I sort of believed what he was telling me while he was telling it, and it was only in the years since, as I have said, that I have doubted. As I think back on it as an old man on my ranch, sitting on my front porch and scribbling out my memories, I can see that the story Billy told me warn’t really much stranger than anything else that had happened to me since I took the train up North to star in Watt O’Hugh’s Wild West Extravaganza with Emelina, in the Great Roman Hippodrome. Still; it was Billy who was doing the telling, and so there was probably some reason that he was saying what he was saying, and the reason probably wasn’t that it was true.
“Do you remember,” he wondered, “when the idea of all of us was born, in the Center of the Whirlpool, fathered by the Void, 5696 years ago, in the year Zero, that calamitous and auspicious year?
“The stars in the sky were just pretty lights,” he said, “a fireworks show, a nice idea to impress a girl. Sometimes they streaked across the sky. Not meteors, not comets. Just pretty lights. The clouds were noctilucent. Why were they noctilucent? Because noctilucent clouds are pretty. The ocean was beautiful. That’s all anyone thought about back then. This idea of it being made up of hydrogen and blah-blah-blah, and water being life sustaining … all that came later. Back then, the ocean was just blue, with white caps on the waves, and it was beautiful. Why were there mountains in Keter? Because an ancient sea sat in the valley?”
“No?” I guessed.
I shook my head.
“We are all together here in Keter,” he said, “but only I can remember it, this not-moment which came to pass not-before anyone thought of the concept of Time. When you sleep, you can see it. And when you daydream, this is what you think about. But you do not remember it as I do. As the past changed and changes under us all, only I remember.” He smiled. “Think what that must be like, O’Hugh.”
Billy never forgot anything, even as new realities fought for dominance in his cranial nerves, even as the universe changed beneath and around him, and even as the rest of us forgot.
“That is, if any of you are real. I know that you ‘think’ you are, but I have no way to know for sure if you are correct about that. I may be a man living alone in an empty room.”
Somewhere, in my mind’s eye, one of the mountains on the horizon across the sea popped, and a dazzling red glow filled the sky.
“Maybe you are just a dream, O’Hugh, and how can a dream have dreams?”
He shook his head, and he took another gulp of his tea.
“He can’t,” I replied. “A dream cannot have a dream.”
“That’s the answer to that one,” Billy said. “A dream having a dream. I wonder what that would be like.”
Billy really loved it in Keter, and I didn’t blame him. He wished that he could have all this back, this past that he remembered, but that everyone else had forgotten, except in our dreams.
In my imagination, a wave, a little bit bigger than the others, crashed on the shore, and a small white cloud passed before the moon.
“Think of a coloring book,” Billy said. “It gets more complicated every time you read it, till it’s filled with Fra Angelica tempera paintings, and then pages of cubism. And the simplicity of the past gets further away. It grows away from us.”
Now the mountain on the horizon popped again, and blue and purple mist rose into the sky and filled the ether.
Billy looked out over the ocean, and at the stars, the ocean and stars that had once been magic.
“When humans first populated the world, they all thought these flecks of light, these pointless decorations, were something profound. In ancient times, they thought they were gods. We were eternal. At one ‘time’ you — we — were half-Divine. Then, we still danced with eternity. Beauty still existed, then.
“Now we are chromatids and centromeres, and our ‘soul’ is nothing more than ‘subjective experience,’ a part of evolution, a necessary survival mechanism. Look what we gave up when we rewrote the story. Now, human beings are no more eternal that the great auks of the Geirfuglasker. Temporary creatures on a temporary rock, on a temporary planet.
“Think again about the stars,” Billy said. “The idea that stars were divine was not a concept that anyone could test. Look at the sky all you want, call the stars gods, that won’t make them gods. We were on a hunk of rock, under a painted canopy, and there was no way out. Then scientists watched the points of light move and plotted their distance from the Earth based on, you know, math, which itself was based on our idly musing as to the number of trees in this forest a bit inland of the fictitious coast.
