Then Komodo saw the front of his father’s box begin to glow, three rings—the Triple Rings—unthinkably incandescent, coming toward him, a screaming target.
A Mutant’s Gamble
THE TOURNIQUET INSIDE THE MONSTER’S HEAD squeezed, dripped fluid. But then, all at once, the gauzed layers of lament, the swaddled sorrows, gave way. In his tortured sleep, an escape route appeared. After all, what did Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s equation really boil down to? What was it but a few chalk strokes written on a blackboard by a man long ago adjudged to be dead and buried?
“We can erase it!” the monster screamed, rousing himself. “Plugpull that All-Inclusive Crisis. Blot it out. What the Continuum don’t know can’t hurt it, right?”
Komodo, however, never heard Gojiro. He was over at the other end of the White Light Chamber busy with the Fayetteville Tree. It was quite a scene, too, the twelve-foot-tall bottled tree sitting on that floodlit scaffolding, a gangliatic web of multihued filaments pasted to its glass sides. Komodo was climbing a ladder that leaned against the Fayetteville container, a royal blue velvet pillow balanced on his outstretched palm. In the middle of the pillow lay a single inch-long golden capsule. At the top of the ladder, Komodo picked up the highly glossed oval and inspected it. Then, in a lightning motion, he opened the top of the jar, dropped the pellet in, slammed the lid tight.
Gojiro recognized that goldplated pill, remembered the day, not so very many years before, when it rolled up onto the beach at Spandex Shore, one of several set inside an elaborate handworked snuffbox. Game for any drug, he was about to submit the pellets to his raging gastros when Komodo stopped him, pointing at the ornate funeral robes that had washed up along with the case.
“Arsenic,” the prudent Japanese said after opening the curious latching seal at the top of each capsule and performing chemical analysis. “Odd . . . such a strong poison inside a pill of twenty-four-karat gold.” The riddle was solved by a note found inside the case. It explained that the pills were once the property of Lieutenant Yajima, a flyer in the war, a kamikaze. Yajima’s great-uncle, a metallurgist by trade, concocted them “in veneration” of his nephew; in the event that he failed in his mission, the young flyer was to ingest the poison to avoid the “shame of living.” However, Yajima was blown off course and crash-landed on a small island inhabited by people who nursed him back to health, therein creating what the airman called “an inextricable tangle of obligation.” To commit suicide would be a hideous affront to his gracious hosts, but how could he go back on his oath to die? He cast the pills into the sea, Yajima wrote, “in hopes that others can die with the honor I find lacking in myself.”
Gojiro always figured Komodo destroyed the pellets—passed on their offer, so to speak—yet there he was, tossing one into the Fayetteville Tree bottle. The reaction was next to immediate. The chickadees, 122 wholly separate genophenic groups according to the last Bunchic census, lingered momentarily in quickly dissipating afterimage, then were gone. Gojiro’s jaw dropped. It didn’t make sense. If Komodo had, for whatever non-sequiturous reason, picked this time to sharpen the sleight-of-hand he sometimes utilized to pacify the more unruly Atoms, you’d figure he’d experiment on one of those pathetic Zoo of Shame creatures Shig had insisted on bringing into the White Light Chamber. Why didn’t Komodo dematerialize that mopey dodo, then bring him back as the daffiest of ducks swinging in a Napoleon suit from a chandelier? What was he doing messing with the Fayetteville Tree, center of all Reprimordial research?
“Hey, what’s up?” the monster croaked, his throat dry.
Komodo turned quickly. “Oh, my own true friend, you are awake.”
“Yeah, I’m awake. The trick’s great, but why don’t you bring them birds back now, okay? Gives me the willies, looking at that empty jar.”
“Well . . . you see . . .” Komodo sputtered.
Like a plexuskick, the monster got the picture. “Oh, shit!” he screamed, bolting toward the vacant vessel, pushing his snout to the cool glass. “Chickadees? You in there, chickadees? Oh, no . . . they’re gone. Completely gone. Nothing is left, nothing at all.”
Komodo did not answer, only looked away.
Gojiro dropped onto the hindlegs, slammed the White Light Chamber floor with balled claws. “BROOKS’S EQUATION . . . YOU DID IT!”
* * *
Sure, there’d been times through the years when they’d roughhouse, roll around on the ’cano floor, but that was all. It wasn’t until right then that real violence came so close.
