Chapter Five
The blues didn’t rest me and neither did my nightly exercise in the stadium. I knew I would not sleep. After my shower I told my house I would be absent for a few days, left a message for McGivern saying the same thing and offering him the use of the place till I returned; then I packed a vacuum bottle of coffee and some clothes, climbed into my car and sped eastward through the velvet Mediterranean night.
I didn’t opaque the field but watched as the car sped low and soundlessly over the wrinkled Hellespont, that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea, and then rose into the starlight over Anatolia. The car rotated slowly, now showing stars, now the soil. The land was black below me, tarnished only rarely with flecks of light, and then it was more often starlight reflected in a pond than any sign of human habitation. The twenty million people remaining on Earth were spread very thin; and Ge was still licking the wounds she’d taken at humanity’s hands, long after humanity’s exile.
I caught up with the dawn high over the Kunlun Shan; dazzled by the bright, unobstructed sun, I made haste to send out a short message, fed the answer into my guidance comp, then dipped my craft lower until it skimmed the craggy peaks. I ate some cheese, drank coffee and fought a sudden craving for Kung Pao chicken.
I landed thirty miles southwest of Chang-an, deep in the land of the Zhou. Here on the rim of the mountains, where the land glowed pink in the morning and the rivers ran cold and exemplary, there had once been a small commercial city. There had been barracks for the soldiers who guarded the great king’s borders, stables for their chariots and horses, a temple to heaven, a garden where the children played and flew kites. The place had been bypassed in the conquest of 256, but with the passing of the Zhou, the trade routes had changed, the garrison had marched away to serve a new First Heaven, and the town had faded, its people forgotten, its gods abandoned. Fading gently but inevitably, like the fading of the whole of Earth, the fading of the last ten thousand years of man.
The city was a mound now, green with grasses and bright with wild flowers, and so it had been for nearly three thousand years, until Snaggles had come a-digging. I abolished the field and left my car, walking toward the neat trench that marked his excavations. Little morning breezes brushed at the half-unfolded flowers. Snaggles extruded a part of himself to greet me; he shaped himself into a caricature of a Chinese god, all teeth and enamel and ravenous bulging eyes. The god writhed his arms at me— they were holding weapons: a long sword and an ax— and blinked like a tabby by the firelight.
“Greetings, Doran,” Snaggles said. ‘It’s been a long time.”
“Yes,” I said. A lot of people seemed to be saying that to me lately. I squatted on the edge of the trench. “Who are you today?”
“I’m not sure.” Snaggles’s mustache bristled. A red tongue unrolled like a carpet and then rolled up again. The eyes rotated independently in their sockets like those of a chameleon; I felt myself getting a headache watching them. I looked down at my feet.
“I think,” Snaggles said, “that I am a guardian of one of the four corners of the universe, but I’m not certain. T’ang dynasty, anyway. I found the representation in a tomb about thirty miles from here.”
“And how are your excavations coming along?” The Chinese god was only a small portion of Snaggles’s vast body: The rest was beneath us, gently insinuating itself into the nooks and crannies of the old city, pouring through it like a seeping pool of oil.
“I’ll have North China wrapped up in the next decade,” he said. “Wuhan next. How are you doing in the evacuation of Hong Kong?”
“Slowly, slowly. Nothing’s changed since my last report.”
The ax and sword revolved meditatively in counterpoint to the eyes. “That’s too bad, Doran. I’m disappointed.”
“The government has surrendered its rights in the Red Sea, though. It and Egypt will be clear in another few years.”
“Ah. Good, good.” The god’s pale face smiled ferociously.
Another piece of Snaggles— a rubbery, brown, whiplike thing— extruded itself from the trench and handed me an object. “Look at what I found here last week. A burial, in an old map case. From your century, I think. There was also a box of condoms, which did not fare as well. How do you imagine they came to be here?”
The object was a comic book, deteriorated but still for the most part legible. Although old and yellow and fragile, and against all likelihood and chemical reality, the cheap paper had survived. I looked at the cover. Action Comics, it said. No. 44. Ten cents. Superman was making a pretzel out of a Nazi howitzer. Gingerly I turned the pages. I imagined some downed flier, a countryman of mine, opening his map case and peering at the surrounding mountain passes from the vantage point of the old city mound. Damn, he thinks. How the hell am I going to make it to Chungking?
