Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  “I should have stayed at Chueh’s and listened to him,” he said half to himself. “If I hadn’t been so pigheaded…” He stopped. Beating himself up wasn’t going to change anything. “Where’s Roger now?” he asked.

  “He and Diana left for the Nevada Quarantine four days ago,” Doc said.

  47

  The King of the Dead

  “Four days! How long have I been here?” Harry asked.

  “The mermen brought you in two days ago.”

  “And Diana left for Las Vegas four days ago?” Harry shook his head in disbelief. “Is everybody crazy? You told me the wolves moved the whole Nevada Quarantine out of our universe. How does she expect to get in? Even if she does, it’s a suicide mission!”

  He sat up and stared angrily at Jericho. “How could you let her go? You knew what she was getting into!” he said, turning his remorse and despair into an angry denunciation of the old man for letting her go and of himself for not staying to help her.

  “There was no way I could stop her,” Jericho said. “She’s a Jaganmatri Valkyrie, Harry. They can usually take care of themselves. She waited for you though, despite everything. Even after the monitor on your ka flat-lined that night, she waited. But by morning, when there was no word, she and Roger figured there was no reason to wait any longer.”

  “But didn’t Chueh tell you what happened?” Harry asked. “His people found me alive that night.”

  “Chueh was having his own problems,” Doc pointed out. “Communications weren’t that great. All hell was breaking out down in the Sinks. When he went in to get you out, the Seraphim and the wolves hit him hard.”

  Doc reached into a pocket and pulled out some kind of medallion on a silver chain. “His intelligence agents have been warning him for months about a new messiah uniting the Seraphim.” He handed the medallion to Harry. It was the Seraphim double-bladed cross like the one he had seen down in the Sinks seven years ago. The only difference was the gun sight circle was replaced by a triangle with a growling wolf’s head nailed to the center. Harry felt his hackles rise and a low, animal growl start deep in his throat as he stared at the medallion that combined the two worst nightmares of his life.

  “Are you all right?” Doc asked.

  “Yeah, copacetic,” Harry said with a crooked, unconvincing grin. He nodded at the medallion. “I guess we know who their new messiah is.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t only New Hollywood types that got to try black ice,” Doc said. “The Norma-genes and their Anubis wolf allies have been busy down in the Sinks. They made sure the Seraphim leadership got the first taste of paradise. After the wolves got control of the leadership, they spread the good news.

  “They didn’t need to take possession of the Seraphim rank and file. It was enough just to give them a taste of what the wolf temples offer, a night or two of paradise, running with their new god, raping, killing, fulfilling every bestial desire as the biggest meanest predators on the planet. After that there was no stopping them. The Slavers, the renegade Tongs, and all the rest of the sink rats got a taste too. Now, they’re all true believers united under the wolf’s head banner.

  “Paradise was within reach and anyone who dies as a martyr to the new messiah gets their ka gathered up by the Anubis wolves and taken to their world to live forever, fulfilling every animal desire. They’re told that they will be rulers of paradise with the kas of their slain enemies to serve them as slaves for all eternity.”

  “It sounds like they borrowed a page or two from the old Koran,” Harry said.

  “It’s an even more effective witch’s brew today than it was a thousand years ago,” Jericho said. “The martyrs today have already had a taste of paradise to wet their appetites. It’s turned a squabbling configuration of Seraphim, Slavers and Tong thugs into a fanatical army of martyrs.

  “Unfortunately, Chueh’s intelligence hadn’t prepared him for anything of this magnitude, especially when the wolves showed up in their crystal warships and began turning his army to dust and shutting down the grav-units on his battlewagons. He lost so many soldiers that first night that he was forced to call in all his markers from the other Tong Godfathers.

