One of Us (41 page)

It was not a better time necessarily, just different; in our hearts, most of us know that there are some things that were supposed to be another way. Only in the dark hours, when we consider death and the past and what they do to us, do we get a glimpse of what we have done; and when we sleep we try to regain a way of being we've lost the ability to comprehend. Sometimes we feel the presence of those who live there still, and give them names and try to understand them.

Because after a while words came to us, and with them a disjunction. Instead of apprehending the world directly, experience became mediated by thought—for as soon as you catch yourself observing, you come to believe you are separate from that of which you think. We began to nail the past down, to hold it in place through description, through making a distinction between it and now. Time began to run forward, and we lost the past as a small boat taking to the sea leaves the vast land behind. We divided light from darkness, and black from white: took everything from within ourselves and placed it outside. We called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters we called the seas, and we saw that they were different and after that it could not be undone.

At least—some of us did. Some of us chose to give form to space and tame the reality in which we soon found ourselves. Others didn't, and thus we became separate strands of the same organism, inhabiting different realms.

We who became visible started to conquer the world. Our pact with corporeality made this possible, changing our planet and ourselves—trapping their fluidity, making them firm and hard. We built, and explored, using our solidity like some metaphysical opposable thumb. But with firmness came the possibility of malfunction, of damage and mistakes and death. It didn't happen all at once, but gradually we condensed ourselves into greater mortality, and paid the price. We became capable of death, and once we had died, there was no way of coming back, except when those who had once loved us glimpsed us fleetingly through the veil of recollection.

The invisibles remained immortal, and stepped between the planes. It was a long time before they realized how reality was being subdivided, and by that time the rest of us had forgotten it had ever been another way. The past had become that other country, and once something had gone there, it was lost. It became what we called memory, a place we could visit in dreams and quiet moments, but only imperfectly. Past events hardened into splinters of glass untouchably embedded in our minds: foreign bodies that shift and tear, too deeply buried ever to be removed but still sharp enough to cut through into the present and damage us time and again.

We gained pasts, and secrets, and parts of our souls atrophied: like a fine house with a locked room at its center and a dead bird lying broken on the floor.

With form, too, came fear, the suspicion that we had blinded ourselves to a part of reality that was no longer our domain. We needed a barrier between us and the unknown; we needed to be protected from the things we no longer understood.

And so we took the invisibles and called them angels and gods.

DECK AND I MADE it to the police station with about five minutes to spare. In the past hour we'd been back to Deck's apartment and made a transferral, then destroyed two machines.

We waited out at the desk for Travis, holding Stratten slumped between us. He was conscious, and awake, but in no state to put up a fight. A big memory dump will do that to you, especially if it's your first time.

When Travis emerged, he just looked at us silently, then beckoned us forward. I found myself in the interview room for the third time in as many days. This time the room looked different. Less like a cage.

"And this would be?" Travis asked when the door was shut.

"Stratten," I said.

"Is he all right? He looks sick."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "He's fine. Just has rather a lot to come to terms with."

Travis leaned back against the table, folded his arms. "You know I still don't have enough evidence to tie the blackmail racket to him. There's nothing that connects him except your word."

"Romer could have connected him," Deck said. "Except he's dead."

Travis didn't look especially surprised. Just made a note of where the body was. "Still nothing that's going to impress the DA," he said. "Sorry, Hap."

"I'm not trying to solve the blackmail for you," I told him. "You're the cop; you sort that out."

"So what do you want?"

I took a deep breath. "I have reason to believe that this man remembers the murder of a Los Angeles police officer."

Travis's eyes flicked over to Stratten: "He killed Ray Hammond?"

"That's not for me to say," I said. "But he's got it in his head."

Travis didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at me, worked it out. Then he nodded. "I can believe that. He looks the type."

"Marvelous thing," I observed to Deck, "that kind of investigative intuition."

Deck nodded. "It impresses the hell out of me."

Travis took Stratten's arm, and Deck and I took a step back.

"It's after eleven," I said.

"Yes," Travis said slowly, "and you know what? Something weird has happened. I was sure I had a file on my desk, full of things I was going to clean up, old cases and such, and now I just can't find it."

My heart tightened. "But you will?"

"Difficult to say. You know how it is with things. Sometimes they disappear for good, sometimes they come back."

"Travis ..."

"Go home," the lieutenant said. "Wherever that may be. Leave your number at the desk. I'll have a good look through my office once I've booked Stratten, and I'll let you know what I find."

I left Deck's number, and then he and I went out to a bar and had many beers.

Next morning Travis called pretty early. I guess he felt it had hung over me long enough. He'd turned his office upside down and just couldn't put his hand on that damn file. He sounded pretty chipper in spite of that: Sodium verithal and a memory scan put Stratten squarely at the scene of Ray Hammond's murder. There remained the question of why Stratten appeared to have been wearing a woman's coat in the memory, and why Hammond had called him Laura, but Travis and the DA felt that Stratten's private life was his own affair. They were both satisfied that justice was being done, one way or another.

As for the Transvirtual job, well, without that additional evidence there just wasn't a case to prosecute. Travis had marked it closed, and it would remain on the database that way. Instead of splitting the bill, the lieutenant had let Ricardo pay for it all.

Travis was about to put the phone down, ready to go off and happily do cop things, when I found myself saying something. I wondered aloud whether maybe sometime a former criminal, now going straight, could buy him a beer.

Travis thought for a moment. "Not a chance," he said. "And certainly not in Irish Ben's next Friday around nine. Just not going to happen."

