Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Come on!” Dirk was already walking on the clay-hard earth toward the plane, pulling a reluctant Reena. The green Toyota appeared from behind a line of small aircraft on a strip a hundred yards away and Cora waved from the window. “Move it, Jiang,” Dirk beckoned. “Please, Reena, don’t fight me.”

  Reena was confused. She knew Dirk, but she couldn’t recall from where. The urgency in his face frightened her. Everyone was shouting in a strange language. She panicked and twisted free of Dirk’s grip. He scowled with batlike ferocity and snatched at her, and she gambled all her strength on her feet and ran down the airstrip.

  “You’re scaring her,” Howard yelled at Dirk and hoisted Jiang into Dirk’s arms. He ran after Reena, and she lunged into the tule grass that surrounded the airport. Charlotte braked at the edge of the airstrip where the bramble was too thick for the Toyota, and Cora barked with anger, “Howard—stop—right—now!”

  Howard caught up with Reena, his legs straining with the effort to pace her. “Please, Reena,” he chattered. “We need you. And I can’t run anymore. I swear my heart’s ready to burst.”

  Howard’s earnest plea touched her though she didn’t know what he was saying. She was running and frightened and didn’t know why. She slowed and looked with fawn-jittery eyes into his face. He took both of her hands. “Trust me.”

  He pointed to where Dirk was helping Jiang into the plane. “Go there with me—please!” He urged her toward the plane, holding both of her hands. Charlotte and Cora had leaped out of the Toyota and were screaming toward them. Howard and Reena bolted hand in hand, and only after Cora pulled up short with a wounded cry did Howard consider how this must have looked to her. He glanced back with a stricken heart and saw Charlotte kneeling into a firing stance.

  The gunshot cracked loudly as hammered rock, and the bullet zipped a foot over their heads. Reena almost fell to the ground as the slug sucked by. Charlotte pulled the revolver back to her shoulder. She hadn’t intended to fire that closely. She just wanted to scare them into stopping, but they ran faster.

  Dirk helped Reena onto the plane from the inside. After Howard entered, lit the control panel, and started the generator, Dirk asked him, “You fly this thing, right?”

  “I was trained to build them,” he said, powering up the engines. “But I don’t know if I can fly it. Buckle up, and we’ll find out.”

  Dirk didn’t bother to buckle up. He pressed his face against the side window, looking for the agent who had shot at them. She and Cora were just climbing out of the field and onto the strip as the plane began its run.

  Howard had never flown anything before, but he’d had pilot friends in the service who had taken him up. He tried to remember what he had learned from them as the plane accelerated down the runway. The headset that had come to life when he had flicked on all the gauge lights squawked something from where it dangled above the floor. Howard’s hands white-knuckled on the yoke while he watched the speedometer climb toward the magic green bar that signaled he had enough lift.

  “Look out!” Dirk yelled.

  Howard raised his gaze in time to see a mammoth jet liner streaking toward them on an adjacent runway. He wailed with shock and pulled back on the yoke. The world slanted sharply, heaving everyone deeper into their seats, and the six-seater jumped into the air. The jetliner loomed ahead like a wall, and they could see the crew in the cockpit, aghast.

  The small aircraft skimmed past the prow of the jet, and its rivets rattled like castanets from the turbulence of the near miss. Everyone on board was shouting, and when blue sky snapped into sight, their screams went dead, and they pushed their faces to the windows.

  The jet lumbered into the air below them. The green peaks of the Waianae Range fell away, stepping down into the brighter green sea; the plane gained altitude. Mottled shades of aquamarine and cerulean patterned the coastal waters with the lacy outline of surrounding reefs. Honolulu sparkled in the noon sun like a necklace of tech art strung along the throat of the bay. Clouds gasped by, and when the Earth was visible again, they could see beyond the headless sphinx of Diamond Head to Koko Crater.

  At the sight of the place where they had met the orc, Dirk touched the arc in his pocket to be certain he still had it. It felt dull, lifeless as a coin. His head felt blunt, too. No superpowered brainwaves peaked in him now, only the cold memory of fear. He reminded himself that the orc, with all its gluey blue lights and demonic shapes, was all in their minds. The Yakuza had been real enough—and Donnie. But the orc’s appearances were just electrical patterns in their brains imprinted by the arc.

