Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Don’t call it an alien,” Reena insisted. “That makes it sound like something frightening.”

  “You’re not scared?” Dirk asked.

  “I’m afraid of becoming what I used to be.”

  “That’s never going to happen again,” Dirk promised. “If we don’t make it, we’re ash. And if we do—you’re getting away. The old man, Howard, and I are gonna have to pretend this whole crazy trip didn’t happen.”

  Jiang twitched at the words ‘old man.’ “You mean to say, I will return to being as I was?” he asked.

  “When the a— When Insideout goes, the weirdness goes with it.”

  Jiang clutched his knees and shut his eyes. The world seemed to convulse. Could he be old again? Could he endure the frailty, the aches, the heaviness again?

  Reena placed her hand over his marbled knuckles. “Don’t be afraid. Remember, just two days ago you were willing to be happy.”

  Her touch overpowered his anxiety. He was an old man. Of course. That was the way of the world. At least, he had lived to be old. He remembered sitting before his straw fire in the evening cooking scallions and rice, alone except when one of the villagers visited to honor their own lost grandparents. Wrung from the day’s toil, his very bones felt exhausted. He sat and watched the flames untangle themselves from the grass. Life became blank. Even the haunting memories of his wife and children that startled him every day in the field or on the road went motionless. Minutes crackled in the fire. Night whispered in the trees. This moment offered the tangless taste of death. Yes, he remembered and was braver for it.

  Reena experienced this transition with him and met his smile with her own. “The five colors blind men’s eyes,” she repeated a thought she heard deep in the well of his mind. That was Lao-tzu’s admonition to Confucius—one of his father’s favorite quotes. His father had used it whenever friends had tempted him to leave his farm and return to a scholar’s life in the city. Jiang’s smile broadened. The simple world was confusing enough, how could he hope for clarity in the grip of the miraculous? “Let’s finish quickly what we’ve begun,” he said.

  Dirk pulled the car off Nimitz Highway onto a factory road that curved through a compound of warehouses. Rays of Hawai’ian morninglight buzzed on the metal roofs. Reena had Dirk stop the car in the shadow of a giant pineapple-shaped watertower. “He’s two blocks away. I think we should park the squad car here so we don’t startle them.”

  “Okay.” Dirk took command, turning around and reclining his seat so he could face them cross-legged. He put the duffel bag in his lap. “Let’s get this teeny little super guy out here and see what it wants to do.” He rummaged in the bag and looked up with startled incomprehension.

  “It’s gone,” Reena said and closed her eyes.

  Dirk dumped out his clothes and turned out the bag’s lining. “Friggin-A! The cops probably have it.”

  “No.” Reena gazed underbreathed for Insideout. It was there, solemn as a salmon at the end of its climb. To link her with the whereabouts of the arc, the alien had to use all its strength. It did. She prickled with the loom of directions that would lead her across the island to the volcanic grotto where Donnie Lopes waited.

  The alien’s strength spun away. The last dazing image she saw through it was Donnie himself. He squatted among dragonish cacti in the pelvis of the dead volcano. Gossamer veils of field lines shimmered like a vast spider’s nest in the silver sunlight, and he was slung at the center, the air quavering around him. His boy-face had sunken closer to the bone and looked wet as plastic. A chitinous varnish seemed to coat all of him, and his bulged eyes had locked open. On the ground before him, the arc shone in a needle-spiked blue glare. The image wrinkled away, and the brown darkness of her closed lids returned.

  “The demon is gone again,” Jiang said, but he saw that they couldn’t understand him because their words made no sense to him. He crossed his hands over his suddenly dense body and stared stiffly at the others.

  Dirk yammered: “Christ, it’s punked out on us again!”

  Reena spoke in French: “This is the center of the Earth and those are the clean, giant clouds of Greece.” She reached her arms out the window and up to the sky and sat rigidly motionless.

  Dirk looked at her crosseyed and then waved his hand before her face. She didn’t stir. “Okay, we’re back to square one.” He got out of the police car and sat on the hood, fuming. All of the alien’s sapience had gone from him, yet he knew what had happened. “Insideout’s out,” he told Jiang when the old man struggled out of the car and leaned against the fender with him. “It’s gone into a glide, and who knows when, or if, it’s gonna come around.”

