Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  He walked fast, all the rest of that day and into the evening. When it got dark, he got out a headlamp and pressed on, never letting himself rest for more than a carefully monitored thirty seconds. But he got lost more than once, and found himself having to backtrack, and scramble up banks, and bushwhack through thick undergrowth. Forty miles in almost twenty hours, he estimated—he tried not to think about the accumulated elevation gain, never mind the climb that was still to come.

  It was midnight again before he saw a river of moving light ahead of him and reconnected with the crowds on the winding thirty-mile Park Service road that led up to the visitor’s center. From there, until the slopes of the mountain really began, it was like trying to shop at Pike Place on a summer Sunday—except that it was pitch-dark and every tourist was shuffling along with a white scarf and a flashlight. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Shoulder to shoulder, and they’d come looking not for flowers and ice cream and troll-caught salmon but for Eternity. He pushed through them as quickly as he could.

  In the slight moonglow, the Muir Snowfield stretched above the parking lot like a drying sheet. It was barely more than a hike, in summer, but clothed now in a new sheen of ice. At least half the Seraphim had given no thought to what they were wearing, and most of them, not even pausing in the parking lot, doggedly continued upward in their ordinary hiking boots, or even street shoes. The air cooled fast as they gained altitude, and slips and falls quickly thinned their ranks. Many of the least prepared just stopped when they could go no farther—at six thousand feet, seven, eight—and looked up, and began chanting. As the crowds thinned, Rosko moved past them fluidly, without even breathing hard, like a champion marathon runner overtaking exhausted joggers on a sidewalk.

  From the visitor’s center, he’d seen evidence of construction only in the distance, on the north flank of the mountain. What he couldn’t see, until he reached the old stone shelter at Camp Muir, at the top of the snowfield, was that the Seraphim had built a cable car running all the way back to Mowich Lake, where there was another road. Behind the shelter, white-scarved groups of twelve were emerging from cherry-red gondolas with broad smiles on their faces, like people anticipating a fun day on the slopes.

  None of them had mountain gear of any kind, and none of them was talking. Beyond the cable cars there was a structure like stadium seating. It was a different design from Mauna Loa, more like monster sets of metal bleachers, but it too was capable of holding a vast number of people in precisely defined patterns. And on a shelf of snow at the edge of Cowlitz Glacier, dedicated teams of climbers were roping together—helmets, crampons, the whole bit—as they prepared to go higher yet.

  Ten thousand feet now. Rosko ignored everyone and sped on, solo, across the fractured ice. Not the safest thing to do, but people trying for speed records on Rainier did it all the time, and the thought of the crevasses didn’t bother him much. They were dangerous for the hundreds of amateurs who chalked up this route every year, but he was skilled at spotting ice danger and he’d navigated worse. In less than an hour he’d crossed the glacier, climbed an intervening rise, and crossed the Ingraham Glacier too. On the way, he was held up briefly by more than a dozen roped, shuffling groups, but he passed them all.

  At the house he’d grabbed a pair of gloves, but not the best kind, and an old jacket that wasn’t thick enough. No helmet either. At least he had an ice ax and his boots were decent. He was cold, but so burning with purpose that he felt he could have climbed Rainier all over again, in his favorite red Converse sneakers, with one arm broken if necessary. As for frostbite, who cared? He’d lost two fingers at Ararat, and if he lost a few more, it wouldn’t matter now. The climbing was easy, at this point. And he’d have no use for fingers where he was going.

  He moved off the glacier and onto the spine of rock known as Disappointment Cleaver. If anything, he was speeding up, and if you’d seen him then, you’d have thought how gracefully and naturally he moved, an athlete born to the mountains. If you’d seen him up close, you might have thought how handsome he looked too, how calm and determined.

  Twelve thousand feet. The summit of Little Tahoma was just below him, over his right shoulder. Not far to go. For the first time since leaving the house, he was confident that he would not be too late.

