Eternal Life Inc. (32 page)

Jericho looked at Harry and tried to keep his guilt and remorse from showing. It was too late for guilt and remorse anyway, he told himself. Too late, too late, he repeated it like a mantra. “I think you’ve become what the Anubis wolves feared you would become,” he said at last.

“The King of the Dead,” Harry said tonelessly.

48

Eater of Universes

“I think I understand now why the Anubis wolves wanted you badly enough to start a war down in the Sinks,” Jericho said and risked looking Harry in the eye. The weirding light was gone and a flush of youthful vigor was returning to his face. “But what exactly happened to you down there, Harry?”

“You should know. You told me the monitor on my ka flat-lined,” Harry said. “I felt the umbilical connecting my body to my ka snap, and the standing waves of probability that had been my life began collapsing into the white light of death. They should have swept my ka along with them, only they didn’t, because I turned away.”

“Impossible!” Jericho said although he knew better and wondered if it wasn’t time to tell Harry so. He rejected the thought almost at once. Too much was at stake, and even a little knowledge at the wrong time could tip the scales of probability he was so carefully trying to balance. “How did you do it, my boy?” he asked instead.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “It was like the first time I learned to die. I don’t know how I did it or how I learned to do it. I just did it, like jumping off a cliff and wanting to fly. Wanting is everything. If you want it enough, want it from the level of your ka, you can do anything, even change your destiny, even the destiny of your universe, but there’s a price. There’s always a price,” he added darkly.

Jericho shifted uncomfortably but said nothing.

“I didn’t know that then,” Harry said. “Maybe if I had…” His lips twisted into a bitter smile of lost innocence. “Maybes and might-have-beens, huh, Doc?” he said and waved them away. “Anyway, I didn’t know, and I really didn’t have a choice. I was
going to die. I’d done all I could, but the probabilities in that universe were all stacked against me.

“I should have died down there in the Sinks. I was fated to die there, but I knew that if I did, the wolves would be waiting for me with their final solution to the King of the Dead problem. They’d eat my ka. There would be no escaping them this time. There would be no rebirth in the light of the Goddess or in the spin-generators of Eternal Life. There would be nothing left of me, nothing forever.”

He looked at Jericho, pleading for understanding. “You see, I really didn’t have a choice,” he said. He didn’t tell Jericho the other reason for his choice, perhaps the most important reason. It was none of the old man’s business that it was love for Diana that finally tipped the scale from nothingness to life.

“What did you expect to find out there?” Jericho asked.

“Life, the power to bend my destiny and change the direction of the universe, but I didn’t realize that last thing was part of the deal. I should have though. I was trying to play god. The only problem with trying to play god is you’re cursed to become one.

“You see, in order to perform this…miracle,” Harry said spreading his arms wide to emphasize his healed body. “I destroyed a universe.” He looked at Jericho and his eyes were like two black holes punched through his face.

Jericho closed his eyes and looked away. It had to be done, he told himself. It was the price that had to be paid to stop the Anubis wolves. Only it’s not me paying the price, he told himself with bitter self-contempt. “Why don’t you tell me what happened out there, son,” he said gently and felt like the worst kind of hypocrite.

Harry didn’t answer for a long time. He remained perfectly still, hardly breathing, his empty eyes staring blindly into the distance. At last, he drew a deep shuddering breath and said, “We’re going to have to start like in the bible. In the beginning…there was only the nothingness of quantum space, like a vast sea
of infinite potential where the standing waves of probability had not yet collapsed into the wave front of material reality,” Harry stopped and looked at Jericho.

The old man nodded encouragement.

“We’ll probably never know what first impulse set off the collapse of that wave front that in turn set off a chain reaction all over this quantum sea. I suspect that it was a touch of desire, the Goddess’s desire, maybe even her loneliness,” Harry said with a sad smile.

“That first touch of desire was like a rock thrown into a still pond. It set off the splash of the Big Bang with an infinite number of probability waves collapsing violently into reality. An infinite number of universes burst into existence, crashed into each other, and winked out again in those first nano-seconds of creation.”

