The Book of Feasts & Seasons

by John C. Wright

  The cavegirl says, “Never mock the power of love. It is stronger than us, stronger than eternity.”

  I pull my gaze back to now, right now. The decision is easy. Decisions are hard only when half your mind argues with the other. When your whole heart and will and strength is devoted, you are not even aware of having had decided, of saying the words you can never take back.

  Hatred or love?

  If I do this thing, I knew I would be killed for it. But from the point of view of eternity, from the zero point, look to the other side, one second in the future, and see what I do.

  I know what life is. You think each organism is separate, but there is only one line of cause and effect, mother and child, one chain of interconnected clouds of probability, reaching from your dying body back to the primordial amoeba.

  Never mind. Call it magic.

  By magic I reach back through time. No, I cannot bring you back to life, not here, not now. I cannot step backward five minutes and rush you out the back door, because my own body, the chains of cause and effect I have already established, are in the way. If I had more time to prepare, perhaps I could have done something–but there is no time. That is the first thing to remember.

  At the zero point, there is no time. So all points in time are equidistant to me, the same way all the parts of my gold ring touch my finger equally.

  The life in your cells has already ebbed too far. Besides, if I were to reach back and force your cells to remember their old shape of some apeman who was your ancestor, the Klansmen in their hoods would just shoot you. But you have older and older ancestors, cousins from parallel branches. Some have more life in them then others, and they are easier to reach. There is a chain of ever small ratlike beings, none of which will do. Then, I see your ancestor from late Cretaceous. His skull is five feet long, and his bite is the most powerful of any creature that ever lived.

  One second into the future, the positive direction, of the zero point, I can see the result of my instantaneous decision.

  Yes, I will be eliminated by my cold eyed mothers for this act, and die so completely that I never will have had lived, and no one, not even you, will remember me.

  Had I chosen otherwise, I would have been safe under your toppled body, and the men escaped, hooting and laughing, their hood removed, members in good standing of the Good Old Boys, staunched pillars of the community, to go to the honky-tonk bar and drink beers with the Sheriff and the mayor and the judge. I would live beyond the moonshot, beyond the administration of Johnson, yes, that Johnson, who promised to addict your people to welfare, and break your pride, you uppity darkie, you. “I'll have those Negroes voting Democratic for the next 200 years…”

  The hypocrisy and hate of men like this would gather in my throat as I grew older, one second at a time, like worm, and then when one of your people is finally elected, these men and their sons, these men who shot you, they hurl such filth, so many slanders. And in my old age, on my deathbed, one of the mothers would appear, and say the dangerous decision time was past, that there was no more paradoxes in my future. I could have my youth and life restored to me. Everything would be mine. But not you. Never you. Time and eternity would not allow it.

  So, yes, I do hate them, the men in hoods, the anonymous men, the cowards. When you rear up, I cannot restore your brains or memories, but I can reach back and pull the old shapes of ancestral cells back into the now point, the zero point, the moment. And, yes, I can even pull in the excess mass from the uncertainty cloud. Heisenberg is nice that way.

  Up you rear, merely an animal now, as savage as the love that beats in my breast for you. The roar is one that had not been heard on earth for countless eons, but somehow the cells in the blood of your victim recall, and their glands react, and they lose control of their bladders. How I laugh! The gunfire hurts you, stings you, but cannot kill you, not in the first volley. And there is no second volley.

  A ricochet strikes me through the brain, and so I die in instant painlessness before I see what happens next. It is a mercy.

  If they had not fired on you, hurt you, made noise with their firearms, perhaps you would merely have eaten the choir. But they hurt you, my love, and your cobra eyes, red as rubies, catch them in your gaze. In your first step you trample the leader and break his bones, and the cries and whimpers while you descend upon his followers.

  Paleontologists would never figure out what those absurdly small fore-claws are for, will they? Too small to catch prey. They contain poison, so that a scratch will slow your fleeing prey, make their legs turn numb and cold. Paleontologist would never have guessed how the king of the tyrant lizards likes to play with his prey like a cat, how you catch them and let them go, and they scream and scream and scream.

