She paused for a long moment.
Then she whispered, “And now, Time returns, and She takes us in Her arms.”
With that, the leaves in the trees began to rustle in the breeze once more, and the birds alighted on their branches, and the soldiers overran the mountain sentries and began their charge into the valley, and the Sidonian soldiers began their countercharge to meet the government forces in the town square.
What can I tell you about this? A battle is a battle, and the soldiers charged down the mountain in a great ball of dust and bravery and bullets, and the Sidonian mob ran forward screaming in anger and fervor. The soldiers fired their rifles, and the world smelled like death. Some Sidonians popped, just an illusion created to frighten the U.S. soldiers, but more of them were struck with bullets and fell to the ground, women and children among them, angry and happy to be defending their Paradise. As they fell, the city buildings began to quiver and fall with them, each structure, built as a living dream, fell as its dreamer died and consciousness left him, dissolving before it hit the ground. My luxurious hotel folded in on itself and vanished in a swirl of dust; the store on the Palace boulevard that sold only top hats collapsed, the columned theater at the end of the Avenue burst like a bubble, and the walls of Sidonia crumbled into an empty field.
At this sight, the Sidonian mob seemed to grow ever larger, and more fighters poured from the side streets and the remaining buildings, and the fog rose and swelled around them and rolled past them and engulfed the soldiers and filled the valley. The soldiers on the front line exploded, coating what was left of the main square with blood and bone, but as the fog progressed, it grew in size and force, and the soldiers just disappeared in the fog, and the blood poured over the meadow.
I didn't really know whom I would fight in this particular kerfuffle, if forced to choose a side. I didn't want to shoot government soldiers, who were just supporting the United States as I had done in the last decade; and I didn't want to shoot the misguided Sidonian adherents, who were just searching for a better life, most of them. But I knew I wanted to kill Allen Jerome, and I knew that I really wanted to kill Darryl Fawley.
So I headed for the Palace.
Chapter 20
Suns crashed from the sky into rivers that boiled and burned off into the air and up into the ether. Riderless horses galloped screaming over cobblestone streets that crumbled into dust beneath their hooves.
I was in a desert, and the Palace was on fire, encased in fog. I hesitated, but then a little hand touched my back, and an encouraging little voice whispered in my ear – words too quiet to understand, but the voice was comforting and calm – and so I continued onward, and as I approached the Palace, the fog parted around me, as though blown away by a ghost’s breath. Thus the fog did not touch me, and so it didn’t kill me.
The gate opened before me of its own accord (or perhaps with a nudge from little ghostly hands), and I approached a great front hall, where an officer of the Sidonian legion cowered, an officer named Jeffrey Matthews, who had come to Sidonia after a particularly terrible drought devastated his little Kansas homestead, and after his wife had subsequently died hungry and ill as a consequence of the drought and the ensuing famine. While terrified by the havoc, Matthews was nevertheless still loyal to the Cause, and so he leaped out from the shadows where he hid, determined to protect the Palace from the government invaders, of which he believed me to be one. I didn’t see him, and I didn’t hear him, and I suppose he raised his gun, but I raised my gun first. Not thinking, my right arm just rose, as though lifted by a little ghost with impeccable aim, and my gun fired, and his gun flew out of his hand, and up over the Palace walls and into the mountains, as though carried by a little ghost who could fly. He charged at me, but I knocked him one in the jaw, and he fell to the ground. He was not dead, just a bit stunned, and I thought that was all right.
I continued into the Palace, unimpeded.
