The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  “Get out!” I said. “Kill me, do whatever you have to…just get out of here.”

  “I’m not going to kill you.”

  I sensed her moving close, and through my fingers saw her lay some papers on the desk.

  “I’m giving you a map,” she said. “At the foot of the hill, next to the sentry post, there’s a trail leading east. It’s well-traveled, and even in the dark it won’t be difficult to follow. Less than a day’s walk from here, you’ll come to a river. You’ll find villages. Boats that’ll take you to the coast.”

  I said nothing.

  “We won’t be able to go operational until dawn,” she went on. “You have about ten hours. Things might not be so bad once you’re out of the immediate area.”

  “Go away,” I told her.

  “I…” She faltered. “I think we…”

  “What the hell do you want from me?” Angry, I spun around. But on seeing her, my anger evaporated. The moonlight seemed to have erased all distinction between her and my Aymara—she might have been my lover reborn, her spirit returned. “What do you want?” I said weakly.

  “I don’t know. But I do want something from you. For so long I’ve felt we were linked. Involved.” She reached out as if to touch me, then jerked back her hand. “I don’t know. Maybe I just want your blessing.”

  I could smell her scent of soap and perfume, sharp and clean in that musty little room, and I felt a stirring of sexual attraction. In my mind’s eye I saw again that endless line of dark-haired women, and I suddenly believed that love was the scheme that had enforced our intricate union, that—truly or potentially—we were all lovers, myself and a thousand Aymaras, all tuned to the same mystical pitch. I got to my feet, rested my hands on her hips. Pulled her close. Her lips grazed my cheek as she settled into the embrace. Her heart beat rapidly against my chest. Then she drew back, her face tilted up to receive a kiss. I tasted her mouth, and her warmth spread through me, melting the cold partition I had erected between myself and life. At last she pushed me away and—averting her eyes—walked to the door.

  “Goodbye.” She said it in Spanish—“Adiós”—a word that sounded too gentle and mellifluous to embody such a terminal meaning.

  I heard her footsteps running up the hill.

  I was tempted to go after her, and to resist this temptation, not to save myself, I took her map and set out walking the trail east. Yet as I went, my desire to survive grew stronger, and I increased my pace, beating my way through thickets and plaited vines, stumbling down rocky defiles. Had I been alone in the jungle at any other time, I would have been terrified, for the night sounds were ominous, the shadows eerie; but all my fear was focused upon those white buildings on the hilltop, and I paid no mind to the threat of jaguars and snakes. Toward dawn, I stopped in a weedy clearing bordered by ceibas and giant figs, their crowns towering high above the rest of the canopy. I was bruised, covered with scratches, exhausted, and I saw no reason to continue. I sat down, my back propped against a ceiba trunk, and watched the sky fading to gray.

  I had thought brightness would fan across the heavens as with the detonation of a nuclear bomb, but this was not the case. I felt a disturbance in the air, a vibration, and then it was as if everything—trees, the earth, even my own flesh—were yielding up some brilliant white essence, blinding yet gradually growing less intense, until it seemed I was in the midst of a thick white fog through which I could just make out the phantom shapes of the jungle. Accompanying the whiteness was a bone-chilling cold; this, however, dissipated quickly, whereas it turned out that the fog lingered for hours, dwindling to a fine haze before at last becoming imperceptible. At first I was full of dread, anticipating death in one form or another; but soon I began to experience a perverse disappointment. The world had suffered a cold flash, a spot of vagueness, like the symptoms of a mild fever, and the idea that my lover had died for this made me more heartsick than ever.

  I waited the better part of an hour for death to take me. Then, disconsolate, thinking I might as well push on, I glanced at my watch to estimate how much farther I had to travel, and found that not only had it stopped but that it could not be rewound. Curious, I thought. As I brushed against a bush at the edge of the clearing, its leaves crumbled to dust; its twigs remained intact, but when I snapped one off, a greenish fluid welled from the cortex. I tasted it, and within seconds I felt a burst of energy and well-being. Continuing on, I observed other changes. An intricate spiderweb whose strands I could not break, though I exerted all my strength; a whirling column of dust and light that looked to be emanating from the site of the project; and in the reflecting waters of a pond I discovered that my hair had gone pure white. Perhaps the most profound change was in the atmosphere of the jungle. Birds twittered, monkeys screeched. All as usual. Yet I sensed a vibrancy, a vitality, that had not been in evidence before.

