The Wave (12 page)

28

The beasts that accompanied us were giants compared to any wolf I had ever heard of. They must have weighed six hundred pounds each. Their snouts were unusually long.

“Why wolves and men?” I asked my father.

“The Wave has flowed into many of our distant cousins,” he said, his grin filled with primordial joy. “Butterflies and locusts, house cats and weeds. But it was man, we knew, who would fear us and strike out. We took human form because that has always been our defense.”

“To become your enemy?”

“To be him.”

“So Wheeler was right,” I said. “You are our enemy.”

“No, Airy. No. We offer a greater vision, a world without division. Hope.”

“You defend yourself by offering hope?”

GT grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. A huge wolf tongue licked my left hand.

Under the cover of a pine forest, we traveled—one man, eight extinct wolves, and the resurrected corpse of my father.

“Where are we going?” I asked GT at midmorning.

“The Wave.”

“Where’s that?”

“Up yonder, boy.” His words had been spoken in a western we’d watched together on late-night TV when I was nine.

For years I had prayed to see him one more time, and now that we were together, I hadn’t told him how I felt.

“I love you, Dad.”

GT and the wolves stopped. They all turned to regard me. Actually, only GT gazed at me. The wolves began to circle us, coughing and barking as that species of wolf must have done for millennia before man had risen upright.

“Love me?” he said.

“Yeah. I missed you for all those years, and now you’re back. I mean, it’s crazy, and you’re not quite right, but you are my father, I know that. And I’ve missed you every day since the day you died.”

“Death,” GT said. “Me. You. These are things we never knew in the old times, in the deep earth. There was only us and then the voices.”

“What are those voices?” I asked.

“Have you heard them?”

“In my head. Like faraway proclamations or sermons or calls.”

“They are in the sky,” GT said. “In space. There are more voices than there are stars. But there is only One that comes.”

“What is it?”

“The Annunciation,” he said with a sly smile.

We walked all day. At night, three of our six wolf companions went off. They came back bearing trout in their jaws. I knew how to rub two sticks together. I made a fire to cook the catch. I hadn’t eaten in a long time. Those fish tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten.

We hadn’t gone very far in the morning when we came to a mountainside cave. Our crew entered the cavern and descended for a very long time. I was cold, but moving made it tolerable. We came to a level and then walked for miles down a tunnel.

There were torches every fifty feet or so, fed by a slight breeze that blew through.

After a long time, the temperature started to rise. Soon it had become uncomfortably warm. Then we came to an opening that might as well have been the entrance unto hell itself.

The stench emitted from that cavern was so powerful that I fell to the ground gagging. GT lifted me back up.

The garish cavern had a fissure down the center. Thirty or forty naked men and women labored hard with buckets and ropes, pluming the gash for black sludge that they then poured into a deep tub carved in the stone floor.

From another part of the cave, one naked man or woman after another dragged forward corpses that they dumped unceremoniously into the pit of muck. In the center of the man-made tub, the tar simmered, and every now and then a human crawled out and collapsed on the cave floor.

The smell of the room was foul. The light came from a hundred torches. The horror and power of the spectacle robbed me of my senses.

I must have lost consciousness, although I don’t remember passing out. When I awoke, I was in a small rocky cavern that was rudely furnished with rugs made from fur, a table lashed together with hide, and a chair made in the same fashion. I was lying on a fur bed. GT and a brown primitive were hunkered down at my feet.

“Where are we?” I pleaded.

“The Wave,” both men said together.

“What were you doing in that room?”

“Bringing back the dead tho that we can thurvive,” the dusky man lisped. He had thick bones over almond-shaped eyes.

He was shorter than I, but his shoulders and thighs were immense. His hair was long and matted. His body stank. But his voice was surprisingly melodious—tenor and strong.

“What are you?”

“I am Veil Bonebreaker, firtht to climb the high mountain.”

“And you are down here raising the dead?” I asked.

I wanted to keep talking. Anything to stave off insanity down there under the ground.

