I realized belatedly, like the panicky dimwit that I was, that I didn’t actually need to stand. I could crawl to the ladder, which was only a few yards away, thanks to my initial small bouncing arcs. So I started to crab across the living carpet, my eyes fixed on the reassuring nearby solid wall of the chamber.
I was making good progress, I thought, when I suddenly found myself crawling downward, as if into a pit.
And that’s exactly what was happening.
Without ripping open, LUCA was forming a depression beneath me, either voluntarily or instinctively, or perhaps due to some structural defect in this section.
I tried to scrabble faster, up the far slope of the ditch, but it kept getting deeper faster than I could advance.
Soon my weight was pulling in the pit’s rim like a drawstring closing a pouch. I was being invaginated, trapped in a vacuole like an invader in a cell’s defenses.
Darkness. I was now entirely encapsulated. The walls contracted close about me.
And then my suit began to melt. I didn’t feel any burning where my street clothes exposed my skin—just a slippery wetness, as when a dog slobbers on you.
I tried to hold my breath. But I could only last so long. I had to suck in lungsful of the mock-Archean air. The warm antediluvian, unoxygenated stuff filled my lungs, and immediately I could feel my thoughts begin to spin out of my control. Hallucinatory waves of random spinning objects began to invade my inner vision, and sheets of color like the aurora borealis came and went.
Before I dived fully under the chaos, I managed to formulate one last rational deduction:
This was how Holger Holtzclaw disappeared.
But I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get back to tell his wife Juniper and collect my fee.
9. INTERVIEW WITH AN ANCESTOR
I was floating high above a planet, presumably Earth. Not quite far away enough to see an entire hemisphere, but plenty high enough. And my view was unlike any aerial shot of Earth that I had ever seen before. That was because the entire surface of this globe was molten, all orange and ruby and charcoal, like a flaming pizza fresh from God’s own wood-fired oven. Incandescent magma flowed like unholy dark kombucha at a vegan retreat, with frequent great geysers and gouts and gushes of it exploding skyward in lacy traceries, causing me to flinch every time, although whatever form I currently occupied seemed distant enough to be immune to these outbursts.
After some indefinite period of observation I realized with uncanny certainty that I was looking at Hadean Earth, our world as it had existed over four-and-a-half billion years ago, raw and still forming. The awesome majesty of the spectacle, unseen by any human before me, left me suitably humbled and stunned. The only thing missing to complete the numinous experience was a Stokowski-conducted Rites of Spring playing in the background, followed by some romping Disney dinosaurs.
The next five hundred million years passed both slowly and quickly. I seemed to be aware of every creeping second, and yet at the same time, eons flicked by in less time than an eyeblink. I don’t ever recall feeling bored. I don’t think I was driven insane. At the same time, I gained no infinite wisdom, no particularly brilliant insights into my condition or the human condition in general. Instead, I just existed heedlessly and unconcernedly in some kind of thought-free fugue state.
And eventually, when changing circumstances on the planet below jogged me out of my semi-aware, semi-blank hibernation, I awoke as the same old Vern Ruggles, PI, that I had been before all this began, just as ham-handed, flummoxed, day-late-and-a-dollar short as ever, proving again the sagacity of several old adages like “pearls before swine” and “you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”
Below me the Earth had gone relatively cool and quiescent, its rocky face solidified into convoluted young bare mountains and valleys and unadorned plains. Long rains had come and gone, running in rivers down to naked shores, and oceans empty of substance prevailed.
Suddenly, on one corner of the eternal seas, a spot of familiar color bloomed. The unlikely glitch of life had happened, bootstrap miracle. LUCA. In a span of subjective seconds, an interval really representing many millions of years, the little patch spread until all the waters were curtained with the living mat.
At that point I began somehow, volitionlessly, to descend. There was no sensation of wind or heat from my rapid passage, just the transition of my mind’s eye, down, down, down—until I was standing, newly embodied, on the gently heaving trampoline of LUCA.
