“Did you hear that?” McMurtrey asked.
“Yes!”
“This IS a freeway,” McMurtrey said. “Remember, Appy said the skins between universes are the shortest spaceways to God. Must be a lotta traffic out here.”
Corona rolled to one side, lay beside him on the bed.
As before, McMurtrey only heard Appy when he touched Corona’s skin. He held one hand to the side of her neck.
“Bleep! Waah!”
“O Krassos help us!” Appy wailed. “I can’t control this psycho! Override! T.O., respond to my override request!”
“Wahuwah . . . weeee . . . soooooo . . . fweeeee . . . ohhh . . . ommmm . . . ”
“No, Shusher,” Appy said. “That’s not even a ship! Don’t worry if it gets there first! We aren’t competing with it. If we were, we’d have been told. It’s the ships like us we’re supposed to beat—the ones behind us!”
In McMurtrey’s right ear: “Wahuwah . . . weeee . . . soooooo . . . fweeeee . . . ohhh . . . ommmm . . . ”
“You ignoramus! Every skinbeater isn’t a ship! You were there when T.O. said it: ‘Many entities traverse the whipping passageways between universes. Only one passes at a time. The way is narrow and fragile. Do not damage it.’”
Shusher’s tone became bassoon-deep. Then it soared into a frightening high-pitched squeal that made McMurtrey pull his hand from Corona’s skin.
“Ow!” McMurtrey exclaimed. He sat up.
So did Corona, and they faced one another on the bed.
She shook her head, rubbed her right ear. “That hurt,” she said.
“Has Shusher stopped?” he asked.
“Kind of. He’s making weird little sounds now, like maybe he’s building up for another big one.”
“Weird is right.”
“Yeah.”
McMurtrey touched her neck again.
“That’s it, Shusher,” Appy said. “Let the lines go. Let them go ahead.”
“The lines?” McMurtrey said. “Shusher and the white lines again?”
“I guess,” Corona said.
“What in the hell is going on out there?”
Corona let out a long breath. “Shit if I know.”
In his left ear, McMurtrey heard Appy grunt, followed by gurgling.
Then McMurtrey’s right ear filled with sound, painlessly this time. It was a harmonic of great intensity, carrying with it unidentifiable layers of contribution, building to a crescendo.
“No!” Appy screamed. “Don’t try it!”
Corona was shaking involuntarily against McMurtrey’s hand.
McMurtrey felt like a tuning fork, with an incredible harmonic tone coursing every pore, cell and muscle of his body, setting all into motion in a great undulating wave.
This ship is a skinbeater, McMurtrey thought. It ‘negotiates’ the fragile skins between universes, whatever that means. Is this sound an aspect of it?
Corona’s face was unidimensional and had gaps in it, with dark cells dancing near one another, not quite touching. She had a strange expression on her face, as if she were being killed and couldn’t figure out how. McMurtrey could see right through the dancing cells, and through his own hand held against the back of her neck, to the headboard wall beyond.
We’re both doing it, he thought. He moved his hand in a dream-state, looked upon its looseness as if it were not of him. He wasn’t touching her now, but the visual and auditory sensations remained.
I can still think and move, he thought.
His hand felt numb and asleep, and he shook it. The particles comprising what once had been his skin moved faster, and he perceived only paper thinness to the hand—a frightening and incomplete singularity of dimension.
With sound filling his head he leaped to the floor, spun and looked back at Corona. She was a dot-matrix woman, with only a facsimile of the features she once possessed.
Next to her sat a wide expanse of dots in human form, in McMurtrey’s form.
The air filled with dots, and in an insect swarm the dots from the bed rejoined him, in delayed reaction. It made him afraid to move.
“Did you see that?” he asked. And his words were like the visual dots, with little gaps of nothingness between hard edges of sound.
She nodded.
McMurtrey felt the deck shudder, saw the compartment screen flex violently. Everything whirled and spun before him, grew dark. He seemed riveted in place, on a spinning carnival ride. But this carnival had no colors.
“Our ship entered a spinning knife-edge of parallel white lines,” Corona said calmly, from somewhere. McMurtrey couldn’t see her, couldn’t see or feel anything. He felt like a spinning, whirling, electronic receiver.
Corona again, her voice susurrant: “Ahead I saw a limitless plane of parallel lines against unbounded space. The stars were brilliant, blinding, with no rest for my eyes. Light burned through me. I died of pain and was reborn. Appy says the skins are damaged. Big trouble because of that. He’s angry with Shusher, says T.O. will never forgive this. Appy talked to Shusher like a schoolteacher scolding an errant student, said that when we were skinbeating we were pulling the compressed skins of two adjacent universes through Shusher’s drive system. He said Shusher didn’t understand how delicate an operation it was, that the skins had been compressed to microthin wires and we were in two universes at once—half in each—pulling the skins through somehow. Behind us it’s like a damaged bridge the other ships may not be able to pass. They may have to go back, try another way. Skins take a long time healing.”
“Appy told us the skins between universes are the fastest path to God,” McMurtrey said, “so I wonder how long it would take traveling to God’s planet conventionally, by spaceship through the universe.”