“Just couldn’t leave well enough alone, huh?” the monster seethed, stalking forward, a fire in his brain. “It wasn’t but a doodle, scribbles on a slate. It could’ve stayed like that forever, at least until the termites ate through. But no! You had to intervene. What’s the matter, couldn’t resist the itch? Technically too-sweet for you?”
Komodo edged away. “My own true friend. Please listen, it was necessary to understand—”
Gojiro lashed out a foreclaw, the breeze of which was enough to knock Komodo down. “I should’ve known. Once a Dom, always a Dom. Never trust a sapien, no matter the patter!”
“It was imperative to demonstrate the equation within a closed environment.”
“Criminal! Hypocrite!” The monster launched a bolt of Radi-Breath, shearing off a chunk of the Chamber wall. “You’re no better than a whitecoat spinal fractionator!”
“There was no other way. I had to determine the potentiality of comprehensive Permanent Dispersal—”
“Permanent Dispersal? That’s a good one! Peddle your techno-euphemisms somewhere else. You iced those chickadees! Zapped ’em! And why? For what? You loved those stupid birds.”
Komodo was standing behind the vacant Fayetteville container now. “Yes. I loved those birds. What I did can never be forgiven. It was a terrible transgression, a sin against Life. But there was no choice. Our Promise is paramount, it must be fulfilled, no matter the cost.”
“Leave our Promise out of this.” Through the jar’s thick glass, Gojiro saw Komodo smile. It was crazy. Komodo, who’d been known to break down at the sight of a wounded aphid, had just synthesized a means to the world’s end, used it to murder his cherished Fayetteville chickadees—and he was smiling his ass off. It took the baleful wind out of the reptile’s sails, that smile. “What have you got to be so cheery about?”
“I am sorry, my own true friend, but I cannot help myself. It is just that my heart is so filled with joy and anticipation. Our future has never been brighter.”
“You’re out of your mind. Our future is all used up.”
“That is not so. Do you not sense how close we are? It is almost as if we can reach out and touch Identity even now. Oh, my own true friend, to have traveled with you back through all history, to days beyond remembering, to witness images seen and unseen, to peer into the very soul of the Evolloo itself. The sound of our own two Freshout Cries becoming one, two entities springing from a single source. Is this not what we have always sought? A Beam! A confluence of souls, a common beginning, a conduit to a New World!”
The behemoth sat down, hung his head.
Komodo went toward his friend, his arms outstretched. “Have we not been guided, as if by an invisible, benevolent hand, to this place and time? Why else would we have journeyed to this strange Valley, if not to fulfill our solemn Vow, to become who we truly are. For it is only here, my own true friend, that a shy and frightened reptile might rise to become a Bridger of Gaps, a Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch . . . the Defender of the Evolloo!”
The monster buried his head in his claws. “So . . . you know.”
“Yes. Now.”
“About Dead Letter Hill, about Billy Snickman . . . and all that?”
“Yes. All of it. Everything is in the Beam.”
The monster began sobbing. “Shit, I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t have lied, shouldn’t have kept it from you. It was a terrible thing to do. But . . .”
Komodo held the reptile. “Do not a
pologize, my own true friend. Destiny is a daunting thing. We cannot be sure if it is something we create for ourselves, or whether it is thrust upon us. But we must acknowledge that it is unavoidable.”
Gojiro was wailing now, his tears flying. “Yeah, but what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to bridge gaps, link lines, nexus Beams and Bunches? I mean, this is me. Me!” The monster grabbed hold of his saggiest leathers, pulled them away from his body. “Me, a skel of a zard! A cinematic charlatan, scared of a sludgicle’s shadow . . . bogus to the bone. How am I supposed to be this . . . God thing everyone wants me to be?”
Komodo peered into the emptiness of the Fayetteville jar, did not speak.
“Look at that, man,” Gojiro despaired. “Not one chickadee left, not a single one. You said it yourself—Permanent Dispersal. We’re talking about an All-Inclusive Crisis of the Evolloo here, for chrissakes. How can you stand in the way of that kind of Power?”
