A couple of ticks later we arrived at an elevator, entered en masse, and Zeus carefully pressed a button marked G.
I, for one, would have assumed that G meant Ground, or Ground floor, or perhaps Get ye off the elevator here. And quite possibly that’s what the button-installer had intended. But what he or she couldn’t have planned when installing this machinery was that the elevator, on having its G button pushed, would open its doors not on the ground floor — or any floor — of the building in which the bally thing resided, but straight into a lion’s den.
I suppose the button should have been marked LD.
Chapter 32
If there’s one thing I can’t abide in any author it’s the habit of whipping the same dead horse, by which I mean the habit of recycling an old trope, if trope is the word I want, numerous times in the space of a handful of chapters. I mean to say, you find yourself wading through a slab of literature and enjoying a juicy passage in which it’s revealed your antagonist has been hidden by a disguise all the while and actually turns out to be the protagonist’s long-lost chum, when three chapters later another bad guy is unmasked and revealed to be another long-lost pal, who later removes another mask and turns out to be someone else, if you see what I’m driving at. A single instance of this plot twist grips the senses and raises the pulse. Three or more of the same twist in rapid succession merely draws a censorious look, a sense the author couldn’t be bothered coming up with something new, and a critique of lazy writing in Publisher’s Weekly. And although I’m the last one to criticize the Author, Capital A, in His literary choices, I felt He was making himself vulnerable to the charges of recycling and lazy writing. I mean to say, just skim through the evidence for the prosecution. Exhibit A: elevators. A fairish number of chapters ago Vera and self had stepped into an elevator at the base of City Hall and ended up in a place that neither of us had intended. A brace of chapters later, on the lam from the Regent’s guards and trying our best to hide from a rapidly advancing reality quake, Vera and self had bunged the unconscious Zeus into another elevator — or dumbwaiter, if you’re going to nitpick the thing — all with a view to staying put and waiting until the coast was clear. On this occasion, too, the elevator had acted with a mind of its own, moving us from position one and depositing our group in whatever spot the plot demanded.
And here we were on this third occasion, barely a day’s worth of reading from the dumbwaiter sequence, entering an elevator in the hope of subtly changing our posish along the Z axis, only to find that when the blasted thing opened we were somewhere else entirely, in apparent violation of previous plot points concerning teleportation. “Elevator ex machina!” I might have shouted, had my attention not been gripped by other things. But this slice of teleportation via elevator is the choice the Author made, and it’s what happened to yours truly, so there’s nothing to do but exercise a bit of journalistic integrity and report these frustrating facts as they occurred. Similar things happened with the topics of memory loss and noggin beaning in what you might call the first few movements of this opus. It’s one thing to play a couple of variations on a theme — it’s quite another to keep serving the same dish for every course.
So as I was saying before my bit of heresy about the Author’s work, the elevator opened into what you might call a lion’s den. Not a literal lion’s den, but a lion’s den in the sense of being a place that held all manner of perils for yours truly and was — at least I thought at the time — exactly the place I didn’t want to be.
The door rather inexplicably opened into the lecture theatre where I’d recently hobnobbed with Isaac Newton — the one that was occupied by all of those heavily scribbled blackboards festooned with numbers and things, and that had a little doorway leading into the cozy apartment where Isaac and self had enjoyed our respective cups of tea, if you can call it enjoying tea when you spend an hour or so trying to figure out if your host is bent on global destruction.
We stepped out. And the face that greeted us in the lecture theatre wasn’t Isaac’s. It was Norm’s. He was standing there, apparently alone, wearing the look of a prophet who’s been pleasantly surprised.
“Terrence!” he cried, looking to be on the point of clapping his hands and dancing a few steps. “Thank the Omega you’ve come! I wasn’t sure anyone heard my summons. And you’ve brought everyone with you. Well done well done well done!”
“Summons?” said Zeus, looking as baffled as I felt.
