1 / Quantum Mutata
Eternals! I hear your call gladly.
Dictate swift winged words & fear not
To unfold your dark visions of torment.
—William Blake
Thrushcross watched the birth of his father.
As the unclad body was borne upward out of the long-term nutrient bath, Thrushcross selected fitting responses from his repertoire of sensitivities. His face softened into attentive radiance; feelings of joyous love blossomed within him, moistening his eyes, settling him into a blissful acceptance of the event.
The moments of caring passed slowly. His thoughts followed a prayer of understanding. It entered his mind as he watched the crystalline liquid fall from the suspended body. Death once gave renewal. We die by degrees, discarding memories, keeping what we please of ourselves. We renew our bodies without the sacrifice of death. We shape ourselves. We go on despite forgetfulness …
The frame was never to be forgotten. To receive its meanings was the only prayer permitted by the circling illuminati, who maintained the frame of Earth.
Thrushcross’s feelings developed. He knelt down trembling before the raised form (to meditate further would result in the recording of special graces); pride, triumph, and delight filled his being.
These sensations had persisted in unconscious forms through the ages before the beginning of the game periods more than five thousand years ago. All life moments within the frame’s container were the work of planners and their descendants, the illuminati; their choices were his own.
The pulse of his life was his own creation from one moment to the next, unlike the crude, unchosen flow of experience known by the unchanged. The unchanged men, he thought, are such frail creatures—clinging to every powerless instant before melting back into nature, where death is the only way of summoning up new individuals.
Emerging from renewal, his father would live his next sequence as desperately as the unchanged still lived their struggle for mere survival.
The last words of the prayer entered him. Free actions and formless things shaping themselves into intense contrasts and varieties: a goal worthier than all others …
All this the planners had taught.
Droplets of remaining liquid glistened on his father’s body. The skin was smooth and hairless. The flesh was new; the brain and nervous system were new, yet retaining the vital past.
Thrushcross stood up behind the clear partition, anxious now to rejoin his own life. In the flow of time he would often impinge upon the sequence of a relative or known person. At times he would be older than his parents; at other times he would not know them. To intersect with recognition was rare. Thrushcross stood motionless as his father’s eyes opened to look at him across the centuries …
It was only half a recognition; the youthful green eyes did not know him. Thrushcross wondered suddenly why he had come to his father’s reanimation.
In the private time of his own sequence, Thrushcross sought colors in the void. His will reached into the cube’s black field and folded out a visible pattern from the spatial infrastructure.
A triangle of light.
The points glowed into stars.
Yellow. Orange. Red.
He relaxed his concentration and the field went blank. Why was it taking so long for the sequence to quicken? A pale shimmer of light marked his unease. His sudden lack of interest turned the cube’s inside a hopeless black, a space larger than everything outside it.
He looked around at the bare studio, got up, and went up the flight of stairs leading out into the alcove in the north corner of his living room.
Beams of light, focused by the giant lens of the picture window, crossed the green carpet. It was spring outside. Thrushcross stepped out of the alcove and walked through the streaming light into the center of the room. A soft wind fluttered the short grass in front of the house. The black road was a chasm running through the tall oaks, a section of night where no one traveled.
Thrushcross thought of the estates beyond the roadway, dwellings for two million persons around the world; behind each person lay the memories of countless lifetimes. How often had he lived through the stored sequences of others? Somewhere someone was now living one of his own forgotten lifetimes. Among the unchanged someone had died; another would certainly die tomorrow; and one would be born, to grow into self-awareness for the first time, with no promise of a past. He thought of Evelyn in her house down the road. She was waiting for him.
Thrushcross stood perfectly still, waiting for the sequence to quicken.
Slowly, the substance of darkness spilled out of the roadway and ate the spring day. Stars pierced the night.
He went up close to the picture window and peered outside. A wind rustled the tree near the house. By the light streaming out from the living room, he saw the leaves change color as the night wind turned them over; they relaxed, turned, fluttering like fingers plucking invisible harpstrings …
He turned back to the brightness of the living room. A vague fear constricted his chest, and he took a deep breath.
The lights went out. He looked around at the dark shapes of motionless furniture transformed suddenly into crouching beasts. The picture window was a cave mouth with a howling wind outside. The dull gong of the doorbell seemed to float up from his bowels.
He walked to the front entrance, turned the brass knob, and opened the door. No one.
But as he looked up, he thought he saw a black, shoulder-like silhouette obscuring the stars. The ground trembled slightly and he gripped the doorframe with both hands. The warm wind quickened its soughing through the oaks. A great figure of some kind had bent down to the house to ring the doorbell.
Thrushcross closed the door and went back into the living room. The lights slowly dimmed and flickered.
He looked around the living room, noticing how dusty it seemed to have become, as if years had passed in the few moments he had taken to check the front door.
He went to the picture window and saw that the eastern sky was filling with orange light and great low-lying cumulus clouds. Beams of light stabbed down onto the roadway.