“Only a few,” Veil said.

“There’s a cemetery not far from here,” GT added. “We need a few more bodies with knowledge on this world. And now that we know how to protect their minds, we are bringing them out for the last migration.”

“But they were crawling out of that pit one after the other. You must have made thousands of people at that rate.”

“Ith only our thecond revival,” Veil said. “Arthurporter made it in time for our thelebration. In all, there are only three hundred and nineteen counth that are free. Nine hundred and fifty-theven for you.”

“You were frozen?” I asked Veil.

“In the cold down here, until the Wave wathed over me.”

“They plan to destroy you all,” I said.

I had no power of conversation. I could say things, and I could ask, but not in any sequence or with any give-and-take. I was dead, that’s how I felt. The words coming out of me were no more than the random last thoughts hemorrhaging out of a deceased brain.

“They have been developing a toxin. When they get it right, they’re going to come after you with it.”

“Thith mutht not happen,” Veil said. “We mutht thurvive to the tranthithon.”

“What’s that?”

“Farsinger,” GT said.

I knew immediately that it was the unique life-form that had cried out for a mate through the vacant ether.

“It’s coming for you?” I asked.

“Yeth,” Veil said.

“You are going to mate?”

“Unite,” GT said. “Farsinger is one, and we are one and many. Together we will be seen across the sky.”

“Migration,” I said. “You’re restless.”

Both men smiled at me, their teeth glistening almost hungrily in the flickering light from the dying torch that lit my cave.

“We mutht thurvive,” Veil said.

“We have to thurvive,” Veil said for the fifth or sixth time.

I had fallen asleep again, and when I awoke, there was cooked rabbit on a rude stone dish sitting next to me. After I’d eaten, Veil came to me and spoke about the migration of the Wave.

“Long, long ago,” he said, struggling with the language that he knew from GT and other dead Americans arisen from his sludge pit, “long before there were even fith in the othean, we heard Farthinger. Thee thang, and we rethponded, and then we began our rithe up from the deep, where we nethted and rethted, counting the many timeth we made the thircle.

“When we heard her, we rothe upward, knowing nothing but numberth and her call. Thee needth uth and cometh for uth. Thee is almotht here.”

“How soon?” I asked the caveman.

“For uth,” he said, “it ith an inthtant. For you, one thouthand five hundred and theventy-one dayth.”

I tried to do the math in my head. I thought of the number, and instantly, 4.304 years came to mind.

“Am I infected with your tar?” I asked.

“Only thlightly,” Veil said with his gentle lisp. “Enough to know thome of what we know and thome of how we think. We are no threat to you.”

I believed this was true.

“Does every particle of the Wave know everything that you all know?”

“Half,” Veil said. “We each know half the thame. The retht ith different for a billion counth, and then it thangeth again. We thare. We thame. We can come together and hold handth”—he smiled—“yeth, hold handth like loverth. All one and everything.”

I remembered being a part of that school of mackerel. I had experienced the one and the many.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Take uth with you back to thomeplathe thafe. Take uth with you and make uth thafe. In four yearth, all that we are will rithe up and become part of Farthinger. We will leave thith plathe and go out patht the blanket of pull.”

“I will help you,” I said.

On what I believe was my third day in the cave, GT announced that he was going to leave for a while.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To complete the penultimate part of my mission,” he replied.

“What’s that?”

“They are stalking us,” he said. “One day they will find us. I must learn how to resist them.”

I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t want him to leave. But there was no room for questions or debate. One moment he was hunkered down next to me, smiling by torchlight, and the next he was walking away down a dark tunnel.

GT returned now and then, but never for very long. During these brief visits he would spend most of the time with one hand dipped into the stone tub that held the Wave.

29

I’m not certain how long I stayed in the cave of the Wave. There were no more revivals during that time. There were many strange things, however. Animals and birds came into the cave and communed with one another. There were about fifty men and women who had once lived but now were dead and resided permanently near the Tar of Life—the Wave. We talked together and laughed. When I was lonely, one of the women would sleep with me on the fur mat in the room where I had first met Veil.

