Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  GRob, keying up a drug mix, makes a disparaging noise. “We just gonna sit around and get high until the shit comes down? That the plan?”

  Baxter checks the mix on her computer, tells her to do up, and then says to Wilson, “Read the pearl for her.”

  The interior of the pearl consists of chamber after chamber, what seems an infinite progression of rooms of varying proportions. Wilson reports this and Baxter says, “You got that, GRob? Infinite. There’s this room, then another and another and another…Get the picture?”

  GRob’s leisurely tone reflects her new chemical constituency. “Naw, man. I don’t got it. How’s that possible?”

  “Right! I’m goin’ explain this whole thing.”

  She doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm in Baxter’s voice and waits for him to deliver an explanation. Finally it appears to sink in. Her head droops to the side as if with the weight of acceptance that no explanation will be forthcoming. A smile touches the corners of her lips, the strain empties from her face. She might be seventeen, a sleepy girl waking after being with her lover, remembering the night they had. “This is probably the way to go,” she says.

  It’s a vague statement, but Wilson, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, trapped inside a giant pearl that has no end, devils like werewolves roaming everywhere, without the guidance of command, and maybe sixty-nine dead, death by cartoon, understands precisely what she means.

  • • •

  1200 hours

  They pass through room after room, more than a hundred by Wilson’s count, all essentially the same. Luxuriously appointed and in disarray, the only sign of previous habitation being the smears of blood on the door through which they entered the pearl. Shortly before noon they open a door and find that it leads out of the pearl, which is lying not in a field of flowers, but in the midst of a brass forest. Perhaps the same forest DeNovo mistook for gold, though Wilson’s not clear on how the pearl ended up in the middle of it. Stunted-looking trees and undergrowth, every vein of leaf and fork of stem and twist of root wrought in cunning detail, rising to the roof of the cave. The temperature of the forest is near scalding. Steam rises from the brass foliage. The vegetation is too dense and interwoven to afford an easy passage. Baxter orders them back into the pearl and calls for a break. Says he’s shutting down for an hour. He tells Wilson to close the door leading to the forest and to stand watch while they sleep. Wilson doesn’t believe this is a good time to rest, but he’s tired and raises no objection. At the center of the room is a fountain, its basin covered in a mosaic of white and turquoise tiles. Liking the trickling sound of the water, Wilson sits on the lip, his rifle across his knees. GRob removes her helmet and lies down among some pillows. Baxter sits against the opposite wall, his legs stretched out.

  Wilson’s grateful for time alone. He needs to think and to augment thought he orders up another shot of IQ. He considers adding a jolt of God’n Country, but decides that the interests of the United States of America may well be in conflict with the interests of his own survival, that—indeed—they have always been so and he has, until now, allowed them preeminence. He’s done his duty, and he’s way past the regulation limit for IQ—his heart doesn’t need any more stress. The drug puts up blinders around his brain, prevents thoughts of home and comfort from seeping in, and he concentrates on the matter at hand. Where are they? What did this? That’s the basic question. If he can understand what happened, maybe he can work out where they are. He references a scientific encyclopedia on his helmet screen, reads articles on quantum physics, not getting all of it, but enough to have a handle on what “changes on the quantum level” signifies. If the bomb caused such changes…Well, a bomb being an entirely unsubtle weapon, the changes it produced would not be discrete ones. A chaotic effect would be the most likely result. He looks up the word “chaos” and finds this definition:

  A state of things in which chance is supreme; especially: the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.

  The place they’re in, the cave, Paradise, whatever, could not, Wilson thinks, be described as disorganized, though the supremacy of chance may be a factor. What are the chances that they have not encountered anything in the cave other than things he’s heard about from either the villagers or Baxter? Distinct form has obviously been imposed on a chaotic circumstance. There must be some anthropomorphic element involved. What you get is what you see or, better said, what you expect to see. Since the villagers were the first witnesses, and since they’ve been expecting to see Paradise all their lives, when something inexplicable happened they imposed the form of the Garden of Allah, the metaphorical forms of the Qur’an, on primordial matter, and then spread the news so that anyone who came afterward would have this possibility in mind and thus be capable of expecting the same things. The devils? Maybe half the village expected not Paradise, but hell—thus the two were jammed together in an unholy synthesis. Or maybe, like Baxter suggested, the villagers were holding back some vital details. This explanation satisfies Wilson. He feels he might poke a few holes in it if he did more IQ, but he’s confident the truth is something close to what he’s envisioned. The idea that there may be a congruent truth does not escape him. It’s conceivable the day of judgment, the day when hell is hauled up from beneath the earth, is at hand and that the bomb was the inciting event. None of this, however, helps him as he hoped it might. Knowing where he is has clarified the problem, but not the solution.

