What’s he looking for? the youngest zardplebe wondered, looking at the dark flamingo of a man. How white his skin was, the color of bone left to bleach in the sun. And his eyes! They were as black as the starless night.
Then they were screaming at one another, the three bipeds. The zardplebe couldn’t make out the words, just the frenzy. Suddenly, the fat soldier, more agile than he looked, hurled himself at the man in black, knocked him into the water. The debonair one tried to intercede, to no avail. Finally some other soldiers, a half a dozen of them, pulled the men apart. The fat soldier’s shirt was ripped, his hat was gone, his balding head shining in the afternoon glare. The man in black had a cut above his eye, blood stark red as it ran down the nearly colorless cheek.
The soldier, who appeared to maintain dominance over the others of his stripe, kept on yelling, something about how he “wasn’t going to let what happened in the Valley happen here.” The youngest zardplebe followed the soldier’s gesticulating finger. Followed it to a face. A small face looking out the window of the silvery plane. The zardplebe strained, trying to see. There was something in that tiny face, something unsettling, an emotion he didn’t know.
Suddenly a forbidding dread filled the air. The zardplebe flicked out his tongue to taste the wind and turned cold. The chemosignal impulsed only death.
“Danger! Danger!” he hissed. Across the ruddy rocks, over the igneous outcrops, through every burrow and den that youngest zardplebe impulsed his warning.
But he was alone. His fellow zardplebes were gone. In the time he’d busied himself with the indecipherable affairs of these sapiens, all his counterparts had been summoned to the Black Spot. He was the only immature upon the Precious Pumice. “Danger. Danger!” The fullgrowns paid no attention. Why should they? They’d been Immersed, in them was a sense of Self and Community built over millions of generations, the product of the most delicate of refinements—so what could a mere zardplebe, the rawest of the raw, tell them that they didn’t know already? “They are right to shun me,” the youngest zardplebe thought, a single ’tile etched against the implacable blue of the ocean sky. “I have no Identity.”
Then the young ’tile felt it, a brutal coercion of being watched. That man in black was staring at him. The man’s penetrating gaze had panned over the multitudes of fullgrowns and come to rest upon this single zardplebe. The plebe was overtaken by the most oppressive of sensations. The man and him: Their gazes were locking on, a connection was being fused.
“Ahh!” The young lizard’s mind convulsed. For at that exact moment his brain was flooded with a competing compulsion. A pulling . . . a tugging . . . something dragging him toward Craggy Ridge. The Black Spot! It was summoning him—entreating him to take his rightful place in the Endless Chain. He sought to follow the sacred impulse, to go off as every other one of his kind always had. But he couldn’t. That man’s stare—it held him. It wouldn’t let him go!
“Come in!” the Black Spot demanded. But that blackclad man’s gaze wouldn’t yield. It yanked the zardplebe equally, kept him in his place. “Come in!” The lizard felt as if he were about to break in two.
Then, suddenly, he was free! The man in black broke off the stare, turned and walked away, back toward that small face inside the plane.
“Come in!” the Black Spot called again, and the zardplebe, unencumbered, strode off to obey. Only that ancient, unswaying reflex was inside him now, prescribing the most inexorable of courses. All else melted to air. Off he went, unquestioning, over the Ridge, through forested canyons, up an ever-narrowing river. It was thick and airless there. Jaggedy streaks of light serrated down from a sky dark with more than night. Ominous thumps sounded from behind unknown foliages, taxonomically untitled beasts lurked on overhangs of cliffs, but the zardplebe was not deterred. On he went until he reached the headlands of those waters, the center of the Great Stone, the Black Spot.
It didn’t look like much at first, just a murky, stagnant pool. A roundish well, set naked on an empty stretch, a hundred feet across, a depression filled with liquid pitch set into the mottled limestone. Then he heard that call again. “Come in! Come in!” That urgent invitation issued from the Black Spot itself!
“Leap!” was the immortal auto-command. The youngest zardplebe readied himself. He came to the very lip of the pool, looked in, saw the blackness there. “Leap!” The word thundered in his brain.
He pushed a foreclaw over the ruddy edge. But then: “Hey, gimme a minute here.”
