Ian kissed his wife on the forehead. Then he stood up, strode past the stage, and turned the corner into the grotto.
He felt powerful. He felt rage. He had survived the City Solicitor’s attacks. He’d come back stronger. He had found what he’d been missing. And it was time to settle a score.
The City Solicitor saw him coming. He was standing in the grotto having an animated discussion with Isaac. Tonto and Rhinnick were decidedly less animated, the two of them having been encased in their own pair of amber cocoons.
The City Solicitor stared at Ian.
“There you are,” he said, not exactly smiling, but raising one corner of his mouth about half an inch. He eyeballed Ian from a distance of twenty paces. Ian was familiar with the procedure. You can’t be an RCO for half your life without enduring a lot of eyeballs. Just try telling a restaurateur that his patio violates zoning bylaws by encroaching a centimetre onto someone else’s land. Then explain that it will have to be torn down. You get eyeballed. You either get used to this, or retire.
Ian hadn’t retired. He’d left the job by train, so to speak. So he accepted the City Solicitor’s present eyeballing without, as it were, batting an eye.
The procedure continued unabated while Ian took a handful of strides toward the Solicitor, who gave every indication of taking an unhealthy interest in something particular about Ian. He was assessing him. Scrutinizing him. Looking for signs of . . . something.
Whatever it was, he didn’t find it. Ian could tell by his expression. He stared at Ian for several seconds, cheesed the eyeballing routine, and switched to a warm, genial smile.
Another round of realization dawned on Ian.
He doesn’t know.
He’s just shot me with that pistol and watched me fall back into the Styx, into the thick of the neural flows.
He thinks I’m mindwiped.
“I imagine you’re feeling a bit unsettled,” said the City Solicitor, kindly. “Not to worry. This is common among the newly manifested. We’ll help you through the period of adjustment. Allow me to introduce my assistant. This is Isaac. Isaac Newton. He’ll be mentoring you, and serving as your guide. I’m sure you’ll make a fine addition to our team.”
Ian glared at the City Solicitor through the sort of anger-and-hate-distorted lens you might expect. This was the man who’d made a hell of Ian’s life, the man who’d done his best to keep him from Penny. This was the man who had tried to strip Ian of every meaningful thing he had, everything that made him Ian.
And a few short minutes ago he had shot Ian between the eyebrows, which even non-Ian-supporters might have felt was a bit offside.
“What shall we call you?” said the City Solicitor, looking him up and down. “I think you look like a Toby.”
Ian took one final step, inhaled deeply, and tapped into a previously undiscovered vein of rage. It was the motherlode. He glared at the City Solicitor and shouted.
“My name is Ian Brown!”
The City Solicitor’s eyes widened. Ian raised his hand toward the City Solicitor, reaching out to him with every scrap of his fury-bolstered will. He would bend Detroit to his will and bring at least a little piece of it crashing down on the City Solicitor. He knitted his brow and winced with the effort of concentration. He opened his hand, and . . .
Something spectacular utterly failed to happen. This was a great relief to the special effects department, but something of a disappointment for Ian.
Ian strained.
The more Ian strained, the more Ian didn’t unleash a barrage of cosmic power.
The City Solicitor raised an eyebrow and laughed.
“You’ve no idea what you’re doing,” he said. “You’ve had it all explained to you, served to you on the proverbial silver platter, and still you don’t understand. You’re too committed to the rules, and haven’t the strength to step outside them. You’ve neither the knowledge nor the will. Let me instruct you.”
The City Solicitor raised a hand, extending a finger that really ought to have ended in a talon. The finger actually ended in a perfectly manicured nail, but its general talonishness was most definitely implied.
The air in the grotto throbbed with power.
Pain happened.
Ian’s pain was indescribable, but if your life depended on describing it, you might say that it started with his entire body feeling like a long, slow paper cut between your two front teeth, followed by a thorough barbed-wire flossing of the gastro-intestinal tract. And then the pain put its nose to the grindstone and really got down to business.
Ian fell to the ground and screamed.
The cavern pulsed. The air in the grotto throbbed with power again.
The pain exploded through Ian’s body. He was on fire. He was drowned in acid. He was bathed in the pain of a thousand thousand tortured prisoners of war, pushed to the point of losing consciousness, and then pulled back into unrelenting pain by a casual flick of the City Solicitor’s outstretched hand.
Ian’s screaming filled the cavern. He screamed until he lacked the voice to continue screaming, until madness came to claim him, until all he could do was lie on the ground and whimper.
And then . . . the whimpering stopped. Not because Ian had stopped whimpering, but because his cries were swallowed by the sudden, inexplicable expansion of a pulse of anti-sound, a thick field of tangible, chest-compressing silence that filled the grotto and shook the cavern.
The world appeared to hold its breath.
Then it exhaled. The silence was shattered by a single, deafening, eardrum-shattering Word. The Word was this:
STAY
The cavern quaked. The Word entered the world without a hint of its cause, barging into minds, vibrating bones, exploding in ears, and resonating in the grotto’s thick stone walls.
