Vacancy & Ariel

by Lucius Shepard

  The rest of my time I spent studying the cylinders in Ariel’s case and what I had learned gave me firm hope that I could penetrate their defenses. The four cylinders with clawed ends were key. One was a beacon that, if Ariel had chosen to use it in conjunction with the SETI radio telescope at Green Bank, would have enabled her to send out a distress call to any portion of the multiverse. The other three were weapons, the least destructive of which generated a rolling wave that would extinguish all life within a radius of two hundred yards, exempting a small safety zone at the center of the wave—this should be sufficient to handle the security force. That I was prepared to kill testified to an evolution of purposefulness only peripherally related to my obsessive personality. Ten days of accessing the cylinders, absorbing the memories of a mind not quite human, may have had some physiochemical effect and certainly was responsible for a psychological one. I was prone to strangely configured paranoias—I experienced, for instance, a stretch of several days during which I was convinced that if I were able to turn my head quickly enough, I would be able to catch a glimpse of my own face, and I had panicked moments when I was certain that another Isha was watching me, waiting to exact vengeance for the death of our analogue. My thoughts of Ariel were an environment whose functionary I had become and, thankfully, were less poignant in their impact than inspiriting. Distanced from her, I was distant from all things. Though my enhanced understanding of the multiverse allowed me to recognize the connectivity of all life, it also served to devalue it. Passion was in me, as were the concomitant emotions of longing and desire, but the character of my search was now colored by aggression. I fully intended to track her down. Nothing was going to stand in my way.

  When we arrived at the streambed in late afternoon, Henley shook my hand and said, “Take care now, Professor. You too good a customer for me to lose.” He lifted his hat, scratched his head. “’Course maybe you ain’t comin’ back this way.”

  “You have one of your feelings?” I asked.

  “Just a bitty one. The bitty ones ain’t always on the mark.” He gave me an uncertain look. I thought he wanted to ask a question, but if so he left it unspoken and shouldered on his pack. “You know where to find me.”

  The task ahead suddenly seemed daunting and, anxious now that he was leaving, I tried to hold him there a while longer and made a lame joke about his returning to Mickey’s to watch Mountaineer baseball.

  “Baseball!” he said. “Shit, I don’t watch no baseball. I just pray for football season to come.” He adjusted the weight of his pack. “Even though it ‘pears God don’t give a damn ’bout what happens to the Mountaineers.”

  WALKING ALONG THE streambed, its banks hedged by buzzing thickets, the air alive with a dusty vegetable freshness, I fell into an emotional rhythm, passing over and over again through a cycle of despondency to fatalism to grim determination, as if a wheel of fortune were turning in my head, offering three choices upon which an arrow of thought might land. Toward dusk, when the birds started a racket in the treetops, I cheered up a notch and conjured images of a happy result, picturing Ariel and me together, bypassing the interval between that possible future and the now; but with the coming of darkness that interval consumed me. As had always been the case since I’d become aware of Ariel, I was chasing flimsy clues and improbabilities. Knowing how to operate an Akashel vehicle would do me little good if there were no vehicles to be had in Tuttle’s Hollow, and all that supported the notion that there were was the photograph of the dead man Siskin had shown me in New York. If a vehicle was to be had, was I then prepared to endure the violent transformation that waited at journey’s end? Could I find Ariel? Would I be satisfied with someone almost her, a sister from a neighboring plane? I answered these questions with another question: What was I to do otherwise? Live? Write my idiot books? Build a tiny fire from the embers of our blaze and pretend to love its heat? The risks of a search were insignificant when compared to the crummy inevitability of accepting loss and moving on with things. I didn’t want anything to be ordinary about Ariel and me, not even our ending.

