Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  The plane righted itself and climbed with a soaring peal. Howard whooped like a bronco rider, and Reena came to underneath Dirk. The last thing she recalled was calling the orc into her to keep it from Jiang. Her telepathy searched for the demon and found it fuming with rainbow streamers like a borealis in the contrail of the plane. She refrained from probing Dirk’s unconscious body with her telepathy, afraid he was dead. She couldn’t bear to touch that with her mind. Instead, she shoved him upright and pressed the palms of her hands against his face. He glistened, pale and fever-glazed.

  She put her ear to his chest and gasped when she heard the trip of his heart.

  “We’re going down again,” Howard yelled.

  The plane bellied back toward Earth, the mountainous terrain swayed, and the sea shone like sapphire. The plane glided down in a gentle descent, drooping past snow limned crags, swooping above tundra fields and sprawling forests. Ahead, Kilauea Volcano plaited a purple thread of gas into the luminous strata of the sky. Sere ridges of shrubs, silver deadwood, and straggling trees fell away, and the black lava fields came into view.

  Jiang saw it all. The crater highlands crawled beneath him as though he flew again in the embrace of the demon. He was flying, more nakedly than he had flown before. The currents of the wind nerved him, guiding him through streamers of clouds and the rinsings of heat draining from the lava fields. He saw everything the sun saw. The airplane at the pivot of his gravity glinted silver in the noon glare, jeweled spangles dusting in its wake to the arc of a rainbow. Not far behind, the pursuing helicopter closed in. And below, yellow-plumed with fumaroles and black with frozen lava, rose the site he had journeyed from his ancestral land to reach.

  Jiang was awed and delighted with his disembodied flight. The plane swayed to his slightest gesture. Where he was going thrummed tautly in him like a kite’s guide thread drawing him down toward the scorched landscape and the ominous exaltation of the mountains. He looked around a last time at the cloud cascades, the sky with its layers of light, and the dragon-scaled land, sloughing toward the sea. Beauty saturated the day, and he smiled as he bowed toward the horizon.

  Reena crouched over Jiang’s body, and she noticed the smile on his face even as she sensed the punchdrunk undertow of gravity competing with him for control of the plane.

  “Better strap yourself down,” Howard called back as he frantically harnessed himself into the pilot’s seat. The yoke had gone dead. The plane flew itself as the broken, wrathful terrain of Hell rose toward them.

  Dirk bent beside Reena and took Jiang’s arm to help him into a seat. Reena stopped him. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s flying the plane. The landing will be easy.”

  Dirk peeked out the window at the tortuous rills and craggy outcroppings. “Maybe just to be sure—”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s going to be all right. Go ahead, strap yourself in. I’m staying here with him.”

  Dirk shook his head as if he knew better and knelt beside her. Out the windows, the sky slimmed away and black ridges rushed past. The plane slowed, the landscape steadied, and Dirk gripped the armrest of the seat beside him, anticipating their impact.

  With a grating crunch and a loud whine of ripped metal, the plane touched the ground, rocked like a subway car, and stopped. Dirk unclenched his remorseless grip on the seat and stood up to peer out the windows. Pitted, steaming fields of cooling lava surrounded them.

  “We made it!” Howard exulted and flung off his seat harness.

  Reena didn’t rise. Dirk bent down again and noticed her hand trembling on Jiang’s chest. Jiang was pale but smiling. “Is he all right?”

  Reena lifted her face, her eyes hot with tears. “He’s dead.”

  Dirk put his fingers to Jiang’s cold neck. There was no pulse. He hovered over the body for a moment in dazed suspension, then he double-fisted his hands and brought them down sharply on Jiang’s chest. He pressed the heels of his hands onto the old man’s sternum and pressed rhythmically as he’d seen on TV.

  Reena put her hands on his. Her eyes were pure and stared him to stillness. At the back of Dirk’s mind, in the ebbing and rising sentience of the Other, she heard the words she had to speak. “Like the swan flying from its lake, he is serious, he has left home.”

