Komodo

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I grew to be good at not caring. I grew good at debauchery. The party I was going to crash in a little while was nothing next to the parties I had attended during this phase. In palaces, in mansions, underground and high in the mountains. Pretending to be almost anything or anyone. Sometimes, I would even switch half-way through, come back through the door as someone else, and listen to what people were saying about who I had been before.

  By the time the assignments grew more deadly, I was treating other people as if they too were merely avatars, skins, so that an order to hurt someone, and eventually to kill someone, meant only that one reflection in an infinite hall of mirrors had to be taken out. Just one, I told myself. All the others remained, grinning back at me.

  When I got bitten by the komodo while on a mission, moving up all my timelines up, I was thinking this single thought: What if you could find the one reflection that, if you snuffed it out, made the rest all go dim as well?

  Soon enough, it was time for the party, time for me to leave the hotel room, and I must confess I suffered a moment of hesitation. Child, you’re probably too young to have ever had to make a decision like I was still in the process of making, but hesitation happens. Because I still did have a choice. I could have stopped right then. I could have walked out of the hotel and melted into the streets and fled the angels. I could have done that. They would have hunted me down in a year or two, but I could have made those months count, I would have strung them out and experienced them in a slow-motion that seemed like an eternity.

  But it would be an eternity of being alone with my own thoughts.

  And I had come this far.

  Sometimes it’s the banalities that pull you through, protect your resolve from your doubts.

  So I left my hotel room and I started to walk down the hallway to the elevators. It was a long walk, a really long walk, and I cherished every frayed patch of beige carpet along the way, every stain from beer or something worse, the dull worn ache of door handles—all of it.

  I was beautiful and young and wearing an amazing red dress. I had a red purse with a deadly weapon in it. I was going to a party. I hoped the angels wouldn’t catch up to me until it was too late.

  A couple of minutes before, however, I had had to implement another part of my plan in a particularly visceral way. I had taken a bottle opener, and on bended knee I had enlarged the wound in my calf. If you’re going to make others suffer, shouldn’t you suffer, too? I lovingly drew the sharp, curved beak of the bottle opener deep along the outlines of the bite, pulling the slow-seeping poison farther into the meat of me. Simultaneously, I loosened my control over the individual compartments of my cells.

  As I walked down that worn carpet to the elevator, I could tell my efforts had paid off. I could hear the far-distant howl of the komodos, approaching fast. I could hear them in the maze of realities, clambering up the walls of Time, looking for a way in, my scent suddenly hot and enraging. It was almost as if they had gotten to the hotel already, their eventuality forming ghostly swirls of scales across the floor, the wall, the ceiling. That probably did not even qualify as a hallucination, just a side effect of my flagging energy level.

  Of course, no one could see the wound. Just as I’ve spared you, child, from the worst of the aftermath. No one should see what I really look like now.

  From afar, I had spent more time than I wanted to with the researcher who used to possess a green alien head atop his neck. Although told to keep an eye on him, I don’t believe I was meant to spend quite so much time watching him. It just turned out that way, and Gabriel never told me to pull back, concentrate on something else.

  But, in general, surveillance provided one area of freedom for those of us “recruited” by the angels. As we in our separate booths took in the full sum of the evidence transmitted back by luna moths and dust crabs and sand mites and fleas and flies . . . all of these creatures that embodied a nano so nano that no Earth scientist through the ages would ever be able to discern the difference between an angel’s or a god’s work . . . we saw and saw, and could not unsee.

  My other main assignment was a seemingly pointless surveillance of an alt-Earth where a vast civilization pushed south from the Arctic, sending ahead their floating ghost-whale spirit weapons. These floating ghost-whales glided across the surface of the world and anyone they touched, anyone who came within the influence of their wallowing bodies, faded into the past of another, random reality---ceased to exist in the present. They emitted whale-song as they came, a deceptively sonorous psych-weapon that could break eardrums and brought fear to the invaders. The invaders had come from across the sea and had misjudged everything that could be misjudged. They had occupied territory and torn up the land while dismissing indigenous tech that was not inferior but simply different because it existed across dimensions, requiring only unity of purpose to bring forth. Those who retreated did so for strategic not tactical reasons. Now the invaders fell back in disarray, still unable to grasp the scope of their mistake.