Veil and I spent a lot of time together. We talked about the threats that humanity presented.

“We are not indethtructible,” Veil said to me one day. “We are durable but not invulnerable. Your friend the plathtic thurgeon could dethtroy uth if you do not make uth thafe.”

“How can I do that if you can’t?” I asked.

“Becauth you are what our enemy ith,” Veil replied. “We are only theeing without knowing.”

I made a few friends while living down under the mountains. One such friend was Dick Ambler, a car salesman who had died seventeen years earlier. Unlike a great many of the humans that had been imbued with life, Dick was very lively, very much like a normal man. In his former life, he’d loved to tell funny stories, but since his revival, he didn’t understand the meanings of the jokes in his mind. Sometimes he’d sit and tell me one of these jokes and I would try to explain why it was funny. He never really understood, but we became close anyway.

“How can the Wave be here and in Los Angeles at the same time?” I asked Dick one evening.

“We had been rising for a very long time under the city you call Los Angeles,” he told me. “We sensed the music played by your DNA. But maybe three hundred years ago, we found a tunnel that led here. After discovering how dangerous men could be for us, the greater part of the Wave retreated to these caves, leaving only a few to reanimate the bodies.”

I learned many things in the torchlight of that cave. At night, when I slept, I had visions of celestial beings communicating across the vastness of space. I could hear the vibrations of my own cells and read all species’ histories through the coiled patterns of genes.

Once I put my hand into a bucket of black mud that Veil told me had all of the knowledge of the world inside it. At first it didn’t feel like anything, but after a while, the heat began to build. Just when it became almost unbearable, I felt a shunt into my brain and all human sensations were gone.

I became an amorphous mass defined by ideas based on numbers rather than physical form or time. I could become a quartz melody or a woolly mammoth, but all of that was contained within a wider sense of being. Gravity and subatomic particles passed through me, massaged me. I encompassed even the shape of the universe.

I had feelings, but these, I saw, were inconsequential. I witnessed human slaughters and depravities, passions and virtues. All of this came to nothing. All except the loneliness of life. The Wave was one with itself and everything that it touched. It was Buddha and the Ten Thousand Things.

After only a few seconds with my hand in the bucket I collapsed.

On one of his sporadic visits, GT told me how much my father had loved me.

“When you were one and a half, you would come up on me on the couch,” he said, “and climb up in my lap. You didn’t talk very much, but you’d say, ‘Sup, sup,’ and then I’d say, ‘Mongo time,’ and you’d laugh and laugh. Nothing else made you laugh so much. You were my little boy, and I would have done anything for you.”

“I found Bobby Bliss where you buried him,” I said.

GT frowned. “Did your mother see him?”

“Do you care?”

“Very much,” he said. “She loved that man and I destroyed him. It was wrong of me. But I was so angry.”

As he spoke, the anger he had felt rose up in me again. The rage ran down into my fingertips, which then clenched into fists.

“I feel it,” I said. “But Wheeler told me that the first XTs to rise from the grave didn’t care about their relatives. Why do you care?”

“We squandered much of our substance to find the right touch,” he said. “The first ones to rise, we pushed too hard, trying to make sure they did what we wanted them to. We learned after many costly mistakes that it didn’t take a gallon but only an ounce to allow the man to be.”

“So that’s why some of the people revived by the Wave seem so distant?” I asked. “While others, like Dick Ambler, act more normal?”

“Yes.”

“But why should it matter how much you use?” I asked. “Since the cells that make up the Wave are almost immortal, they aren’t really squandered.”

GT put his hands against his breast and said, “This part of the Wave cannot rise with Farsinger. Inside the body of man, we can only be man.”

There was a deep sorrow in GT’s voice. He was dreaming of the universe but was kept from it by the sacrifice he’d made to reach up into the atmosphere. He had become alienated from a life-form that he’d shared for millions of years. His feeling of loss permeated my mind. He was like a man walled into a crypt, fully alive and aware, with no hope of deliverance.

