by Weston Ochse
“What was that cracker’s name?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I think it’s important that you say it out loud.”
“Is this a form of therapy?”
“Maybe.” Boy Scout leaned forward. “Maybe I just want to know. You know, a detail. Like the red house or the nasty smell. A detail.”
McQueen exhaled. He glanced at Boy Scout several times before he finally spoke. “His name was Billy Picket and he’d been my best friend until he found out I was gay.” Then McQueen slammed his face into his hands and bawled.
Details.
Cleaning out the closet.
And to discover that the man McQueen had raped had been his best friend.
Boy Scout thought about that for a moment, then got up and left the room to give McQueen some time alone with his specters.
Sometimes Boy Scout forgot that even though they were a team, they were also individuals.
Each one of them came from somewhere.
Each one of them had a past.
Each one of them had done things they’d regret until the day they died.
But very few of them had done something that had left them ashamed… something that was nearly impossible to come back from.
Chapter Twenty-Two
THEY SAY THAT anger is an emotion best kept in a closed fist, but McQueen’s anger had the unintended but welcome healing quality of returning whatever vigor the Sefid had leached from him. Boy Scout had given him the space and time to grieve, during which the other members of the TST busied themselves by wiping down their weapons and applying oil where necessary. They’d been provided a wooden tray of cheese and fruit and a jug of locally produced wine. Their stomachs weren’t used to anything but gruel, so they ate carefully. Had this been a normal military unit during a normal time, they’d be exchanging war stories, making up lies, and bragging about improbable sexual conquests. But what they were now was far from normal. Each dreaded returning to the fugue, but they knew the inevitability of it, they were merely counting down the moments while they were still in the now.
A thousand years ago the daeva had been everywhere. They stormed the skies from modern Iraq to the Hindu Kush. As the Mevlevi dervishes had explained, the daeva pleasured themselves in war and could be seen burning savagely above battlefields, their very presence filling the embattled with martial rage. But daeva couldn’t fly by themselves. They used vimana, sometimes referred to as chariots of the gods, which allowed them to soar above the earth as they went in search for evidence of man. They couldn’t fly high, but when you’re a god and flying, you are high enough.
So the daeva searched out man, for wherever man was, violence and war was sure to reign.
When Boy Scout asked if anyone had ever seen these vimana and their daeva, the Mevlevi dervishes had laughed. Predating the Vedic Era of India, which was about 1500 to 500 BCE, there were reports in the earliest writings of mankind about these flying machines and their ability to rain down fire. Alexander the Great wrote about them in a letter to his advisor and tutor, Aristotle. Roman scribe Flavius Philostratus witnessed vimanas in India repelling invaders. There was no end to those who had seen the daeva riding in their vimanas. To the common man, they might seem little more than a disturbance in the sky, but to ancient men they were as real as the sun that warmed them and the air they breathed.
Then, in the thirteenth century, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī founded a secret sect of Mevlevi dervishes for the specific purpose of rounding up the daeva and imprisoning them, believing that peace would finally reign on Earth with the absence of those beings who inspired and fed upon man’s hatred. As the story was told to them, Rumi and his dervishes found an isolated valley ringed with impossibly high mountain ranges in the northwest corner of what was now Afghanistan, and one by one lured the daeva into it.
The term dervish was generally used to refer to an initiate following the Sufi path, while the whirling was part of a dance to celebrate the Sama ceremony. The dhikr was the dance that was part of that ceremony and was meant to inspire and demonstrate their love of God. But with a few steps added, it allowed the dervishes the ability to move sideways through realities, an insight that had come to Rumi and inspired his formation of his own personal sect of Mevlevi dervishes.
They built outposts at each entrance to the prison valley. They didn’t have weapons other than their hands and feet. They didn’t need weapons. What they had was the dance, and whenever a daeva would try and leave, they’d dance, slip-sliding in time and sending the daeva into a different reality, until all the realities were filled with lost and lonely daeva.
The TST’s problem—and the problem of the Mevlevi dervishes who’d explained it to them—was that the TST had physically removed a daeva from the valley. Their methods of communication with each other were unknown, but since no one had ever heard them speak, the Mevlevi believed that some form of unspoken communication was, indeed, used... which meant if this daeva ever awoke, it could communicate the truth of its existence and the Mevlevis to the other daeva, possibly bringing the entire imprisonment down. The idea of releasing thousands of bloodthirsty daeva on a planet that already had a death wish was unimaginable. So it was up to the TST to find a way sideways, to where they went on a mission and didn’t kill two daeva and wound another.
Boy Scout remembered one of their earliest fugues when they’d almost accomplished the mission, but at the last minute they’d had to fire to keep the daeva from killing them just as they had the JSOC general and his crew. On yet another mission they’d allowed themselves to be killed... but still ended up back in the cistern with the imprisoned daeva. They’d been trying to get back to that point where they’d delivered the JSOC general to the valley, but without being able to reach into that moment and inform themselves, they seemed doomed to repeat everything. Still, they had a strong, though waning belief that they could figure it out, and this was what kept them going. Of course, there was also the unspoken threat of the Mevlevi dervishes. You made the problem. You fix the problem. And you can’t leave until you do it. None of them had even whispered such a thing, but Boy Scout was aware that it was a possibility.
