Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  You know how to fight.

  I already tried that. Remember? It’s no good against these buffalos.

  No, the muted voice insisted. I held you back. Inadvertently. Remember, the strength went out of you during your fight. I finally figured out what happened. Your power was drained off by my shadow self. I can stop that.

  Why didn’t you stop it before? I wouldn’t be in this mess now.

  I was confused before Reena. The alien sounded like a peeved kid. This is all new to me, you know. Everything’s so scattered—so separate. Even me! My mind is broken into four parts—and I’m still discovering what’s what.

  You got it straight now? Dirk’s viscera trembled more with anger than fright. How could this being traverse light-years and yet blunder so stupidly? What can you do to get me out of this?

  Nothing. My range with you is purely cognitive.

  What about Jiang’s strength? I could use some of that.

  I can’t give you that. And I can’t give You Reena’s telepathy or Howard’s prescience. Those functions are as separately connected as width, depth, height, and time. That’s simply the way 5-space prisms in your universe. Nothing I can do about that.

  Great. Now what do I do?

  Fight.

  The car swerved into a turn, and Dirk pressed against Ipo. A smell like squashed gingko nuts soured the bulky mans aloha shirt. The car bumped over a rutted dirt road through curtains of palm fronds and fern boughs, and Dirk clutched the seat behind Chud to keep himself out of Ipo’s lap. His mind raced for escape. He had come around in time to look out the window before the turn and recognize the verdant cordillera above Kane’ohe Bay, and by that he knew he had been taken out to some desolate camp in the wilderness of the Ko’olau Range. Shouting and running were useless here. He would have to make a stand.

  On the floor of the car next to Dirk lay his duffel bag, clothes hanging out from Ipo’s search. Dirk let his hand fall into it, and he felt for the arc. It was still there, but the power had gone out of it. It felt flat and lifeless as a coin, and he let it go.

  When the last of the windshield-slapping branches burst aside, a green vista of mountains kneeling at the sea came into view. Dirk’s heart squelched: A black Mustang with two red hearts painted on the hood above the headlights was parked in front of an abandoned millpond shack. That was the Judas Boys’ wheels and meant there would be others to deal with.

  Chud swung the car to a stop under a wide-crowned monkeypod tree, and Ipo shouldered open his door. Dirk quickly surveyed the terrain: The shack occupied the back of a sawmill that had been abandoned a century ago. The cornerstone, cut free of vetch and cluttered with a collapsed pyramid of empty beer cans, displayed an engraved date: 1856. The cascade that had powered the mill etched into the greengrown cliff above a collapsed vine-woven hillock that was once a building. High up on the cliff, cars glinted by on the roadway that had diverted the stream and killed the mill. A giant gear, big as a Mayan calendar stone, leaned against one of the three standing walls of the shack. Downhill, a short way from the shack, the terrain curved through a couloir of hot green turf and scarlet-flowered shrubs before dropping into a hundred meter gush of emptiness.

  Ipo grabbed Dirk’s hair and dragged him out of the car. “Eat it,” he gruffed, throwing Dirk face-down to the ground. “Dats all you got now, toilethead. Dirt.”

  Gravel bit him and dust stung his eyes, and he slapped the earth with his forearms to break his skid. He lay still, hearing the car door slam and metal snick as Chud got out and a knife opened in his hand.

  “No!” a woman’s voice cried.

  Dirk looked up to see Lani standing in the doorway to the shack. In her lowcut green blouse, tight blue jeans, and open-toed spikes she looked weirdly displaced standing among the weed-ruck and sagging timbers.

  “Get back in dah cah an go from heah, Lani,” Ipo commanded.

  “He told me you were gonna kill him,” she said, stepping out of the shade into the sharp light.

  “Get in dah cah!” Ipo barked.

  “He’s goin’ with me,” she said and strode toward Dirk.

  The sight of Lani risking her life to help him anguished Dirk. He spit dust and rolled to his feet. Suddenly spilling with rage, the gritty dirt in his mouth the taste of his lifelong hurt, he wanted to lash out. His heart rocked grimly. Yet, he was afraid. His strength had faltered before. Could the alien prevent that now? What if he made a natural slip. They would kill him. He backed off a pace and stepped into Lani.

