by Pratt, Tim
Sigmund looked into Carlsbad’s past, as far as he could—which was quite far, given the cocktail of uppers singing in his blood—and Carlsbad never changed; black, placid, eternal. “What—” What are you, he’d nearly asked. “What do you do for the Table?”
“Whatever the Old Doctor tells me to,” Carlsbad said.
Sigmund nodded. “Carlotta told me you’re a fallen god of the underworld.”
“That bitch lies,” Carlsbad said, without disapproval. “I’m no god. I’m just, what’s that line—‘the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.’ The Old Doctor says that as long as one evil person remains on Earth, I’ll be alive.”
“Well,” Sigmund said. “I guess you’ll be around for a while, then.”
***
The first time Carlsbad saved his life, Sigmund lay panting in a snowbank, blood running from a ragged gash in his arm. “You could have let me die just then,” Sigmund said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “You could have benefited from my death.”
Carlsbad shrugged, shockingly dark against the snow. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I thought you were evil,” Sigmund said, lightheaded from blood loss and exertion, more in the now than he’d ever felt before, the scent of pines and the bite of cold air immediate reminders of his miraculously ongoing life. “I mean, you’re made of evil.”
“You’re made mostly of carbon atoms,” Carlsbad said. “But you don’t spend all your time thinking about forming long-chain molecules, do you? There’s more to both of us than our raw materials.”
“Thank you for saving me, Carlsbad.”
“Anytime, Sigmund.” His tone was laid-back but pleased, the voice of someone who’d seen it all but could still sometimes be pleasantly surprised. “You’re the first Table agent in four hundred years who’s treated me like something other than a weapon or a monster. I know I scare you shitless, but you talk to me.”
Exhaustion and exhilaration waxed and waned in Sigmund. “I like you because you don’t change. When I look at most people I can see them as babies, teenagers, every step of their lives superimposed, and if I look back far enough they disappear—but not you. You’re the same as far back as I can see.” Sigmund’s eyelids were heavy. He felt light. He thought he might float away.
“Hold on,” Carlsbad said. “Help is on the way. Your death might not diminish me, but I’d still like to keep you around.”
Sigmund blacked out, but not before hearing the whirr of approaching helicopters coming to take him away.
***
“I’m the New Doctor,” the New Doctor said. Willowy, brunette, young, she stood behind a podium in the briefing room, looking at the assembled Table agents—Sigmund, Carlotta, Carlsbad, and the recently promoted Ray. They were the alpha squad, the apex of the organization, and the New Doctor had not impressed them yet. “We’re going to have some changes around here. We need to get back to basics. We need to find the cup. These other jobs might fill our bank accounts, but they don’t further our cause.”
Ray popped a wasp into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Fuck that mystic bullshit.” His voice was accompanied by a deep, angry buzz, a sort of wasp-whisper in harmony with the normal workings of his voicebox. Ray got nasty and impatient when he ate wasps. “I joined up to make money and get a regular workout, not chase after some imaginary Grail.” Sigmund knew Ray was lying—that he had a very specific interest in the cup—but Sigmund also understood why Ray was keeping that interest a secret. “You just stay in the library and read your books like the Old Doctor did, okay?”
The New Doctor shoved the podium over, and it fell toward Ray, who dove out of the way. While he was moving, the New Doctor came around and kicked him viciously in the ribs, her small boots wickedly pointed and probably steel-toed. Ray rolled away, panting and clutching his side.
Sigmund peered into the New Doctor’s past. She looked young, but she’d looked young for decades.
“I’m not like the Old Doctor,” she said. “He missed his old life in the archives, and was content with his books, piecing together the past. But I’m glad to be out of the archives, and under my leadership, we’re going to make history, not study it.”
“I’ll kill you,” Ray said. Stingers were growing out of his fingertips, and his voice was all buzz now.
“Spare me,” the New Doctor said, and kicked him in the face.