Ian’s eyes widened. The City Solicitor’s eyes narrowed, thus preserving the average eye width in the cavern. The City Solicitor stepped toward Ian’s crumpled body and, because he believed in being thorough, kicked Ian smartly in the ribs.
The universe pulsed. The voice thundered again.
AWAY
The Richter scale abandoned ship. The Word echoed backward and forward through time. The Word was there in the beginning. It would be there at the end. In the beginning was the Word — and in the present it wrapped itself around the City Solicitor’s mind, singeing synapses and strangling neural connections.
The City Solicitor fell to his knees and gripped his head with both hands. Ian’s pain abated, replaced by the new, more bearable pain brought by the Word as it expanded to fill his mind.
The City Solicitor focused his will, marshalled his strength, and reached toward Ian. He gripped his opponent by the throat and squeezed with every ounce of strength.
FROM
The voice thundered throughout creation. The cavern convulsed, ending Rhinnick’s confusion about stalactites and stalagmites by reducing them all to a heap of rubble. The stage at the river’s edge heaved and crashed into the Styx. The City Solicitor tightened his grip. He focused every scrap of will on the task of ending Ian Brown.
The cavern trembled, throbbing with ear-popping, blood-thickening pressure. Once again, the voice of Infinity erupted out of the void, sweeping across the length and breadth of all creation. What the Voice said was this:
My husband.
The cavern shook to its foundations. Boulders exploded. Columns collapsed. The Styx surged and jumped its banks, roaring its way into the topsy-turvy topography of the grotto. Nearby parishioners exploded in their crystalline cocoons, their bodies shattering into countless tiny fragments. This seemed unfair to the frozen faithful, but at least they’d eventually pull themselves together, so to speak.
And then the anomaly — Penelope — rose to her feet and strode past the collapsed stage, through the grotto’s crumbling rock, and toward her husband. She looked like an especially wr
athful entry from the book of Revelation. Clouds of steam rose from her body as she stepped toward her husband, her glare fixed steadily on the City Solicitor.
“Get away from him!” she thundered.
Every sphincter in a twenty-mile radius clenched as they’d never clenched before.
It was at this point that both the City Solicitor and Isaac found themselves flying backward, away from Ian, registering twin looks of dumb surprise. Isaac flew backward into a column, ending his flight with an Isaac-crunching thud. He slid silently to the floor.
The City Solicitor, for his part, was also hurled toward the darkness, apparently destined for a distant cavern wall. But then . . .
The world rearranged itself so that the City Solicitor was not flying toward the darkness, but standing beside Penelope — the barrel of Socrates’ gun pressed directly into her temple.
“I was wondering how you’d arrive,” he said, smiling. “It’s been a pleasure.”
He pulled the trigger.
Click.
“Damn.”
The cavern spun. The earth trembled. Had there been a camerawoman present, she’d have started with a tight shot of the City Solicitor standing directly beside Penelope, and then run around the pair in a circle to give the audience a dizzying sense of pandemonium. Then she’d backpedal away, camera still trained on the action, yielding a widening shot of the two combatants. Finally, with the addition of some costly post-production effects, she’d have ended with a medium shot of Penny and the City Solicitor, staring hatefully at each other, separated by ten paces.
The world vibrated. As far as physicists are concerned, this always happens. But at this particular time you could notice the vibrations without years of specialist training and expensive lab equipment. It was the sort of vibration you get when the empty dumpster in which you’re hiding suddenly drops about three stories and lands on steel, yielding the same overall feeling that a tuning fork might get when it’s been struck. Everyone in the grotto seemed to blur around the edges.
Neither Penny nor the City Solicitor moved. This wasn’t a physical contest — at least not in the traditional sense, unless your traditions hold that physical contests include world-bending psychic battles in which time, space, matter, and physical laws are warped and counter-warped by the principal combatants.
Both combatants appeared to buckle under the strain. The City Solicitor’s eyes bulged. Penelope’s ears bled. The world around them started to crumble.
“You would do this?” shouted the City Solicitor, over the sound of crumbling rock, “you would risk collapsing Detroit, tearing holes into this reality, all for someone so — so insignificant? Someone you’ve known for less than the length of a mortal life, less than the merest fragment of the eternity you can see expanding before you?”
Penelope corrugated her brow.
“Of course I would,” she said.
The laws of physics went on vacation. Time slowed, space stretched, the Higgs field did something even more surprising and complicated than whatever it usually does. Motes of light seared their way into the space that filled the cavern, boring holes into the foreground and revealing the cornea-melting glare of a world beyond. In a thousand pocket dimensions a thousand thousand worlds were born, evolved in the space of a nanosecond, and gave rise to civilizations that went to war and faced each other under banners showing allegiance to Penny or the City Solicitor.
Penelope suddenly seemed to grow about two feet. Or possibly fifteen miles. It was difficult to judge, what with the topsy-turvy state of what presently passed itself off as the space-time continuum.
The City Solicitor clenched his teeth. Sweat beaded upon his brow. And then he did something unexpected.
He started to shrink.
Not in a wicked witch, “I’m melting” sort of way, but as though he’d started sliding into the background. He was gradually disappearing into the far-off, distant reaches of a landscape that was increasingly Penelope-shaped.