“I don’t know.”
“If the skins are severely damaged, we could be forced to take the slower route back. That might take so long that we’d die en route, effectively trapping us out here.”
“You’re right. Could be no way back.”
A long silence. Presently McMurtrey said, “It’s strange here . . . I felt it even before this, that I was able to think more lucidly away from the clutter of my life on D’Urth. When it’s all over, Kelly, what really matters about life?”
“I dunno.”
“I wish I could remember everything that’s happened to me. When I can’t remember something, it’s like part of my life has been stolen from me. Why go through each moment if it’s going to be forgotten? When it’s all over what do we have? What does it all matter if you can’t remember most of it?”
Her voice came from blackness: “You’re talking weird.”
“No, I’m not. Think about it. Memories are all of consequence that remain at the end of a person’s life. It’s not the things he accumulated, nor which he sought to accumulate. Rather it is the richness and fulfillment of each experience itself. This should be the truest endowment of life. But what is that endowment if time and circumstance pulverize it?
“Sure, there are memory enhancement techniques: concentration, review soon afterward, even a policy of trying to experience significant events. This trip is a significant event par excellence, so we’ll remember most all of it. But everything in life can’t be a significant event; we can’t concentrate on everything at the time it’s happening or take the time for a review soon afterward. Life goes on at too rapid a pace. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“Yes, but you needn’t be so gloomy about such losses. It seems to me you’re forgetting about the memories others have of you, the important impression in clay left by your life.”
“I suppose that’s true. It matters what God thinks of me, too.”
“Sure it does. Even if you’re pulverized to dust with no memories remaining at all, what you were matters, the way you changed lives, the way you graced and improved them.”
“I didn’t help everybody. I tricked many of them—my Cosmic Chickenhood prank. Now ironically, the fat chicken society may be meaningful after
ail. God as much as suggested that, although I can’t believe it.”
“We can do important things by accident, or good things without meaning to do good things, and what we’ve done is still important, still good.”
“But lessened by lack of intention.”
“Maybe not. Maybe you did what you really meant to do after all.”
“Subconsciously?”
“Yes,” Corona said.
“I don’t think I believe in that stuff. You do?”
“I guess. The older I get and the more I think about things, the less certain I am about anything.”
“Do you suppose the most important events in life occur by accident?” McMurtrey asked. “Meeting you, I mean, was totally unplanned. Even people who work hard and succeed in business need big breaks to get ahead—If the breaks go the wrong way, no amount of effort can compensate. Maybe, in the end, everything good depends on good luck and everything bad upon bad luck.”
“I disagree. All of it happens because people place themselves in position for things to happen. You got into religion, which placed you on this ship. I’m a Merchant Spacer, and that placed me on the ship. We’re here because we placed ourselves in position to be here.”
“We intended to meet?”
Corona chuckled. “Let’s just say we stirred the stew.”
“I’ll say we’re in the stew. We lost our bodies somewhere. We’re probably dead!”
“It’s kind of neat though, isn’t it? No pain, and we can still think, can still talk.”
“But only with one another, for all of eternity?”
McMurtrey felt circulation return to his lips as he spoke, and nearly cried as this sensation of flesh returned. Sensations followed throughout his body.
Far away he saw a faint burst of yellow light, the same tone the auras had been—the identical yellow of the mysterious human cloud-shapes amid the white lines. A second flash was the same color, brighter, and it split in two, approaching as side-by-side beacons. Hazy shapes appeared around the beacons, and the beacons became Corona’s eyes: dark and profoundly secret.
“I love you, Ev,” she said. “That’s the meaning of life, the most important thing. Finding someone to love. We’re alive!”
The room became light, and Corona stood before him, looking normal. The dark, dark eyes were a fresh shade of brown, prettier than he recalled.
“We’re supposed to pinch ourselves now,” he said.
They did.
And Corona went to him, held him tightly. She was trembling, and it made McMurtrey proud when he soothed her, dispatched her fears.
“We have each other,” he said.
The deck shook violently, with a crashing, jarring shrill of discord that lasted only an instant. In that instant as McMurtrey held Corona, he experienced the vision she had described: He saw a spinning sharp edge of parallel white lines, with a limitless plane of parallel white lines stretching to the horizon of the universe. Light burned through his eyes, though he closed them—a fiercely brilliant, blinding nova of light that blotted out everything in its path.
On the deck outside Corona’s compartment, Jin lay shaken. He stumbled to his feet and to his cabin controls.
The screen dropped from the ceiling, clicked into place.
Within seconds Jin was hidden from the view of others, assessing system damage via electrical probes that coursed the fiberoptical passageways of his body.
Something had changed in the field—irreparable programming meltweld—the Duplication program was transmitting green sound, dominating all other functions.
He felt a whir and throb in his Central Command module, and dull humanlike pain pulsed there, inside his head. This was from the Duplication program, he theorized, a simulated headache. But this was a more intense headache than any in his experience.
Almost automatically, Jin touched a cabin control button.
The bed swung out, opened out.
Jin dropped supine onto the bed, let his aching head sink into the billowed softness of the pillow.
Just a little rest, he thought. Maybe things will smooth out . . .
