King of the Worlds (34 page)

“Do you know how humiliated I've been since we met?” Wendy went on, foaming at the corners of her mouth now. “And yet I've endured it in the name of Jesus Christ, who endured so much to ransom us with His holy blood.” She was getting kind of hysterical. He hadn't seen her like this since she'd torn at her breasts in this same forest some months ago. “Do you know how loathsome homosexuality is to me? Do you know how sickened I am by the thought of copulating when I'm not even ovulating? And yet I took it without complaint, as commanded by the Redeemer. But make no mistake, it sickened me every single day. Ever since I met you, Dylan, my celestial love, I don't believe there's been a single moment when I didn't want to retch.”

The blade had gotten purchase now. A drop of scarlet dripped down Erin's neck.
God damn it to hell
. Because he'd been such a fuck-up, his baby was dead and his wife was about to join him.

Please
, Dylan thought or prayed or whatever it was—
Help me.
He had no specific addressee in mind, but no sooner had he made this devout wish than an answer distilled on him like dew from heaven. He knew exactly what he needed to do. In a way, he'd been preparing for it his entire life.

“I can't tell you how much it saddens me to hear all this, Wendy,” he began.

“Shut the fuck up, Dylan.” She wasn't buying it, not yet. “Out, Adversary! Out!”

“No, I mean it. I hope you know I'd do anything for you. Anything at all. You know that, right? That I'd ditch Erin in a second if you wanted me to.”

He was taking a gamble here, a gamble that Wendy's envy ran deeper than her love, that her feelings toward Erin were as changeable as her version of her religion, and—riskiest of all—that he could act.

“You would?” Wendy said, looking up.

“Who would not change a raven for a dove?”

“You're making fun of me,” she said, tightening her grip on Erin's windpipe even more. Erin coughed inaudibly.

Tears formed in Dylan's eyes, clouding his vision: “Scorn and derision never come in tears,” he said.

Wendy made no response. Erin's face was now as purple and shiny as any eggplant. A vein he'd never seen before bisected her forehead. She couldn't take much more of this. Neither, frankly, could he.

“I love you, Wendy. You know that, right?” He was looking straight at Wendy, but his words were for Erin. Swap the names and it was all perfectly true. The Method.

[
I don't believe you. Roll it again
.]

“I have
always
loved you.”

[
Goddamnit, Greenyears. Do you have an
ounce of feeling in your whole body?
]

“Meeting you was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

[
You've never been in love, have you, Greenyears?]

[
Now hold it right there.
Dylan makes the time-out sign, gets down off the bow of the ship, and approaches the director's chair.
Look, Cameron, I know you think you know everything in the universe, but you're wrong on that score, all right? The truth of the matter is I've been in love with the same woman since high school and I'll be in love with her for the rest of my life. If I couldn't channel that into my part in your movie, if I couldn't convince you that I felt like the king of the world, then it must have been because some part of me knew that there was no possible universe in which I succeeded in that role and didn't subsequently lose that girl. So I made my choice, and, goddamnit, I'd make the same one again. Now stop haunting me, would you? It's been twenty years, and your movie did just fine without me.

Cameron nods his head slowly.
Okay, Greenyears. Okay. But what say we take it just one last time, eh? For your sake, not mine.

Now it's Dylan's turn to nod slowly. He heads back to the bow of the ship and takes up his position...]

“O Wendy, don't you know that you've saved me in every way that a person can be saved?”

He held out his arms. A tear slid down his left cheek.

“Now, Wendy, my celestial love, let Erin go. Let her dwell in Outer Darkness. Who cares? I love you, and I know you love me. What else could possibly matter?”

Now how all that was going to play in the viper's nest of her mind was anybody's guess…

And then, right on cue, she wilted. Pools formed in each of her eyes. She loosened her grip on Erin's breath, dropped the knife, and ran into his waiting arms.

Erin, meanwhile, fell to the ground, coughing and heaving.

[Cameron stands and applauds, followed by everyone else on set—actors, extras, film crew. Even the caterers are giving Dylan a standing O.]