  “It didn’t take much to convince them, though. The Tongs have had an uneasy truce with the Sinks for years. The deal was the Sinks keep out of New Hollywood and the Tongs keep out of the Sinks. Black ice has been straining that truce for months. Once the other Tong Godfathers realized what was really going on and what it would do to business, they put all their forces at Chueh’s disposal. Nobody wanted religious fanatics running amok with something like black ice and the Anubis wolves pulling the strings. Even with the support of all the Tongs, Chueh had a full blown war on his hands, and it was getting nasty.

  “The Seraphim holy warriors proved all but unstoppable. They came in waves and fought like berserkers and were unafraid of death because they had their living gods fighting beside them. These seven foot tall, black, wolf-headed deities rode in on crystal warships, unlike anything we’d ever seen, and they carried weapons that could shut down grav-units and bring down a fleet of battle-junks in seconds. On top of that, they’ve got blue death rays that strip a man to the bone in seconds. You can’t hide from them; they penetrate solid walls and spider-spin armor. In less than twenty-four hours, Chueh and the Tongs lost over seventy percent of their troops and half their fleet to the Seraphim.”

  Harry had an instantaneous memory flashback. “I think I once saw a weapon like that strip a man to the bone,” he said in surprise. “It was out on the astral plane.”

  “On the astral plane?” Jericho asked uncertainly.

  “No, not exactly out on that astral plane,” Harry shook his head as if to shake the memory free. “I think I followed the wolves back to their home world, and I…”

  “You what!” Jericho said. Then he raised his hand. “Stop, just a minute and go back and tell me exactly what happened,” he said with barely repressed excitement.

  Harry eyed him curiously. “What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that no one knows where the Anubis wolves come from,” Jericho said. “It’s their most closely guarded secret. It’s why Isis risked her life to steal a Pathfinder. It’s…Just tell me what you saw,” he said impatiently.

  Harry felt like a poker player who had just been dealt four aces. “And Diana has the Pathfinder now?” Harry said.

  “Yeah, so what?” Jericho said irritably.

  “Is she going to use it to try to go there?”

  “Go where?”

  “The Anubis home world, of course.”

  Jericho looked at him in momentary confusion and shook his head. “No, why would she go there?”

  “So where is she going with it?”

  “I told you, Las Vegas to try to rescue her sister.”

  “And she needs the Pathfinder to get her there, is that it?” Harry asked.

  “Ah!” Jericho nodded as he suddenly realized what the game was all about and nodded reluctant acceptance. “Yes, she’s going to use the Pathfinder to try to get to Las Vegas,” he admitted.

  “And?” Harry prompted.

  “And to do that she has to get to a place that her father found years ago,” Jericho said reluctantly. “A kind of interface with all possible dimensions and worlds of the quantum field.”

  “Like one of those power points that shamans talk about, where the wall between worlds is thinned out?” Harry suggested.

  “Exactly,” Jericho said and Harry heard the relief in his voice and knew he was lying, but before he could do anything about it, his mind began opening up like an origami Pandora’s box, releasing a host of repressed memories. They rushed up and swarmed around him, a multitude of accusing ghosts that would no longer be denied. An instant later, he came face to face with the King of the Dead. “No-o-o-o!” he screamed and buried his face in his hands. “What have I done!”

  Jericho reached out instinctively. “What is it, Harry?” he asked and laid a comforting hand o
n his shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me!” Harry screamed. “Keep away!” His voice rose to a hurricane roar. It filled the stadium and shook the heavens. Birds rose from the surrounding trees, flapping and screeching in fear, and the distant laughing voices of the mermaids and their children fell into cowering silence.

  Jericho stumbled back and fell into his chair. The storm he was expecting had finally come, and he was terrified at what it brought with it. No human voice could have made such a sound. It was like the cry of a crucified god.

  Harry raised his head, his face a mask of ecstasy and despair. He seemed to look right through the old man, out past the distant walls of the stadium, and into a hidden place of terrible wonders; and his eyes burned with the cold, blue fire of that place. “So much power, so many chances to fail,” he muttered to himself. “So many worlds to die.”