  Thirteen thousand feet. He could hear chanting from above him, perfectly synchronized, like a thousand-voiced choir. The seductive song of oblivion—but he knew he could resist its lure. The genes that made him a Babbler protected him. What sweet revenge: the Architects had created the Babblers, and made use of them for thousands of years as their enablers, their intermediaries. But in doing so they had created—in the I’iwa, and in people like him and Morag—a branch of the human family tree that was tough, and resistant, and dangerous to them.

  Despite the chants, when he got within sight of the crater rim he was surprised by how many climbers had made it all the way. Rainier had never been so crowded. It made sense, though: if half the population had become Seraphim, then half the mountain freaks in a region of mountain freaks would think that this was the place to be, that this was the place to end it all. Or begin it all. Here they were, a profusion of beards and goggles, plaid shirts under expensive down, rough, strong hands and stinky wool socks—the usual crew. He’d probably met a few of them climbing with Daniel.

  There were no friendly greetings now. No conversation about first ascents, gruesome accidents, and best recipes for homemade trail bars. For each of these people, this was the final climb. They’d dropped their ropes and gear in the snow, and they were already looking up, mouths a little open, hands held forward. They’d even dropped the language with which they’d been raised, because they had returned their minds to the beginning and were chanting, chanting, chanting, expressing their euphoria and infinite hope, in the one true language of the Architects.

  It had taken a lot of swearing and skinned knuckles, and all night, but the little plane was ready. Because Iona had trained him that way, he went through the checklist aloud. “Brakes on, check. Mags on, check. Throttle set.” He rolled open the hangar doors to reveal a gray, gloomy morning. He hit the starter, and the engine not only caught but sounded perfect. “Throttle to twelve hundred.” The oil pressure was still low, but it would do. He waited for it to warm a little. “Mags off.”

  They taxied out across the deserted airport to the north end of the runway and took off quickly, as if the machine was impatient and wanted to be airborne. The concrete ribbon fell away from them like a dropped scarf. Easy as walking. But as they passed a thousand feet, they began to lurch and sway; a strong, gusting wind was pushing in from the west. He fought it and turned them into it, and the airspeed dropped to ninety, eighty, seventy. In the back of his mind, he was puzzled by the light again; it was as if dawn hadn’t properly broken. But fighting the machine, or using the machine to fight the wind, was taking all his attention.

  Glancing in the little mirror, he could see Morag behind him, pale and panicked looking. “Don’t worry about the turbulence,” he said. “I’ll get us up higher and it’ll smooth out.”

  It didn’t. As they climbed through four thousand feet, the wind only got stronger and gustier. The engine sounded like a trapped animal clawing at a piece of canvas. He was looking at his instruments, and at the southern end of the Olympic Peninsula in the west. Had the others made it out there? If he could get around the mountains, then north as far as Forks, there was an airfield Iona had shown him once—

  “Daniel, look,” Morag said. Then she had to say it again, louder. “Daniel, look at Rainier.”

  The band of darkness was so obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it already. He had to turn awkwardly in his seat to see the extent of it. And there were puffs of snow and steam coming from Liberty Cap, where he’d stood with Iona and Rosko: on the summit of Rainier—Ta-HO-ma, Ta-HO-ma, Ta-HO-ma—the end had begun.

  “I don’t think we’ll make it to the peninsula,” he shouted. “Have to make
the best of the wind.” He turned the plane around sharply so that they could ride the air instead of fighting it, and opened the throttle.

  “What about the others? They’re going to—”

  “I know. We don’t have any choice, M.”

  Turning east had almost doubled their ground speed. Maybe, he thought, if they could stay airborne for half an hour—

  Before joining the other climbers on the lip of the crater, Rosko stopped and looked around him. He remembered the climb with Daniel and Iona on that beautiful, tragic morning in Patagonia. It might have been yesterday, or decades ago. Or it might have been in a dream. Daniel had saved his life, then—but he’d come so close to death that this, now, was almost easy.

