Here came images from the mythic memory of mankind. But in one and one place only, they were different. The image of a mythical and timeless events were linked by rays of light like a tree to specific events that happened at specific places in the mortal world. It was like a road or a path or a tunnel reaching from the deep parts of eternity, far too far for me to reach, up to the mortal time. It was a pathway or pillar spanning the whole deep of the sea from the surface to the bottomlessness depths.
The dreams grew thick about me as I approached the path of light. I saw two trees, one white as chalk with silver fruit, one black as pitch with luscious fruit and red, guarded by a freakish shape like an ever twisting snake with wings of bronze, and along all its length, and in every feather, eyes that shot lightning. In the hands of the snake was a two-edged sword that twisted and darted in every direction, but the tip was broken off, so that the point was square and blunt. I saw a barge like a huge box, covered over with a roof, wallowing in stormy sea, up and down waves that passed like walking mountains, and uprooted trees, scattered roofs and livestock, and endless acres of corpses, of women and children and giants, floated in the waves. I saw an empty tomb.
Toward this last I turned and rose. I came to the surface in mortal time. Nothing barred my way.
Next to the empty tomb was a man in white.
The robe was whiter than any washerwoman of earth could have cleaned any cloth. It shined like the sun. When I stared at his face, I gradually came to remember what a human face looked like.
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” he asked me. “Why are you a dead among the living, seeking?”
“I have unfinished business,” I said. “I need saving. My soul needs saving. My soul is all I have, now, at the moment. And my soul is wounded, it is forgetting, it is rotting from the inside. I need a savior. Is there a Mr. Christ around? First name, Jesus?”
“He is not here. He is risen,” said the angel.
“I believe in Him. Sort of. I’d like to believe in Him. Can I make an appointment or something?”
“Now is the appointed time. Kneel.”
So, who am I to argue with Gabriel or whoever? I knelt. I saw what being too proud to kneel made you into. I saw what face you wore if you went that way.
“Confess your sin.”
“But I have not done anything wrong! I’ve already forgiven Rory for shooting me! It actually did not hurt that much, and —”
I had to throw both hands before my face. The angel’s face had grown too bright to look at. This was someone more complex than a guardian angel. This was an archangel. It was not just a bolt of lighting, but an intricate symphony of lighting, of pure light, the divine powers blazing with all the colors of the spectrum, and the million other colors human eyes never see, beyond infrared and ultraviolet, all the way from radio waves to cosmic rays, each one more beautiful than the next.
I realized what was happening. He was not getting brighter. I was getting darker.
“Forgive me! For I have sinned!” I cried in desperation.
“Confess!”
The whole story poured out of me. “My unit was shipped home before his. She had heard somewhere — I don’t remember, a rumor printed in the paper, or from Madame Zhulyi the gypsy — that his unit was wiped out to the last man. On Normandy Beach. I did not know it was not true. I did not know for sure! He COULD have been dead!”
“Confess!”
There was only one way to make it so I did not go blind. “I thought he was maybe alive. So I lied. Wouldn’t you lie to marry a girl like Rory? She was the prettiest, the smartest, and the most smart-mouthed. She knew how to clean a gun and where to bury a vampire so it could not get up again. And that hair! Those eyes! She was the best we had, the prettiest. And — and — Do I really got to say this out loud? Can’t I just tell God privately in my heart?”
“Confess!”
“Aren’t you the broken record, then? I lied to get the girl. She married me. When Sly showed up—she had always loved him. The stupid, dumb, strong, honest guys. A guy she could wrap around her little finger. But she stuck with me. Sly never complained. I gave him a job, and that was so I could rub his nose in it a little. Him with all his medals, more than mine, and his good grades in school, higher than mine, but in the civilian life, in the real world, I was the boss, see? He could not spend a dime without my say-so—and—and–”
I opened my eyes again. The angel was no longer blinding.
“And I am the bad guy here. I was the one keeping them apart. I could have sweet talked her out of pulling the trigger. Didn’t try. In a way, that makes it suicide after all. Don’t it?”
The angel said, “Why did you buy the insurance? It was more than you could afford.”
My imaginary mouth felt dry. “Guilt. A wedding gift to them for after my death. I lived a dangerous life. I fought monsters and I mouthed off to elves. I knew I was going to die. I knew she would go back to him. Childhood sweethearts, right? And I knew I could never have children, not after I mouthed off to that fertility goddess, and told her to take her best shot. She always wanted children.”
“Even as you are now, you could have spoken to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. Why did you not?” The angel’s tone was gentler now.
He was asking why I had not told the Judge, or Father Donovan, or anyone I knew who could see ghosts exactly who had shot me. It was as hard as pulling a tooth without Novocaine to get the words out of my mouth.
“I had already ruined her life. I did not want to ruin it more. Some detective, huh? I want my murder never to be solved. And my sin is envy. Jealousy. Anger. Even dead, I still wanted to possess the one woman I could never possess. Why does he get to have her? Why? She’s no angel. He’s not perfect. Why does he get to be the hero, and get the girl, and have a happy ending?”