***
By spying on their pasts and listening in on their private moments, Sigmund learned why the other agents wanted to find the cup, and see God:
Carlotta whispered to one of her lovers, the shade of a great courtesan conjured from an anteroom of Hell: “I want to castrate God, so he’ll never create another world.”
Ray told Carlotta, while they disposed of the body of a young archivist who’d discovered their secret past and present plans: “I want to eat God’s heart and belch out words of creation.”
Carlsbad, alone, staring at the night sky (a lighted void, while his own darkness was utter), had imaginary conversations with God that always came down, fundamentally, to one question: “Why did you make me?”
The New Doctor, just before she poisoned the Old Doctor (making it look like a natural death), answered his bewildered plea for mercy by saying: “No. As long as you’re alive, we’ll never find the cup, and I’ll never see God, and I’ll never know the answers to the ten great questions I’ve composed during my time in the archives.”
Sigmund saw it all, every petty plan and purpose that drove his fellows, but he had no better purpose himself. The agents of the Table might succeed in finding the cup, not because they were worthy, but simply because they’d been trying for years upon years, and sometimes persistence led to success.
Sigmund knew their deepest reasons, and kept all their secrets, because past and present and cause and effect were scrambled for him. The Old Doctor’s regime of meth, cocaine, and more exotic uppers had ravaged Sigmund’s nasal cavities and set him adrift in time. At first, he’d only been able to see back in time, but sometimes taking the Old Doctor’s experimental stimulants truly sent him back in time. Sometimes it was just his mind that traveled, sent back a few days to relive past events again in his own body, but other times, rarely, he physically traveled back, just a day or two at most, just for a little while, before being wrenched back to a present filled with headaches and nosebleeds.
On one of those rare occasions when he traveled physically back in time, Sigmund saw the Old Doctor’s murder, and was snapped back to the future moments before the New Doctor could kill him, too.
***
Ray ate a Sherpa’s brain two days out of base camp, and after that, he was able to guide them up the crags and paths toward the temple perfectly, though he was harder to converse with, his speech peppered with mountain idioms. He developed a taste for barley tea flavored with rancid yak butter, and sometimes sang lonely songs that merged with the sound of the wind.
***
“We’re going to Hell,” the New Doctor said.
“Probably,” Sigmund said, edging away.
She sighed. “No, really—we’re going into the underworld. Or, well, sort of a visiting room for the underworld.”
“I’ve heard rumors about that.” Hell’s anteroom was where Carlotta found her ghostly lovers. “One of the Table’s last remaining mystic secrets. I’m surprised they didn’t lose that, too, when they lost the key to the moon and the scryer’s glass and all those other wonders in the first war with the Templars.”
“Much has been lost.” The New Doctor pushed a shelf, which swung easily away from the wall on secret hinges, revealing an iron grate. “But that means much can be regained.” She pressed a red button. “Stop fidgeting, Sigmund. I’m not going to kill you. But I do want to know, how did you get into the Old Doctor’s office and see me kill him, when I know you were on assignment with Carlsbad in Belize at the time? And how did you disappear afterward? Bodily bilocation? Ectoplasmic projection? What?”
“Time tra
vel,” Sigmund said. “I don’t just see into the past. Sometimes I travel into the past physically.”
“Huh. I didn’t see anything about that in the Old Doctor’s notes.”
“Oh, no. He kept the most important notes in his head. So why aren’t you going to kill me?”
Something hummed and clattered beneath the floor.
“Because I can use you. Why haven’t you turned me in?”
Sigmund hesitated. He’d liked the Old Doctor, who was the closest thing he’d ever had to a father. He hated to disrespect the old man’s memory, though he knew the Old Doctor had seen him as a research tool, a sort of ambulatory microfiche machine, and nothing more. “Because I’m ready for things to change. I thought I wanted to be an operative, but I’m tired of the endless pointless round-and-round, not to mention being shot and stabbed and thrown from moving trains. Under your leadership, I think the Table might actually achieve something.”