  Dirk hung his head in angry despair, and Jiang was the first to see the approaching man. The character looked sinister, and Jiang nudged Dirk’s ribs.

  A block of a man, huge as a linebacker, crossed the street toward them, bald head slung like a bull’s. Dirk stood bolt upright and almost yelped. “Chud!”

  When Chud heard that Dirk had been picked up by the cops, he had gone to the station and posted himself in a saimin shop across the street to await developments. After Dirk and the others came out, he’d followed them here on his moped. “You owe,” he said.

  “Hey, Chud,” Dirk grinned weakly and backed away. The man did not appear orc-possessed, but he was threatening enough without supernatural strength. “Don’t want no trouble, man.”

  Jiang moved to block the large man’s way and raised both of his gnarled hands before him. “We mean you no harm,” he said in his village dialect. “Please, leave us alone.”

  Chud shoved the elderly man to the ground, and Jiang tried to roll with his fall but was too stiff and hit the pavement with a hurtful thwack of his head.

  Concern leaped in Dirk then snapped at once to rage. “Hey! You jerk, he’s just an old man. What kind of wacko are you?”

  “You dead, fool,” Chud said and kept coming.

  Dirk slinked backward into Repulse Monkey, palms open and shuttling with his retreating stride. “I dropped you once, Baby Huey. And that was no accident.”

  The insult goaded Chud forward, and Dirk suddenly lunged and leaped into a leopard kick. Chud dodged, and Dirk pranced past him. Sunlight grinned from the blade that opened in Chud’s thick hand. Jiang, who was sitting up, groaned to see it.

  Fear unclasped Dirk’s knees, and he had to straighten up to conduct strength back into his legs. He took a deep breath, and as Mitch had taught him, he imagined the breath distilling to a point of ferocious intensity just below his bellybutton. The effort calmed him, and he sunk into his stance and waited for Chud’s attack.

  Chud danced forward with a sprite agility that startled Dirk. The knife hacked the air, and Dirk traced its hysteric pattern with the fingertips of one hand. With the blade sweeping toward him, he stepped into its path, caught the big man’s wrist in one hand and punched into his face with the other. The blow stunned Chud, but the force of the blocked knifehand sent Dirk sprawling to the pavement.

  His knife hot with sunlight, Chud bent and stabbed. But the down sweep of his killing blow choked when Jiang, who had climbed to his feet, threw himself onto the giant’s back and snagged his arm with both hands. Chud bucked, casting Jiang off like a heavy coat. And Dirk seized the momentary distraction to kick upward into Chud’s groin.

  The killer buckled, and Dirk hopped upright and struck a devastating downpiling blow to the side of the man’s head. Chud dropped faceflat to the sidewalk and lay unmoving. Dirk took the knife, clasped it, put it in his back pocket, and hurried to Jiang.

  The old man reeled, dazed but intact. Dirk helped him to his feet and led him back to the car. Reena was still reaching through the window to embrace the clouds. Dirk opened the back door and supported Jiang’s featherweight until he was sitting on the shaded back seat. The geezer looked used up, sweat-streaked, and pallid, and the alarming thought whirled through Dirk that he might have to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation if the old guy had a
seizure.

  Jiang patted Dirk’s hand and nodded his head. He mumbled something in Chinese, and Dirk backed off.

  What now? Dirk wondered and glanced to be certain that Chud was still unconscious. Disburdened of that anxiety, he went around to the other side of the car and stared into Reena’s face. How fragile she looked now. Her green stare was mulling something over, but the porcelain of her face and her weightless arms were disconnected. He touched her cheek. She felt cool as marble.

  Overhead the morning widened among rafts of blue-white clouds. That emptiness embraced the whole Earth, and toward which Reena was grasping. He looked again at Chud, and fear muttered louder in him. “This is crazy,” he said. He clapped his hands before Reena’s face, and she blinked but did not move. Jiang watched him with a feverish gaze.

  “So what now?” he whined and plopped into the driver’s seat. “Do we just sit here and wait to see if Chud or the alien wakes up first?” His body sagged, and he nodded to himself like a drunk. Jiang was just an old man. Reena didn’t look so pretty with drool dripping from her chin. And nothing good could come from him. Yet— Blood flurried through his arms and legs, and a foxy optimism renewed itself. He’d always taken care of himself, had never yielded to fear or betrayed a friend. Somehow, he’d make this work, too.