“Because he desires not to possess her but to be possessed. He conquers by surrender, and by dying, he lives. So too does your lord. So too should you. Look backward at your life. You are head down, and see things reversed. Did you not die to save her life, your wife?”
I suddenly knew why the timelessness seemed always to be downward to me. I had put mortal time, the human world, above me when I turned back. I had turned back to see her hugging me as I died. I was like Lot’s wife, who turned and looked and was cursed. I was looking down and it became up. I put my sight of her above my sight of the light calling me, and the light winked out.
I knew that if I stepped into the timelessness now, I would no longer be sinking below the surface of time, but breaking the surface. That is, if somehow the curse of Lot’s wife were lifted from me.
I waited, but the angel said nothing.
“Well?” I said impatiently. “I confessed my sins and now I’m sorry. I promise never to marry my best friend’s best girl again, if it ever comes up.”
The angel looked at me with fathomless eyes.
“So? Then can I be absolved?”
Now he spoke. The angel looked surprised, even shocked. “I have not that authority! Who is like unto God? Not I!”
I jumped to my feet, sputtering in anger, and the dust swirled about me, and rocks trembled, reminding me what kind of ghost I was. “What? You can’t absolve me? But you are an angel!”
“And I am no Son of Man.”
“Great! So I am the villain of this story, and I get to go to hell? I was hoping for–”
“For what do you hope, Son of Adam?”
“I was kind of hoping each man would be the hero in his own life. A tragic hero, if he goes bad, or a happy one. But not just cursed from the start.”
“All men are cursed from the start.”
“Great! What kind of stupid universe is this! I could have made it better!”
“You could have, but chose not to.”
“What?”
“Men are Sons of Adam. He is father and first and king of your kind. His is your law, and you cannot make yourself not to be his child by any power of y
ours.”
“So how do I get my happy ending, if you can’t absolve my sins?”
“Get thee to Simon, son of Jonas, or some other of the Eleven at this same day at evening, in the City of David, at the end of the street called Straight. Then the Lord shall appear even in their midst, and grant them his peace, and breathe on them, and with his breath they shall become living souls. Then shall he say, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost. They do not have it yet.' Then shall he say, 'Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.' Without these words being spoken, no sins would be forgiven. For this reason was the lamb of God slain.”
“Uh, what? I thought it was to take away the sins of the world.”
“Your ears are heavy.” Angels can be very polite. He was telling me I was a moron, and that he had just said that.
“How will I find the way? This city, and that street? Which building? Is there a number?”
“Your eyes are slow,” he said, and he pointed. I looked, and, in the distance, I saw a great multitude of ghosts, dozens and scores and hundreds and then half a thousand, all walking and dancing and flying through the air. I saw more in that one moment than all the ghosts in all my cases put together. They were filled with joy, and they seemed to be clear and plain in the daylight, so that their loved ones could see them. They were all headed the same direction.
He picked up a staff that was on the ground next to him. I found, to my surprise, that I could touch and hold it. I realized I had a long journey ahead of me, and even imaginary feet can get tired.
“Thank you,” I said. “But one last question, only one–why was all this necessary? Why did he have to die? Why did I have to die?”
“Unless you die, you cannot live again. Unless the Son of Man dies and lives again, he cannot breathe a new soul into an empty soul.”
“Then the whole thing, the torture and the confusion and devil and the murder—all the pain, and the death—the whole thing was so that he could say those words? 'Whose sins you remit are remitted?' That is what Easter is?”
But the angel must have thought I meant it when I said I had only one last question, for he was gone, and did not answer my other questions. No matter. I know the answers now.
On I went, seeking forgiveness. I was dead, but it was not too late.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
–Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant (1821)
The Ideal Machine
The Feast of the Ascension
It may have been a coincidence that it was the Vatican Observatory which first detected the object occluding the star Eta Aquilae.
The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array buried beneath the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was the second to register an anomaly from that precise point in space, a flux of high-speed weakly interacting particles with no clear explanation for a possible source.
The name is lost to history of the graduate student at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (the largest fully-directional radiotelescope in the world) who noted the ultralow frequency anomalies issuing from the same right ascension and elevation as the Vatican's unnamed transplutonian object, and correlated it to the muon readings, taken months earlier, from the South Pole Station. He legitimately earned the right to name the heavenly body, had it been an asteroid or plutino. Since the observatory was in West Virginia and once this occluding body become the most famous in the world, for a time it was known as the Robert C. Byrd Anomaly, after the Senator responsible for funding the telescope array.
The object passed through the heliopause, which is the boundary between the thicker interstellar medium and that bubble wider than the orbit of Pluto of relatively empty medium surrounding the Sun, swept clear by the solar wind.
By the time, a year later, the Byrd Anomaly passed the orbit of Jupiter and entered the hot, brightly-lit areas of the Inner Solar System, several observatories had visual sightings of a large, regular, featureless pale sphere. At this point, more and more of the National Radio Astronomy Observatories were tracking it, as it was on a collision course with Earth.
