Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Josh took out another case, bent over Webster’s body, thrust down with his hypodermic. “Better do this, even though he’s out. What did that to him? I didn’t get nowhere near him with the needle. Well, this’ll slow him down, and then the second one’ll freeze his mind, make it stop thinking.”

  The four young men helping Josh were four dream images, haloed in prismed light, glittering, recognizable as men for all their dizzying splendor, though men permeated by the immaterial, the ineffable.

  “You’re Emilia’s sons?” Carolyn asked, her voice coming as from somewhere else, a long time ago. Emilia had promised to send them, and here they were.

  They nodded. One replied, “We got the cousins, too. Josh said maybe we need an army.”

  The voices were only human, but the effulgence shivered by the sound was more than that. Each word they spoke traced itself in a coruscation of violet light upon the substance that held them. Forces blossomed, energy became concrete, a presence moved upon them, something larger than the room it occupied.

  Josh patted his pockets, started for the door. “I’ll go get the truck. You get the clothes off them.”

  He went out and Teo’s kinsmen finished stripping the lax bodies, piling the clothes to one side, suit coats, shirts, ties, trousers, socks, but, with a glance at the women, leaving the shorts on the bodies. The inane courtesy of it made her want to shout with immense laughter, but she could not. She was as incapable of laughter as she was of movement. Something possessed her, held her, cradled her, leaving only a tiny space around her. If it had not given her that tiny space, she would have been unable to stand, to breathe, to keep her own heart beating. If it had not allowed her that space, she would have been compressed into nothingness.

  The truck came into the driveway, swerved, and backed toward the kitchen door. One of Emilia’s sons opened the door, and through it Carolyn could see Josh raising the back of the truck to disclose the racks there: eight pods, racked two high, four against each wall.

  Josh beckoned to Teo’s brothers, who leaped up beside him. “Open the four bottom ones,” he said. “I started the cycle before I left. They should be awake, or almost. Drag ’em out of there if they’re not.”

  Two were awake. Two were not. One of the awake ones was Teo, though he looked like a dishrag. All four were lifted out and gently carried toward Fidel and Arturo’s house.

  “That’s Teo,” said Josh unnecessarily. “And some other guys didn’t belong in there.”

  Aggie said, from the far side of the universe, “They don’t have any clothes.”

  “Clothes in the grocery sacks the boys brought,” he said. “The boys’ll get ’em dressed.”

  Two of the young men came back to help Josh carry bodies to the truck, strip off the shorts, and lift them in. Naked and unconscious, they didn’t look like devils. They looked like men. That was the trouble with devils, Carolyn thought. Too often they looked like men.

  They took Keepe first, then Martin, and then Jagger, each more slowly, as though they waded through curdled space and time. When Jagger was carried out, both space and time solidified. The room closed behind him. No way out was left. Outside, all motion stopped, no leaf moved. Through the door they could see Josh standing frozen, one leg halfway into the truck, and beyond him a tree bent in the wind, unmoving, also frozen.

  Inside the room a presence seethed in every direction, light shattered as the space that held them was first vacated, then stretched. A chill music fell upon the bubble they stood within, coming from cavernous elsewhere, immensity stretching unseen on every side, all sensation centered at the body lying on the floor:

  Webster. Left all alone on the kitchen floor while they stared down at the images wavering and changing, flowing like water, becoming a mirror that showed to each her own icon.…

  Bettiann saw her own face, her own body. Perfect. Her body was sylphlike, desirable, so lovely that it moved even her to passion. Heat bathed her, her lungs labored, panting. Here was what she really was! What she had always sought to be. Truly beautiful. Forever beautiful!

  Carolyn saw herself as a perfect Crespin woman, surrounded by her children, poised, smiling gently, the perfect mother, the perfect wife. This was what she was, what she really was. She needn’t have felt guilty anymore about letting the family down. She smiled up into Albert’s face, happy in the knowledge she was exactly what the family wanted!

