“What is it?” Sheila Brooks screamed, clutching tighter.
“It’s . . . the Varanidid.”
“The what?”
“A myth, walking.”
Onward it came, claws glinting in the sunlight, across the rapidly heating sand.
“It’s looking at me!” It was so. The approaching beast’s eyes were fixed on Sheila Brooks.
Then, when it was close enough, it said, “You have returned. I knew you would when the time was right.” The voice was a rasp, a croak.
Komodo thought she would run, but she didn’t. She stepped forward, toward the Varanidid. “What are you talking about? I’ve never been here.”
“Yes you have.”
“Never—not until now.”
The Varanidid seemed unsteady now, but still it came ahead. They were almost face-to-face. “But . . . you came as you came before, over this same ridge. Walked as you walked before . . . to this very spot!”
Komodo said nothing; what was playing out was beyond his intervention.
“Don’t be upset, Leona. Today is a great day. After so long, you have returned.”
“Leona? I’m not Leona.”
“Not Leona? But you are. I can feel it.”
“Leona was . . . my mother.”
“Your . . .” The Varanidid reeled back; when it straightened up once more, the Echo Man was poking his wrinkled face from beneath the scaly mask. There was an unbearable silence as the Indian studied Sheila Brooks with narrowing eyes. Then, without warning, he shot out a clawhand, grabbed hold of her goggles.
“Hey! What’s the big idea! Lay off!”
The Indian would not let go. He pulled at the glasses until the heavy elastic came loose with a loud snap. The glasses flew from Sheila’s head, rose up into the blue heat of the Encrucijada sky, and fell back into the Echo Man’s hand. “Let me see your eyes.”
“Get away!” she screamed. But the Echo Man held her tight, peered deep into her face.
Then he released his grip, stumbled back. His Zardic regalia was askew now, ripped and hanging, his wrinkled head fully visible. He looked older, sadder. “Years ago, she came to this place. I always knew, someday, she would return. But instead, it is you.” A tremor ran through him as he spoke. No longer the mythic Varanidid, he once again seemed to be the fleabitten Nelson Monongae, just another whiskey-drinking Indian haunting the plasma banks.
But he recovered, straightened up. A light suddenly in his eyes, the Echo Man closed his leathery palm around the black vial hanging from his neck. With one sharp pull he ripped the rawhide strand. Then he reached over and placed the vial in Sheila’s hand, folding her long white fingers around it. “Your eyes are her eyes. See with them. See what she did not.”
Sheila Brooks looked down at her fist. “What is this?”
“Blood.”
“Blood? I can’t stand the sight of blood.” She opened her hand. “It’s black.”
“Blood from the earth. His blood. They’re stealing it, draining it away. You take it. Use it—I have kept it for you, all these years.”
Right then Komodo felt that horrible pounding in his head once more. Except it was worse now. “Gojiro!” He grabbed Sheila Brooks, and they started running, away from that Echo Man.
* * *
“My own true friend, I have returned! Ms. Brooks has accompanied me.”
Komodo called again, only to hear his voice once more reverb and fade away in the highest reaches of the White Light Chamber. There was no reply. He turned to Sheila Brooks. “Perhaps he has become shrunken once more, the result of the potion I described. Shrunken down and somehow wedged in an unforgiving nook or cranny. My own true friend! Indicate your presence, please!”
Sheila Brooks looked around in numbed stupefaction. With that transparent antirad protection suit taut over her fuzzy pink bathrobe and titanium lamé pantaloons, she looked shrinkwrapped.
A desolation overcame Komodo. So many times—across unfathomable gulfs—he’d followed love’s radar, arrived in the nick of time to snatch his friend from the brink. But now, his heart straining until it ached in his chest, he felt nothing.
It was a violation of their Promise, he knew, bringing Sheila Brooks into the White Light Chamber without first asking Gojiro’s permission, but what choice was there? Things were different now. The monster was right, they weren’t on Radioactive Island anymore. They were in a new world, with new rules. The Triple Ring Promise was no longer their solemn secret, between them and no one else. Others were involved now; who knew how many? He turned to watch Sheila Brooks stagger about the ghastly Chamber. There was so much he longed to tell her, so much she would have to know! But where was Gojiro? A mere glimpse of his great friend would explain so much of what he could not put into words.
