How about you?"
"Can I come with you?"
"Of course. I've been waiting three years for you to ask."
Theo was dumbstruck for an hour, uncertain of the agreement he had unwittingly enjoined. Then they crested the hill and, far off, in the direction of the Cougar's Haunt, a pillar of smoke rose to touch the mid-morning sun.
Researcher's Note: Farther forward, further back. Vorpal blades go snicker snack. Hearts alone have heart attack. Time stopped Sunday; time flew back.
Greaves. Grief. Aromatic Polyamide.
As I hung by my shins on two hooks over a wide, shallow glowing pool littered with ancient stones and the slow-dying bodies of my predecessors, my thoughts centered on these.
The polymer greaves, glorified soccer equipment, had been a gift of fortune. Our Province Guard gave them to me at my send-off, a poor substitute for a breastplate, the last of which had been destroyed by the Cannibals. Snagged in a forest of hooks, the greaves lynched me above the deadly surface below.
The slow, boiled expressions of the floating people below me filled the future tomb with grief. One of the men still gripped the corner of a steel shield, the likes of which hadn't been employed in a hundred years. He gave new meaning to the word "centurion." Though his eyes and matted hair retained the vibrance and color of youth, the great gravity holding him down and unholy liquid cast him in a breathing death mask. I stopped looking down on the pool when I recognized the face of the last man we sent.
I swung gently in the air, clutching my crotch, praying not to slide out my body-shaped, bullet-proof pants, constructed of woven cables forged at the laboratory of Our Province's lone remaining Aromatic Polyamide laboratory.
I freed one hand to sway a little more, quaking at the many upward tugs, any one of which could swiftly shift to an irreversible drop. I bowed toward the ceiling, nervously clutched another hook. Letting go of myself with the other hand, and grabbing the hook with both, I slowly worked the hooks out of my greaves.
The second leg fell free, sending me swinging over the pool, my hands raking through a sea of hooks. The far ledge came up hard. I splatted against it, windless, but thankful for the pain.
To my knees. I looked at my gloves. Not a scratch. Aromatic Polyamide.
Checked the holster. Pistol still strapped in. No more bullets left, but I wasn't going to shoot my way out of this anyway. Still, a sentimental comfort.
Then I realized, of the three things I thought of when hanging like butchered meat, none of them were the most important.
I reached behind my shoulder, my heart sinking.
Backpack.
More specifically:
Backpack latch.
I had unlocked the stupid thing after the fight to grab my last clip. My entire purpose, a holy sacrifice, now lay shattered and scattered behind me, locked forever beneath a blanket of phosphorescence.
The glow from the dead, never-dying pool behind me barely lit the columned exit in front of me, but I didn't have a flashlight. It had been in the backpack, too.
Blindness struck me momentarily as I stumbled from the black tunnel. The light, which I can only describe as "not quite blue" burned any shadows from the room. The stone narthex was bleached a brilliant white, and was smooth as marble. Gossamer thin tapestries waved magically in the still air. I crossed the main aisle and banged my knee as I fell to it before the god.
His beauty forced my eyes from Him, and instantly caused me to never see another thing in this world without His face hovering over it like a cataract. I stared again, wondering if my mortal eyes would decay in their sockets.
He sat on a jagged throne, and seemed smaller than I had expected; larger than a man, but not by much. Thunder rolled through the chamber - His voice.
"You people and your worship. Do you know that that really doesn't do anything for me?"
Until then, I'd heard of trembling. Now I know.
"Get up. Please. We don't stand on ceremony around here."
"'We?'" I said, fighting every instinct I had to flee into the preferable sea of hooks and eternal doom. I stood. My chin lifted, as if drawn by a string. His face, a miraculous triumph, shone like molten gold.
He waved his hand dismissively. Sparks flew from it. "Me. Sorry. Language has no good pronouns for, ah, me."
"So," he said.
I swallowed hard, searching his eyes for a clue, and losing myself in their depth and glamour.
"The sacrifice or offering? I'm sure you are just itching to present it to me with all the proper recitations."
I held out my empty palms. For a split-second, I thought of improvising, to offer myself in service using the ritual chant I had committed to memory every night on my journey from Our Province. I turned it into a shrug, searching for words.
"Not really."
His perfectly aligned teeth parted and the laughter that poured out echoed like falling water.