  “Come on, Dirk,” she said in a gray tone, mastering her fear. “We’re getting out of here.” She took Dirk’s hand and led him toward the Mustang.

  Chud took two strides and cut them off, the knife in his hand chromed with sunlight. Ipo stepped closer. “Let dah lady walk,” he told Dirk. “Dis stay our business.”

  To be is to gather from within, a thought, slimmer than a voice called to him. Inside you’re a fighter, he heard himself say. Your father trained you that way. It’s the way that killed him—but you, it will save.

  A laugh jumped out of him. His father was dead all right – and his mother walking dead. The only thing they’d given him was his body and a fury that fit it well. He let Lani’s hand go and stepped away from her. “Get behind the wheel, Lani,” he said quietly. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  In a sudden burst, Ipo lunged at him, wanting to tear him apart with his bare hands right in front of Lani’s eyes. Dirk watched him with a mordant lucidity, unmoving until the massive man was an inch from tackling him. With gravity’s complicity, he fell backward, kicked both heels of his western boots into Ipo’s midriff, and sent him flying over him into the dirt.

  Dirk somersaulted backward with the momentum of this collapse and came up behind Ipo. He jammed a boot heel into the back of the fallen man’s thick neck and viciously pressed his face into the earth.

  Behind him, Chud had rushed up, thrusting his knife in an upward swipe. Lani screamed as Dirk hopped aside and the blade slashed past his face. Dirk turned as if to flee, reversed into a roundhouse kick, and caught Chud squarely in the throat as he stepped into the blow. The impact dropped the bison-shouldered man and left him retching for air, spasming toward shock.

  Dirk picked up the dropped knife and turned around with it poised to jab when he heard Ipo charging him. Ipo’s hand flicked out faster than Dirk had guessed he could move and slapped the knife away. Dirk clutched his stung hand and retreated before the killer, dancing backward, surprised, staring at Ipo for a limp, a lapse, a way in. There was none.

  The ground sloped downward under Dirk, and he snapped a glance over his shoulder and faced a startling drop into a crag-spiked gorge. His strength coiled dizzily, rooting him to the spot. With grim intent, he fixed his gaze on Ipo’s hard stare and lowered his weight into his pelvis.

  Ipo did not charge as Dirk had hoped, and the youth swiftly changed his stance to strike instead of throw. The large man parried Dirk’s eye-gouging stabs and caught a groin-kick with a wrist block so solid he flung Dirk backward. The boy bounced over the hummocked turf and crashed into an ohia shrub, pulling its taloned roots from the thin soil and sending it tumbling into the windy drop. He slid on his back, sprawled like a pentagram on the cliff edge, stock-still with both hands grasping the tufted grass. Staring at the sky, he watched clouds carrying today into tomorrow while he ice-inched his body away from the ledge.

  Don’t panic, he heard the alien’s childbright voice saying. There’s a ledge just below you. Go on. Don’t be scared. Get up.

  He rolled to his side glittering with sweat and saw Ipo over him. Ipo’s bare foot kicked for Dirk’s head; Dirk lurched, and the blow caught his shoulder and flung him backward over the edge.

  Ipo grinned and with cat-wariness stepped past the gash from the uprooted ohia, wanting to satisfy his kill and see Dirk’s broken body. As he leaned over, Dirk, who knelt on the ledge just below the brink waiting out his certainty that Ipo would peer over, grinned his mirthless shark’
s smile at the startled man. Ipo gaped and frantically turned to climb back up the cliff edge. But Dirk grabbed his thick ankle and yanked with all his might.

  Ipo fell forward, slapped the cliff edge with his torso, and clutched at the serrated grass. The weeds tore away in clods of red clay, and he dropped. Yodeling hysterically, Ipo slid past Dirk and tumbled into the abyss. Dirk dug his fingers into the turf, pulled himself up, and clambered over the slope without looking back.

  Lani watched from the top of the rise, fraught with alarm. Chud sat up, gaze baleful.

  “Let’s go,” Dirk urged Lani.

  Her face looked funny, anguished and almost laughing at the same time. “No, I’m not goin’ with you. I didn’t want anybody killed. That’s why I came.”

  Dirk took her arm, and she flinched away. “You’re cold,” she whined and frowned at him with disbelief.

