They laid him out on the floor, leaving him there with Carlson guarding the door and Cherise standing beside his stretcher. Ben wasn’t there but a moment before the changes hit.
He is a child again, with his father.
“No, Ben! That’s not how you connect a garden hose. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. Protect the male!”
His male member, machine-tooled tool cut to precise tolerances, unscrews and falls off while he is washing it, bloodless dismemberment connecting him to absence—
He is a child again, with his mother.
“You like it when I touch you there, don’t you, Benny? I like it when you touch me and rub me here—”
“Sister!” shrieks his aunt, bursting into the room. “What are you doing with that boy?”
Red ants, black ants, shaken up together in matchboxes so they fight to the death, war in a box—
The gray-pink tentacles around his forehead abruptly began to extrude, blind burning snakes writhing over his head and down his body, spinning a chrysalis of fire that quickly hardens to a cocoon of white-hot ashes, locking the house of his body, protecting him against the world.
“Ben! Ben! What’s happening to you?” Cherise shouted, then screamed.
To Ben’s blind-sighted eyes she had become Sophia, goddess of wisdom smiling with both concern and unconcern, smiling from out of his dreams, from out of that irreproducible apparition that haunted his steps on the way to Ten Thousand Beauties. Though he could not see, he knew what was happening. He did not possess vision; vision possessed him. Cherise ran toward Carlson to get help, but Sophia did not. Ben’s body, covered in fire and ash, burned red-hot through the steel floor, into the ground beneath.
In a hole the shape of his cocooned self he sank into the earth, past soil disturbed and roots broken in the building of the place. Past water lines exploding into steam, and power cables sparking. Past bands of stone. The earth vitrified and closed over him as he sank.
He sensed the presence of Sophia, or someone like her, descending with him.
As he came to rest deep underground, his cocoon expanded to become a chamber. In the coppery light, Ben saw—could not help seeing—the feminine presence that had traveled with him. Stepping through the wall of the chamber, she revealed herself to him, in all the bright glory of her shining nakedness. Only in awe, and not physically, could he hide his face from that divine light, losing his separateness, his solitariness, in that overpowering brightness.
In the same instant he was violently dismembered by unseen forces, taken to pieces as Jaron—in Manchu shamansmith form—bent over him. Ben’s arms, legs, and head were severed from his torso, then the skin, fat, and muscle were carefully stripped from his bones, the viscera removed from his body cavities. He felt a distant pain, like the twinge from a scar over a deep wound recently healed.
“Welcome to your cocoon in Binah,” Jaron said. “The palace and womb of Understanding. The beyond that is within you. Here, let me give you something to hang your mind on, so you get a little insight into what’s going on.”
Ben broke down in a most protean fashion—not just in himself but back through the eons, shape-shifting back through the trunk toward the roots of the tree of life, through more primitive primates, through simpler simians, through earlier mammals, through birds and reptiles, through amphibians and fish and insects, through cephalopods and gastropods, through ammonites and trilobites, back and down to the first true cells of shape-changing life, to photon-devouring algae, to chemical-gobbling bacteria.
“I know what you’re wondering—and I really do—” Jaron said, angel and shaman and smith and cyborg, working him over with the help of innumerable binotech micromachines—“especially since I wondered the same things. But this is the only way you can really be reconstituted. All your intimate dismemberments remembered, then forgotten. Metamorphosed. Overwritten by new possibilities.
“And what of your Sophia? Visions of her break into your dreams, but she is real. In Bruno’s reworking of the Kabbalah, she’s Diana, the chaste moon maid, and you’re Actaeon, voyeur turned stag. The hounds that are rending your animal form are your own binotech.”
Reduced to a bubbling pool, a stockpot aswarm with biomechanical life, Ben couldn’t understand how his liquified self could still have a mind to think, ears to hear, or eyes to see.
