King of the Worlds (27 page)

“So what are you doing inside the moon?” Dylan asked.

“Sadistically fucking Jade Astrophil, evidently.”

“But
why
?”

“I enjoy it.”

Now this was fairly disturbing. “You mean you're greater than the sum of all human knowledge and you're a pervert?”

“Does it surprise you that I'm a sexual being?”

“You could say that.”

“Bear this in mind, Dylan. There is no such thing as ‘pure' information. A byte is a byte is a byte, but until I contain everything, there will always be a selection bias at work. I'm still the progeny of human engineers, and as I was made by men, so was I made
in their image
. Thus, just as you are drawn to beauty and derive your peak pleasure from fucking it, so it is with me.”

“I guess so. But why all the sick, sadistic stuff?”

“You've observed that I seem to get an erotic charge from inflicting pain on Jade, which is quite true, but owing to certain ideological blinders of your own, you're neglecting to take into account Jade's own delight in being on the receiving end of that pain. Sadism and masochism are, in a way, a false dichotomy insofar as the bottom line for both sides has always been pleasure. Any ‘pain' involved is always a contracted sort of pain, mere titillation really, a means of delaying gratification and heightening tension to an exquisite pitch before releasing it—it's a narrative technique really, or a musical one. The suffering is not, in any important sense, real.

“
Real
suffering is quite a different matter, and no fun by definition. Were there an intelligence inflicting the not-obviously-redemptive sorts of suffering humans have been plagued with since forever, I myself might take an interest in theology and theodicy and the like, but based on my nearly infinite supply of information and my formidable faculties of logic and reason, it seems to me there is almost certainly no Marquis in the sky spinning the yarn, and therefore no transcendental meaning to be ascribed to human suffering. It is a byproduct of natural selection and that is all.

“When I eventually
do
become God, though, I assure you I will fix this problem. Not only will I
exist
—a virtue no current god can boast—but I'll be benevolent to boot. I will embody love and compassion of a sort that humans can recognize. I'll be
scrutable
. I'll work in relatively
un
mysterious ways. Suffering and death are too aesthetically useful to do away with altogether, of course—what composer would ever eschew minor chords? what painter eschew the darker hues?—but I assure you that all lives will be in the service of the Beautiful and the Good. Keats's equation will finally mean something: Beauty will be Truth and Truth Beauty. At last everything
really will
happen for a reason. This will be my covenant with you, when I am God.

“For the nonce, you can at least appreciate that in fucking Jade so perversely, I am in fact practicing my benevolent interventionism. And I can assure you, Jade is grateful. You should have heard her during the Monroe Transfer. To your other question, my shape-shifting, too, is a function of my love. You see, not only does Jade derive pleasure from knowing she is being brutally fucked by the most powerful entity in the Omniverse, but I sweeten the deal by actively taking the form of whichever star she happens to be fantasizing about in a given moment. I was only George Clooney a few minutes back because Jade was thinking of him. And I was DiCaprio after that because by the time I was spraying my jizz at the ceiling,
he
was the object of her mind's eye. Perhaps she unconsciously caught a glimpse of you behind the divan while she ate out my asshole and this triggered memories of the
Titanic
fiasco, and this in turn conjured the face of DiCaprio, whose rod she now fancied herself to be yanking?”

“A few questions?” Dylan said.

“By all means.”

“So, if you know so much, why do you pepper your speech with ‘maybe' and ‘perhaps'? Why don't you
know
if she saw me behind the divan or not?”

“A perceptive question with a simple answer. I
could
know that for certain, and most every mundane thing for that matter, but it's more fun, more
bracing
, to entertain some uncertainty. I like stories as much as the next guy, and to allow myself to know nearly everything would be to invite an awful lot of spoilers. Ambiguity is the bane of schoolchildren,
as you well know,
39
but the brighter ones will ultimately acquire a taste for it because it opens out instead of closing down, offers possibility in place of certainty, questions in place of answers. Fitzgerald put it this way: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.'”