  Aggie saw herself—pure, sexless, angelic, the white edges of her veil blown behind her like wings, the archbishop bending forward, putting his hand on her forehead, and saying, “You are a living rule, Reverend Mother. You have become a perfect nun.…”

  Ophy was holding her baby, the other little ones tugging at her skirt, while her father beamed his approval. Oh, it felt so good to have given up being a doctor. Better by far to be a mother, a wife, to make her menfolk comfortable. Jessamine was preparing a Thanksgiving feast for her parents, and for Patrick, and for her son. Oh, it felt so good to have given up being a scientist. Better by far …

  Faye felt a sexual lure like a hook set into her flesh, drawing her. Looking down into Webster’s face, she saw an image of herself, saw the face change, become like her own, infinitely seductive, but male. Herself, but a self that would control her, take care of her.…

  “You see,” he whispered to them. “You see. Everything you really need is here. What woman needs and really wants. Not all that nonsense about freedom, or rights. No. Your true nature is here, right here.…”

  They were all moving toward him when his eyes snapped open. They were red, like the smallest borehole of a volcano, a fiery hotness that ran from this room in this place, away to the center of the earth and from there into forever.

  Awareness came into his eyes. His face moved. His lips curved into a dreadful smile. His hand reached out, summoning, pointing, directing, and they saw what he moved.…

  Afar, in city after city, the marching men came upon their quarry at last. A great shout went up from a hundred thousand throats. The old women were silent, only waiting.

  Afar, in city after city, men cried out their rage.

  You, they cried. You witches, you sperm stealers who would put the goddess in place of the God I have built in my own image! You vessels of sin, you imperfect creation, you faulty, you foul, you impure. You broads, bimbos, bitches. You evil mothers, conniving sisters, you castrating wives who never bowed down to me as you should. You …

  Webster sat up. Carolyn couldn’t see him clearly. He was blurred. The air in front of him wavered, like heat waves rising from pavement. His glance swept around the kitchen, and, touched by that glance, the women seemed to stop breathing.

  Carolyn felt a breath in her ear, felt an arm slide around her in a silken caress, embracing her, interposing itself, deflecting Webster’s gaze. The searchlight glance swerved around her harmlessly through space that was somehow compressed. Light bent and split into prisms; positions shifted; people warped and elongated, as though seen through a wobbly lens, but she went on thinking, moving, sweating. She felt the drops running down her back, down her neck and cheeks from under her hair. For a moment she saw him clearly. He was the same man she had seen forty-one years ago. No matter this robe of cloud and storm, he was the same.

  He got to his feet, raising his hand like a conductor. It almost could have held a baton.

  Afar, in city after city, men howled their rage.

  But afar, in city after city, “Hush,” said the old women, as with one voice, making one great wave of sound that rushed and frothed across the sands of time and space: Hush, hush, hush.

  “Hush,” said Aggie, Bettiann, and Carolyn. “Hush,” said Ophy, and Jessamine, and Faye.

  “Hush,” said another voice, full of laughter. Sophy’s voice.

  It was Lolly’s body that moved, but it was Sophy who was there, the person well-known and loved, the sound, feeling, smell of her, the presence of her, dressed in her old, sloppy clothes, her hair pulled into an ugly bun, her hand reaching
out to touch him. Carolyn wanted to cry out, Beware, Sophy. Get away. He’ll destroy you, Sophy. This is your enemy, this is the one who had been seeking you. Oh, Sophy, Sophy, take care.

  She could not make a sound. There wasn’t room for the smallest movement, no room for lips to twitch or eyes to blink. All space not occupied by their bodies was filled with something besides Sophy, something vastly larger than she: a warmth like hearth fires, a flowing like a hot tide, like an endless river of sustaining blood, a flowing not around, but through, a permeation.…

  Sophy’s fingertips, Lolly’s fingertips, gently stroked the lids of those fiery eyes; the heel of Sophy’s hand reached up to press his mighty horned brow; but it was some other power than Sophy’s that flowed through those fingers. Time stopped. The red eyes blinked, staring upward, awed perhaps, certainly surprised at what they saw, maybe even terrified, for Webster’s dreadful mouth opened, and he said, “You.”