He keeps his maps, compass and gun, but he’s read the comic already and he knows he sure as hell isn’t going to get laid. He buries what he can’t use so the Japanese can’t trace it to him and optimistically begins his hike into the foothills.
I hoped he made it out.
“A pity it isn’t Plasticman,” I said. “I imagine you’d identify strongly with him.”
“My machines are preparing an essay,” Snaggles remarked conversationally, “‘The Morphology of Comic Book Diffusion,’ but of course I need more data. Perhaps you would like to see it when it’s done.”
“Let me know when you finish it.” I’d make a point of being busy. I’d seen his monograph on the distribution of Coca-Cola bottles throughout Mesopotamia and found it as tedious as I’d expected, given the subject. It is difficult to understand what an alien intelligence perceives as important; in Snaggles’s case it seemed to be just about everything.
“Snaggles,” I said, “I may have to leave for a while. Forty to fifty years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” In the dispassionate tones of a Park Avenue analyst. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
So I did. The Chinese god stood motionless, listening, while I told him about the deputation from offplanet, the lugs, their odd faster-than-light habits.
“Curious,” Snaggles commented.
“Have you ever encountered these things?” I asked. “Know anything of them? You might save me a trip.”
The Chinese god burst into a kaleidoscope of motion, rolling and unrolling his tongue, his eyeballs rotating, arms windmilling, mustache and beard wriggling. I felt olives and coffee and wine stirring unpleasantly in my stomach, and looked away. Despite the activity, Snaggles’s voice was matter-of-fact.
“Me? No. They live out toward the Orion Arm. I’m from galactic center.” He paused for a moment, the Chinese god frowning. “Their sort aren’t my province anyway,” he said. “I specialize in the social evolution of carbon-based intra-skeletal species. This is quite out of my area. I wouldn’t mind learning the teleporting trick though— it would save a lot of time.”
My last piece of hope trickled gently away. Save a lot of time; that was all it mattered to Snaggles. He was immortal, a thousand times more ancient than all the artifacts he rummaged among on this dusty planet; and he was in no hurry to go anywhere.
I, however, still had the remnants of my mortal haste. “You don’t know how it’s done then?” I asked. Hopelessly.
“Gracious, no. You will tell me if you learn, won’t you?”
“Could you consult your machines?”
“They don’t know how it’s done either. And your data is insufficient for them to synthesize a conclusion. Sorry.”
“I just thought I’d ask.” My centaurs will take this planet back from you, I thought. They owe you nothing. It was not they who signed the pact to sell the soil of their home.
That, of course, was me. Me alone.
The shadow-priest of Delphi, for whom Pythian Kassandra had cried her terror.
I had first met Snaggles eight hundred years earlier, when I was trying to collect a degree in physics. I was young, but in those days so was everybody. Ambitious, though not for fame... say rather for knowledge. Serious, a little oversolemn; I had not yet had time to develop my sterling sense of irony. I was too busy trying not to starve.
By present standards, I was a slave. My title was graduate assistant.
I’d published a few papers that had given me a reputation for interesting if unprovable flights of theoretical fancy, but that hadn’t gotten me work, so I was doing drudge duties in Los Alamos. My salary failed to entirely keep me from hunger. A vainglorious physicist named Jay Zimmerman, possessed of a pouter-pigeon chest and an aggressive, nagging manner, had discovered the existence of small, low-energy particles that he called, with his usual heedless and swashbuckling egotism, Zimmerman particles. He was always careful to use the full name, although everyone else connected with the project called them z-particles. With a lower-case zed, to distinguish them from the Z-boson, which rated a capital letter.
These particles had been perceived in accelerators, popping up apparently by accident when the scintillators were recording other, more deliberate actions, and the odd thing about them was that there was no obvious place they had come from. They did not have the heedless and destructive energy of the so-called “cosmic rays,” and Zimmerman had noticed that they were not seemingly produced by any of the staged interactions for which the spectra were made. The particles were very small and so low in energy that they just dribbled feebly across the plots, leaving a short but distinctive trail, and then faded away.