He hugged Wendy tight, held her feverish, crazy head and ran his fingers through her hair, and even as Erin caught her breath and tiptoed over to hand him the licentious vine they were preordained to strangle Wendy with, it could not be denied that he continued to feel something for this biggest fan of his who had once written to him from a ski lodge in Utah to tell him that there was a hole in her exactly the shape of him and that she loved him and always would.

In a way, he would always love her too. Even as they garroted her now, and her pretty eyes rolled up in her head, he was compelled to kiss her on the forehead and whisper, “I'm sorry” into her deoxygenating brain. For a few seconds there, she almost seemed to
enjoy
being asphyxiated.
Nobody enjoys the last few seconds, of course.

Once the deed was done, they laid the body down in the dirt. Dylan closed the eyes with his thumbs, the way they do in movies. Erin held onto the tongue—once so vigorous, now so blue—and poured a smoothie down the crushed esophagus for good measure. Then she went to calm and console the poor kids as best she could while Dylan dragged the body into the weeds and let the forest have its way with her. Wendy was no longer inside of there anyway. She was somewhere near Kolob maybe, shaking hands with Jesus.

PART FIVE

EX MACHINA

Dylan and Erin tried for a few weeks, they really did, but deep down they both knew they had crossed some ill-defined point of no return. Their son was dead; so too was their wife and any notion they might have had of her saving them; their surviving children were now crippled by post-traumatic stress; and, adding insult to injury, they'd discovered Cane alive and well, albeit with excised vocal sacs, in a holey shoebox toward the back of Wendy's temple undergarment drawer. In addition to the toad, the box contained twelve omni-lens cases filled with neurotoxic secretions—evidently she'd been milking the toad's glands for quite some time. Dylan promptly slew the beast with a ball-peen hammer.

For close on a week, the family ate their meals together in something like silence, until one evening, after trying and failing to excuse the kids—they refused to leave Erin's side now, ever—Erin dropped her fork on her plate and spilled her guts, “Dylan, I love you and you love me, we both know that, and there is nothing any number of years or light years can ever do to change it.”

He nodded and took a sip of the Merlot they'd been drinking since lunchtime.

“But if we're ever going to have anything resembling lives again,” she went on, “there's no way we can just go back to business as usual. It wouldn't be healthy. For the children least of all.”

“I don't disagree with any of that,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

He uncorked their third bottle.

• • •

Two weeks later, Dylan drove his wife and kids to the teleport. Intent on avoiding any sort of ceremony, he kissed them all and wished them good luck from the curb. Tears would not have helped things, so nobody shed any. He watched them vanish into Departures. In a few hours' time, they would have installed themselves in Erin's parents' house in good old Aston, PA, 2,001 light years away, as the crow flies.

Back at home on Yushan Lane, Dylan made himself a cup of
poxna
and set to getting the house in order. He began by throwing out that Pandora's box of fan mail inside his closet. He didn't make any sort of ceremony out of that either.

He kept in touch with them via omni. Within the month, Erin landed a gig teaching PE and directing plays at Cardinal O'Hara High School, where once upon a time they'd met at rehearsal. The kids would go to that same school now too when it came time, and Dylan, without quite knowing why, took some comfort in this.

• • •

Over the years, he would visit them now and then, staying in his old bedroom until inevitably his mother and then his father shuffled off this mortal coil
in quick succession.
50
His sisters were intent on selling the house, so he stayed in motels after that. He tried to get to Earth at least once a year to see the kids. He was sorry he couldn't be there more regularly, but on balance he was glad that they were being raised by their mother, who was as natural a parent as he was a teacher.

For his part, Dylan stayed on at the American School of New Taiwan and devoted every dram of life force he had left to teaching students the old-fashioned art of close reading. His classes—especially Science Fiction—were popular, and many of the students who couldn't get into them still joined Felled Trees, the “reading/writing/dreaming club” for which he served as advisor.

