Authors: Brian Herbert
Tags: #Comics & Graphic Novels, #General, #Fiction, #Religious
“Appy told us the skins between universes are the fastest path to God,” McMurtrey said, “so I wonder how long it would take traveling to God’s planet conventionally, by spaceship through the universe.”
“I don’t know.”
“If the skins are severely damaged, we could be forced to take the slower route back. That might take so long that we’d die en route, effectively trapping us out here.”
“You’re right. Could be no way back.”
A long silence. Presently McMurtrey said, “It’s strange here . . . I felt it even before this, that I was able to think more lucidly away from the clutter of my life on D’Urth. When it’s all over, Kelly, what really matters about life?”
“I dunno.”
“I wish I could remember everything that’s happened to me. When I can’t remember something, it’s like part of my life has been stolen from me. Why go through each moment if it’s going to be forgotten? When it’s all over what do we have? What does it all matter if you can’t remember most of it?”
Her voice came from blackness: “You’re talking weird.”
“No, I’m not. Think about it. Memories are all of consequence that remain at the end of a person’s life. It’s not the things he accumulated, nor which he sought to accumulate. Rather it is the richness and fulfillment of each experience itself. This should be the truest endowment of life. But what is that endowment if time and circumstance pulverize it?
“Sure, there are memory enhancement techniques: concentration, review soon afterward, even a policy of trying to experience significant events. This trip is a significant event par excellence, so we’ll remember most all of it. But everything in life can’t be a significant event; we can’t concentrate on everything at the time it’s happening or take the time for a review soon afterward. Life goes on at too rapid a pace. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“Yes, but you needn’t be so gloomy about such losses. It seems to me you’re forgetting about the memories others have of you, the important impression in clay left by your life.”
“I suppose that’s true. It matters what God thinks of me, too.”
“Sure it does. Even if you’re pulverized to dust with no memories remaining at all, what you
were
matters, the way you changed lives, the way you graced and improved them.”
“I didn’t help everybody. I tricked many of them—my Cosmic Chickenhood prank. Now ironically, the fat chicken society may be meaningful after ail. God as much as suggested that, although I can’t believe it.”
“We can do important things by accident, or good things without meaning to do good things, and what we’ve done is still important, still good.”
“But lessened by lack of intention.”
“Maybe not. Maybe you did what you really
meant
to do after all.”
“Subconsciously?”
“Yes,” Corona said.
“I don’t think I believe in that stuff. You do?”
“I guess. The older I get and the more I think about things, the less certain I am about anything.”
“Do you suppose the most important events in life occur by accident?” McMurtrey asked. “Meeting you, I mean, was totally unplanned. Even people who work hard and succeed in business need big breaks to get ahead—If the breaks go the wrong way, no amount of effort can compensate. Maybe, in the end, everything good depends on good luck and everything bad upon bad luck.”
“I disagree. All of it happens because people place themselves in position for things to happen. You got into religion, which placed you on this ship. I’m a Merchant Spacer, and that placed me on the ship. We’re here because we placed ourselves in position to be here.”
“We intended to meet?”
Corona chuckled. “Let’s just say we stirred the stew.”
“I’ll say we’re in the stew. We lost our bodies somewhere. We’re probably dead!”
“It’s kind of neat though, isn’t it? No pain, and we can still think, can still talk.”
“But only with one another, for all of eternity?”
McMurtrey felt circulation return to his lips as he spoke, and nearly cried as this sensation of flesh returned. Sensations followed throughout his body.
Far away he saw a faint burst of yellow light, the same tone the auras had been—the identical yellow of the mysterious human cloud-shapes amid the white lines. A second flash was the same color, brighter, and it split in two, approaching as side-by-side beacons. Hazy shapes appeared around the beacons, and the beacons became Corona’s eyes: dark and profoundly secret.
“I love you, Ev,” she said. “That’s the meaning of life, the most important thing. Finding someone to love. We’re alive!”
The room became light, and Corona stood before him, looking normal. The dark, dark eyes were a fresh shade of brown, prettier than he recalled.
“We’re supposed to pinch ourselves now,” he said.
They did.
And Corona went to him, held him tightly. She was trembling, and it made McMurtrey proud when he soothed her, dispatched her fears.
“We have each other,” he said.
The deck shook violently, with a crashing, jarring shrill of discord that lasted only an instant. In that instant as McMurtrey held Corona, he experienced the vision she had described: He saw a spinning sharp edge of parallel white lines, with a limitless plane of parallel white lines stretching to the horizon of the universe. Light burned through his eyes, though he closed them—a fiercely brilliant, blinding nova of light that blotted out everything in its path.