  GRob stirs, stands, and comes to join him on the lip of the fountain. She unlatches her gauntlets and dips her bare hands into the water and splashes her face.

  “Go on take a bath if you want,” Wilson says, grinning. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  She shoots him a diffident look. “Uh-huh.”

  “Hey, I’ve seen your ass before.”

  “That was training. You see it now, you might take it for license.”

  The clear modulation of her voice and her use of the term “license” alert him. “You’re not on downs,” he says.

  “I boosted IQ when I racked out. I wanted to work through this mess.”

  “Yeah, same here.”

  “You hit on anything?”

  Wilson tells her his theory in brief and then asks what she came up with.

  “We’re close,” she says, patting her face with damp hands. “But I don’t think this place has anything to with Paradise. I think it’s all hell.”

  “How you figure?”

  “Only things we’ve seen so far are flowers, the wolves, and a pearl with some blood on the door and nobody inside. Now maybe the pearl came from Paradise, but whatever dropped it, dropped it in hell. We find a door that leads out of it, it leads to the brass trees with the boiling fucking air.” With a flourish, she wipes her left hand dry on her thigh. “Hell.”

  “Might be other doors.”

  “Probably thousands, but I don’t get they’re gonna lead us anywhere good.” GRob cups her right hand, scoops up water and lets it dribble down her throat onto her chest. “Maybe you can reach Paradise from here, but I figure we might hafta pass through somewhere bad to get there. And even if we find it, what the fuck we supposed to do then? We’re infidels, man. We’re unbelievers.”

  “You may be taking this all too literally.”

  “Taking it metaphorically just makes you confused.” It seems she’s about to say more, but she falls silent, and Wilson says, “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t hold back now. You got something, let’s hear it.”

  “Okay.” GRob dries her right hand. “Maybe it’s BS, but back in Tel Aviv I was doing a tech lieutenant. Guy’s always trying to impress me what a huge deal he was. Mr. I’ve-Got-A-Secret. He told me they were fixing up something special for Al Qaeda. A bomb. Didn’t know what kind, but he was working on the triggering device. Part of it was this big fucking electric battery produced seventy thousand volts. So when I saw him at the compound…”

&nb
sp; “Fuck!” says Wilson.

  “See what I’m saying? I saw him here, I remembered all that shit about hell and seventy thousand ropes. I said, Okay, maybe it’s a coincidence. Then when Baxman started running his mouth in the carrier, when he mentioned it, I was like, Aw, man! This is too weird, y’know.”

  Wilson studies the back of his left gauntlet, the grain of the plastic forearm shield, his thoughts looping between poles of denial and despair.

  “Seventy thousand’s such a weird number,” GRob says. “I thought it was like a special number for ragheads, so I did a search. Only time it’s mentioned is in relation to hell. Seventy thousand ropes. Seventy thousand volts. Some ol’ raghead mystic back in the day, he got the word wrong…or he received the message right and didn’t know what volts were, so he said, ‘ropes.’”

  “Fuck,” says Wilson again—there seems little else to say.

  “No doubt.” GRob hefts her rifle. “I say we blow a few holes in those brass trees. Clear a path. See what’s on the other side.”

  “Might be a big goddamn forest,” Wilson says dubiously.

  “Didn’t you read it? It’s not that big. And we got a lot of goddamn firepower. The other side of it reads infinite, but…” She shrugs. “What’s the option? We hang out here, live off battle juice and C rats? That sucks.”

  “Baxter’ll come up with something.”

  GRob snorts. “Forget him! Man’s sitting over there drooling into his food tube. I never heard anyone give an order like he gave us. Take downs in the middle of the shit? What’s that about?!”

