Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  She smiled at that.

  147. Lisa

  She said “A long time, yes, too long. But I knew I had you snared when you agreed to take me to see your mama.”

  I said with surprise. “I never knew that! You did that on purpose?”

  She chuckled warmly. “Do not underestimate the superior mind.”

  “But it was just a joke I was playing on my Mother.”

  “To you. Women do not joke about such things,” she said primly.

  “Oh, come now. It was my idea to…”

  “Ta-ra-ra.” She snapped her fingers. “I pick to marry you, so it is done, but I am patient, as the huntress is patient, for you to come to your senses, and ask.”

  I said slowly: “I never knew that when I was alive. That means this scene, this dream, cannot be just from my memory.”

  I gestured to the right and left. “This is from when we first met. But your little speech about seeing me naked, my hairy legs, that was when you surprised me in the binnacle. We were aboard my cousin’s schooner for our honeymoon, touring the Aegean, seeing the Greek Islands. Strange. The monsters, well, they somehow must have confused or combined elements from the two happiest periods in my life. But it never happened this way, not while I was alive.”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “I am dead, my dear. I thought you were pregnant when I marched off to war, because you were so moody. I actually had your letter in my hand, and had lit a match to read it, when a sniper saw my light and shot me. Took me about an hour to bleed to death. Stupid of me. I won’t do that again. Never did find out what was in that letter. I hope it was good news.”

  She raised an eyebrow at that, and puffed a nervous little puff. “Ah! What is this you say? Never mind it! Listen: Little ones; how many children do you think we will haff? I am strong; you have good bones. How many?”

  I said, “Seven. Four sons, three girls.”

  She smiled at that, and her eyes danced. “Seven? This is not bad. No so many as Mama, but—“ she shrugged. “I am the modern woman now, yes? American.”

  “Two of the boys will grow up strong and tall; one of them dies in the crib. The girls will be as beautiful as their mother. We will lose our sons in the war.” I heaved a sigh. “That is not all you will lose to war. Our eldest boy will be called Frederick, after your grandfather. When he is fourteen, he will be the man of the house, and your sons will comfort you, once I am… gone… you will still be young, with children between six and sixteen, and your folks will urge you to remarry. Long you will live, my love, long enough to see a man step onto the Moon.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and the gleaming love-joy in her eyes was muted. Another puff of the cigarette: this one rapid, nervous. “This joke you are making, I do not like it. Die in crib? Gott! That you should say such a thing! War? What war?”

  “Two wars. Germany will rearm. Pacifists will weaken the will of the West to resist, and England will be slow to cry foul. A terrible war. A war fought with scientific weapons. Flying machines. Poison gas. Rapid-firing guns; cannon with rifled barrels. There will be an armistice for twenty-one years, and then the Germans will attack again, and the Japanese will help them. There will be Ironclads and land ironclads. Rockets. Planes made of steel. A wireless method for detecting ships at sea. Bombs that turn whole cities into ash.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “Lay down. You have been sick. You must wake up from this.” I sat on the bed and she passed me the hip flask. “Drink! You will feel better.”

  It burned my throat, but turned into a pleasant warmth in my chest and belly. I said, “I have stepped outside of time, and the devils want to use me to recreate all the misery in the universe. If I let them. I am the last life-line, the last thread, stretching between—I don’t know what to call it—heaven and hell, I guess. The devils want to use me to call back the things I love. You. Your family through you, and mine through me, I suppose. You could get all the generations of man back to the beginning, that way, I suppose, because no one was never loved by no one: every baby had a mother some time. And–”

  She said sharply, “Let us hear no more of this talk! You, you make yourself sick again, you are, yes?” Angrily she threw down the cigarette butt and stamped it under her toe.

  So many things about her are so perfect. The line of her thigh when she lifted her leg to step, the black and shining gleam on the toe of her boot. Such a little foot, so pretty. The flash in her eye, blue as summer skies, when she tossed back her head and blew from her red lips upwards, to dislodge some fine strand that had escaped her tight coif to tickle her nose. Everything she did was comical, and sweet, and solemn, and dainty, and fierce, and, oh, so very feminine.