“But here, plotting the distance of the stars and planets from the Earth, these ideas — well, O’Hugh, they were brilliant. They added up. If you had two plus one on one side of the equals sign, you’d get six minus three at the other side, or you’d discard it. And the more the scientists thought about it, the more they proved it. And you can’t prove something that isn’t true, can you?
“At first, anyway, the mountains were beautiful, and then they were gods. Now, of course, geologists have come up with a better explanation, and proved this better explanation to be true, and thus now it is true. When we painted the sky, it was just a pretty picture, and other minds made it something more, made it complicated and old. Our art is no longer a pretty picture on the ceiling, but balls of gas, or spinning rocks glowing in the light of the balls of gas.”
He shrugged again; what the Hell did he know? He wasn’t a mathematician, and Billy Golden didn’t really understand any of this. He took another big gulp of his tea, and he finished it.
“Human beings are very imaginative,” he said. “And so reality never stops changing. I wonder what will be out there, once the psychosphere makes up her mind. When we solve the Bieberbach conjecture, will Fomorians ascend from underground, and will the sky crash down upon our heads, all because of Bieberbach? Soon, no doubt, we will find other wondrous things in this universe that weren’t there before but suddenly will have been there forever, and we will close the door on wonderful things that are no longer possible — Time roaming, perhaps?”
Here is another way to think about it, Billy Golden said, musing.
“Let’s imagine a woman, who is in love with a man. He loves her at first sight when they meet in 1852, and this lasts till 1857.
“He loves her from the Battle of Caseros till the Second Opium War.
“Then in 1857, he realizes not only that he doesn’t love her now in 1857, but that he never loved her. Because how could he have loved her? Such an idea is ridiculous. And that realization travels back through time, coloring every second of the prior five years, till the past is ultimately and irreparably changed.
“If the Universe is a human emotion, and it changes, just like that, when human beings realize that the ideas they held last year were preposterous and absurd, then it is just like that man, who loved a woman from 1852 until 1857, and then never loved her at all, ever.
“For a while, one thing was True, and verified, and deeply believed by those who believed it, and then something else was True and verified, and equally deeply believed by those who believed it.”
I thought that this was nonsensical, and I asked how this could be — a scientist publishes his findings, and suddenly something is true that had not been true before.
“On the other hand, Third,” Billy said, “how can ideas exist if no one has thought them? That’s more ridiculous, I might conclude. Isn’t an idea something that someone thinks? And if the universe and consciousness are intertwined — if consciousness has some role in the universe, and if science is a ‘social construct’ — then your ideas about the physical world, your careful proof of something, will make it real; you can change the physical world and the physical world’s past. The stuff of the world is mind stuff. You see: A universe controlled by a lucid mind would grow more rational with time. We’re all helping the universe decide what it wants to be when it grows up.”
“And what does it want to be?”
I had two questions, and only two questions.
First: “Why is it worth saving?” I finally asked him. “This terrible curse of existence?”
“It is not worth saving,” Billy agreed.
“People are assholes,” I pointed out.
“However,” Billy continued, “the Falsturm and his legions are worth destroying. He is the very worst vestige of our disastrous project. There are new universes springing up all the time now, cloned from this one, by these fellows … they call themselves ‘Otherworld Fabricators.’ Now they’re creating new armies, carbon copies in Otherworlds. The Otherworlds are inscapes, so to speak, ‘inner landscapes’ made of dreams. Each becomes a little less real, and the consciousness of each of the fabrications — that is, the denizens of these inscapes — is a little less conscious. For him to be destroyed, if eons of misery and torture are to be avoided in whatever Otherworld he might imagine, then our universe — this stupid universe — must live.” He squinted. “I have caught little glimpses of a better future, from time to time. Perhaps I am a romantic, a utopian. Still, I have seen the seeds of something Good, here and there, from time to time. I have tried to bring it about, where I can.” He laughed. “So far without success. So far, it always bites me on the ass. But I will keep trying.”
“Forever?”