"Good for you. It is so refreshing to find a worshipper who actually wants to attempt seduction for a change. Come closer. What is your name?"
"I thought – Gard Brodford."
"You thought what?"
"I thought you already knew it."
"I'm omnipotent, stripling, not omniscient." His smile softened the epithet a great deal, but not entirely.
"But – I'm sorry."
"But what? Speak to me as if I were a man. I'm betting your results will be better."
Thoughts raced through my mind, as they often do. Lessons from youth: hold your tongue, revere your elders, don't incite those with more muscles or intelligence. As usual, I ignored them.
"How can you be all-powerful without being all-knowing?" I said, already regretting it. "Isn't omniscience a power?"
"It's complicated. Think of it as ninety-seven percent omnipotence. The three-percent I don't use is the omniscience I don't have."
I probably shouldn't have gaped at Him at that point. I did though.
He sighed heavily. I felt as if my short-lived ability to entertain him had just collapsed. "It's a holy thing. I wouldn't waste what's left of your decaying mind worrying about it. So. Brodford. May I call you Gord?"
"Yes. It's Gard, like a watchman, not the plant from the vine."
"Hm. Very good. So. You are a criminal?"
"No! I mean, how?"
"The sort of people who pay me a visit don't exactly arrive on their own accord. You very obviously aren't the religious sort, so your options are criminal penance or insanity. And the insane tend to lack the mental acuity to survive this far.
He leaned back on his great chair, which I now saw was made entirely of black and brown needle-sharp thorns. A few threads from his silver, green and turquoise gown snagged in its brambles.
"I'm a bit of a borrower, but I'm here on my own accord. I wasn't sent here for my petty crimes. I volunteered."
"I think that was, well, sort of stupid," said The god.
"No, Your Honor," I said, remembering the proper address from the ritual chant. "My country is just that desperate for Your Honor's help." In truth, it wasn't a country, per se, but a small city state, a biggish tribe, if you will.
"I'm not here to judge you, Gord. Please, call me something nice and warm and sparkling, like Fountain or Star."
I laughed in spite of myself. "You are a very strange god, Star. Not at all what I was expecting."
"Wouldn't it be a little bit disappointing if you traveled all this way to see The God and all you got was the expected? An encounter with Divinity should never be normal."
He hitched his hems, and waved in the direction of a nearby column. The ball of fire at its top had been waning slightly, and now swelled with light. A large brass mirror on a pedestal next to the god caught the illumination and intensified it to the ceiling. He picked up the mirror and gazed into it, sighing and smiling softly.
"Well," he said a few moments later, casting the mirror at my feet with a clang. "That's done. My own image is burned into it. I can't even look at myself without it becoming a blur."
His face smiled at me from the mirror. Even with a raised warp running from his eyebrow to his tower-like throat, it drew me in, finer than the finest art I could imagine.
"Have it, if you like. It seems to bring you pleasure."
I stooped while unshouldering my pack, grateful to secret it away, my treasure.
"So, the Golems. How were they?"
"Impressive," I said.
"But what did you really think of them?"
"Remarkable," I said.
"Blah blah blah. Did they give you a decent fight?"
"No." It was true. After the initial shock of clay statues moving about like atrophied men, they had been easy to best. At its worst, it was like tipping over furniture.
"At least you are an honest criminal. Let me guess: the big one marched back and forth in the entry way, and the tall one crouched menacingly at you when slipped past the big one."
"Yes, mostly. I shoved the tall one from behind after I made it past, and he tripped the big one. I was worried they would track me down. They just wriggled like fish. I have to say I was bewildered."
"Golems are tricky, their orders limited and permanent. Still, they scare away probably ninety-seven percent of my visitors. Effective. I'm curious, where did you find the gumption to get past them?" The god seemed particularly prone to estimate in percentages of ninety-seven.
"As I said, Your Honor – Star – desperation."
"And that got you past the Ferocious Soldiers, too?"
"Those skeleton things? No, that was a healthy dose of instinct and terror. And gunfire."
"Oh dear. Really? You used the firearm on them?"
My heart traded places with my adam's apple, so my chest had a knot and my throat a throbbing beat. "Yes," I said very slowly.
"Where?"
"In the chamber above the hooks."
"No where did you shoot them? In the skulls?"
"At first, but that didn't do anything. I was point blank and turned one to powder when I shot the spinal column on one."