“We will.” The grinding and humming underground intensified, and she raised her voice. “We’ll find the cup, and see God, and get answers. We’ll find out why he created the world, only to immediately abandon his creation, letting chaos fill his wake. But first, to Hell. Here.” She tossed something glittering toward him, a few old subway tokens. “To pay the attendant.”
The grinding stopped, the grate sliding open to reveal a tarnished brass elevator car operated by a man in a cloak the color of dust and spiderwebs. He held out his palm, and Sigmund and the New Doctor each dropped a token into his hand.
“Why are we going... down there?” Sigmund asked.
“To see the Old Doctor, and get some of that information he kept only in his head. I know where to find the cup—or where to find the map that leads to it, anyway—but I need to know what will happen once I have the cup in hand.”
“Why take me?”
“Because only insane people, like Carlotta, risk going to Hell’s anteroom alone. And if I took anyone else, they’d find out I was the one who killed the Old Doctor, and they might be less understanding about it than you are.” She stepped into the elevator car, and Sigmund followed. He glanced into the attendant’s past, almost reflexively, and the things he saw were so horrible that he threw himself back into the far corner of the tiny car; if the elevator hadn’t already started moving, he would have pried open the doors and fled. The attendant turned his head to look at him, and Sigmund squeezed his eyes shut so that he didn’t have to risk seeing the attendant frown, or worse, smile.
“Interesting,” the New Doctor said.
***
After they returned from Hell, Sigmund and the New Doctor fucked furiously beneath the card table in the Old Doctor’s library, because sex is an antidote to death, or at least, an adequate placebo.
***
“That’s it, then,” the New Doctor said. “We’re going to the Himalayas.”
“Fucking great,” Ray said. “I always wanted to eat a Yeti.”
“I think you’re hairy enough already,” Carlotta said.
Sigmund and the New Doctor sat beneath a ledge of rock, frigid wind howling across the face of the mountain. Carlsbad was out looking for Ray and Carlotta, who had stolen all the food and oxygen and gone looking for the temple of the cup alone. They wanted to kill God, not ask him questions, so their betrayal was troublesome but not surprising. Sigmund probably should have told someone about their planned betrayal, but he felt more and more like an actor outside time—a position which, he now realized, was likely to get him killed. He needed to take a more active role.
“Ray and Carlotta don’t know the prophecy,” Sigmund said. “Only the Old Doctor knew, and he only told us. They have no idea what they’re going to cause, if they reach the temple first.”
“If they reach the temple first, we’ll die along with the rest of the world.” The New Doctor was weak from oxygen deficiency. “If Carlsbad doesn’t find them, we’re doomed.” She looked older, having left the safety of the library and the archives, and the past two years had been hard. They’d traveled to the edges and underside of the Earth, gathering fragments of the map to the temple of the cup, chasing down the obscure references the New Doctor had uncovered in the archives. First they’d gone deep into the African desert, into crumbling palaces carved from sentient rock; then they’d trekked through the Antarctic, looking for the secret entrance to the Earth’s war-torn core, and finding it; they’d projected themselves, astrally and otherwise, into the mind of a sleeping demigod from the jungles of another world; and two months ago they’d descended to crush-depth in the Pacific Ocean to find the last fragment of the map in a coral temple guarded by spined, bioluminescent beings of infinite sadness. Ray had eaten one of those guardians, and ever since he’d been sweating purple ink and taking long, contemplative baths in salt water.
The New Doctor had ransacked the Table’s coffers to pay for this last trip to the Himalayas, selling off long-hoarded art objects and dismissing even the poorly paid hereditary janitorial staff to cover the expenses. And now they were on the edge of total failure, unless Sigmund did something.
Sigmund opened his pack and removed his last vial of the Old Doctor’s most potent exotic upper. “Wish me bon voyage,” he said, and snorted it all.
