New Wave Fabulists

by Bradford Morrow

  We went around another bend and there was a faint flickering light. Then a steep incline, perhaps fifty yards, and we entered the large chamber from which the light was coming. It was a window to the sky. But it wasn’t obviously sky—it was a bluish gray vista, on which concentric circular lines of light were superimposed, flickering.

  “The circles are stars,” Raven said. “Months are going by every second. This window faces what would be north, in Alaska, so we see the circumpolar stars rotating around the pole. But they’re going so fast they look like streaks.” He hopped up a pile of rocks that formed a natural staircase, and I followed with ease.

  Below us spread the broad savannah and the thick jungle, separated by the river. The jungle seemed to vibrate, as trees died and were replaced. The river itself undulated, coiling like a slow serpent.

  “It must take centuries for a river to change its course like that,” I said. Raven nodded like a human, staring. Over the space of a few seconds, the savannah was transformed into pastureland. Huts of wood and stone—pieces of the Dark Man?—appeared and disappeared.

  Parts of the jungle were cleared and a bridge snapped into place over the river. A town appeared and became a city, with regular streets and tall buildings on both sides of the river. Two more bridges appeared. The city spread out to the horizon, and it seemed almost to be dancing, as new buildings replaced old ones in ripples of progress.

  A throbbing curve of fire on the horizon. “That’s a spaceport,” Raven said, “where they leave for other stars. They won’t get to Earth; it’s too far away. And they don’t have much time.”

  As he said that, there was a lurch, and the city was suddenly leveled, a static jumble of ruins. The river started to move again, and widened into a lake.

  In less than a minute, the jungle reclaimed the ruins on the other side of the water.

  “Look at the stars,” the raven said.

  “I don’t see anything different.”

  “Keep looking. Use that hill on the horizon as a reference.”

  I looked at the hill for a minute and saw that the circles of stars were slowly crawling to my right.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The Dark Man is turning around to face the sun. The land nearby is moving with him.”

  “Is that what happened to the city—was it an earthquake when the Dark Man started to move?”

  “No. They did that to themselves. Happens.”

  “People appeared and disappeared just like that?”

  “It was actually quite a long time, to them. And they weren’t people as such—as I said, mammals are just food here. They were lizards similar to the ones in the jungle—much like you were, but with longer arms and useful hands.”

  I remembered how it felt. “Just as vicious, though.”

  “Something they had in common with humans.”

  I looked out over the expanse, now apparently an inland sea. There was no sign of their civilization.

  “The Dark Man has seen this happen before, and it may happen again. He’s turning around to watch the sun because it changes on a time scale that’s meaningful to him. He’ll watch it die, over billions of years.”

  “Does this always happen?”

  “Stars dying? Of course.”

  “No—I mean the lizards. Does civilization always bring ruin?”

  “Not always. Often.”

  He hopped down the steps to lead me back down the corridor. “It’s all timing. Once a species learns how to exchange ideas, a process is set in motion that might ultimately result in permanent peace and harmony. But it’s not inevitable.”

  “As in our case. Humans.”

  “Timing, as I say. In one way of looking at it, humans discovered fire a little too early, fire and metals. From there on, it’s only a matter of time before a species learns to use the forces that make stars burn. If they haven’t grown past the need to wage war by then, their prospects aren’t good.”

  I stepped carefully down the wet rocks, thinking of how I had saved my son from a senseless war, only to have him killed by a senseless man. “So you say that humanity is going to go the way of these lizards.”

  “You’re asking me to predict the future, which is meaningless. There are many futures.” He started down the corridor. “Come on. More places to see.”

  On the last step, I twisted my ankle and fell. He hopped back when he heard me cry out, changing into old Gordon, who gave me a hand.

  We hobbled along. “It’s only a couple of hundred yards to my ship. The room.”

  “It seems to go anywhere you want,” I said through clenched teeth. “Why not just whistle for it?”

  “It can’t come in here. Time is funny in here, as you may have noticed.”

  We came out of the cave into a pelting rain. He carried me the few steps to the yellow light. Once inside, my ankle immediately stopped hurting. The place, or thing, smelled like cinnamon again.

  “You should open up a clinic,” I said. He’d changed back into a raven. “You’d be the richest bird on Earth.”

  “I already am, when I’m on Earth.”

  “You travel like this, most of the time?”

  “Time, space.” He flexed his wings in an unmistakable shrug. “I do keep moving, observing. But in a way, I’m always in Sitka. Gordon doesn’t disappear for months at a time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Soon.” We both dissolved into the now-familiar transition state.

  A moment later, we were back in the yellow room. “Did something go wrong?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re never far from this place.”

  The door opened and I stepped toward it. “Don’t go outside. Just look. I think if we went outside we couldn’t get back in.”

  “Where are we?” It looked like a quiet woodland.

  “There isn’t any ‘where’ or ‘when’ here. Everybody sees something different. Tell me what you think it is.”

  I stepped cautiously to the door. There was a disturbing noise.