"Drat. Powder? You must have destroyed the emplanted electrical turbines. Those things were very hard to get my hands on. Harder than the bones themselves; ancient kings of Egypt and Chaldea." His face fell. Silence. I thought of my daughter's face when I left Our Province, and that look of pleading and loss.
"I'm sorry." My voice cracked and came out louder than I had planned.
He shrugged.
"Well, you've answered my questions. Ask yours."
My mind raced, wondering if I had played into a trap, wondering if there was a sequence of superstitious petitions that would inspire The god's sense of justice, or his vanity, or anything to enlist him against the Cannibals.
But I had to start small.
"Why do you sit on thorns?"
"Because I don't care that much for standing."
"But why thorns?"
"Oh, you mean the discomfort. You must understand that this entire world of mine is uncomfortable to me. Nothing in your materials, not your softest divan or your most luxurious pillow, would be any more comfortable."
He shifted in his seat, straining. He nimbly snapped a particularly excruciating thorn, shaped roughly like a water witch from under his thigh, and cast it aside.
"Your world?"
"Oh yes, I own it. It was given to me as a gift. I wanted a bigger one, of course. A red one." The deity shrugged dismissively.
"Then you can do whatever you want with it?"
"Well, for your purposes, yes. Remember that ninety-seven percent? Oh why do I bother? Yes."
I had to pick my words very carefully. Care and words are two things I am not the best at, especially under pressure.
"You seem like a nice god," I said, shifting my weight like a potty-needful child. I told you those two things weren't my strengths.
"Really? I actually believe you Gord." I wasn't about to correct him a second time. "What a pleasant thing to say."
"And, since it is likely in your power - almost certainly, that is - obviously so - what with the omnipotence being right up there and all --"
"Ask, child."
"My people - they are outnumbered and besieged by Cannibals. I broke the ranks and risked my life to ask you for your help: anything, even a small lightning storm would be great."
The god shrugged. "No way will I do that. Sorry. Something else, perhaps? Another mirror?"
"Thank you. No. Just the Cannibals."
"I can't help you. There is a hidden exit behind me that will bypass the hazards."
My muscles quivered. My voice wavered. I knew I was either a dead man or a man without a home, which was the same thing. "Can't help? Or won't?"
"Won't, really. I was trying to be polite. What did you bring me?"
My mind fumbled to find the words to describe my tribe's sacrifice, dedication and care that went into the priceless gift. It completely stalled. How could I tell him that the most precious, expensive and holy thing I had ever seen was now drowned in his iridescent pool of gloop?
"Nothing," I said.
The god's mouth dropped open and he clapped a massive palm over it. I felt the rattle in my bones. The shaking got worse and I steadied my hands against the floor to keep from losing my balance.
It was laughter. Mirthful, echoic and deafening, it sounded like an ape bludgeoning a donkey with a sea lion. I put my hands to my ears and waited for the wobbling to stop.
"Nothing," the god repeated, breathing heavy. "That is very novel."
The way he said it gave me hope. False hope. I looked at him, pleading.
"How embarrassing for you," he continued. "But thank you for the amusement. It has been an age since a mortal anything, much less a human, held my interest for such a duration. But now, my interest wanes."
A small conical ivory spintop appeared in his palm. It stood on its pointed tip as he lowered on his cloth-draped knee. He sighed deeply and gathered another large metal mirror and lost himself in his own expression.
I shifted on my knees for an uncomfortable minute or two, awaiting a break in his fugue.
Finally, he said, "Bullets?"
"Pardon?"
"Do you have bullets?"
"No. I shot them all earlier."
"Good." He then fell into a deep silence, never turning from his reflection. The spintop began to make a very faint musical sound.
Skeletons began to appear from behind the pillars, draped in fresh linens, bearing elegant Sagarii, lightweight, thin-headed axes, perfect for plying armor, slashing and picking through muscle.
I shouted for the god to notice, took to my feet, and ran. So, too, did the Ferocious Soldiers. They closed ranks and closed on me from both sides. With the hooks and pool behind me, I ran the only direction where death was, at the very least, uncertain: the throne.
I threw myself at the god and he moved not at all. I snatched the white device to discover that it was much larger in my hands than it appeared in his. It was bigger than my shoe. In stealing it, I slapped against the cloth of his robes. They felt ridgy, like Aromatic Polymide.