  But this Earth also existed in a kind of temporal hiccup where everything kept happening over and over again. The spirit-whale advance would reach a certain point, re-set, and begin again—so many times that now the commanders of the northern armies headed south, and their civilian leaders, knew like an echo of an echo in their brains what was happening—a subconscious message received from the near future—and in a thousand minute ways were intent on altering their decisions to try to effect some sort of change.

  Gabriel had told me that eventually the hiccup would feel the combined psychic pressure of this and it would end . . . but not even the angels knew if that reality would then proceed normally or cease to exist.

  Sometimes the angels hid their wings and traveled there and let the spirit whales dissolve them into the past as a kind of strange jest or joke. The most adventurous would wait until the very second of the temporal hiccup before diving in, and thus be subject to any number of dangerous and random possibilities. Those who survived their comrades would find and bring back and restore their memories. It may have been meant as some kind of adventure, even some sort of rite of passage, but I thought there was a hint of desperation and sadness to it. That the angels, Gabriel included, really wanted to forget, but had to disguise that impulse as play. But what did they need to forget? The cruelty of decisions they said they made for the greater good? Something much worse?

  (Where’s your mother? Hypnotized in the corner, not even seeing me or hearing me, like the rest of the patrons at the bar; so, maybe, at the end of the day, I am as much of a monster as Seether, but I need an audience right now, I need you, child, to hear this.)

  Eventually, even with the time-sink of that other assignment, I realized what the alien researcher was up to, what the angels might want from him. What made him get up in the morning after hanging all night in what looked like a trellis with stirrups, body dangling below his carefully wedged giant head. But it took a while because like a magician with misdirection, his laboratory process tended to mesmerize me.

  A seemingly endless series of lab rooms lay beneath his house, all of them spacious to accommodate his bulk. Transparent beakers stood on green-tinged tables, the liquids that bubbled and swirled within purple or red or green or orange. Some of these were legitimate. Others, I found out soon enough, were his equivalent of alcoholic beverages, and before each lab session he would get roaring drunk. Oh, the weight of scientific endeavor. Oh, the objectivity of it all.

  But the alien researcher whose name sounded like two crickets mating while being burned alive—a kind of charred series of exclamation points of varying intensity—wasn’t a mad scientist from a bad movie. He was a kind of 3D physicist, dealing in potentialities and living metaphor.

  One day, for example, he worked with model galaxies while I watched from the twinned vantage points of an amoeba in a drop of water on the counter and the pupa of a moth-like thing that dangled from the ceiling.

  Across a lab sink, Two Burning Crickets
had strung a kind of porous material analogous to paper that I would later find had the feel of skin, almost as if putting thin-kneaded dough across the open face of a pie. At first the “paper” was pale white, but then he poured a purple liquid from a beaker over it. The liquid was the combination of komodo and angel blood that I had given him at Gabriel’s request. The liquid strained through but left a stain, and revealed a floundering of tiny creatures that resembled sharks and hippos and squid and catfish but were not. They were metaphors for different kinds of life . . . and out of that floundering arose a kind of clear smoke that formed a three-dimensional rotating representation of a spiral galaxy. A darkness encroached around the edges to illuminate it and the creatures beneath grew still and evaporated in wisps of green flame.

  You would have been just like me at that point. You would have clapped your hands and asked for more. It was a kind of marvel, the sort of thing that captured me so utterly in the early days that I could ignore the other things.

