Unsong

by Scott Alexander

  Except that in my case none of it mattered. It had taken me a moment, but when Jane had talked about how the Drug Lord couldn’t use Names, I’d figured out his angle. He couldn’t use Names because he didn’t have a human soul. If he could get a human soul, he could use Names. He wouldn’t just be a single consciousness occupying millions of supernaturally determined bodies. He would be a single consciousness occupying millions of supernaturally determined bodies, every one of which could recite the Names of God and call flame and terror down from the heavens on demand. The whole War on Drugs had been built on our only advantage: we could use Names and he couldn’t. He was stuck using obsolete technology subject to the vagaries of Uriel’s machinery; we could field whole legions of kabbalists.

  Unless I let him have the Vital Name. Then his teeming multiplicity would overpower our helpless armies. He would overrun Royal Colorado, Texas, the California Republic, and the rest of the Untied States.

  I’ve always thought of myself as a pragmatic person. When Caiaphas says in John 11 that “better one man should die for the good of the people than let the whole nation be destroyed,” I always nodded along. However tragic a single death, surely a million deaths are a million times worse. And sacrificing a person to save an entire continent should have been the easiest decision I’d ever made.

  The problem was, things that make perfect sense when you’re talking about people you don’t know who have been dead for two thousand years become a lot harder when you’re talking about people you love.

  I thought of my last conversation with Ana. “Do you need rescuing?” she’d asked me. “I think I might,” I’d answered, even though my situation was far less dire than hers was now. And she hadn’t dithered, or complained, or told me that she had problems of her own. Just said she would get off at the next port. She would risk her life for me willingly, happily. I had dragged her into this mess, screwed up everything, and she’d stuck by me. I pulled at the telepathic link. Nothing. She was somewhere far away.

  I started crying. I loved Ana. I knew she knew it, but I’d never told her. And I wouldn’t, even if everything worked out well, even if we spent a thousand years together. Everything came rushing back to me. Her in her white dress, telling us about the Book of Job, always doubting, always wondering. Why evil? Why the Drug Lord? Why a universe at all? Why am I in this position? I screamed at her, across the dinner table in Ithaca. What am I supposed to do? What is God’s plan? Does He even have one? If there is providence in the fall of a sparrow, how come we, who are more valuable than many sparrows, get flung around in darkness, with no hint of a way out anywhere? I wished Ana were here, so I could ask her. That just made it worse.

  I saw her, sitting next to me as Erica stood behind the podium in our basement. “Once to every man and nation,” Erica was reciting, “comes the moment to decide, in the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.” Fuck you! I shouted at imaginary Erica. Sure, that’s easy for you to say, just do GOOD and avoid EVIL. That works really well in the real world, doesn’t it? What are you even at? Imaginary Erica just answered “They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.”

  We like to think of ourselves as weighing various causes and considerations upon the scale of philosophy, then choosing whichever side carries the most weight. Maybe we even do, sometimes, for the little things. That moment, atop Trump Tower, I threw everything I had onto the scale, saw it land again and again in favor of hurling the peyote into the street and walking away, and again and again I knew I wouldn’t.

  I looked down. Las Vegas hummed beneath me. There on the side of the building was a giant golden ‘T’. T for tav. The last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The letter of apocalypse. Jesus was crucified by being nailed to a lowercase T; there beneath me was an uppercase one, ready to finish what he started. Fitting, just like everything else.

  I threw out the whole scale, weights and all, and I focused on that one sentence. They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin. Well, of course they do. And dooming the world for the sake of a friend – even a friend who was my weird Platonic sort-of-girlfriend except we were just friends and I wasn’t supposed to call her that, a bond stronger than death – wasn’t just making compromise with sin, it was forfeiting the whole game to Sin, handing over everything, giving up. But agreeing to let Ana die, and running away from this place, getting the Vital Name back, building an empire, and living happily ever after in exchange for nothing but the one insignificant little life of my best friend – that seemed like a compromise with sin. Which was of course the total opposite of how I was supposed to interpret the passage. But then, it is not in Heaven.

