by Matt Snee
“It's more than that,” Jennifer told them. “I'll show you. Come on.” She unstrapped herself and walked toward the airlock.
Captain and Plerrxx looked at each other, but Captain shrugged. He trusted Jennifer now and was sure that whatever she said, no matter how crazy, was the truth.
“Everything I have learned conflicts with the concept of Weird Space,” Plerrxx told Captain. “Whether your friend is telling the truth or not, I believe we are in grave danger.”
Captain said nothing. They followed Jennifer to the airlock. She stood with a sly smile. She was almost home. She felt euphoric.
“Shall I bring anything?” Plerrxx asked.
“No. It will just be heavy,” Jennifer told him. “We are going to have to climb. A lot.”
“Climb what?” Captain asked.
“The mountain.”
“What mountain?”
“The one in your mind,” Jennifer said. “The one that you're at the bottom of right now.”
* * *
“Non-existence is not the same as nothingness,” Jennifer started. “You can persist, but not exist at the same time. You have to become fluid, so reality splashes around you.”
They sat in a circle. Captain could feel the magic of the place; the hair on his arms stood up, his breath became short. Jennifer passed Captain and Plerrxx each a copper coin. She showed them she had one herself, and then placed it on her tongue. As she did so a shiver ran through her body, and she clenched her fists.
“What are you doing?” Captain asked, fearful.
Jennifer opened her mouth, sticking out her tongue and showing them that the coin was gone. “We each have a fee to pay to cross into Weird Space. You must place the coin on your tongue and let it disperse into your body.”
“So this is the game?” Plerrxx asked her. “We ingest the mountain?”
“No,” Jennifer said. “It's not a drug,” Jennifer told them. “It's a frequency. We need to set our bodies into a vibration that matches Weird Space. Only then can we slip sideward into the Betweenities.”
Plerrxx did not respond. Jennifer supposed the Mmrowwr could read the truth of her thoughts. He placed the coin on his tongue and closed his mouth. He shivered also and groaned between his teeth. Then he relaxed.
Captain was scared. He hadn't expected something like this. What would happen to him?
“It's okay, Lewis,” Jennifer told him. “I'll take care of you.”
He looked at her and stared deep into her eyes. To him she was the only person in the universe. Plerrxx was new; Jennifer had been real since Earth. Since reality.
He placed the coin on his tongue and was instantly shocked by an electricity that ran from his mouth to his feet then back to his brain. He bit his tongue and moaned.
“You okay?” Jennifer asked.
Captain spat blood. “Yeah.”
Already he could feel a cold wind upon his back and the night of stars darkening. He looked at Plerrxx, who seemed deep in thought, and looked at Jennifer, who smiled. “Don't be afraid,” she said.
A moment passed. “Can you hear the soul of the fire?” she asked.
Captain stared into the flames before them. But he heard a larger echo, behind them, which he knew could only be the stunning cycle of the sun. “Which fire?” he pondered.
She smiled. “Good. You have it now. It shouldn't take long.”
While the light of the stars dimmed, a separate light, centered in front of them, appeared and grew until it was impossibly bright, spilling heat all over them. But that brightness barely tempered the vast darkness that now clutched them. They couldn't see farther than five feet out of the circle. The space-hopper was beyond sight. The cold wind became a violent howl.
“I'm cold,” Captain said to Jennifer. Her form retained color and glow; she seemed closer to him by the moment.
“It will be cold there,” Jennifer said back. “Do you feel the snow beneath you?”
“Do I?” He reached beneath him. There were puddles of ice-cold slush. “My God,” he said.
“What is going to happen?” Plerrxx asked, desperate.
“Nothing is going to happen,” Jennifer explained. “This is just the beginning. In a minute we will be there.”
Captain could hear the sound of trees blowing in the wind. He knew that they were no longer on the asteroid, that they had passed somewhere else. He could see patches of purple in the sky above him.
“Be still. We are almost there,” Jennifer told them.
The sky lightened. Captain could see shadows standing around them, something like trees, but also not like trees. He knew that whatever these shadows were, they were not alive. He could feel that nothing was alive in this new place.
The cold of the snow beneath them sunk into his thighs and rear, and he shivered. He sucked a new air into his lungs, different from the sun-blasted breath of open space. The odor of the universe around them had been exchanged for something frozen and clean.
Sight returned. A victorious stream of stars wreathed the bruised sky above them. Captain saw that what he thought had been trees were actually thin, rock formations like a petrified army around them.
It was some sort of dusk, but one that had existed for thousands if not millions of years. Captain could feel that no time passed here, or at least that whatever did pass had no effect on their strange surroundings. He found himself sitting around a fire on a mountainside, across from Jennifer and Plerrxx, ancient snow beneath him, bizarre oxygen in his lungs.
Plerrxx stood up and wobbled. “This is impossible!”
“I know,” Jennifer answered. “But it's true. This is not a real place. This is Weird Space.”
“It couldn't be that simple!”
“All you have to do is look for it in the right place,” Jennifer told him. She stood also, her feet crunching in the snow.