On the deck outside Corona’s compartment, Jin lay shaken. He stumbled to his feet and to his cabin controls.
The screen dropped from the ceiling, clicked into place.
Within seconds Jin was hidden from the view of others, assessing system damage via electrical probes that coursed the fiberoptical passageways of his body.
Something had changed in the field—irreparable programming meltweld—the Duplication program was transmitting green sound, dominating all other functions.
He felt a whir and throb in his Central Command module, and dull humanlike pain pulsed there, inside his head. This was from the Duplication program, he theorized, a simulated headache. But this was a more intense headache than any in his experience.
Almost automatically, Jin touched a cabin control button.
The bed swung out, opened out.
Jin dropped supine onto the bed, let his aching head sink into the billowed softness of the pillow.
Just a little rest,
he thought.
Maybe things will smooth out
. . .
It was not uncommon for human-simulating cyberoos to feel fatigue, but this was the first time Jin had been forced to lie down on the journey, so engrossed had he been in his work. All the energy he’d felt since boarding seemed oddly irrecoverable, as if drained from him permanently. He felt depressed.
At a thought-impulse, he set a dormancy timer, directing that his functions be put to rest for eight hours.
But the Duplication program did not rest, as it should have. It continued transmitting into his unconsciousness, filling every synthetic cell of his body with green sound.
Chapter 9
There are different dimensions of the word “love,” dimensions lost in the vast umbrella of the word. We feel love in varying subcategories and intensities for different people, and too often we speak the word for the wrong reasons, when we want something, when we want to take something. Thus love becomes tainted, for it is narcissistic. More than all other words, love is ultimately meaningless, for it means too many different things to different people. It means too many bad things. The best and purest definition: Love is giving all of yourself while expecting nothing in return.
—Light-Inscribed Thoughts in
Evander McMurtrey’s Brain
McMurtrey died of pain and was reborn.
When his eyes stopped hurting he lifted the lids cautiously and let room light flow into the corneas. This time the light brought no pain with it, and timeless energy flowed along his arteries into his cells, bringing consciousness. With consciousness came a message borne on light, a message about love.
The words were illuminated in his brain like a great electrogas sign, and he wanted desperately to speak them, to tell Corona the depths of his feelings for her.
“We hit something,” Corona said.
McMurtrey heard her before seeing her. Then, like an apparition, she appeared standing sideways before him, where his eyes had been directed. She was only a few steps away.
Appy’s voice, across the P.A. system: “Intruder! Seal all sections, dammit! Intru—” The voice sputtered, went silent.
“What the hell’s going on?” McMurtrey said.
He reached around and touched a button on the bulkhead, raising the screen of Corona’s cubicle. The screen squealed as it went up, where before it had been nearly soundless.
From all around the ship came the confused and anxious tones of pilgrims.
Corona stood motionless before McMurtrey, profiled against the mezzanine railing.
“You okay?” McMurtrey asked, his voice almost shrill.
No response.
Corona trembled, and she turned her head to look with fearful eyes at McMurtrey. Her lips moved without sound.
McMurtrey stepped toward her and reached out, but she pulled away, wouldn’t let him touch her. She trembled uncontrollably, a d’Urthquake within her flesh.
“Kelly, what’s going on?”
Her eyes became radiant and aura-yellow, and the body surrounding the eyes became as black as starless space, as black as the darkness that had permeated them when they spoke without bodies or flesh.
Within that quivering, human-shaped universe the eyes became twin beacons, receding into a limitless distance. They disappeared from McMurtrey’s sight. Presently the trembling ceased, and before him stood a motionless, eyeless black shape.
A chill coursed McMurtrey’s spine. Now he was trembling, afraid to approach or move away, afraid to speak his love.
Was this a woman anymore? Was his beloved dead before him, with only the remnants of soul clinging to existence?
Far away within the blackened shape of the head, McMurtrey saw a faint flash of aura-yellow light. A second flash was brighter, and as before when he and Corona were in darkness, the flash divided in two and approached as teamed beacons. Hazy shapes formed around the beacons, and the beacons again were Corona’s eyes: dark and with a mystery of depth to them beyond anything he imagined possible.
“There is an intruder aboard,” she said, but not in her own voice. It was the accented voice of Appy.
“What do you mean? And why is your voice—”
“We are shipwrecked.”
“Shipwrecked? What the hell do you mean? Where?”
“Other ships are closing in. We’re going to lose the race. We have less than eighteen hours to effect repairs. I am not Corona.”
Corona’s lips moved again, producing her own voice this time.
