World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  Another long, long silence.

  “Thank you,” said Mom. “And Doctor?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something else I need to ask you about. Is this hereditary? Have I—or my husband—passed this on to our child? Would it pass on if—,”

  Boy heard no more. He realized he must have slept again. He woke at one point and heard Mom crying softly. Then her breathing deepened and she began to snore. He had no idea how much time passed after that, but when he became aware again, there was another voice in the room, a female voice.

  “You pray, ma’am?”

  “These days, yes. Yes, I do. Too little, too late, maybe.”

  Boy knew Mom had been raised Catholic, he’d seen the Bible hidden in one of the cooking pots, but Pop ‘didn’t hold with that preachy crap’ so it was rarely discussed. She didn’t go to church, and when Boy had occasionally asked about religion, she’d said he would have to make his own mind up about it when he was older. She had grown up questioning many of the beliefs her parents had instilled in her, but she said she couldn’t dismiss faith entirely. Now, she’d brought a Bible into his hospital room. The doctors had given up; science had failed her son. Boy wasn’t surprised she was turning back to God. He’d never told her he’d jettisoned the idea of a deity years ago. Mom might be hoping for a spell in purgatory followed by eternity in heaven for him, but he was a hundred percent sure his consciousness would turn off like a lightbulb and that would be that.

  “There’s always hope, ma’am, always. Hope, faith and charity. The power of Jesus to heal his children is a wondrous thing. A wondrous thing indeed. Amen.”

  Boy found himself disliking the unknown woman. He tried to open his eyes, but his body wasn’t interested in cooperating.

  “You go to church, then?” Mom didn’t really sound interested. She sounded exhausted. Boy guessed she had been at his side ever since he’d been admitted, however long ago that was. She was probably grabbing a few hours’ sleep at a time, between visits from nurses and doctors. Maybe she was glad of any kind of conversation.

  “Yes, ma’am, I surely do. A beautiful place. Proclaimerz congregation of Light and Love. That’s Proclaimerz with a ‘z’.”

  Mom obviously couldn’t think of an appropriate reply. She made a noncommittal sound.

  Boy had heard of Proclaimerz, of course. It had started a few years back when Rev Jesse Newman had arrived. He was an evangelist preacher fresh out of a midwest seminary, full of ideas, energy and according to Pop, bullshit. Boy suspected Mom agreed with Pop, as she never spoke up for Rev. Jesse in Pop’s absence. Jesse Newman arrived with some significant financial backing, that much was clear. He’d rented an old industrial building, converted it to a church that could hold nearly 1,500 people. It was a mile out of town in a run-down area—he could hardly have picked a worse location. No one thought he would attract more than a handful of church goers. But then he started appearing on TV commercials every night offering praise, prayer, healing and a reminder of God’s eternal wrath against the wrongdoer Wednesday evenings, Saturday mornings and three times on a Sunday. Wrongdoers, according to Rev. Jesse Newman, were those who didn’t attend Proclaimerz Mega Church on at least one of the aforementioned occasions on a weekly basis, and ponying up a decent chunk of change to support the “ongoing mission”.

  If Boy could have rolled his eyes, he would have. When he was a little younger, he assumed the “ongoing mission” referred—like his favorite show—to a continuing search for other civilizations, other galaxies. But Rev. Jesse showed no signs of boldly going anywhere. Which was a pity, because something about the evangelical preacher’s smiling tanned face always gave Boy the urge to punch it. At the time, he couldn’t have explained why. But he didn’t need to be able to spell ‘hypocrite’ without feeling uncomfortable whenever he saw Rev. Jesse in the back of his chauffeur-driven car, making his way to church, driving past the poor folk walking the half-mile from the nearest bus stop, their last few dollars saved for the collection plate. No one could deny the incredible energy and charisma of the man though, and those qualities seemed to convince vast numbers of people to turn off their rational and critical faculties in his presence.