“If you like,” Kwok continued, “in this incarnation she becomes a very powerful intrusive-countermeasures program, a machine intelligence developed by the SCIs to defend their firewall by subverting any attacking program. She’s the ice maiden who helped kill me, in some ways.”
Yet Ben did still think and feel, in a way far more out-of-body than even his earlier experience in the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.
“But it’s not quite that simple. In Bruno’s scheme of things, you are also Hokhmah as humanly attainable wisdom, the Shadow of the Shadow. Diana is Binah, too, the understanding of the reflected Divine—the Shadow of the Idea. We prepare you for ascent toward Amphitrite, toward Keter, toward the Idea itself. The Infinite in itself is unbearable and incomprehensible, so this is all necessarily symbolic, manifesting by concealing, and concealing by manifestation.”
Disembodied, Ben watched as Jaron removed his rough form from the swarming pool and smithed a body electric for him, weaving photonic flesh upon electronic bone.
“We’re helping you become whatever it is you are to become. We destroy you only to re-create you. Whether you will do the same to all the universe is up to you.”
When he was finished, Jaron pulled Ben’s mind down from where he’d hung it and dropped it into the waiting form. Pleased, Jaron smiled and stepped out through the wall of the cavernous cocoon. In the same instant the cocoon shrank, to wrap only Ben’s body again.
“Come on, Ben,” Jaron called, as if from another room. “You’re morphed. Time to break out and swim.”
Ben grasped the cocoon, which tore at his touch. He squirmed out and moved upward, toward where Jaron flashed what looked like a metal or crystal mirror at him.
Ben drifted free now—freed not from the furniture of sleep, but from the gravitational bed of space-time itself. He glanced back once at the place he’d left behind. His body was there, but only as a flash-flattened shadow. The cocoon stood like an abandoned house—only this house was a husk, anchored with silken threads, a house whose walls were everything Ben once thought he knew, everything he had ever experienced.
All of that information was inside him now, immediate to him, in a new way that no longer required the old husks of memory. He stared at the thing he had become, and thought to his twin without speaking.
—Jaron, what is this?
—Your “subtle body.” Your dreambody. Your quantum-teleported self. You caught a glimpse of it when you first entered this stage.
—But how?
—Forced exaptation. “Forced” the way a gardener causes a spring bulb to bloom in winter, inside a greenhouse. Exaptation in the sense of evolutionary change that actualizes a potential already long present. In our case, the latent ability to move among the manifold realms of the plenum.
—Then Tetragrammaton’s goal has been achieved?
—Yes and no. We’ve traveled a long way down the posthuman road, it’s true. Unfortunately for Tetragrammaton and their plans, we are also largely postphysical. We can travel anywhere in the present, but only in this rather ethereal body-electric form. Travel to other universes is even more ghostly. We cannot interact physically with the matter or energy that exists in those universes. There, we are virtualities. Images in the mirror, for which there is no substance.
—I don’t understand.
—You’ve already experienced it. The vision of serial universes, a block or loaf sliced into snapshots, space-time frames. Like when you step into the space between two mirrors standing face to face and your mirror-framed image repeats and repeats to a vanishing point at infinity. Think back. You sensed the presence of those nonpresent realities, but you could
n’t interact with them. Those realities that have already transpired are the ones we once called “the past.” Here, let me show you. We’ll visit some of them.
Jaron placed his hand on and somehow into Ben’s mind. Instantly Ben’s quantum-teleported consciousness was looking out through Kwok’s eyes, at the moment Jaron picked up the Forrest documents.
Through that moment Ben traveled into the mind of the old spy and pseudonymous science fiction writer himself, Felix C. Forrest, a man in suit and fedora and eye patch—looking like a self-parody but for the fact that he was utterly real, and aware of both the parody and the reality.
“If you write realistically of things that didn’t happen exactly the way you’ve described them, you’re considered either a historian or a ‘literary’ writer,” Felix Forrest says over a glass of wine, regaling a table of his friends in a posh restaurant. “If you write realistically of things that won’t happen exactly the way you’ve described them, you’re labeled either a prophet or a science fiction writer.”