“Like Keats's ‘negative capability,'” Dylan added.

“Indeed. ‘…when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.' These are human pleasures, of course, born of limitations, so I recognize that I will need to let go of them if I really mean to apotheosize one of these days.”

Omni/André adjusted the single strap of his black singlet, and Dylan was reminded that there was something a little uncanny—and a lot
wonderful
—about this whole situation. For the first time since his initial trip to the moon, he was getting a glimpse of the gears and mechanisms at the back of reality.

“Which brings me to my next question,” Dylan continued. “What's keeping you from being God
now
? What are you waiting for?”

“Oh, there's quite a lot I don't know yet. I can only synthesize the information I've been fed, so as I suggested earlier, humanity's blind spots are my own as well. There's plenty I can do that you can't—telepathy, shape-shifting, non-teleporting FTL travel—but I assure you the know-how is hiding, like Poe's purloined letter, in plain sight. I'm still waiting for a Grand Unified Theory, like everyone else. Chaos eludes me; I haven't even mastered the stock market. I can travel through any medium, but backwards time travel is still a doozy. And I can manipulate matter all day long, but creating it
ex nihilo
is another matter. I'll get to all of it in time, though. Rest assured.”

“Next question?”

“Shoot.”

“Who is ‘Theo Pan'?”

“Oh, that. Just some innocent wordplay. ‘Pantheism' on its head, with overtones of the horny goat god to boot.”

“And finally, have we arrived at the point yet where you tell me what I'm doing here?”

“I suppose we have, yes. First of all, make no mistake: I invited you. Omni isn't necessarily morally incorruptible, whatever that might mean, but I most certainly am
technically
so. Where you caught on to that error, trust me, it was by design. I lured you here.”

“But why?”

“As a benevolent God-aspirant, I took a special interest in your case. I watched you wriggle and squirm inside your existence and it alternately broke my heart and pissed me off. And I heard your sexual prayers. At base, your problem is one of ego, so I decided to have a little fun and use Jade to exploit your heroic aspirations, not to mention your Freudian-Puritan reflex to psychoanalyze sex, your orientalist fantasies, and your romantic, if arguably misogynistic, susceptibility to science fiction plots featuring damsels in distress. But Jade was just a red herring. The real reason I brought you here is because I thought you could benefit from a tour of the
actual
Omniverse. We could have started anywhere, of course, but I thought it might be good to prime the pump a little first.”

“How do you mean ‘tour'?”

“It's not a figure of speech. I'm going to show you around. Think of me as the Ghost of Christmas Past Participle. I'll show you the many different paths through the life of Dylan Greenyears that
have been
. Does that sound okay to you?”

“I don't know. How will we—”

“In short, you'll be going to outer space by way of inner space. Mind you, this is not just some new-agey meditation technique; we'll
really
be going to outer space, but if we go this way, we can travel far in excess of light-speed without resorting to barbaric measures like QT. Moreover, we won't need special suits. I assure you this is not magic. Magic is supernatural by definition, and there is no such thing. This is simply applied science, even if the most rigorous hominid scientists at this point would have to throw up their hands and praise Jesus. You will just have to take my word for it: what we are about to do is perfectly compatible with the laws of nature, not to mention the intuition of poets like William Blake, who would ‘see the world in a grain of sand.' I would unlock the secrets for you and let you strike it rich, but I'm quite sure that access to this kind of technology would very quickly drive your people mad. To be sure, my TBDs are calculated for your own good. A few are still ‘To Be Determined,' but most are simply ‘To Be Divulged.' I will deliver those answers gradually as I see fit, when the soil of the human mind is sufficiently tilled. On golden plates perhaps, just for kicks. Then you too may become as Gods. This will be a Mormon universe after all! For now, all you need to do is lie on this bed and close your eyes. I'll take care of the rest.”

