Unsong
Page 30
“And who are you, anyway?” Jane asked as we neared the outermost tendrils of the megalopolis. “Sits alone in an angel bastion. Solves locational arithmetic problems. Knows secret Names.”
It could have been a compliment, but it wasn’t, not the way she said it. It was more like chewing me out for daring to be mysterious in her vicinity. Complicating her plans. And the entitlement! Demanding my secrets just a moment after refusing to give up her own!
I was tempted to bargain, knowledge for knowledge. But truth was, I was feeling pretty entitled too. Sure, I was curious what she was doing, what book we had just stolen. But my secrets were more important than hers. I needed to relax somewhere dark and quiet and re-establish full telepathic contact with Ana. Then I needed to get a book on name error correction. Then I needed to get myself a good computer. Then taking over the world and becoming the next Comet King could continue apace.
Sure, it was flattering for her to ask who I was. Wasn’t that what I’d always wanted? “Who is this man, this Aaron Teller, who breaks impossible codes in mere minutes, and knows the hidden holy things?” But going any further with Jane was way too much of a risk.
“Man of mystery,” I said as nonchalantly as I could.
Jane was quiet for a second. Then she grabbed the paddle from me. We hung motionless. She jumped onto the front of the kayak, spun around, took out her pistol, jammed it right into my head.
“You can become invisible,” she hissed. “You know locational arithmetic which means you’ve been doing work that requires locational arithmetic which means you’ve used Friedman’s Conjecture which means you’re a passable kabbalist. Sometimes passable kabbalists get very, very lucky. Maybe one is lucky enough to discover a secret Name that grants invisibility. If he were to do that, the only question is who would get to him first. A nice person, who asks him politely to accompany her to somewhere very far away where he can be debriefed and kept safe? Or a not so nice person, who would torture all his secrets out of him and then kill him to make sure he didn’t tell anyone else?”
“Um,” I said.
“I’m neither,” said Jane. “I’m a practical person. I will ask you politely to accompany me someplace far away where you can be debriefed and kept safe. And if I detect the slightest hesitation in your answer, then I will switch tactics and do the other thing.”
“Um,” I said. “Let’s go to the place.”
“Good,” said Jane. “Now, who are you?”
“My name is Aaron Smith,” I said. “I studied kabbalah in Stanford. With the help of a prophetic dream, I discovered a Name that granted invisibility. I used it to go sneaking around places I shouldn’t, and finally I got cornered, and I spoke the Vanishing Name, and ended up in that library with you.”
“You’re not telling the whole truth,” she said. But she shrugged. “I guess I can’t blame you. Let me give you an offering of goodwill. I work for the Dividend Monks in Colorado. The book we’ve taken records a prophecy given by them in secret and since forgotten, which I was asked to retrieve. We will land, go to the hotel where I am staying, and make contact with our transportation back to Colorado. Once you are there you will stay in the monastery and be questioned further. What happens then is for you to decide. But you seem to have enemies here, and there are worse places for fugitives than the Divide.”
I nodded, mutely. Actually, she was right. There were worse places.
There was a theory that the shape of the Tree of Life corresponded to the shape of the American continent. That would mean that the perfectly balanced center of the Tree, the Pillar of Harmony, corresponded to the Continental Divide. Some mystics claimed that standing exactly on the Continental Divide allowed them to balance the energies, achieve strange powers, and see into the future. They had straggled into Colorado and formed the Dividend Monks, becoming some of the earliest and strongest allies of the Comet King and his children. Colorado was a civilized country, and I could expect better treatment from the Cometspawn than I was likely to get from Malia Ngo or any of the other warlords in what was left of the West. And the Dividend Monks, notwithstanding whatever book they’d needed to send Jane to go steal, had a fantastic library probably filled to the brim with name error correction references. Sit tight on a mountain somewhere, wait for Ana to become powerful enough to rescue me. It sounded like a plan.