  “So which way do I go now?” Howard asked.

  Dirk shifted fretfully, orienting himself. He pointed southeast through a surge of cloud steppes. Hands touched his neck and shoulder, and he turned in his seat and faced Reena. She was airsick. She had a corner of her hair in her mouth and looked ready to weep. Beside her, Jiang, empty of strength, sat back with the side of his face against the window as though listening.

  The racket of the engines and the bounce and shudder of the plane had rubbed the velvet of her mind the wrong way, bristling and darkening her feelings. She had wanted to hold onto the man with the red upper lip, who had asked for her help before. But he was flying the plane. And the old man next to her drooped, tired, the amber of his scarab-lined face pale with fatigue. Only Dirk, the sullen, silver-eyed boy who had scared her with his anger, regarded her alertly. He didn’t look sullen or angry now – only careworn and boyish.

  Dirk put his arm around Reena, and she tucked her face into his neck and drooled on his shoulder. He smelled of bare oak, like the groundkeeper’s lumber shed at the hospice. And that reminded her how far away she had gotten from that familiar and hopelessly sad place. And that made her happy.

  ***

  Heartshattered, Cora believed Howard had run off with a younger woman, and her desolation drained her of strength. Charlotte, who was eager not to lose her quarry, had an arm under Cora’s arm and hurried with her down the runway. “You don’t know that he’s run off with her,” the agent said, breathlessly, not taking her eyes off the small plane as it dipped and bucked into the sky.

  Cora knew. In the last two days, she had seen how old she looked, how frumpy she had become. “Howie’s a millionaire now,” she said. “Why would he want a frump like me?”

  “You’re not a frump, Cora. Besides, he loves you. You told me so.” A police van sped toward them, and Charlotte took out her badge. “Don’t judge him so quickly. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this.”

  Charlotte officially commandeered the van and left the police driver behind to drive in the abandoned station wagon. She drove full speed down the runway. Cora clutched the dashboard. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going after them.” She searched all directions with frantic intensity and cut across several runways to a helipad where a chopper was winding up for flight. She braked just outside the stroke of the rotorblades and darted for the helicopter, waving her badge.

  Cora hustled after her. If Howard was leaving her, she would at least face it. Charlotte tried to shoo her off, but she adamantly clung to the hatch until they lifted her in.

  The pilot, a private operator about to take several tourists up for a sightseeing cruise, acquiesced to Charlotte’s request when she showed him her badge. A white-bearded, crinkle-eyed man, he had flown helicopters in Korea and Nam, and the sight of Charlotte’s gun tucked in her belt didn’t alarm him.

  They went up in a roar and, using a police emergency priority, got permission from the tower to cut across airspace over the landing strips directly to the ocean. Because of that, Charlotte never lost sight of the twin-engine plane. Her work was full of uncertainties and unsolved cases, but this was one mystery she was willing to pursue to the ends of the Earth.

  ***

  “We’re being pursued,” Howard told Dirk. They had been flying for over an hour, and the foam-webbed sea ranged landlessly below. Howard kept th
e plane on a south-southeast bearing, full throttle, banking only occasionally to avoid massive plateaus of cloud. While making such a slow curve, he spotted the insect dot of a helicopter behind them. “Nothing we can do about it,” he said to himself. “But we better start thinking about what we’re going to do when we reach the Big Island.”

  Reena was still hugging Dirk, and he had turned sideways in his seat to accommodate her. Jiang seemed asleep, but he stared inward, waiting for strength to come back to him. The first among them to sense the darkness within unraveling to light, he smiled and opened his eyes to Reena and Dirk holding each other and looking at themselves with sudden, bashful clarity.

  Reena released her hold, but her fingers lingered at the back of Dirk’s neck and on the wet patch of his shoulder. “Thank you.”

  The warmth she felt radiating from him eased her embarrassment, and she sat back in her seat and straightened her hair.

  Howard watched tiny moths of fire fluttering outside the cockpit, and he thought they were reflections from his timesense. He fixed his eyes on one and with a frisson of switched perspectives recognized that the flickering sparks hovered inside the cockpit. The spark he had fixated on looped nearer, and he yelped at a fire-fanged face glaring at him with eyes of glory. “Look!”

