“I can never help smiling at our Sadlareeyahian dancers,” Kaelour said, and she proved her point with a broad smile. “This would not be Sadlareeyah without the dancers.”
I smiled, but then gritted my teeth and said something about the joy of people living at the edge of an abyss.
“But you know,” Kaelour objected, “aren’t we always living at the edge of an abyss? Isn’t everyone? Even in the best of times?”
Across the street, the dancers led the children from Otto’s through the plaza that abutted the main thoroughfare, into the middle of a festival; musicians tooted their horns; clowns juggled; magicians magicked; the dancers spun and floated, tapped and pounded; and she applauded with all the others.
I paused a beat, then returned to business. I wondered how to get a great cache of weapons past the pro-imperial Xiorian military, or even how to get it down into Hell.
“You will accompany the weapons,” she said.
I thought that sounded deceptively simple.
“Hell,” she said, “is more of a psychological matter than a geographical one. You are not long for the World, Mr. O’Hugh, but only because you’ve lost your World legs. You just cannot survive up here anymore.”
She gestured west.
“A warship is on its way from a shrouded inlet in the very far north, and will make landfall at around two a.m. We will load the arms, and you will set sail. General Tang will be waiting for you when you dock in Hallitanud.”
“I just sail there,” I said. “Just like that? Like sailing from New York to Boston?”
She nodded, watching the dancers across the street. She took a sip of her coffee, and without meeting my eyes, she told me that there was someone else here in Sadlo’reen who wished a word with me.
At that moment, a fellow over in the corner started pounding away at the piano, belting out a crazy rhapsody about “Guys” and their “Dolls,” which I didn’t understand at all. I looked up and there was Billy Golden, my own personal cosmological constant, a legendary Roamer, convicted mule thief and sneaky, sockdologizing hugger-mugger, sitting there at the piano and, from the expression on his face, apparently having the time of his life. Billy Golden to-day, dressed in a traditional Sadlareeyahian baggy white suit, looked about thirty-seven-years-old. I realized that, in addition to a late-night out at a lively downtown café, this excursion was an ambush, although not ill-intentioned. After a while, Billy pulled a clarinet out of thin air, stood up from the piano (which kept playing) and tooted out some kind of amazing swinging tune, and some of the coffee-drinkers at the café stood up from their tables and danced, and a few even flipped a few loop-de-loops in the air. When he’d finished his tune, the café exploded into the usual rapturous applause — Billy really was a great and charismatic entertainer, I have to admit, who could create delirium like you’ve never seen — and he got up from the piano, walked through the room, shaking hands and thanking his new fans, and he sat down at our table, crossed a leg.
He smiled, with a look on his mug of faux fondness and faux concern, but it looked like genuine fondness and genuine concern.
“Third,” he said happily, just a little bit out of breath. “When Kaelour told me you were coming, I was so glad. I hope you’re enjoying Sadlo’reen?”
“I was,” I said, “till now.”
He laughed.
“An improvement, I think, over your previous accommodations? Hell can be Hell, can’t it?”
He was likable, tall and confident and lacking the nervous pessimism that he could sometimes project as an older man; I worked hard not to like him.
Kaelour shook my hand, cast a sympathetic glance my way and told me she’d see me at the docks at two the morning.
The waitress placed in front of Billy a cup of very dark tea, and she quickly retreated.
And with that, Billy and I were alone.
Chapter 26
Billy said that he had expected to see me earlier, and I said that we had run into a bit of trouble on the way out of Xiorian, and he nodded, and he said a few sympathetic things about the plight of the Xiorians.
“They think they remember the greatness of the past,” he said, “of Emperor Magnano’s reign, but it is a mythical memory. It is difficult to accept the sloppiness and unfairness of life, isn’t it?”
I agreed that, yes, indeed, it certainly was difficult to accept the sloppiness and unfairness of life. I am sure he detected the sarcasm in my voice — much of the unfairness of my life had come about thanks to various machinations that, no matter the originator, always seemed to revolve around Mr. Golden. Indeed, I did not yet realize the full extent of his deceptions, but I already knew enough.
He smiled, and I didn’t smile back, and he seemed to realize that this would be trickier than he had hoped.
“We’re running out of time,” Billy said, and he looked at his wristwatch. “Unfortunate that you were detained; I had hoped for a longer and wide-ranging briefing. Dammit. All right, Watt, I’ve got to freeze Time for a little bit.”
And Time stopped. Two dancers flipping each other about in the street stopped where they were, a few feet off the ground, their faces stuck in a strange, unchanging moment of exuberant joy, staring sightlessly into each other’s eyes. Wind stopped blowing; clouds stopped moving; birds stopped singing.
“I don’t really like to do that,” Billy muttered. “It’s such a cut-rate Sidonian trick. It makes me feel cheap.”
Then he sighed and tried to relax, and he sat back in his chair, in the café, in the still Sadlareeyahian early evening.
Now he grew old. I’d seen this before with Billy, and once with Theera: the rare Roamer who can change the past spends a certain amount of his time writing and re-writing it. This moment was something he’d really worked on. I gave him my full attention.