  Such showers and streams of blood! The chunks of weeping red meat drip from your scarlet teeth. Did they think they were fearsome in their hoods? Let them know fear now, and for the rest of the paltry moments of life left to them.

  Paleontologists are perhaps too kind to guess that you enjoyed taking your prey by the legs, snapping off limbs one by one, so that the lungs, the mouth, the head of the victim is left weeping and shrieking last of all, to disconcert the other members of the prey.

  For the king of the tyrant lizard fed his bulk by eating whole herds of prey animals. And that is all the worms who slew you, my love, are now to me. Prey.

  Yes, I am sorry about the innocent people killed in the chapel when your hunger is not sated, and you break through the walls of the chapel, and wrestle open the bus to find warm and crunchy women and children inside. How bravely you faced the National Guard, and, later, the Army!

  Small price to pay.

  I should laugh. It is so like a B-movie science fiction film of this day and age. But I don't.

  But I am comforted in knowing that when my sisters and mothers erase me, everything I did will be unmade, including all these deaths.

  When I am eliminated retroactively, my love, everything after we met on the bus will be erased and rewritten. You will love a long and happy and normal life, and yet never meet the girl you think of as some odd fan of H.G. Wells or Jack Williamson pulling your leg. The girl you thought was from Northern India; the one who did not know how to use a payphone.

  That first conversation and that first touch of the hand is to be wiped out, sponged away from the stone monument of time. Now, I never was. You will never know me, and never, ever hear these words, which are the last imaginary letter I write to you.

  But here, in the one moment, the moment of uncertainty, the moment of eternity, when all time is gathered into my eye as if in the eye of a goddess, I do not choose vengeance.

  That is not why I did it.

  This is what I would say, if there was time. But here in eternity, in the infinitesimal point between Eschaton and Big Bang, timespace does not exist, and so there is no time. I have eternity or I have love.

  I have made my choice.

  Did you think, even for a moment, that I was so consumed with hate that I would die to avenge you? No. I die for you. You will never know me, and I will never exist.

  I die that you might live.

  A Random World of Delta Capricorni, Called Scheddi

  Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, also called Lady Day

  It was not abduction. I volunteered to go.

  I trampled out the crop circle in the north field of the Suttlebys’ ranch, at night, with nothing more than a board of plywood and a long rope. I did not know what the signs mean, but I copied them. Took me all night. The sky was pink above the barn and I could see my breath by the time I finished. It was October, the best month for contact, so I was wearing my windbreaker and work gloves. I would have worn my green skirt to look nice for them, but it was too cold, so I wore blue jeans instead.

  You might wonder why the Hierarchs—they don’t call themselves “grays” or “LGMs”, obviously—used such crude methods. They want to do what we can imitate.

  I was glad
for my windbreaker when I stood on the soil of the cold world beneath four suns. The first white giant was eclipsed by the second for a day. The other suns were red and dim as tail-lights.

  The surface was cracked, dried mud, and lopsided little crawly things swarmed in the cracks, but their movements were awkward, and they shivered.

  Before me was a peak, and a waterfall the color of India ink slid or slithered over the brink, and was beaten into a blue-gray froth as it tumbled, and the wind held a fan of indigo droplets. The drops smoldered where they fell. It was not water. Call it a something-fall.

  The jungle was blue-black. The leaves and flab-mounds and swollen vines were blotched and sickly. Some of the trees had eyeballs, but these were grown at random, not connected by nerves to any central brain. Where the droplets fell, the tree-things shrieked a piping noise.

  The star vessel was a crystal circle overhead that vanished when I looked at it directly. I could see it in my mind. Since I had just been aboard, it was 'pastward' of me. Back on Earth I could not see into time, but the mind-processes of the Hierarchs had woken something in me.