  It was a quiet woodland otherwise. Birds twittering. The smell of green growing things. Buds flowering. A pear tree with a single large fruit. A snake the size of a python draped among its limbs.

  “The Garden of Eden?” I said. “This can’t be real.”

  “Whatever it is or is not, it’s real. Do you see the pain yet?”

  The room moved over a thick stand of bushes, toward the noise. “Stay inside,” Raven repeated.

  In a small clearing, a pregnant woman lay on her back. She was covered with streaks of blood, hair matted with it. She was grunting and whimpering hoarsely with exhaustion and pain. God, had I ever been there. I took an instinctive step forward.

  Gordon suddenly appeared, blocking the door. “Stay. I mean it. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “All right,” I said. He turned around and looked out the door.

  The woman—I couldn’t think of her as “Eve”—was very close to giving birth. Her womb was dilating and I could see the top of the head, hair black as her own. Blood oozed around the crowning head. Her body writhed and she screamed, keening. “Steady,” Gordon said, a hand on my shoulder.

  “I’ve seen this before,” I said. “I’ve done it.”

  “Not like this, I think.”

  Her womb opened impossibly wide and for a moment the screaming stopped—then in a spray of blood the head came out. It was an adult’s head.

  Her own head? Now it started screaming, even louder. With a start, I saw that the mother’s head and neck had disappeared. Her womb split horribly sideways, and a bloody shoulder worked its way out. She was giving birth to herself, turning inside-out.

  The screams stopped only long enough for her to take deep ragged breaths. The other shoulder worked through, distorting the mother’s torso into something made of human parts but not recognizably human.

  Both breasts slid out at once—and it became terrifyingly clear that the self she was giving birth to was also
pregnant. I didn’t know the word then, but she was everting herself. The body split and after the abdomen worked its way through, the rest was swift: the new womb and then her limbs and feet. All streaked with bright fresh blood.

  The newborn mother began to whimper and clutched at the bloodied grass.

  “Oh my God. She’s starting over.”

  “You see a woman.” He was Raven again.

  “You don’t?”

  “I almost did, as Gordon. Now what I see is the Orion Nebula: the dying and birthing of stars. It goes on all the time, of course.”

  “But this pain.”

  “You think the universe feels nothing, giving birth and dying? Any pain you’ve ever felt was only an echo of that.”

  I watched with horrified fascination as the process started over. “That’s only metaphor,” I said. “The universe doesn’t have flesh and ganglia and a brain to interpret their distress signals.”

  “Why do you think you have them? One of your own said, ‘Pain is nature’s way of telling us we’re alive.’ That’s close to literal truth.”

  I was obstinate. “Pain draws our attention to something that’s wrong with the body.”

  “What did I just say? Your body was perfectly happy when it was a scattered bunch of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon atoms. Life is what’s wrong with it.”

  “Now that’s a wonderful argument against suicide. When I die, the universe will be a smidgeon happier.”

  “This is not an argument. I’m just showing you around. What you do when we return to Sitka … will be what you do.”

  “Including … take my life?”

  “Life was yours to give and it’s yours to take. But I don’t think you will kill yourself now. Let’s go to one more place; then we’ll start back.” I shut my eyes hard and endured the whirling dislocation. It went longer than ever before, and I clenched my jaws so hard against being sick that I could hear my teeth grinding. Finally it was over.

  “This is not a world,” he said as I opened my eyes, “in the sense of being a planet. It’s not even really a place, as your Garden of Eden was not an actual woodland.” The door opened. “But I think we’ll both see the same thing this time.”

  I stepped to the opening and took hold of the edge of the door. We were evidently floating over a landscape, drifting a few hundred yards off the ground. Dramatic mountains and cliffs, but not menacing like the first planet. Everything was subtle shades of warm gray, soft and monochromatic.

  There was no horizon. The landscape stretched out forever, becoming vague with distance.

  “Let’s go on down,” Raven said.

  As we floated closer to the ground, what had appeared to be a kind of granular texture became thousands of individuals, perhaps millions.

  Some few were human beings, but the overwhelming majority were otherworldly creatures. Gargoyles and sprites. Demons and floating jellyfish, an articulated metal spider and a close formation of thousands of blue bees arranged in a perfect cube. Two dinosaurs like we had been and a cluster of six of the translucent angel creatures we saw on the first planet.

  “Only six?” I said.

  The raven bobbed his head. “The six who elected to die.”

  “Wait … everyone here is dead? This is the afterlife?”

  “They’re not completely dead. But they’re not really alive, in the sense of eating and breathing—if they were eating, a lot of them would eat each other; if they were breathing, they’d be breathing different atmospheres, usually poisonous to the others.”

  “Daniel! Is Daniel here?”

  “He might be someplace. I wouldn’t know where to find him, though. And you couldn’t talk to him or touch him. I really don’t understand this place, the where and how of it. The ‘why’ seems to be that it’s a holding area of some kind.”

  “Of souls,” I said. “After they die.”

  “They look like bodies to me.”

  “Waiting for something?”