“Yes. The summons to bring Jack and the Hand of the Intercessor through the teleportation portal so we could help Isaac finish up his—”
“I didn’t get any summons,” said Zeus.
“You didn’t? Oh. That’s odd. Then it’s lucky you’ve turned up. Well, the important thing is that you’re here and you’ve brought Jack and the Hand of the Intercessor with you. Isaac and Oan will be so pleased. You’ve saved us buckets of trouble. Let’s get to it.”
He turned on his heel, obviously keen to roll up his sleeves and get to whatever in Abe’s name needed getting to, and apparently expecting the rest of us to make like a troop of ducklings and follow along. He’d travelled about twenty steps before he realized my entire baffled troop remained rooted to the spot, blinking at him.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
“Enlightenment,” I riposted.
“What about?” he asked, ungrammatically.
“What in Abe’s name you need with Jack, why you’re here at the university instead of invading R’lyeh, and what’s all of this rot about helping Isaac ruddy Newton. When last I checked you were all hotsy totsy about thwarting this chump’s experiments, and now we find you eager to push his work along!”
“Yeah!” said Vera, always willing to lend a vocal cord or two to a righteous cause.
The rest of those present, rather than lending voice to the r.c., stood by in quiet solidarity and subjected Norm Stradamus to a collective brow-furrowing that unmanned him. He stood back on his heels and twiddled his thumbs for a space before making anything you might call a response. And when he did give a response, it wasn’t what you’d call a master class in Rhetorical Art, for all he managed was this:
“Well . . . I mean . . . we did plan to stop him. That is, we . . . or rather, the Regent . . .”
His speech trailed off into something reminiscent of a dying soda siphon.
“Spit it out, man,” I said. “You came here with one plan, changed course for some reason or other, no doubt specious, and then decided to hitch your lot to the opposition. That much we can see. That much is apparent. What we want to know, prophetic fathead, is why you changed your plans. Why all this side-swapping and redirecting? Why,” I added, making the matter plain for the meanest intelligence, “go from stopping Isaac Newton to suddenly helping him with his plans?”
“It’s like he was following your example,” said Vera, rather stalling my momentum.
“My example?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Vera. “I mean, didn’t you do exactly the same thing with Professor Newton? You told me and Oan that he was the most dangerous man in the world, and that Abe sent you on a quest to stop him, and you went to the university to — how did you put it? — to lay his plans a-stymie, or something. But when you came back you said his plans weren’t dangerous at all and that you’d agreed to help him with his research. Maybe the same thing happened with Norm.”
“That’s it precisely!” said Norm.
“And it’s also the very point I hoped to make!” I said. “I mean to say, the Regent and Norm, all lathered up in religious fervour, got themselves convinced that Isaac Newton would wreck the world, inflicting mortality on Detroit, making retroactive changes, and causing reality quakes that leave the place in disarray, not to mention what they do to people hiding in dumbwaiters. But what they failed to do was listen to my counsel. ‘Leave it alone,’ I explained to them, as patiently as any chap could, for Newton’s sc
ientific tootling was confined to this quantum realm and could have no more impact on Detroit than tying together a couple of quarks, squashing a neutron or two, or possibly splitting a handful of atoms.”
At my allusion to splitting atoms, Vera made a face suggesting the only thing preventing her from spitting out her tea was the fact she wasn’t drinking any at the time.
The optimist in me had expected my oration to put an end to the argument, but it didn’t. Rather than curling up in the face of my iron logic, Norm seemed to feel the need to add a few footnotes and qualifications.
“That’s . . . well . . . that’s not exactly true,” said Norm. “I mean — Isaac’s plans are significant. They really will change the world. They’ll change everything. They’ll transform the way people see Detroit, and help break down the boundaries between this world and the beforelife.”