That’s when she screamed. “Over there!”
Komodo wheeled to see the dodo. The unfortunate former extinctive was sitting in the middle of the Chamber floor, seemingly engaged in a poignantly vestigial nesting activity. The sad bird met Komodo’s gaze and emitted a deep sigh. Then it got up and waddled away, leaving behind a shiny pellet. That dodo had been sitting on a Goldplate Pill—as if it were its own egg.
Komodo was hovering over the gleaming capsule when it came to him. At first the sound was no more than a scratchy whisper from behind a thick wall, so faint he thought he’d only dreamed it. But then it came again, no less undeniable for its imperceptibility. Komodo’s mouth dropped open. “There is Quadcameral activity here—I can feel it! Oh, my God, Ms. Brooks. Gojiro—he is inside this Goldplate Pill!
“My own true friend, can you hear me? Please, come in. Acknowledge reception!”
Sheila Brooks was beside Komodo now, staring down at the pellet. “But, how . . . I mean . . . it’s so little and he’s so big . . .”
She extended her index finger. Then, just as he’d seen her push her extended arm through the parietal loam of that massive Quadcameral model, Komodo watched Sheila Brooks’s bitten nail travel through the dank air, toward that Goldplate Pill. When her fingertip touched the polished metal, her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Ms. Brooks . . . you sense it too!”
With a sudden spasm, she pulled away. “No! I dunno! Shit! Why’d that goddamned Indian have to steal my glasses?” She reached out for Komodo, grabbed him hard. “I’m begging you, tell me what’s going on here—I’m not a fucking idiot.”
Once again, the shame flooded in. He wanted to bring her into the Valley, to show her the man standing at its center, to somehow liberate her from Hell. But Gojiro was in trouble, and there was no time. He took her hand. “Oh, Ms. Brooks, if I had only been honest, forthright. It is to my great disgrace that I have not revealed this earlier.” He reached out, flicked on that bank of monitors. Blue-gray light filled the Chamber.
“Dad.” She took a step ahead, then looked back over her wingy shoulder. Help, she seemed to say-help me now. But Komodo could not help her, not then. Gojiro was inside the Goldplate Pill!
* * *
Komodo projected his Quadcameral overlays onto a ten-foot-square foldout Dishscreen. Years before, Komodo envisioned those transparencies as a first step toward a comprehensive mapping of the monster’s fabulous mentality. The plan was to chart the energy of each neural coupling, fix their positions as one might the constellations in the night sky. But the Quadcam was simply too big, too varied. Komodo’s astral-neural maps were pocked by empty spaces, barren patches, great black holes. Whole cortexial partitions remained unexplored. And, after the 90 Series incident, the task had been abandoned altogether.
Now, however, those woefully insufficient charts seemed the only chance. Gojiro was alive—the Quadcameral activity inside that Goldplate Pill proved that. If the still-viable sectors of the reptile’s brain could be pinpointed, then insight might be gained into his condition.
Connecting the Dishscreen to a keyboard, Komodo sat down and began to punch deck like a Dexi-driven dictaphonist. The music would point the way. It always
did. To Komodo’s trained ear, each separate pair of neural connectors and its accompanying synapsial spark struck a distinctive tone. “The infinite symphony” Komodo called it, back in the Glazed Days. How thrilling it was to press his ear to his friend’s frontal plate and hear the majestic interplay—the low, earthy bass lines of the most ancient reptilian wards underpinning the skittish cadences of the limbic rock, those two blending with the allegro fleet of the neo-cort, all of it topped off by the angular clash of the uncharted fourth realm, that dissonant, offcentering careen of the New.
Now, however, the Quadcameral soundscape offered no ever-redefining swell, no dazzling aggregate of hue and timbre. The track Komodo heard was more minimal than a Tibetan trancer’s demo, nothing but a solitary Om, a lone high-hung hum. The tone penetrated, louder and louder, vibrating inside his head like a hardstruck, razortonged tuning fork.