The Palace in Sidonia’s last moments was a crumbling, burning ruin, a remnant of ancient greatness. I continued on into the banquet room, where the ceiling was caving in, and intricate paintings by unknown Renaissance masters who had never lived were dissolving and floating away into the fog. The hallways opened up into a greenhouse filled with plants of an unidentifiable nature that changed shape moment to moment; a small bush of pine needles made way for a thick and flowering vine, which became a withered, yellow tree. Faeries buzzed confusedly about the flowers, settled on their petals, and flew into oblivion, leaving a little vague white outline where they had once hovered, which wobbled and drifted into the uncalm air. I turned to the left, and I found myself running down a long corridor lit by torches that lined the gray walls. I could hear footsteps clattering off into the distance, and without deliberation – as I was vaguely convinced that anything I did now would be guided inevitably by my omniscient, infallible specters – I took a sharp left, and a sharp right, and then for just a moment, less than a second, I was on a mountaintop, in crisp air and blinding-white sunshine, teetering on a cliff edge high above a green, flowing valley. After this moment passed, I was deep underground, in a near-airless cellar, following those tapping footsteps.
Up ahead, I saw Darryl Fawley step lightly through a small postern. He shut a thick metal door behind him.
A dark figure stood guard, and I approached, still several yards away.
It was the prison guard, the beefy tough who had kicked me in the ribs back in my cell while I lay helpless on the stone floor.
After a few moments, I stood face to face with my tormenter.
Did he look afraid? No; he was fearless and confident. He didn’t believe that anything could hurt him. He was imbued with the spirit and force of Sidonia, and how could anyone imbued with the spirit and force of Sidonia be anything other than invincible and immortal? Flames licked the walls behind him, and the walls began to blacken, but he didn’t fear the fire.
I cast my eyes on him, and he died.
I kicked in the metal door and found myself briefly in a grove of imposing trees, which scratched the sky, with trunks a mile wide. An old man wandered in the opposite direction; as we passed, I asked him the way out, but he told me that he had been lost for many years and could only advise me the pathways to avoid. This he did, in some detail.
“I am not entirely certain that I am not utterly imaginary,” the old man then acknowledged, before continuing on his way.
As I walked farther into the forest, it became an expansive room with a bright light blazing from far above. The walls were decorated with childish paintings of trees. I ran to the farthest wall, kicked it in and came out into sunlight, an overcast day, a chilly beach, a gray ocean. Little wooden cottages behind the dunes, white paint cracking and peeling in the sea air. The gangly figure of Darryl Fawley rushed down the beach, the son of Sidonie, and the husband of Lucy Billings. He slipped in the sand, lost his balance, recovered tenuously. I ran until I had reached his side, and he turned to me and stopped running. He was afraid, but he seemed resigned.
“That man is still in the world!” I exclaimed.
I cast my eyes on him, and he became a heap of bones.
Darryl Fawley’s English seaside melted before my eyes, and a golden treasure room rose up before me. Allen Jerome was on the ceiling, in a sparkling white suit. Architect of the Sidonian experiment, mathematical genius, leader of men, slithering across the ceiling like a silver-skinned gecko. I jumped, and to my surprise, I landed feet first on the wall, which I then scurried up like a squirrel till I was within striking distance of my enemy. I reached out for him, but he ducked; I tried to strike him, but he slipped out of my grasp. Now he was before me, now behind me. The ceiling was cracking under us, and all around me, the Palace was changing moment to moment – now a fortress, now a church, each a memory or fantasy in Allen Jerome’s mind, one after another, a great blinking living phenakistoscope.
He dashed to the eastern wall, and I dived from the ceiling, landing on him with a great crash. The
wall was disintegrating, crumbling into sand. My knee was in his chest, my gun was on his oily forehead, we tumbled backwards, and he was laughing.
“You cannot kill an idea with a gun,” he laughed as we fell together to the stone floor with a terrible thunk. He said it as though he were no longer merely a man, as though he were something bigger than me, bigger than he had been before, something outside of either one of us, like helium or love or justice (or Pachelbel’s Canon), which would live on no matter what happened to an insignificant mortal.
“Try it,” he whispered, a confident taunt. “Go ahead. Try it, you stupid sonofabitch.”
So I tried it. I pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.
“Misfire,” I muttered. “Barrel empty.…”
Jerome laughed now, again.
“You think your gun is empty, or that it misfired?”
I nodded stupidly, my knee still rammed into his gut.