  “Rev. Jesse is a real man of God, ma’am, a preacher like I’ve never heard in all my years. And he has the true gift of healing.”

  Boy knew what was coming next, and his heart sank. Surely Mom wouldn’t? He had heard his own death sentence pronounced and it had almost been a relief. His life had often seemed hardly worth living before the tumor changed him. After it had taken control, he had committed terrible acts, done things he could barely have imagined. Whether he or the tumor was responsible for the violence was hardly the point. There was only one sure way to make it stop.

  “A healer?” Mom’s voice sounded just a little brighter. Boy felt suddenly, crushingly sad for her. She wasn’t ready to give up yet. She hadn’t been able to accept the inevitable as he had.

  As the two women talked, he faded away into sleep. Last he remembered, they were plotting to get him out of the hospital and over to the church. Boy offered up a small prayer of his own, to the god he didn’t believe in: please let me die first.

  Chapter 20

  Mexico City

  Present Day

  Seb woke at 5am. Beside him, Mee had moved past the high-decibel snoring stage into the barely discernible breathing that meant she was deeply asleep. She had a wonderfully pragmatic approach to problems. If they could be solved, she’d try to solve them. If not, she wouldn’t. Either way, she never lost sleep over it.

  Seb got out of bed, stretched and walked slowly around the small apartment. He had struggled to get to sleep, and when he finally had, images of Felicia and her children snapped into his mind, their faces distorted, burning, screaming, looking to him for help. He knew the only sane response to his current state of mind would be to sit, to contemplate. To enter into that alert, compassionate state of mind he had first practiced in his teens, and allow his thoughts, fears and regrets to surface and be acknowledged, losing much of their power over him in the process.

  He glanced at the meditation stool leaning against the piano. Turning his back on it, he pulled on some clothes and walked out into the pre-dawn city. He wasn’t in the mood for forgiving himself.

  Walking in the gray-blue light, the streets as quiet as they ever were in Mexico City, he allowed his thoughts to center on his limitations. He was as close to a super-being as Earth had ever known. Invulnerable, able to travel huge distances almost instantaneously and manipulate matter at a sub-molecular level. All without breaking a sweat. And he had saved lives since escaping from Mason with Mee. Many lives. And yet, the reality of the multiverse meant that unimaginable numbers had died at the same time as he saved others.

  He realized with a guilty shock that he was much more upset about the death of this universe’s Felicia than he was about the others who must have died while he was helping in this—his home—universe. The earthquake in Honduras, for instance. The families he had saved from the rubble would have been buried alive in countless other universes. He had not been there to save them. And yet, somehow, the loss of life in other universes didn’t seem quite as real to him. Then he remembered the family he had saved hours before. They were in a neighboring universe, but because he had been there, had met them, they were now every bit as real to him as anyone else.

  Seb turned into the warren of alleyways leading into the Iztapalapa district. Iztapalapa had grown from a few houses in the 1970s, to one of the most densely populated areas in Mexico City. No real urban planning meant some residents still didn’t have access to clean water. Crime was a problem, drugs, prostitution and murder a part of life for the two million people crammed into its streets. Yet Seb loved walking through the district, talking to people, drawn to the intense sense of community he found there. His own reluctance to belong was thrown into sharp relief by the families he met for whom their community was—literally—central to their
survival.

  Seb remembered watching the Semana Santa parade the week before Easter. Three million people had squeezed into the streets of Iztapalapa to celebrate the passion of the Christ. Some had dragged full size wooden crosses, even going so far as being nailed onto them when they reached their destination. Groups of sweating men carried floats bearing religious icons, flowers and statues, so huge and heavy they needed forty or more people to lift them. Seb had watched it all with a mixture of horror, envy and hope. Something in him was drawn to the powerful feeling of love between these people. It was palpable. And yet, why torture themselves in the name of religion? Why deny themselves food—when they already had so little—to pay for the extravagant floats, colorful clothes and overpriced plastic relics?