It seemed to me that the chap must have missed the entire point of my recent speech, and that the arguments I’d presented had somehow failed to make their way through his ear canals and penetrate the bean. I was about to say as much, and to present my thoughts once again at something approximating a kindergarten level, when Vera weighed in, hogging the spotlight and causing a change of focus.
“And he needs Jack to do it?” she said. And if you cared to describe her tone as dubious, you wouldn’t be far wrong.
“That’s right!” said Norm. “Jack’s the key. I mean, any Napoleon might work, but Jack is best.”
“You were torturing him!” thundered Zeus. And while one might accuse the chap of pushing the conv. off the rails and onto a tangent by bringing the torture note to the forefront, no one voiced an objection at the time. This may have had something to do with the tone he’d adopted, and the fact that, in his wrath, he seemed to have grown to the height of about nine-foot-seven.
Norm took two steps backward — always a prudent manoeuvre when staring down the barrel of a fully loaded Zeus. He muttered a word or two of something that seemed halfway between an apology and an explanation, but Zeus wanted no piece of it.
“I don’t care why you did it,” said Zeus. “But it stops right now. We brought Jack out of the Regent’s hall to keep him safe. Not because of any summons, and not so you could use him in any experiment.”
“But that’s just it,” said Norm. “We don’t need to . . . well, erm . . . expose him to . . . ah . . . any sort of discomfort. The Regent and I had it all wrong. The key isn’t making the Napoleons reincarnate. That’s not how we’ll reach the beforelife. The key is to adopt a Napoleonic world view.”
Once again this prophet had surprised me. I mean to say, I knew he was intent on finding a way to the beforelife, where he would meet this Great Omega beazel in person and do whatever it is religious zealots do when face-to-face with the one they worship, but how this would be assisted by adopting a Napoleon’s outlook, gabbling in their goofy lingo, and planning tactical assaults, was beyond me. It was beyond Nappy, too, for this particular Napoleonic pipsqueak, who had hitherto been obscured by Zeus’s left thigh, stepped around the behemoth and put the question to Norm Stradamus.
“What do you mean, a Napoleonic world view?”
“It’s all a bit complicated,” said Norm. “Why not let Isaac explain—”
“She asked you to explain,” said Zeus, “and we’re not moving another inch until you answer.”
“Oh. Ah. Right then,” said Norm. “Well, you see, it’s all about expectations. Isaac explained the whole thing to us. He’s been changing the world by altering ancients’ expectations — changing their thought patterns and beliefs. You see, the ancients help Abe shore up the walls of reality. They . . . well, they constitute Detroit. It’s like Oan taught in the Sharing Room,” he added, turning to me, “the world is made up of the expectations of those who live within it. And the most powerful minds have the greatest impact on it. These ancients — the ones who arrived in Detroit shortly after Abe, and who helped him to build the walls of reality — they continue to shore it up when they go dormant.”
“They dream the world,” said Vera, thoughtfully.
“In a way,” said Norm. “Their thoughts and expectations carry on shaping the world and holding it together, preventing anyone else’s stray thoughts from changing things and ruining it for everyone else — stopping everyone’s conflicting expectations and desires from fouling everything up, as it were. When Isaac realized this — when he observed the battle between the City Solicitor and Penelope — everything fell into place, and he understood the inner workings of Detroit.”
At least that made one of us, I thought. But what I said was “Good for him.”
“He didn’t like it,” said Norm. “Not one bit. But at least it made things clear. It explained why the world that he observed failed to correspond to his calculations. He had based his calculations on the assumption that we lived in a physical world, where laws of nature could be known and uncovered through empirical observation, where calculations could predict the movement of everything from quarks to planets. But try as he might—”
“He couldn’t get his calculations to work!” I added, dredging up something from my earlier confab with Professor Newton.
“That’s right. And it frustrated him more than you could imagine. He’d devoted his life to science and mathematics, only to learn, too late, that he didn’t live in a reality where the rules of science and math govern the world. Here in Detroit, the planets follow orbits that the people collectively expect them to follow. Gravity works in the way that we expect. Chemistry, biology, astrophysics — every branch of science operates according to the expectations of those who live in Detroit, guided by minds like Abe, Penelope, and the sleeping ancients.”