  He looked deeper into Reena’s slack face and connected with the dulled beauty of her features that would brighten when her alertness returned. The glamorous violence of their situation inspired him, and he turned away with the conviction that if anyone could succeed, they would.

  “That’s the strength we need,” Reena’s gentle voice said.

  Dirk curled about to see Reena leaning through the open window, her chin resting on her hands. Jiang had hopped out of the car and stood on the curb, body erect as an ironweight.

  “So how about answering your question?” Reena asked. “What now?”

  Jiang lifted Chud’s unconscious body into the squad car and propped him over the steering wheel. Reena flexed her hands, prickly and bloodnumb from her catatonic posture. She got out of the car and squinted into the transparent brightness. The morning ranged twenty-two years deep: Her whole life compressed into the wakefulness of this moment—as her lapse into her former state had proven. The lovelight in Dirk’s face shone dimmer now when he looked at her, and her telepathy mirrored the sodden stupidity that he had seen in her visage. Her life in this world was deadlocked. She had to get free.

  “Insideout blacked out, because we pushed it too hard,” Dirk explained hastily, following the contours of thought as they materialized in his mind. “It was trying to find the arc.”

  “It found the arc,” Reena said. “I know where it is now. The way to it is inscribed in me. I saw it.” She recalled the cocooned boy she had seen squatting in ectoplasmic light among the cacti and superimposed that memory on her view of Dirk. The boy’s name came to her. “Donnie Lopes has it.”

  Dirk put a hand to his forehead and paced briskly. “Donnie. That twit’ll throw it in the ocean to spite me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Reena replied. “The orc has him. It’s transforming him somehow.”

  “Into something gruesome, no doubt.” Dirk ran a fretful hand through his hair. “Now the arc is bait.”

  “Put it out of your mind,” Jiang said. In this crux of sunshine, uncertainty, and danger, with his bones dutiful, his muscles strumming with might, he was ready to act. Today unfurled into the blossom of his life, and he shone. “Let’s free the one we’ve come for. With his strength, we’ll have the force that we need.”

  Dirk plunged his hands into his pockets to manacle his anxiety, and they walked toward the moss-colored building where Reena sensed Howard. On the way, Dirk sketched out a plan of attack, suggesting that they approach from the shadow side of the warehouse, hoping they would be noticed less quickly.

  Strategies were unnecessary. What had to be done revealed itself as they went. Emerging from the shadows across the street from the green warehouse, the lookout at one of the large swivel-hinged windows spotted them and watched to see where they were headed. Reena pointed at him and told him to forget he had seen them. He turned as if to shout to the others, then sat down. At the door, a massive sliding structure, Jiang coiled his strength from the pith of his body, drawing force from the center of the Earth. Reena found Howard’s dreamy presence at the far end of the warehouse, and she nodded for Jiang to exert himself.

  Jiang willed the force buzzing in him to extend into the steel and wood structure of the door. An ear-wrenching boom resounded, and the large door crashed apart and went hurtling inward.

  Howard, who had been dozing at the formica table bent over the mound of chits he had won from Tony Robello and the Yakuza, jumped awake. In his vision, chunks of wood and twisted rods of metal spewed across the empty space, and the blurring tints and hot filaments of his timesense focused to a vortex eye of serene white light. He shifted his gaze to see into the actuality of what was happening, shocked to watch Dirk with an old man and a young woman striding through the spinning splinters and roiling dust of the exploded door, heedless of the guns trained on them. Tony staggered, agape, a forty-five wavering in his grip. The Yakuza stayed unflinching, intent.

  The old man raised his arms like a maestro and Tony and the four Yakuza dropped to their knees like supplicants, pistols flying from their hands. The guns circled the tall space like a flurry of crows before smashing through the windows and plummeting to the street.

  The Yakuza stared dumbfounded; Tony sputtered. The young woman shouted something, and the five men lined up like marionettes on parade. And then something weird happened. The air thudded rapidly like a breathless heart, and the space around the five kidnappers glossed blue.