  Dirk relented, put his right hand softly on the old man’s heart. Howard joined them. The air roiled with a smoke of possibilities in his timesense, the probability clouds of their individual motions and positions hazing the cramped space of the cabin—yet Jiang remained fogless. His clothes had soaked with light, shining like petroleum-stained water, and his features appeared carved of aged ivory.

  The monotonous thunder of a helicopter thudded closer. “Get the arc out,” Howard said and clambered for the door.

  “Can we find the right spot without Jiang?” Dirk asked.

  “I’m seeing genies,” Howard answered and opened the door. The pounding, roaring wash of the copter bleared his face. “Move it,” his mouth mutely said. “We’ve got to try.”

  Dirk and Reena followed Howard out of the plane and into the sand-stinging gust from the churning blades overhead. The helicopter bobbed over the downed airplane, dicing the air, hesitant to descend. When the three of them crawled onto the wing, they saw why. Jiang had brought the plane down in the middle of a spiky, uneven field. The helicopter rose and canted over the nearest rise, looking for a safer place to land. They found it on a sward where the magma had forked, and they went down between the two lithified currents.

  Dirk took out the arc and almost dropped it. The silver skin of the ovoid had tarnished to a strangely luminous ebony, like black milk. Only minutes remained before it would seal itself off and die inwardly forever. Reena grasped that with him. She also partook of Howard’s prescience and saw as he did that the specter of the future had coagulated into actuality: A glass well formed before her. Dirk’s faraway thoughts told her it was the drop into the singularity. It began here with one step forward. The bones in her feet itched. She stepped down from the wing of the plane and began walking over the churned surface of solid lava.

  Howard escorted her and witnessed the hallucinatory mosaic of time blinking over the terrain. The one direct path that led to the hyperfield stood out unblurred; at the end of it, he discerned the three of them, their faces twittery as white leaves, walking past pitted lava boulders that looked greased in the dry light. Dirk followed their trancewalk, squeezing the arc in his fist, wanting to feel the raw cold of its power, feeling only dull metal.

  Ahead, beyond the rise where the helicopter had landed, peeked the top of a shake roof building. That was the ranger station, Dirk realized. Ohelo bushes glittered with crimson berries along the rise, and not far away a gray plank walkway disappeared among skeletal shrubs. Recognition flashed, and Dirk stared past pocked boulders glazed by manganese oxides and spotted the pit where he had taken the arc from Donnie. A sulfur stench wafted as the wind curled across the cinder-waste from the smoking vents in the distance.

  Howard and Reena skidded down the scarp hand in hand, and Dirk bounded after them. At the bottom, Reena took his hand. Dirk held up the arc. Less than a minute remained. Howard let go of Reena and touched the black disc in its web of light. Reena too put her fingertips on the arc. The crystal interfaces of all the minutes and events that had led them here pushed their hands down with a dowser’s insistence. They knelt, the arc in their hands swirling above the volcanic tuff like the planchette of a Ouija board.

  A silver-gold charge leaped from the ground to the arc, and the three hands snapped away. The arc fused to the spot beneath it in a shock of galvanic fire. A dowel of energy the color of moonlight rose from the arc and disappeared in the sunlight among biscuits of clouds. The arc strobed silver, and its argent luminosity filled the grotto with shimmering air.

  “My friends!” The windspun voice came from everywhere. “Strange indeed are the ways. I’ve found my way back!” Poe appeared, naked and youthful, in a nimbus of white radiance that tre
mbled like sheet lightning. Its large-eyed, mustached face was transfigured with joy. “Oh, I can’t tell you how happy I am—so—so yes-out-of-mind! You’ve actually saved me! I’d given up hope. Oh, glad fortune! No time left to thank you with the intensity I’ve learned to feel for you. No time—”

  “What about Jiang?” Dirk called to Insideout, and the white-hot refulgence around Poe huffed brighter. “He’s dead.”

  “Is that what you think?” Insideout’s drafty voice asked, eyes jeweled with tears of joy, the flesh around them crinkly with merry assurance. “I thought for sure you understood by now. Certainly you must know, Dirk. Poor dears. It’s all inside of you. If only there were time to show you. Time has no shores.” It reached out its arms, and fire-dots appeared overhead, dew-webbing the forcelines that domed the basin. “A moment of song,” it said, and the fire-dots spun like spirochetes.