It was a remarkable coincidence that Zimmerman noticed the phenomenon in the first place, it was very rare. But despite the inability of anyone who knew him to stand the company of the man, Zimmerman had a precise and brilliant mind; he knew something out of place when he saw it, and his first action was to send his slaves— beg pardon, graduate assistants— to working their way through tens of thousands of printouts, plots and spectra looking for that particular trail. We found hundreds of them, all overlooked by previous researchers because they weren’t related to whatever it was they’d been studying.
Jay Zimmerman began to build theories explaining what he had found. He thought he had just discovered some strange effect related to higher-energy interactions, one that would cast light on high-energy phenomena and the structure of matter. He set his graduate assistants to work on the big accelerators in New Mexico, trying to duplicate the phenomenon.
He was on the wrong track entirely but didn’t suspect it, or if he did suspect it, he didn’t want to admit it until he’d collected more grant money. Experiments went on in the usual way— making particles bash one another in the hopes they’d show us something we didn’t know. Electrons exchanged photons like jugglers exchange Indian clubs; hard-charging deuterons made mincemeat out of an assortment of helpless targets; and pions and antipions laid tracks for home. It was all exemplary.
It was also useless. The z-particle appeared every so often but there was no way to predict its appearance, and when it did appear, it seemed obstinately unrelated to any of the interactions we were producing. Zimmerman concluded there was a lot of interesting data being generated but that further study was necessary. He wrote a long grant proposal filled with impenetrable jargon in hopes of getting more money from a bewildered NSF, but even he must have begun to suspect he was taking the wrong tack.
While Zimmerman awaited the results of his latest grant proposal, I was working the graveyard shift on the accelerator, spending long nights in supervising the controls after the project heads had set up a long run and gone home, leaving their photo-multipliers to collect the data. The money was pretty good, and since the job consisted only of watching the dials to make sure nothing untoward occurred, it left me time to read magazines, study and contemplate the possibility that one day I might ponder about thinking about writing my thesis. The latter occupied a lot of time between glances at the dials. I tried to revive my flagging interest in the whole project by thinking about the money and fame that awaited me once I got my degree. If I sold out, I could pull down a lot of bucks thinking of new ways to bludgeon the nation’s enemies. Or I could go into research and write baffling grant proposals like Zimmerman. Neither seemed as attractive as going out by myself into the Red River area the next weekend and spending my time drinking beer and roasting weenies.
One night I was sitting in front of the dials and doodling on the pad I carried with me. My doodles began to resemble the distinctive track of the z-particle. If I could figure out where it came from, it would make my reputation. Maybe I wouldn’t even need the damn thesis.
A shadow fell across my page.
“I can tell you how those particles got there,” said Snaggles. I started and looked over my shoulder.
He was more or less human in form and voice, a sort of nondescript brown male wearing a nondescript brown suit, but I knew from the first moment that there was something very wrong. The expressions and movements of his face didn’t match what he was saying, and he seemed to be rooted to the floor. Which he was, in point of fact, since the humanoid I saw before me was a shaped extrusion of Snaggles that had come up through a minute crack in the building’s concrete foundation.
After the first moment I wasn’t shocked at all. Intrigued, rather. The appearance of this oddity was so unusual that I had no clear notion of what to say. So I improvised.
“Tell me,” I said.
“If I tell you,” said Snaggles, “you will be able to end poverty and war, and send your race to the stars.”
A loon, I thought. But a half-interesting loon.
“Sounds good,” I said. “So what’s the secret?”
“I have certain conditions.”
I sighed. Somehow I knew he would.
“For one thing,” Snaggles said, “I want you to keep my name out of it.”
I began to acquire the feeling that I was not dealing with something entirely natural. I listened and watched Snaggles carefully as he spoke, and there was something odd about him. By the time he got around to revealing his nature, I wasn’t surprised.
Or afraid. I was a scientist. Snaggles was a phenomenon. He interested me.
His other conditions were simple, if a little more complicated than the first. I didn’t have to sign over my soul, which was what I was half-expecting him to ask. He just wanted to dig in privacy.