  By the time I reached the river, the fog had cleared. I walked along the bank for half an hour and came to a village of thatched huts, a miserable place littered with feces and mango rinds, hemmed in by brush and stands of bamboo. It appeared deserted, but moored to the bank, floating in the murky water, was a dilapidated boat that—except for the fact it was painted bright blue, decorated with crosses and bearded, haloed faces—might have been the twin of the scow in The African Queen. As I drew near, a man popped out of the cabin and waved. An old, old man wearing a gray robe. His hair was white and ragged, his face tanned and wrinkled, and his eyes showed as blue as the painted hull.

  “Praise the Lord!” he yelled. “Where the hell you been?”

  I glanced behind me to make sure he was not talking to someone else. “Hey,” I said. “Where is everybody?”

  “Gone. Fled. Scared to death, they were. But now they’ll believe me, won’t they?” He beckoned impatiently. “Hurry up! You think I got all day. Souls are wastin’ for want of Jerome’s good news.” He tapped his chest. “That’s me. Jerome.”

  I introduced myself.

  Again he signaled his impatience. “Got all eternity to learn your name. Let’s get a move on.” He leaned on the railing, squinting at me. “You’re the one sent, ain’tcha?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “’Course you are!” He clasped his hands prayerfully. “And, lo, I fell asleep in the white light of the Rapture and the Lord spake, sayin’, ‘Jerome, there will come a man of dour countenance bearin’ My holy sign, and he will aid your toil and lend ballast to your joy.’ Well, here you are, and here I am, and if that hair of your’n ain’t a sign, I don’t know what is. Come on!” He patted the railing. “Help me push ’er out into the current.”

  “Why don’t you use the engine?”

  “It don’t work.” He cackled, delighted. “Nothin’ works. Not the radio, not the generator. None of the Devil’s tools. Ain’t it wonderful?” He scowled. “Now, come on! That’s enough talk. You gonna aid my toil or not?”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Down the Fundamental Stream to the Source and back again. Ain’t no other place to go now the Lord is come.”

  “To the coast?” I insisted, not in the least taken with this looney.

  “Yeah, yeah!” Jerome put his hands on his hips and regarded me with displeasure. “You gotta lighten up some, boy. Don’t know as I’m gonna be needin’ all this much ballast to my joy.”

  I have been a month on the river with Jerome, and I expect I will remain with him awhile longer, for I have no desire to return to civilization until its breakdown is complete—the world, it seems, has ended, though not in the manner I would have thought. I am convinced Jerome is crazy, the victim of long solitudes and an overdose of religious tracts; yet he has no doubt I am the crazy one, and who is to say which of us is right. At every village we stop to allow him to proclaim the Rapture, the advent of the Age of Miracles…and, indeed, miracles abound. I have seen a mestizo boy call fish into his net by playing a flute; I have witnessed healings performed by a matronly Indian woman; I have watched an old Ger
man expatriate set fires with his stare. As for myself, I have acquired the gift of clairvoyance, which has permitted me to see something of the world that is aborning. Jerome attributes all this to an increase in the wattage of the Holy Spirit; whereas I believe that Project Longshot caused a waning of certain principles—especially those pertaining to anything mechanical or electrical—and a waxing of certain others—in particular those applying to ESP and related phenomena. The two ideas are not opposed. I can easily imagine some long-dead psychic perceiving a whiteness at the end of time and assigning it Godlike significance. Yet I have no faith that a messiah will appear. It strikes me that this new world holds greater promise than the old (though perhaps the old world merely milked its promise dry), a stronger hope of survival, and a wider spectrum of possibility; but God, to my way of thinking, darts among the quarks and neutrinos, an eternal signal harrying them to order, a resource capable of being tapped by magic or by science, and it may be that love is both the seminal impulse of this signal and the ultimate distillation of this resource.

