In the Ocean of Night (21 page)
A hundred meters away men labored to frame up more bleachers. It was pointless; people were sitting on the jutting rock ledges already in immense numbers, far more than last-minute measures could accommodate.
The hills swarmed with life, the ripplings of the throng like cilia on an immense cell. On the narrow floor of the valley the impassioned performed: tumblers, self-flagellators, psi acrobats, chanters with their hollow booming sound, dancers. The annular rings turned. Brimming loving flying dying. Fling. Shout. Moan. Stamp.
At last, the excited babble came. At the head of the canyon a white dot blossomed. Alexandria in her wheel-chair, wrapped in glittering robes. She occupied a platform among the banked rock shelves. Four Immanences flanked her.
“To fullness!” chanted the crowd. “Oneness!” In the sky a winged dot burned orange at one end. Against the pale desert blue a cloud formed. A white sculpture for the occasion: an immense alabaster woman. Wings. Hand raised in greeting, blessing, forgiveness. Alexandria.
Words from an Immanence. Music. Trumpets blared and echoed from the stones. Stamp. Sing. Running living leaping soaring. Salvation in the shimmering, enchanting heat.
He knew the litany well. It washed over him without effect. He was numb from following her. He knew he should leave but he could not give up when he could still stay close, still see her in the distance. A white dot. The walking, talking dead. Come and see. Have your hopes raised. Regain your faith. Joyful singing love forever.
And yet, and yet…he envied her. And loved her.
He grimaced.
Her voice suddenly rolled down the canyon, booming, silencing the mob. She spoke of Him, the One, and how He saw through each of us. Of a vision—
She crumpled. Something banged the microphone. A man shouted hoarsely. Nigel squinted and could make out a knot of robed, milling figures clustered where Alexandria had stood the moment before. Shrill voices called out orders.
She was going at last. Woodenly he stood, brushed away dust from his pants, staring fixedly ahead. Going. Going.
In his room in Mexico City he let the 3D play while he showered and packed. A short balding man, pink skin, fleshy cheeks, said that Alexandria had suffered a relapse but had not yet joined the Essential One, as she herself had predicted she soon would.
His telephone rang.
“Walmsley? That you?” Evers’s voice was high and ragged. Nigel grunted a reply.
“Listen, we just heard the news. Sorry, and all that, but it looks like she’s dying. We know you’ve been following her. Security’s tracked you. Have you been able to find out what she’s told the New Sons? I mean, about J-27?”
“Nothing. As far as I can tell.”
“Ah. Good. I’ve gotten word from higher up to be pretty damned sure nothing gets out. Particularly not to those… well, it looks okay, then. We’ll—”
“Evers.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t cut the second channel. She isn’t dead yet. If you do, I’ll tell the Three-Ds about… J-27.”
“You’re …” Evers’s voice cut off as though a hand had cupped over the speaker. In a moment Evers said, “Okay.”
“Keep it on indefinitely. Even if you hear she’s dead.” “Okay, Walmsley, but—”
“Goodbye.”
For a long time he stood at the hotel window and watched pedicabs lace through the lanes of the Paseo de la Reforma, mostly the late crowd streaming out of Chapultepec Park. The hivelike comings and goings of man.
So he had made one last gesture, threatened Evers. Perhaps kept her alive a few more hours or days. For what? He knew he would never see her again. Only the New Sons would relish those last moments of her.
So… back to JPL? Begin over? The Snark still waited.
Eventually, yes. He needed to know. Always the clean and sure, the definite; that’s what he sought. To
know.
Something that Shirley, and perhaps even Alexandria, had never quite understood.
Or…
He fluxed the window and a seam parted in the middle. At least two hundred meters down. Into a pool of racing yellow headlights. Compressing lines, snuffing him out like a candle burned too low.
He looked down for long moments.
Then turned. Picked up his bags and took the shuttle down to the lobby. He checked out, smiling stiffly, tipped a porter, left his bags and went out onto the sidewalk. Soft air greeted him. He shoved his hands into his pockets and decided to take a walk around the block, to clear his head.
From his pocket he took a wedge of plastic. It contained microminiature electronics, a power source and transducer. He clipped it into a holder beneath his collar and made sure it did not show. It rubbed as he walked.
He wanted to be in the open when he tried this. A building might shield the signal at these distances, or blur it. He could take no chances. When Alexandria died, the Snark could still use the channel…
He reached behind his ear and pressed. The telltale hummed into life. The bit of plastic and electronics he’d had made at such expense rubbed his neck. He pressed a thumb against it and heard a faint ceramic click.
He walked. Stepped. Felt a massive, bulging surge— Stepped—
Love and envy.
Stepped—
A day later: he steps—
—steps
—onto the sheets of folded rock. Stone decks of an earthen ship, adrift in this high desert. A craft of baking rock. The ages have layered and compressed this wrinkled deck; life skitters over it. Chittering. Leaping.
He mounts the flaking rock. A scorpion scuttles aside. Boots bite into crunching gravel.
—plants licking, foamlike, at the coarse crust—
The looming presence
peers out
sucks in
understands
—
and is quiet.
In this brittle Mexican desert he marches on. The air is crystalline; puddles from a recent rain splinter the descending light.
Poppies, mallows, zinnias, cacti, sand mats and yellow splashes of lichen—
—soil awash in life—
—sun spinning over the warped earth—
Nigel smiles. The being rides back, behind the eyes.