When Komodo turned toward Gojiro again, he had that look on his face—the glowing optimism that sheared through every doubt. “Think of that song Budd Hazard once sang: ‘To find Identity, you’ve got to jump into the Mystery.’ ”
Gojiro shook his head. “Cosmo. That’s just Cosmo—dreams and illusions percolated by a lizard and a boy on some unknown Island. You still don’t get it, do you? We’re not walking the broad beaches of Corvair Bay now, we’re in some awful hole in the ground, beneath the Sunbelt’s sprawl. Up there they got George Jones on the radio. They drive to shopping malls, try to balance their checkbooks, and if they don’t, the bank comes and takes the doublewide. This ain’t our world. It never has been, never will be. You can’t jump into a Mystery that ain’t your Mystery.”
Komodo’s eyes widened. “What else can we do? There is no other path for us but to rush toward Identity. Our Promise demands it.”
Gojiro backed away, horror on his face. “You’d risk the world to fulfill the Triple Ring Promise? That’s crazy . . . a madman’s gamble, a mutant’s gamble.”
“But my own true friend, is it not a gamble every time a Throwforward answers the call of the pheromone, each time a Bunch attempts Reprimordialization? All Change is a gamble. Budd Hazard says, ‘Change is Crisis, Crisis is Change.’ Does it not follow that the greatest of Crises offers the greatest Change?”
At that point, Komodo appeared about ready to restate, with a forthrightness that was his alone, his allegiance to the halcyon Universal, to once again assert his trust that an Idea born in the minds of a lizard and boy inside a forlorn volcano might indeed resonate around the globe. But he never got there. He began to tremble, pressed his palms to his cheeks.
“What’s the matter? You all right?”
Komodo grew rigid. “Ms. Brooks is approaching! I must go to her!”
* * *
Komodo never said another word, not goodbye, nothing. He just left, as if seized by an invisible, undeniable force. It was the pheromone that took him, Gojiro knew. He’d seen it happen a hundred times in his dreams of Lavarock, the way Initiates would simply drop whatever they were doing, heed the summoning. That was how Komodo went, involuntary, like Prewire.
So, again, Gojiro was alone inside that White Light Chamber. He thought of the last time Komodo went to Sheila Brooks, left him there. “Be Gojiro,” Komodo said then. “Be Gojiro, then you won’t be afraid.”
“Be Gojiro,” the monster said aloud. All of a sudden it was a tremendous joke. “Be Gojiro!” Like it was a snap. No hassle at all. Great peals of laughter poured from his outsized voicebox, echoed through the cavern, the shockwaves of his howling roar sending a seismo-smashing tsunami of mirth right through to moho. It was hilarious, a riot. After everything, that’s what it came down to: “Be Gojiro.” After all, who else was he supposed to be?
“Okay,” he screamed out. “I’m Gojiro.”
Was this the way those fate-pressed, strawgrasping Paiutes felt? the monster wondered. Them and a thousand other societies living on the rubber chit of borrowed time, accelerating toward the end of the tunnel, seeing no particular light there, but still going, going on, armed with nothing more than the same slagheap of half-baked ideas that had brought them to the brink to begin with? Probably. Because, really, what other option’s open? How else is there to feel? You crash past the Duh Point, cross your fingers, and hope.
That’s what Gojiro was thinking when he realized that goony dodo was standing beside him, shuffling its webbed feet against the White Light Chamber floor.
“Something I can do for you?” the reptile asked.
The dodo raised its mica chip eyes, looked at the monster, and dropped the gilt-edged box from his cracked beak. It was that snuffbox, the one Lieutenant Yajima’s uncle had made. Gojiro picked it off the floor, opened it. Inside was a single gleaming Goldplate Pill.
* * *
It came on slow. Like the creep of a coaster up the first rise, or maybe how a window washer feels, sixty stories up, when the first of the supporting strands begin to unravel: a catch in the throat, a subliminal pang of peril.
He could watch it happen—see himself as if he were a pyramid on a supermarket shelf, the centermost can pulled out. Then, like those Fayetteville chickadees before him, he shuddered, shook, and fell. Fell right through the floorboards of reality’s suspended solution. Slurp. The noise was unmistakable, he’d heard it a thousand times before, whenever they opened a can of freeze-dried this or dry-roasted that on the Dish. Vacuum packing, one of those 1939 World’s Fair promises of the utopian morrow. Except here the process was reversed. Instead of Gojiro swallowing the Goldplate Pill, it was swallowing him.