  All the hairline scars that covered his body began to glow like the coils on a toaster. His face became an eerie mask of glowing dendritic scars as if his blood was on fire. The fire went from cherry red to the intense blue-white of an exploding star. Harry opened his mouth to scream again and all the scars in his body split open in a blinding burst of energy.

  Jericho squeezed his eyes shut and turned away until the flashbulb afterimages burned into his retinas disappeared. When he turned back to look, all the hairline scars had closed into a circuitry of softly glowing filaments, and Harry was surrounded by a shimmering blue-white aura. Like the halos around saints in ancient icons, Jericho thought. “Harry, can you hear me?” he asked, not daring to touch him again, not even daring to move. “Are you all right?” he asked fearfully.

  Slowly, Harry turned. His eyes still burned with that cold blue fire. Instinctively, Jericho tried to look away, but it was too late. His eyes snagged on that fey light and instantly it blew his doors of perception wide open and unhinged his mind. He looked into an infinity of possible and impossible universes; of myriad worlds being born and dying, of space-time eternally folding in on itself through countless dimensions and, overlaying it all, were the branching lines of infinite probability that were also the branching lines of his own nervous system. “Too much! Too much!” he moaned as his old Darwinian monkey mind began chittering and screeching with terror, and all he wanted to do was curl up in a ball and bury his face in his crotch.

  After an eternity that was no time at all, the vision passed, leaving Jericho dazed and shaken. He looked around the ruined stadium, across the lagoon and up at the sky, trying to fit the broken pieces of reality together again, to make the world make sense again. He looked everywhere except at Harry.

  “Have you ever thought about how terrible it is to be a god?” Harry asked, and the pain and despair in his voice touched Jericho’s guilty heart and drew his gaze back. The aura of power that surrounded Harry had disappeared, the hairline scars no longer glowed, and only a faint residue of fey light still flickered in his eyes, but he looked like he had aged fifty years.

  Jericho avoided those eyes with guilty self-reproach. What’s done is done, he thought, it can’t be undone. He looked up past Harry to the collapsed, overgrown stadium bleachers and the blue sky filled with fat, white cumulus clouds like cotton candy.

  “The mermen, who brought you in, treated you like some kind of holy, religious relic,” he said at last. “They claimed you worked miracles. They swore that when the Seraphim ambushed them down in the Sinks and S-s-sarge was killed, you suddenly woke from the dead and stood on the water in a halo of light and called all the mermen to you. The Seraphim were shooting from everywhere and not a bullet, particle beam, or laser ray touched you or the mermen gathered around you.”

  Harry cocked his head and listened intently.

  “They say you raised your arm and pointed at the Seraphim,” Jericho said, “and your whole body cracked open and an expanding bubble of light poured out of the cracks and behind the light came an army of gods and demons, pushing the bubble before them and wherever they went, the earth and sea, the ruins of the city, the ships and the Seraphim were all wiped away as if they had never been.

  “When there were no more Seraphim left, you called your army of gods and demons back into you, and you and your mermen were left on the floor of the seabed, in the center of a vast empty crater, surrounded by a bubble of light that sliced through the surrounding ruins and held back the waters. Then, you dropped your arm and the bubble collapsed and the sea rushed back into the crater. Later, the mermen found you floating as if dead on the water.”

  Jericho paused and looked at Harry. He sat perfectly still, his head cocked, his eyes hooded as if he was listening to something only he could hear.

  Jericho shivered. “They took your body with them,” he went on doggedly. “And the next day they were attacked again, this time by the crystal gunships and a battle cruisers of the Anubis wolves, and the same thing happened. You came back to life and not a ship or wolf survived.

  “I’ve seen the aerial reconnaissance of both areas,” Jericho said. “It looks like ground-zero, a perfect circle of destruction. Everything within a two hundred-yard radius has been scoured away and a six hundred foot deep water-filled crater is all that’s left. There’s no sign of the buildings, bodies, or ships that were there. It’s as if they’ve all been erased.”