  We argue these matters constantly, Jerome and I, to pass green nights along the river. But upon one point we agree. All arguments lapse before the mystery and coincidence of our lives. All systems fail, all logics prove to zero.

  So, Aymara, we have worked our spell, you and I and time. Now I must seek my own salvation. Jerome tells me time heals all wounds, but can it—I wonder—heal a wound that it has caused? Though we had only a few weeks, they were the central moments of my life, and their tragic culmination, the sudden elimination of their virtues, has left me irresolute and weak. The freshness and optimism of the world has made your loss more poignant, and I am not ashamed to admit that—like the most clichéd of grievers—I see your face in clouds, hear your voice in the articulations of the wind, and feel your warmth in the shafts of light piercing the canopy. Often I feel that I am breaking inside, that my heart is turning in my chest like a haywire compass, trying to fix upon some familiar pole and detecting none, and I know I will never be done with weeping.

  Buck up, Jerome tells me. You can’t live in the past, you gotta look to the future and be strong.

  I reply that I am far less at home in the fabulous present than I am in the past. As to the future, well…I have envisioned myself walking the high country, a place of mountains and rivers without end, of snowfields and temples with bronze doors, and I sense I am searching for something. Could it be you, Aymara? Could that white ray of science pouring from the magical green hill have somewhere resurrected you or your likeness? Perhaps I will someday find the strength to leave the river and find answers to these questions; perhaps finding that strength is an answer in itself. That hope alone sustains me. For without you, Aymara, even among miracles I am forlorn.

  There was a goddess in Katmandu named Kumari, a living, breathing incarnation chosen from among the daughters of wealthy Newar families—chosen by oracular sign, some said, and by political necessity, said others—and until she reached the age of puberty and a new incarnation was selected, she lived in a temple on Durbar Square, where she was worshiped and pampered and paraded before the faithful on festival days. It astonished Clement that no one apart from himself found this notable, that people dismissed Kumari’s existence as an atavism left over from a simpler time, from an age when superstition had not yet been overthrown by logic. They seemed to neglect the fact that no matter how completely the phenomenon had been explained away, there was a goddess in Katmandu, an actual goddess whose followers numbered in the hundreds of thousands…and, even more remarkable in Clement’s opinion, scattered throughout the country were thirteen women who had once been Kumari and were now shunned, deemed unlucky and thus unsuitable for marriage.

  If there was one overwhelming reason that Clement was so taken with Kumari’s divinity, so insistent upon its importance, it was that he needed something larger than himself on which to focus, something whose nature might afford relief from the grim realities of his profession. He was thirty-eight, a compact muscular man with sandy hair and what seemed a permanent case of sunburn, and blue-gray eyes that in certain lights appeared colorless. His face had a bland, boyish innocence, the face of an aging athlete or a young cleric, of someone to whom duplicity and violence were shameful but minor matters; for the past three years, however, he had served as the CIA station chief in Calcutta, a position that required him to commit duplicity and violence on a grand scale. Many considered him a murderer, while others considered him a man who was doing a nasty but essential job. For his own part, Clement refused to characterize himself, because life had grown too complex for him to accept the emotionality attaching to either label. In his business such uncertainty led inevitably to mental sloppiness and fatal error, and Clement knew he was in danger; but he had a secret that allowed him to defer hopelessness, to believe in salvation of a kind. He wasn’t sure it was a real secret, but it was at the least a mystery, and in order to determine its true nature, every now and then he would take a long weekend, and—accompanied by his wife, Lily—he would travel to small Asian hill towns and wander through the markets and inquire after an elderly foreigner who carved animals out of wood.

  It was during one of these trips that Clement learned of Kumari, and he asked the station chief in Katmandu, Carl Rice, to assist him in tracking down the women who had once been incarnations. Within a matter of hours, Rice—a lanky olive-skinned Southerner, whom Clement had known for years—presented him with a list. “Most of ’em are locked away by their families,” he said as they sat in the bar of the Soaltee Oteri, a simulation of a Hilton Lounge, with floors and walls of black marble, a teakwood bar, and a lethargic jazz trio presided over by a busty Japanese singer, whose accent and shrill upper register were turning “That Old Black Magic” into a cryptic lamentation. Rice gazed at her admiringly and waggled his fingers in a clandestine wave.