“No. Not forever.” Almost to himself, Billy mused, “I will die — or I did die, depending on your point of view — about ninety years after I was born, which was thousands of years ago, and sometime in the future, dancing on a scalar field illuminated by the light of the singularity.”
My second question: the idea of each of us arrived in this universe in its first moments, out of nothing, and someone decided some of us should be beautiful women and some of us should be handsome men — where did that idea come from? Was it possible that he, and I, and all of us, were conjured from somewhere else? That our universe was just an Otherworld, and we believed that it was the first because we didn’t know any better?
Billy held up a sandwich which was wrapped in wax paper, and he unwrapped it.
“Corned beef,” he laughed. “Corned beef on rye, with mustard.” He shook his head. “Some joys are eternal. Some joys existed before the universe came into being and will continue to exist even if no sentient creatures grace the universe, or any artificial multi-verse. Come on Eileen. Gliding Dance of the Maiden from Polovtsian Dances. Pachelbel’s Canon. And corned beef on rye, with spicy mustard. It has nothing to do with butchering cows. In a world with no cows, you would still be able to eat a corned beef sandwich. A hot corned beef sandwich, in a world with no ovens, no fire, and no cows. Is that possible? Or is it left over, somehow, from something that came before?
“How would I know what came before?” Billy asked. “Dickie Lefferds from Universe Number Twelve created all this from a mixture of chemicals in his bathtub before the ceiling-sky caved in? He bequeaths us corned beef on rye, Come on Eileen and his own idiosyncratic notion of what’s beautiful, and just before he pulls the switch, he drops the numbers 137 and 6174 into the mix, just to confuse and entertain us? Maybe so.”
He took his last bite of sandwich; Billy Golden’s face radiated pure bliss.
A good sandwich.
“Any other questions, O’Hugh?”
I had no other questions.
If you’ve somehow read the previous volumes of my Memoirs, then I imagine it is unlikely that you are reading this one. Not because you hated the first two (although maybe you did), but just because the odds of randomly stumbling on even one, intact, is quite unlikely, and so the odds of stumbling on all three is practically impossible. But if you have, and if you are, then you know that in 1928 I awoke in the middle of the night with an epiphany, which in my case means a sudden burst of smart after many years of stupid.
And that night in 1928, when I awoke, I realized, among other things, that if Allen Jerome had remained loyal to Darryl Fawley, then I would have joined the Falsturm’s mission in the room of gold, I would have accepted his offer of riches, happiness, Lucy’s love. I would have admired the Falsturm’s loyalty and the Sidonians’ loyalty. They would have seemed a paragon of virtue beside Billy Golden’s multiple betrayals, and consequently I would have betrayed Billy and followed the Falsturm into a life with Lucy, and perhaps in those other pasts, I was happy sitting on my golden throne, paying visits to Sidonian-occupied Manhattan in the 1920s with my ever-young bride.
And so Billy, after many tries, had engineered a version of the past in which Allen Jerome betrayed Darryl Fawley, and in which this very old version of Billy might then warn me, that evening in Sadlo’reen, to “remember that.”
Remember how the Falsturm and Allen Jerome betray those closest to them.
The one thing that would keep me loyal in the face of the Falsturm’s offer.
“I have been working on your destiny,” Billy had once told me, years ago, “and on your past. It’s not easy to do. You won’t be a great man, I think. But a useful man.”
I left Billy to rejoin Kaelour, who awaited me outside Otto’s in her carriage. My legs were unsteady, and I wobbled when I walked across the courtyard. I was impressed by Billy’s pyrotechnics, by his “special effects.” Who would not be impressed? Billy knew a lot of tricks, he was good with the Led Zeppelin laser light show, the hocus pocus. Back then, I didn’t know much about “college,” I didn’t know anything about “pot,” and I had not yet visited the year 1976, but as I approached the carriage. I felt as though I’d just smoked a lot of “pot” in “college” in 1976, and I’d forgotten to do my homework as a result. I felt lost, unprepared.