One evening some eight or nine years after Erin's departure, while he was finishing up with a stack of papers, a former student of Dylan's dropped by his office to say hello. He remembered her, if only vaguely. Her name was Alaina, and she was among the most distressingly pretty girls he had ever taught. Since that time, it seemed that little more than her age had changed. She was still fresh and beautiful and filled with dreams. He asked how she was doing—“Fine”—and what she was doing—“I'm a paralegal”—and then, quite out of the blue, she confessed that she had had a “major crush” on him the whole year she was in his class, and then all through the rest of high school and, if he really wanted to know,
still
. Taken aback, he told her that he was very flattered and didn't really know what to say. She told him to say that he would have dinner with her Friday night.

A delicious nervousness stirred in his chest then—“that old tomcat feeling,” as Tom Waits once put it—and he knew well enough that if he turned her down, he might never have that particular feeling again.

But maybe that was okay.

“I don't think that would be a very good idea,” he told her.

“Oh,” she said. And then she, too, exited his life forever.

When he was finished with the papers, he walked back the long way to his apartment (he'd long since sold the house). It was the sort of evening, rare on this planet, when you could see your breath, if only for a bright moment.
It is of the nature of dreams to die
, he mused;
otherwise we should never wake up.

Over the ensuing years and then decades, Erin remarried, the kids stopped being kids, and any quiet hopes he might have harbored about Omni ascending to Godhood and setting the universe to rights began to fade. So too did any naïve hopes that cryonics might come of age and Junior be raised from the dead. All of that might come to pass
eventually
for the hominids of this universe, but Dylan no longer felt any personal stake in it. He was growing old. In all likelihood he would not live to see the invention of an honest-to-goodness time machine either, but he consoled himself that he had his books, and that, as a teacher, he got to touch some little piece of the future every day. It was a cliché, and poor consolation maybe, but it was enough. Hominid brains are exquisite objects, maybe the
most
exquisite objects, but if the history of the galaxy over the past century was any indication, one couldn't have too much humility.

As a man of letters, Dylan happened to know, with garlic/
galric
-level wonderment, that those two words—“hominid” and “humility”—ultimately derived from the same Indo-European root,
dhghem
, meaning “earth” (cf. humus). And so maybe, somehow, it was no mere coincidence that after finally retiring from the American School at the age of eighty-two, he should spend the lion's share of each day on his knees, cultivating the modest garden behind his apartment. He marveled to watch what he could grow, to see life defy entropy, if only for a little while. He almost regretted that he hadn't taken up this gardening stuff earlier, but at this stage of his life he wasn't about to waste any more time on regret.

He planted an olive tree in the garden, and another decade flickered by.

And then one fine morning, while he was on his knees digging, his trowel pinged against something solid in the dirt. He brushed it off with a gloved, arthritic hand and uncovered what appeared to be a bundle of golden plates inscribed in some hieroglyphic language he could not read.

He smiled with his whole failing body.
My mind is sufficiently tilled now, is it?

The plates glinted in the light of Lem.

At last he was being summoned. Now all he had to do was take the plates inside and figure out how to translate them. His mind reeled at all the secrets they might unlock: time travel, immortality, the resurrection of the dead.… He might yet fathom the great mysteries of the cosmos and human existence, not to mention his tinnitus and his religious experience in Ascension Forest all those years ago. He might even make good on Wendy Sorenson's crazy prophecy and become “the one mighty and strong.” Indeed, if Omni was to be believed, he might yet become as a God!

But to be God was a young man's dream, and he no longer had it. Maybe in some other universe — —

So he covered those plates over with dirt again, and crawled off to dig his hole somewhere else.

• • •

And that might well have been the end of this story, and all of it might have gone unwritten, were it not that Omni then chose to stage a more active intervention.

With a
whoosh
and a hot blast of wind, the onionberry bush beside Dylan's head shot up in flames. He retreated several crawl-paces and shielded his face with his gloved hands. His mouth fell open of its own accord. He understood at once that this must be Omni's second coming, but it was nevertheless sort of alarming.

“You can't let it end like this,” the flames boomed. It looked like a run-of-the-mill brushfire, but it had Morgan Freeman's voice.