McMurtrey breathed a tentative sigh of relief as he listened to her:
“We collided with the white lines,” she said. “We’re ‘beached’ on a line, unable to proceed unless certain conditions are met. We’re in the middle of the whipping passageway, at a dead stop with the skins of two universes gripped in Shusher’s drive system. God says the skins are damaged here but still passable. Soon the others will be upon us, and if we can’t beat skin we’ll have to get out of the way. God’s exact words: ‘Ship, heal thyself.’”
“How do you know these things, and why did you speak in Appy’s voice?”
“The same answer to both: I am Appy now. I am also Kelly Corona. I can think as either at will, speak as either. I can, it would appear from my preliminary understanding of this, carry on a conversation with myself.”
“But—”
She anticipated, said, “The computer system went out when we collided . . . the white line entity is a Gluon, like Shusher. Gluons can pass through one another without harm except when they are on a whipping passageway. They’re ensnarled now, and neither can proceed. We are in a most delicate situation.”
McMurtrey didn’t understand enough to phrase a question.
“Appy activated a ‘save’ program before shutting down,” Corona said, “and this program, containing all of the data comprising Appy’s bioelectronic brain, traveled the electromagnetic pulses of light from Appy to me. The lavender light in which I was bathed placed me on precisely the same light circuit with Appy. The computer had a choice of dumping its data into either Shusher or me, and it chose me.”
McMurtrey longed to tell Corona he loved her, but was hesitant to do so with Appy linked to her. It was silly to feel this way, he told himself, since Appy was linked to God, and God heard all anyway. But Appy’s proximity made McMurtrey ill at ease. He didn’t know who or what controlled Corona anymore.
“What if our ship can’t move out of the way?” McMurtrey asked.
“Then God will bump us aside. He has to, or there’ll be a huge collision here, with long-term destruction of the ecology. Appy’s damned mad about the situation, thought he had the race locked up.”
“And behind us, where Shusher started trying to pass the white lines? What kind of shape are the skins in back there?”
“Again, damaged but passable. Competing ships won’t be slowed appreciably . . . only a few extra minutes will be required.”
“Why can’t entities traveling the skins pass one another?”
“Because all the matter, antimatter and other contents of the skins of two universes have been compressed into a micro-thin electromagnetic wire known as a kra or whipping passageway, a kra that is for the moment the only one available to the skinbeaters of two universes. It’s like a one-lane road, and the only way one skinbeater can pass another is if the skinbeater in front drops off the kra into one universe or another.”
“The white line Gluon refused to yield.”
“Right,” Corona said. “Those spaces previously occupied by the skins of engaged universes have been replaced by electromagnetic voids. At a certain point a skinbeater must leave the whipping passageway and drop into position in the destination universe. Entities utilizing this mode of transport can go in either direction upon it, but only one direction of flow can be utilized at once.”
“Pretty tricky. There must be long waiting lists.”
“It’s first come, first served, with no preference to the high and mighty, not even to God. This system preceded God; it’s one of the elemental forces He can’t control. One of the skins we needed was hogged for a while by inconsiderate Gluons, the reason we were delayed three weeks in St. Charles Beach. Gluons are inveterate travelers, irritatingly so, and it made God mighty agitated, I can tell you! The Gluons weren’t even from one of our adjacent universes. They were from a universe on another side of a universe adjacent to us, if you follow me. And they had the adjacent universe’s skin that we needed.”
“We have
several
universes adjacent to us? If so, couldn’t we just combine one of the other skins with our own to make a whipping passageway?”
“Ordinarily, yes, but their skins were damaged in a natural catastrophe, making them unavailable for skinbeating. The skins are healing, but it will take time.”
“What about Shusher and the white-line Gluon? They’re damaged?”
“Being determined. The second Gluon crowded onto our whipping passageway just seconds before Shusher took off, and for a time the interloper was taking the exact D’Urth-to-Tananius-Ofo route we were on.”
McMurtrey scratched his head. “Only one direction of flow at a time, I believe you said, so it was fortunate—for a while anyway—that the second Gluon wanted to go in the same direction as we did.”
“That’s right.”
“What has the merging with Appy done to you? I mean, are you injured in any way?”
“I think I’m fine. A human is like a computer in many ways, and Appy is on a biodisk that’s been booted into my body. I . . . have two ‘programs’ now, one for Appy and one for Kelly Corona. They network rather nicely. In thoughts I can switch between them or activate both simultaneously. Let me try something—”
Corona’s voice changed, to an eery, blended tone: “This is the composite of Appy and Corona, in two-part harmony.” She smiled.