We landed on the outskirts of Los Angeles, hid the flying kayak under a pile of wood, then took the bus into town. Jane insisted I hold her hand the whole way; presumably you can never be too cautious with a prisoner who can turn invisible. I didn’t mind. She was pretty, in a scary way. Rich, too, apparently. She was staying at a penthouse suite in the Biltmore. The Dividend Monks must pay well.
When we finally reached her room, she made a beeline for the dresser, opened the third drawer, and retrieved six purple sparkling Beanie Baby dragons.
Then she panicked.
Holding my hand was forgotten. Keeping track of me at all was forgotten. I could have walked straight out the door and spoken the Vanishing Name if I’d wanted to. Maybe I should have. She ransacked the room, slamming open every drawer, looking under the covers, under the bed, tearing open her suitcase and flinging various mysterious objects in every direction. It was like she was having a fit.
“Aaron,” she said to me, when she finally remembered my existence at all. “Somebody has stolen the seventh dragon.”
Chapter 25: Lie Down Before My Feet, O Dragon
Afternoon, May 12, 2017
Los Angeles
I.
Coming from the edge of my consciousness, a faint voice:
[Thou shalt not krill]
The organizing soul within me – the kabbalists would have called it the neshamah – awoke, even as my body dozed on the hotel bed.
[Thou shalt not commit idolphintry] I answered, but I knew deep down it was a second-rate attempt.
[Weak,] said Ana. [Where are you? Are you safe? Are you okay?]
[I spent the morning kayaking with a pretty girl, and then she invited me back to her hotel room and handcuffed me to the bed.]
[Really?] asked Ana.
I opened my eyes, taking care not to break the hypnopompic trance that smoothed the telepathic link between us. The clock told me it was early afternoon. Jane was nowhere to be found. I still had a gag in my mouth to prevent me from speaking any Names, and I still had my hands cuffed to the bedposts to prevent me from taking off the gag. I’d asked Jane why she carried a gag and handcuffs with her in her luggage, and she hadn’t answered. Too rushed to restrain me so that she could run out and search for her precious Beanie Baby.
[Really,] I said, and sent Ana my memories of that morning. Speaking the Vanishing Name right under Malia Ngo’s watchful eyes. Escaping the Strategic Angel Reserve with Jane. The frantic search for her missing Beanie Baby, no amount of pleading inducing her to offer an explanation. Then her restraining me so she could expand the search to the rest of the city. [And you! What happened to you? You were with me in UNSONG! And then you learned a Name! Where are you? Are you safe? Where is Erica?]
[I’m on a boat,] she said. [I haven’t seen Erica, but she’s not dead. The link from the partial marriage ceremony would have told me that, I think. I keep trying to telepathically ping her, but I’ve never been able to feel her as strong as you.] Then she sent me her own memories. Sarah appearing mysteriously in her hotel room. San Francisco. The Comet King’s ship.
[So you don’t have the computer?]
[No.]
Everything I’d been doing up until now had been predicated on Ana having Sarah. If Ana had Sarah, the plan was still intact. She would become mighty. She would rescue me. We would be rich and important. If Ana didn’t have Sarah, then the error correction was our only hope. Otherwise, I’d be back to being nobody. The thought was somehow worse than being a fugitive, worse than being cuffed to a bed. I could take a lot if I was somebody. The thought of falling back into my cog-in-the-machine status filled me with dread.
I sent her a burst of grateful encouragement.
[In the meantime,] she asked [do you need rescuing?]
Jane didn’t seem evil in the same way as Ngo. And Colorado was a good place. But the handcuffs on my wrists reminded me that she probably didn’t have my best interests at heart either. And exactly because Colorado was a good place, it was the sort of place that she would reassure me we were going, even if she worked for the Harmonious Jade Dragon Empire or somewhere further afield. I noticed that she had told me we were going back to the Biltmore to meet her transportation back to Colorado, then left on her search without expressing any worries that she might miss said transportation. Jane didn’t seem evil, exactly, but she was suspicious, secretive, and maybe crazy.
[I think I might,] I said.