  The flurry of volt-faces swirled hotter. “The demon,” Jiang breathed.

  Reena wasn’t breathing. She listened to the thoughts in Dirk’s head, sifting past his fright to the translucent, latticed frost of the alien’s mind. Panic encircled a core of scorching pain. No thoughts. Minutes remained before the hyperfield collapsed and the arc became an eternally sealed capsule of pain. Winnowings of consciousness blustered within the terrible hurt, and her body screeched like a drill-bitten nerve. She shook alert.

  “Don’t anybody try to do anything,” Dirk said, following the mazy flights of the specks of light, trying to trace their source. “Lusk. Like we did in the volcano.”

  Timelines spewed into Howard’s sight like flung spray and spume. He tried to ignore them, keeping his eyes trained on the horizon, now shimmering dayglow purple. He flicked a glance at the control panel, to keep his gaze loose, and sat back, stunned that the fuel gauge needle wobbled toward empty. A half hour ago, it had read almost full. He tapped it, and the needle fell flat to empty. Pressing his face to the side window, he saw the spray of leaking fuel and spotted the corrosive hole just under the wing where the tank had punctured. Tiny blue flames ate the edges of the hole. “We’re out of gas!”

  A hoot of fear spiked Dirk as he understood why the orc had started appearing now. It would manifest at the first cough of the choking engine and harry them right into the sea. Reena felt it like a wave of nausea mounting in the cabin. Jiang shuddered with its immanence, and Howard stared into miles of sky and saw nothing. “I’m blind,” he cried.

  “You’re just scared,” Dirk said, hopefully. He daggered his fingers before Howard’s eyes, and the staring face didn’t flinch. He reached inward for understanding, feeling the drain of awareness, the thickening lethargy as the orc drew strength. Comprehension came: Howard’s blindness manifested a mesmeric fixation induced by the orc. The foveas of his eyes had been locked onto one point, and the neural flux from the retinas had stalled. He needed a gentle boost to snap out of it. Dirk looked at Reena, who was already aware, and she pushed into Howard’s mind, right through the rigid hysteria that had frozen the micromovements of his eye muscles. His eyes jiggled freely again, and his field of vision opened up.

  “I don’t think I should be flying,” Howard said. He brushed aside the flitting demon-headed gnats and squinted through shreddings of cloud. Ahead a whale-blue, humped shadow appealed on the horizon. “Am I hallucinating or is that land up ahead?”

  Dirk leaned into the windowshield and rapped his knuckles against the glass. “It is land.”

  Jiang sat up, shivering, his face bright as a drunk’s. With a hand on Howard’s shoulder and one on Reena’s, he smiled kindly at Dirk. “The journey is over.”

  The engine coughed. Dirk was thrown to the ceiling, his right leg kicking straight out at the windshield. A blowtorch of star-blue light blasted from the sole of his boot where the orc had hidden. The windshield plate on the right side exploded outward, and the cabin dervished with icy air.

  The plane yawed wildly and dove. The yoke pulled Howard out of his seat, and he fell forward over the dashpanel. On the nose of the plane, an eel shape of gummy, azurous light reared a starfish-spiked head, its moray grin widening as the plane screamed toward the sea.

  Dirk crashed back into his seat, whipped by wind buffeting through the shattered half of the windshield. Prismal tongues of ghost fire licked over him, pinning him with the inertia of the spiraling dive and lighting up the inside of his skull with flame-quaking shadows. In the bright darkness, he faced his father. Mitch loomed forward, necrotic, his face a rag of flesh against a hard grin of bone. Death had never been more articulate.

  Howard, too, entranced by the orc, pressed face forward into the scream of their dive, seeing chromatic timelines tunneling directly into the frog-gaping mouth of the orc.

  The surge of the wind gunning through the shattered window had cast Jiang and Reena into the back of the plane. They clutched each other and watched the orc entwining the plane’s nose, thrusting its lizard head into the cockpit. With ravening fury, its dinosaur jaws gripped Dirk, then Howard, leeching the vitality from them.