The Ferocious Soldiers held in a half circle in front of the throne. Awaiting my descent. I climbed the unmoving god, expecting a spectacular death involving lightning bolts and blazing fire and instead tumbled over his shoulder, slashing my greaves against the thorns.
Striking the ground flat footed, I launched toward the exit, shocked I stayed upright. I gripped the white spintop in my fist. A glance back showed me the skeletons in pursuit, the god lost in his own gaze.
My muscles burned. My legs slowed, even as I punched and prodded them to keep them working in spite of the numb, dull fire that made them rigid. I emerged on a cleared but overgrowing plain, on the opposite side of where I had entered the temple.
At the edge of the jungle, breathing hard, one hand on my knee, I grabbed a heavy branch,. I snapped it from the tree and held it like a club. I was surprised to face the skeletons and see that their ranks were already far behind me - hardly out of the concealed exit of the temple.
They were stiff and slow of foot. In my first encounter, I had not noticed: they nearly had been upon me before I noticed them and started shooting. Now, I could see that my jog outstripped their sprint.
I could escape their clutches easily, even weighted down with the spintop in my hand. It was heavy as a brick.
I backed into the jungle. The skeletons halted shortly thereafter, hollow-eyed, bleached orange in the sun, watching it set, possibly for the first time. Kneeling in a hard patch of ground, I set the spintop, point down, against the armor at my shin. The object grew lighter, coming alive at the contact, making a faint and merry tune.
The Ferocious Soldiers perked up, chattered jaws, and began marching in my direction. Though I could get away from them, I had no intention of letting them go.
It had been a slow, steady march of several days, and my bitterness against the vain and impotent god only spread through my exhausted soul. I had fallen into a patterned fugue: putting a handful of miles between my pursuers, priming the spintop, and resting until the white bones appeared. Once, I got sloppy and awoke to sharp fingers on my throat and a sagaris whistling toward my face. I kicked out, snatched the spintop, and ran headlong into a tree, nearly knocking myself out before scrambling away.
I didn't sleep after that.
The Cannibals had my tribe hemmed in: we had destroyed the bridge to our north before they began the siege, so my people were backed against the river nestled at its fork. The only approach was from the southeast, where the Cannibals had established siege lines and rows of heavy forward mantlets designed both to shield the attackers from gunfire, and to draw it from their restless opponents. As soon as our tribe was out of bullets, our arrows would do little against their body armor. Our walls would not hold against their crude but effective rams and rocks. I found very little relief in finding the place intact: it only meant I would be witness to its destruction.
My plan was doomed from the start. I should have known, but it wasn't until I counted the number of the teeming enemy, in the hundreds. Then I thought of their swarming insanity versus the small and methodical mob I had strung along through the jungle, and it was plain: this would fail.
Still, my best hope was that the skeletons distracted enough of the enemy to slay a few, that I could take down one or two more and die a hero before they started ripping my muscles to reach my marrow.
Clearly, I was not thinking. But, as my surviving grandfather often says, on the spectrum, brave and stupid usually occupy the same turf.
I hid behind a berm less than a mile from home and set the spintop on its point against my leg. I unfastened my pack, knowing that it was no more likely to make it to safety than I was, and pulled the mirror out. I refused to gaze on it, his smug, detached expression poisoning my mind as it was, but it was my only weapon.
Its edge was fine, and, with a gloved grip, the disk would certainly crush and bruise. Well-placed, it might even decapitate – permanently removing the blasphemous tusked jaws from ever committing the abomination.
It took an hour for the skeletons to arrive. Holding the disk under one arm, and balancing the heavy top on the palm of my free hand, I slowly strode directly into the siege camp's rearguad, my spent heart throbbing erratically.
Her skirt and button-hook blouse were feminine enough, her eyes doe-like. The tusks jutting from her chin were elegant and gaping. Her peculiar grace made her all the more a horror. It was hard to believe they were even human. I weighed the disk and steeled myself for a desperate launch at her throat.
She screamed and ran. The Cannibals, at heart, are cowards, but I was not expecting flight. I, for an instant, began to dream that I would rout them all with my audacious frontal assault. Perhaps they thought I represented a thousand reinforcements. Perhaps they had left their entire siege line exposed from the rear.