“You will soon meet the Falsturm,” he told me, in his weak, old-man voice, “in a room of gold.”
“The oracle told me, already,” I said.
Now Billy was younger, a comparatively strapping man of fifty-five or so.
“Hmm?”
“In Utah. I met an oracle who told me a number of things, all of which I committed to memory.”
“The oracle who becomes … a snowy egret?” Billy asked.
I said that was the very one, the exact same oracle. The snowy-egret oracle herself.
“Tang gave her a strip of dried carrot. I believed her. When I met her again, a couple years later, near Pyeton, I gave her a coin.”
“Very ancient,” Billy said. “Very wise.”
He continued, and he spoke with no little pain in his voice.
“No longer in good health. The spread of Sidonian Magic across the land is not good for our oracles. But still she is very wise.”
“Madame Tang didn’t think her so wise,” I said; “this oracle.”
“Yes, she did. Madame Tang understands the oracle’s wisdom better than almost anyone.”
“She surely doesn’t want to admit that.”
“No,” Billy agreed. “She doesn’t.”
“She is in Hell now,” I said. “The oracle. The egret.”
“What? In Hell?”
“Yes. Down in the Hell of the Innocent Dead.”
“Oh,” Billy shrugged, “she is everywhere.”
He paused, and he took a sip of his tea, and he grew a little older, just a little greyer.
“I cannot prevent you from meeting the Falsturm,” Billy said. “And it is true that you will meet him in a room of gold. That is fated. There is no conceivable or possible future in which it does not occur. But although I cannot prevent you from meeting him, I can yet beg you to be strong. I can beg you to resist his offers.”
“Why should I resist?” I asked. “What do I owe you?”
“You’d be dead on a prison floor if it weren’t for me.”
He’d saved me from the Wyoming pen, convinced Madame Tang to cure my busted legs. He needed me, somehow; and here he was again.
“You h
ad your reasons,” I said. “It wasn’t generosity of spirit.”
I leaned back in my chair.
Dust was motionless in the air between us, and a bird was immobile behind Billy’s right shoulder.
“What will he offer me?” I asked.
Billy shrugged, nodded, shook his head.
“The Falsturm isn’t obligated to keep his word,” Billy said. “He’ll offer you things. Whatever you seem to want at the moment. You won’t get it.”
“At least with him there is a chance,” I said. “A mansion. A palace maybe. And caviar, right? I had Hell caviar recently. Not good. Bad, even for Hell. But I had real caviar once, in 1863, at a party I attended with Lucy. I liked it. Salty, with a pleasing pop. Like a little salty bubble. Caviar, a palace and riches. That’s what the Falsturm will promise me?”
“All of those things,” he said. “Yes.”
A small boy in front of Otto’s had his hands together in a joyous clap, unmoving.
“But he will also offer you something else,” Billy said softly. “Lucy. He will offer you eternity with Lucy.”
“The Princess already did. The murderous Princess of Sidonia.”
“And what did you say?”
“I asked her some questions. We jousted with words.”
“What questions do you have?” Billy asked.
“This is what I wondered. Will she just seem like Lucy?”
I had thought about this since I had seen Lucy through the windows of the little chess shop, in the Grey City.
Billy took a drink of his tea, thinking.
I persisted.
“Or,” I asked, “will she really be Lucy? This woman. Will she really be my Lucy?”
“I don’t know, Watt,” he said. “I do not think that Lucy could ever survive in Sidonia, with her independence of spirit. Perhaps she would be a Skimmy, not the real Lucy.” He paused. “You might never know for certain. And there is something else to bear in mind.”
Now he became very old. These seemed to be among his very last moments; he was thin, his skin was papery and dry, his elbows angular, his fingers long and knifelike. His hair mere tufts in a potholed skull. His sad eyes were red and dry.
The old Billy had traveled this road many times, he had written and rewritten this moment over and over, trying to get it right. I wondered why.
“Remember that this is the very thing that he offered Darryl Fawley,” old Billy said, in his quiet scratch of a voice. “A palace. Riches. Justice, and an admirable cause, and not the least of it, Lucy Billings’ love. This is exactly what he offered Darryl Fawley, and he even gave it to him, for a while. A mansion, riches, and the real Lucy. Remember that.”
I said I remembered that.
“And remember the Grey City. It will eat your world, and then other worlds.”
“I think you drew it on the horizon to fool me,” I said. “To show me something terrible to fight against.”
“That isn’t true,” he said softly.
Now he was a man of perhaps fifty. Weary, but still a bit of life in him.
“I tell you something, Billy,” I whispered. “I cannot trust you. I might join the Falsturm, you sonofabitch, just to rip your hide.”
He didn’t flinch, his calm veneer didn’t crack.
“What about Hester?” he asked.
“I will bring her with me,” I said.
“The Falsturm swallows everything around him. He will suck the universe dry and then move on. You will not be spared, and Hester will not be spared, and the Lucy Simulacrum will not be spared, no matter what the great Falsturm may say in the room of gold.”
He sighed.
