It was a book. A comic book . . . the fumetti! The story of Radioactive Island, saga of boy and lizard, lizard and boy. “A practical gift,” an eloquent statement of the situation at hand; that was how Komodo had described the fumetti when he left the White Light Chamber to beg for Brooks’s help in the solution of the Triple Ring Promise. Except it had blown out of Komodo’s hands, whirled up into the cloudless sky, undelivered, until now.
Brooks started reading, thumbing through. There was no sound, no rush of sand, no insect’s creak, nothing but Brooks’s fingertips upon the yellowed pages. Gojiro sat motionless, breath bated. He’d envisioned the fumetti as a corrective to Shig’s purloined tracts. “The Truth—our version, at least!” he called it. But really, he wanted it to be more than that. He wanted it to be hopeful, as hopeful as Komodo was. That’s why he’d insisted on that single shot of the two of them together, his monster’s arm around his friend’s shoulder, the two of them looking out to the unseen Cloudcover, brave, forthright. “To the future!” said the white balloon hooked to the reptile’s mouth.
The reading was over now. Brooks closed the fumetti, let it drop to the ground. He was looking out again, but not as before. He was looking down, to the Encrucijada floor . . . his eyes sweeping over the sand . . . as they had across Lavarock . . . passing over every other animal and bush . . . as he’d scanned the multitudes, a thousand zards, maybe more . . . until he came to that shrunken lizard . . . that youngest zardplebe . . . Him. Him and him alone.
As Gojiro had felt Brooks’s stare in his Dream, he felt it now.
Forty-seven times the payload! Still not enough!
Those dark eyes, boring in. The reptile turning, returning the stare.
Forty-seven times, still not enough . . . the job unfinished . . .
Man and Beast—their sightlines fused.
Then Brooks wasn’t at his spot anymore. Nothing was there except that old fumetti, caught in the draft of a late-afternoon dust devil, rising upward, its pages detaching from their rusted staples, flying every which way.
Brooks was running now, past the house, toward that decrepit shed. When Gojiro got there the old man was pulling away the wooden shutters from the door with a crowbar. He cut his hand, bright red blood deltaed across the stark white of his skin. But it didn’t matter, he kept ripping at the pitted boards. Then he was inside, madly tossing objects from his path, kicking at old machine parts, tossing aside piles of ocher envelopes.
The blackboard! He was going for the blackboard.
Brooks stood in front of the equation he’d written so long before and spit. His saliva ran down the board, taking figures with it. He wiped away the rest with his sleeve. Gojiro felt it in his stomach. It was as if a carpet was pulled out from beneath his feet, sending him swirling to midair, a slow-motion somersault, and down below, no ground on which to land. “He killed the Heater, wiped it away.”
The screeching started. Chalk on slate. A squeal of agony.
Brooks’s hand moved like a ghost’s. Numbers, vectors, variables settled upon the blackboard like a print in a photographer’s solution, as if they’d been there all along, waiting only for the great worldshatterer to summon them to visibility.
Gojiro scrambled for an improved vantage point. The world was shifting; he struggled to memorize its new configuration.
Then Brooks stopped, regarded what he’d written: several lines of figures, a board full of symbols and signs. His hand returned to the board, drew an equal sign, paused again.
Gojiro swallowed.
But there was no last stroke. Instead, Brooks laughed. Loud. A boyish, rollicking kind of laugh. Then he dropped the chalk and walked out of the shed.
·Part Four·
Godnoose
THE NOOSE HAD BEEN TIGHTENING around Gojiro’s neck ever since Komodo, tuckered and worn, made his way back to the White Light Chamber and saw those figures etched on the wall. “What is this, my own true friend?” he inquired. “A glyph? A legend inscribed upon these forsaken walls by an unknown and neglected people?”
The monster did not remember writing it down. He hardly recalled any of what happened after he staggered, purblind, away from Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s blackboard. Even now, those clawed gouges looked like chicken scratches left by a haywire polygraph, the sheet music of a mad Stone Age composer.
“Oh, that.” He thought he’d make up a story, something about how if you locked enough monkeys inside a cave and gave them enough chisels, sooner or later they’d chip out a petrogram that resembled a scientific equation. But Komodo was already writing the numbers into his notebook, so the monster had no choice but to tell how Brooks erased the Heater’s birth formula from his blackboard and wrote this new thing in its place.