My hopes were dashed. A squad of slope-headed, knob-knuckled, and decidedly not-fleeing Cannibal males answered her cries. I slipped off my glove, laid it on the ground and dropped the spintop in the palm. The brutes stared at it for a second, eyed me warily, then charged. I turned heel like a rabbit, dashing between the open files of the Ferocious Soldiers.
The onrushing lead cannibal plucked the skull from a skeleton and bashed his teeth against it as the body flailed and then fell against the earth. It made it back to its knees only as a second Cannibal jumped two-footed on its spine, disintegrating it into pieces. The Cannibals had disjointed another marcher before the first sagaris was raised. Their number would be demolished in minutes.
More Cannibals arrived, slavering. My shoulders sagged and I prayed briefly that somehow this futile distraction would inspire my countrymen to an impossible victory. Then I worried that the hated god would hear my divine plea as I fell against an array of ravenous teeth and order up a cake in my honor.
A Cannibal made it to my flank, so I turned swiftly and found the rage to swing that disk all the way through the full motion, not slowing for the shoulder bone. The blow came so hard my arm tingled and any sound he could make imploded in his lungs.
The Cannibals were nicely dressed, which was particularly eerie. They had prepared that very day for a feast. I bashed another one, glancing but sending him over to a well placed attack against his temple by the dwindling vanguard of skeletons.
My adrenaline failed. I deflected a nasty bite with my forearm, weakly, and staggered back. As the remaining ranks collapsed against the growing reinforcements of Cannibals, I shielded myself with the disk. A blow came and rattled my body. Then one more, from a stone. Then nothing. I am ashamed to say my eyes were closed, and I do not know how long I stood there, awaiting hell to take me in my failure. Still nothing.
For the first time, instead of dying where they stood, the skeleton ranks marched past me, to the fore. I heard crunching and bashing noises, and finally peeked around the shadow of the shield.
The Cannibals were kneeling on the ground, staring at my shield in awe.
The mirror. The face of the god. They gave him worship, even as the Ferocious Soldiers clove their snapping faces.
The surviving skeletons harvested the Cannibals like wheat, hacking them to the ground in succession. At the farther ranks some could not see the shield, and gained swift advantage over my deathfaced allies. I took some steps forward, aiding the skeletons again, always holding the face of their god before them.
Then I heard gunshots. The Cannibals were in disarray, pinched between my relief force of now fewer than a dozen, and my surging countrymen, firing openly from the walls.
The skeletons gathered at the spintop, where the remaining Cannibals overran them in their retreat.
The terrified female ran back to me, finding no safety at the front. Children and other women were in tow, just ahead of the men. She stopped in front of me, her eyes transfixed upon my mirror. My own people would be upon them in moments.
I reversed its surface, away from her gaze, breaking the spell. I clutched her wrist, slid the disk into her hands and propped it up over her head, her arms held high. The mirror faced behind her, capturing nearly all the remaining Cannibals in its glow.
Then I spanked her back like swatting a horse, and she ran away, leading a ragged procession behind her.
My brother ran to me, just as I collapsed against him, asking me, "Why?" and shouting "Hallelujah!"
I cannot answer, to this day, his question except to say that fortune has been a strange paradox, and I feared greed might be its undoing.
I don't remember falling asleep, but I do remember waking up in my own bed, free of greaves, free of grief and at long last, free.
On the cover of this tome is an image that is in the public domain and can be found in the archives of the United States Libray of Congress under the title Interior of the Temple of Aboo-Simbel, depicting the temple of Pharaoh Ramses the Great. It appears internationally online as a digitized photograph of the color film transparency of a lithograph, hand-colored on the page of a book, published in 1846 and captured by the artist David Roberts on November 9, 1838, exactly 126 years and zero days before H. Beam Piper would be discovered, dead by his own hand in his own weapons room, fallen on an array of carefully placed drop cloths.
Daniel Eness writes stories of strange adventure where the hero always wins, except those times when he dies spectacularly in an explosion.
He lives in Iowa with his family of six, for whom he writes of the churning seascape of the soul, deep evil and the hope that has overcome them both.
His work has appeared in Stupefying Stories, Ideomancer, Diagram and Brain Harvest Magazine, and, in 2012, Eortholic Press will release two of his novels, a novella and a number of collections of short adventures.
Visit him online at http://www.thegoodweird.com
Look for his other digital stories at:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/eortholic
Revival originally appeared in Bruce Bethke’s Stupefying Stories 1.1.