“Leap!”
“But, like . . . it’s so, you know . . . Infinite.”
It was incredible. Faced with the eternal task performed by the untold million links in the unbroken Chain, the youngest zardplebe hemmed and hawed. At the brink of Illumination, he balked.
“Leap!”
And so, finally, he went . . . up and up, higher and higher, to the apex of his leap . . . Only to be freezeframed, for all time, in the hottest of strobes.
* * *
It figured that Komodo would interpret Gojiro’s recurring dream as “a potential central metaphor” in the ongoing attempt to fulfill the Triple Ring Promise. Rubbing his hairless chin, the contemplative former Coma Boy paced the ’cano. “Can it be denied that the Black Spot symbolizes that special Beamic media by which the uninitiate of a prospective Bunch finds his own true Identity within the Evolloo? Is this not the mystic sort of realm we wish to enter? It is my opinion that this vision requires the closest analysis.”
Gojiro scoffed. “Hey, park that Sigmund shit at the door. The whole thing seems pretty cut and fried to me. The Heater crushed Newton’s apple to sauce; a zard went up, he did not come down. Simple as that.”
A light was in Komodo’s eyes. “Exactly my point! In the face of holocaust, axioms cease to function, meaning is exploded, history swallowed, expectation shattered. Yet it is into these zones we must go. Imagine, my own true friend, what might we learn should that youngest zardplebe actually reach the Black Spot.”
“But he doesn’t. It’s the same every time. He never gets there.”
“That is so,” Komodo said gravely and went off to his beakers and bunsens. When he came back, several hours later, he was dragging a large gray box, the first dream printer, prototype of a whole generation of neural periscopes Komodo would develop to see around the corners of Quadcameral plumbing. The plan was to tap into synapsial electricity, render it palpably visual, project it onto a Dishscreen. Noting that “all that separates that youngest zardplebe from Illumination is the thinnest gap of time and space,” Komodo hoped that through manipulation, it would be possible to somehow influence Gojiro’s dream, “change it, so Identity might be revealed.”
Gojiro honked derisively. “Man, you go too far! Dreams exist in their own time. You can’t change a dream!”
Still, the monster agreed, allowed himself to be hooked up to Komodo’s machine. Privacy was not an issue; in those early days, the Quadcameral, everything it thought, was considered communal property on Radioactive Island. So, with the reptile seated ’neath a shocking-pink hair-dryer-type contraption, gator clips hotwired to his every node, they waited for the inevitable return of the Black Spot Dream. It didn’t take long. As soon as Gojiro closed his eyes, his dream was playing out on the screen, as clear as any Filipino soap opera.
Suffice it to say that the next few weeks were ridiculous. Every auto-suggestion failed, ditto for Komodo’s most ingenious editing schemes. The incident at the Black Spot remained unchanged. In the end, the two friends were reduced to watching the daily rushes of the dream, waiting for the youngest zardplebe to reach the lip of his supposed Identity, then screaming “Leap!” like a pair of demented cheerleaders.
Nothing helped. Immune to their exhortations, the youngest zardplebe leaped, all right, but too late—always too late. Gojiro and Komodo watched the trajectory of his jump, right up to the zenith, only to see the image bleed from the Bomb-whitened screen. “I told you it wouldn’t work!” Gojiro screamed, near hysterics. “You can
’t unfreeze a dream.”
“Yes,” Komodo said soberly, looking up at the disappearing image of that tiny lizard. “There is nothing we can do. It appears that there are any number of means by which an entity can be brought face-to-face with his personal moment of Truth; however, it is only that individual who can seize Identity, make it his own. It remains to that youngest zardplebe to unfreeze the dream, him alone.”
Gojiro saw the look of failure on his friend’s face, ripped the wires from his head, stalked off, sat down to watch a hundred hours of sitcoms. What else was he to do? He couldn’t exactly come clean, tell Komodo he hadn’t tried his hardest to make the experiment a success. He couldn’t admit that his whoops of “Leap!” were fake, that he was no more willing to plunge into the Black Spot than that pathetic phantasm in his dream. He couldn’t confess that he was equally afraid, immobilized, full of doubt. That Identity was nothing he craved, that the merest thought of it filled him with terror.