Vera piped in once again, doing her best to translate this into basic English.
“So if people didn’t expect the world to work in a particular way, it wouldn’t. Even if Isaac’s calculations proved it should.”
“Something like that,” said Norm. “It’s much more complicated, though. I mean, if some new invention or discovery fit with people’s expectations, then it might work, even if it’s something people hadn’t already imagined. If people thought science might someday find, say, a way to reach the stars, then it might be possible to do that in Detroit. Isaac’s problems were at the margins, deep within what Isaac calls the hidden universe — things that only a scientist might detect. Microscopic, fabric-of-reality sorts of things that don’t correspond to intuition — these are the areas where Isaac ran into problems.”
“And those are the things he’s changing,” I added, a touch of exasperation in my timbre. “Teeny, weeny, undetectable things. Which is why I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Let the chap tinker with these marginal whatnots at his leisure. Leave him alone.”
“But why do you need Jack?” said Zeus, who’d managed to maintain his glower right through Norm’s bit of exposition.
“It’s related to what Vera and the Hand of the Intercessor saw at R’lyeh,” said Norm. “Isaac created a way to change the memory engrams and the — well, the science is a bit beyond me,” he paused, chuckling, “but whatever you call it that goes on deep within a person’s brain, right at the very core of their psyche, Isaac can change that. He can chemically transmit new patterns of thought, so the recipient’s world view changes. He takes his own scientific discoveries, his own calculations, and encodes these into a fluid that he injects into the ancients. This changes the ancients’ expectations, which in turn changes the nature of the world. Quite ingenious.”
“But Jack?” said Zeus.
“Ah, right,” said Norm. “If Isaac could encode Jack’s neural patterns into this fluid, he’d be able to imprint them on to someone else. And if that person had a sufficiently powerful mind — say, like the Regent—”
“Then that person would now share Jack’s conviction that the beforelife was real, and that passage between Detroit and
the beforelife was possible,” said Vera, cottoning on. “They’d take on the Napoleons’ ability to reincarnate.”
“Wait,” said Nappy. “You mean, eef you can make les anciennes believe what Jack believes, zen everyone will be able to go back to ze beforelife?”
“Perhaps,” said Norm, “but we don’t want to go that far. We don’t need to make everyone believe in the beforelife. We just want to send the Regent there as an emissary. We’ll encode Jack’s neural patterns, inject them into the Regent, and send her back to the beforelife where she’ll meet the Great Omega.”
“Won’t she reincarnate as a child?” said Vera, which seemed fairly astute, as I hadn’t thought of that objection.
“Very good!” said Norm. “She will! But she’ll carry some of her memories with her — just like Napoleons do when they reincarnate. What we’ve learned from Jack, and some of the other Napoleons, is that they reincarnate in the beforelife still remembering some bits of their lives as Napoleons. Isaac is doing something with the Regent’s brain — I don’t pretend to understand it — that’ll help preserve her memories. By the time she reaches adulthood in the beforelife, she’ll remember much of her life here in Detroit and make her way to the Great Omega.”
“Seems like a dashed silly plan to me,” I said.
“Me too,” said Nappy.
“I mean to say, why bother with Jack at all? It seems that you, the Regent, and Isaac are all thoroughly convinced that the Napoleons are right, that the beforelife is real, and that reincarnation happens. What’s the point of injecting Regents with beliefs they already hold?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Norm. “It’s not just about belief, it’s about absolute, unshakeable convictions. A level of faith in the beforelife that most will never achieve. A belief so strong it breaks through the boundaries of reality created by Abe and the sleeping ancients, and allows reincarnation despite the accepted ‘truth’ that the beforelife isn’t real.”
Afterlife Crisis Page 36
