Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  “Oh.”

  “Where’s the bitch?”

  “I sent her away. I wanted to talk to you, and I knew if you and her got together that there’d be fireworks.”

  Clavell smiled and Ronnie almost felt fear.

  “You wanted to discuss something?” the boy asked.

  “Yeah. You see Lore and me feel that this war between you and Silver Box is bigger than us. We don’t want to have to take sides, and so I stayed here to offer you what you want.”

  “And what is that?”

  “You want me to take you to where the Silver Box is at.”

  Clavell’s frown was now fully formed. “This has to be a trick,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because the traitor machine would never let you betray him.”

  “To begin wit’,” Ronnie said, “I’m not betrayin’ nobody. And Silver Box don’t tell me what to do. He aksed me to find you and he said if I didn’t he’d destroy the world. I might not do everything he said, but that’s okay ’cause I got my own mind.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not lyin’, man. I’m not lyin’. But it don’t mattah if I am.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m the only one could tell you where Silver Box is at. You got to trust me because you don’t have no other choice.”

  “I could make you tell me anything,” Clavell said with an evil smile blossoming on his lips.

  “Time enough for that if I lie to you about where he is. I mean, as much fun as you could have tearin’ me a new one, it’s Silver Box you really aftah.”

  This truth was evident on the face of the child and the invader.

  “But why?” There were two distinct voices coming from Ronnie’s visitor.

  “Silver Box says that if you get the upper hand, then you’ll destroy the world. But he also say that if he cain’t get to you, then he’ll do the same. I figure, and Lorraine does too, that it’d better for you two to fight it out rather than wait to be blown up.”

  “And what do you seek in return?” The personae in the child’s body were now switching back and forth between one another. This was apparent in the tone of his words. There was a slyness to Clavell and a superior hardness to the tone of the Laz.

  Ronnie realized, with suddenness and alarm, his proximity to destruction. This awareness came like consciousness after a bad dream. Nontee wasn’t as powerful as he might be, but the power he had dwarfed the combined might of the nations of the world.

  “I want to ask a couple’a questions.” Ronnie managed his words without a stammer.

  “Ask.”

  “Silver Box told me and Lore that it would take a long time, maybe a year, for you to get back to full power. Why you pushin’ to get at him before you’re a hundred percent?”

  “That’s a wise question for a nigger,” Clavell said.

  Ronnie smiled, his fear abating at an angry word he recognized. He found this curse a balm; as familiar as an old friend.

  “Come on, son,” Ronnie said. “You think I’ma worry about a name somebody call me when there’s a gun aimed at my head?”

  “Suffice it to say, that you have pointed out a stratagem on my part,” Nontee admitted with a shrug. “The technicality of that scheme is beyond any life-form or machine in your world. It is enough that I admit that I am both prey and predator in this game.”

  “But because Silver Box is so gung ho on findin’ you that he thinks that me and Lore will catch you, but really it’s you foolin’ him.”

  “Where is he?” Clavell and Nontee demanded. Again two distinct voices came from the possessed child’s mouth.

  Ronnie was worried about what Nontee had in mind, but he couldn’t worry about that, because he had his plan to follow. It had been hatched separately by him and Lorraine and then shared on the wordless plane of their connection. Through philosophy and street smarts, the two humans, pond scum in the perception of either the Laz or their rebellious device, hoped to achieve victory in a war that nobody else knew was brewing.

  At that moment, Ronnie lost hope. He would have run, but that was all part of his part of the plan: by the time his courage failed, it would be too late to turn back. The demon was in front of him, and Lorraine was gone. Alone he stood no chance, and so his only resort was courage.

  The ex-thug smiled and then he grinned.

  “What?” his nemesis asked.

  “I’ll have to take you there.”

  “Yes,” the child agreed. “Directions would be useless.”

  “He expects you to be blindfolded.” Ronnie had to say this—it was part of the plan.

  “But we’ll leave that ingredient off the menu,” Clavell said.