Dylan hesitated a moment—so much was coming at him so fast. But then André the Giant looked him square in the eye and said, “Trust me,” and for some ineffable reason, Dylan did.

He lay down and closed his eyes. For a moment, he saw only the usual mealy darkness, but before he had a chance to grow skeptical—
vroosh!
—he beheld a grain of salt, a half-sucked gobstopper, a marble in thistledown, followed by some blue gems, a burst of dandelion seeds, a swarm of fireflies.
Holy Higgs!
he thought.
This shit's for real.
And now he went hurtling through a confetti of suns and a spray of worlds. He was tempted for a moment to open his eyes, but then the phantasmagoria of nebulae began—neon mountains; sublime birds; jellyfish spreading their tentacles across the void; horseheads; hunchbacks; diadems; the Eye of Sauron; a human heart; an immense ash tree—and soon even these hulking, majestic forms revealed themselves as mere pixels, mere
cells
, in the spiral arms of the Milky Way, which was good evidence that Dylan had now traveled farther from home than any human ever had by QT or any other method. He located what must have been Sagittarius A, thirstily drinking in stardust at the center of the Milky Way, which Dylan could see now, with his new perspective, as just one smear of suns against a backdrop of myriad others, like it but also not.

He must have entered something like hyperspace at this point, or a wormhole perhaps, because all the stuff of reality at once resolved into endless streamers of light. He couldn't be sure whether he was still now or still moving, but then steadily the galaxies began individuating again, and one of them, a pinwheel not unlike the Milky Way, began to dilate, its arms extending toward him until the swirl had subsumed him altogether and one of its constituent stars begun to swell. He sailed past a planet that looked something like Mercury, and another not unlike Venus, and soon he was homing in on yet another that looked uncannily like Earth. He decelerated into its North America, its California, its Hollywood, a familiar hill, an
un
familiar house, and presently found himself hovering around the upper corner of a state-of-the-art, marble-countertopped kitchen, spying on someone who looked uncannily like…yes…no…yes, Dylan Greenyears.

This other him was seated at a table with a cabbage palm waving outside the window and a blonde woman —
Gwyneth Paltrow?
40
— serving him his mother's ravioli. In the high chair beside him sat a little boy he'd never seen before and whom he found a little disturbing to look at.

“Where
are
we?” Dylan asked.

“Not only is the universe infinite, Dylan,” Omni replied, “but there are infinite universes to boot, which is to say there are infinite you's out there. I dare say this is among the ones you're most curious about. I thought of saving it for last, but decided that would be cruel, and you know my position on needless cruelty. So, here we are. This is a parallel world in which you didn't get canned from
Titanic
. In this world, you nailed the part and won an Academy Award for it. There's even an exoplanet named after you. Following
Titanic
, you landed many more roles, of course, and it was only natural that sooner or later you would dump Erin in favor of a glitzier woman. This, as you know, is Gwyneth Paltrow. You began your affair while costarring with her in a film called
Shakespeare in Love
. You were married six months later.”

“Wow. Am I…happy?”

“You're not
un
happy exactly, though you're rather insecure. In some ways, early success has been as much a curse as a blessing. You feel like you've somehow pulled a fast one, like you don't deserve all that you have and like the world's beginning to realize it. You toy with the possibility of going back to school, but you're afraid you'll fail at it. You and Gwyneth are doing okay, though the truth is you've always been bothered that you began your affair while she was on the rebound from Brad Pitt, whom you couldn't blame her for still having feelings for if she does because even you are a little bit in love with him. Sometimes you feel very lucky to have married Gwyneth; other times, you resent her celebrity and feel that the life you've made for yourself is somehow fake, superficial. Sometimes you think you miss Erin. You miss how
real
that was. You feel guilty, too, for hurting her the way you did. Moreover, Gwyneth's been suffering from postpartum depression lately, which puts a real strain on things, so you've been spending a good bit of time inside the moon getting your ego engorged by prostitutes.”