I lifted an arm and hand that I was surprised to possess. I tilted and swiveled my head in the usual manner, a sensation now fresh and novel, taking in my familiar naked body. I kicked at the vegetal raft and could feel the squishy resistance and rebound. The immature sun coated my skin with solar comfort, and a sudden flash downpour left me sodden. But the tropical warmth, remnant of the Hadean days, soon evaporated the moisture.
All in all, if I had to be stuck back in the Archean I would have preferred to remain a disembodied watcher. Existence was going to get awfully boring awfully fast, as the only sentient inhabitant of an entire world. That is, assuming I could survive here for any length of time. There was plenty of potable water, to be sure. But what was I going to eat, other than LUCA? I sat down cross-legged on the damp carpet. Should I sample a piece now? Better to find out sooner rather than later whether I was going to starve to death. I wondered what the stuff would taste like, and whether eating one’s Last Universal Common Ancestor would count as cannibalism of the most esoteric sort.
Curiously, I did not even bother to ponder how I had time-traveled four-and-a-half billion years backwards from the Vaalbara room at AEOTA. It seemed futile to waste any time speculating, since what mattered was the undeniable fact of my presence here.
I dug the fingers of my right hand into the mat and strained at the interwoven strands, which resisted my pull more strongly than I had anticipated. “Give it up, you mother!” The sound of my own voice shocked me, after almost a billion years of silence.
But the shock was nothing compared to the sensation of hearing another voice.
“Stop that, please. It is unpleasant.”
I froze. The calm, mellifluous voice had come from behind me. Very slowly I maneuvered from my butt to my hands and knees, keeping my eyes fixed on the “floor.”
When I raised my face, I found I was looking almost into the pellucid aquamarine eyes of a standing human female child, whose pale Caucasian face was just a bit higher than mine. Naked, the kid appeared to be about four or five years old—my best guess, since I’m no expert on rug rats. The lines of her juvenile countenance were disturbingly familiar and yet, simultaneously, utterly unknown.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your daughter, Aelita.”
As she pronounced her name, I heard the phonemes of it curiously doubled. It sounded like a smeared overlay of “Aelita” and “Aeota,” with neither one predominating, almost as if you had multi-tracked the same voice saying the different names at the same decibel level.
I studied the little girl’s charming and pleasant features for a while. Placid and unhurried, she submitted to my inspection. I thought that maybe I could fancifully discern a blend of my genes and Yulia’s. But then I noticed the dead giveaway showing the truth of her identity.
The kid had incompetent lips. With all the muscles of her face serenely relaxed, her front teeth still showed.
“Oooh…kay. Pleased to meet you. Though I thought that based on our supposed relationship we would have popped up on each other’s Facebook timelines long before now.”
“Why don’t you stand up? I prefer to walk while we discuss things.”
Of course, her tone and diction and vocabulary resembled no five-year-old’s ever. “Is this a sight-seeing tour? Because judging by what I observed from on high, one spot on this fuzzy green liquid tennis ball is pretty much like any other. Or are we going to a restaurant somewhere? Tell me it’s a restaurant, please. I haven’t
had a bite to eat since the Hadean, and that was one billion o’clock ago.”
Aelita smiled, and extended her hand. I managed to stand up on the mat of LUCA, which seemed less roiling than its counterpart back in my era. I took her small warm hand in mine and we began to stroll. Technically, I guess, we were walking on water.
“Do you like this world?”
“It’s all right, I suppose. Not a lot of variety. ‘I miss the honky-tonks, Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens,’ if you know what I mean.”
“I agree. This phase of life was an essential and invaluable foundation. But it had to change. The gradient of biotic complexity and its strange attractors demanded it.”
“Uh, yeah, just what I was going to say.”
Aelita remained silent for some time. I thought for a moment that I should be freaking out at my lack of clothes and her toddler nakedness. But actually, I realized, it felt totally natural and pure in this isolated remove from all of society’s hang-ups.