He stepped back and sat down in the high-backed chair that faced the window. Feelings of concern for Evelyn stormed into him as he summoned the sight of his father’s eyes. Inertia imprisoned him in the chair as a desire to visit Evelyn seized him.
The orange light grew brighter, passing through the window like a threatening tide. He got up and forced himself to walk to the door. Opening the door seemed a slow process. He stepped outside.
The clouds drove quickly from the lighted east, staining the night sky. He turned around and saw the house lights blinking through the open doorway, as if a fire were raging inside.
Memories flickered just beyond recognition.
Urgently he turned from the house and ran down to the road. From there he looked back at the assembly of interconnected domes, in reality, globes set in the Earth; the windows flickered with white light, and the picture window suggested the eye of a giant. At any moment Central would activate the buried colossus and he would tear his way out of the ground, scattering dirt and rock around himself.
Thrushcross felt his body readying itself, preparing him for the dangers of the sequence. He walked into the center of the road and started to run toward Evelyn’s house. He slowed suddenly and continued in a fast walk, puzzled by the involuntary reversal.
He felt apprehensive as he walked. The road curved right and he saw the house, three interconnected pyramids with flattened apexes and triangular windows. The lights were blinking inside.
The wind was growing stronger; the clouds were darkening, creating enclaves in the orange expanse. There was a smell of flowers on the wind. Despite the rush of air in his ears, Thrushcross felt the stillness inside the house as he came up to the open front door.
He went insid
e, turned right, and entered the oval living room. Looking up through the skylight, he saw the ghastly heavens pressing down on the house. The orange light fell into the room like a fog, discoloring the red rug.
Her body lay in the center of the room, headless.
Thrushcross slowly became aware of a man standing in the far right corner of the room. He held Evelyn’s head by the hair. In the flickering light, Thrushcross saw that the intruder wore long black hair to the waist; his features were coarse, thick lips open in a sneer.
Catlike, the figure rushed him, knocking him down as it went past into the hall and out the front door. Fixed in Thrushcross’s mind was Evelyn’s face, eyes shut in sorrow, long red hair drawn tightly by the weight of the head. As he got up, Thrushcross could not decide which to do first—go after the head or attend to the body.
He ran outside, down to the road, and continued into the lighted east. The wind pressed him back, thickening the air into a barrier which struck him in the chest and face. Ahead of him, his mother’s head was a black ball swinging back and forth in the running shadow’s hand.
2 / Line of Darkness
“I believe the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systemize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.”
—SALVADOR DALI
The orange brilliance of the east was becoming a bright yellow. Thrushcross could no longer see the fleeing marauder. He slowed to a walk. His heart beat steadily, an acoustical sun at the center of his universe, sounding loudly over the rush of air in his ears.
The yellow glare swept toward him, dissolving all sight of road and horizon. Thrushcross stopped, turned around once, and lost all sense of direction. Dust rose from the ground around him.
He felt frustration and anger. Images of mutilation played in his brain. He pulled the arms and legs from the intruder’s body; he dug the eyes out of the head; ripped the tongue from its mouth; shattered the teeth with a stone. The mouth filled with blood, becoming a deep pool of thickening liquid.
He ran, legs working furiously, but they did not carry him out from the realm of yellow light. He tried another direction, and another, with no result.
He stopped and was still. He breathed, he saw, he heard the sound of his heart; but who was he? There was something he had to do—
—the moment of discontinuity passed. The light cleared and he saw a red plain ahead, dunes to his left and right. Overhead the sun was too bright to look at, a smear of white heat in a deep blue sky. A warm, dry blast of sand hit him; as he turned away he glanced back in the direction from which he had come—
—blackness where the cadmium sands ended, a wall of darkness at the edge of the world, as tall as the sky, right and left into the vanishing point. Its blackness seemed to be absorbing daylight, as if reality had been cut open here to reveal the night beyond.
He ran up a high dune to his left and looked away from the barrier. Heat waves rippled the image of a plateau. The view jiggled into clarity and he saw white cliffs.
Squinting, he noticed that something spiderlike was climbing up a portion of cliff face. The heat magnified and distorted the limbs, making them even more insectlike.
The fleeing figure reached the top and disappeared over the edge of the tableland. As he watched, Thrushcross noticed the faint images of two cloud-wrapped peaks standing far back on the plateau.
He turned again to the black wall. Its surface changed into a front of billowing storm clouds filled with silent lightning. He thought he heard an ocean, the crying of sea birds, beached fish flapping on the packed wet sand until the waves rushed in again to pull them out—
—and the clouds pulled themselves over the desert like a blanket of steel wool unrolling to the sound of grinding gears. Rain fell slowly, sorrowfully, with the rhythm of a rhyming verse.
The desert melted into brown mud. The sky was an inverted black floor pierced with small holes; right side up it would have been a fountain instead of a drain.
A yellow glow was trying to break out from behind the peaks on the plateau. The rain ran down the cliffs, staining them dark gray.
Thrushcross looked up into the raindrops, expecting that at any moment he would fall into the sky, to the surface below; but the setting remained the same, refusing to flip over according to his anticipation. Good, Good, he thought as the water washed his face. He waited.