  Four miles out from the project I removed Ariel’s gun and the four claw-ended cylinders from my pack. I had rigged a sling for the gun; I looped this over my shoulder, hid it beneath my jacket, and stuffed the pack beneath a bush, doubtful that I would need it again. I twisted the end of the first cylinder until it clicked twice and taped it to my palm. Holding death in my hand drew a curtain of black intent across my thoughts. I walked a mile or so with only a simple awareness of the world, noting sounds and movement, the suggestions of danger. A moonless dark replaced the dusk. I switched on a flashlight. After I had gone two more miles, well inside the perimeter Henley had described, I began to wonder why my presence hadn’t been detected. They must be watching, I decided. Trying to decide whether I was an accidental or a purposeful intruder. Maybe they wouldn’t approach at all, but would have a sniper take me out. I started shouting as I walked, identifying myself, calling to Paul Siskin, saying I had information for him. About fifty yards farther along, a voice hailed me, ordering me to switch off the flashlight and stand still. I obeyed, wondering how close I had come to eating a bullet. Ahead and behind me, men were filtering out of the thickets. I could barely make them out at first. They were dressed in black and wore night vision goggles, which they soon removed. One shone a light in my face, blinding me as he came up, and said, “Mister Cyrus! Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  Siskin.

  Whatever reluctance I might have had about using the cylinder taped to my palm vanished when I heard his voice. It was he I blamed for everything—but for his attempted usage of me, I would still have Ariel. I hadn’t really expected to find him there and I felt as if I had hit a trifecta at the racetrack.

  “Surprised to see me?” He angled the light away from my eyes. “I’m not surprised to see you. Isha always comes after Ariel. Usually doesn’t take so long. Guess she didn’t set the hook real deep.”

  I couldn’t tell how many men surrounded me, but it was close to the full complement. What Siskin had said, however, stayed my hand. I asked what he was talking about and he chuckled. “You haven’t figured it out yet? Well, let’s just say your situation is hardly unique. Don’t you worry. I’ll put you in the picture when we get back to base.”

  “Put me in the picture now.”

  He made a bemused sound and turned toward a man standing about ten feet away, perhaps to give an order; but as he turned I grabbed him around the neck, drew him close and thumbed the end of the cylinder—it emitted a double click. Siskin struggled, dropping his light, then went limp as the men around us slumped to the ground, into the stream, giving not a single outcry. I couldn’t tell how they had been stricken and was grateful for that. All I felt was a sudden warmth, as if I’d come too close to a furnace; all I heard was a windy whistling—lasting for several seconds—as of someone imitating a ghostly breeze. I shoved Siskin to the ground and he went crawling toward the nearest of the fallen men. I covered him with Ariel’s gun, told him not to get crazy, and picked up his light.

  “What’d you do?” he asked shakily. “What in the fuck did you do?”

  “Surprised?” I shone the light on him and showed him the cylinder. I caught sight of the dead man’s face—except that the eyes were full of blood, gone to bright red ovals, it seemed unmarked. I felt an uneasy dwindling of spirit, the sense that I had done something so despicable as to attract God’s anger.

  Siskin came to his knees and shouted into the darkness, “Kill him! Kill him now!” No one responded to his command. He repeated it with greater desperation.

  “Let’s go,” I told him.

  As we made our way toward the hollow I interrogated Siskin about the project and what he knew concerning my situation. The hope of getting answers had been at the heart of the impulse that caused me to spare him; but either he was playing soldier or he simply didn’t care. “You killed twelve of my men, you son of a bitch,” he said when I asked why he
wasn’t surprised to see me. “Now you want me to chat with you?”

  “You shouldn’t have messed with us,” I said.

  “I was just speeding you along. Whatever you were gonna do, you woulda done it sooner or later.”

  “That’s not true. We…”

  “All you fucking trans-multiversals do the same damn thing. You always fuck up.” Anger or frustration, whatever he was feeling, acted to deepen his southern-fried accent. “Ever ask yourself, Cyrus, your Ariel’s so in love with you and all, how come she didn’t even hesitate to shoot you back at the cabin?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “We were watching, asshole! You think we wouldn’t?” He slowed his pace and I gave him a nudge with the gun. “You didn’t buy all that bullshit I handed you in New York?”

  “You couldn’t have been watching close or you would have known what I was capable of.”

  “That was a glitch. We thought the destruction was caused by the other. We didn’t know you had weapons.”

  “And here I thought you guys were experts. Cool and efficient professionals.”