  Lavish waves of well-being rocked the three terrestrials, and the straps of their muscles and buckles of their joints loosened. Gravity unspooled a little, and their bodies hung effortlessly in space. The wave-bundles of their minds drifted free of their brains and floated into the charged air outside their bodies. Colors brightened to sheer vibrations, and a deep quiet fell toward the sun. Drifts of heaven flowed into them from where the future grows, reaving the last shreds of their past. Life splurged.

  This extrahuman passion bloated the three of them with nostalgia for their humanity. In synchrony with this feeling, the fire-points in the air stopped spinning, and the celebrants returned immediately to their bodies—Howard, Dirk, and Reena again, snug in the loops of their blood.

  “You’ve all learned to be more human since we first met,” Insideout said, bleary-eyed with bliss. “Me, too.” Poe iced to a still image, hand raised in parting. “Goodbye, my friends.”

  “Goodbye,” Dirk said.

  “Where can we say you came from?” Howard asked, urgently.

  “Go in happiness,” Reena cried.

  “Ah, more light—”

  The radiance staggered, flared brilliantly, and Poe and the geyser of light vanished. The arc that stayed behind pulsed like an ash-white coal. The space above it cracked with wiry voltage, and a tense silence shrined the pit.

  “You gotta stand over the arc now,” Dirk said, feeling Insideout’s call for her.

  Reena, sad and smiling, acknowledged, “I know.”

  “Right.” Dirk touched her cheek with the tingling tips of his fingers where the arc had shocked him. He had angel strife in his look. “Good luck.”

  She kissed him on the lips and stepped away into a distance he would spend the rest of his life crossing. Howard waved. He watched the glass well turning in the air, twisting, gathering her in. He took Dirk’s arm and pulled him backward.

  Dirk abruptly pulled free and leaped to Reena’s side. “Take this,” he said, digging his class ring from his pocket. “I want you to have it—from us, your first Earth. We’ll remember you. I’ll never forget you.”

  She took the ring with a touch sticky with extreme cold, and a voltaic spray drizzled from the ring as it passed between them. She spoke to him, but he couldn’t hear her. Her face looked happy, slippery with tears.

  Dirk backed away. He stopped with his heels against the rocky incline for a last look at Reena as she stood over the white fire of the arc, the visible force wavering like tufts of bleached grass around her ankles. She raised her hand, and a rainbow dropped from it like a shooting star.

  Dirk turned and climbed up the face of the scarp after Howard. Howard had already crawled out of the basin, and he saw Charlotte running toward him on the boardwalk that led from the ranger station. She had her gun out.

  Halfway up the slope, the black rocks under Dirk glared white. He flipped over and scowled against the luminance. Reena’s hair had ignited like a matchhead, and streamers and gushes of magnetically looped radiance wreathed her. The image fragmented into chips of chrome—solar phosphenes that twinkled briefly in the outline of her body before scattering like silver leaves on the lance of the wind.

  Dirk scrabbled to the top of the scarp in time to see Cora appear on the boardwalk that led out to the lava. Charlotte ran ahead of her, gun drawn. Howard already had his hands on his head. Dirk raised his hands.

  Cora budged past Charlotte and hurriedly picked her way over the sharp lava to Howard. She confronted him with worried alertness, looking for signs of lack-love, and he swooped her up in a staggering embrace that almost toppled them into the pit. Charlotte lowered her pistol and stepped out on the lava.

  Cora’s and Howard’s laughter uncoiled joyously and echoed from the volcanic cones. Dirk, smudged, scratched, bruised, his clothes in tatters, gazed beyond them toward the distant brimstone outcroppings, the crater mists, and the sea. He listened as far as he could for the diamond grindstone music of heaven. But that had disappeared. Utterly himself again, he placed his raised hands against his head and laughed to feel the snugness of his bones. He looked into the basin. The air lifting from the pit had the smell of apples and twilight. A rainbow circled the space where Reena had stood and then slowly faded away.