  The initial phase complete, a tiny golden globe now appeared, a tiny knife. A test tube of some clear fluid. Each of these things, he flung into the middle of that slow-moving image of a galaxy. Each reached a certain point in the matrix and winked out. Each time, the galaxy changed shape a little bit. Each time, the darkness encroached further, and what was left burned every more brightly. Finally, he picked up a canister of ashes that had ossified with a brilliant stream of turquoise frozen down the side. I recognized the canister—it held the remains of an angel who had chosen too rapid a path to re-entry into the atmosphere and burned up. In another ten years, those ashes would have been an angel again. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, but it hadn’t come from me.

  Two Burning Crickets pried open the lid like it was a can of beans and took a pinch of ashes, flicked them out into the middle of this apparition of a galaxy. The image became blurry, and then I realized that the blurriness reflected a change: now there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of overlapping versions of the same galaxy made manifest there, as if the ash had separated out the component elements of a sample. Then, without warning, the variations began to disappear, each vanishing making the image less blurry . . . until there was only the one galaxy again, and then not even that, leaving only the now badly singed and sagging paper and a swirl of colors in the drain. Not to mention, Two Burning Crickets, capering about like he’d won the lottery.

  My first thought was that the angel in the canister would be furious when he reconstituted, if he became aware that his compatriots had volunteered him for this experiment, and even more so when he realized he was missing part of his mind, or a thumb, or half a wing, or whatever those particular ashes had meant to him. If it worked that way.

  But my second and third thoughts were much more serious, as I investigated further. In his mind, Two Burning Crickets may have only sought unity, clarity, the solace of just one thing , and perhaps his six-hundred-year-old mind, could no longer hold all of the possibilities, all of the replicas. But when I better understood what I had observed—that he was close to giving the angels a way to destroy an entire set of realities; say, every alt-Earth in existence, even the one with the ghost whales—I knew what I had to do. I even knew how to do it, the blessing of having invested so much training in my surveillance work.

  When everything was finally in place and I came to kill him and destroy his research, he met me at the door and said in his language, “Are you the one?” I remember that distinctly. “Are you the one?”

  I suppose I was, in a perverse way.

  Is it better if someone you love or used to love who kills you? Shouldn’t it be? Someone whose hand has slipped from yours but who knew you intimately? Like Seether or William would have been to me.

  I knocked on the door to the candidate’s hotel suite and two bodyguards opened it and they let me into the party. Because I looked like I belonged. Because I had taken on the appearance of a television reporter the candidate had once dated, someone I knew was far away, on assignment in London. Flimsy, but it didn’t need to hold water for long—just a handful of minutes. I wasn’t much for parties, especially lingering at parties.

  The candidate stood across the spacious room, behind the barricade of a table upon which had been placed a sumptuous spread of appetizers. The candidate was shaking hands and talking to potential donors. About forty or fifty people lay between us. About a hundred thousand iterations of Earth lay between us. Ghost whales and ghost bears and other spirits still.

  He had a kind of haggard, dark look to him, not at all like the TV ads, and you could see the bags under his eyes that make-up would usually take away. His shoulders were stooped under his immaculate blue suit with the conservative dark tie. His hands dangled from the ends of his jacket sleeves. But there was about his gaze a kind of intelligence and animation that belied the stoop, the dangle. A way his mouth set firm that inspired confidence. In all ways, he projected the idea of the stalwart underdog, a kid off the streets who had been domesticated and risen through the ranks of the opposition party not like a falcon but, as his campaign ads exploited, like a barrio dog that, fed on scraps, had finally found a home after much hardship. If all went well, here and across a number of other realities, he would rise to become president at a critical time. (And yet, all of which was irrelevant, child. It truly was.)

  For a short time, I just observed him. He didn’t deserve this, but there were a lot more of him where he came from. At least, that’s what I told myself. He’d never know that I meant him no harm, no harm at all, even as I inflicted the greatest possible harm. His role was not to know, the same role as most people in the worlds. To not know. To receive hints, perhaps, to have faith, to believe in . . . something . . . but not to know . Even Two Burning Crickets hadn’t known the identity of his benefactors, his prodders.