  He smiled to himself at the thought: it was like a speech he’d already practiced, already learned. Ever since the beginning, but especially since Daniel had become a Mystery at Ararat, he’d been studying late into each night to master every known phrase of the Architects’ language. He hadn’t even known what drove him, beyond the usual hunger to master every new language he came across, and a vague sense that mastering this one—unlike, say, Korean, or Nuxalk—might be important. And sure enough: when they had factored the I’iwa’s Number, and been able to unlock the underlying pattern, he was left with a task that was no more difficult than learning a long speech in a play.

  Ei-DOL-cham, Qe-IMT-ak, Kzu-YE-jol—

  Something about the scene before him, and the task ahead, made him reluctant to say anything aloud, in English. Instead he tried to picture the whole Earth, and all its inhabitants—every human being now alive: that was the picture, in his mind—and formulated a wordless blessing, both for those who would not survive the thing that was about to happen and for those who, in the aftermath, would have to try to survive. Then he thought of Shul-hura, three thousand years ago at Babylon, secretly working with stylus and clay to record his heretical ideas about who the gods really were, and what they really wanted—and Archimedes, at Syracuse; the I’iwa, in their New Guinea caves; Iona, with her newspaper clippings and lists and suspicions, in a basement study in Seattle. We’re all Babylonians, he said in his mind. And what I do now, I do for all of you.

  He threw down the pack, the ice ax, and his gloves. His fingers were already almost completely numb, but he managed to unzip his jacket and shrug it off. He was only wearing a wool shirt underneath, and the air bit into his skin like fire; it was good. He took a long, slow breath and, because he needed to hear the actual sound of the words, he risked saying out loud: “Daniel. Morag. This is for you. Get away from the mountain, now. Get away, like I told you. And be safe, and live a long life, and be happy.”

  As the voices around him grew louder, a flicker of doubt crossed his mind. The sky was changing too slowly. Perhaps there was something wrong? Perhaps even his speaking those few words had alerted the Architects, and they wouldn’t come?

  No. They were coming. It was just taking time for such vast energies to accumulate.

  He walked out into the middle of the chanting throng. All the figures around him stood motionless, stilled like statues by their infinite expectation, but he turned slowly, full circle, looking toward the horizon. A great gray stain was spreading across the sky, in an unbroken arc. It stretched from Mount Baker, on the Canadian border, to Rainier and Adams, and all the way south to Mount Hood in Oregon.

  The chants grew louder. For half an hour nothing much changed, except that the stain in the air spread and thickened and turned in places to an oily black.

  Rosko shifted his eyes, looking down at his outstretched hands. He could no longer feel them: they might as well have been stone. His whole body might as well have been stone: he could move only his lips and eyes. When he looked up again, he saw that the Architects were beginning to congeal, with great effort, into physical being. As they dripped down, and took recognizable form, they became more and more like mirror images of the individuals below them.

  Wraiths of stray material streamed out behind them. (They looked like wings—was that where the idea of angels had come from?)

  Wraiths of stray material streamed out from around their half-formed faces. (They looked like horns—was that where the idea of demons had come from?)

  As they came closer, and seemed to come more into focus, he saw again how beautiful they were, how seductive, how tempting. This time around, though, he could also see something else, poorly concealed: the ravenous hunger for full consciousness, the desperation to re-embody, the infinite, heedless greed.

  And that was just fine by him. That was good. Because in the depths of his mind, carefully wrapped and hidden inside a language that he had practiced obsessively but never before spoken, he was carrying a gift for them. A lovingly, carefully crafted gift. Something they had never received before; something clever enough, and unexpected enough, to amaze them.

  His lips were so numb that he was no longer making any audible sound, but that was irrelevant. His chant was an inner chant that the Architects, the dark descending stalactites, could hear perfectly. He could feel their icy fingers reaching down, down, down into his mind, picking through and examining and lifting up every experience he’d ever had as it listened to the melody of his chanting.