  I said, “This is a dream. All the details are wrong. Look.” I plucked the dog hair off my shirt. “I did not get Pepper until four years after we were married. How can his hair be on my shirt? This is the camp where I first met you, but you are talking and acting as you did on our wedding night, which we spent, if you recall, on my cousin's schooner, sailing the Aegean.”

  I looked back and forth. “All the details are right. Little things. My tiger rug. But I never would have used it for a ground cloth. And the amber beads my taxidermist used for the eyes: I bought them in the queer little market in Cairo. I have not been to Cairo yet. But I loved that rug, and it did feature prominently on my honeymoon.”

  She looked at the dog hair, and at the rug, a vertical crease of annoyance between her pale eyebrows. Then she giggled at the rug, and smiled her wicked little smile, hiding it unsuccessfully behind her fingers.

  I said sadly, “Naughty girl, thinking about the honeymoon uses of a tiger-skin rug at a time like this. And, yes, that is why it becomes one of my favorite rugs.”

  “Very well!” she said, growing sober, and she put on her face what I like to call ‘her Prussian face’, which she would use in years to come when she was trying to explain to our children, why it was illogical to cry, or why it was important to stand up to schoolyard bullies, even when very afraid.

  “Let us be scientific about this, yes? You say this is a dream. What dream?”

  “It is the moment of time between the destruction of the old universe, and the beginning of the new one. It may be too late already, but something must be happening now, right now, to set things so that the new universe is created as one They also own.”

  “So, then,” she shrugged, “You wake up, new universe starts, all is happy, yes? We go back to the honeymoon. I want to start on the seven little ones. Will be a lot of work.”

  How could I help but smile? It brought tears to my eyes, to see her again. But it was strange to see her so young! So thin! I had to hide my eyes in my hand, so that she would not see my tears.

  “You are in pain? I will get mine father.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Let us be scientific about this. The devils—I don’t know what to call them. They are not from inside the universe—want to use me, want to use my love for you, to do what? Kitimil would know. Something bad. Mr. Bliss spoke of orchestrating the moment of creation, running it like it was an adding machine to sum up to what he wanted. Mr. Threshold said we could use his art, the dimensional rotation, to move ideas from the realm of memory into the material realm, folding something along the time-axis back into three dimensional space, fleshed from dreams. But he said we needed to use the ship’s engines to do it. And he said. What is the word? The enemy was ‘entangled’ with them. As if it were tainted or poisoned.”

  She started to move away. “Father will help you…”

  I held up the hair from my coat again. “Whose dog is this?”

  She said. “Pepper. He leaves the hair over everything. You know that.”

  “Where is Pepper now?”

  “With your mother, at her house, back in Nantucket.”

  “Across the Ocean. Then how can his hair be here? How can I do—this?”

  Since imagination, like everything else, was part of the indistinct totality, I nee
ded do no more than imagine the thousand-sided nine-dimensional hypersolid, anchored it in the points that Abraxander’s people had prepared to receive it, and the imaginary object would move the ideal object, which affected the time-versions of the object. And time, after all, was merely one aspect of space. A slight pressure was all that was needed to move from the fourth to the third dimension. A link led from the hair, along the time-axis, to the source of the hair. And of course I love my dog. So, I squinted, and–

  There came a bark echoing in the distance, faint as a dream, like the wind. Then paws were rustling through the grass of the plains. Then, loud, sloppy, solid, and needing a flea bath, Pepper bounded into the tent.

  I petted him and made much ado over him while Lisa, showing great aplomb, helped herself to a slug from the hip flask. She coughed and sneezed only a little.

  She said, “Enough. Proof is proof. I believe.”

  “Then help me?”

  “How? This means I am not real, either, you know.”

  I blinked at that. “I – I suppose. Are you an image in my mind, or—a ghost? A hope?”