“I’ve lost the one I love, too, you know, O’Hugh. You remember?”
I remembered her, the love of Billy’s millennia, the luscious Christine Nilsson, the famous and almost supernaturally beautiful Swedish soprano, whom he first met in April 1879 in a rainforest by a diamond mine beside the Amazon river. I had met her once, too.
“I remember, Billy,” I said. “No one ever said you aren’t human.”
Billy blinked. He scowled.
“I am alone,” he said. “There is no God where I am.”
I just stared, after he said this.
“Aleister Crowley,” Billy added, apropos, it seemed to me, of nothing. I didn’t know what this meant. Aleister Crowley.
“I will listen to this Falsturm,” I told him, “and then I will make my decision.”
Billy, now younger still, perhaps thirty-five.
He shook his head sadly, stood, snapped his fingers. At once, the acrobats in the street flew about again, the music in the air bangled again, and child dancers bounced from table to table, grinning from ear-to-ear, all motion and excitement and mischief. The bird flew, the dust wafted.
North Sadlareeyah folded in on itself and disappeared into a glowing vortex, and another world grew from nothing, in a sea of flames, a world of darkness surrounded by fire.
“Listen to me,” Billy said. “It is time for your anagnorisis.”
I listened to what Billy had to say that day, in that world of darkness surrounded by fire, but sometimes, these days, I wish that I had not.
Chapter 27
This is the part of the story where a fellow shows up out of the blue and explains everything, which is what Billy meant by “anagnorisis.” In stories, generally speaking, after the “big reveal,” everything suddenly makes sense, and the story comes to an end. The killer confesses; the wizard dusts off an ancient book of wisdom and opens it to the exact page. (If you don’t care for that kind of plot development, you should feel free to skip to Chapter 28. I promise you that you will be able to follow the remainder of my yarn as easily as you would if you had stuck with it and completed this Chapter 27.)
The difference is that my story is true, and in real life, people are assholes and also liars. Especially in this case. Billy Golden, in my experience, always played some sort of angle. You see? On that day, decades ago, he provided me with a relatively involved explanation for the chain of events that had brought us all together — Billy, Tang, me, everyone else — but, unlike the anagnorisis in (for example) The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, Oedipus or Star Wars: Episode 5, most of Billy’s big reveal was almost certainly a few shades from the truth. He tossed in a few things that we both knew about, and some things that I could verify for myself later — such as the nature of Fabricators and the inscape — to make the whole story seem authentic. But was it true? The rest of it? And was it the “whole truth”?
Still, I think that this meeting with Billy is worth relating, because it happened. And because it had some impact on what was to occur later on, and may shine a light on Billy’s end-game, whatever it was. And because it might have all been true. I just do not know.
“Think about where we all started,” Billy said, just a voice in the middle of the flames. “Before Pangaea. Before science. Remember Keter?”
“Hmm?” I wondered.
“Keter,” he repeated. “In case you wanted to know what we called the place you can remember only in your most elusive dreams.”
“Keter,” I repeated.
“Human beings like to name things,” he said, and then he smiled. “Isn’t that funny? I wonder why we do that.”
I TRIED TO PICTURE KETER, but I couldn’t. Then I thought I saw something in the darkness, just some bit of imagination, and it grew in my mind, a blue sky flecked with narrow wisps of cloud, then a sun-tinted sea, a few mountain peaks on the far horizon, and at last, an endlessness of towering trees in air that smelled like air (which I had never really smelled before). Strangely enough, I could see a young woman, whom I knew Billy was imagining too, young and slender, but with nearly white hair. Her smile was untroubled. I couldn’t understand anyone who was untroubled, but this was a landscape before troubles.
“One day we will return to Keter, this place in Space and in Time, or in un-Time, as it were,” Billy mused, after we had sat on the rocky shore watching this imagi
nary landscape for some time. Then, after a beat, he added, “Or ur-Time, perhaps.”
He weighed this in his head.
Ur-time or un-time?
He stared past me, at the red sun glittering on the waves in Keter, in his imagination.
“When we return, Watt, it will be either to drink a Monongahela to toast our victory (however temporary) over the Falsturm’s forces, or to mourn our loss, with one last Monongahela.”
Would my drink taste different, I wondered, depending on whether it was the first Monongahela of a new era of hope, or the last Monongahela of our universe? I imagined that the last Monongahela would taste better, more precious, than the next of many.
“While our victory would be temporary,” Billy said, staring into his tea, “our loss would be forever.
“The world would not end with the Coming Storm — it would grow colder and darker and rainier. We would live in the Grey City, and we would feel life slip away gradually. And in the end, the universe would become a bit of crumpled parchment; then an onion skin; then a bubble, floating on nothing; then naught but a dim outline. And then it would blow away. Forever and ever. And whatever happens, this is where we will come to watch, once the future is sealed. A long time from now. I wonder. I wonder how it will all turn out.” He squinted. “What will we see inside the naked singularity?”
Billy Golden talked and talked, and I listened as I drank my coffee, wishing it were a Monongahela, and as the night sky bloomed with stars and a bright half-moon.
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 23