Later that afternoon I discovered that nuking Quat's—well, Stratten's—homesite had done something I hadn't anticipated. The crabdaddy had eaten Quat's fake accounts, and Vent recaptured them before digestion was complete. I still lost most of my money, through irrecoverable virtual streams that had died when the site crashed, but I got back enough to live on for a while. Vent got what I owed him, plus his punitive rate of interest, and I had enough to pay somebody to remove my crime from the database again.

But I didn't do it; I don't think I will. Bad things happen. Sometimes you do them, sometimes they're done to you. Claiming they never took place doesn't solve anything, and it won't make them go away. No matter how deeply you hide something in the trash, it's still down there, and it's still a part of you. Once you've read a letter that breaks your heart, burning it doesn't help. So you call a truce. You stop turning the knife in the night, and try to stop letting it ruin your day. Waiting for perfection is merely a way of turning your back on reality, placing a higher value on what's inside your head than what is evident all around you. Though where we live may be based on shadows, it is our home: And the battered furniture and handprints near the light switches are what make it so.

THE INVISIBLES played and tampered for a long time, floating through the lives of the visible cousins they now regarded as damaged strangers. Sometimes a human would accidentally wander into memory, and see how things really were, but no one could remember what the vision had been like, and so they made up stories to fill the empty spaces. As soon as you turn back, like Orpheus, you lose what you went there to find. You can't write with black on black—so you pick up the white brush and do your best, and the very first mark you make will be wrong.

In time one of the angels came to believe that the invisible and visible could be brought together again. He tried to hint at the ways things could be.

But he was too late. The human need to literalize had extended beyond the real world and into the realm of ideas. The operating system had adapted to fit the new hardware, and we now needed to codify everything, to make it rigid. We took what the angel said and reworked it until the vision he'd shown us no longer made any sense. We elevated one invisible above the others, made him father and king, and called him God.

The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization—but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't realized the power of corporeality, that the minds of men would of necessity alter the mind of their God. Being a deity meant taking on a lot of your subjects' qualities—both profound and trivial. The invisibles were simply not bound by gravity, for example, but we decided that if they could fly, then angels must have wings. And thus it became so, much to the invisibles' annoyance. Wings were, it transpires, a total pain in the ass—and really tiring to use. They don't need spaceships either; the lights in the sky are just something we see in our heads. Each one of us is alien to somebody: The invisibles are just a little more so than most.

And finally God succumbed to our greatest distinction, that between good and evil. Good deeds have always been done for bad reasons, mistakes made with the best of intentions, but we separated the moral heart from the action, and evil from good, and one side of God from another. We split his mind, and broke his heart.

God was lost in darkness for a while—torn between visibility and invisibility, between the worlds of angels and of men. Some of the other invisibles took advantage of his absence and rebelled against the situation, largely out of pique. They tried to set up opposing power blocs, but before long they tired of the sport. Like humans, angels don't know how the universe came about. All they wanted, and all God ever tried to achieve, was a better relationship between our two kinds.

When God finally returned, he accepted his earlier errors, and the invisibles tried to codify the relationship between the two worlds. Where once it had often been possible for humans to sometimes wander across the line, it was now made much more difficult, and angels, too, were banned from crossing between worlds any more than necessary. Eventually God communicated with a human who had some ability as a medium, in an attempt to reforge the old link. God arranged for this man to be able to do a few tricks (largely involving control over gravity, the transub-stantiation of matter, and a brief and flawed triumph over death) so that mankind would be convinced of the reality of the revelations the man brought. The message was simple, and designed merely to be planted and then left alone to grow.

We are part of something much larger.

To a degree, it worked, and the new idea spread like wildfire. But, as always, we embraced it too literally. We made our myths. We decided Jesus couldn't just be some guy, so later generations invented the virgin birth, ignoring the fact that the original Hebrew text of Isaiah used the word almah, which means not a virgin but merely a young woman. Jesus started to ad-lib, and some of his jokes weren't funny.

Our world was too heavy to be reorganized around the truth: So we altered the truth to fit. The word got edited and mangled, often in ways that made no sense at all—and so a myriad of accounts and visions were revised into a story that reads like it was script-edited late at night. God never said he created anything at all. We merely took his name and used it for something we'd done to ourselves. Even the account of the birth of Jesus combines events from a span of ten years into a single night.

Luke would have felt right at home in the Prose Cafe: He was the first screenwriter, sculpting fiction for the producer-priests. They wanted a good pre-titles sequence, and they got it—but only by making it up. We turned truth into words, then typed them on top of each other until it was impossible to see what they said.

The medium got himself whacked in the end, and circumstances conspired to spread a religion throughout the world. The invisibles had set up a franchise, with an outlet in every town— but the product got damaged in transit, and the message emerged misshapen and skewed.

Worst of all, the message captured God and enchained him in words, made him so concrete that he had to live among us all the time: the wandering invisible made flesh.

LAURA RETURNED on the evening of the day I had the conversation with God. She found herself in a forest, down by the stream that she'd known as a child, standing on a rock. After a while she walked back into the city, and ended up at Deck's door.

She didn't remember anything about where she'd been, but something must have happened to her there. She was calmer, seemed better for being away. I wonder whether she chose not to return for those few days, to spend a little extra time in that place where things look different: to examine the start of the circle and try to understand where her life had come from. Sometimes you have to look back: What turns us into pillars of salt is the inability to face forward again.