That sound! He recognized that consuming, bell-shattering note. He’d never forget it. Once, he’d fixated on that same drone, tracked its soul-shearing pitch throughout that terrible descent into Gojiro’s head. Oh, appalling memory—how he kept going deeper into the Quadcameral’s sacred fourth tier until he found that single neural pair, short-circuited the electricity there. Could it be? That out of the great mentality’s boundless ensemble only one tone remained—that same pulse to which the 90 Series once adhered? Komodo sat stunned, attempting to make sense of things. How could that 90 Series coupling, receptor of those desperate supplicants, be back? Every indication pointed to the unregenerative nature of Quadcameral cellular material; once the cortical matter was destroyed, it did not—would not—grow back. He told Gojiro as much on that long-regretted day. Time appeared to bear out the prognosis. After the operation, supplications no longer swamped the monster’s mind. Never again had he been transported into the despairing consciousness of the pleading Atoms, G-fans, and the rest.
Until now. Until they came into the Valley.
Komodo felt chills when he heard that other noise. It had been there all along, thrumming low behind the tremulous tonality of the neural signal, but he hadn’t made much of it. There was no reason to. The sound was clearly external, a stray byte, not Quadcameral in origin, no part of the infinite symphony. But now it grew louder, dominant. That whoosh . . . the howl of wind roaring through a tunnel.
“The Beam! It’s inside his head!”
Komodo keystroked feverishly, desperate to locate the impulse on his overlays. It didn’t take long. When he saw it, Komodo gulped. Once that 90 Series receptor had been just a single neural coupling, one among billions, but now it stood by itself, a sole, tiny blinking star amid the blank. Komodo amplified the pulsating image until it filled the Dishscreen. It didn’t look different from the usual Quadcameral neuron: a pair of opposable cerebral stanchions, topped by the jagged sear of synapsial energy. But it was—radically, remarkably—different.
“My God,” Komodo said softly, “the Beam has refastened the 90 Series neurons. It has taken the place of the truncated synapsial force. It’s all that’s left of him. The only thing keeping him alive.”
* * *
First he saw pi, a ruthless irony. There was a time he’d spend whole days, even weeks, happily employing that useful Hellenism, extending it dozens of decimal places beyond the standard 3.14 so as to more precisely compute the circumference of the Triple Rings upon Gojiro’s chest—the chest that no longer existed. But that Beamically supplied energy reconnecting the monster’s last neuron was no fixed thing. Bonewhite phosphor amid the lusterless steel gray of the Dishscreen, it roiled, refigured, bisected. What did it look like now? Two tildes over a wayward n? Twin lightning strikes between radar towers? These items came to mind. But then Komodo settled on one imprint and one alone. “The Equal Sign,” he murmured.
Years before, Komodo had tried to convince Gojiro of the relevance of the Equal Sign within the working of the Instant of Reprimordialization. “In considering the properties of the eternal equation Prewire = Identity, we would make a grievous error to assume that the equal sign is nothing more than a mathematical convention, a simple conduit to be taken for granted. On the contrary, it represents a terrible chasm, a yawning breach. Oh, my own true friend, Reprimordialization is no easy thing, no walk in the park. It is Belief, personal decision. To view Identity from across the river is not enough. We must seize it, immerse ourselves in it. In my mind, this is the significance of the Equal Sign. It is Faith. That is the leap we must make. The Leap across the Equal Sign!”
Peering up at that quivering image on the Dishscreen, Komodo felt only despair. It was like being back on Radioactive Island, watching those seemingly endless reruns of Gojiro’s Black Spot Dream. “Leap!” he screamed then, urging that vacillating youngest zardplebe to plunge into the dark pool—only to see him go up but never come down. Now the whole thing was repeating itself, Komodo thought. Once again a youngest zardplebe, in this case disguised as a five-hundred-foot-tall King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms and goaded by a hopelessly idealistic, terminally foolhardy friend, had attempted to leap—only to be wrenched, yet another time, from the world he knew. This was the futility of that lone idiogram on the Dishscreen, Komodo decided; it was possible that even at that moment, his friend was waking up lonely and afraid inside another volcano, on another charred island, and calling out for another boy. Komodo put his head down on the keyboard. Once that Equal Sign had represented so much promise to him. But now it was nothing more than a pair of horizontal prison bars, a hideous limbo.