It was thought at first to be the head of a comet, because the albedo was that of water ice, but then first one observer, and then all, confirmed the object was suffering changes of course and speed that no natural forces working on a body in free fall could explain. The sphere was decelerating.
She–for this was clearly a vessel constructed by a nonhuman and unearthly intelligence, and by a tradition too mysterious to be ignored, all ships are called 'she'–was given a fanciful name by Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists. As if in a nervous giggling fit of dread, they called her SETI, after the Search for Earthly and Terrestrial Life, but spelled it CETI after the constellation of the sea monster.
During the six seeks while she circled the globe from pole to pole in what is called a ball-of-string orbit the popular press ignored the official designation, and instead called her by various ever more panic-inducing names: The Intruder, the Alien Invasion Force, the Bug Eyed Monster Egg, the Death Star, and even Wormwood.
When she entered the atmosphere, and her outer energy envelope altered and assumed the shape of a lens or disk, everyone called her the flying saucer. And maybe there was a coincidence in that as well.
After passing rapidly over the South Atlantic and the Caribbean, the vessel entered the airspace of the United States over the Carolinas, then traveled north along the Appalachians, rapidly outdistancing the fighter jets attempting to pace her. However, the vessel was emitting light, radio noise, and microwaves, as well as being solid enough to return a blurry yet serviceable radar echo.
Air defense and antimissile defense batteries were pointed at her, including orbital-based weapons it had not been expedient to admit publicly existed, in sufficient numbers that apparently the Head of State, Uriah Thompson Vole, was confident enough in his power to destroy the intruder if need be that he, or one of his underlings, decided to let the vessel land.
It should be mentioned that this Mr. Vole had been the fourth Vice President in history to replace an impeached predecessor. For, ever since the informal abolition of the Electoral College, resulting in the recently-packed nineteen-man Supreme Court had interpreted the living, breathing Constitution to disallow national elections, Congress merely impeached every Head of State once he lost the confidence of the press and people. Without the waste, confusion and partisanship surrounding national elections interfering in the America people's business, matters in Washington were decided by a consensus reached between the leadership of the several wings of the two major political parties, the various NGO's and pressure groups, the heads of powerful bureaucracies and their private armies, various powerful corporate donors and government-run syndicates, and other interests at play in Washington. Mr. Vole's sole qualification for office was that he was a complete nonentity unlikely to offend any of the actual decision-makers.
It should also be mentioned that no official record exists stating who, if anyone, made any of the decisions in the days following, or what became of the man they arrested as a traitor.
The vessel did not land in Roswell, New Mexico, nor on the lawn of the White House, nor even at the Nuclear Power Plant in Calvert County. She came to rest hovering motionlessly at a spot above Moll's Cove, roughly halfway between Church Creek and Priest's Point, a tributary of the Chesapeake in St. Inigoes, St. Mary's County, the southernmost tip of Maryland.
The gleaming, wheel-shaped vessel, brighter than a full moon, was plainly visi
ble across the street, where NESEA, the Naval Electronic Systems Engineering Activity, occupied Webster Field. This was a small office building and workshop, and two short runways. The modest little airfield would have been a logical place for an airborne vehicle to land. And General Electric did research and make tracking and fire control systems for the Navy, but was hardly worth flying from Mars to come see, much less from a point far outside the Solar System somewhere in the direction of the constellation Aquila. So it might have been a coincidence that the vessel came to rest here.
It was a cloudy and windy night, so the gleaming disk of ghostly, luminous substance some thousand feet in radius, was sometimes visible and sometimes not. When the cloud covered her, the vessel's shining energy envelope looked like a vast blind owl's eye peering through fogs and smokes. Aircraft from the nearby Patuxent River Naval Air Station flew in narrowing circles around the monstrous vessel, which was large as an aircraft carrier.
One of the helicopter pilots, Lt. Joseph Cupertino Tyler of Helicopter Antisubmarine Squadron HS 8, was a local boy, and spoke with a trace of the distinctive 'Smith Island' accent. It was he that first noticed that the center of the immense disk was exactly above the St. Ignatius Church located on Villa Road.
Energy from the disk was jamming all radio signals within a mile of her. The aircraft, both fixed wing and rotary wing, were communicating with ground observers by heliograph. At midnight, Tyler signaled the ground crew with his spotlight, and landed his LAMPS Mk III Seahawk helicopter at the NESEA Airstrip. He reported to the deck officer that he had seen 'strange flashes' issuing from the hovering saucer, and said trouble with electrical systems required him to land. No other of the score of observers on the site at that time confirmed this report, or experienced any difficulty with their avionics.
Nonetheless, Colonel Turvold, who was in overall command of the operation at the moment, was eager to have the data from the nose-mounted infrared turret examined, and ordered the Seahawk to stay on the ground while it was examined.
The Book of Feasts & Seasons Page 9