He wanted to dig up the whole world. Not right away, but he seemed to think that eventually I would be in a position to permit this. It seemed a frivolous sort of pursuit for someone who wanted to hand me the keys to the universe, but I didn’t complain.
I did the deed. And twenty-five hundred years back down time’s y axis, Kassandra began to moan, foreseeing what would come of it.
Zimmerman, to his own surprise, got his new grant; but by then I’d left school. I sold the half-interest in my parents’ house that I co-owned with my brother— he was a stockbroker and so upwardly mobile I got a cramp in my neck just looking at him— and went off into the woods for a while. With Snaggles, who had acquired his name by then. I don’t think I ever consciously gave it to him; one day it just was.
The z-particle was not produced by the high-energy interactions at all, which I had begun to suspect by then. It was a random and natural phenomenon and would have appeared anyway, even if the accelerators hadn’t been pumping particles across the scintillators.
What I hadn’t suspected was that the z-particles were low in energy because they had spent most of their energy just getting here. They were on their last legs, having come a long way.
From another universe, in fact. A still-forming universe, an inchoate pre-Bang universe trying like thunder to kick itself out of its gravity shell. The z-particles were strange little short-lived bits of semi-matter of various sizes and charges, alike only in that they possessed enough energy and dynamics and peculiarities to cross from one universe to another. They left their distinctive trail on the spectra because, during their brief life span, they were not fully in our universe and were rapidly using up their energy in trying to enter our continuum.
There were, for our purposes anyway, an infinite number of z-particles, although only a scant few managed to cross into this universe. Others, perhaps, found their way into universes other than our own; and others just ran out of energy in trying and never made it.
But if a pathway were to be opened between the universes, the z-particles would pour into our universe in numbers limited only by the size and quality of the hardware into which they were channeled. Once opened, the particles could be channeled by a magnetic field, allowing certain kinds of particles in and turning others back, in effect polarizing them and allowing in only those possessing desired qualities.
The z-particles came from a strange place, a universe that had not yet defined itself or the laws by which it worked. They proved to have diverse capabilities. Polarized in a certain way, they had the function of creating a field that was not quite in our universe and yet not in their own. The tunnel could be made semi-independent of the strong, weak, gravitational and electromagnetic interactions of our own universe, and as a result, anyone sitting in such a tunnel could theoretically move rapidly about our local piece of existence without having to worry about such consequences as inertia, gravity or friction.
Unfortunately the tunnel could not be perfectly polarized; it interacted sufficiently with our universe to provide functional limits on its capabilities. It could not, for example, move faster than light; that limit still seemed absolute. And in order for someone inside the tunnel to know where he was and where he was going, he had to have enough interaction with the universe to be able to see out, which further diminished the theoretical perfection of the tunnel. It was good, but it still had limits.
Another type of z-particle obtainable through polarization had the unique capability of creating a field that slowed strong nuclear interactions by absorbing most of their energy to help maintain the field. This meant that if the field were made large enough to, for example, cover a city, all weapons depending on nuclear force— hydrogen bombs, say, as well as any one of a number of more mundane objects such as nuclear reactors— would simply fizzle ineffectually without doing anyone any harm.
I thought that was a pretty neat trick, the best of all.
There are other tricks the z-particles can do, which I am not prepared to reveal.
It took me about a year to work out the project on paper— engineering wasn’t Snaggles’s strong point, nor mine and another year to actually build the first generator, what I called the Falkner Power System.
It was about the size of a small automobile engine.
It was also empty. It didn’t work. I had to have enough power to open a tunnel between the universes and permit the flow of z-particles into the apparatus before it would be anything other than an inanimate heap of metal.
Snaggles could have provided the energy from his ship, which was powered by similar generators, but that would have left people wondering where I’d gotten it in the first place. So I returned to my job at the accelerator and cooled out under the blue perfection of New Mexico skies until I was alone on the graveyard shift once again. Some of the physicists had set up a sixteen-hour run and wouldn’t be back until morning. I shut down the accelerator, opened up the twelve-foot-thick steel and concrete door, and Snaggles wobbled in with various pieces of hardware. Then I shut the door and fired up the accelerator again.