  I remembered something abominably stupid I had said just a day before. “My dream is to become the new Comet King”. God Most High! Had I forgotten what happened to the last Comet King? I realized then that of course this was how all of this ended, that by that phrase alone I had set this kabbalistically in motion and now I had nothing to do but to play it out to the bitter end.

  I thought of all the things I could say to excuse my decision. My father had abandoned my mother and me; now I was horrified at the thought of abandoning others. My telepathic bond to Ana made me especially sensitive to her suffering. The Talmud said that to save one life was equivalent to saving the world, and to end one life was equivalent to ending the world, so really it was evenly balanced either way and I might as well do what I felt like.

  None of them rang true. The truth was, I wasn’t the Comet King. I was a scared twenty-two year old boy. I knew everything about everything in the Bible, and in the end it all paled before the weight of Romans 7:19 – “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

  I swallowed the peyote before my better side could talk me out of it.

  [If you like this story, please vote for it on topwebfiction. Even if you voted for it on Wednesday, please vote again, since you can vote every day. After today I will put this message on the sidebar or something and not keep spamming you with it every update.]

  Chapter 38: I Will Not Cease From Mental Fight

  Hershel of Ostropol came to an inn and asked for a warm meal. The innkeeper demanded he pay in advance, and when Hershel had no money, he told him to get out. Hershel raised himself up to his full height, looked the innkeeper in the eye menacingly, and said “Give me my meal, or I will do what my father did? You hear me? I will DO WHAT MY FATHER DID!” The terrified innkeeper served the traveller a nice warm meal. After dinner, when Hershel was calmer, he ventured to ask exactly what Hershel’s father had done. “That is simple,” answered Hershel. “When my father asked someone for a meal, and they refused to give it to him – then he would go to bed hungry.”

  — Old Jewish folktale

  May 13, 2017

  ????

  Blood bubbled up from the ground in little springs. The trees were growing skulls where the fruit should be. I concluded that I was somewhere from Aztec mythology. Probably not one of the good parts.

  It was neither a jungle nor a desert. More of a grassy valley with bushes and occasional trees. The sun had a face locked in a perpetual grimace. I had a vague memory that Aztec mythology was really bad.

  There was a directionality to the world. I followed it. It led me up a hill strewn with rocks. I spoke the Ascending Name. Nothing happened. Okay. This was somewhere else. The usual rules didn’t apply. Things started coming back to me. The Drug Lord. Peyote. I had taken peyote. Now I was…where?

  [Ana?] I asked.

  [Aaron!] came the answer. Then a flood of pure relief and happiness. No affection, no confusion, just gladness that I was here.

  [What happened? Where are you? Are you safe?]

  [I’m not sure. Somebody must have drugged my dinner. I’m…fine. The Drug Lord tried to extract the Vital Name from me. He couldn’t. That’s all I know.]

  I reached the top of the hill. Below me lay a city. I recognized it and drew its name out o
f half-forgotten memories. Teotihuacan. Birthplace Of The Gods. The greatest city of the pre-Columbian Americas. The great street down its center was the Avenue of the Dead. The two great structures that towered above the rest were the Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon. The pictures I had seen made them look austere and crumbling. Here they were covered in bright colors and streaming banners. Also, a waterfall of blood was flowing down the southern staircase of the Pyramid of the Moon, looking for all the world like a macabre escalator.

  The real Teotihuacan had been dead for millennia. This one teemed with activity. Ghostly shades, all. I wondered if they were the souls of the Drug Lord’s captives. I double-checked my own arms. At least I looked normal.

  [Where are you?] I asked.

  [On top of some sort of demonic ziggurat.]

  [A demonic ziggurat. That’s wrong on so many levels.]