“Shoot the ceiling,” he said.
I hesitated.
“Go ahead,” he said, still laughing. “I’ll wait. See how the gun works when you’re shooting something temporal.”
So I did – I wasted a bullet on the crumbling ceiling, and shards of stone and wood and plaster flew into the room and swirled about in the wind. I put the gun back on Allen Jerome’s forehead and pulled the trigger, and though I heard the shot, and I felt the recoil, Allen Jerome was unharmed.
“You see?” said Allen Jerome. “Nothing will happen to me.”
And he added:
“Hence: (p|q)(q|p) = (-1)^((p-1)(q-1)/4), where p and q are distinct odd primes.”
For just a moment, it all made sense.
“Do not forget,” Jerome said, as he easily slipped from my grasp and rose up before me, now six feet tall, now eight feet, now filling up my whole world. “Do not forget, that I am the Falsturm’s little dog.” Then he added, “主席要我咬谁就咬谁,” and for the first time (but not the last), I understood Chinese perfectly. What Allen Jerome said was, “I bite whomever he asks me to bite,” and I thought of that poor little rat, and I thought to myself, We are all of us that rat, all of us, our collective head stuck in Sidonia’s teeth. And isn’t that always the way with mathematics?; that discipline that few of us understand, or love, or want to learn, but which governs our every movement, our every breath, our every step, like spinning, heartless blades of steel, that monster that is always right and can never change. His face was a black-green mask of hateful mirth, and I could see the Grey City on the horizon, just a dim outline against an angry virescent sky.
“You just let Darryl Fawley die,” I said, swinging from the ceiling to the eastern wall. “He was running along the English shore like a fox chased by hounds. Running. Some Movement. Some loyalty.”
“We have our martyr!” Allen Jerome laughed. “And I have his power at last. Every movement needs its martyr, and its unquestioned tyrant. In one moment, you gave us our tyrant – that would be me – and our martyr, the wise Darryl Fawley, who loved the people. And the martyrdom of my dear friend will enrage our masses.”
“You let your masses die.”
“Some of the Sidonians have died. Others will go with me to the Otherworlds. Angry, strong and more righteous than ever. And the movement will spread. Pilgrims will come from hundreds of miles around, just to lay eyes on this holy spot, where the Dream once lived.” He smiled. “See how it all adds up? Two and two will always equal four.”
Though I tried to chase him through the increasingly translucent corridors of the Sidonia Palace, Allen Jerome quickly vanished into the distance, and when I escaped the tottering Palace, thick with flames, he was nowhere in sight.
But I could now see Rasháh and his gang approaching from the west, smug and confident under a flaming sun and an angry sky. He smiled.[20]
I stepped beyond the Palace walls and the last speck of ash vanished into the air.
Well, I’m not proud of it, and I am not ashamed either, but my first thought now was to find a horse and ride in the opposite direction. There wasn’t much I could do for the counter-Revolution right now, or, more importantly, to kill Allen Jerome or even the Falsturm to avenge Lucy’s untimely and unjust death. I imagined a steed, and a steed appeared before me. We galloped to the last traces of the city, the bare ruins on the eastern border, where I thought I might take shelter till the coast was clear. Then I thought I’d spend a few years in 1981, sitting by the swimming pool in Death Valley. I’d return after a while, nearly as young as the day I left, and I’d deal with my problems then.
But as I drew near to its outer core, I could vaguely discern a figure who watched me as I approached, seated on a white mare, almost obscured by drifting dirt that had once been the city. When I was yet closer, I recognized Lucy Billings, dressed in a man’s denim shirt and rugged work pants, just as she had been that day in Weedville, the day that I learned of her death and met her deadling self for the first time.
“I failed,” I said when I had drawn up beside her. “I did nothing that Allen Jerome had not planned for me in advance. I did nothing that he did not want me to do.”