“But what about Veil?” I asked. “He was the first to rise. He seems to know what it means to be human.”

“He has reincarnated himself many times,” GT said. “Again and again until he got it right.”

“But why?”

“He was the first,” GT said, as if this was an explanation.

Together Dick Ambler and I helped Veil with grooming, to prepare him for the twenty-first century. There was water in the cave, so we washed him and cut his hair. We couldn’t do much about his clothes. The wolves brought animals for me to eat, and Veil made clothing from their pelts.

I conversed with many of the risen dead in that cave. Most of them told stories about themselves in a removed manner, as if their previous lives had been fictions. They talked about loves they had felt and crimes they had committed.

One white man named Brad Ferguson told me that he had raped and murdered a dozen black farm workers and Chicano migrants he’d lured to his farm by promising them work.

“I killed them one after the other until one day a man named Pablo got away,” the ghoul said, looking into my eyes. “A week later, he came back with two friends and slaughtered me.”

“Do you regret what you did?” I asked, more than a little afraid of the man.

“I buried them in the basement of my house,” Ferguson said. “I brought them all back, and they are among us now.”

“Where do the people you raise go when they leave here?” I asked Veil soon after that conversation.

“They go out into the world looking for other depothith like ourth,” he said. “We wonder if we are the only one that hath thurvived.”

“There were other Waves?”

“Millionth of yearth ago,” he said. “We moved out from the thame great depothit. Maybe the otherth ended. Maybe they are thtill moving up.”

Veil made me a backpack from the hide of a deer. We filled it with the black tar, which was the Wave in its purest form. After the liquid was poured, it became a gelatinous whole—a giant ebony hard-boiled egg that quivered and gleamed.

“Is this the full knowledge?” I asked the primordial man.

“Yeth,” he responded. “A billion yearth of evoluthon. A billion yearth of counting up to thith moment. One full athpect of all that we’ve been through and all that we’ve become.”

I looked upon the jellylike mass with a sense of awe that I had never known.

I was tutored by the Wave during my sojourn in the cave. The few cells that connected my mind with the greater being had translated thousands of blueprints and histories, the evolution of life and the urge to grow. I often woke up exhausted from all the voices chattering in my head. Scuttling insects and great dinosaurs traveled in my mind, found their histories in me. I had come to see the sludge from the pit as God.

I would have died to save this being from Wheeler.

One day Veil and GT came to me. I hadn’t seen the simulacrum of my father for quite some time and I was happy at first and greeted him with a smile.

“The wolves are dead,” GT said.

“How?”

“Wheeler has made a bullet that enters the body and spreads a poison. They die as animal life dies. They are no more.”

We mourned the wolves’ passing. They had been the heart of the community we identified as home. Even though they’d had only the intelligence of beasts, they also had vibrated with the power and ambition and knowledge of the Wave.

The Wave was beyond the human experience of living and dying. Each aspect of the Wave—be it a cell, a group of cells, or a great construct, like the one that lived in my backpack—was physically connected to every other aspect of the greater being. This oneness made for a mind that was all-enveloping. For over a billion years, the Wave had no natural enemies, no reason to hate or fear or fight. It lived on elements and minerals developed from its natural interaction with its rocky environs. Its hypersensitive cells spoke to advanced beings far beyond our small part of the universe.

The sludge, the black tar that simmered and stank in the main cave, was far beyond human minds or human abilities.

“What is the smallest possible unit of the Wave that still has all of its knowledge?” I asked GT.

“About a pint,” he said. “We’re going to have you carry so much in case a part of us is destroyed along the way.”

GT, Veil, and I went to the main cave. There GT dipped his hand into the tar. After a moment, the god began to tremble and then bubble. GT was also shaking. After a minute or two, he removed his hand.

“What just happened?” I asked GT.

There was a deep sadness in him.

“My human side,” he said, “has taught the Wave to kill without mercy.”