  “You think a lotta things, Mister Cyrus, but apparently you don’t think any of ’em through.”

  That was all he would tell me.

  Though the slaughter of twelve men had been relatively sanitized and unaffecting, I couldn’t pull the trigger on Siskin. Too personal, I guess. Or maybe I’d lost the mood. I recalled being agitated at the time I double-clicked the cylinder, a hurry-up-and-get through-this feeling such as you might experience when anticipating a dental injection. Now I was calmer, committed to the course, past the hard part, and I considered Siskin’s question about why Ariel had not hesitated to shoot me. I could find no answer that made me happy and I asked Siskin for clarification. He trudged along without a word.

  We climbed to the lip of the hollow and descended to the bunker. At the door Siskin paused and said, “There’s a man just inside. He’s unarmed. You don’t have to kill him.” In his voice was a depth of loathing, one that implied I was an insect whose habits revolted him.

  I left the man inside gagged and shackled—Siskin provided the cuffs—and we proceeded to an elevator. Three levels below the surface we exited into a corridor with white plastic walls. On one were displayed thousands of small framed video captures, each depicting a male face, many of them inhuman; the more-or-less human among them were variations on what I once might have thought of as their original: me. On the opposite wall were thousands more, each containing a variation—some unrecognizably alien—on Ariel.

  “You getting it yet?” Siskin asked.

  I was beginning to think I might not want to know more than I already did and I made no comment. In the upper right corner of some of the screens that showed Ariel, a red digital dot flashed on and off. I asked Siskin the meaning of the dot.

  “Terminated,” he said. “The science boys’ll fill you in. That should be fun for you.”

  The corridor opened into a circular room about sixty feet across, its walls occupied by computer consoles and banks of monitors. Eight men were gathered at the far end, two sitting, the others leaning over the seated men’s shoulders—they were watching one of the screens. They turned as we approached. They had mahogany skins and high cheekbones and black hair flowing over the collars of their lab coats. Their stares all had the same weight, the same inquisitive alertness. They were identical to one another and identical in every regard to my old friend, Rahul Osauri.

  Siskin continued toward the men, engaged them in a muted conversation, but I stopped short, flabbergasted, thinking that I had been lied to about Rahul’s death; but when none of the Rahuls smiled or greeted me, I understood who they were. I motioned to one, told him to come stand beside me. I herded Siskin and the rest into a room we had passed in the corridor and locked them in with Rahul’s keys, and I escorted Rahul back to the circular room and sat with him by the consoles. The resemblance was uncanny. I could find no point of distinction between him and my memories.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked; his quiet tenor had Rahul’s East Indian accent.

  “Freaked,” I said.

  “I mean physically.”

  I asked why he wanted to know.

  “We think you may have made a crossing.” He bent to the gun, peering at it. “Is this the weapon that caused the destruction at the cabin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you notice any changes in your environment after using it?”

  “Yeah, matter of fact. Just little stuff.”

  He nodded. “The weapon must have created a slight backwash effect. I suppose it’s intended as a weapon of last resort.” He cut his eyes toward me. “It’s nothing to worry about. You’ve only gone a step or two away from your home. You probably won’t even notice the adaptation process.”

  I decided to postpone consideration of this new cause for alarm and deal with what lay before me. “Is your name Rahul?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I actually had the urge to hug him. “Jesus! This is ridiculous…what I’m feeling.”

  “Not at all. You and Ariel are lovers no matter where you begin your journey. It’s the same for us. We’re friends. We share pleasant memories.” He smiled. “The strip club you took me to the night I arrived in Palo Alto.”

  “Dirty Birds.”

  “You see?”

  “Remember the blonde you liked? You were so drunk, she gave you a lap dance and you proposed to her.”

  “It was a cultural thing, not drunkenness,” Rahul said and smiled again. “As I recall, you were much drunker than I.”

  “Different universes,” I said.

  “That could explain it.”

  Though we were technically strangers, I wanted to sit and reminisce, to pretend our connection was real…and maybe it was real, as real as any connection. But I needed to know where I stood and what might happen. I asked what the mission of the project was.