  Ana didn’t laugh, which under the circumstances I guessed was kind of predictable.

  [Is it the one with the blood escalator, or the other one?]

  [The one with the blood escalator, definitely.]

  I started walking down into the city.

  [I’m coming to rescue you,] I said. [Hold on.]

  There was no answer, which again made sense given the circumstances.

  I broke off a branch from one of the skull-trees, a process which was terrifying but ultimately went without incident. It also proved unnecessary. The shades in the city had less than no interest in me. This was just as well, since the stick pretty clearly wouldn’t have hurt them. Some of them passed right through me. I felt nothing. My only moment of panic was a sudden hissing noise near my feet. I smacked what I thought was a snake, only to barely miss what looked like a spinal column with a skull at one end. It slithered away, hissing and scolding. Aztec mythology really sucked. I gained a sudden appreciation for Hernando Cortes.

  My other problem was getting up the pyramid. The Ascending Name wasn’t working, and the stairs were covered in flowing blood. I circled around until I found another staircase. It looked more promising. Using my branch as a staff, I climbed the steps.

  Atop the pyramid was a ball court, and in the middle of the court was Ana. I ran to her and hugged her. She hugged me back.

  Then a sort of mist or glamour fell away, and I saw the Drug Lord.

  I had expected something horrible, worse than the spine-snake, but he was more humanoid than not. He stood about six feet tall. His skin was pale green like cactus-flesh, with tiny little thorns sticking out of it. His two arms were big and broad, like the arms of a cactus. His face was big and round like a cactus barrel. He wore a modest brown poncho, but his mien was kingly, and there were gold flecks in his eyes. He was sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth, and in one hand he held a wooden cane.

  “Welcome,” he said, in an aristocratic Spanish accent. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen him before. Maybe he could just appear and disappear at random? Maybe this was all his dream, and he had total control over what we saw or didn’t? Whatever it meant, it didn’t bode well for my ability to take him on with a skull-tree branch and zero Names.

  “I came,” I told him. “Now you have to let her go. You promised.”

  The Drug Lord smiled. “Many years ago,” he told me, “I used to watch the Teotihuacani sacrifice captives to the Sun God, to give him the strength to fight off the Night Goddess. Sometimes, their wars would go poorly, and there would be no captives. Then one of the priests of Teotihuacan would step up to save the day.”

  He paused for a second to see if I appreciated the pun. I hate to admit it, but I did.

  “You,” said the Drug Lord, “remind me of one of those priests. This is admirable. But also bad, for you.”

  “All I said was that I’d take the drugs. I didn’t say I’d cooperate with you.”

  I saw another smile play on the Drug Lord’s big face. “I didn’t say you would have to.”

  “I don’t even know the Name,” I told him. “We forgot it. Both of us. I don’t even care if you believe me. It’s true.”

  “Yes,” said the Drug Lord. “I gathered that from Ana’s mind.” After hugging me, she had gone sort of frozen. I had a suspicion something bad had happened to her mind. “I will have to pull it out of wherever it has vanished to. That will be easier with two people than it would be with one.”

  Then he was in my head, and I could feel him like a wind, scouring my thoughts, blasting me to the bone until I felt like I would end up like one of the spine-snakes. Every distraction was batted away, all my attempts to direct my own train of thought pushed aside like reeds. He zeroed in on the Vital Name.

  For a moment I wrested control of my awareness from him and I was back on the ball court. He was right in front of me now, one broad green hand touching my forehead, the other still holding the cane for support. I lunged at him with the branch; he knocked it out of my hands. I punched him in the face. “Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!” I screamed. Punching somebody made of cactus had been the worst idea.

  Then he was back, searching for the Vital Name, and there was nothing I could do. Closer and closer he came, winding through my memories. Not enough left of my consciousness to object, to even form a coherent thought, but not enough gone that I didn’t feel the violation on some deep level.

  He was in the right part of my brain now. I could feel it.

  ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON, he pulled from me, as if with tweezers. MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA. Something instinctual in me doubled down like a bear trap, but he gave it no heed. KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER…

  A second time I broke away from him. This time I ran. I ran to the edge of the ball court, only to find that the staircase up the pyramid was shifting places, like the winding of a snake, moving too fast for me to get a foothold on it.

  The Drug Lord walked up beside me, leisurely, like I was a wayward puppy. Ana followed. The three of us stood on the ledge and stared down at Teotihuacan below. From this vantage point, I could see that its architecture encoded some of the same glyphs as the Lesser Key of Solomon.

  “A beautiful city, is it not?” asked the Drug Lord. He placed a broad arm against my back, cutting off any hope of escape. “I made it. A long time ago. I came here from a distant place, and found people who lived in mud huts. I went into the cacti, and the cacti went into the people, and they learned new things from me. I was Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent, Tezcatlipoca the smoking mirror, Huitzilopochtli the left-handed hummingbird. I built as I pleased until Uriel closed the gates that fed me, and now that the gates are open I will build again.”

  [Ana, do you have any ideas?]

  [I think we’re past the point at which we had much choice in any of this.]

  Then he was in my mind again, right where he had left off, like a dog digging a hole, flinging dirt everywhere. GALISDO, he drew from my mind. TAHUN. Then suddenly we were back on the ledge, the Drug Lord using a hand to shield his eyes from the sun and peering down at the city below.

  A figure was walking down the Avenue of the Dead, alone. Tall, lithe. Very fast. As we watched, it reached the base of the pyramid. It didn’t bother to go around, just started climbing the staircase, wading through the blood as if it wasn’t there. The face came into focus.

  “Jane!” I shouted.

  Then she was with us on the ball court. For a second, we all just looked at each other, taking stock. Me. Jane. The Drug Lord. Ana.

  “Let them go,” said Jane, “or I’ll do what my father did.”

  I was familiar with the Hershel of Ostropol stories. Ana was familiar with the Hershel of Ostropol stories. And that, I presumed, meant the Drug Lord was now familiar with the Hershel of Ostropol stories. Which meant that, as far as bluffs went, this left something to be desired. Sure enough, the Drug Lord lifted a spiny arm and pointed it at Jane. Some sort of unseen force lashed out at her, knocked her off the pyramid with the force of a freight train, smashed her into the stony street below.

  “Mortals,” said the Drug Lord, di
smissively.

  With all my strength, I rushed at the Drug Lord, kicked him right in the gut. Of course, the spines pierced my shoe and stabbed my foot and I fell down, doubled over in pain. “Ow!” I said. “Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!” The Drug Lord looked down at me bemusedly, a smile still playing on his features. Ana covered her face with her palms.

  “Aaron,” said the Drug Lord. “Stay calm, stop moving, just a second more, then nobody else needs to die.”

  He reached an arm out toward my head.

  Then something moved behind him, and the Drug Lord wheeled around to confront it. Jane walked towards us from the far end of the ball court. She still wore her black leather jacket and black leather pants, but her long black hair had streaks of white in it now, and her eyes had flecks of silver, and her face looked…different? Somehow more? She looked almost happy. I knew who she was now. There was a very big sword in her hand, so big that by rights she shouldn’t have been able to hold it. It definitely hadn’t been there before. “Let them go,” said Jane, “or else I’m warning you, I’ll do what my father did.”

  For the first time, I saw the Drug Lord’s little smile fade. “Go away, mortal!” he commanded, and a wave of fire and wind crashed against her.

  But Jane raised her hand, and the attack dissipated. “Mortal?” she asked. “You call me mortal, you overgrown weed?” The fire passed all through her and all around her, as effortlessly as air. “I was born of sky and light. I am the ending of all things in beauty and fire. I am Cometspawn. And if you don’t let those two go, then as God is my witness, I WILL DO WHAT MY FATHER DID!”