The rain stopped, leaving small rivulets running away into the sand. A great creature had been slaughtered beyond the sky, and the desert was soaking up the fallen blood, reddening itself further. Heat mists rose from the sands, vapors swirling around Thrushcross, closing up space until he could not see five feet in any direction. He sat down on the wet sand and waited for the universe to open up again.
A crablike creature crawled out of the mists, a moving death’s head leading with a single claw. Thrushcross looked at it carefully as it jerked slowly forward on the loose sand, past him and back into the fog.
He stood up and saw that the mists now extended only as high as his waist. A giant, he had poked his head through the clouds and wondered why he could see only snowfields. The shallow mists floated gently over the sands, secure and lazy, as if waiting for the world to change beneath their cover.
Far away the cliffs floated on the whiteness. Beneath a bleached sky the twin peaks imprisoned an orange fire in their valley. Thrushcross thought of Evelyn’s head, consciousness scattered from behind its eyes, sparks wandering now in a starless waste of the unclaimed. I remember, I remember, he thought as he began to run slowly toward the plateau. Halfway there he quickened his pace; his eyes searched for a way up as he came close.
He saw a series of handholds cut into the white chalk wall. Inhaling white dust, he climbed, feeling the softness in his palms and fingers.
As he reached the edge and looked over across the tableland, a strange quiet drifted into him. Tall grass moved in a slow breeze. The two peaks dominated, casting sharply cut shadows across the grainlike plain of grass.
Thrushcross stepped over the edge with one knee, then the other. He stood up slowly, at peace. A permanence hung over the land, as if thoughts were draining out of the world, to come back, in time, as new physical objects for his appreciation.
As he began his walk to the mountains, he pictured a vast hollow area inside the plateau, a region of resonances, where thoughts and wishes aspired to musical utterance, where the dreams of all who lived within the frame of Earth were channeled into a mighty river running out of chaos into the reality of, for him, a green plain, unbroken blue sky, mountains, and the lure of what lay beyond. I remember, I remember, he thought again as he hurried.
Beyond the jungle of the valley ahead of him, the horizon was a blinding wall of light, its upward glow suffusing the blue sky. The rocky barrens of the mountain pass were behind him. Ahead, the Earth sloped downward into the tangled greenery.
The smell of corruption reached him on a sudden gust of wind, the whisper of a desperate messenger. The way became steeper, and he saw the swamp.
Here the forest’s knotty roots were met in vast networks of crotches, elbows, and open-fingered hands. Mist rose into the mass of leaf and vine overhead, but some of the glow from outside still filtered through, bathing the swamp in a bleak yellow. The vegetation seemed to breathe with an endless sadness, concealing a pathos which mocked profundity. The thought surprised and puzzled Thrushcross.
He came to the water’s edge, stopped for a moment, and tried to remember, then continued to his right along the sandy shore. A hundred feet ahead stood a tree, its drooping branches dipping into the stagnant water, weary limbs straining to lie down upon their own reflection.
Thrushcross walked closer and saw Evelyn’s head hanging on a branch like a rotting fruit. Her mouth was an open o, eyes closed to shut out the stroke of her attacker’s blade.
Thrushcross summoned a shudder; his body shook and he tasted sweat on his upper lip. Good, he thought. He searched for the intensity of fear, and found it coiled snakelike in his stomach.
Suddenly a spear of light left his mother’s mouth and lanced out across the green water, a hundred yards across the oily stillness, to a small encrusted island, to touch a shining slender metal shaft standing there on spidery undergear, pointing like a cathedral spire to the sickly yellow sky.
Thrushcross saw a dark figure step out from behind the tree. Evelyn’s murderer raised a spear and hurled it—
—directly into Thrushcross’s solar plexus. The jolt of penetration threw him back; his arms flew out as the message of pain traced out the complex circuit of his nervous system. His hands closed around the lance and pulled it out. The attacker drew a machete and reached Thrushcross in two leaps, swinging the blade in a whistling are[??] that caught him in the neck, throwing his head upward—
—he saw his trunk fall with hands still clutching the spear, felt the blood rush up after his head, pulse out from his heart. It took forever for the head to fall; he was suspended within an instant of time, buoyed up by the force of his denial. He tried to shout, but his sound shot out as a cord of light touched the spire point on the islet, and faded.
Below him, the blood from his body soaked into the sand.
He lay in a dream-filled night. The pain in his open neck vessels reached out after his severed head to lure it back. He felt no pain in his head. Liberated, it floated in the starry darkness, jealous of its freedom, wondering how it could ever have been part of the broken thing lying on the pallid sands below. An accident in the game sequence, was it possible?
The past came into his brain, comforting him with its age—
—his body agonized, welling blood—
—memories fell like stones into the mirror surface of an azure pool, creating circles of wave fronts drifting into the past—
—he was looking down into a valley of dying stars, glowing coals left over from the fire of a devouring creation. Time reversed itself and the stars flared up as if a sudden wind had breathed upon them—
In the Distance, and Ahead in Time Page 15