  As he walked, Seb looked up into the scaffolding around a ramshackle building. The building was so unsafe-looking, he wondered if the scaffolding was the only thing holding it together. Five stray dogs had made their home on the wooden planks above him. They watched him pass, curious, but not interested enough to bark at the stranger. A few yards behind him, two figures peeled away from the shadows and quietly followed the tall, fearless figure who had so casually decided to walk through their territory.

  Seb thought back to his adolescence, growing up at St Benet’s, the Catholic orphanage. He had stopped attending Mass in his early teens, but he was familiar with the Bible, and saw how the Sisters and Father O’Hanoran had tried to live their lives guided by that old, much edited, mistranslated, badly interpreted, poetical collection of stories, history, poetry and parables. He respected their dedication and their obvious love of humanity, but could never bring himself to embrace a tradition that he found, at an institutional level, to be judgmental and forbidding, rather than loving and welcoming.

  Father O had been an exception, and the reason Seb couldn’t entirely jettison his childhood faith. He had taught Seb contemplation, the spiritual technique which had—he still believed—saved his life. And when pushed on theological matters, the old priest had always answered in the same way:

  “Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

  Then he would chuckle and raise a bushy white eyebrow.

  “You could always start at the end and work backward, of course. Know yourself, so you can have compassion for yourself. Then you might love yourself and be able to do the same for your neighbor. Whether you know it or not, you will be loving God at the same time.”

  Conversations like this had always made Seb uncomfortable. He flinched every time he heard the word ‘God’. He had once challenged Father O to define it.

  “Far wiser heads than mine have defined God,” said the priest, his face solemn, “and I can make you one promise about those definitions: they’re all wrong.” Then he’d burst out laughing.

  Seb smiled at the memory. He wondered what Father O would have made of Mee. He probably would have liked her. Certainly, being in a relationship had given Seb an occasional practical demonstration of how it felt not being the center of his own existence. It had always been a theoretical concept before, now he was living it. It hadn’t been easy at first. His self-image as fairly selfless, open and giving had quickly been exposed as just that: an image. The reality was a little harder to come to terms with, at first. Seb realized he was selfish, proud, judgmental, unable to truly see life through the eyes of another. It was a shock, particularly when he could see that Mee—self-contained, forthright, loud Mee—was actually far more loving, accepting and selfless than he was. When the shock had worn off a little, he’d found himself letting go of some of his certainties. He’d taken the knowledge of his newly discovered flaws into his practice of contemplation and had let them wither in the light. If he hadn’t nearly lost Mee, he might have taken her a little more for granted. But seeing her threatened had woken him up to the fragility—and importance—of human relationships. He might never feel that same sense of belonging that Father O, or the faithful who paraded during Semana Santa did. He could accept that now. But he had finally let another person in—and that was more than he had thought possible just over a year ago.

  He stopped. The light was stronger now and there were signs that the city was waking. Not that Iztapalapa ever truly slept, but he had walked for an hour without having to dodge a cart, or move out of the way of a truck. He turned to go home.

  Two men blocked his way. Both were armed—the one to his left with a machete, the other with a gun. Seb looked at their faces. They showed signs of heavy drug use—probably cheap cocaine. Narcomenudeo was the street trade that supplied coke and meth to residents of Mexico City. When it was difficult to shift product over the border in America, where the market was far more lucrative, dealers simply cut the drugs with roach poison, flour, laundry powder, and sold it to the poor in their own city. The cartels would sometimes clash in their pursuit of trade, and it was often the poorest neighborhood that took the brunt of the ensuing violence.

  Seb slowly reached into his pants pocket and took out his wallet. The men were young—late teens, early twenties, perhaps—scared, and hurting for their next fix. He held the wallet out toward them. The two men looked confused. They expected fear, or resistance, not passive acquiescence. The one with the gun nodded at his friend to grab the wallet. Holding the machete threateningly in front of him, the man inched forward and grabbed the wallet. At the same moment, Seb stepped sideways and grabbed his arm.