Captain did the same. He was bewildered. How could something change so? Or was Jennifer telling the truth? Had they just travelled? Slipped out of the gears? Become liquid and been subsumed?
“We must hurry,” Jennifer said. “It's only going to get colder.”
“Where do we have to go?” Plerrxx asked.
“We have to climb this mountain. We're not there yet. We still have a long way to go. Come on.”
* * *
Here, the sky was no longer the sky. It was something else, something vaster, more significant, more frightening. A purple color was everywhere around them; it extended from the ground, which was little more than hills of gray ash, to high above, higher than any sky Captain had ever seen. He stood astonished, catching his breath.
“Where are we?” Plerrxx exclaimed, similarly surprised. The cat-man looked around himself, perhaps hoping not to be caught off guard any further.
“Weird space is the future that's not the future,” Jennifer told them. “Well … that's what my mother said. I never understood it. It's a part of time, and space, but an unused area, kind of like the margins of a piece of paper.”
“It's deeply unsettling… and amazingly cold!” the Mmrowwr commented.
A freezing bolt of cold hit Captain as well, shivering his spine. “Yeah!” he agreed.
Jennifer smiled. That means I'm home, she thought.
She kicked at the ashes on the ground. Home, indeed.
They seemed to be at the base of a small mountain, which alone carved into the purple of the horizon. A mountain of dry, silvery ash.
This sight encompassed Captain's view and mind. Jennifer had spoken of a mountain… at the bottom of their minds. Was this it?
“You speak in riddles, but your riddles are true,” Plerrxx admitted to Jennifer.
“Thanks, I guess,” she replied.
“Now what?”
“Now we climb.”
“We climb this?” Captain asked. The mountain was great.
“Yup,” Jennifer said, stepping up the incline. “Now let's go.”
They followed her up the first steps onto the mountain, whic
h was soft and swallowed their feet with ash. It wasn't quite like any other mountain Captain had ever known. “Is the Devasthanam at the top?”
“Yes,” Jennifer answered. “Far.”
Their feet were unsteady. There was no wind. Only the ash and the chilly air greeted them here in this strange place. Where did the light come from? Was it air they breathed?
The questions were abrasive.
They followed Jennifer.
* * *
There had once been a time in Captain's life when he had embraced the wildness of reality, harpooning chaos with his steps like one might a rabid whale. This was long years ago, before his father had died, before he had lost his nerve and built himself an island.
Yes, there had been a reckless teenager he once inhabited in his younger years, who drove cars like they were smoke and kissed girls like they were bits of rain. He and his friend Jack … they were unstoppable entities, gargantuan, immortal. Had they been born in a previous era, they would have galloped horses madly and chased adventure wherever it hid.
Instead, Captain was born in a modern era of refrigerators, digital clocks, and impending nuclear apocalypse. The Cold War.
He wondered now, as he took his slow steps up the mountain, was that just an illusion? The Shadows playing puppets on the wall?
Captain recalled the bite of the wolves back on the moon. There were more terrible things than communist interlopers. He almost laughed now. The Shadows, they knew men well, but of course they had once been angels.
His mind switched over to other memories: his Protestant upbringing by an indomitable mother and a Puritan society gone insane. He remembered church, and the stories they taught of Jesus and the Lord God who thundered everything to being… just because. If angels were real, than what else was?
Still, he couldn't find many warm feelings he had for the Church, or Christian dogma, or for the multitude that followed it. Something had always felt off to him about it, and even while chased by angels, his doubt was strong.
His mother, however, she believed. Carefully, silently, but ever determined. Had she found that peace? He remembered the light on her face in the Cosmic Garden. With this, he only knew how to feel sad.
Her mother had told him she had to see his father. Almost as though they had an appointment.
Was life just a string of appointments? The scream of birth, the minute of love, the final, deathly moments scheduled in fate? Captain had once written a book about the inevitable moments of a terrible clock-like universe titled “The Hour of the Gun,” where a retired cowboy lost in the modern world of the early 1920's searches for the bullet that a Native-American sorceress had prophesied would kill him. Ultimately, the cowboy is killed by a gay, heroin addict with a knife, spending his last moments elated that fate had surprised him with a different, but still regimented lack of choice.
He wondered now, as his steps grew more labored, what did Jennifer and Plerrxx think about this stuff? Captain guessed he could ask, but what would they say? Nothing? Or would some platitude come to their tongues, semi-soaked in sobriety?
Plerrxx had said in passing that there had been a time when all the alien races lived in peace and harmony, all completely aware of each other and never warring or betraying each other. But what did fallen angels and confusing Gods mean to a beings such as the Mmrowwr?
However, Jennifer was even more perplexing. Obviously, some sort of indestructible belief system governed her actions, but he could barely contemplate it, knowing what he did about her past and the things she had said here and there.
He also wondered if he was in love with her. It was crazy, he knew this, but he also knew his heart and he had fallen in love with girls in a quicker time than he had known Jennifer. It was all rather silly, he thought. His heart was like a young horse. Still, there was something about her besides her beauty and wit, something that had never existed anywhere in the universe until she had been brought into his world.
He watched her now, leading the way—as always—scouting their way into her own past and their own irrevocable futures.