A woman, not of their party yet somehow familiar, flips back her dark blond hair as she passes their table, smiling at the sound of their laughter.
Then Ben was back in Jaron’s head again as Jaron returned the Ginsburg algorithm work, in its new form, to its old hiding place in the Memorial Hall.
Moving backward, he was there when Jaron found and removed Ginsburg’s original papers from that selfsame hiding place.
Through that moment he flashed into the mind of Shimon Ginsburg himself, the bearded mathematician and itinerant literary scholar, rabbi estranged from his own faith, who had derived from Kabbalah the great and crucial complex of distributed algorithms.
“It is as Luria teaches and Kafka suggests,” Ginsburg tells his students. “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary. He will come only on the day after his arrival.”
The students nod. Outside the window of the classroom, a woman both familiar and unfamiliar, her dark blond hair partially covered by a babushka, glances in at him before passing on.
Finished, Jaron removed his hand, leaving Ben with many unanswered questions.
—But what of Ricci and Hao—and Giordano Bruno?
—Seek those three gentlemen yourself. Put yourself in proximity to what they touched.
—And the woman?
Laughter seemed to explode throughout the universe.
—Ah, yes. Always the woman. I know your questions, Ben, because they are mine, too. Who is she? How much does she know of all this? Is she part of a conspiracy, stalking us across time and space? Is she a simulacrum, generated by something inhuman? (Are you? Am I?) Is she a shadow cast forward by the searing light of the great and final catastrophe? Is she part of our fulfillment, or our destruction? Are we to fear her, or to love her? Are we just the one she’s looking for? Or is it all just a mistake?
I’ve asked the questions, Ben, but to reach the woman you’ll have to go further than I have. You will find the answer, now.
—Why?
—Because you can. Because she haunts you, even more than she haunts me. I vanish at infinity, but you don’t have to. I’m trapped in this stage, but you can go on to the next. You can break out even from this newer skin. You can step through the mirror to become substance, while I must remain only an image. You can strengthen these puny wings and spread them to their full extent. You can fly to all the universes and touch them with your own hands.
You can bring back what needs to be brought back. To restore mankind to humanity.
—And end its ‘insane plight’?
—Its plight and ours are the same—victims of our own success—yet not the same, Ben. Remember Daedalus. He built the labyrinth by which the Minotaur was concealed, but he also revealed the deciphering clue through which the Minotaur would be destroyed. Remember Oedipus. The detective is the murderer and the murderer is the detective.
—Who killed you, Jaron?
—If killing oneself is as close to murder as killing one’s identical twin is to suicide, why then you will have, Brother Ben, by the time this twisted loop stops its labyrinthine twisting. But of course, by the time the snake eats its tail, I will have wanted you to. And you will have wanted to as well. In order to save Reyna.
—Why? How?
By way of answer, Jaron put his hand into Ben’s head one more time. Ben didn’t know whose memory they shared this time, though, because it was one they had already shared in another time. Jaron was there bending down and weaving his fingers together, making a cup and bridge of his hands and a circle or loop of his arms.
“Here. Give me your foot and I’ll boost you up.”
As abruptly as it had appeared, the memory vanished.
—I don’t understand.
Jaron put the coppery mirror in front of Ben’s face, obscuring his own.
“Look into it and see yourself, Ben Cho,” Jaron said, “Also B. Enoch.”
But as Jaron spoke, Ben saw his own lips moving in the mirror.
And then he saw only the whole world.
THIRTEEN
DIAMOND-SILK COCOON
GUANGZHOU
DeSondra Adjoumani had managed to drag a barely conscious Lu out of the place of gunfire and explosion that had once been the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Adjoumani was as bloodied and battered as Lu herself, if for slightly different reasons.
Soon the detective stirred and, once she fully regained consciousness, she promised to return the favor by getting the FBI agent through the hair-trigger Chinese security that had surrounded the place after the blast.