His legs make easy strides. A bootheel rubs. Leather creaks. Arms rocking, calves bunching. Heart pumping lungs whooshing skin warm boot turning on a stone sky flat shirt tugging in the damp armpits waxy cactus in the path canteen rattling as he turns—
From this awareness Nigel selects. The being does not. He eats it all.
A rabbit bounds to the side. A claret-cup cactus beckons. Nigel stops. Unscrews canteen. Drinks.
—feels the rushing silvery quilted reddening flavor on his tongue—
—And senses some dim trace of what the other being must feel. It honored the sanctity of living creatures; it would not have bid Alexandria to rise again, but she was already gone, already dead to her own world. So to see this fresh planet, the being used a body that men had already cast aside.
In those first moments of contact with Nigel, on the street in Mexico City, the being had very nearly withdrawn. But when it saw the ruined canvas inside this man, it had stayed. Using the subtle knowledge, learned from thousands of such contacts with chemical life forms, it undertook some brush of contact. And remained. To taste this sweet world. To shore up this man.
—blue custard sky vibrant with flapping life, drifting splotches, writhing clouds—
This place is alien.
Pausing, the sharp jagged horizon dividing this world into halves, he reflects. And sees the rippling weave of Evers and Lubkin and Shirley and Hufman and Alexandria and Nigel. A play. A net. Gravid workings. Each a small universe in itself.
But each together. Exalted. Each a firmament. A clockwork.
So familiar.
So alien.
Deep, buried in the currents of the torrent, Nigel swims.
Swimming, he heals.
The looming presence sat astride the flood of perception and took it all. Before Nigel could apply the filters of his eyes, ears, skin, touch, smell—before all that, the being sponged up this new and strange world, and in the act of taking altered it for Nigel as well.
And someday the being would go. Pass through. Nigel would split his cocoon then. Emerge. Into the splintering day. On doddering feet.
He would pass through that lens. All would pass. But for the moment:
The Snark
feels the booming pulse unfolds the rocks before him carves the dry air smacks boots into yielding earth—
seeing
tasting
opening.
Eases him into the warming world.
Pins him loving to the day
—E v e r s L u b k i n S h i r l e y H u f m a n —
AlexandriaAlexandria—
Thinking of them, knowing he will return to that world someday, a weight slips from him and he rolls and basks and floats in these familiar waters of the desert. Evers-Hufman-Shirley—
Alien, they are, his brothers.
So alien.
H
e woke, staring up into an iron-gray sky glowing with dawn.
He woke alone.
The being was gone. The faint trembling pressure had seemed to ride behind his eyes; now Nigel felt only a hollow absence of something he could scarcely recall.
He sat up in his sleeping bag, felt a buzzing dizziness, and lay back again. A horned lizard froze on a nearby rock and then, sensing his relaxation, darted away.
There were two places, he thought, where people feel closer to the source of things. The ocean, with its salty memory of origins. And in the desert—bleached, carved, turning beneath a yellow flame, a place reduced to the raw edge. And yet it was alive with a fine webbing of creatures. Perhaps that was why the being wanted to come here.
He remembered buying his backpack, goosedown sleeping bag and boots in a Mexico City shop. Remembered the short flight into the high desert. Remembered walking.
And sensed something behind his memories…
Of standing in a high place, looking down on a flat checkerboard of
things,
of
categories
and coordinate systems and forms.
He had watched himself. Seen a bird sheltering in a mesquite plant. Watched the first layer: Bird. Wings. A burnished brown. Phylum-order-class-genus-species.
Watched the second layer: Flight. Motion. Momentum. Analysis.
And saw at last that there was an essence in the way he filtered the world. That beyond the filter lay an ocean. A desert.
That the filter was what it meant to be human.
There was something more, something larger. He snatched at it but it…it brushed by him. He dimly saw the fabric of something… and then it was gone.
Nigel blinked. He lay on a shelf of worn rock, his body rubbed and warmed by the goosedown bag. The hill beside him glowed soft and golden; the horizon brimmed with light.
What had he learned? he thought. Factually, nothing. There were glimpsed aspects, nuances, but nothing concrete. The being had come. It provided some cushion for him during those dark hours in Mexico City (had he really fluxed the window? thought of jumping?). And the being had gone, seeped away in the night.
Nigel frowned, stretched, relaxed. His calves ached from walking. His stomach rumbled with hunger. He reached over to his backpack and fished out a dried fruit bar. His saliva wetted a bite and the flavor of strawberry filled his mouth.
What was it?
After all he’d been through, Nigel still knew nothing about the alien that was useful. No facts, no data. One does not ask questions of a ghost.
He chewed, watching the filling sky.
Alexandria, Shirley—all behind him now. Ironic, how close you could be to someone, how much he’d thought he loved Shirley. Now, after all she’d done, there was only a dull, sour memory.
And questions. Had he really loved Shirley, or was that another illusion? The only person he had ever been sure of was Alexandria. And she was gone. Through the Snark he had known some faint trace of her, for a while. Perhaps some fraction of her remained in the Snark, some shadow.
He blew his nose on a handkerchief. The cloth came away with a smattering of blood; the night air had dried out his nasal passages.
Nigel smiled. Was the blood a sign of life? Or of death? Everywhere was ambiguity.
And yet…he wanted answers. He needed to know. Of his old world only one fragment remained: the Snark. There he must go. NASA and Evers would be stepping-stones outward and there would be others, other people who could help. There would be some resistance to him at NASA, he knew, particularly after the business about signaling the Snark first. Nigel Walmsley, the mad astronaut. But he would get through that.