  Soon the number of people would swell, a flood of others arriving to replace this advance guard of the candidate’s admirers. So I smiled across to him, with a wave of a raised be-bangled arm, saw the corresponding sudden animation of his features, the gleam in his eyes, missile-sharp, the corresponding wave, which meant he was accessing a slew of salacious and no doubt satisfying memories. Beauty is a disguise. People rarely look past it to intent.

  As I made my way toward him, the howling of the komodos in my ears was a gale-force wind and time seemed to slow and the ghost frogs that are the harbingers, the advance guard, the early warning, of those dangerous reptiles began to pop into existence, there in that room, photo-negative explosions of the purest, almost translucent white. Only I could see them. They floated in the air, these impossible party favors, staring at me with their luminous eyes, accusing me of something.

  I’m doing this for William, I told myself. For all the Williams. Even though I could no longer recall what he looked like.

  But my timing was off, child. All of the timing was a little off, maybe ever since I had donned the green alien head . . . I just hadn’t known it yet.

  Thousands of alt-Earths, millions maybe, died out every year, some of them mundane and other positively outré. In addition to the amazing things I saw because of Gabriel, I saw these terrible things, too, because he forced me to see them. The world that experienced mass extinctions due to cat litter and plastics, compounded by nuclear holocaust. The world that remained verdant but person-less when warlike aliens that resembled large, land-going sharks appeared through a wormhole and declared the human race guilty of marine genocide. The world where the dominant species of intelligent ravens engaged in bio-warefare of such global proportions that it destroyed them and the human slaves they used as tools. And so it went, on and on and on. Trillions lived and trillions perished. Biomasses were inherently unstable, was the message, I thought. Bags of flesh and bones with brains didn’t keep well. They kept replicating, kept on going, but they were doomed.

  When I expressed this thought to Gabriel, he looked at me as if I were the lowliest ant.

  “Our enemy caused this,” he told me. “The e
nemy always causes this. And we cannot root our enemy out.” There was a cruelty to his fixed smile then, the kind of smile you do not expect from a being perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old. A smile you expect to see from a child who has revealed he has done something wicked but for whatever reason even as he confesses can’t help but show he is rather proud of this wicked thing.

  He cared not for the destruction of worlds, but had fixated on this idea of an Enemy underlying all of it, like most of the rest. This was the point of the surveillance, ultimately, on a strategic level—to monitor the worlds, the realities, everything, for this presence, for the idea of it made manifest in the flesh.

  “We need a way to flush the enemy out,” Gabriel told me. “We are finding a way to flush the enemy out.”

  Looking through surveillance records, I began to realize that beyond the usual monitoring, they were also looking for the presence of Evil with a capital “E,” which is crazy. Which is evil. They had become deranged by this idea, or most of them. As if the impulse came from the echo of a ghost of a memory of a threat that had indeed once existed but did no more . . . and yet to them it was a real as anything real could be. An invisible enemy that must be rooted out. That’s when I turned my attention to other records and found dark spots. Places where it appeared the angels had destroyed to protect. Never more than a planet or two, you understand. Never a whole series of realities . . . until Two Burning Crickets had come along suggesting even greater possibilities.

  How do you know when a near-immortal race of non-angels has reached the end of its tether? When that race comes to believe in the Devil, and believes that the Devil must be cast out by any means necessary.

  From my training in surveillance, I knew that certain coordinates in space and time and reality are imbued with power and energy that accrete over time. A nexus can be used to effect tremendous change because of their connectivity. If you map them all and you know how to destroy alternate realities because of Two Burned Crickets, you can truly extinguish everything. If you’ve lost the formula for destroying on such a grand scale and your maps have been rendered useless, you can’t do much of anything for a while.