  The Hierarch I called Lollipop Guild hovered naked next to me, his gleaming gray skull at armpit height. He raised a slender, shining arm and pointed, looking at me with eyes too large for his face, and deeper than outer space. In his eyes, I saw the message: This is why.

  “Why what?” I asked, teeth chattering. I had not mastered their art of speaking without speech.

  In his eyes I saw a memory. The first thing I had said to them when the crystal ship had lowered itself out of the October dawn, ringing like hollow chimes, and the inhuman, solemn faces peered at me like fishermen examining a fish beneath their keel had been a question. “Why do you come to Earth?”

  Well, no. That had been second. The first thing I said, or, rather I shrieked with laughter, was “Take me to your leader. I come in peace!”

  A snake wallowed among the jungle roots. It had nine legs on one side, and could not walk. Its brain was carried in a bag or mantle of flesh that it dragged behind it as it limped. It licked the mud, but did not know how to chew.

  To Lollipop I said, “I don’t understand. What is this world? Why is everything so ugly?”

  In his eyes, I saw that this world was one of the many unplanned ones scattered through the Orion Arm. The changes to their characteristics are by random chance. Those unfit to survive perish, and therefore do not pass along their defects.

  “That’s just evolution,” I said. “It happened on every world, doesn’t it?”

  His lipless mouth was so small that it was only a pucker, but I saw it twitch into a sardonic smile. The Designers passed through this arm of the Galaxy long ago. Your race and mine share a common template: you were meant to learn our arts.

  I had wondered why the Hierarchs looked so much like us.

  The wind picked up. A revolting smell came from the jungle. Certain of the tree-things collapsed, mewling, because the bones inside their trunks were evidently not strong enough to support their weight.

  Worlds they did not touch are like this. Somehow, I understood that the Designers had left behind no clues.

  “You seek them?”

  I cannot tell you the sorrow I saw in his huge, blind-seeming eyes then.

  “But why?” I demanded. My voice sounded more angry than I meant to. “You’ve got starships and mind-powers and the stars to explore! Why are you looking for ghosts?”

  Why did you call to us at night?

  “I thought there had to be something more to life.”

  Indeed. We think this also.

  I realized that they had brought me all this way just to answer my question. The whole spaceflight, the long sleep, the strangeness of the wormhole, and seeing the other-time version of ourselves intersect with us when we surpassed lightspeed: all that energy spent just to show me this.

  He shed grief like heat from a stove. I wanted to sit, pull him onto my lap.

  We cannot take you to our leaders. They hide. Until we become like them, we cannot find them.

  I saw one tree-thing claw itself up on crab-legs and wobble awkwardly toward the pool at the foot of the something-fall. It had three mouths, each a different size, but its teeth and tongues were growing out of its upper branches, and not in the mouth-sockets where they’d be useful. It sucked at the liquid, uttered a horrific squeal, and fell over, kicking its three mismatched legs feebly.

  At my foot, a slug the size of a rabbit tried to hop, but it stumbled.

  Earth’s great beauty compels us visit her.

  I knew then why they had taught an Earth-girl their powers. Shuddering, teeth clenched, I picked up that greasy slug-thing, and looked into its future.

  I petted it until it was covered with rabbit fur.

  Sheathed Paw of the Lion

  Good Friday

  I realize another century is supposed to pass before you wake from cold sleep, but, since it is my turn to be alive, I thought I should quickly summarize the events of the late Twenty Fifth Century for you, and for Rogers, Graham, Davis, Taylor, and Arthur.

  I should mention that, while we were coldsleeping, psychology has apparently become an exact science, and the method of rendering human nervous systems to match their environment, both physical and political, has been precisely defined. As it turns out, the human nervous system reacts most clearly and strongly to pain signals, especially when combined with psychological disturbances such as shame and humiliation, and so the Harmonic Scientists and doctors of infliction take special care, when applying negative rewards, to use methods that to us might look awkward or even cruel. But it is all based on a very carefully determined theory. It is called the Harmonic Science, since it allows all elements of society to operate together in peace and joy, especially those born to be burdened with concern for the public weal, and other positions of great responsibility.