Still, who was she? And what did she get for her trouble?
* * *
Jennifer, too, was lost in thought, but with things more idyllic than Captain. Despite the heavy nostalgia, despite the fatigue and the cold, her mind was at peace, focused on something entirely innocent: poetry. A phrase ran through her head. Forgive my grim tomorrows. Don't let me go; forgive my grim tomorrows.
It was an old trick she had learned as a lonely child, funneling her frantic emotions into sentences and metaphors and whittling it all down into simple, useless poems. It was how she calmed her mind and emotions through this little craft she had learned from reading Baudelaire and Frost. Sometimes she wrote her poetry down, but more often than not it was more of an exercise, a meditation than an artistic urge. She would take what she was feeling and translate it into meter and music, simplifying everything into a lovely mathematics.
Forgive my grim tomorrows. Don't let me go; forgive my grim tomorrows.
Her steps were heavy, but not just because her body was weak. This had all been apparently impossible: returning here after venturing to Earth to rescue Captain. After all the madness that had ensued, here she was again, back home, visiting her former prison.
For visit was all they had time for. She had convinced Captain that this was their destination. In fact, she knew it was only a way station. The future rattled ahead like a terrible train. Their journey was just beginning. This had all been prologue.
She had never been able to tell Captain the truth about herself and the Devasthanam. She had been incapable of doing so. How do you describe a lifetime, where hours were eons and minutes saw the rotation of massive galaxies? She, like most human beings, was far vaster than words could tell. But she felt especially lonely here and sorry for herself. Why had she done what she did?
The cold air, the ancient air … these things were welcome to her and her body now shrugged off all the memories of their adventure in hot, closed-in places. This was her home, and she would be damned if she wouldn't love it for the last bit she could.
Ghosts are waiting for me, up there, she thought to herself. Not just the aliens, but the ghosts of her parents, of the owls, of her own former life here. What would the ghosts say? Would they speak at all? Would she be the most silent one of all?
She led the way. Jennifer Pichon, long-rumored dead, orphaned. Her steps were both pathetic and prophetic. The No-Shape waited. Whoever had let it loose waited. Soon, even their legendary patience would shred and the solar system would be torn asunder—
Unless… Unless…
What would be demanded of them? What secret had the Tiamatites saved for last? Would they even allow her to drown again? Or was their time of speaking over?
Each step made her stronger. She was ill with confusion, but a superhuman confidence and resolve had manifested in her blood.
“I shall,” she muttered to herself, too quiet for the others to hear. “I shall.” She repeated the words to herself, knowing they were always repeated, each time they were said like she said them, in all periods of history—in innocence and in perdition. It wasn't just a promise.
It was a curse.
The light seemed to dry up; there was no sun here, just some sort of diffused light, and it drained from around them and left only a sickly color like a desiccated leaf.
“What kind of rock is this?” asked Plerrxx, breaking the silence.
“It's memory-lava,” Jennifer answered. “From an Owltech fabrication volcano.”
“Owltech? How? And how do you know so much about them?”
“This whole facility is Owltech,” Jennifer told the Mmrowwr. “They created it to study what was left of the Tiamatites. A long time ago.”
“I should say so,” replied Plerrxx.
“What is Owltech?” Captain asked.
“The Owls were a race of technocrats that once flourished across the solar system,” Jennif
er explained. “They were around prior to the Martian Empire, but long after the Tiamatites were extinguished.”
“Owls,” Captain said to himself. “The skeleton on Venus.”
“Yes. They disappeared in the early years of the Martian Empire, no one knows where they went.”
“The legend has it that they… 'ascended,' whatever that means,” commented Plerrxx.
“No one knows where they went,” Jennifer confirmed to Plerrxx. “Not even my father knew, and he was the solar system's resident expert.”
“And I suppose you're the expert now,” teased Plerrxx.
“I guess so,” she said.
“So this place, this mountain, was built, by the… Owls…?” Captain was trying to wrap his head around it.
A wind started. Jennifer told them it was because they had reached a certain height on the mountain, and it would only get worse. It was cold. The memory-lava was slippery. The darkness was encompassing, sinking into their hearts as easily it did their eyes.
“Is there anything alive here?” asked Captain.
“Alive? Other than us? No.” Jennifer thought it a strange question.
“Nothing lives here?”
“Not even the barest insect or bacteria,” Jennifer explained. “Except for what we bring in here with us.”
“Now that's alien,” said Plerrxx.
“How did you survive here?” Captain asked.
“My parents. They were prepared. And they had the knowledge of the Owltech devices.”
“They grow food?”
“The devices are food,” she replied. “They're proteins and fats and minerals that construct themselves out of the most rudimentary energy.”
“So no animals or plants?” Captain was astonished.
“No. Something high-tech. It will make sense when you see… and eat it.”
“I never thought of you as an animal that did not have to consume other living things,” said Plerrxx. “I suppose you might as well be a divinity.”
“It's not divine,” Jennifer snapped. “It's just practical.”
“I need to eat meat to survive,” Plerrxx admitted, proud.
“I know that. You'll get your meat. But it was never alive.”