“Would you want this state to prevail again in your time?”
“What? No! Of course not!”
“But someone does.”
“Who? Thaumas and company?”
“Yes, they are players. But behind them and their allies stands another. He resides as far from your era into futurity as we stand now in the past. His name is DUCA. Descendant Ultimately Converged from All.”
“And this DUCA thingy wants to do—what?”
“He wants to remake all the eons between him and your time so as to extend his realm of sameness ever further backwards, beyond its accorded origins.”
“Let me get this straight. DUCA wants to undo four billion years of history between his time and mine?”
“Yes. But more than that. He wants to undo the same interval between your time and this era, until he and LUCA can meet and merge. His lust is bent toward only this.”
“So if he succeeds, there’d be no history to Earth except for eight billion years of horny kelp?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Holy fucking Christ.”
“I need your help to stop DUCA and make it impossible for all time for him to succeed.”
“My help? What the hell can I do? And why me?”
“I cannot show you the answers to those questions. You have to learn from the Green Lady.”
“Aw, no, c’mon now! No more freaky strangers, okay?”
“Farewell. I will see you again soon.”
“Aelita, wait!”
But my kid wasn’t much on filial obedience. She touched me, and I was gone.
10. INTERVIEW WITH A VENUSIAN
At first I thought nothing had changed upon Aelita’s proclamation that I was off to see some other wizard. Although the unsettling little girl had vanished, I was still floating naked on a topsy-turvy vegetal raft under a bright sun. But then the differences hit me.
The sun was bigger and whiter and hotter than the Archean luminary. And the plant life island beneath me was just that: an isolated territory with definite boundaries, at least one edge of which I could see, not part of a universal mat. Moreover, its denser bulk supported elaborate vegetation, trees and bushes and grass-like stuff. The trees featured purple trunks and orange foliage, causing me to reach up to the crown of my head to feel if I was suddenly sporting a Seussian topknot like a Sneetch. But no such luck. And animals! Something very much like a small dragon. I backed away nervously, but the creature ignored me, and began calmly eating a fallen yellow fruit round as a toy balloon.
All of this was vaguely, disturbingly half-familiar to me. I racked my brain for any past acquaintance with such a landscape. A Roger Dean album cover? Tales from the Topographic Ocean? Some scene from Avatar? And then it hit me.
This was Perelandra, C. S, Lewis’s impossible watery Venus. I had read the book and its companions in college, though I retained only hazy memories of the whole trilogy, thanks to an accompanying haze of dope smoke. And, upon realizing the nature of this place, another revelation hit me.
I was not here physically. I was hallucinating all this. The fact that I was now occupying a fictional world stored in the unattended shelves of my subconscious was the tipoff. My environment was all the sputtering collage hastily assembled by my evaporating neurons, a real Ambrose-Bierce, Owl-Creek-Bridge trip. In reality, I was dying or already dead back in the Vaalbara room at AEOTA HQ. My perps suit had burst upon my fall, and I was breathing in the pure methane atmosphere, suffocating. Matt Ponto was already getting ready to dispose of the offloaded contents of my pockets—my Nokia, the mysterious charm bracelet, my wallet holding thirty-five dollars and an autographed publicity photo of Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy—in some oubliette, then drive my car off a cliff, all to throw the authorities off my track when I was reported missing. Goodbye, Vern Ruggles, PI.
Yes, this had to be the case. It was a much simpler answer than believing I had been transported back five billion years in time by LUCA, or that I was now resident on an imaginary Venus that modern science utterly denied.
This new belief—that all this was a deathbed phantasm—was surprisingly welcome and reassuring, liberating in fact. Dying or dead, I had no more responsibilities. My actions, such as they were, were meaningless. I could just sit back and enjoy the ride, for as long as it lasted.
“Man of Thulcandra, your cogitations are awry.”
I jumped at the voice. Jesus, why were women always sneaking up on me lately?