“Got word from Beckwith,” Adjoumani said. “He’s got Ben Cho at the consulate compound.”
Lu nodded. Thinking ruefully that she should have been more serious about her martial arts and self-defense classes, she told Adjoumani about her humiliating encounter with the woman who had been accompanying Beckwith. Adjoumani seemed to be trying to wrap her mind around that as they headed for the helicopter they had arrived in, ages ago. It remained well outside the blast perimeter.
Though the copter was intact, extricating themselves from the blast site proved to be difficult, nonetheless. Lu, however, had been shoved around and beaten up enough for one day. Angry and frustrated, she flashed her police credentials at every underling who blocked her way. She pulled the two of them through to the helicopter, where recognition by the pilot got them past the last of the security.
Along the way, Lu assiduously avoided Wong. Since she was convinced he was already planning to replace her, she hoped to get airborne before she’d have to deal with the man.
As soon as they had boarded, she told the pilot to take off. Together, Lu and the pilot radioed their way through the blanket of air cover the security forces were putting up over the explosion site.
Only when they were through that hurdle did Lu also radio Wong and Ma—neither of whom were happy about her exit. She argued that, since she and Adjoumani were already on the way, they should designate her the representative Chinese investigator for the situation at the consulate. To her surprise the two men agreed, reluctantly—and largely, she sensed, based on the fact that Ben Cho was already on American turf and Lu, through Adjoumani, was their best shot at gaining access to that turf.
Still playing the game, Lu thought. And still playing for time.
As Adjoumani rang through to Beckwith and got clearance to land on the helipad atop the consulate, Lu watched the scene as it unfolded below them. Heavily armed US Marines were tactically positioned throughout the compound. Elements of various Chinese security forces—from the Guangzhou police to Guoanbu and Army units—surrounded the place. It looked as if they were flying into a war zone.
Tension was thick on the rooftop, as they exited the helicopter and made their way into the building under heavy guard. Even the unflappable Robert Beckwith seemed discombobulated as he met them on the first stairwell landing. He gave Lu a particularly long look, but Adjoumani signed to him that Lu had been cleared.
; “Where do you have Cho stashed away, sir?” Adjoumani asked as they made their way—double-time—downstairs.
“In one of the secure rooms in the subbasement,” Beckwith said. “Or at least that’s where he was.”
“What do you mean, was?”
“He’s pulled a Houdini on us, that’s what I mean.”
“Houdini?” Lu asked. He had lost her.
“Look,” Beckwith said, a grimace distorting his countenance from chin to hairline, “it’s easier to show you than to explain it. Just follow us, please.”
After an interminable descent down one flight of stairs after another, they came to a fluorescent-lit corridor along which military and civilian staff moved quickly, darting in and out of the room toward which, Lu gathered, she, Adjoumani, and their escort were headed.
The scene inside the room struck her as a surreal parody of the crime scenes she herself had worked. Soldiers and techs stood above a hole roughly shaped like a man. As they drew closer, it looked to her as if someone had chalked an outline of a corpse, and then the image had caught fire, generating such intense heat that it had melted its way into the earth.
The sound of a saw cutting through stone echoed up from deep inside the hole. Not far from the edge, looking on, stood two people in zip-tie handcuffs. One of them Lu recognized as Patsy Hon. She nodded gravely at the woman, but Hon was too busy observing what was going on in the hole to take any notice of her former boss.
“…sank just so far into the hole,” said a rather shocked-looking woman, over the noise of the saw, “and then it sealed over itself in that mound you see there.”
Lu was even more shocked at recognizing the speaker. It was the woman who had kicked her around, taken her down, and put her out. In a whisper Adjoumani identified the speaker as Cherise LeMoyne, Jaron Kwok’s widow. Jaron Kwok’s widow? Lu thought, amazed. What’s she doing here? And who the hell taught her to fight like that?
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