Boy Scout had just sat down to eat a piece of cheese when McQueen came out of the wash room.
His face was red but there was no evidence of his grief. Lore greeted him and McQueen nodded in return. He went to his bunk, sat on it for a moment, then retrieved his weapons and started disassembling them, clearly using the monotonous labor as a distraction from the reality at hand.
After a few minutes, Lore came over and squatted next to Boy Scout.
“What’s going on?” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“With McQueen. What happened?”
“Why do you think something happened?”
“Men. You can’t tell if something’s wrong unless it’s in letters scrolling across a woman’s forehead. Trust me. As a woman I can tell something is wrong.”
Boy Scout stared at her for a moment, then chuckled. He bit off a chunk of cheese and chased it with some of pungent wine. “If you want to know anything, you have to ask him. I’m everyone’s rabbi and I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Yeah, well, I was hoping you were still the fat, doped-up Boy Scout from the last fugue.”
Boy Scout rolled his eyes. “Thank God that wasn’t real. I was like a walking turnip.” She was about to leave, but Boy Scout reached out and stopped her. “Let me pose a question for you.”
“Shoot.” She returned to her squatting position, hugging her knees with her arms and resting her cheek on them as she gazed at Boy Scout.
“So we go sideways or whatever in these fugues. Because we’re trying to recreate an event and change the outcome, we keep going back and back to the same time period.” He paused, searching for the words to describe what he wanted to ask.
But Lore saved him. “You want to know about Joon.”
“Yes,” he said as both a sigh and a word.
“How could she know, and I not?”
“You’re worried about time travel.”
“Yes. I know we’re going sideways to different realities, but it seems as if I’m going back to the same place… like in time travel. If I was going sideways, creating different realities each time, then I wouldn’t encounter anything a second time. Remember that Ray Bradbury story about the butterfly and the dinosaur?”
“I think so, but you’re the English lit guy. I just do religion.”
Boy Scout nodded. “It was called ‘The Sound of Thunder.’ The premise was that scientists had figured out time travel and monetized it. They knew when a T-Rex was about to get its head staved in by a tree and made the whole enterprise into a trophy hunt where hunters could shoot the T-Rex right before it died. Anyway, the protagonist loses his nerve, steps off the levitating path, and accidentally kills a butterfly. And that changes the whole world.”
“The butterfly effect,” she said. “Right.”
“Yes and no. That whole Jurassic Park Jeff-Goldbloom-chaos-theory-butterfly-flapping-its-wings-in-Tokyo shit was attributed to the butterfly effect, but it’s not the same. That’s chaos theory. Bradbury chose a butterfly to demonstrate that even the most inconsequential change to the past could change the present.”
“But we’re not changing the past. We’re changing the…” Her mouth remained open as she sought the right word.
“Right? What would you call it?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed as she said, “We’re changing the sideways.”
“I guess that’s as good as anything. But we keep going back to the same places… and I mean the exact same places. The people remember us. It’s like if you were reading a book for the fifth time and a character in the book started speaking directly to you and asking you why you keep reading about them.”
Lore nodded, then abandoned her squat. She moved up and sat next to him. She took a swig of wine, then grabbed the cheese out of Boy Scout’s hand. “You make a valid point. What if we’re not really traveling sideways in time?”
“But that’s how they described it.”
Lore flapped her hand in irritation. “Sure, whatever. Sideways. Upside down. Inside out. Whatevs.” She took another bite of cheese, then punctuated her next words with what was left of it in her hand. “What if we don’t go anywhere at all but in our heads? I mean, sure we’re there all the time anyway, but based on your surprisingly intellectual gyrations, I think I know what it is we’re really doing. You see, I don’t think this is time travel, sideways, backwards or whatever. Do you know what I think, Boy Scout? I think we’re constructing another reality.”
“Constructing another… what?”
“You heard me,” she said. “We’re putting our minds together like a server farm and working in parallel to create something from all the data we have.”
“Then why are they trying to tell us this is time travel?” Boy Scout asked.
Lore waggled a finger. “They don’t alter time. They cause us to alter our own realities. As to why they’re trying to see it as time travel, it might be something we need to find out.”
“Okay. Let’s back up a minute. I think I sprained a muscle with my—what did you call them—intellectual gyrations. I don’t understand the difference. I mean, I’m sure it’s there, but can you speak in one or two syllable words for the dumb guy here? What’s the difference between altering time and altering reality?”
She scoffed. “Right. You’re the one with a master’s degree, remember?”
“In literature, not philosophy. For me that whole ‘the abyss is staring back at you’ is creepy as hell.”
“Nietzsche,” McQueen said from his bunk. “Frederick Nietzsche. German philosopher from the 1800s. He said ‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’”
Lore chuckled. “Now look who’s Mr. Wikipedia.”
“Just trying to be specific,” he said.
