“What happened?” he demands to know.
But Pauline won’t say. They walk outside, and she says, “Josh.”
“What?”
But she can’t find the words. Tears flow, and she sobs, and when they are riding home, just the two of them, she says, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” he replies warily.
For a moment, she seems pleased. But when the tears slacken, she becomes distant, almost cold. Josh has to wonder if this is the same woman that he woke up beside. A tentative voice asks, “What did you get today?”
Her answer is a cold stare.
“Show me,” he demands.
Nothing special. With an expert eye, he examines the designations and reads a few random lines. What could have happened—?
“Stop,” she begs.
Their car obeys instantly.
For an instant, she smiles. But if anything, it is a mocking expression that only makes Josh angrier and more scared. “I’ll be right back,” she promises, stepping out into the sunshine.
They have parked outside a small local park, its ornate garden enclosed by a high iron fence.
“Where are you going?” Josh asks.
“Wait here,” she tells him.
He does. For a moment too long, at least, he waits for her to return. Then he gets out and follows, passing through the black gate and into a little green glade. There, he finds Pauline dead. A suicide, apparently. Or maybe he doesn’t find her body. Maybe Josh follows her footprints across the sweet damp grass, observing that she was running the entire way, passing through the park and through the opposite gate...and regardless what happens after that, she is gone...she is lost...as good as dead, to him...
“NO NO NO, LIAR, NO!” He writes.
Then He drops the mind’s stylus, furious eyes gazing at each of the new offerings from the gray puddle. “I don’t believe this. None of this. You’ve invented these silly trees just to anger Me!”
The puddle doesn’t reply.
The silly trees are three vast and comprehensive genealogical records. Each record begins differently, and each ends the same: A creature with His glorious genetics rules not just this world, but the entire sky as well. To the ends of the galaxy, and beyond, these three gods hold sway.
“Shit,” He mutters.
A young slave stands nearby, watching His display with a fascinated horror. The Divine One is so perplexed and furious that He hasn’t bothered to kill her yet, and He barely notices her now.
Seeing the faintest trace of a hope, she runs.
He kills her at the Temple’s door, and drains her body dry of its blood.
“Shit,” He repeats.
“You made this all up,” He claims. Knowing that that cannot be true. “You did this just to be cruel, you fucker!”
The Authority remains silent, its gray face calm and smooth.
Because you feel unhappy, you must be deeply flawed. In an era of plenty and enlightenment, how can you do anything but smile? When you look at realities very close to yours, you see yourself smiling: your grinning, happy face is wrapped around bubbly creatures that aren’t at all like you, creatures that seem to enjoy everything about this wondrous, boundless existence.
In the midst of this life, you begin to kill yourself.
They warned you that this could happen. Years ago, they told you that suicide was more than a real hazard. It was a statistical certainty.
By every means imaginable, and none original, you busily extinguish your life—trillions of times every instant, accomplishing in the process a measurable and important nothing.
Josh delivers his last three offerings:
The final forty-two days of his journal, and a short story about a billion-year-old man who can never escape living the same velvet day over and over, and finally, a digital that he makes while he sits beside the ocean, discussing the nature of the universe and himself with the gray-voiced Authority.
“Tell me that I’m not small,” Josh begs.
But the Authority cannot give that simple gift. Honest and inflexible, it says, “But you are small.”
“Unimportant,” Josh moans.
“You are trivial, Josh. Of course you are.”
Then it takes a different tact. “Given the opportunity,” it asks, “would you want to matter? Would you wish to live in a universe where every motion of yours matters? Where your mistakes sweep away the stars, and the laws of nature need your constant attentions?”
“Yes, and yes,” Josh says. “And no. And never, no.”
Silence descends.
The first two offerings have dropped from view, swallowed by the gray fluid. Now Josh removes the disc from his camera and watches as it dissolves into the Everything.
“What do you want today, Josh?”
He doesn’t seem to hear the question. He cocks his head, as if listening to a sound only he can hear. And with that, Josh begins to nod, reaching inside the gym bag, a calm hand bringing up a simple black pistol. The weapon just made itself, born from a package of cream cheese, a stack of coins, and a dusting of microchines. A single bullet resides in the newborn chamber. With a smooth, certain motion, he lifts the barrel to his head. His mouth. His temple. The soft tissues behind his lower jaw, sometimes. And he squeaks, “Pauline,” as he abruptly tugs at the trigger, setting loose a nearly infinite series of astonishingly quiet little barks—a bullet smaller than his little finger passing through the soft wet center of his mind.
But in at least one reality, the gun fails. A mistake in fabrication, unthinkably rare and inevitable, spares him.
Spares him, and embarrasses him.
A long, strange moment passes, Josh staring at the pistol, a sense of betrayal surging, giving him a temporary rage. He flings the pistol at the ocean, and with a drum-like thump, it skips sideways, sliding across the floor and into one of the white corners.
Again, just as calmly as before, the Authority asks, “What do you want today, Josh?”