As in shaped by Penelope.
Penelope stretched out her hand, a cluster of stars held in her palm. The City Solicitor fell to a knee, disappearing even further into the distance.
And this was how the two were frozen when someone picked this awkward moment to press pause.
Even the harshest art critic would have admitted that the frozen, cosmic battle made an eye-catching tableau. You’d have loved it. The freeze-frame image came complete with disappearing cavern walls, rifts that led to distant dimensions, singularities popping in and out of existence, and the unique sort of mind-bending imagery that Picasso and Jackson Pollock might have painted if given absolute free rein, a grotto-sized canvas, and about fourteen pints of tequila. It was the sort of picture you might find in a basement occupied by a teenaged boy, hanging next to posters of dragons, robots, busty warrior women, and other things you fight with twenty-sided dice.
“Wow,” said Ian, surprised to find himself to be the only mobile element in the picture. He took a few steps inside the panorama and poked his finger into a couple of pocket dimensions. They felt tingly.
“Wow,” said Ian, again.
“You’re telling me,” said a voice. “That’s got to be about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen more than most.”
Ian risked a bit of whiplash, whirling around to face the speaker.
One of the crystalline cocoons had split in two. It had released a remarkably non-descript acolyte who was wearing a plain brown robe.
It was a robe he’d borrowed from Ham, not that he couldn’t have whipped a new one up for himself. His features shifted, and he became a tall, brown-skinned man, apparently ageless, smiling contentedly and looking around the frozen scene with interest. He brushed a crumb of amber from his shoulder.
Ian gasped. But when he gasped, he gasped a word. The word was “Abe.”
He’d never seen him before, but he recognized him instantly. It was a face that anyone, anywhere would have recognized straight away.
“Heya, Ian,” said the most powerful man in the universe. “Sorry for all the trouble.”
“You . . . you did this?” said Ian.
“Just the freezing bit,” said Abe. “All of the lights and booms and rifts and special effects were them,” he added, up-nodding toward the frozen combatants. “Mostly her, really.”
“Is she all right?” asked Ian, walking googly-eyed around the frozen scene and staring up at the woman who, despite her galaxy-striding scale, he still saw as the girl he’d married.
“Pfft,” said Abe, unhelpfully. “Nothing could harm her here. Not even me. I guess you could say we’re equals now, if you don’t mind rounding-up to the nearest Abe.”
Ian made a puzzled expression. He was good at that, what with all of the practice he’d had in recent memory. He wasn’t sure what to say. He had questions. But none of his questions seemed, well . . . real. Every one of them felt as though it had been drawn up in a poorly written book on “Ten Things To Ask When You Meet Your Maker,” a mind-numbing checklist of “How did X happen,” “Why didn’t Y go how I’d planned,” and “What’s the true meaning of Z.” And then there was Penny, floating stock-still overhead — literally larger than life — frozen in an abstract, cosmic landscape. Stars and galaxies spiralled around her. The shrinking form of the City Solicitor glowered at her across millennia. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Ian was wired to handle.
Abe appeared to understand. He looked at Ian kindly, and answered the most important question.
“Don’t worry about her,” said Abe. “She’ll be fine. Better than fine. You’re both going to get your happy ending, if it’s the last thing I do.” He seemed to smile at a private joke. “But first, I think that you and I should have a chat.”
“How did she get here?” asked Ian, cutting right to the chase.
Abe smiled benevolently, stared up at Penny’s f
rozen form, and poked her firmly on the leg. He made the little, impressed half-frown that people make right after they’ve kicked a Ferrari’s tires. “She’s been with you all this time,” he said. “Since you first popped into the river. On the day that Tonto found you.”
“But how?” said Ian, thoroughly baffled.
“Hard to say,” said Abe, making a sort of facial shrug. “I’m foggy on that one, too. No need to look at me like that,” he added, noticing Ian’s doubtful expression. “There’s plenty that I don’t know. And plenty of things that I can’t do. Seeing into the beforelife is one of them. I also can’t repair a mind that has been wiped — not unless I’m there when it happens. No one is all-powerful, here. Not even me. Not anymore. Not since I was alone. Too many other minds to deal with.”
Not since I was alone, he had said. Ian thought about that for a while. Years later, he still had nightmares about it. Dying, and waking up alone in a shapeless, empty world that changed itself based on whatever you expected. Imagine what that must have been like — the terrors that would have been spawned by a freshly killed mind waking up alone and afraid in a barren world. What would that do to a person? Abe had managed to get through it in reasonably good humour. Imagine the will that would have taken.
Ian shuddered.
“I think I have a rough idea about what happened, though,” said Abe. “Your wife has given us clues. Like the fact that you manifested with your memories intact, and that she didn’t appear to manifest at all, until the City Solicitor wiped you.”
Ian made a face that indicated that he would need more clues.
“Let me explain,” said Abe, patiently. “The first thing that you need to understand,” he continued, “is that the CS was right.”
“Who?” said Ian.
“The City Solicitor. He was right about how things work. All that stuff about expectations — he was spot-on. You probably ought to have paid more attention in the Sharing Room,” said Abe.
Beforelife Page 48