  She shook her head brusquely, her Prussian look back on her finely sculpted features. “An image of something to come. A temptation. No matter. I will help. What am I to do, eh?”

  “You must help me to commit suicide.” I passed my left hand over my right forearm. Again, I saw the multi-dimensional geometric shape in my minds eye. Again, I turned it. Ydmos was myself, reincarnated into the future. Surely no man has ever lived, who does not love himself, with some part of his heart, in some way.

  When I drew my hand back, I saw the raised red spot on my forearm where the capsule was embedded. The capsule is made so that the venom is released both into the mouth, and into the big veins near the elbow, when the traveler despairs of ever returning to the Last Redoubt as a human, and bites it.

  148. Suicide

  She put her little hand over the reddish mark on my arm. “No,” she said. “That is madness, cowardice.”

  I said, “Not cowardice. Not when done for reasons such as these. The Romans often slew themselves when…”

  She just gave a snort of contempt. “Romans, eh? Italians, but old, that is all.”

  “They were brave and great men: Trajan; Cato; Aeneas; Seneca…”

  “The pagan, he martyrs himself to serve his own glory, no? And on the inside, he worships himself. Just himself, nothing else. Very small thing, a man; not a good thing to worship, I think.”

  “Japanese Samurai, when his honor has been…”

  She just rolled her eyes at that. “Honor! Another word for man who talks big, too scared to back down when people are watching. Universe is dead, you say. No one watching now.”

  I drew back from her. “You think it is a sin, don’t you? A mortal sin.”

  She narrowed her eyes and looked at me closely. She said, “I know you, Reginald. Your father, he believe in nothing, he like to go fishing on Sundays, so he let you skip church. Then you listen to college boys, and you decide to be the fool, in his heart, who says there is no God, eh? Fine. Maybe there is, maybe there is not. Many men, many brave good men, believe this thing, many years. But suppose it is a lie. Why is it so convincing? Why so many men believe this lie, all these years? Good men and wise. Every country, even pagans, some sort of heaven, some sort of God.”

  I said, “All men fear death. All men regret that there is no justice in the world. All men are horrified to imagine that this, all of life, is an empty abyss.” And I remembered the words of Crystals-of-Bliss. He, too, had been another incarnation of mine, hadn’t he? “So they invent a story to make it all make sense.”

  She pursed her lips. “So. This story, if men were cowardly little things, they would have a cowardly little story, yes? If the story tells you, ‘Man, he is too fine a thing, like an angel, a thing like fire, divine fire, he is too fine for you to kill him’ that is not a little story. That is big story, yes? What kind of man listen to that kind of story? Big man.” She reached and pulled the cigarette from my fingers to take a puff.

  Her left hand was gripping her right elbow, and her right hand was near her face. Her hips were cocked to one side in a relaxed posture. She seemed so golden, like a cornstalk, so supple, like a steel épée, and the smoke drifted above her, catching stray rays of sunlight that pierced the stitching in the tent, and turning to golden motes.

  Lisa continued: “Maybe story is not true, maybe it is. I think about that later.” She shrugged. “But this story, it tells you life is good, life is sacred, then it is not a bad story, no? Because a good story, it gives you the heart to do the right thing when the wrong thing seems wise and brave. So?”

  I shook my head. There was no point in trying to explain things to a woman, even a woman as Amazonian as Lisa. I said, “There are things more sacred than one’s own life. Ask any soldier.”

  “It is an insult to all that lives, you know.”

  I said, “What is?”

  “To kill yourself. You are saying to the bird: Sing no more to me. You are saying to the sun: Shine no more on me. You are saying to the tree: I need no shade of you, do not stand. No drink from the stream, no twinkle from the star, no smile from a human face, no bark from the dog who is loyal. To everything, you say: I hate you.”

  I rose to my feet. “But this is a dream. I am being shown what I am about to lose. The birds and suns and stars, everything we thought eternal, it is all gone.”