  He risked another glance at Harry. Except for the faint flicker of weirding light in his eyes, he could have been carved out of stone. “It’s hard to imagine what could have done that, son,” Jericho said gently, nudging Harry towards the truth.

  Harry said nothing.

  “The mermen say you were burned to death and buried in the bottom of the sea when they first found you. That you came to life, that they saw new skin growing out beneath third degree charred blisters. They say later the blisters sloughed off like an old snakeskin and even your hair grew back overnight.”

  Harry reached up and touched his face. It felt like it had always felt. He looked closely at the back of his hands. He could just make out a pattern of branching scar-like lines, so fine he might not have noticed if he hadn’t been looking.

  “Yeah.” Jericho nodded. “Those scars are the real miracle. I’ve never seen anything quite like them,” he lied. “But the back of your head is completely healed,” he went on hurriedly, “not a scar in sight except for those, whatever they are, and no brain damage that we know of. The mermen say they watched the bone splinters being pushed out of your brain pan as the skull grew back and the wound healed. They say that the medivac monitor went nuts.”

  Jericho looked at Harry and tried to keep his guilt and remorse from showing. It was too late for guilt and remorse anyway, he told himself. Too late, too late, he repeated it like a mantra. “I think you’ve become what the Anubis wolves feared you would become,” he said at last.

  “The King of the Dead,” Harry said tonelessly.

  48

  Eater of Universes

  “I think I understand now why the Anubis wolves wanted you badly enough to start a war down in the Sinks,” Jericho said and risked looking Harry in the eye. The weirding light was gone and a flush of youthful vigor was returning to his face. “But what exactly happened to you down there, Harry?”

  “You should know. You told me the monitor on my ka flat-lined,” Harry said. “I felt the umbilical connecting my body to my ka snap, and the standing waves of probability that had been my life began collapsing into the white light of death. They should have swept my ka along with them, only they didn’t, because I turned away.”

  “Impossible!” Jericho said although he knew better and wondered if it wasn’t time to tell Harry so. He rejected the thought almost at once. Too much was at stake, and even a little knowledge at the wrong time could tip the scales of probability he was so carefully trying to balance. “How did you do it, my boy?” he asked instead.

  “I don’t know,” Harry said. “It was like the first time I learned to die. I don’t know how I did it or how I learned to do it. I just did it, like jumping off a cli
ff and wanting to fly. Wanting is everything. If you want it enough, want it from the level of your ka, you can do anything, even change your destiny, even the destiny of your universe, but there’s a price. There’s always a price,” he added darkly.

  Jericho shifted uncomfortably but said nothing.

  “I didn’t know that then,” Harry said. “Maybe if I had…” His lips twisted into a bitter smile of lost innocence. “Maybes and might-have-beens, huh, Doc?” he said and waved them away. “Anyway, I didn’t know, and I really didn’t have a choice. I was going to die. I’d done all I could, but the probabilities in that universe were all stacked against me.

  “I should have died down there in the Sinks. I was fated to die there, but I knew that if I did, the wolves would be waiting for me with their final solution to the King of the Dead problem. They’d eat my ka. There would be no escaping them this time. There would be no rebirth in the light of the Goddess or in the spin-generators of Eternal Life. There would be nothing left of me, nothing forever.”

  He looked at Jericho, pleading for understanding. “You see, I really didn’t have a choice,” he said. He didn’t tell Jericho the other reason for his choice, perhaps the most important reason. It was none of the old man’s business that it was love for Diana that finally tipped the scale from nothingness to life.

  “What did you expect to find out there?” Jericho asked.

  “Life, the power to bend my destiny and change the direction of the universe, but I didn’t realize that last thing was part of the deal. I should have though. I was trying to play god. The only problem with trying to play god is you’re cursed to become one.

  “You see, in order to perform this…miracle,” Harry said spreading his arms wide to emphasize his healed body. “I destroyed a universe.” He looked at Jericho and his eyes were like two black holes punched through his face.