  “You were acting pretty crazy.”

  “I saw a fifty-foot wolf that smelled like a dumpster eat my best fucking friend! If I was outa line, Baxter shoulda slapped me down. No way he shoulda told me to get druggy.”

  “He’ll bounce back.”

  “Oh, yeah. He just needs a nap. That’s whack, man! He was right for command, we’d have stopped five, ten minutes, then kept on burning. He’s over! You’n me, we gotta look to each other from now on.”

  Baxter’s helmeted face, half-obscured by reflection, seems at peace. Asleep or on the nod, it’s no way to be in the midst of war. Wilson wants to ignore the idea that Baxter’s showing cracks, but he doesn’t dispute GRob’s last statement. “What’s Arizona like?” he asks.

  “You live right next-door. Don’t you know?”

  “I been to the ruins at Betatakin. That’s about it.”

  “Got cheap package stores. Cheap smokes. The desert’ll trip you out. I don’t know. It’s cool.” She gazes off into a private distance. “Running the border towns was the best. We’d start out in Nogales and hit the cantinas all the way into New Mexico. Drinking and dancing.” She gives her head a little flip, and Wilson thinks the gesture must date back to the time when her hair was long and she’d toss it back from her face. He imagines her with a summer dress clinging to her body, laughing, living crazy under the stars, and how they met and had a night beneath the stained ceiling of a twenty-dollar motel room and the next morning they drove off in opposite directions and forgot one another, but their bodies remembered…

  “Where’s your head at, man?” GRob asks. “Am I losing you, too?”

  “Just a little vacation. I’m back.”

  She gives him an even look and extends her hand for the grip. They lock up, chest to chest, eye to eye, and she says, “We get outa this, man…You’n me. For real.”

  “Are you motivating me?”

  “Fucking A! Is it working?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Think hard. Think a week in Rome. We’ll see how it sets up after that.”

  “Naw, how about somewhere by the water? Tangiers.”

  “You got it! Soon as we clear debriefing.”

  Wilson searches for the place behind her eyes, the place every woman’s got where they keep their soul ray shuttered, and feels it from her. “We’re not getting out of this,” he says.

  She holds steady. “It’s still a promise.”

  They stay locked, and then she says, “Fuck the monsters! We’re the real monsters here.”

  “Fanged motherfuckers!” Wilson says. “We rule the goddamn world!”

  “We’re poison in a plastic pill. They eat us, they’ll crap blood and scream for their mamas.”

  “They won’t eat us, we’ll eat them. We’ll burrow into their bodies and live there. Raise our babies on their dead flesh.”

  “We’re too cool to die! Too sexy!”

  “We’re movie stars with mad fucking weapons!”

  “We’re scrap iron…”

  “We’re wild dogs!”

  “…we were born for the shit!”

  • • •

  1323 hours

  On waking, Baxter exhibits a passive attitude. He doesn’t seem to care what they do. He’s obviously been running high levels of down. GRob draws Wilson aside and suggests they leave him, he’s likely to become a liability. Wilson tells her he can’t do that yet. He tries talking to Baxter, says they’re thinking about trying the forest, and Baxter just goes, “Whatever.”

  The three of them stand in front of the pearl, their rifles set to fire mini-grenades, and walking forward together they clear a path of smoldering brass wreckage. They walk, stop, fire, walk. Wilson plays his tunes to muffle the detonations. Globules of melted brass accumulate on the ground. The trees on either side are blackened, their leaves shredded by shrapnel. Shattered glowing twigs snatch at their suits. Acrid smoke mixes with the rising steam. Big brown rats scurry underfoot, some of them burning. There must be thousands. Their squeaking becomes a shrill tapestry of sound that comes like feedback to Wilson’s ears. Ten minutes in, Baxter calls for a halt and GRob says, “Fuck you, Jim!” and then, to Wilson, says, “Keep firing!” Baxter hesitates, drops behind, but catches up after a few seconds. He fires, however, only intermittently, and doesn’t react when urged to give an effort. It takes almost an hour to carve a four-foot-wide path to within a dozen feet of the forest’s boundary. Through gaps in the gleaming foliage they see what appears to be a field of yellow flowers. The field reads infinite in all directions but one. On his helmet screen, Wilson begins to receive an inconstant digital image of the cave mouth, sections of it eroding into pixels. He’s excited at first, hopeful, but when he goes to a deeper view, the display shows werewolves prowling in the field beyond the cave. He asks Baxter to contact command, but Baxter’s not functioning on a soldier level, so Wilson tries making contact himself. The command channel remains dead.