  His hands were icy—his whole body lithe with frosty power. Grappling at the cliff edge had infused him with chilled radiance. And in that boneheld light, he sensed the alien closing in on him again. He ran to the rust-mottled car that had carried him here, grabbed his duffel bag and pulled out the arc. It was brilliantly markless and cold. Holding it in his palm, in the shadow of his bag, he noticed that his hand gave off a violet luminescence so transparent that it would have been invisible in daylight. He crouched in the shade of the car and confirmed that this vapory light also glossed his arms and torso.

  Fear, starker than his fright at the cliff’s edge, heaved in him, and he dropped the arc back into the bag.

  Ease up, son, his father said. Keep your wits about you now. The sound in Dirk’s head molted to his mom’s nag: I can’t hold back anymore, kid. I’m hurting real bad. That shadow self I told you about earlier? It’s on me right now. I can’t stop it. Get away from the others.

  Dirk ran both hands through the nest of his hair, felt his brain darkening. “Don’t use those voices, Jack.”

  “Sorry,” Insideout said in a stone flat female voice. I’m trying to get it right, Dirk. Really I am. Listen inward for a moment, and you’ll understand.”

  Dirk placed both of his hands on the hot car roof and rested his face on them with an exasperated sigh. “I’m listening,” he said, and as his cool breath misted back from the sun-charged metal of the roof, his mind veered into a trance.

  A hulking gargoyle squatted in the sunlight, its grotesque face a clasping of jaws, fangs, and slithering barb-tipped feelers. Its torso banded like a scorpions thorax, it reared up on thick legs that slushed into the contours of the ground below it. The bandy arms it raised vibrated into waves of plasmic light, violet and oozy, streaking in the sunlight and looping in spirals toward the diminutive image of Chud.

  “Isn’t it grotesque?” a sonorous, polished utterance came from beside him. Poe waited there, arms crossed, one hand fingering his mustache. “I don’t know if I’m more embarrassed or terrified. It’s a collage of demon-destroyers from human history—dragons, gremlins, ouphes, bog queens, seraphim, wraiths. I have nothing to do with it. That’s what’s scary. It draws its energy, as I do, from the vacuum field.”

  “What’s that?” Dirk asked.

  Poe tucked his chin to his shoulder. “It’s my shadow self—my death reaching for me from the future. I’ve decided to call it an orc, a word for monster from the roots of your language. It’s a monster that wants to devour me in whatever form I assume, the way antimatter eats matter. I hate to say this. I really do. But you must know, it will kill you to preserve the cosmic symmetry.”

  Staring at the orc as it writhed from fang and claw actuality to swerves of violet energy, Dirk stood mesmerized. “What is it?”

  “It’s just like me. Pure energy, waveforms in the vacuum. But it’s not conscious as I am. It’s more reflexive—more bestial. It’s reaching into the human psyche to stalk me. You see it here in the projective light of my mind. Soon you’ll see this abomination in raw sunlight. Then God save you—and me.”

  Poe folded into bent light, like a ruby’s flaw, and Dirk became himself again, leaning against the roof of the car. He squinted into the stinging sunlight and watched Chud sway to his feet. The air around him thrilled to mirage-waves, and Dirk thought he detected the purple shadows of the orc in the giant’s face.

  “Lani!” Dirk called. “Get in your car! Get out of here! Fast!”

  Lani scurried to the black Mustang and got in. The engine rumbled, and the wheels roiled dust as the car curled around Chud and growled down the rutted road and through the hanging branches of crowded trees.

  Chud ignored her and came at Dirk in a stooped, linebacker’s rush. Dirk got in Chud’s battered car, found the keys in the ignition, and started the engine. Chud grabbed the tail fin as the car pitched into gear and swerved off. Metal shrieked, and the taillight came off in Chud’s grip. In the rearview, Dirk shivered to see spark-points of blue light chipping the space around Chud as he threw the taillight after them.

  At the paved road, the alien said in Dirk’s father’s voice, “You did well, son.”

  “Sure.” Dirk stared to the right, down the highway, through virid miles toward the bay, the sun-bashed windows of the town, and the highway that led back to the orphanage. He turned left and drove the climbing curve into the mountains. “Thanks for telling me about that ledge back there.”

  “Knowledge is power,” Mitch’s voice said.