  “You,” whispered the men in their myriads. “You …”

  Only that one word. Every muscle of his body writhed beneath his skin, but he could not move, no more than Carolyn could. There was no room for him to move.

  “You are dominion,” said a voice that was not Sophy’s voice, a voice Sophy’s had only hinted at occasionally. A Gorgon’s voice, a voice of adamant, a voice that was also the voice of millions, old women, old voices, wise with age and the androgyny of time, the Goddess’s voice. “You are dominance. You are lust and terror. You are pain and persecution. From the beginning you have been our enemy. My daughters of all worlds and I, we have summoned you on this holy ground. Here brute and here bane, and here we stand, sisters, to claim this victory.”

  Carolyn was choking on her own breath, listening. There was something coming, like a volcano or a wind or a towering wave; something immaterial, monstrous, marvelous, a thunder of wings, a mountain of water, something formless from distances unimaginable. For a moment she was filled with ecstasy, a luminous presence, a wondrous in-habitation; for a moment she knew … oh, the things she knew that she had no words to describe. There were aureoles of light, enormous voices calling greetings across an eternity of time, a crying of choirs aloft, a name! A name cried out by every voice in the universe, by every creature who had a voice to cry.

  And for an instant Carolyn saw them as they were, Sophia and him: she scaled with rainbows, shining with the light of the primal dawn; he as he was, the star swimmer, the feaster upon souls, the monster who takes the form of his prey, the shadow, the amorphous presence defined by what it consumes. They saw him for only a moment, a man-shaped hole in the fabric of being, black and sucking, grasping, eating, gulping. In the next moment he receded from before them. They felt him going inward, swiftly and more swiftly still, with a long, horrified whine, like a bullet shot from a gun into unfathomable chasms, the fabric of him stretching from outside to inside, from the eyes and brain of the body he occupied into the very substance of that body. They felt something break, a snapping, like one quick shock of earthquake with no following tremor but only a whispering sigh as of gravel falling or dust sifting, a filling in. His body remained, and he within it, but he was no longer connected to this time, this place, to any time, any place. He was a singularity, a tininess, spinning upon itself inside that body, caught there forever, immortal, unable to escape.

  In city after city, the drums stopped beating. Men stumbled, then turned to one another, confused. They rubbed their foreheads fretfully, trying to remember why they were where they were, why in this company? Why at this time? Muttering, they wandered off in any direction, forgetting that they didn’t know why they had come.

  In the kitchen there was one moment more while the Goddess breathed them in and out. Then the marvelous inhabitant withdrew, pouring away as a tide pours from the beaches out into the sea, leaving behind only the memory of permeation, the anticipation of return. Still, Sophy was there, herself, looking into Carolyn’s face, reaching out to her. “I have not finished, Carolyn.”

  “Oh, Sophy. We’ve missed you.”

  “And I you, love, all you loves. Listen. The bubble that holds us will not last. I must tell you now, quickly, before it breaks. See the lights, my friends. See them, here, in my hand.”

  She spread her hand. It seemed to them that she held on her palm a fragment of rainbow, a shard thrown by a prism, red, yellow, green, blue, and a violet so dark it was almost black.

  “Look,” Sophy said, turning to the others. “See.”

  All of them saw.

  “Listen,” said Sophy. “Listen carefully.

  “These lights are given me by Sophia. We have done what we have done to save you; still, we have done it without your consent. We have shut a certain door, closed a certain gate, but life demands you must have the means to open that gate. Just as you were changed, so you may be changed again:

  “You yourselves must choose the ground on which you will stand, never to decline or fall from that place. If you choose the ruby light, then in all future time only pairs mated for life will breed once in a decade. A woman may have one child or two. Rarely, three. Never more than that. Your numbers will fit themselves into the wholeness of life. There will be room for other life than yours and better perception than now. Do you understand?”

  They nodded, all of them. It was the only motion in the universe.

  “If you choose the topaz light, you will become like us, parthenogenetic, mothers and daughters, with a few males born only each eighth or ninth generation.”