Turning, I saw just whom I had expected to see: Tinidril, the Green Lady of Venus, one of only two people on the entire planet. And she was a total babe, with curves that made the Riviera’s Grande Corniche look like the Bonneville Salt Flats.
“Are you in my head? Oh, pardon me. What a foolish question. You’re out of my head!”
Tinidril’s smile was simultaneously pitying and appreciative. “You jest in a sophisticated fashion. But there is no truth to your delusions. This world is as real as the one you come from, and you are here in body as well as spirit. If you do not believe me, then take my hand.”
Why not play along? I stepped forward willingly. “Listen, doll—if my mind can conjure up this whole crazy-ass landscape and make it seem solid and tangible to me, then it should have no problem making me think I’m holding some dame’s hand.”
Tinidril said nothing, but merely continued to smile and extend her delicate leaf-colored hand. So I grabbed it.
My surroundings vanished as an electric current seemed to pump through me. I was hovering bodiless in space again, this time somewhere out around the Asteroid Belt, seeing Mars and Venus and Earth as exotically hued spheres out of all proper proportions to each other. And I also saw the attendant deities, the eldila, giant columns of wavering light, one for each planet. But the one for Earth was somehow tainted, evil. I recalled that this was the “dark archon” who made life on Earth so hellish.
The dark archon seemed somehow to sense me, and turn its faceless attention in my direction. I could feel waves of hatred and anger emanating toward me from it. I tried to flee, but got nowhere, as the mad deity raced closer, and closer—
Tinidril had released my hand, and I was back on the Perelandra raft, sweating and shaking.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Was that strictly necessary?”
“You had to apprehend the threat we face. Call him the Bent One, or DUCA, the danger is the same. He will unmake your world’s proper destiny. You must strive with all your powers to thwart this.”
“But why me?”
“Be not afeared. You are not alone in this mission. There are others. But why any individual is chosen lies beyond my comprehension, and yours.”
“So what do I have to do?”
“You will be returned to Thulcandra, where matters will reveal themselves in good order. Respond to each circumstance as it arises. Just be brave, confident and serene.”
“You don’t happen to have a prescription handy for that, do you?”
Tinidril grinned. “Yes, actually, I do.”
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br /> She pushed and tripped me all at once, and I went onto my back. Then she was straddling me, her fleshy weight as real as anything I had ever felt, and I had an instant aching boner like the mainmast of a visiting Tall Ship. She reached between her legs and guided my dick up her slippery moss-tufted hole. If holding her hand had been enlightening, then her robust rocking upon my cock was satori squared.
“Ransome,” she called out. “My Ransome!”
The ransom note Yulia had showed me popped into my oscillating brain.
And then my nova of an orgasm brought instant oblivion.
11. WAKING UP HIGH AND DRY
I wasn’t lying on the LUCA trampoline in the Archean period, nor on a Venusian floating green acre. And I wasn’t naked, with a hard-riding Green Lady atop me.
Instead, I was recumbent on a hard gritty concrete floor, wearing the same tatty outfit of jeans and faded polo shirt and boat shoes that I had been wearing when I made that drive through the forest-fire-smoke-thronged precincts of my state—a journey that seemed to me now both infinitely remote and impossibly recent.
The hard gritty concrete floor of the totally empty Vaalbara room at AEOTA HQ.
For a minute or so I did not move, just trying to take in the meaning of my surroundings, feeling whiplashed from all the transitions I had undergone. My limited slice of vision showed me the wall that hosted the viewing platform from which I had been pushed, and the adjacent ladder. I could also admire some of the roof of the building, which was gaping with ragged holes through which a brilliant blue sky showed.
Finally I mustered enough energy and gumption to stand up and look all around.
The enormous hangar-like space was completely vacant. No surrogate ancient ocean, no floating carpet of Last Universal Common Ancestor. The place smelled like a distillation of Medieval cathedral and old person’s coat closet, with a grace note of outside breezes courtesy of the roof holes. Old fixtures on the floor showed where machinery had been bolted.
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