“Oh, my own true friend! I should have listened when you spoke,” Komodo sobbed. “You were right. There are lines that should not be crossed. Mr. Brooks’s equation should never have been touched. Mine was a mutant’s gamble, the result of which now stands before me. You are caught up in a realm out of time, out of space . . . like a coin forever on its side.”
“Wrong!” The word rang through the White Light Chamber, sheared through Komodo’s sobs.
“Wrong?” He’d almost forgotten about Sheila Brooks.
“Wrong!” She stood in front of that bank of Philcos and Admirals, her palms pressed to her pasty cheeks. “It’s not right, not what it’s supposed to be!”
Komodo raced over. Joseph Brooks was on those monitors, in his searching position, as always. Now Sheila was backing away from the picture. At her feet was her stereopticon. Komodo bent down and examined it once more: Joseph Prometheus Brooks and Leona Ross Brooks standing in that Valley, happy. And why not? They were soon to have a baby. The Echo Man had it right, Komodo noted. Sheila did have her mother’s eyes.
“His arms are empty! They’re not supposed to be empty!”
Komodo turned to the monitor. “You refer to the cradling position, Ms. Brooks. A most enigmatic—”
“It’s wrong. That’s not how it is in . . . In . . .”
Komodo came closer now. He could feel her struggling, trying to battle her way from Hell. “Not the same as in what?”
“As in Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision!” The words flew out in a solid stream.
Komodo peered at the monitors again, then back at the stereopticon. Now he understood. It had started when Leona came across the country, heading for Los Angeles with her mother. Except their train broke down. Then she wandered away, found her way into the Valley. She met the Echo Man there—the poor, sad Echo Man, hope of a dying Clan. He thought she was the one who would help him fulfill his mission, renew his kind. But he was wrong. Instead, she saw the Beam and painted what she saw, in that X-ray style. That part was easy enough, Komodo thought, rubbing his chin. But what about Joseph Brooks? He wasn’t in the Beam. No, that was different. Brooks was Leona’s contribution; she put the scientist in the Encrucijada. Somehow, in the unknowable workings of her artist soul, she understood that the Beam was incomplete, that it needed a catalyst, someone to set the Power into motion. Then, in a Paris bar, she saw her vision playing “In a Mist” on a clarinet and convinced him of his destiny.
Komodo loo
ked over to where Sheila Brooks stood, still yelling that her father’s searching position, the same stance her mother had foreseen in her X-ray painting, was wrong. This was not exactly accurate, Komodo decided. “Unfinished” was a better term. The notion that any idea—any vision—was the product of an individual practitioner, or even a single generation, struck Komodo as presumptuous. More than likely it would have to be passed on, like a baton in a relay race, to the next visionary, and the next—sifted and simmered through who knew how many generations of brains before it came into perfect focus.
“His arms aren’t empty!” she screamed again. “He’s holding . . .” She stopped now.
“Ms. Brooks! Tell me what you see!”
“Victor! What’s Victor doing on television?”
Komodo turned to the monitors once more. Those extra surveillance cameras, part of Shig’s exhaustive security apparatus, had preempted Joseph Prometheus Brooks. Victor Stiller was there instead, standing beside his Mercedes, relentlessly dapper in a summer suit. Several men in overalls milled around what looked to be a camouflaged oil rig.
A man was yelling, motioning everyone to stand back. “Gonna rip!” The rig shook, black liquid surging out.
“Owww!” The pain came simultaneously with that gusher, a thud between his eyes that knocked Komodo off his feet. He tried to get up but fell back down again.
“Are you all right?” Sheila Brooks asked.
“A momentary balance problem.” That’s when he saw what was happening on the Dishscreen, the way the Equal Sign was flickering, arcing like a poorly screwed-in bulb. Off, then on, off again. “My own true friend!” It was like watching a dozen deaths, a dozen resurrections. With the pumper’s every gush, the signal grew fainter.
Amid the ensuing panic, one phrase stood out: “What do fossils mean but fossil fuels?” That was the riddle of the Encrucijada, Komodo understood then, the reason Leona Brooks brought Joseph Brooks there to make the Bomb, the reason a lizard and a boy had come from so far to seek their Identities in that sandy, comet-made bowl where the dinosaurs perished.
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