  Carolyn swallowed deeply, thinking of Hal. And Luce. Ophy shook her head, rejecting; but Faye whispered, ah …

  “There is an advantage to our way. Where men are many, they fall easy prey to creatures like Webster. And where there are only women, you need only half as many. Do you understand?”

  They did. More than her words was being conveyed. They saw what she meant.

  “If you choose the emerald light, all will be with you as it was before, except that no woman will ever conceive unless she chooses to conceive, unless she is ready in mind and body and heart and has chosen so over long and careful time. No pregnancy can be forced upon any woman. If this light is chosen, no woman would say, ‘Be it done unto me.’ Each woman would have to say, ‘I want this for myself.’ ”

  There was quiet. Outside the door Josh stood halfway into the truck. On the trees the leaves were still.

  “If you choose the sapphire, you will return to your former nature except in one regard. Men and women will mature quickly, almost overnight, but not for thirty years. Some creatures take that long to mature; it is not a great change. Think of a long and lovely childhood, a long and lovely youth in which to learn and travel and work, learning of oneself and of the world, followed only then by a brief reproductive maturity. Think of a life with no adolescence, a life in which only the mature may bear. Do you understand?”

  They nodded, understanding.

  “And last, if you choose this lapis light, you will be as you were, your world will be as it has always been. Remember the stories you have told me of yourselves, remember the stories I have told you of others. Remind yourselves how your world has always been. Much was His fault, but as much was not.”

  They were silent. Sophy moved swiftly, to each of them, one at a time, giving a kiss, a caress, bending to touch her cheek to theirs. Good-bye to Carolyn and Faye, to Ophy and Jessamine, to Bettiann. And last to Agnes, holding her close, closer than she had ever held her when they had been girls together.

  “Good-bye, Agnes. You see. I am not a devil.”

  “Don’t go!” she cried.

  “I have gone.” Sophy smiled, an expression of such radiant joy that Agnes blinked before it. “I have already gone.” And she gestured, the movement of her hand encompassing all that had happened, all that was being accomplished. “Don’t be afraid, Aggie. It’s all right. It isn’t a sin to be wise.…”

  Afar, in city after city, the old women went away, by ones and twos, invisible.

  And Sop
hy was indeed gone, leaving Lolly slumped on the floor, quite limp, her chest rising and falling only a little. Carolyn’s eyes squeezed shut. When she opened them a moment later, she stood in her own kitchen. Through tear-spangled light she saw once again a small, useful space ending at the walls. The herb garden sat quietly on the windowsill. Webster’s body lay quietly, relaxed, eyes shut. Faye and Ophy were against the far wall, as was Jessamine. Bettiann was just inside the door. Aggie knelt beside Lolly, with her arms protectively around the girl. All of them gasped for breath, as though they had not breathed for a long time. Carolyn tried to tell herself she had imagined it. She was very tired, stressed—she had imagined it.

  As she might have done, except for the five small vials that sat on the kitchen counter, fragments of rainbow, self-illumined, ruby and topaz, emerald and sapphire—and that one of livid light, lapis made effulgent to glow with a hard, aching heat, like a bruise. Carolyn picked them up, reading the label on each. “Choose. Decant into Sophia’s chalice. All will be as you have chosen.”

  So. She hadn’t imagined any of it. Even thinking so was a betrayal. She had imagined none of it. It was all real.

  “What did she leave us?” Ophy asked.

  Carolyn gave her the vials, and from her hand they went the round, returning to Carolyn, who put them into her jacket pocket.

  Josh came in, seeing nothing unusual, unaware of any happening beyond what he had planned. Carolyn managed to remind him of the second shot for Webster, though she thought to herself it probably wasn’t needed. Then the young men came to carry Webster outside while the women stumbled after them, watching while they loaded him into the last empty pod and closed the heavy lid upon him. Josh went from pod to pod, referring to a card he held in his left hand while he pushed buttons with his right, waiting, frowning intently until each little green light came on. When the last one shone, he nodded in satisfaction, then came down to close, lock, and seal the door. The boys went back into the kitchen, gathered up the scattered clothing, and departed.