“You saw all this?” Jericho said in awestruck wonder.

Harry turned and looked at him and said nothing but the fey light was burning in his eyes again, and Jericho felt his mind start to unhinge and quickly looked away.

“Of those universes that survived, the majority were nonviable,” Harry continued as if nothing had happened. “The natural laws that determined their existence were unable to support them for more than an instant before they burst like soap bubbles and returned to the quantum sea.

“Natural laws are like the concrete foundations and steel girder skeleton holding up a building. If your foundation is weak, maybe your concrete is too porous, or the steel girders are too thin or put together wrong, the whole building becomes unstable and collapses.

“Even though an infinite number of universes died in those first nano-seconds, there was always an infinite number waiting to be born out of the roiling waters of the quantum sea. Some universes survived the first minutes of the Big Bang, some the first hour, their coherence and stability dependent on how
probability had collapsed into natural law.

“The effects of the Big Bang still ripple through the multiverse today. Some universes as old as our own, or even older, will suddenly wink out of existence due to inconsistencies in their natural laws that have gradually built up until the whole structure becomes unsustainable. Then, the universe loses stability, comes apart at the seams, and sinks back into the quantum sea.

“When I died and turned my back on the resurrection trail, I stepped out into the spirit realm on the shores of Samuel Kade’s Shining Sea of Gods and Demons. I’m not sure why my ka chose this conceptual interpretation over any others. On the other hand, I never knew why Kade called it the ‘Shining Sea of Gods and Demons’ and never bothered to ask. I just assumed it was a metaphor, you know, colorful shaman language,” he said and shook his head with a self-deprecating smile. “I should have known better.”

“I’d stepped into the Shining Sea a couple of times with Kade, not very far, mind you, and not for very long but long enough to discover that it was a sea made of golden probability bubbles. This time, though, I went in way over my head, stepped off the continental shelf, so to speak, and I learned why Samuel Kade called it what he called it.

“As I sank into the infinite depths surrounded by these golden bubbles, they sang to me, and I realized that each one was a universe of worlds, and each universe was alive, singing with consciousness, and their songs were the songs of the gods and demons of the natural laws that created and sustained each universe.”

“Gods and demons of natural law?” Jericho shook his head. “You lost me there, son.”

“Yeah, I lost me there too,” Harry said and laughed. There was nothing funny in that laugh. It was high and shrill like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve.

Jericho put a comforting hand on his arm. “Harry?”

“It’s okay, Doc, just a mild case of indigestion,” he said and started to laugh again and clamped down on it hard. “Just give me a minute,” he said and sat silently, staring at the lagoon without really seeing it.

Finally, he turned and looked at Jericho. His features were calm and composed, his voice as steady and devoid of emotion as a science report. “Natural laws aren’t the dead mechanical automatons that Newton made them out to be,” he continued. “They’re precipitates of consciousness expressed as gods and demons that create and sustain a living universe. They are, in fact, those gods and demons, good and bad, creation and destruction, two sides of the same coin, creating a constant dynamic interplay that sustains balance and drives change.” He raised his hands palms up weighing them. “Like a scale,” he said. “No creation without destruction, no destruction without creation…gods and demons, precipitates of consciousness. How could it be otherwise? As you, yourself, pointed out, the quantum field is a field of consciousness so everything that comes out of it has to be conscious including those laws or forces that structure reality.”

It looks like there were some things Jake Lloyd didn’t tell me, Jericho thought wryly.

“As I swam through that sea of universes, that multiverse, I could hear the golden songs of the laws that sustained them and each one was as different as the worlds that sang them. It’s important to always keep in mind that these laws are expressions of consciousness, that they are in fact deities and demons. Our primitive ancestors got it right. There are gods of thunder, of lightning, of the earth and the sky, but there’s also a supreme God or Goddess ruling each world and universe.”

Harry’s face darkened, and his voice got low and hoarse, and Jericho thought of dank cellars and rotting bones and that old shiver of premonition was back again. “I don’t want to believe
that what I did, I did on purpose,” Harry said, “because how could I know?

