Mountain of Black Glass (14 page)

Now he was in the back seat of a car, driving along the coast, with his parents arguing in the front and his sister beside him, grinning and jabbing him with the neck of her headless doll. He kicked at her, but she stayed out of reach, and although he cried out to his parents, they were busy with their conflict. As the car rounded a bend in the highway the sun bounced its reflection off the water, and for a moment he was dazzled by the light that silhouetted his parents' faces. . . .

His two younger brothers had crawled out of the tent. His mother was yelling, which wasn't helping her soothe the sick baby in her arms, but the bad thing was that his mother was really frightened because it was night outside and dark and his father still wasn't back yet. He pushed out of the flap and past the nervous goats, who rang their bells and bleated. The night sky was huge and endless, running away in all directions, and the stars were fierce, and he called his brothers' names over and over. . . .

But I don't have any brothers,
he thought.
And those aren't my parents, are they?

Everything began happening all at once.

A shack high up in a valley between the hills, and his bicycle lying in a ditch beside the front path, the wheel rusted to the forks because he had left it there all winter, to win an argument with his father that his father didn't even know they were having. . . .

The place in the long front hallway where his mother's and older sister's pictures sat on a table, with a vase of flowers just between them, and where sometimes, on holy days, his grandmother burned a candle. . . .

Playing in the river before the rainy season returned, with nothing but mud far down the banks. His cousin and one of the other village children were wrestling, and they slipped down and for a moment they disappeared into the sludge, frightening him, but then they came up again laughing, with everything the same fecal brown except their shining eyes and teeth. . . .

They were taking down his uncle's flag now that evening had come, and he was rigidly at attention, hoping his uncle would notice how straight he was standing. . . .

Second step. The smears of light fragmented into smaller, more rigid pieces, shards of lives, thousands of bright, jagged insights like broken windows—a high mountain trail, following the horses, watching the brilliant tassel of a blanket . . . a sharp bark as his dog heard something in the next apartment, where no one was supposed to be home . . . his baby brother's crying face, fat and red and completely without understanding why it had been pushed down in the sandbox . . . a pair of new shoes set carefully on his folded communion suit. . . .

And all the time a great dark something was moving beneath these glinting bits, as though he, the observing eye, were a diver floating just beneath the surface while something impossibly large, something too big and traveling too deep to be fully comprehensible, passed slowly, slowly beneath him. It did not know he was there, and his fascination with it was almost as great as his naked terror, but nothing in the universe could have been more exposed than he was, a worm without even a hook, floating above the great shadow. . . .

This third step brought the dark, as though the Big Nothing passing beneath him had risen and, without realizing it, accidentally swallowed him whole. Dark surrounded him now, permeated him, but it was a darkness that burned, the darkness inside the oven after the door has closed.

He screamed, but there were no words. He knew no words. There were flashes of light, but they had no more meaning than the burning darkness. He was not only bodiless but nameless. He had no brothers, no sisters, no fathers, no mothers, only pain and confusion. He was a singularity, one infinite point at the center of everything, and all that surrounded him was finite. He turned himself inside out over and over again.

The oscillations came faster now, hotter now, faster and hotter and he could not he tried but there was no sense or sound or sight or anything but fast and hot and

And then something finally did. Something blue, something quiet, something clingingly cool poured over and made everything slow down, slow down, blessed creeping syrupy slow frost that held him and covered him and let his deep black empty heart go slow, go so very slow, until it beat only once in an age, once in an aeon, once when everything began and then again when everything would finally stop . . .

Doom
. . . The fourth step.

And with that singular and potent reverberation came nothingness. And it was welcome.

 

He came up nameless, out of fundamental blankness into another, lesser blackness, a still place with no time except
now.
He only knew it was a place because he had a sense of himself as an individual thing, and thus a dim feeling that anything that existed must exist in a place, but he was in no hurry to know where he was, or even who he was. With the acceptance of personal existence came a certain commitment, he knew, and he did not wish anything so strenuous or permanent just yet.

The blackness, although it encompassed everything, nevertheless had a shape, a shape he had seen before, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top—a mountain, a cup emptied and then turned over, a pyramid . . . He was in the darkness—
of
the darkness—but he could still feel the impossible geometry of the black form, the vertices both converging and simultaneously extending upward in parallel, forever.

And as he felt himself alive and tiny and for this moment unnoticed in the heart of the black pyramid, something began to sizzle in the emptiness. When he saw the torn place moving before him, he realized that what had ripped the darkness was light, a fizzing irregular glow like a Fourth of July sparkler. . . .

The jagged place tore more widely, light spilling out now. For a moment—only a moment—he was disappointed to see the beautiful darkness compromised so easily and so carelessly. But as he floated in all that black he could not look away from the light, which was spreading before him, becoming a field of regular shapes, angled lines, a grid that turned inside out from white lines on black to black lines on a white . . .

. . . Ceiling
. . .

. . . And he came to realize he was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling of some institutional room, all insulated tile and easy-clean surfaces.