I opened the door to Kaelour’s carriage, and then I shut it. I wondered how much reality had changed while I was opening and shutting the carriage door. Then I did it again, I opened and shut the carriage door, and I wondered again, was the universe entirely different now? Was it so different that it made Billy dizzy? I sat down beside Kaelour in the carriage. I probably looked insensible. She squeezed my hand, sympathetically.
By the time we reached the docks at the western edge of the town, the lights had gone out and the streets had grown barren. Kaelour held her gun with more nervousness now.
On the sea, some way out, a strange ship came into focus. Although it appeared to be very far in the distance, I could see every detail as though it were near. The dim glow from the foggy sky bounced off the ship’s sides, which seemed to be made of stone — impossible! — and on deck, a hunched creature paced. He wore a hooded brown cloak, and I could not see his face. A gnarled green hand poked out from one sleeve and clutched a twisted wooden walking stick. Kaelour didn’t seem to notice any of it. Or perhaps she was just used to it by now, the mad sea captain, the Dark Thief, the way you have become used to planes overhead that might drop from the sky and crash into your building, but which won’t drop from the sky and crash into your building. (Except sometimes.)
“Walk with some confidence, Mr. O’Hugh,” she said, and we exited the carriage and walked briskly but without fear to the warehouse, where an armed guard unlocked the door, slid it open with a crash, and then stood back impassively.
Row after row and shelf after shelf of muskets and revolving rifles and carbines, a stash of black explosive powder and various nitroglycerine-based explosives, and a row of cannons and cannonballs.
“Guns,” said Kaelour. “Explosives. Miscellanea. Your army will kill a lot of people with these weapons.”
She looked up at me with a sad smile on her beautiful face.
I shrugged and nodded. This was the point, after all, of all of this.
Chapter 28
You know, “critics” of your world, the “literary” world of the 20th and 21st century may be (as you say) “nonplussed” by the way I boarded the battleship out of Sadlo’reen and just sailed back to Hell. They may criticize my Memoirs for this reason; you
r newfangled “action stars” would have commandeered the ship, or taken control of Sadlo’reen’s military. He’s very passive, they will say of me. But the captain of the battleship, who was named Jur, was husky and thuggish and a good ten years younger than I; Hell, I believe, had eaten some of my muscle mass and taken some of my speed. Jur had black metallic weapons, and he had a crew of twelve. I had a few bullets in my waterlogged .45.
I know that you people love your “action stars.” In reality, there is indeed only so much one man can do.
I don’t know how much “time” it took for the battleship to reach the shores of Hell, but Jur kept his eyes on an ancient Chinese compass as the sky grew progressively more grey, and at length the difference between night and day was negligible. I knew that Jur didn’t want to grow lost in this fictional landscape. His orienteering was flawless, however, and eventually the sky grew ever-dark, and I was “home.”
When I woke on that dreary “morning,” it was as though I had fallen asleep here in Hell after my struggles with the rapids, with rancid water in my lungs, and had a vivid dream. As though I had never left, Rasháh’s bony fingers wrapped around my throat. (By now I was used to awakening in 枉死城, choking, with Rasháh’s bony fingers wrapped around my throat.) “If P is a p + 1 punctured Riemann surface of genus g,” Rasháh gurgled, grinning, showing his bloody-grey teeth, “then P × R admits a contact form α such that it is finite at infinity.”
I didn’t have much time to think about this — about being finite at infinity, or about how Rasháh intended to puncture a Riemann surface, which sounded painful — because by the time I was fully conscious, Rasháh had faded away into the dawn. His claws were gone, the only evidence the scrapes on my neck; I could breathe.
My horse here in Hell, as promised, had rejoined me on the other side, and he stood waiting patiently at the dock. Horses! Loyal and beautiful creatures, stupidly devoted. Like the sort of stupid person doomed to betrayal and failure in Malchut, horses seem to expect loyalty in return, fields of clover and loving foals when they retire, rather than the glue factory. A stupid, beautiful soul, a man’s horse.
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 24