Komodo sat down on a high stool, hunched over his tiny desk like a black-pajamaed crab, and, with the candlelight stretching shadow against the rugged Chamber wall, went to work. “Spectacular deduction,” he purred, his fingers hot and light over the calculator keys. “Magnificent induction.” Every vector, each differential was cause for celebration. For Komodo, to commune with the elegant mentality of Joseph Prometheus Brooks was pure ecstasy. He took special pleasure in the fact that the old scientist hadn’t finished the equation, that for some mysterious reason the right-hand side of the equal sign had been left blank. It seemed an invitation, an opportunity for collaboration.
However, as the pile of crumpled paper grew beneath his dangling feet, Komodo’s mood changed. The deeper he delved into the labyrinthine intricacies of the formula, the more he felt himself surrounded by an arbitrary, chaotic violence. Far from the quiet certitude he’d expected, a serene landscape where Ideas might reveal themselves wholescale, as immaculate as Bach, the terrain of Joseph Brooks’s thought seemed afflicted, demon-ridden. The swell of tortured calculations threatened to consume Komodo, drown him in a sea of cinder.
“I believe it to be a vacuum problem of some type,” the haggard Japanese finally said, after twenty-four straight hours of deliberation. “A nuclear vacuum problem on a massive scale . . . the dimensions are enormous.”
“Super,” Gojiro grunted. “An Electrolux to intake Texas. Where you gonna get replacement bags for the sucker? If Brooks thinks he can go door-to-door with that, he better get himself some encyclopedias.”
Komodo only resumed his math, murmuring of sorption, torrs, and thermosublimation pumps.
Then: “Nothing.”
“What?”
“Again . . . nothing.” Komodo’s voice was full of anguish. He slammed his fist down onto the desk.
“Nothing what?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all. My sum . . . I continually arrive at nothing. Zero.”
“Zero?” The monster shifted his weight.
“Nothing. Everything is dispersed. Obliterated.” Komodo leaned back in his chair. His eyes were sinkholes, his face ridged with lines as deep as Baikal.
“But that’s not possible. Matter can never be created or destroyed—that’s the Law, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” Komodo said, his voice low, dazed. “Physics teaches us of the indestructibility of matter. Yet Mr. Brooks appears to attempt the repeal of this dictum.”
“Who does he think he is? There’s always got to be something left over.”
Something left over . . . For Komodo and Gojiro, the concept went beyond any temporal weight and measure. It was basic to all they believed. After all, they’d both been besieged by the Heater’s holocaust, had everything they ever knew taken from them, yet had managed to survive; however altered, they were left over. This was the essence of the Continuum; even in the face of absolute annihilation, something would remain, even if it was nothing more than a single pair of cells. For from a single pair of cells, a whole new world can arise.
But now, facing the emptiness beyond the equal sign of Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s equation, Komodo appeared lost, without direction. “I see nothing here.”
“Don’t get pent-up. I must’ve remembered it wrong,�
� the reptile offered. “You know, inverted when I should of diverted, botched a variable. I could go back, check it again.”
Komodo bit his lip. “No. Mr. Brooks’s logic is difficult but inexorable. These are the correct factors. The fault must lie with me. I have blundered somehow. What a fool I was to presume I might make sense of Mr. Brooks’s work.”
“Hey! You ever stop to think that maybe he got it wrong? That maybe the great Brooks has lost a step, gone south in a leaky seabag? Look at the guy, standing there in the hot sun. Some genius!”
Komodo didn’t even hear Gojiro. “I must find a solution to this problem. Suddenly, I fear everything is at stake.”
* * *
That clinched it, Komodo using that same exact expression as Joseph Brooks had thirty-six hours earlier, with Grives and Stiller. “He will show His face when everything is at stake.” Brooks’s phrase throbbed through the Quadcameral, brought a deeper winter to the monster’s blood. With that objective in mind, what else could the worldshatterer’s equation add up to? “Nothing!” Each time Komodo said the word Gojiro felt a deeper winter in his blood, another gallows trapdoor opening beneath his feet.