  “Do you have to use that voice?”

  “I thought you admired your father,” Insideout said as a female telephone operator.

  “Yeah, but he’s dead.”

  “Dead and proud.”

  “Nah. Just dead.”

  “I disagree,” Insideout said. “I found his light cone. You know, the lost light of the past. He’s a bit scattered like you’d expect from someone who’s been disembodied for twelve years, but coherent enough to be proud.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Your Dad.”

  “You mean, even when you’re not recreating him, he’s still around—like a ghost or something?”

  “Ghosts, astrals, the bardo—those are your species’ intuitions about light cones in the vacuum field. They’re fairly accurate, as intuitions go. You see, thoughts are things. They’re electrical patterns, complex and precise waveforms. Yours are unique to you, unique as a snowflake. Everything you think and feel, even sensations, perceptions, and dream patterns you’re unconscious of, all have photonic shapes imprinting the vacuum field continually, your whole life long. You ought to think about this. After the waveform-generating system—the body— dies, the waveforms go on expanding with the vacuum field. They don’t die—light is ageless. It never dies. So the waveforms of consciousness are always there. And they’re always repeating themselves, endlessly. Yet evolving slowly as field particles interact with them. That evolution is the life of the dead. It goes on for ranges of time you have no names for. Mysterious as ghosts seem, they’re quite common really. You can interact with them, too. The brain is designed to talk with the dead.”

  “Of all the crazy stuff you’ve laid on me, buddy, this is the craziest.”

  “Even so, doesn’t it sound right to you? Everything that ever existed, still exists. Nothing is lost. Right this moment the universe’s explosive birth tingles its warm echo in the freeze of outer space. The sky around you is filled with the lights of myriad worlds—including this world at every instant in its past. The blackbody depth of the universe holds every waveform intact. Every photon that ever was is circling back on itself, circumnavigating the universe. And – get this – because this universe is finite yet unbounded, lost light visits all galaxies as it returns to itself.”

  Dirk sat up straighter. In the rearview, he tracked a figure galloping uphill at tremendous speed. At first, he thought it might be a lunging animal—then the back of his neck prickled as he identified the silhouette of a man. Chud bounded after him at forty miles an hour. “Shit! That’s impossible.”

  “It’s the orc,” the a
lien sighed. “It has gained enough power to seize the people around you and use their bodies.”

  “Insane!” Dirk wiped sweat from his woeful eyebrows and floored the accelerator. The clunky car groaned and went no faster. “The grade is too steep!” he wailed. “What’re we gonna do?”

  “Whatever you do, don’t try to fight the orc. That will just strengthen it.”

  Chud closed to within a carlength, and Dirk could see the air around him prickling with light like a fuse. His face, gruesomely distorted by the inhuman effort of his run, looked smeared, and as he reached out for the car’s fender the whole mask of his flesh flapped on his skull.

  “Evade!” Insideout shouted.

  Dirk stood on the brake. Tires screamed, shot smoke, and the car bucked to a stop. Chud slammed into the trunk and bounced off the rear window with glass-shattering force. Dirk squeezed the wheel with all his strength and rested his head between his knuckles.

  “This is a nightmare,” he whispered, insides squelching with fright. “I don’t believe this.”

  A bellow yanked him upright, and he turned to see Chud standing beside him, face stickled, scoop-cheeked, and blue as a prehistoric fish. His spark-whirring hand reached for the door handle.

  Dirk threw the car into gear, and it coughed and stalled out. As he jangled the ignition, the door swung open, and the car screeched forward. Lightning banged through Chud, and the door ripped off in his fist, sending the leaping car careening off the road. The impact of the electrical discharge gonged through the car, and Dirk lost control and slammed into the trees. He flew out through the torn-off door and lay in the leaf mulch watching Chud slump toward him.

  The man was monstered: hands and face tarred with ectoplasmic mucus, rabid eyes fixed on his prey. The sight of this ghoul paralyzed Dirk, but Insideout squeezed itself to one loud word in the boy’s mind: Move!

  Dirk sprang to his feet and ran to the car. He snagged the duffel bag with one hand and dashed for the highway, waving his arms in a freefall sprint down the mountain. Chud loped after him, smoking spectral fire but moving slower, somewhat spent from tackling the car.