I had a lot of explaining to do when the physicists began wondering why I’d shut down their run, but I got away with it. And then I resigned.
Poor Zimmerman, I thought. He’d been reduced to renting out his time on the accelerator to cancer researchers while he rethought his entire approach. He was coming up with wild ideas about the nature of his particle. Eminent ideas in fact, though incorrect.
To give him his due, he might have worked out the real solution after a while. He was that brilliant.
I went home to my apartment and shut off the current and plugged the generator into the fuse box. Then I turned on the lights. Then I turned on my electric stove and the air conditioning and my radio. Then I went to my neighbors and asked to borrow their television set and their mixer and their vacuum cleaner. I got a set of power tools and a rug cleaner from another neighbor, and a magnum of champagne from the corner liquor store.
By two that morning all the appliances were still running. I was half-deafened by the television and the radio blaring away, and I was also flat on my back from all the champagne.
After my hangover faded, I began assembling another generator, which I finished in a couple of weeks. I then powered the second one from the first and drove my second-hand motorcycle to San Francisco to my first meeting with Brian McGivern.
He was a hotshot patent attorney. He was thirty-five years old, and a couple of years earlier his money and ambition had damn near made his friend, who was governor of California, the president of the United States. He was an unsentimental man with a lot of connections and a lot of money. He craved power but he had no desire for fame. Until I met him, his ultimate ambition had been to be the gray eminence behind the president.
Later we made a couple of revolutions together. And then, after I gazed for the first time upon the messy corpse of the first man ever to try to kill me, I began developing my irony.
*
I watched the Guardian of One of the Four Corners of the Universe as his eyes mutated and his tongue flapped up and down. Below I could hear shifting, squelching sounds as his various pseudopodia fondled artifacts with the eagerness of a lecher feeling up a tired whore.
Snaggles, I thought, was a pedant with a sense of humor that could best and most accurately be described as alien. He’d dug up diverse hundreds of planets, and my best guess was that he was no longer sane. It was not a dangerous kind of insanity but it was an obsessive one, and I really didn’t want him hanging around my planet anymore.
“Snaggles,” I said, “have you seen any intelligent life forms on this planet? Other than human and cetacean, I mean.”
Snaggles’s eyelids closed translucently, like nictitating membranes, as he considered this. “No,” he answered. “I have not. Here and in Mesopotamia, the odd herdsmen or nomad. Some caught me unawares, and I frightened them and they ran away. But nothing else, nothing at all. Why do you ask? Have you seen such a thing?”
“‘I am troubled by strange dreams,” quoth I. I remembered the Nilus turned silver by a full and lunatic moon, a mad sky spotted with stars, and the sudden feeling of presences standing on the sand nearby, things with red eyes that stared, inhuman, from the dark. When I turned my light on them, I saw what they were. Lean, human bodies, dark and sleek, lithe muscles glinting nakedly, and above, horribly, the owl head, the jackal head. Predators scouring the dead and ancient land for the carrion droppings of man. Someone mad had made these things and— inspired by the desperate nightmares of old Egypt— had tapped the last DNA shard into place with his tiny silver hammer, and as he did so, madly gloated. Now he was gone, or dead, and his creatures had dominion.
They had run from my light; but later I heard them, the jackal-headed kind, as they howled. I knew from the first glance that they could not be tamed, although they possessed intelligence. They and my centaurs would battle for possession of Earth, I knew, and I feared the outcome.
“Ah,” Snaggles said. “Nightmares.” For once he was still, eyes closed, an oracle. “They are a precondition of sentience, I’m afraid. I do not sleep, but even though I am awake, part of me dreams, and sometimes the dreams are terrible.”
I was intrigued. “What do you dream of?” I asked.
It was his turn to be opaque. “Things you know not of,” he said. Sadly.
I rose and brushed dust from my trousers. “I’ll let you know if I leave,” I told him. “Thanks for the conversation. And the comic.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Come any time.” And then he added, sorrowfully, “Old friend, I hope your dreams are joyful.”