It was insane. For years the monster had railed against what he labeled Shig’s “master plot.” Stealing the movies, corrupting the Cosmo, distributing the Crystal Contacts, the culminating invention of the 90 Series—to Gojiro, it was all directed to a single goal. “He’s got me fitted for the Fallgod, some bogus Eye in the Sky,” the reptile charged, teetering beneath the weight of those unremitting supplications. Shig’s motive was revenge—a relentless program of retribution to make him pay for what happened to Kishi out by the Cloudcover. At least that’s what Gojiro always supposed. But what was happening now was beyond anything even Shig could conjure. This was a load no Atlas could carry.
The conspiracy was huge, multi-angled, a vast entrapment aimed at hustling him into a singular, unwanted destiny. That Beam—if he was correct in calling it that—was part of it. A key cog! Because: If it was a Beam, then where was the Bunch?
“Beams for Bunches, Bunches for Beams”—wasn’t that Cosmo’s copacetic combo, Budd Hazard’s Inviolate Binary? Wasn’t that the clarion with which Lavarock Initiates summoned themselves to the Molt, so they might “whirl from the First day to the Last, to Attach ourselves to What We Are.” It was supposed to be paradigmatic—each one everyone, everyone each, a Line integrated in body and soul, indivisible, a fabulous collective. But what happened when that so-called Beam entered Gojiro’s head? Sure, he’d spun back through every eon, but throughout those repeated passages, had he ever felt the succoring commonality of the group? Had he ever—through the nightmare visions of Sauric death, the muggings by furball marauders, or even during the relatively sedate eras of basking and burrowbuilding—felt himself woven into the magnificent tapestry of the Zardic Bunch? The answer was no. Not for a single moment. All the way back to that bizarre egg his existence remained unique, apart. Everything he did was as a loner, a solitary figure.
A Beam for him and him alone? One of a kind? What sort of hand was that to play across the boundless reach of Time?
But who really was to blame? Once he’d railed against the sapiens’ “malignant megalomania,” warned how their steroid-puffed self-esteem threatened to split the seams of the Magnificent Matrix. “We call their sin Stallonism because they delight in inventing wholly specious cosmologies with themselves at the self-aggrandizing center,” he’d preached. Now, however, that rectitude soured in the harsh light of his own Ptolemaic hallucination. It reminded him of something old Jung once said, how just because flying saucers turned up on radar scans it didn’t mean they actually existed. Rather, the wily Swiss suggested, the signal was a product of the psychic desire of those who so ardently wished to see something in the sky; their longing, coalesced in a single spot in the heavens, became palpable and therefore detectable by electronic means. Gojiro had always scoffed at such notions, but now he wondered. Although not about those yearners on the ground. He thought about the imaginary saucer itself. Did that incorporeal disc appear on those blipping screens through a sheer craving to be seen?
With each new thought the nightmare grew: the unshakable sense that somehow he’d rigged it, wished the whole thing into existence, that he was caught in his own trap.
That night on Dead Letter Hill, when Billy Snickman’s supplication came into his head . . . what made him answer as he did? What could have possessed him to announce himself as “the Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines—Defender of the Evolloo”? The monster didn’t know. He’d never known.
Behind him, he could hear Komodo still wrestling with Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s equation. “The vacuum properties create a medium of artificially induced excitation of molecular bonding, thereby stimulating excessive transmutation . . .”
Lost in thought, the monster paid little attention to these arcane murmurs. However, Komodo was soon yelling, his voice a mix of discovery and terror. “Why, it’s remarkable. Incredible!”
Gojiro looked up warily.
Komodo was sweating. “Of course, it seems highly unlikely that Mr. Brooks could have intended his formula to read in such a manner, but it appears to speak quite specifically to the question of Reprimordialization, pertaining to the overstimulation of mutation. Why, if this equation was enacted at the proportions Mr. Brooks cites, it would institute . . .”
Komodo stepped back from his paper-strewn desk, his face the color of sulphur. “My own true friend, according to my calculations, if Mr. Brooks’s formula was to be brought to fruition, it would usher in an All-Inclusive Crisis of the Evolloo!”
Once the phrase left Komodo’s mouth, Gojiro knew his friend had solved Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s equation. An All-Inclusive Crisis of the Evolloo—what else could put everything at stake? An All-Inclusive Crisis, that was game. Endgame.