“I think I understand that,” Boy Scout said. “But it’s still creepy as hell.”
“Philosophers are a creepy bunch by nature,” McQueen said.
Lore and Boy Scout stared at him.
Finally it was Lore who broke the silence. “You’re just going to throw that out there? You’re not going to expound… give us examples? Come on, McQueen. Give.”
McQueen sighed. “Okay. Descartes had a thing for cross-eyed ladies. Immanuel Kant was an OCD hypochondriac. Kierkegaard believed that his family was cursed. Jean-Paul Sartre had a deep and abiding fear of crustaceans. They were all crazy. I think they spent too much time in their heads.”
“Says the man who never speaks but is always thinking,” Lore said.
“I speak when necessary,” McQueen murmured. “I try and spend my time thinking instead of constantly yammering.” He gave her a pointed look, then resumed staring at the ground.
Lore stood up and squared her shoulders. “Did you call me a yammerer?”
Boy Scout shook his head. He’d surrounded himself with brilliant minds and loyal friends, but they were irritating at times. Irritating to distraction.
“Calm down, Lore,” Boy Scout said. “We were talking, so it’s okay for you to yammer.”
The corners of McQueen’s lips rose by the merest millimeter, but Lore didn’t seem to notice.
Lore frowned and bit back a retort. Or did she? “I’ll try and not yammer while I explain my idea.” She flashed her eyes at Boy Scout, but he didn’t move. “The dervishes don’t alter time. We don’t go back in time. I don’t even think we go sideways. I think we stay in our own reality during the fugue.”
“So we’re just trapped in our own minds.”
“You’re not trapped any more than you are now. Their dance isn’t magic. When they whirl, they aren’t opening up great doorways in time that we step through. I think it’s a simple matter of hypnotism.”
“So it’s a parlor trick.”
She chewed on her lip. “It’s more than that. Somehow, through their very specific dance, they put us in a state where our minds can function together. We create our own massive multiple online role playing game where nothing is real and we’re just characters of our own creation while our bodies rot inside an Afghan cistern.”
Boy Scout blinked in confusion. “But I’ve been working under the assumption that there’s something that we have to change… like there are forking paths and we need to go down the right ones until we reach that moment of change.”
“Like choose your own adventure books, only ours results in our demise,” McQueen added.
“Can’t the dervishes just bring us a book with the answers?” Boy Scout asked.
“They might, but even they don’t know the answers.”
“Makes you wonder how they lured the daeva into the valley in the first place,” McQueen said.
“Faood mentioned to me that this area has been in constant conflict for more than two thousand years,” Lore said. “Most of that reason was because of the very presence of the daeva. There was a cluster here to begin with, which was one of the reasons the dervishes chose that valley. Supposedly the Soviets executed more than five thousand Afghan militants here. All the activity drew the daeva. But how they lured the rest, I have no idea.”
“You’ve had this idea for some time,” Boy Scout commented.
“Not really. It’s just something I’ve been trying to work out. It was your comments about Joon that allowed me to put all the pieces together. You see, if this were time travel and we were going back in time, then she would never know. And if this were sideways travel and we were constantly moving into a different reality, she would never know then either. The only way Joon could recognize you would be because you’re going back to the same place over and over… and that place has to be inside our own heads. Joon is a construct that we keep reconstructing. The only problem is that whichever one of us constructs her remembers what happened before
and lets that information inform the recreation of her.”
Boy Scout turned to McQueen. “What do you think?”
“The force is strong in this one.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Boy Scout turned back to Lore. “So then how are we to get the answers?”
She sighed in exasperation. “That I don’t know. In fact, I’m not sure we have the whole story. I’m wondering why the dervishes wanted to sell us a time travel bag of goods. I mean, if we can’t travel back in time, then we can’t change anything.”
“Then why are we here?” Boy Scout asked.
She nodded and frowned. “Exactly.”
Boy Scout glanced towards the door to the main cistern where the daeva hung. “So we’re in our heads like a large server farm. My memories are co-mingled with everyone else’s memories and we’re somehow using that to create our own reality. I remember being fat. I remember being a drunken asshole. I remember you getting kicked in the balls.”
She snorted. “I don’t have balls.”
“You certainly act like you do,” he said, grinning. Then, back to the conversation, he added, “So you think we’re constructing another reality. Doesn’t it have to exist in a place and time?”
“Does it?” She passed the cheese back to him. “I’d die for baked brie right now but this is pretty good. Goat, I think, but hard.” She wiped her hands, then repeated, “Does it have to exist in a place and time? I don’t think so. What is it they say? We use only ten percent of our brain? Whatever the number, think of our brains as computer servers and think of our fugues as the world’s best reality MMORPGs ever. Blows World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls out of the water.”
Boy Scout waggled a finger. “Don’t mess with Master Chief.”
Lore laughed. “That’s HALO and not an MMO. Still, I would never mess with Master Chief.” She flashed a grin. “It’s just that I have this belief the dervishes can’t—”
Her words were cut off by a shriek so sharp it made them all jerk to their feet.
Chapter Twenty-Three