  Dirk ran up to Howard. “Let’s go, Howard!” he shouted though the air had suddenly become as still as a cyclone’s bulls-eye. “The orc is coming down!”

  Before they could move, a gale of withering cold shocked the chamber. The five killers leaped like windblown sacks as the force of the Arctic blast funneled through them. Dirk grabbed Howard’s arm, and they bolted for the sunny door. The Yakuza and Tony Robello pounced toward them adorned with ghastly body haloes, shedding green fire.

  Reena skipped closer and commanded, “Stop!” She backed away stunned the next moment when Tony Robello, staggered by the shout, did not stop. The watery fire about him writhed more sharply, and he grabbed her and slapped her to the ground.

  Dirk hurled himself at the man, and a Yakuza grabbed him and they tumbled to the floor. Jiang was immediately over them, and he jerked the Yakuza off Dirk without touching him. The gangster flipped into the air like wind-caught laundry. Dreadful brilliance crackled around him, and he stopped, poised in midair, and grinned with an inhuman intensity.

  Jackhammer blows of radiance pulsed from the hovering man and kicked Jiang off his feet. The old man smacked the floor so forcefully all his breath gasped out of him, and he lay stupefied.

  Tony bent over Reena, lifted her by her blouse, and prepared to strike her again. Reena felt his mind, molten with rage, and as he unleashed his blow, she circled the intent back toward him. His arm rebounded, the air around his face swashed sparks, and he crashed to the floor.

  “Don’t fight them!” Reena shouted to the others. “Turn the orc force back on itself. Lusk.”

  Lusk, Dirk thought, receiving the alien’s understanding in a rush of clarity. “No effort,” he said aloud, and when the man who had knocked Jiang down from midair leaped to the ground beside him, Dirk rolled into him and knocked him over. “Don’t fight. It just gives power to the demon. Don’t feed it.”

  Howard didn’t know what Reena and Dirk were saying. The timelines’ vortex eye had scrambled into a hocus-pocus of jangled colors. He ignored that confusion and held his attention on the fracas around him. These killers were real with or without the ghostlights around them. He backed away from the fight, hands open before him submissively.

  Jiang had come around in
time to receive Reena’s directive. He leaped acrobatically to his feet and advanced on the two Yakuza that closed on him. Instead of lashing out with his invisible strength, he surrounded himself with a rubbery force. When the bunsen-flamed Yakuza pounced on him, the air clanged with brilliance. Bewildered cries rang out, and the two men fell back in a snaggle of electric thorns and flitted sparks.

  Dirk pushed upright and ran for Howard. A Yakuza blocked his way, the eerie blue emanations around him sticking to the air in tendrils. Dirk jinked left and ran to the right, skirting the man. A smoky tentacle lashed out and wrapped about his head. Dirk froze in midstride, and a frightfully familiar voice stippled with silence brimmed through him: You’re doomed, son. Mitch spoke with utter certainty. The orc is stronger than the alien now. You’ll be with me soon.

  Cords of ghostfire uncoiled from the thugs’ bodies, and their faces sickened with the torment of their possession. Reena could feel their uncomprehending horror, their brains bouncing with fear, unable to escape the abomination growing within them. They lurched about, Frankenstein monsters with the blue flames of their bodies roaring like a furnace.

  A whip of fire struck from Tony Robello and snagged Reena’s throat. She restrained her panicky urge, to tear it away, knowing the effort would only tighten it. The small space of her mind penetrated by the orc’s consciousness became a darkness deep as the dungeon of a coma, a shimmering darkness like a meshing of insects. Here was her insanity, the brainwave of the wind, empty and full of meaningless noise. She had never been more than this before the alien came to her, and the encounter with it from the fulcrum of her clear mind boggled her.

  Eels of blue fire stung Jiang and Howard, too. Jiang, fanged at the heart, the orc’s umbilicus poisoning him with nightmares of his wife’s and childrens’ worm-riven corpses, their faces falling apart like wet tobacco, released a silent shriek and withered.

  Howard was already on his knees, a viper of green voltage biting his forehead. The Yakuza from whom it reached turned gray with pain. Howard watched him at the center of a lightning-cut whirlpool, dragging him into a maelstrom of abysmal darkness.