  Reena heard their suffering from within, both of them mewling with unscreamable agony. She hid her face in Jiang’s chest, her consciousness twisting around his with the urgency to do something. He embraced her in the meteor-cry of their plunge, and he closed his eyes and groped inward, toward the heaviness of gravity. He found his strength in the stomach-squeezed cramp of their fall, and from there he extended his telekinesis, stretching his power through his body outward and into the crucified shape of the plane. He shoved against the Earth’s pull and felt his invisible force buckle. Empurpling strain almost blanked him out. He exerted himself with bone-brittling insistence, willing the plane to fly.

  The sea spun close enough for them to see the swells when the nose lifted. The pitch of the plane’s plummeting siren modulated lower, and the aircraft swung through the belly of the dive’s parabola. Howard heaved backward into his seat. Dirk hollered with dismay. And the orc erupted into shards of ectoplasmic trolls that palsied in the wind like mescaline vibrations. The imps whooshed in with the bashing airflow and charged to the back of the plane.

  Reena instinctively curled up in the seat where she had been slung by the plane’s abrupt rollout, and the menacing imps swarmed over her. Jiang, flat on his back on the floor, muscles popping like veins under his skin, sustained the plane’s flight. None of the ball lightnings lighted on him. Reena was magnetizing all of them to herself by using her telepathy to merge with them.

  Inside was pain – the drilled nerve pain she had jumped from before. This time, she held herself there, in the tireless suffering of the orc, and her body thrashed to a fit. She convulsed in her seat, her bones hammering to break the straps of her muscles.

  Dirk barged into the back and grabbed Reena to steady her. The phantom flames eating Reena rushed up Dirk’s arms in a snaggle of claws and teeth, and he let go and banged into the seat beside her. “Reena,” he bayed against the wind’s cacophony. “Let the orc go! Lusk!”

  In her anguish, she could hear nothing but the whirlwind mania devouring her. The roar of the furnace, the storming torrent consumed her, uncoiling her torment into greasy smoke and brittle ash. The smoke and ash clotted to form her physical body, a pain-marrowed ogress writhing with the orc’s hurt.

  Dirk backed up to the windrushing cockpit, keeping Reena’s wracked body under his gaze. “How much farther?”

  Howard’s brain had peeled open to the timeswept ranges of yes-out-of-mind. Iridescent shadows tattooed the sky and shirred to a geodesic funnel that dipped behind the mountain range below them. “We’ve been over lan
d since we came out of those clouds back there.”

  Dirk glanced out a side port. A holocaust of clouds mushroomed over hummocky green fields and forests. Off the starboard side, ribbed with enormous jade chasms, a mountain with a peak of glassy snow floated by. “Mauna Loa. We’re almost there, Howard.”

  “Where’s there?” he shouted back.

  Reena rose from her seat, resplendent with fiery flickers and comet dust. Her flesh corpse-tinted, eyes flame-cored, she bent to strangle Jiang, and the plane rolled.

  “Geezus!” Howard yapped. “I’m losing it. We’re going down!”

  The pit of Dirk’s stomach trapdoored as the plane plummeted, and he threw himself at Reena. Their contact sprayed green light across the cabin, and the air soured with the stink of burnt flesh. Dirk hauled Reena back from Jiang, his arms and chest pierced by quills of fire. He tackled her into the empty seats, his flesh sliced with mincing razorstrokes, and he wailed to the brink of blackout.

  “Hold on!” Reena shouted. And he understood. The pain tattering his nerves and curdling his blood was the alien suffering its endless dying. That was the strength of the orc. By their willingness to conduct that anguish, they weakened the orc enough for Jiang to regain control of the plane. Each second, they flew closer to where the hyperfield waited, and the arc intensified. Yet, each second inflicted torment, and they burned like filaments in an electric current, their lives vaporing away.

  Dirk clenched his life against the battering pain, forcing himself to feel his being, to touch the hurt, to remember—ah! At last, life came, returning to him with the memory of lusk on the ocean, when Insideout rose as a watershape and being unfurled the abandon of life. That freedom soared in him again, and he lifted above the swamp of his pain.

  As Dirk lofted on a wave of pain-induced exaltation, the suffering ascended with him. The orc writhed over their clutched bodies. Howard, who glanced back with frightened eyes, not wanting to face the upswelling fields of ash and cracked soda, saw the orc as a mantis-jawed specter twisting violently. Its shape ruptured into flashes of discontinuous spectra that smoked away, passing right through the hull of the plane with a bellow louder than the dive’s scream.