  “Those fucking wolves are out there,” GRob says, “they’re dead for real, not just their transmitter’s down. I say we keep on going.”

  “Deeper into the cave or out into the valley?” Wilson asks this of Baxter, but it’s GRob who answers. “Deeper,” she says. “Might be worse back in there, but I done enough with those wolves.”

  “It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Baxter says, slurring his words.

  The anger and frustration that’ve been building in Wilson, his sense of being abandoned by Baxter, betrayed by him, all this spikes, but he doesn’t act on it, he doesn’t start ranking on his best friend, and from this he realizes that, like GRob, he has given up on Baxter. Their stroll in the brass forest has confirmed her judgment. “Dog!” he says to Baxter. “You in there? You are, you better do something, man. Battle juice, God’n Country, IQ. Whatever it takes. ’Cause you are fucking slipping away.”

  Baxter’s eyes find him through the faceplate, and he’s about to speak when a silent shadow sweeps over them, a massive shadow. Wilson knows before he glances up that it’s death in some form. Its chill invades him, but it’s gone so quickly, the form that imprints itself on his mind doesn’t seem the one he actually saw, a cat’s face with black wings, leathery wings and struts of cartilage, maybe a bat, an enormous bat. Incredibly fast. Like the blur that took DeNovo. He looks back along the path. Rats are gathering in the crooks of the twisted brass trees that survived their passage, thous
ands of glinting red eyes pointed from pockets of shadow. He hears behind him the snick of GRob slotting a fresh magazine into her rifle. “Keep going,” she says. “That’s who we are, man. We keep going.”

  • • •

  1655 hours

  They are miles from the brass forest, the walls of the cave once again too distant to see or to read, lost in a field of yellow flowers, when they happen upon what appears to be a survivor from another patrol, a suited figure sitting among the flowers, his torso and helmeted head visible above the blooms. At a distance he looks like an element of a Zen garden. A minimalist, vaguely human sculpture of pale brown stone. His privacy screen has been engaged and the display on his faceplate is showing a clip excerpted from a Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon. GRob bends to him, punches keys on the soldier’s computer, reads the arm display. “OD,” she says.

  “Who is it?” Wilson asks.

  “Gary Basknight.”

  Wilson remembers him from training. The Basilisk, he called himself. Kept growing a soul patch against regs. Big, muscular kid from Tampa. A laughing skull tattooed on his neck. Wilson, himself tattooless, contemplated getting a similar one. He watches the cartoon clip. Sylvester chases Tweety Bird around a corner inside a house and screeches to a halt when he sees Tweety hovering before him. He makes a two-handed grab for the bird, but Tweety squirts up and Sylvester just misses. He makes another grab, and another. Another yet. Each time, Tweety Bird squirts higher, losing a yellow feather or two in the process, yet suffering no serious damage, continuing to hover almost within reach. Sylvester doesn’t notice that as he grabs and misses, he’s rising higher and higher off the floor. Finally he notices—oh-oh!—and realizes he can’t fly. A perplexed look comes over his face. Then down he falls, leaving a spreadeagled cat-shaped hole in the floor. The clip restarts. Wilson can’t get over the banal ugliness of the sight, this brightly animated few seconds of Oof! and Gasp! and Kapow! framed by a camo-painted combat suit, this human being reduced to a death utterance of streaming video. Nor can he connect these silly, albeit somewhat ominous, images with the surly badass who Basknight pretended to be and, in fact, was. Basknight’s choice of privacy screen might, like his own, have been hastily considered, or maybe this was Basknight’s way of flipping off the world, maybe he realized how obscenely trivial it would appear to anyone finding his body. Then again, maybe the clip embodies an absurdist view of life that he kept hidden from his peers, most of whom perceived him to have the famished appetites and clouded sensibility of a creature in a shooter game.