[Then when we reach our next port, I’ll get off and try to find you. I don’t think these people will try to stop me. They seem nice.] I felt no fear in her mind. Yes, Ana had the Spectral Name and potentially the element of surprise. That was a pretty deadly combination. But still. No fear. I sent her a burst of positive emotion. [One more thing,] she added, and she sent me the Airwalker and Zephyr Names.
[Who do you think got the computer and gave those to you?]
[Honestly?] asked Ana. [God.]
[You think God directly intervened in the universe to help you and your friend when they were in trouble? Don’t they warn you against that kind of thing in Theodicy 101?]
I didn’t get to hear her answer. The jingling noise of a key turned in the lock.
[Jane’s coming back,] I said. [You tell your mysterious billionaire sailor friends to keep you safe.]
[You tell your psychotic spy girl friend to keep her hands off you,] she thought back. [You’re already kabbalistically married!]
I sent her a burst of the most positive emotions I could manage just as Jane flung open the door and turned on the light, breaking my trance. I startled fully awake.
Jane looked a little sweatier and dirtier, but the permanent scowl on her face had only deepened.
“I got you some food,” she said, putting a bag of McDonald’s on the counter, “and some clean clothes. Get dressed. We’re going to Las Vegas.”
“Las Vegas?” I asked, after she had taken the gag off.
“The manager doesn’t know who took my dragon. The cleaning staff all say they didn’t take it. No toy store in the whole city has a replacement. But they all say there’s a big specialty store in Las Vegas that will. So we’re going to go to Vegas. Get dressed.” She unlocked the cuffs.
Jane was nothing if not efficient. Less than five minutes later, we were on our way out. I grabbed the bag of food and a bottle of Apple-Ade from the mini-bar.
She glanced at me as I took the drink, but said nothing. Which was just as well, considering.
II.
“Jane,” I had asked her very gingerly, earlier that morning, as she was nearly tearing the room into pieces, “what do you need seven toy dragons for?”
She’d rounded on me. “You shut up!” she snapped. “You know too much already! If you hadn’t screwed everything up on the Angel Reserve we wouldn’t be in this mess! Mind your own business!”
Then she went back to searching like a madwoman. She went into the other room of the suite, and I could hear her opening and slamming the colors.
I walked over to the dresser, looked at the six purple dragons inside. I was no expert on Beanie Babies, but they looked pretty normal. I shook one. It felt like there were regular beans inside. Very carefully, I squeezed it. Nothing happened.
Behind the dresser I saw a glint of purple.
The seventh Beanie Baby had fallen through the back of the drawer, and was wedged in between the dresser and the wall. I reached my arm in and grabbed.
“Jane!” I called.
From the other room, again, her voice. “Shut up! I swear by the Most High, if I have to tell you to shut up one more time, I will burn your tongue out. You think this is funny? Just. Shut. Up!”
Then more slamming.
Atop the dresser was a mini bar; in the mini bar was a plastic bottle of Apple-Ade tinted an almost opaque green. I poured the Apple-Ade down the sink, stuffed the seventh Beanie Baby into the bottle, then put it back on to the bar.
Why had I done it? I wasn’t sure, now. I was being treated like an infant. And I was being kept in the dark. I hate being treated like an infant and kept in the dark. I was sick of reacting; I wanted to act.
But the more I thought about it, the more I approved of my previous choice. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible would happen when she got that seventh Beanie Baby, that it would complete whatever arcane plan needed a book from the angels’ own library, that there would be something very final about her getting it.
And now we were going to Vegas. A dark place, to be sure, but not Jane’s place and not on her terms. If Ana was coming to rescue me, I’d rather Jane be off searching for a Beanie Baby in Vegas than doing whatever she would be doing when things started going her way.
Interlude י: The Broadcast
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was spreading a catchy quote denying all tricks greater than the one about faking nonexistence.