“Can’t you tell?” He laughs, and sobs, and on shaky legs, he rises and walks over to the pistol, recovering it before returning to his stool. Will the gun work now? The question appears in his face, his actions. With a stubborn hopefulness, he brings the barrel back up to his temple, and only at the last instant does he notice the new pressure. Like an insistent little tug, it keeps him from feeling the barrel kissing his skin. He feels warm fingers that aren’t his, little fingers curling around his suddenly trembling hand.
He looks back over his shoulder.
She says, “Maybe not.”
Who is the woman? Then he remembers. She was sitting in the outer office, sitting behind the first desk as he came in for his appointment. Her name is—?
“Not today,” she tells him.
“What?”
“I don’t think you should.”
“Who are you?”
“Teller,” she replies.
“What? What’s that?”
“My name. Teller.” She spells it, and smiles. At first glance, she looks young. But everybody looks young, and it means nothing. Something in the eyes, or deeper, implies an age substantially greater than his own. “Anyway,” she says with a fond assurance. “You can’t actually kill yourself.”
“Why not?”
And she laughs, apparently enjoying his foolishness. His desperate folly. “Of course you can’t. How could you? Haven’t you paid any attention to what we’ve been telling you?”
He shakes his head woefully.
Again, with an unnerving determination, the Authority asks, “What three things do you want today, Josh?”
With an easy strength, Teller pulls the pistol from his hand.
“Answer him,” she suggests.
“How about...?” He pauses, thinking in clumsy, obvious ways. “Okay,” he says. “A journal. From someone exactly like me, and from right after his botched suicide.”
The first make-portal opens, disgorging its gift.
He looks up at the
woman, admitting, “I didn’t come with a list, this time. I don’t know—”
“Don’t lie,” she warns.
Then she takes a half-step backwards, as if giving him a taste of privacy. “There’s something you desperately want to see.”
He blurts the name of his lover. Twice, he says, “Pauline,” and then adds, “Where she didn’t kill herself. She went through the gate, and I found her waiting for me. Naked. That’s the universe. I want a digital showing us together there. Okay?”
A disc falls to the floor, and rolls.
“What else?” the Authority asks.
Sad eyes blink and lift.
“Another digital,” he blurts. “Showing me having sex with...”
He glances at his savior.
She shrugs her shoulders, amiable to whatever he wishes.
“Not that.” Josh drops his head, his face flushing. Slowly, slowly, a curious look builds, and then he smiles abruptly, saying, “I want an autobiography. Except each of my novel genes are changed. Are a little different.” It’s a kind of cheat. He used to play this game with Pauline, the two of them changing identities. Except he says, “I want Teller’s genes. And I’m living on a distant, very alien world.”
A narrow smile builds under the old eyes.
“Does that make any sense?” he asks somebody. Teller, or the Authority. Or maybe himself.
But it must make sense. Beside him, the last make-portal opens, and out flies an enormous metallic butterfly, accompanied by a wild music and a fragrance like sweat and cinnamon.
Or you somehow manage to escape suicide. You are just lucky enough, or maybe you’re composed of sterner stuff. Either way, you find yourself alive. But the Authority still remains, and after some cold consideration, you decide that it is the central problem in your tiny life. Once the source of edification and strength, it is now something else entirely: a temptation and weakness, an affliction growing more dangerous with time, and a drug that has long ago scorched away your sites of delicious attachment.
A smart person knows what to do.
With strength and a steely resolve, anyone can save themselves.
Give up the drug. Deny the enticement. The Authority is a piss hole, tiny and unworthy of your attentions. Tell it so. Declare that you won’t visit again, and then don’t. You might live another ten thousand years, and if you can’t find the energy and focus to be busy every moment, then you must not be trying very hard now, are you?
In this realm, at least in your life, you simply admit defeat. The Authority is too much of an attraction. So you walk away. Simply and forever, you leave temptation behind. Perhaps you join communities of like-minded souls. On distant moons, you and your new companions live like monks. Life is stripped to its minimal best. Horizons end at the horizon, and only a select few works of literature wait on the shelves, begging to be read again; and if it is true that every action and thought, achievement and failure are repeated endlessly throughout Creation...if originality is nothing but an illusion...well, at least inside these virtuous walls, amidst the dust and silent shadows, every little word you utter sounds fresh, and feels almost... at least a little bit...worthy...
Conquering the sky would be a child’s waste of time.
But He is a grand, magnificent child. And like anyone with enough pride and vanity, He revels in His glorious undertaking. His first act is to boil the gray puddle to steam and smoke. Then with stirring words and programmed thoughts, He marshals His world, loyal slaves quickly fashioning a fleet of starships, each ship vast and swollen with fuel, armored and bristling with every awful weapon. Then from the underside of His own tiny phallus, The Divine One scrapes away a few living cells, coaxing each to divide and differentiate, a thousand clones of Himself grown in a thousand puddles of warm, salty water.
Each clone receives injections of memories and dreams.
While maturing, each baby is given the same powerful tools that have made His life such a perfect pleasure.
At some point, even The Divine One is uncertain who is the original among the Thousand and One. He is just another captain of a starship, His destination set, eyes forward. Their destinations are the thousand and one closest suns. The exhaust from so many great engines boils the Earth to a bubbling cherry-colored slag. But He pretends not to notice. Only the slaves look back at the dead world. They are checking the plasma flows, they claim. And none of them weep. They know better than to grieve. Weep, and die. That is His rule. The Earth was just a temporary island of rock and metal, they tell themselves, and it just happens to be gone, while in a multitude of other realms, it lives on.