  Rogers had the watch before me. You remember those events. The National Aerospace Administration had long since lost the capacity to launch rockets into space, for obvious reasons, but the Forbidden City allowed us to retain receiving dishes, radio-telescopes, and the like, since these did not disturb the harmony of the World Kingdom.

  Perhaps the Forbidden City regretted that decision when certain Search-for-Extraterrestrial-Intelligence signals were answered with a simple code spelling out the digits of pi in base two, of the square root of two in base forty, and then a simple grid drawing a recognizable diagram of the Pythagorean theorem.

  At first the signals were thought to originate in Epsilon Carinae, one of the four stars making up the asterism called the False Cross, so named because of its reputation for being mistaken for the Southern Cross and leading to navigation errors.

  At the command of the Son of Heaven, Peking turned the mile-wide orbital array known as the Thousand-Eyed Bodhisattva toward the signal source.

  This was against the cautious advice of the Harmonic Scientists. As they predicted the lack of observation produced a disharmony. There were riots among the ruins of the major cities in North America—it was a holiday from the omniscience of the Akashic Internal Intelligence Service, so what else did one expect?—but the array caught clear pictures of what the press immediately dubbed the Big Dumb Object.

  The rioters, and anyone unlucky enough to be netted in municipal purification sweeps, we executed by sawing. One of our still-loyal descendants in the waking world died that way. The Harmonic doctors hung her by the feet and sawed through her body from the crotch down. This method allowed the blood to drain into her brain during most of the slow process, to keep her alive longer. I never learned her name. She looked like a fourteen year old, but it is hard to tell, since the people are shorter these days, due to malnutrition.

  The Object was in a hyperbolic path, more distant than the orbit of the planet Eris.

  If you are surprised I called Eris a planet, I should mention something Rogers left out of his centennial digest: the Son of Heaven objected to having only eight p
lanets in the solar system when previous generations enjoyed more. It was thought to be an affront to his dignity, and therefore a potential cause of disharmony. The Forbidden City therefore commanded the College of Panphysical Sciences to discover more. I think only our own Dr Uriens objected: luckily, the amount of disharmony created by his words was within the venal range, and so the Harmonists merely had him pitchcapped.

  Pitchcapping is not pretty. Uriens had his hair and ears cropped off with a razor, and a cap filled with hot pitch bound onto his head. The doctors had removed his hands at the wrist but left the feet, so he could run around, mad with pain, smashing his head into the jeering onlookers as he tried to remove the cap and end his agony. Then a rope was attached, and the other end flung to the cheering crowd, who pulled the cap off, taking lumps of flesh and skin with it, leaving Dr Uriens alive but disfigured for life. This was run on something called the World Amusement Network, which is wired into cloth and cups and windows and basically any transparent substance.

  Uriens enthusiastically supported the new definition of what constituted a “planet”—not only were Pluto and Eris granted this status, but the Son of Heaven was pleased to learn that his solar system now officially contained forty-nine planets, including Ceres, Makemake, Haumea and three dozen other Kiuper belt objects. Harmony was restored.

  The Big Dumb Object was a cube 1363 miles on a side. For size comparison, draw a line from the tip of Florida to the Great Lakes, and then west to Montana and south to Mexico City. That is the footprint the thing would cover if is landed, assuming it did not crack the continental plate in half.

  It was covered with some sort of ablative foil that gave it a gold hue. The press immediately dubbed it ‘The Borg Cube’ from one of the few television shows from North America’s “pre-re-unification” days that the Net was allowed to carry. (Pre-Re-Unification is an idea from Twenty-Fifth Century history, which says that the Han are the ancestral people of the American Indians, not to mention Caucasians and Negroes, and that all conquests are therefore merely undoing the unfortunate side effects of prehistoric civil wars that divided mankind.)