Not that it turned out to matter much. For, soon enough, the Black Spot Dream, like Budd Hazard before it, faded from the Quadcameral, never to return.
* * *
Until that night Sheila Brooks’s letter came.
The dream was the same as ever. A terrible bad penny come back in its entirety, except now it was worse. The passage of time had annotated the vision in a most distressing fashion. That fat, screaming soldier—only a colonel then—was General Grives, the military head of the Project. Gojiro often ran into the general’s porcine image on the Dish, even if they’d recently changed his timeslot from Sunday morning “public affairs” to off-hour religious shows. The dapper one, who else could that have been but Victor Stiller? Stiller: calculating accelerator of particles, the most politic of men, advisor to presidents. He’d given up science, they said, become an owner of things. Maybe he owned everything.
And, of course, the man in black. Joseph Prometheus Brooks.
So it was Brooks all along! Brooks whose steely gaze had panned the Lavarock horizon. Brooks who singled out that youngest zardplebe among the great tangles of ’tiles and turned him stockstill with his deathstabbing stare. “No!” Gojiro called out, once again inside the dream. “No!” he yelled to that zardplebe when Brooks’s stare fell upon him. “Don’t look! Turn away! Don’t let his pestilence into your brain!”
But it was to no avail. The dream kept on, unchanged.
Then there was that other positive ID: the small face in the plane window with the unknown, yet vaguely unnerving expression. Maybe it wouldn’t have held up in court, given that she couldn’t have been more than two or three years old at the time. But Gojiro was sure. It was Sheila Brooks, and on her face was fear—not fear a youngest zardplebe would ever recognize, but the kind Gojiro knew all too well.
“Sheila Brooks—inside my head for years!” the monster screamed in his sleep.
The dream wound on toward its inexorable conclusion. Once again the reptile reached the crucial position, poised on the edge of Identity. Again Gojiro tried to make his mouth move, to summon up a shout, offer heartfelt encouragement. But it came out weak, barely a squeak: “Leap.”
It didn’t help, not at all. The youngest zardplebe hesitated as always, jumped too late . . . too late to avoid the crack of Doom. Up he went into its angry face—only to come down again! Yes! The youngest zardplebe hurtled down through that Cloud, saw the taut black surface below, coming up to meet him.
Gojiro heard himself yell as the zardplebe plunged. A bellyflop into the Black Spot! The dream had unfrozen. But why was he surrounded by green, not black? Lime green!
“Ahhhh!” The monster shook himself awake. Lime green . . . that letter! The one from Sheila Brooks! What was Komodo saying about a new kind of supplication?
The monster thrashed out of his burrow, lurched toward Komodo’s desk. What was Sheila Brooks doing sending in a supplication? He grabbed the letter, held it up to the Dishscreen light, read through. It was exactly as Komodo said, except for the end—the part he never got to. There, written in a hand that might have belonged to a nine-year-old, was “Come in, Gojiro. Please come in, Gojiro, BRIDGER OF GAPS, LINKER OF LINES, NEXUS OF BEAM AND BUNCH, DEFENDER OF THE EVOLLOO. Please come in, please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
Gojiro read this and fainted dead away.
Through the Cloudcover
IT WAS NEAR DAWN WHEN THEY LEFT their island. In the metallic sky above, the stretched-canvas moon creaked down on pulleys and out came the sun they’d made.
The sun was their first great public-works project. The idea for it began in something Komodo once said, about how even though those Okinawa whitecoats always referred to that dank hospital ward as “his” room, he never got to fix it up the way he wanted. It made Gojiro mad, hearing that. Everyone should get to fix up his room how he wanted, the reptile declared, and, since Radioactive Island was their room, sort of, they ought to get cracking. A sun would be the place to start, Komodo suggested. That way they’d be able to tell night from day.
At first Gojiro protested. “Later for the ‘let there be light.’ Let’s live by night, slither surreptitious on a roulette wheel of life. Each to his own Eden, I say.” But, after stubbing his toeclaws on steel-drum boulders a couple hundred times, the reptile agreed that they had to have a sun.