I followed her on horseback into the last crumbling quarter of Sidonia, a rickety New York tenement that looked dauntingly familiar, muddy and grim. She galloped down one side alley, then another, turning left, then right, each alley growing narrower and dirtier and darker than the one before it. I was certain that we were hopelessly lost, but then the streets opened up, and with Rasháh behind us we swept through the Five Points – and it was, I saw, the Five Points of my childhood, as the Old Brewery still stood, not yet replaced by the charitable mission of the latter 19th century – and we exited my terrible slum-home and slowed down as we reached the clothing and junk shops of immigrant Chatham Street. Lucy dismounted at Number 17, a lodging house that was unusually tidy for the block. Then I dismounted. And our horses vanished.
“New York has the scroll,” I said, and she said nothing. She knew, and she knew what this meant for her idealistic old friends.
As we ascended the stairs, I asked if this neighborhood were an illusion, or if it were real. Lucy said it was real. We were roaming, she said. Still, that would not stop Rasháh, who would be here any moment. So we would have to hurry.
On the third floor, we entered a small apartment. A little kitchen, a little bare throw rug in the small, square living room, and a tiny bedroom off the living room, with a narrow queen-size bed next to a crib. The apartment was as ransacked as such a spare dwelling could be. The dresser had been knocked over. Dishes had been smashed on the kitchen floor. The front door was splintered; someone had broken in, and the family who had lived here was gone. The small front window was a view of the side street; the kitchen window looked onto a brick wall.
“Here is where we say goodbye, Watt,” she said. “In a moment’s time, a portal will open right about … there –” and she pointed to a little shadowy corner of the kitchen. “You’ve seen portals before? They look like a rip in the physical world; they just hang there in space, like a great wound.”
“Yes. I’ve seen them. Well, I have seen one. That day in Weedville. That terrible day.”
“That terrible day that was also beautiful.”
She smiled just for half a moment, remembering something, and then she stopped smiling.
“You will go through the portal this time. All right, Watt?”
I nodded.
“I have to leave now,” she said.
“Lucy.”
She listened.
I noted that deadlings were a matter of some disputation. Not everyone aware of the concept believed that the souls of our loved ones inhabited the bodies of deadlings. Some people believed that each deadling was born from the imagination of the bereaved, and that such a creature could live only for moments.
“Do you understand?”
Lucy said she supposed she understood what I was trying to say.
“If that is true, then I believe that I am Lucy Billings,” she went on,
“although I am not. I am a woman who came into being moments ago at the edge of this city, imbued only with memories of Lucy that you, the bereaved, might give me. But nothing else.”
I said that was exactly right.
“And some believe that deadlings are not even truly alive,” I continued. “They are hallucinations, merely walking dreams, who lack even basic consciousness. They are a projection of the imagination of the bereaved into the physical world. In which case, you are no more alive than a painting or a statue – you are just something I created, because I wanted to.”
Lucy thought.
“You want some proof, I suppose.”
“You owe me nothing, Lucy.”
“But you want to know,” she said gently.
“How could I not want to know?” I asked.
“Here it is then, Watt my darling. I am rescuing you to-day as I rescued you once before, long ago. You were too young then to remember it now.”
She swept out her hand about the tiny apartment.
“In this room, a seven-year-old girl rescued a one-year-old boy. If you escape what comes next – and Watt, I cannot guarantee that you will – please come back here and ask those old enough to remember that day, neighbors who can still remember the people who lived here and that seven-year-old girl I once was. Or roam back here and see for yourself. And this will confirm that I am not a figment of your mind, that I am the very same soul that you loved and who has loved you, for longer than you ever knew.”
This was why I could never remember how I had first met my beloved Lucy Billings. Because I have known her forever. Since before she was Lucy, and before I was Watt.
She put her arms around my neck.
“We have thirty seconds left, Watt O’Hugh, and then it is goodbye forever. Sidonian magic brought me to life, and you cannot abide Sidonian magic for much longer. And so we will never see each other again. I will love you from my dark oblivion in sheol, forever forever, from my dark sleep, from my nothingness.”
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 25