Hospital.
The word came to him after a moment, and with it the slowly dawning realization that he must have awakened—that he must somehow have been thrown out of the network and back into his body. Another thought came to him tardily, and he braced himself for the pain that . . . that . . . (the name finally came) that Fredericks had described, but after long moments of looking up at the acoustic tiles, it still had not arrived. He had, however, become aware of two other presences on either side of the bed, leaning over him, which could only be his mother and father. A quiet joy filled him as he opened his eyes.

The shape on his left side was hidden by shadow, so deeply hidden that he could not see it, only feel it. What he perceived was sentience, but also emptiness and the cold that came with it. It was not a pleasant feeling.

The shape on his right had a head that was nothing but light.

I've been here,
he thought.
But it was an office, not a hospital. When I first . . . when I first came through . . .

Hello, Orlando,
said the thing with the face made invisible by its own brilliance. It spoke with his mother's voice, but it was not his mother, not by any stretch of imagination.
We have missed you. Although we have not been very far from you.

Who is “we”?
He struggled to rise but could not. The thing on his left side moved, the chilly shape he could not quite see; for a heart-stopping moment he was terrified that it would touch him. He turned away violently, but the light on the other side was blindingly bright, so he was forced to turn his face back toward the acoustic tiles. A small thing was crawling there, a tiny thing, perhaps a bug, and he pinned his attention to it.

“We,” in the sense of “I,”
the not-his-mother continued.
“You,” I suppose it could even be said. But of course that would not be strictly accurate either.

He could make no sense of that.
Where am I? What is this place?

The thing of light hesitated.
A dream, I suppose. Perhaps that would be the best explanation.

The cold fire rippled. He realized the shape was laughing. As if angered by this, the shadowy thing on his left periphery shifted. He thought he could hear it breathing, a slow, somnolent sound from a long way away.
No, no,
the shape on his right said.
Nothing so simplistic. You're talking to yourself, yes, but that's because that's where words come from.

That word doesn't mean much in this particular conversation.
The glow rose a little, the fierce radiance bringing a tear to Orlando's right eye. He blinked as it continued.
You are between. You are near a boundary. You are halfway between Heaven and Hell—a place which, medieval theology aside, has nothing to do with Earth at all.

Are you . . . God?
Even in his distraction and disconnection, a part of him did not believe it. It all seemed too pat, too simple. The cold thing on the other side of him leaned closer, or seemed to—he felt a chill shadow inch across him, and he shut his eyes tight, terrified that he might see what stood there.

The voice that went with the radiant face was kind.
Here's the question, Orlando. It's kind of a Sunday School question. . . .

Eyes tightly shut, he waited, but the silence went on. Just as he was about to risk everything and open his eyes, the soft voice spoke again.

Orlando strained to hear as the voice, which had grown steadily fainter, whispered the last word. As if he might hear better with his vision restored, he opened his eyes to . . .

Blackness, complete and absolute and containing nothing but . . .

 

F
OR the second time in what seemed a very short span, he appeared to be back in a hospital. His eyes were tight shut, and the idea that those same odd bookend figures might still be sitting over him meant he was in no hurry to open them, but Orlando could tell that he was flat on his back, restrained by sheets or something equally binding, and someone was dabbing at his forehead with a cold, damp cloth.

Also contributing to the hospital theory was the fact that he felt absolutely dreadful.

“He just blinked,” said Fredericks in the excited tone of someone who has been watching for something a long time.

“Oh, God,” Orlando groaned. “I'm still . . . alive, then? God, that locks utterly.”

“That's not funny, Gardiner.”

As he opened his eyes a second sarcastic remark died on his lips. It was not Fredericks cooling his brow, but a round Egyptian woman with dark skin and an impatient expression. “Who are you?” Orlando asked.

“Just hush your mouth.” She sounded far more Deep South than Nile Delta. “You were almost dead, boy, so I think you'd better keep still for a bit.”

Orlando looked to Fredericks, hovering behind her, and mouthed,
Who is she?
His friend shrugged helplessly. The room decor gave no clues—the walls were whitewashed mud brick, the ceiling white plaster, and there was no furniture in the room other than whatever kind of lumpy, pillowless bed was beneath him.

The woman put a gentle but firm hand against his chest and pressed him back onto the rustling mattress. When he tried to resist, he realized that some kind of rough blanket had been tucked around him very tightly: his arms were virtually pinned against his sides.

“What's going on?” he blustered, frightened to be so helpless. “Are you planning to make me into a mummy or something?”

“Don't be stupid.” She dabbed a last time and then stood up, fists on her full hips. Even with Fredericks wearing his slight-bodied Pithlit sim, she only came up to his shoulder. If Orlando had been vertical, the Thargor body would have towered over her. “You aren't a king, you're just an ordinary god like your friend here, and you're not even dead. You just don't rate mummification, boy. Now say your prayers and then get some sleep.”

“What are you talking about? Who
are
you? What's going on here?”

“You were really sick again, Orlando.” Fredericks looked to the woman as though asking permission to speak, but she did not look away from her patient. “When we came through . . . when we were out of that temple place . . . you were . . .”

“You were acting like a crazy person,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “Hootin' and hollerin' and carrying on something terrible. You tried to kick your way through the wall of somebody's house, and then you tried to walk across the Nile.”