They used a wrecker’s ball for the core, discarded beach reflectors and shards of broken bottles from the top of sugar-plantation walls to make it shine. Gojiro forged the sphere with his Radi-Breath, sealed it with his spit, then shotputted it up into the dull sky. But it didn’t stick. It tumbled like a junkyard meteor into the sea, sending up a steamy fog that took three days to clear.
“Now we’ll never have a sun,” the monster said dejectedly. “How we gonna hang it?”
Komodo rubbed his hairless chin. “On a hook,” he said.
“On a skyhook?” Gojiro smirked. “Hey, you can’t fool me, there ain’t no such thing as skyhooks.”
But Komodo was right. They searched the forlorn firmaments of their world and, sure enough, in the gritty air above Asbestos Wood, suspended over the razortipped treeline, they found a skyhook. “Only here,” Gojiro muttered as he launched the sun into the sky once more. On the twenty-fifth try, it stuck.
Still it wasn’t right. “It’s so small,” the reptile moaned. “It looks like a manhole cover up there, a medallion round a record producer’s neck. You can barely see it.”
Nodding grimly, Komodo went to work with his beakers and bunsens, whipping up a multiglassed optical that when accurately adjusted afforded their sun its proper prominence.
Together they stood on the rapidly growing beach at Corvair Bay and marveled at what they had made. “We have a sun,” Komodo said, staring into the dazzling disk, “a center to our sky.”
“Yeah,” Gojiro replied. Then he told Komodo to stand back.
“What are you going to do?”
“Just stand back,” Gojiro repeated, and with one great whooshing leap he catapulted his massive body upward until he hovered face to face with the gleaming globe. He grabbed the sphere and held it tightly to his chest. Komodo had to shield his eyes from the ensuing explosion, but when he looked again, he saw that their molten sun was now embossed with three concentric circles.
“Now it’s really ours,” the monster said, thumping back to land. “I always wanted to carve my name in the sun.”
* * *
They’d hoped for so much new under their sun! A Bunch! A Beam! The founding of a longest Line! But now, backpaddling toward the Cloudcover, Komodo resting on the monster’s belly, it seemed to Gojiro that their sun radiated all the majesty of a fifteen-watt bulb hanging naked in the hallway of a new but already shabby housing project. How pitiful that it should have to peer down on such a sorry state of affairs: the two of them, skulking away without even saying goodbye.
But what other course of action was there, after Gojiro awoke from that Black Spot Dream and read Sheila Brooks’s letter? None. None at all.
�
�Okay!” the monster had screamed to the still sleeping Komodo. “I give in. Let’s go to America, let’s see this Sheila Brooks—but we got to go now! Tonight!”
An hour later, carrying a sack not much bigger than the one Komodo held when he first arrived on the Island, the monster and his friend were tiptoeing across the bleached beach beyond Radon Seep. They couldn’t chance running into Shig. You never could tell when the severe post-teenager would turn up, peering from the synthetic thicket, the day-for-night glinting off the sheer drop of his no-eye shades. Be seen by him and there would be explanations to make, incurring who knew how much guilt.
Then there were the Atoms. A gaggle of those grinning spasticates could stumble from the steel-trunked forest at any moment, nipping at Gojiro’s pedal extremities, whining for him to put them up on his shoulders for a dragon ride. So many evenings he’d endured that humiliation, being made to jump over the counterfeit moon like a common cud chewer. News of their departure could not be broken to those wretched kids in any civil fashion. Hideous tantrums would ensue, the more epileptic Atoms spincycling into most soulrenderingest of thrashes. Komodo wouldn’t be able to take it. He’d seek to soften the pain of parting with a splash of pageantry, organize some brass-band Busby-Berkeley-goes-to-the-Special-Olympics bon voyage extravaganza that would involve at least two weeks of rehearsals and wind up, without doubt, in the anarchy of pointed heads being shoved into the bells of tubas. It was a vicious thing to do, Gojiro knew, stealing into those Atoms’ funksmelling dormitory, lacing their nightly IVs with an extra helping of Thorazine, but he saw no other way. Without immediate action, there would be no action at all. Inertia-city. Now was the time. If all went well they would be in Hollywood in a week.
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