  “We’re attempting to put an end to the proliferation of trans-multiversal travel,” Rahul said. “We haven’t come close to succeeding. Mostly we kill Ariels. Sometimes we kill Ishas, but Ariels are more dangerous. They habitually kill Ishas and then continue to travel across the Weave. We train Ishas to kill them.”

  I was almost as startled by his characterization of Ariel as I had been on seeing the Rahuls. I told him I had seen nothing to suggest this sort of essential antagonism in Ariel’s books.

  “Your wife’s books are memories imperfectly rendered. Romantically rendered. You can’t trust them.”

  “And I should trust you?”

  “I admit I have an agenda. All you can do is listen and draw conclusions.” Rahul settled himself more comfortably. “In the universe where you were born, you dropped out of Cal Tech and I died in a project whose instrumentality and direction were based upon your fundamental conceptions. In other universes, however, you finished your physics degree and met a woman named Ariel, whom you married. She was lovely, brilliant. Too domineering for my tastes. All three of us worked on the project and we succeeded in our work. You and Ariel had a violent falling out. The argument started over a project matter, but it seemed to acquire a life of its own. As if you’d been waiting for the chance to argue. In some cases it was your fault; in others it was hers. In almost every case, using the technology we created, Ariel fled and you followed.”

  He flipped a switch and all the monitors came alive with the myriad faces of Ariels and Ishas.

  “This happened throughout the multiverse. For some reason the Ariels all fled toward…” He paused, reflected. “For simplicity’s sake, let’s say toward the center of the multiverse. Toward one specific region. The Ishas followed. The stress of this concentrated travel broke down the barriers between certain universes. Some were affected catastrophically, thus weakening the underlying structure of all things. What your wife called the Weave. The problem has developed not only because of the millions of initial flights and pursuits. Most Ariels continue t
o flee, making multiple journeys, and Ishas continue to hunt them. New Ishas and Ariels are wakened to the chase…as with you. The stories of each couple vary to a degree, but they’re basically the same. Both Ariel and Isha are obsessed in their own fashion. Obsessed to the point of insanity in some instances. It’s as if they’re engaged in an archetypal dance. Yin and Yang. Kali and Shiva. The creative and the receptive. The Battle of the Sexes. In every culture there are a thousand metaphors for their conflict.”

  I had no idea what my face was showing, but Rahul seemed to derive satisfaction from what he saw there.

  “Those of us trying to inhibit the conflict,” he went on, “have taken the names Akhitai and Akashel. Akhitai is the word for ‘man’ in one of the multiversal languages. Akashel means ‘woman.’ The Akashel believe the conflict can best be resolved by the elimination of Ishas. We believe the opposite. Though Ishas are relentless in their pursuit, rarely do they perceive Ariel as a threat. Their attitudes are colored by affection. Though Ariels are generally considered the more gentle and nurturing, fear motivates them to use deadly force far more often than is the case with Ishas. If a deadly weapon had fallen to your wife’s hand during her moment of fear, when she recognized on a subconscious level that you were a mortal enemy, she would have killed you. It’s possible her original mission was to kill you…you specifically. That she was traveling to California to meet you and not the Isha with whom you fought.”

  I was incredulous. “You’re saying it’s just her and me? We’re the ones causing all the damage?”

  “I’m sorry, but…yes.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “It is as it is,” said Rahul.

  “If it’s true, why not send operatives to kill us all?”

  “How many operatives should we send? Millions? There are at least that number of trans-multiversal Ishas and Ariels. So many more journeys might destroy the Weave. A few of us make journeys by necessity, but it’s safer to train Ishas and Ariels to kill one another. The method’s not terribly efficient, I’m afraid. We’re spread too thin. We don’t have the resources we need and so we make mistakes…like the one we apparently made with you.” He brushed aside a forelock. “There’s another figure in the dance, of course. Me. Every outpost of the Akashel and the Akhitai is manned by at least one of my analogues. I’m in conflict with myself.” He gave a disconsolate laugh. “The three of us make a curious trinity.”