The idea had come up years ago, in the midst of a desultory post-Glazed Days Budd Hazard session. “As the Muse has indicated, ‘Change is Crisis, Crisis is Change—all Change is Risk,’ ” Komodo said, holding forth in his academic mode. “But let us try to place this koan in the context of Reprimordialization. After all, are not great risks incurred each time there is a reconnection of Bunch to Beam? That is the drama of the Reprimordial Instant—the Throwforward’s heroic journey into that realm where Eternal Equations switch from P + AT = I to P = I and back again. The renewal of Life always carries the possibility of its dissolution—as we have seen in the Zoo of Shame, not all Bunches can be assured of continued existence, at least in the form to which they are accustomed. Molecular bonds can be torn asunder, atoms flung from configuration. This is the Crisis of Change. And, if the Evolloo is to be thought of as one encompassing symbiotic entity, then a Crisis for one Bunch must be considered a Crisis for All. So we see that the Evolloo is composed of a great chain reaction of such Crises—risks—and that in this eternal cycle, we may find the engine of Life.”
The monster sat back, snorted. “Okay, sure. But suppose every Bunch in the world goes into Reprimordial Crisis at the same time. Then what happens? Don’t that overload things, blow out the systems?”
Komodo grimaced. “An interesting thought, my own true friend. Change unbalanced by stasis becomes discord. If every single Bunch was to enter the Reprimordial realm simultaneously, it is possible that a measureless entropy could be unleashed, mortally wounding existence as we understand it. Yet this potentiality must be considered exceedingly remote. Amid the infinity of Creation, there are uncountable Bunches fusing with an equally uncountable number of Beams. Each of these units operates according to its own autonomous agenda, its own separate Reprimordial schedule. Therefore, I believe, the dilemma you describe is all but precluded by probability.”
“But it could happen, right? All Bunches could go into risk behavior at the same time, therefore affecting all Beams. It could be an All-Inclusive Crisis of the Evolloo. I ain’t saying it’s gonna happen, but we’re making Cosmo, right? And who ever heard of
a Cosmo without a last-things scenario? Everywhere you look they got apocalypin’ Rongaraks, a hundred blue-in-the-face, multiarmed exterminators. Them seven seals been barking for so long, someone ought to throw ’em a fish already. I’m talking story here—beginning, middle, end. You got to think of the symmetry of the thing. What’s wrong with an All-Inclusive Crisis of the Evolloo? It’ll round everything out a bit.”
Komodo swallowed deeply. “An end to the Endless Flow? This is a shocking idea, difficult to accept. Something impossibly polluted . . . unthinkable.”
“It’s supposed to be unthinkable,” the monster smirked.
Now, however, inside the White Light Chamber, Gojiro could hear Komodo softly weeping. How piteous! To witness the mourning for an innocent vision of a world without end. The reptile couldn’t take it, tried to immerse himself in the Dish. But there was only Brooks, searching as always, in the center of the Encrucijada. Except he looked different, somehow more relaxed, as if his urgent seeking had been replaced by a patient expectancy.
Gojiro lashed out a foot, smashed it into those Philcos and Admirals, got the outside transmission back. With any luck at all he would have picked up a hockey game, or maybe a marathon of heavy metal videos. But there were only G-fans.
“The PA and the 90 Series are one,” a dough-faced ’tile-o-file announced to a reporter.
“PA?”
“Personal Appearance, man. The PA is the 90 Series made flesh.”
Made flesh . . . the monster’s head rolled back. You know you’re in deep when they start restructuring the standardized millennials into fresh synthotext. By what manner did his would-be flock presume he’d satisfy this PA? Did they want him to show up at the mall, sit at a bridge table, sign autographs?
Things were out of control, going by themselves. They kept showing that overhead shot of the Insta-Envir, commenting on the “bizarre pattern.” It was bizarre, all right; the way he saw himself posed, vigilant, in deep mantis stance, Gojiro might as well have been looking at one of the Atoms’ potholders. Except that this was no foot-square rag easily held in a single claw. It was real size, an image sculpted into the Insta-Envir, visible only from above, as if it were the work of a wretched agri-tribe trying to catch heaven’s eye. In all taxonomic history, there was no record of the Insta-Envir simply growing like that.
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