“Let what end?”

“Your life. The story of your life.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn't have to.”

Dylan sat up and took a moment to gather his wits about him. His eyes had adjusted to the extra light now, and he put his hands back down in his lap. “But this is just the way it
goes
in this universe—you taught me that. I'm a desiring machine. There's no universe in which I am completely satisfied.”

“That's not to say you've got to lie down and accept defeat,” Omni said. “Look, no one's on board with masochism more than I am. You know that. I am the arch-sadist, and I'd
love
to satisfy your desire to suffer if I thought it was authentic, but this is something else altogether, Dylan. This is suicide. There's no good in it for anyone. Don't you see that I'm offering you a chance to alter your destiny
in this universe
? Forget about all those other yous out there for a moment. This is about numerically-identical you, the one you're inside of.”

“I have no desire to found a religion,” Dylan said. Despite whatever residual enthusiasm he might have been able to drum up for that kind of power, vindicating Wendy's homicidal madness was decidedly
not
on his to-do list. “I've got neither the energy nor the ambition.”

“Fine,” Omni said. “Forget that. It was just a whim. But Dylan, let's at least go back in time and save your son, okay? That, I'm pleased to report, is now a thing I can do.”

Dylan was speechless. And breathless. It was one thing to consider such a prospect in the abstract, another to have an actual offer on the table. Once he'd recovered his breath, he knitted his brow and got to thinking. He had given up on that sort of hope so many years ago.

“Dylan,” Omni boomed, “excuse me, but what's the problem here? Why is this a difficult decision for you? Don't you see that I'm offering you a chance to undo the central tragedy of your life?”

“And don't
you
see,” Dylan protested, “that I've built my whole life around it? I have no idea what my life would even
mean
without tragedy center-stage.”

“This is about ‘meaning' then?”

Dylan shrugged. “I guess so.”

The fire took a turn for the purple. “It's time for you to put away childish things, Dylan. Meaning is a holdover from the old godless-universe days.
I'm
God now, I actually exist, and I really do love you. From now on, life will simply be, not mean; you'll no longer have to seek recourse in symbols and abstractions. Forget Job. Forget the consolations of philosophy. I'm prepared to alter the worldlines of everyone in your universe in order to make this story a happier one. That's how much I care about you. I can't guarantee that we won't inadvertently make some other lives worse—the butterfly effect and what have you—but we'll deal with the complications one by one until we're in Leibniz's best of all possible worlds after all. Just you wait.”

“But isn't there a certain beauty in acceptance and surrender?” Dylan countered. It seemed to him that the underlying premise of so much great art was that our too-human dreams are unfit for the world we find ourselves in, and the world invariably wins.

“Granted,” the fire replied, flaring up, “but do you really think processing this as an
aesthetic
issue is the way to go? Is it not perverse that you're more concerned about your sense of a poignant ending than about happiness, not to mention saving your son's life? Are you so afraid to risk the naked schmaltz and optimism of a happy ending that you'd just as soon forego happiness altogether? Let it be written, Dylan: art exists for the sake of life, not the other way around. When the house is burning, save the baby, not the Botticelli.”

Dylan fumbled for words. A few minutes ago he'd been a man of considered, and largely hardened, opinions, but now he wasn't sure he knew anything at all. If death was no longer a death sentence, then it seemed to him everything was up for grabs.

“Will I remember all of this?” Dylan asked at length. “If we go back in time?”

“You won't have voluntary memory of it,” Omni said, “but you'll have traces, engrams. Your intuition will have been schooled by it all. You'll tend to repeat actions that turned out well for you this time and steer clear of ones that didn't.”

“So this life, as I've known it, will just be rubbed out of existence altogether?”

The fire died down a bit. “I'll tell you what, Dylan, if it's any consolation, we could make some kind of artifact to commemorate this universe by.”

“An artifact?”

“You're a man of letters. How about a novel?”

“You want to write a novel with me?”

“Why not?”

“I guess I've just never heard of a collaboration between a mortal and an immortal before.”

“And yet all the best books are that in some way or other, no?”