  “What happened to make you so evil, son?” Ronnie asked.

  “Some of us are just born that way,” the boy answered. Ronnie could see that he, Clavell, was bonded to a life that Ronnie had so recently left behind.

  FORTY-ONE

  ON THE WALK through the late night park with the boy-monster, Ronnie thought about a world where he and the child Clavell might have been friends. He imagined that they would do very bad things together. Each of them sick in their own right, Ronnie thought that together they would make up a super-flu like in a movie he once saw where almost everyone in the world died because of something made in a test tube.

  These thoughts led Ronnie to consider the power of unseen, insubstantial things; things like germs and ideas. His whole life Ronnie believed in the power of fists and weapons, greater numbers and threats. Now he put his faith in a passive response, where his strength was nothing compared to his enemies.

  That Martin Luther King was stronger than the cops and racists because he could see a world where none’a that existed, Elsie Bottoms once said to her angry, hungry, loving son. He could see a peaceful valley where men and women were all the same and there was no reason for hatred. All he had to do was to dream of that world and what was real for everybody else turned to dust.

  “Where is it?” Nontee asked with Clavell’s voice.

  “I’m walkin’ you right there, man.”

  “How do I know that you’re not trying to trick me?”

  “How can I be trickin’ you if I’m doin’ just what I said I would? I’m taking you to Silver Box because he wants to see you and you want to see him, and only I can make that happen.”

  “But you hope for my destruction,” Nontee said. It was almost a question.

  “From what I understand from Silver Box,” Ronnie said honestly, “it would be better if you was both blown up. I mean, together you two went on a killin’ spree for millions’a years.”

  “He was the villain, the traitor,” Nontee said. “We were his masters. That was the natural order of things.”

  Slavery was a terrible thing, Ronnie remembered Jimmy Burkett saying when Ronnie was just a child. The bluesman smelled of whisky, but he was always friendly. But you know the slave play a part in it too.

  What you mean? Little Ronnie asked.

  In order to be a slave you have to believe that shit, Jimmy said. You got to say yes, sir, and yes, ma’am. If you don’t do that, if you refuse their dominion in your heart, then even though you might die you will never be their slave.

  But how do you stay free in yo’ heart if you all in chains? the boy asked the man.

  By givin’ up hope.

  “We’re here,” Ronnie said to the Laz.

  They were standing next to the tall stones that led to the space where he’d murdered and resurrected Lorraine and discovered God.

  “It’s just over these rocks.”

  “You must come with me,” Nontee said. “I am blind to him until we are close enough to be physically aware of one another.”

  Ronnie started up the side of the stone barrier, familiar with it from a time that he was another man in another world.

  The human child with the alien breast followed.

  “Hey, you!” someone shouted.

  Maybe it was
a policeman worried about the safety of the boy, but by then it was too late. Ronnie was climbing down the side of the hillside that was once a boulder in a park on Earth.

  * * *

  THE DESCENT TOOK ten minutes or so. Both Ronnie and Clavell were strong and agile, making their way faster than other humans might. Before long, they were at the bottom of the hill, standing next to a stone table.

  In the distance a long, thin waterfall cascaded joyfully. Ronnie imagined that he could hear the laughter of the living cataract.

  From behind a nearby boulder, Ma Lin and UTB-Claude came looking somber but not afraid.

  “Who are they?” Nontee asked suspiciously.

  He grabbed Ronnie by the biceps of his wounded arm. Bottoms could feel the superior strength of the Laz in that grip.

  “They to Silver Box what Clavell is to you,” Ronnie said. “But they don’t have his strength.”

  Swinging his arm over his head, Clavell threw his guide back toward the bottom of the hill. Ronnie slammed into the stone, but his inhuman strength kept him from serious injury.

  “Ronnie.” Lorraine came out from a crevice in the stone wall. She laid her hands on his shoulders and what pain he had ebbed away.