  He gave himself up to this last one of all his experiences, willingly. He welcomed the cold alien intelligence, encouraging it to feel at home in the unlocked vault of his being. And now his chant moved subtly out of sync with the others, and sped up, and became more complex, and a visible ripple passed up from him into the oil-slick sky, like a spasm of hunger passing through the belly of an animal.

  They were receiving what he was offering them, and willingly. They were delighting in it, like children with an infinite box of candies. They were not able to believe their good fortune—and, if he’d gotten it right, there was no going back.

  This last experience was exactly as Daniel had described it: the light intensified, until it could not brighten more; then it brightened more, and still more. All language fell away from him, all concepts, thoughts, emotions, and at last there was no more to see, even, except that everything, everywhere, was light. And more light. And more beautiful light. And amazement and free fall and wonder—

  Except that this was Babel in reverse.

  Rosko’s gift was open now, and the amazement was all theirs. No putting it back. It was already spreading among them like a virus. Like a poison. Like an idea. It could not stop the Anabasis that had already begun, but it would use the great power they had accumulated and turn that power against them. Like an avenging god, it would shred their master language, their angelic language, destroying their ability to communicate, destroying their power to cooperate, destroying their capacity to plan, and seek, and feed.

  And then the growing consciousness of other beings would be safe from them at last.

  The growing consciousness of other worlds would be safe from them at last.

  Creation’s parasite, defeated.

  Everywhere and always.

  EPILOGUE

  YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

  I’m conscious of the light.

  Conscious of the weak, pale-yellow sunlight that’s filtering down through high branches into the big white clearing. Conscious also of the fragments of civilization that surround me on every side: our ragged, inadequate tent; the little collapsible backpacking stove that ran out of fuel yesterday; the two filthy sleeping bags airing out on a clothesline made from red paracord.

  Conscious also of my mother, who died so long ago, watching me. You can do this, Daniel, she says. You have to carry on until you can’t carry on, and then carry on anyway. Your job’s not done yet. You’re needed, to help the world glue itself back together.

  Her voice is in my head, but I reply out loud into the icy stillness. “Easy for you to say, Mom. Easy for you, because you died. We’re the ones carrying on.”

  The fact that I’m talking to her shows that she’s not dead, not completely. Part of her is still here, in me. But s
he’s a shade, a ghost: most of what was Iona Maclean was dismantled by the Architects.

  I try hard to imagine what it means, that every conscious experience she ever had—every flavor, every sound, every pain or irritation or childhood hope or adult sense of achievement—still exists out there separately somewhere, a thin dust of particles that have lost forever their coherence, their attachment to one another, their capacity to give each other meaning. Then I try to wipe the thought from my mind. Try to look away. Wonder again whether it’s easier or harder to cope with this than it would have been just to cope with losing her.

  We found the camping gear in an abandoned ski cabin. It’s crap. The tent’s a toy; the bags are the kind people get for their kids’ sleepovers. But we’d be dead if we hadn’t found them. I expected snow, but the temperatures have caught us by surprise. Shouldn’t have done: even Krakatoa caused massive global cooling; Toba—aside from nearly wiping out both us and the I’iwa—screwed the climate for a thousand years. This time around, for all we know, the world impact is worse: if the Cascade Range is anything to go by, half the world is enveloped in soot. Another mass starvation? Another population bottleneck, taking us back to a few thousand people? Don’t know. But the temperatures are freakish.

  I know from experience what a strong, cruel enemy cold can be. But it’s almost trivial next to some of the other things we’re dealing with. Hunger—little food for days, now. Injury—I broke two ribs in the crash, and couldn’t get free, and while Morag tried to help me we both got burns on our hands. (Hard to camp, when you scream with pain every time you have to touch something.) What else? Oh yeah, uncertainty, exhaustion, and fear. Grief too—we have grief for Rosko, grief for the world we built, grief even for places. I’m surprised how important it is, and how upsetting, that I will never again visit the streets, neighborhoods, parks where I grew up, because they no longer exist.