  “I don’t know. If it’s something like your Catholics’ Purgatory, then I wonder where Heaven is. I’ve never come across it.”

  “Maybe your room, your ship, can’t get there. Maybe you do have to die and spend some time here, first.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Almost as good, anyhow.” There didn’t seem to be much order in the crowd. I tried to pick out the humans, and the nearly human, and there did seem to be a lot of the very old and the very young, as you would expect of the dead. Nobody really looked dead, though. No wounds or signs of disease. But nobody was moving. It was like a photograph in three dimensions. While I was looking, two new ones appeared, one like a human woman but with spadelike appendages instead of hands, the other a kind of long-haired monkey with an extra pair of legs.

  “Does everybody come here, good or bad?”

  “Impossible to say. There appears to be room for about everybody.” We started to rise at an accelerating rate. The individuals merged back into the granular texture and then into a smooth gray; mountains shrank to pebbles and disappeared. The horizon didn’t change, though.

  “What happens if you fly in one direction for a long time?”

  “It doesn’t seem to change. You never come to an edge. But ‘a long time’ doesn’t mean much here. The illusion of time belongs to worlds like yours. Here, there’s only will and chance.”

  “What do you mean by that? Time an illusion?”

  “When you studied mathematics, you used the idea of infinity.”

  “Of course. You couldn’t do calculus without it.”

  “And you believe the universe is infinite.” I nodded. “So stars and planets and nebulae go on forever.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I have news for you: they don’t. Within your lifetime, scientists will suspect that there’s an edge to it. Within another lifetime, they’ll prove there is.”

  “That’s curious. So what’s beyond it?”

  “Another universe. And another and another. Every instant, from the universe’s birth to its death, exists side by side, in a way. Think of it as an Edison cinematograph, writ very large: one frozen moment, then the next, and so on.

  “Furthermore, every possible universe exists as well. Many where the Civil War didn’t happen or was won by the South. Many where you did kill yourself Thursday evening. Many where you had biscuits for breakfast, instead of toast. With everything else in the universe unchanged. There’s room for them all.

  “What you perceive as time is your translation from one possible moment to the next, because of something you did or something the universe did to you.”

  “Free will and predestination?” I said.

  “Decision and chance,” the raven said, “inextricably intertwined.”

  We had risen so high that a featureless gray plane faded off into mist. Above the mist, blackness, no stars.

  “But this place, this is beyond that?”

  “Yes. This is where people go when they stop moving from moment to moment.”

  “So maybe this is Heaven?”

  He just looked at me. “Close your eyes. We’re going back to the angels.”

  I didn’t close my eyes, at first—after all, while we were traveling, I didn’t seem to exist as an assemblage of body parts, so what did “closed eyes” mean? In a few seconds it became pretty obvious, if not describable. Like seasickness, but somehow larger, longer, with the threat that it could last forever. I did something like closing eyes and the room disappeared, and I only felt miserable. The smell of musk changed to lemon.

  Then it was cinnamon and we were there, on the Dantean planet. Through the open door, the seven angels braided together in the oven heat. “Let me speak to them first,” Raven said. He hopped over to the dark soft patch he called their brain. They were momentarily still, rigid, and then resumed a rhythmic twining. “Now you,” he said. “Shoes off.”

  The ground was like hot flour between my toes. But I remembered not to dig in when I stepped onto their coolness. At f
irst I didn’t hear or feel anything. Then there was something like a quiet song, a wordless hymn in my mind. I concentrated, but couldn’t make any sense of it. Then it was gone.

  “Won’t you use words?” I said. But they just curled and uncurled in silence.

  The raven was back in the yellow room. “I think they’re done. Come on.”

  I crossed the hot sand, looking back at them. “Did they tell you anything?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know. They like you.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off them, as I backed into the cube.

  “Then why didn’t they say anything?” It smelled of mint tea.

  “They don’t so much say things as do things.” The yellow wall appeared. “Close your eyes.”

  This time I obeyed. “Are we going back?”

  “Yes and no.” I squeezed my eyes shut. The dislocation seemed about as long as the first one.

  “You can look now.” The door was open on a scene of incredible desolation, stone buildings battered to rubble, a few steel skeletons standing. Everything blackened by fire.

  “Where is this?”

  “Times Square, New York City.” He had turned into Gordon, who blinked away tears. I had never seen him cry. “Your world, about a hundred years after you were born.”

  “Like … like the lizards’ world?”

  “Exactly. No human left alive.” He turned to me with a kind of smile. “I feel like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. This is what usually happens. Not always in the middle of the twentieth century. Sometimes it takes another hundred or even a thousand years.”

  “But it always happens.”

  “Not always.” He changed back into Raven. “You don’t want to go outside here. You would die. Close your eyes.”

  “Where are we going?”

  He didn’t reply, but I felt weight on my body, the compression of stays around my waist, and took one quick look. Instead of the strange skintight suit, I was wearing my warm-weather teaching clothes, the light gray Gibson Girl suit I’d mail-ordered from San Francisco.