  She jabbed the cigarette toward me an in angry gesture. “Then what is worth fighting for, eh? You are alone in the universe. Everyone dead. Nothing is real. No one is watching. What is worth fighting for? What is worth dying for?”

  I squinted at her. “So tell me.”

  She sniffed. “Same as before. Same things as when you were alive. You remember you are a man, yes? You know what it means to be a man?”

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but the dream faded. Lisa evaporated like cigarette smoke. The warm African sun, the savage and beautiful golden plains; it all vanished.

  149. The Plain Of Silence

  It seemed to me I hovered in the void, above a vast, limitless, plain. Nothing on earth could be so large as that: the plain had no end. All was drenched in an unpleasant reddish light, as if from the coal of a dying fire. Above me was a black circle, vast as the sun, and from the edges of this disk were arms of fire. It looked perhaps like an eclipse, perhaps like the burning atmosphere of a dead sun.

  Directly below the dead sun was an impact crater, marring the flat perfection of the ruby plain. As I dropped my gaze, my point of view dropped. Swift as a falcon stooping, I was thrown down through miles of air into the crater.

  The crater was larger than the Earth. A planet the size of Jupiter, falling, could have made such a place. The debris thrown up from the crater was taller than the mountains to each side. The Himalayas, Mt. Everest itself, would have been less than a foothill, compared to these terrible slopes. The peaks were hundreds of miles high.

  So deep was the crater, that, even at my speed, many minutes passed before the floor came into view: a land larger than Texas, made all of cracks and canyons, pock-marks from lesser craters, long-cold lava-flows, dead volcanoes, hills of ash and soot. It was a sterile world of lifelessness. No drop of water, no blade of grass, no midge, no mite, no smallest thing was here.

  Except, suddenly, in the middle of the crater floor, rising atop a lonely peak, was a house of greenish jade. It was a strange and massive house, built of cyclopean blocks, like the Great Wall of China, or the circle at Stonehenge. The house was circular in form, and had three stories, with walls of shining green brick and barred windows built between the massive cyclopean columns. But the oddest architectural feature was the little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames, that rose from each wall. The rooftops had curved and crooked eaves, giving it a look something like that of a Viking longhouse, or a Chinese pagoda.

  I looked up, and saw something suggestive in the
black sun hanging directly overhead. If there had been a light burning under the silent house, and a vast ceiling above it, it would have cast a shadow shaped something like the disk overhead, and all the flame-shaped pinnacles and eaves would have cast the flaming corona.

  The doors of the house were barred and locked, and every window as well.

  Kitimil was sitting on the doorstep of the house. The front door was a low arch, and a heavy roof, held up by thick posts, formed the porch, and continued upward to form the second floor, that overhung the first. The whole porch was countersunk into the façade of the house, so that to enter the main doors, one had to pass through a low-roofed tunnel.

  It was cold, bitterly cold here, and my lungs heaved but drew no breath. Almost without thinking, I rotated into being around me the arms and armor I remember from my life as Ydmos. The Living Steel clasped my chest; the gray cloak emitted heat; I took up the cup from my pouch and held it over my mouth and nose, and the substance of the metal in the cup somehow turned into fresh air.

  In my other hand, the Diskos, that terrible weapon. The disk-shaped blade was motionless, but, beneath my gauntlet, the haft of the weapon tingled and throbbed. There was something achingly familiar about it; a sense of ferocious loyalty. Pepper? Could a futuristic weapon be haunted by the ghost of a long-dead hound? The idea was silly, and yet….

  Kitimil was seated as I have seen Tibetans sit, with his heels on the ground and his rump resting on his ankles. He was dressed in his wolf-skins. In one paw was his bone truncheon; in his other, was a fist-sized statuette of a big-bosomed and pregnant woman, very crudely carved. Kitimil was rubbing the big belly of the mother-stone, and crooning to himself.

  I stepped toward him. “Where is this place?”

  He looked up. “This–” He gestured toward the outer gloom of blood-colored light. “This is the scaffolding of the new universe.”