— Steven Kaas
[Content warning: Part II of this chapter contains graphic scenes including references to Hell, gore, rape, psychological torture, and death. Some commenters are saying it was excessive even beyond the level suggested by this content warning, so take that into account. If you don’t want to read it, you can skip to Part III without missing too much plot-wise. Thanks to Pyth for helping out as Hell Consultant.]
I.
After three months living with Ana, she learned that I hadn’t seen the Broadcast.
We’d been talking about theodicy, as usual. Ana was explaining how the Cainites had made the terrible mistake of trying to munchkin Biblical morality.
Munchkin-ing is this idea from role-playing games where instead of trying to tell a good story, you search for weird little loopholes that violate the spirit of the rules and make things much too easy. The Bible says – check your Luke 15:6 – that “in heaven there will be more rejoicing over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine souls that are righteous and have no need of repentance.” Solve for maximum rejoicing in heaven, and the obvious munchkin solution is to deliberately sin in order to repent later. Add some common-sense assumptions about the relationship between magnitude of crime and magnitude of repentance-related heavenly rejoicing, and…well, you can see where this is going.
Ana was against the Cainites. I was provisionally for them.
“You can’t just follow the letter of the law and not its spirit!” Ana was protesting.
“Holy frick you’re a kabbalist and now you’re against the letter of the law? Forget the letter! We’re supposed to believe that even the tiny extra dots and brushstrokes on some of the letters in the Bible have special meaning! When God said you couldn’t start a fire on the Sabbath, and the rabbis interpreted that to mean you couldn’t use electricity either, the Israelis just went ahead and programmed all their elevators to constantly go up and down stopping on every floor, because then you could enter and not push buttons and you wouldn’t technically be the one initiating the electricity. The whole point of the kabbalah is that God wouldn’t include something in the Bible that you could interpret a certain way unless He meant you to have that interpretation. And you’re saying a really really obvious thing not just suggesting that repentance is better than righteousness but actually giving a numerical conversion factor was a mistake?”
“You’re talking about the Jewish Bible,” said Ana. “The Christians don’t do things that way. And God knew the Christians wouldn’t do things that way, so He wouldn’t insert that kind
of complicated subtext in the Christian Bible.”
“God couldn’t stop adding complicated subtext to save His life,” I said. “How does that Galileo quote go? I cannot believe that the same God who hath endowed us with the tendency to overinterpret things in clever self-serving ways intended us to forego its use.”
Ana swatted my face playfully.
“What was that for?”
“I cannot believe that the same God who hath endowed me with a hand to slap you with intended me to forego its use.”
“Careful,” I said, picking up a big pillow from the couch. “God hath endowed me with a pillow.”
“You wouldn’t,” said Ana.
I swung it at her really hard, barely missing a table full of books and a potted plant. “See,” I said, as it hit her in the face. “I hereby repent of doing that. And now Heaven rejoices over me more than you.”
“But seriously,” said Ana, and she was serious now. “Why would God put a verse in the Bible calculated to make us want to be as sinful as possible? What if someone goes on a murder spree or something?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But we know that ‘serpent’ has the same gematria value as ‘messiah’, and that kabbalists since time immemorial have been saying that there’s some deep sense in which evil is the key to redemption. Also, God created a universe filled with evil. That was definitely a thing that happened.”
“Tell me about it,” said Ana.
I decided to take her literally. “Look. We know God has to desire evil on some level. Otherwise He wouldn’t have created Thamiel and set him loose in the universe to promote it. So why not actually put something in the Bible that sufficiently defective people will use as an excuse to be evil?”
“You’re heading towards repentance theodicy,” said Ana. “The theory that the reason God put evil in the Universe was that repentance is so great, and without evil you can’t repent. But I…don’t see it. Repentance is great because it makes there stop being evil. We celebrate repentance more than we maybe do with constant saintliness because we want to send a big signal to other evildoers that we will welcome and celebrate them if they stop being evil. Somebody beating me up and then saying sorry and he won’t do it again is preferable to somebody beating me up and intending to continue to do so. But not to never getting beaten up in the first place.”