This breeds hope, that idea of undiluted possibility.
For slaves, the little gray ocean remains a promise—their only tangible sign that no existence, no matter how awful and how wicked, has any genuine importance at all.
“And then my cocoon split on its sky-side,” Josh reads aloud, “and what I saw first was my last skin smiling at me...”
He stops reading, setting down the butterfly book.
Teller watches him. A very old woman when this Earth discovered the Authority, her body has been regenerated by most means. But not everywhere. The bare breasts have a telltale sag, and the pubic hair is shot full of white. Perhaps because of these details, Teller seems both exotic and uniquely handsome. In every circumstance, she carries herself with a seamless confidence. Her smile is pleasant and wise, but distant, and it is the distance that often infuriates Josh. She knows something, he complains. Why won’t she tell him what she knows?
“The creature is looking at her last skin,” she offers. “The skin she was wearing before her pupae stage.”
“I figured as much,” he replies, attempting to laugh.
The alien is a much more complex species than humans. In one incarnation, she possessed a human’s body and mind. Then she slept and grew, the human-like genes falling asleep too, a stew of new genes transforming her into something infinitely more marvelous.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Josh complains.
“Like what?”
“So different. So...bizarre...”
Deep eyes grow even more distant. What won’t she tell him?
“It doesn’t pick at random,” he says. “I’ve known that for years. Everybody knows it.”
“Who doesn’t pick at random?”
Josh won’t say the name. The Authority. Instead, he shakes his head, asking, “Why? Did it show me this because I just tried to kill myself?”
She watches him.
“Or because you were there with me, maybe?”
Then her eyes lift higher. “I don’t know,” she responds, her voice quiet, nothing deceitful in its tone or her expression. “If either of those things played a role in its choice, I can’t say.”
He jumps on one word. “Choice,” he repeats. “So you know that it does. Choose, I mean.”
She shrugs, pulling her strong young legs against her sagging breasts. “You haven’t told me,” she mentions. “What do you really think about this strange woman?”
Josh has read the butterfly diary at least a dozen times, and there have been little moments when he almost feels that he understands what the creature wrote. Not in words, but she wrote them as scents. As pheromones. Yet despite the damage done by translations and the pervading alienness to every portion of this text, Josh feels an eerie sense that he already knows this Other. Understands her, even. That she is his friend, or some distant sister. Or she is the lover sitting in his own bed, watching him with her own secret gaze.
He closes the book and places it back inside its cage.
In the corner of an eye, he sees a knowing grin. But her face goes blank when he looks straight at her.
Again, he says, “Thank you.”
As always, she asks, “For what?” Then she shrugs, laughing with tenderness. “Like I told you. You came that day looking so sad and desperate, and alone, and I wanted to help.”
“Did all of you come help
me?”
The question is ludicrous, and he knows it. What Josh wants is to hear her answer, and the tone of her voice.
“Only me,” she says.
Not true.
But then she touches his bare knee, and smiles, and asks, “Really now. How many more than one would be enough?”
I am wings tied about a soul which flies past the skin of the sky, and I am enormous, and sometimes I am sad...I miss my legs, my walk...in my dreams, I am small and ugly, and happy...in my dreams, the sky is unreachable, and the sky could not be more magnificent...
Almost as easily as you kill yourself, you murder whole worlds.
Fusion exchanges. Nanochine blooms. Conscious plagues, or simple kinetic blasts. Your methods of annihilation run the gamut from what is likely to the slightly less likely, and your reasons are pulled from the same bloody mix of excuses: Self-hatred. Self-pity. Self-righteous fury. Or some little accident happens to slip tragically out of hand.
Every moment, you kill too many worlds to count.
And within each of those brutal moments, a trillion times as many worlds continue to prosper, happy and fertile beneath a loving, well-loved sun.
After eons of uninterrupted exploration and conquest, The Divine One finally discovers an opponent with real muscle and heart. The world has Jupiter’s mass, oceans of acid sloshing against continents built of warm black iron. Its aliens are decidedly alien; their physiology, genetics, and basic morphology conform to an entirely different evolution. But they are organized, one leader at the helm and all the rest willingly enslaved. For thirty centuries, the war is a clash of equals. But The Divine One is quicker to adapt, and at least in this one reality, He finds one tiny critical advantage, and in a matter of hours, He manages to defeat and butcher the entire alien horde. Then alone, He descends. He finds His opponent, the once-great despot, hiding inside a steel temple, and with a thought, He kills the creature. Kills it and drains it of its strange white blood, and tosses the corpse over the far horizon. Then He sets out to explore the broad hallways and giant rooms of the temple, examining sculptures made from body parts and images of parades celebrating suffering and sacrifice. His enemy was remarkably similar to Him. Despite all of their profound differences, they were very much the same. Here lived a god in mortal clothes, and what if He had spared the creature? What if they had spoken? How much more would they have found in common?
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