  The machete flashed down with an instinctive jerk of the man’s arm and severed Seb’s hand. It fell—still holding the wallet—to the ground. Panicked, the man with gun fired four shots into Seb’s chest, then bent down to retrieve the money. As he did so, Seb’s severed hand let go of the wallet and wagged a finger at the thief as if admonishing him. The man gasped and crossed himself.

  “Oh, now you call on God,” said Seb. Still holding the arm of the first man, who had now dropped the machete and started babbling, he grabbed the arm of the second man. Both men took a split second to process the impossibility of this, then stared at Seb’s wrist. Instead of a wound gushing blood, a perfectly healthy hand projected from Seb’s sleeve. With unconsciously comic timing, both men then looked at the floor, where the third hand was now running in circles around the wallet like a spider.

  Seb used Manna to reach out and drain the last remnants of cocaine from their systems and turn off the addictive centers of their brains. The men felt it happening, looked at each other and back at Seb. The extra hand climbed up his leg, replaced the wallet in his pants pocket, then turned into an albino rat which ran up the street. As it rounded the corner, Seb heard the yelping of the scaffolding dogs as they spied a tasty snack.

  “You’re sick, you know that?” said Seb2. Ignoring him, Seb looked at the men. Now drug-free, they looked exhausted, terrified and under-nourished. Seb sighed and let go of them. He slowly reached into his pocket again and withdrew two one hundred-dollar bills, handing one to each man.

  “Go get something to eat,” said Seb. He walked back the way he had come, leaving his attackers staring at each other and shaking. Where were those men in all the other universes? Who might they kill or injure there? What was their life expectancy as drug-addicted thieves? He couldn’t know, and he couldn’t change it. He headed back to home, and Mee.

  He made it less than a hundred yards before his head began to throb and he felt himself falling.

  “Shit,” he thought, then consciousness was sucked out of him like a spider up a vacuum cleaner.

  Chapter 21

  This time, the alien—Mic—wasn’t alone. And the surroundings were a good deal more opulent than the Social Security office of his last visit. Although the constant background hum was still present.

  Seb was sitting in a tan leather office chair at one end of a large, oval, highly polished mahogany table. The chair was oversized, very comfortable and smelled of fresh leather. A series of buttons under the fingers of his righ
t hand tipped it backward, forward, side-to-side and even inflated a lumbar support which pushed reassuringly into the small of his back. This was obviously a CEO-level office chair, announcing its superiority to other office chairs in every carefully crafted detail. This was a chair that had made it to the top and had no qualms about letting inferior chairs know about it. This was one smug chair.

  “Are you finished?” said Seb2.

  Seb spun the chair 360 degrees while tilting it as far back as he could.

  “What?” he thought. “I mean, have you ever sat in anything this comfortable?”

  “This is not a dream,” said Seb2, “and we have company.”

  Seb pushed and held a button and the chair slowly and quietly tilted him into an upright position. Between his feet, three long glowing faces appeared at the other end of the table. As the chair reached the end of its movement, the faces were followed by the upper half of bodies.

  The three aliens were wearing business suits. Two of them were 80s style, shoulder-padded, ‘Dynasty’-era power suits, the other a quiet pinstripe that was beautifully made. Probably hand-tailored. Which prompted the question: where did eight-foot tall aliens go for their suits?

  “You’re not quite fully conscious yet,” said Seb2. “Being summoned like this has an effect that takes me a minute or two to counter. So don’t say anything stupid.”

  The pinstriped alien in the middle spoke. This time, the voice came out of speakers discreetly mounted in the ceiling.

  “This one is appointed to induce formalities,” it said. “Remembrance. This one is Mic. Seeing you fortuitous and grateful, Seb Varden.”