His entire fifty tons was being sucked into an inch-long pill! Komodo’s rough treatise on the dual-stage workings of Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s equation appeared accurate. First it intook, packed every molecule tighter than a junkyard press, then it blew it out, spewed forth every deconstructed atom. Maybe it was like those stories about the traveling salesman—you know, he pulls the old Delta 88 off the road, walks into Hopper’s diner, orders coffee, a buttered roll, but before the paper’s folded back, wham, he’s hit by the spontaneous combust and nothing’s left but dust and the spinning stool.
Eyeless, the monster blinked.
Which of those tiny specks sheened across the blackest firmaments had been what building block of his former corpus? Gojiro couldn’t know. Broke loose of him, they all looked the same: a shower of anonymity.
Over the Equal Sign
KOMODO WENT OUT INTO THE IMMENSE American night, behind the wheel of that pink plasti-car. First devised as a soapbox racer for automotive-minded Atoms to crack up in around Dead Canon Curve, the balsa-weight vehicle was in no way street legal, but it went 150 and that was all that mattered.
He found her where he knew she would be, on that strip of freeway across from the Desert View Motor Cinema. She was wearing the same fuzzy pink bathrobe she wore the first time he saw her at the Turret House. That same fear was on her face. She was in Hell, Komodo knew, still in Hell.
Komodo looked at her and understood what his parents had done for him on that exceedingly bright morning in Hiroshima; and how he’d unknowingly sought to repay their act of love in the Opening Sequence. They put him in a hole so he wouldn’t have to see. See: It. Their efforts were rewarded. His life had had its ups and downs, Komodo thought, but it had always been his own. Not for a single instant had he ever been in Hell.
He could hear her screaming now. “Out there!” she yelled, her long, white finger pointing east. “That’s where I’ve got to go. But I can’t get past here!”
In an instant he was beside her. “That’s why I’ve come, Ms. Brooks, to help you. To take you on.” He held out his hand, clasped her bony wrist. Then they were standing, facing each other. And it started up again.
“Ahhh,” Komodo said.
“Ahhh,” Sheila Brooks said. Closer, closer, across that gaugeless gap. But before their lips could touch, Komodo stiffened, pulled away.
A shadow passed over them
. It was Billy Snickman, ward of a dozen foster homes, author of “Forget That House.” The wild boy stood beside Sheila and Komodo, an oddly cherishing smile spread across his exhaust-streaked face. Komodo knew that look. He’d seen it on Ebi’s face, only hours before she died, as she sat in the Traj Taj kitchen, watching her share a pot of tea with Sheila Brooks. “We’re just a family,” Ebi said then, so sweet.
“Ain’t supposed to be on now, you know,” Billy Snickman said in a soft voice, gesturing toward the print of Gojiro vs. the Enigma-Inking Squid at the Rock of Knowledge filling the giant screen. “Usually, show’s over at midnight. But not now. Not anymore. The fans got into the booth, chased the manager out. They’re gonna keep playing it. Until He comes.”
The sun was verging over the jagged peaks. Dawn was coming fast. Komodo hadn’t noticed before. But now he felt a tension in his head, a pile driver through his brain. The early morning light was diffusing the picture on the movie screen, bleaching it out. Gojiro was fading away, becoming a ghost. “Oh, no!” Then Komodo was pulling Sheila Brooks, dragging her toward the plasti-car. “We must go!”
* * *
She was asleep when they arrived at the edge of the Encrucijada, curled up beneath that silvery space blanket Komodo had tucked around her to guard against the desert cold. Looking into the Valley below, Komodo felt an awesome portent. The elements, so long assembling, were about to go critical in that ancient bowl.
“Where are we?” she groaned as he gently shook her awake. One glance at the Valley was enough to snap her neck back. “Oh . . . here.”
They made the rest of the way on foot, Sheila Brooks’s red designer galoshes against gnarled ravines, over the pinnacle rocks. It was the long way around, but with the sun now rising in the sky, they couldn’t risk cutting straight across. Komodo thought they were home free when they reached the salt flat. But then, no more than five hundred feet from the Chamber door, Sheila Brooks grabbed his sleeve and gasped.
The figure shimmered across the white ground like a mirage. Komodo breathed deep as the great scaly ensemble lurched closer, the reddish comb of its cranial dome stark against the blue sky.
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