  Epilog

  Jiang soared through the thriving azures of an endless sky to Sandalwood Mountain, the land of the dead, with its cascades of shimmering gold and slopes of transparent fire. He became light itself, sheer energy in a mobius bundle of complexifying waveforms, free of flesh and boundaries. A wordless understanding accompanied him, like Dirk’s special awareness, and he knew that he was expanding at the speed of light into the luxurious emptiness of the quantum field. The sky around him carried the eternity of all energy, the interior of light.

  Howard’s prescience went with him as well, for he observed his future pearling ahead of him to geodesic linkages of mass, phosphorescent circuits of matter. Able to watch himself in the near future, tunneling into a shining gridwork, he experienced his intelligence showing him the nacreous vibrations folding in and out of each other like water shadows and harmonizing to nodes bright as full moons—spirals of DNA, the youngest possible human body.

  As the vast, elegant structure of opalescent light narrowed around him, and the edge of space closed in with a swirl of faces and places from his new life, he realized that he had reentered the genetic crystal of human life.

  Dirk had been right: There was no end. Already his mind folded into a new molecular bondage as the chromosomal antenna absorbed his wave pattern from the quantum field. And in that instantless zone between being and oblivion, a cinematic flurry of crosscut images and vivid scenes rushed before him, jangling with color, revealing the achingly familiar features of his wife and children merging with the shadowy, backlit futureview of the family he was entering somewhere on a suburban slope of Golden Mountain.

  Before relenting to this love that reconciled everything, Jiang looked for the others from the end of his last life. Howard and Dirk lingered there on that slope—with Cora. The timelines lensed. And Jiang understood that they would become a family, adopting Dirk in the last year of his childhood.

  For her part, Cora believed not a word her husband and Dirk told her about the alien. In fact, no one did. Despite the fact that polygraph tests supported their lunatic story, the police remained convinced they were lying. Dirk, outraged by the detectives’ incredulity, demanded truth serum. Some of the police wanted to oblige, eager to find the weapon that had pulverized the Yakuza kidnappers. But no such weapon was ever found—and experts insisted it couldn’t exist. Howard posted their bonds after he and Dirk were charged with flying without a license and the near miss with the jumbo jet, and they were released from police custody.

  Donnie Lopes woke up in Koko Crater remembering nothing from the time he left the police station. All memory of the orc had evaporated, to return in the years ahead only remotely, between the acts of his dreams where it souled whimpering, teeth-grinding nightmares. The police found him crawling out of the gully, and they guided him away from Ipo’s broken carcass. The sight of Hunza’s and Pepp
ercorn’s fly-busy bodies punched him, and the horrible undoing of the alien budged closer to memory. He was hysterical when the police carried him from the crater. Later, Dirk told him the whole story, but Donnie dismissed it as another ruse. He was overjoyed when the Dycksons adopted Dirk and took him back with them to Illinois.

  Cora’s interrogation and doubt would last longest. Who was that sharply dressed blonde she had seen running hand in hand with her husband? And where had she gone in that black desert? People did not simply disappear into thin air. Howard told her the truth, again and again, without once losing his temper, and she accepted that something had happened. But she didn’t relinquish the last of her anger and suspicion until she found out that she was pregnant.

  The child to come existed as just one cell in the gaze of Cora’s blood when it received Jiang’s waveform. Thirty-eight years before, Jiang had lost his wife and youngest son in the violence of the revolution and had not once dreamed they were on their way back—let alone that they would take the dissimilar forms of Howard and Cora. And he never would dream it, since the waveform’s collapse into the spiral antenna of DNA also collapsed Jiang’s link with the alien and the knowledge they had shared.

  In the mothering gravity of his new body’s first cell, Jiang’s flight through the void that holds all things ended, and he became a thing again, spectral with happiness, full of blood and sleep.

  Howard and Cora would never guess. Howard, content to have his wife back and a few million dollars in the bank, accepted his bizarre fortune for the cosmic glitch that it was. The weirdness had left him with a lifelong exuberance for the ordinary. Baseball, food shopping, car engines, and changing diapers were all equally savory now, and he lived each day with gratitude and happiness.