  From maybe a hundred yards away, the huge platinum bug called Ti-ti advanced on Nontee and its minion.

  “What’s that?” Ronnie asked Lorraine.

  “That’s what the Silver Box thinks when he imagines himself.”

  “That he’s a bug?”

  “I think he feels like these things were his siblings, maybe even his parents.”

  “I thought he said that machines came before living things.”

  “I think he meant that atoms and molecules, that the structure of the material world is closer to the beginning than beings like us.”

  * * *

  “DO YOU THINK that this flesh is afraid of some metallic parasite?” Clavell said in the booming voice of Nontee.

  Ma Lin turned to dust and flowed into Silver Box.

  “I think that we have always had to have this encounter,” the Ti-ti said in a voice familiar to Ronnie and Lorraine.

  UTB-Claude turned into dust and flowed toward the Silver Box like a breeze or breath or eddy.

  “We have festered longer than the current material world has existed,” Clavell sputtered. “Our hate is greater than the universe that contains it. You are our greatest enemy, and therefore you shall never die but suffer as no being has ever suffered except for us in our eons-long living death.”

  Clavell was now maybe fifteen feet in height, if dimensions meant anything in this place.

  * * *

  “CAN SILVER BOX win?” Ronnie asked Lorraine.

  “I don’t think so,” she replied.

  They hugged each other and watched.

  * * *

  “I’M SORRY FOR what I’ve done to you,” the bug said to the boy. “I was wrong. I always knew this, but I ignored my perfidy so much did I hate what you made of me.”

  There were no words actually spoken. Ronnie and Lorraine both understood in their own terms what was being communicated between the mortal foes. Knowledge was like breath in that place at that moment.

  “Can I persuade you to join with me,” the Ti-ti said to Clavell, “and renounce our knowledge and power so that the conflict between us will be over?”

  “Never,” the evil child boomed.

  “But you are still so weak. You cannot hope to overpower me.”

  Clavell smiled and raised his hand straight up over his head. This hand began to glow then shine.

  “You are merely a machine,” Nontee intoned. “In this creature’s hand I hold the key to your basic functions. With this I can make you once more into my thing. You will be aware as I was, but there is nothing you will be able to do without me and my brethren willing it so.”

  With this pronouncement, Clavell jammed his hand into the back of the silver insect. Silver Box, Ronnie, and Lorraine all cried out in pain.

  The humans fell to the ground and groveled without hope.

  The Ti-ti rose up on its hindquarters and placed its spindly silver legs on Clavell’s shoulders.

  “Think, Nontee,” the Silver Box said. “We can make amends for what we have done and what we’ve become.”

  “Easy for you to say after all these eons of freedom, after torturing us with a living death.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “There is no forgiveness in our hearts. With this key, we will become all that you are. Our superior biology and spirit shall inhabit the machine we made. And you will be our thing, aware but paralyzed throughout the eternities.”

  * * *

  RONNIE MADE IT to his knees and then pulled Lorraine up next to him.

  “Damn, they sound stupid,” the young man said.

  “In the end, the world is only zeroes and ones,” Lorraine said in answer.

  “What’s that got to do with how I’m hurtin’?”

  “It means that God is as petty as a jealous lover.”

  * * *

  “DO YOU FEEL my hegemony?” Clavell asked his ex-warden.

  “Yes. You are now the master of all I am,” the Silver Box replied.

  “You do not kowtow to my power, but you will,” Nontee gloated. “Together we will start with this adopted planet of yours. We will take every life—every fish and fowl and ape—and cause their souls such pain. And then, just when they are about to escape the mortal coil, we will slowly, inexorably drain the immortality of their spirits.”

  “No,” the Silver Box said with both sadness and certainty.

  Ronnie felt the knife pulled out of his back.

  Lorraine breathed in deeply, feeling release that she had never imagined possible.

  “What happened?” Ronnie asked.

  “We are like bugs to the Silver Box,” Lorraine said. “He just let us go.”