“Can Appy still speak through the ship’s speakers?” McMurtrey asked.
Corona hesitated, spoke as Appy: “No. I still have my private comlinks though, including the one to Shusher. They’re internal . . . and on the Shusher link I can speak or even beam thoughts to Shusher. He’s whining now, whimpering that this wasn’t his fault. The other Gluon—an entity called Pelter—is giving him hell. He just called Shusher the equivalent of a nincompoop!”
Appy laughed crazily across Corona’s lips, and she appeared irritated by this.
Corona’s voice, in seeming interjection: “There’s more to explain, from this infernal Appy’s data banks: Every universe abuts some other universe at every point of skin . . . the skin of every universe is in effect a double skin therefore, because of the adjacent universe’s skin. There are many, many universes.”
“I’m having trouble visualizing all that,” McMurtrey said. “Wouldn’t there have to be sides to everything, places where there are only single thicknesses of skin? I mean, I can see universes in the middle of the cosmos all touching one another, but wouldn’t there have to be some universes on the outside?”
“You’re limited by your own experience,” Corona said. “Accept what I’m saying.”
“Shit, I’ll try.”
“Skinbeating isn’t restricted to Gluons. Other entities travel the whipping passageways, and some of them are pretty bizarre. All skinbeaters achieve a whipping effect between universes, employing electromagnetics, concentrated gravity waves and other forces, and these forces literally slap the entity across the cosmos. Gluons are among the smoothest travelers, and their skinbeating action is so rapid and smooth in normal operation that life forms traveling with the Gluons don’t feel it.”
“Is this a matter/antimatter interaction with one universe of matter and the adjacent of antimatter?”
“God isn’t certain how it works exactly, but He doesn’t think that has much to do with it. There are antimatter universes, matter universes, and there are universes such as our own containing combinations of each. There are even universes containing other things, which I won’t go into here. Each universe, no matter its makeup, has an invisible electromagnetic skin around its perimeter . . . and these perimeters are as varied in shape as the configurations of stones in the cosmos. Each skin is electromagnetically identical, and thus readily available to any skinbeating entity.”
“I never imagined,” McMurtrey said.
“Come with me,” Corona said, motioning for McMurtrey to accompany her. “We have an intruder to meet, an intruder Appy saw before downloading into me. This intruder is at the heart of the mess we’re in now, and it is only through the intruder that our Gluon can extricate itself from Pelter.”
McMurtrey moved to her side, and they negotiated the carpeted mezzanine walkway toward the elevator bank. “I don’t understand again,” he said. “Isn’t Pelter the intruder?”
Corona shook her head. “It’s a human,” she said. “A peculiar little man carrying a dead child.”
“Clear the way,” Corona ordered, in Appy’s voice. She pressed through a crowd of pilgrims thronging the main passenger compartment. They moved aside for her sluggishly.
McMurtrey followed her, through startled whispers.
When the last layer of humanity fell away, McMurtrey got his initial glimpse of the intruder.
Indeed this was a peculiar little man seated in the center of the deck. He cried silently, bore a pained expression, and in his arms he held the limp and lifeless form of a dead girl-child. The man appeared to be in late middle years, with thinning curls of black hair, dark little eyes and a short but crudely trimmed gray-flecked beard. He held the dead child tightly, with white-knuckled fingers that were the length of digits more suited to a much taller person. Or to an ape.
The little finger of one hand was missing.
The man pulled his hands free gently, letting the body rest on his lap. Briskly with one hand, he rubbed the knuckle above the missing finger. Afterward he put the four-fingered hand under one of his legs, apparently to keep the hand warm.
Yes,
McMurtrey thought.
He resembles an ape, with that protruding forehead, those high cheekbones, those hands
. . .
and look at his arms—they’re extraordinarily long
. . .
Of the child’s death there could be no doubt. Her eyes were open and empty, with a grievous wound on the side of her head. The man holding her wore a short-sleeved denolyon shirt that was brown with a broad magenta stripe across the chest. The trousers matched, with a magenta stripe down each side. He had blood on his clothes.
A pungent, acrid odor irritated McMurtrey’s nostrils, forced him to mouth-breathe. It wasn’t the stench of death, at least McMurtrey didn’t think it was, from the impossible-to-forget odors of dead animals he had been near a few times.
“That smell,” McMurtrey said, wrinkling his nose. “What is it?”
“Opium,” Corona said, glancing at McMurtrey. “He’s an addict.”
The apeman looked up at the crowd, and down at the lifeless form. Then he pressed a loose flap of skin over the open wound, and with tender fingers pressed it in place. It held.