  “Why they do that?” Clement asked.

  Rice said, “Huh?”

  “The families…how come they lock ’em up?”

  “They’re embarrassed ’bout ’em bein’ unlucky. They’re delighted to have a goddess in the family, but an ex-goddess…’pears they just as soon be kin to a rat. This ’un”—Rice pointed to a name—“she went insane. Couple of others are prostitutes. They’d just bullshit you. But this un’, now. Cheni Abdurachan. She ran away and got herself educated. Hung out with some Westernized Tibetans. She’s pretty damn Westernized herself, speaks good English. I don’t know if she’ll talk to you, but I can get you to ’er. Fix you up with a plane tomorrow.”

  Clement inspected the list and saw that Cheni was thirty years old. “Where’s Tasang-partsi?”

  “Mustang. We’d fly you to Ra-lung. That’s a four-hour walk away. I wouldn’t advise takin’ Lily. There’s lotsa hill crime.” Rice sipped his drink and studied the Japanese singer, who was striking centerfold poses. “So you want the tour?”

  “Yeah, tomorrow’ll be fine.”

  “This isn’t business, is it?” asked Rice, and sipped his drink.

  “Just curiosity.”

  “Curiosity.” Rice pronounced it syllable by syllable, as if perplexed by the word. “You gettin’ a weird reputation, man. People wonderin’ ’bout you.”

  “People?” said Clement.

  “You know…people.” Rice wadded a strip of cocktail napkin between his thumb and forefinger. “Y’gotta watch your behavior. It ain’t like you got a spotless record.”

  “You talking about D’allessandro?”

  Rice shrugged and pegged the wad at the bartender.

  “D’allessandro’s dead,” said Clement.

  “Now there’s two schools of thought ’bout that, ain’t there?”

  “I saw the fucking car blow up, man.”

  “Ri-ight,” said Rice with a sardonic drawl.

  “You got something on your mind,” said Clement, annoyed, “why don’t you spit it out?”

  “Okay.” Rice’s long bony face was imperturbable. “Here we are, six years aft
er D’allessandro pulls off the biggest scam anybody’s ever pulled on our ass. I mean, we’re talkin’ a Barnum & Bailey production. Right before his plot thickens, the man’s terminated. Terrorists, looks like. But a few days later when the shit hits the fan, people start sayin’, ‘All we got here’s bits and pieces. Could be our boy’s done a Houdini. No way to prove it, but we got his right-hand man.’” Rice poked Clement’s shoulder. “Whyn’t we keep him on a string and see which way he jumps?”

  “Think I don’t know all that?”

  “You don’t act like you do,” said Rice. “You’re becoming a goddamn eccentric. People watch you makin’ these funny moves, and they start seein’ hidden agendas. Anybody else was actin’ like you, their butt would have been sanctioned. But what I’m leadin’ up to is this. Time’s a gonna come when they gonna say, ‘D’allessandro’s probably dead by now, anyway. So what’re we gonna do with this chump we got runnin’ Calcutta?’”

  Clement forced a grin. “But that time hasn’t come yet. And being watched but not leashed, that gives a man a certain freedom, doesn’t it?”

  Rice leaned back as if trying to see him in a better light. “What’re you up to?”

  “Good things.” Clement sucked on a piece of ice to calm his nerves. “If I’m going to keep the assholes off my back, I need to count some coup. So”—he cracked the ice—“I’m going to count me some goddamn coup.”

  Rice stared at him deadpan. “Square business?”

  “Scout’s honor. I’m going to give ’em a prime-time spectacular.” He fingered out another ice chip. “Since this is official…”

  “Wait a minute!” Rice was offended.

  “C’mon, pal,” said Clement. “We haven’t had a heart-to-heart like this in years.”

  Rice looked down at his drink. “Y’unnerstand it ain’t like I enjoyed this shit. I don’t get off on hasslin’ my friends.”

  “That Old Black Magic” ended in a tortured shriek and a drumroll that covered the lack of applause; the Japanese singer announced a break.