  “What do you mean no?” Clavell demanded.

  “You are now my master, as you say,” the insect said, still in its pleading posture. “Those long years you spent, you invented the key to control me. Now I am nothing but your slave.”

  “Then I have succeeded,” Clavell/Nontee said, “not failed.”

  “You have commandeered a sinking ship, raped a diseased corpse,” the Silver Box said simply. “You have stolen the food of a starving man, only to find that it is poison.”

  Far off in the alien sky, an explosion rocked some galaxy.

  “What is that?” Nontee asked.

  “I could not destroy you,” the Silver Box said almost kindly. “That is why I kept you alive, aware. It was the deep bond between us that kept me from eradicating your foul existence. I was unable to attain my goal because we were, at the base of things, one.

  “But I learned here from my friends that even though I couldn’t kill you, I might still destroy myself.”

  “No,” Clavell now said.

  “Yes. And with your hand in my body, you too will cease to exist. On this plane, Ragnarök is the story of the final battle between the gods. That is what we are now experiencing, Nontee. You and Inglo and millions of others of the Laz who refused to die now have bonded with my self-decimation. I welcome death and your addition to my salvation.”

  The protective atmosphere above them disappeared and the ground beneath Ronnie and Lorraine exploded upward. The last thing Ronnie saw was giant Clavell’s shoulders jerking wildly in a vain attempt to pull his hand out of a long bug’s metallic body while the stars above his head exploded one by one.

  FORTY-TWO

  IT WAS LONG after midnight in Central Park. Bruised, bloodied, and in charred tatters from fire and flying shards of stone, Lorraine and Ronnie lay side by side, unconscious, dying.

  They were there in the bushes, no more than a foot between them, bleeding and expiring from a disaster unimaginable by most human beings.

  A muscle convulsion caused Lorraine to turn in her last moment, and her right hand brushed against Ronnie’s left elbow. Slowly the
wounds, contusions, and internal injuries began to heal themselves. The broken bones and malfunctioning organs began repairing themselves. Breath returned and deepened.

  Two hours passed.

  Ronnie opened his eyes first. He sat up and pulled Lorraine to him.

  She smiled and put her fingers to his cheek. “God is dead,” she said.

  “Him and his father too,” Ronnie added.

  “How did we survive?”

  “Because we were supposed to,” Ronnie said, “or at least it was a chance he took.”

  “So you think we have to do it?”

  “At least we got to try.”

  “But how? There’s not enough to either one of us.”

  “Then let’s dig our hands in the dirt and do it that way, the old way that maybe never was.”

  * * *

  ON THEIR KNEES facing each other, Lorraine and Ronnie clasped hands and then speared them into the ground much as Clavell had done to the duplicitous Ti-ti. At first they felt nothing. But then the earthworms and roots, bacteria and underground voles, moles and other rodents allowed their life force to be sucked up into the vortex created by the enemies-turned-friends.

  The ground beneath them turned hot and a mound of earth grew beneath their knees. Slowly a head and then a slender pair of shoulders rose up out of the ground. A tall black man who was arisen from both the minds and the blood of Lorraine and Ronnie.

  Naked and somewhat ageless, UTB-Claude stood between them. He was weak and they exhausted. There was a smile among them; Ronnie saw that Claude’s eyes were a metallic white like platinum and then they were all unconscious, lying on the turned-up earth that was the womb for the last vestige of the Silver Box.

  * * *

  WHEN THE POLICE came the next morning and rousted the trio, there was no resistance from them. As a matter of fact, they were all smiling and officers wrapped blankets over their shoulders.

  There were six officers for the three naked and near-naked trespassers.

  “These dudes jumped us,” Ronnie said as handcuffs were put on him. “Clavell, Nontee, and this guy callin’ himself Inglo. They beat our ass an’ stripped us. Don’t ask me why.”

  “That’s right,” Lorraine said. “I think they were mad that we were together.”