“But I went out there looking for a miracle that would reconnect my ka with my body, flushing it with so much raw probability that it would twist my destiny from death to life. What I didn’t realize is that a universe is a closely woven pattern of consciousness and each person’s life is part of that pattern. When you die, it’s not a break in the pattern, it’s part of it. It’s your time to die. I went out on the quantum sea to find something powerful enough to twist my destiny, which in turn meant twisting the pattern of my universe.”

“And you found it,” Jericho said quietly, dreading what he was about to hear.

“Oh yeah, I found it, or rather it found me,” Harry said. “I felt like a god, I was a god, walking through the infinite sea of the multiverse with the golden bubbles of universes singing to me as my ka brushed against them. I realize now I was like a hungry predator, stalking a herd, looking for the weakest in the flock.

“I keep telling myself I didn’t know what I was doing, but I should have known, just as those old twentieth century scientists knew that, on the quantum level, what you want to happen, happens. Wishes have a way of getting fulfilled, only, as the old saying goes, you gotta be careful what you wish for.

“My ka was a probability wild card, no longer tied by an umbilical to the structured laws of our universe that would have prevented what happened from happening. Each time I brushed against a bubble, my ka sent unpatterned probability waves rippling through the space-time of that universe until, at last, it touched a universe so unstable it was balancing on the edge of dissolution.

“It was like a house of cards just waiting for a little touch of unpatterned probability to break the weak bonds holding it together. When that happened, in the instant before it crashed into unreality, I opened my ka and let it crash into me instead. I
ate it! I became King of the Dead, Eater of Universes!”

He suddenly got up and stepped over to the rusted guardrail and leaned against it with his back to Jericho so the old man couldn’t see his face. His voice became a flat objective monotone as if he was trying to distance himself from what he was saying. “I felt their lives flow into me, I think I heard them scream as all their patterned consciousness dissolved into unpatterned probability, flowing into me…filling me to overflowing…”

He leaned over the railing looking down into the water as if searching for something he’d lost.

“…Filling me with gods and demons,” he said at last. “Those gods and demons, those precipitates of consciousness that had structured the laws of that universe, would not go down into dissolution. Instead, they remain inside me bound to my ka…like an undigested meal.”

So we’re finally there, Jericho thought and remembered Jake Lloyd lying ghostlike in his bed, his body glowing softly, fading into his ka and too weak and too attenuated to do anything except prophesy the coming of the Anubis and the death of humanity unless…“An abomination,” he had whispered to Jericho, “another one like me…” and his face was transfixed with horror, “but not like me…The only thing that can save us, an abomination, cursed with gods and demons…A King of the Dead! You must find this abomination!” Then he grabbed Jericho’s hand and told him what he had to do.

“I wanted life,” Harry said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “But in my universe, the universe I left, I was destined to die. In fact, I did die. In that universe I never walked out into the Shining Sea but instead went down into the white light of death.

“You’ve got to understand, this isn’t the only universe in which the earth exists. There are countless alternate universes with alternate earths, alternate timeline bubbles, that have split off from the original like those bacteria that reproduce by simply
splitting in two. In the beginning the two universes look identical, but gradually, the difference between them becomes more and more pronounced as they follow different timeline trajectories.”

He remained hanging over the rusted railing, staring down at the water, saying nothing for such a long time that Jericho thought he was finished. Then suddenly he asked, “Do you know what creates a new timeline universe?”

Jericho thought he knew but decided it was best to let Harry talk it all out of his system.

“It’s conscious desire, the wanting, that drives you to make a decision,” Harry said. “But not all decisions have the power of consequence that can split a universe and create a new one. It doesn’t matter, for instance, if you decide to take a cup of coffee or tea in the morning or walk or ride to work. Every decision like that, probably every decision you’ll ever make has no effect on the larger scheme of things. They’re like pebbles thrown in the ocean. They cause small ripples that gradually get ironed out in the vastness of the sea. On the other hand, some decisions, an almost infinitesimal number, are like a huge meteor strike, raising probability tsunamis that shift the balance of the universe to the extent that it births an alternate timeline.”