It was not uncommon for human-simulating cyberoos to feel fatigue, but this was the first time Jin had been forced to lie down on the journey, so engrossed had he been in his work. All the energy he’d felt since boarding seemed oddly irrecoverable, as if drained from him permanently. He felt depressed.
At a thought-impulse, he set a dormancy timer, directing that his functions be put to rest for eight hours.
But the Duplication program did not rest, as it should have. It continued transmitting into his unconsciousness, filling every synthetic cell of his body with green sound.
Chapter 9
There are different dimensions of the word “love,” dimensions lost in the vast umbrella of the word. We feel love in varying subcategories and intensities for different people, and too often we speak the word for the wrong reasons, when we want something, when we want to take something. Thus love becomes tainted, for it is narcissistic. More than all other words, love is ultimately meaningless, for it means too many different things to different people. It means too many bad things. The best and purest definition: Love is giving all of yourself while expecting nothing in return.
—Light-Inscribed Thoughts in
Evander McMurtrey’s Brain
McMurtrey died of pain and was reborn.
When his eyes stopped hurting he lifted the lids cautiously and let room light flow into the corneas. This time the light brought no pain with it, and timeless energy flowed along his arteries into his cells, bringing consciousness. With consciousness came a message borne on light, a message about love.
The words were illuminated in his brain like a great electrogas sign, and he wanted desperately to speak them, to tell Corona the depths of his feelings for her.
“We hit something,” Corona said.
McMurtrey heard her before seeing her. Then, like an apparition, she appeared standing sideways before him, where his eyes had been directed. She was only a few steps away.
Appy’s voice, across the P.A. system: “Intruder! Seal all sections, dammit! Intru—” The voice sputtered, went silent.
“What the hell’s going on?” McMurtrey said.
He reached around and touched a button on the bulkhead, raising the screen of Corona’s cubicle. The screen squealed as it went up, where before it had been nearly soundless.
From all around the ship came the confused and anxious tones of pilgrims.
Corona stood motionless before McMurtrey, profiled against the mezzanine railing.
“You okay?” McMurtrey asked, his voice almost shrill.
No response.
Corona trembled, and she turned her head to look with fearful eyes at McMurtrey. Her lips moved without sound.
McMurtrey stepped toward her and reached out, but she pulled away, wouldn’t let him touch her. She trembled uncontrollably, a d’Urthquake within her flesh.
“Kelly, what’s going on?”
Her eyes became radiant and aura-yellow, and the body surrounding the eyes became as black as starless space, as black as the darkness that had permeated them when they spoke without bodies or flesh.
Within that quivering, human-shaped universe the eyes became twin beacons, receding into a limitless distance. They disappeared from McMurtrey’s sight. Presently the trembling ceased, and before him stood a motionless, eyeless black shape.
A chill coursed McMurtrey’s spine. Now he was trembling, afraid to approach or move away, afraid to speak his love.
Was this a woman anymore? Was his beloved dead before him, with only the remnants of soul clinging to existence?
Far away within the blackened shape of the head, McMurtrey saw a faint flash of aura-yellow light. A second flash was brighter, and as before when he and Corona were in darkness, the flash divided in two and approached as teamed beacons. Hazy shapes formed around the beacons, and the beacons again were Corona’s eyes: dark and with a myste
ry of depth to them beyond anything he imagined possible.
“There is an intruder aboard,” she said, but not in her own voice. It was the accented voice of Appy.
“What do you mean? And why is your voice—”
“We are shipwrecked.”
“Shipwrecked? What the hell do you mean? Where?”
“Other ships are closing in. We’re going to lose the race. We have less than eighteen hours to effect repairs. I am not Corona.”
Corona’s lips moved again, producing her own voice this time.
McMurtrey breathed a tentative sigh of relief as he listened to her:
“We collided with the white lines,” she said. “We’re ‘beached’ on a line, unable to proceed unless certain conditions are met. We’re in the middle of the whipping passageway, at a dead stop with the skins of two universes gripped in Shusher’s drive system. God says the skins are damaged here but still passable. Soon the others will be upon us, and if we can’t beat skin we’ll have to get out of the way. God’s exact words: ‘Ship, heal thyself.’”
“How do you know these things, and why did you speak in Appy’s voice?”
“The same answer to both: I am Appy now. I am also Kelly Corona. I can think as either at will, speak as either. I can, it would appear from my preliminary understanding of this, carry on a conversation with myself.”
“But—”
She anticipated, said, “The computer system went out when we collided . . . the white line entity is a Gluon, like Shusher. Gluons can pass through one another without harm except when they are on a whipping passageway. They’re ensnarled now, and neither can proceed. We are in a most delicate situation.”
McMurtrey didn’t understand enough to phrase a question.
“Appy activated a ‘save’ program before shutting down,” Corona said, “and this program, containing all of the data comprising Appy’s bioelectronic brain, traveled the electromagnetic pulses of light from Appy to me. The lavender light in which I was bathed placed me on precisely the same light circuit with Appy. The computer had a choice of dumping its data into either Shusher or me, and it chose me.”
The Race for God Page 21