Time unspooled, and Sigmund found himself beneath the same ledge, but earlier, the ice unmarked by human passage, the weather more mild. Moving manically, driven by drugs and the need to stay warm, he piled up rocks above the trail and waited, pacing in an endless circle, until he heard Carlotta and Ray approaching, grunting under the weight of stolen supplies.
He pushed rocks down on them, and the witch and the phage were knocked down. Sigmund made his way to them, hoping they would be crushed—that the rocks would have done his work for him. Carlotta was mostly buried, but her long fingernails scraped furrows in the ice, and Sigmund gritted his teeth, cleared away enough rocks to expose her head, and finished her off with the ice axe. She did not speak, but Sigmund almost thought he saw respect in her expression before he obliterated it. Ray was only half-buried, but unmoving, his neck twisted unnaturally. Sigmund sank the point of the axe into Ray’s thigh to make sure he was truly dead, and the phage did not react. Sigmund left the axe in Ray’s leg. He turned his back on the dead and crouched, waiting for time to sweep him up again in its flow.
Carlsbad found Ray and Carlotta dead, and brought back the supplies. By then Sigmund was back from the past, and while the New Doctor ate and rested, he took Carlsbad aside to tell him the truth: “There’s a good chance we might destroy the world.”
“Hmm,” Carlsbad said.
“There’s a prophecy, in the deep archives of the Table, that God will only return when the world is destroyed by fire. But it’s an article of faith—the basis of our faith—that when the contents of the cup are swallowed by an acolyte of the Table, God will return. So by approaching the cup—by intending to drink from it—we might collapse the probability wave in such a way that the end of the world begins, fire and all, in the moments before we even touch the cup.”
“And you and the New Doctor are okay with that?”
“The New Doctor thinks she can convince God to spare the world from destruction, retroactively, if necessary.”
“Huh,” Carlsbad said.
“She can be very persuasive,” Sigmund said.
“I’m sure,” Carlsbad replied.
***
The fire began to fall just as they reached the temple, a structure so old it seemed part of the mountain itself. The sky went red, and great gobbets of flame cascaded down, the meteor shower to end all others. Snow flashed instantly to steam on all the surrounding mountains, though the temple peak was untouched, for now.
“That’s it, then,” Carlsbad said. “Only the evil in you two is keeping me alive.”
“No turning back now,” the New Doctor said, and started up the ancient steps to the temple.
Ray, bloodied and battered, left arm hanging broken, stepped from the shadows beside the temple. H
e held Sigmund’s ice axe in his good hand, and he swung it at the New Doctor’s head with phenomenal force, caving in her skull. She fell, and he fell upon her, bringing the axe down again and again, laying her body open. He looked up, face bruised and swollen, fur sprouting from his jaw, veins pulsing in his forehead, poison and ink and pus and hallucinogens oozing from his pores. “You can’t kill me, junkie. I’ve eaten wolverines. I’ve eaten giants. I’ve eaten angels.” As he said this last, he began to glow with a strange, blue-shifted light.
“Saving your life again,” Carlsbad said, almost tenderly, and then he did what the Table always counted on him to do. He swelled, he stormed, he smashed, he tore Ray to pieces, and then tore up the pieces.
After that he began to melt. “Ah, shit, Sigmund,” he said. “You just aren’t evil enough.” Before Sigmund could say thank you, or goodbye, all that remained of Carlsbad was a dark pool, like a slick of old axle grease on the snow.
There was nothing for Sigmund to do but go on.
***
“The cup holds the blood of God,” the Old Doctor said. “Drink it, and God will return, and as you are made briefly divine by swallowing the substance of his body, he will treat you as an equal, and answer questions, and grant requests. For that moment, God will do whatever you ask.” The Old Doctor placed his hand on Sigmund’s own. “The Table exists to make sure the cup’s power is not used for evil or trivial purposes. The question asked, the wish desired, has to be worth the cost, which is the world.”
“What would you ask?” Sigmund said.
“I would ask why God created the world and walked away, leaving only a cupful of blood and a world of wonders behind. But that is only curiosity, and not a worthy question.”