It was a lovely land, the land of Zhou. Ancient, resonant, its great solitary valley green, its mountains dark and becoming, immaculate, calling out to me in compelling whispers. It would be better with Snaggles gone.
I continued east to Hong Kong, polarizing the tunnel so as not to admit photons while keeping my speed down to allow a short nap in the darkness. When the field died and I found myself looking across the dark and choppy waves of the bay, I felt again in condition to communicate with humans.
The garden of the Last Scarlet House rang subtly with wind chimes and was alive with late-summer blossoms: honeysuckle, jasmine, ilang-ilang, bitter orange, sweet basil— perfume plants all, intoxicants, plants for dreaming and forgetting. Around the garden were small houses where the women lived. The place had not changed.
Madame Lu greeted me gravely. “You are welcome in my House, Doran Falkner,” she said. “What do you desire?”
“A bath,” I replied, “and a place to sleep. A pleasant dream upon awakening.”
She nodded and a slow smile crossed her features. Her eyes were still, peaceful. “We specialize in waking dreams, Mr. Falkner.” She clapped her hands and spoke. “Please take the dream of your choice.”
Desperation, poverty and human folly: Once upon a time these were the main causes of prostitution. Desperation and poverty no longer exist, and human folly is out of fashion; there remains the rarest reason only, that of vocation.
Madame Lu’s girls were whores by choice, not by compulsion. It was a way of life in which they felt most comfortable. Once upon a time they might have been priestesses of Astarte; now they had each their own private mysteries, and private gods, worshiped in their small houses arrayed around the fragrant courtyard. I chose a tall ebony woman whose name was Lilah. She wore a blue sarong and seemed like a cold mountain stream that I could drown in. Drowning was what I was after.
I drank iced tea as she bathed me, her long eyes watching me while an enigmatic smile touched the corners of her mouth. “How old are you?” I asked. She seemed no older than twenty-two.
“Five hundred plus,” she said.
“How long have you been here?”
“Five years. This time. I have been here before.”
“How many times?”
Leonardo would have given his left arm to have painted that smile. “Many times,” she said.
She took me from the bath, dried me, and moved me to the other room of her little house. She laid me down on a mattress the size of Montana and put a light quilt over me.
“Would you like me to lie next to you as you sleep?” she asked.
“Yes. If you don’t mind. It will be a long sleep.”
“I don’t mind. It is near my time for sleeping.”
She took off her sarong and crawled under the quilt, resting her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her. Her skin was smooth and wonderful, anointed with oils. She smelled of frankincense. I wanted to dive headfirst into her long and solemn eyes.
My dreams were not of the best. At the last I dreamed of a vast stone chamber, its upper surface merging with the night sky but supported by pillars with palm-leaf capitals. The pillars and the unfinished granite walls flickered redly from a gush of flame at the front of the room. The flame lapped in reflection at the faces of a congregation, lean bodies agleam. Jackal-headed things, owl-headed things, other things with the heads of hawks and buzzards and crocodiles. They stared with mad eyes at another creature at the front of the chamber, seen dimly through the spout of scarlet flame. It seemed indistinct, amorphous, black and huge; it reflected bits of its congregation, the teeth of the crocodile, the lolling tongue of the jackal, other fragments too brief, too terrifying to properly discern.
The animal-headed things went on their knees in worship. Suddenly I realized that the object of their devotion was Snaggles.
I woke with a cry and immediately felt Lilah’s cool hand on my forehead. “Hush,” she said. “It was a bad dream. You are here in the Last Scarlet House.” Her languid eyes were close to mine and it was late in the afternoon. “Bad dreams,” she said, and I could sense her liquid tongue next to my ear, “are not allowed here. I will send it away.”
Snaggles, I thought, was bound for Egypt after he’d finished with China. What would he do when he discovered the mutilated denizens of the Nile? What kind of arrangement would he make with them?
I would have to think about this.
I looked at Lilah and felt her coolness. I am here in the last whorehouse on Earth, I thought, with a five-hundred-year-old whore. Madame Lu is older yet. What no one knows is that I’m the oldest whore in the place.
Outside a breeze touched the tinkling chimes and drifted the perfume of the garden into the House. Lilah held me close.
I turned to her and drowned.