“Mom!”
Hers to relive again and again.
“Mom! Dad! . . . No.”
Then there was only the Cloud, billowing up. The Cloud, and the weeping. But that’s not where it stopped. Not that Beam. For, right then, it rolled back once more, back and back, to the day that Valley was born, to that smoking comet, the saurs falling in its wake. And again, Gojiro was inside the body of that tiny lizard, traversing the killing fields. That’s when he understood who the Varanidid was and what he did. And why the memory of his Great Deed was lost in the faded mists. After all, the Varanidid wasn’t a fierce and powerful T-Rex, or even Radi-Breathing star of stage and screen. He was just an ordinary zard, a funky-looking one at that, and his only act of heroism was the commonest of acts. He followed the pheromone, kept himself alive until he found his mate. And together, amid that Death, they forged the first link of the Line.
It was the most monumental of destinies, easy to confuse, claim for yourself. Gojiro, a lonely mutant, had succumbed to the lure, imagined himself to be what he was not. He went ahead, caused that terrible whirlpool. The Echo Man, his people dying out, made the same error. But this time there was no mistake. This time it was as it was meant to be.
“Sheila!”
“Yukio!”
Twisting, writhing stegosaurs fell beside them, but it mattered not at all. Their mission was singular, without provision for detour. The straightest path to the purest goal.
“Yukio!”
“Sheila!”
Is it the pheromone that directs hearts, or hearts that drive the pheromone? They didn’t know, just pushed ahead, closing distance. They came as they had under Albert Bullins’s smoky tent, as they had out on the freeway median. They came like two elegant butterflies living deep in a jungle no saw’s ever seen. They came the same as two roaches in a kitchen, knowing that they alone possess that one confounding gene to set back pest control another ten years. They came like Mall Darters in a derelict shopping center, like so many chickadees on the branches of a glassed-in Fayetteville Tree. They came like every pair of Throwforwards who ever homed to that unremitting cry: “Adapt! Adapt or Die!” They came like all who would make New Life must, shining, full of Hope.
They met on top of the smoking Comet, the stone that dropped from the sky to announce the passing of an Age. It didn’t matter if their feet got hot. They lay down and made love right there. They made love through the ages, through sixty-six million years of time, until the Comet turned to dust and there was nothing there in that Valley but themselves. They made love until the Heater came and turned the world to white. And when it was gone, they were still there, making love.
* * *
It was about that time the monster heard that shout echo through the void of the Goldplate Pill. “Come in, Gojiro!”
“Wha?”
“Come in, Gojiro! Please come in!”
The supplication? What was it doing inside this place where even Bird’s solo didn’t sound?
“Come in, Gojiro! Please heed this humble servant’s plea!”
“An afternoise,” the monster supposed. “Residual electricity. Like what makes Frank’s chickens get up and dance funky in the grocer’s bin even though they got no heads.”
“Come in, Gojiro! King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo. Please heed these humble servants’ pleas.”
It occurred to him to deny. Dummy up, ignore the call, as he had every other 90 Series supplication, except for that one crazy moment with the wolf boy, Billy Snickman, out by the spire on Dead Letter Hill. But the chant kept on, louder and louder until it sounded like a billion voices, a booming noise to shake the stars, tear the plaster from the walls of space.
“Can’t you see I’m dispersed? Gone.”
Again the supplication came. Again and again.
“I can’t. I’m afraid!”
Then, amid that gnawing tumult, the monster heard his friend’s voice, sweet and reassuring as ever, whispered in his ear just as if the two of them were about to cuddle in their burrow during the earliest of times. “Be Gojiro,” Komodo said, “then you won’t be afraid.”
“Gojiro . . . I am Gojiro.”
That’s when he saw the foot, floating down there, where before there was only dark. A familiar-looking foot. A foot with a gnarly tuber, the result of a hundred stubs against the doorstep of a vulcanized volcano. A zardish kind of foot. His foot, that floppy old size two thousand.
It was the supplication that summoned back those parts of him. The words themselves: “Come in, Gojiro . . . Come in.” Each syllable wielded its own specific gravity, its own particular pull. From behind the moon came his craggy dorsal plates. From south of Saturn, his belly hit him like a medicine ball. Those arms, which he always cursed for being too short to change a channel, boomeranged back, fused to his sides. The great tail came twisting through the black, the supraoc, too. Then he sensed it, far off at first, a tiny speck in the black—his face. His face coming across space. Fast. Bigger and greener and closer until: Clang! Clang and clamp, the screws tightening down with airgun squeals.
* * *
Then he was back, all of him. But it wasn’t done. Not yet.
Komodo was right. Reprimordialization is no walk in the park. Identity is not handed out by a gruff man with the nametags behind the Ellis Island counter. It is will, decision. You’ve got to declare it, you’ve got to want it—Leap into it! So the monster listened as the supplications came in. Millions and millions . . . Dick from Londonderry, someone put a bomb into his daddy’s car, Okoye from Tanzania, whose truck was buried in a landslide, Pablo from Peru, they took away his brother in the night . . . Denise from Pittsburgh, Ali from Dhaka, Anatoly from Kazak, Mzwakhe from Soweto . . . Loud and clear they came, their yearning echoing through the Quadcameral.
More and more . . . until he was ready. Then he schagged himself up and broke through the confines of that tiny Pill, shattering the stifling bonds of his own ambivalence.
“Yes!” came his shout, sonic cross the heavens.
“I, Gojiro, King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo, am here! To do what I must!”
0.0247 Seconds
THROUGH THE PREDAWN MURK OF THE ENCRUCIJADA, Gojiro saw the cameras on the hillside. Maybe that Shig was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a welcher. He’d signed a contract with Hermit Pandora Pictures to make Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision and he intended to deliver. Not that Gojiro would require much direction. You don’t when yours is the role you were born, or reborn, to play.
Ditto for Joseph Prometheus Brooks. With that two-foot golden sphere cradled in his previously empty palms, he stood in his spot, eyes fixed ahead, as always.
That was how they faced each other, Opposer and Defender, bound by a common, solemn purpose.
If it had been a day earlier, a week, or a year, Gojiro wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face. What were the two of them trying to prove anyway, he’d have asked, an old man and a mutant zard playing a high-noon game in the middle of a Valley already steeped with the maudlin sediment of crumbled symbols? The whole thing was absurd—didn’t they know that all the good archetypes have already been taken, beat flat of meaning?
That’s what Gojiro might have thought, before. But this was now. Now, across the Equal Sign’s great divide, the monster’s sense of his own ridiculousness was obliterated. Here was only Identity. Identity and Action. For there could be no question as to the contents of Brooks’s glowing globe. It was annihilation, pure and simple, a hand-held All-Inclusive Crisis of the Evolloo. Everything at stake.
From his vantage point five hundred feet above the sand and creosote scrub, the monster’s view was comprehensive, unrestricted. He could see Sheila Brooks come running. It was a heartbreaking scene, really, the way she tried to tell her father she knew everything, that she loved him anyway. Heartbrea
king, too, that she knew nothing could make her father put down that golden ball—that he wouldn’t even look at her, much less hold her in his cradling arms again. After all, she’d seen this scene unfold before, hundreds of times. But still, knowing everything, she kept on, petitioning for her father’s love, because that’s what daughters do.
Gojiro could not be moved. To him, Komodo and Sheila Brooks were nothing more than faceless, antish figures, a black-pajamaed guy and his girl, like any couple you might see on a bus or in an airport terminal. Strangers. None of his business. Nothing mattered now except what was between him and Joseph Brooks and that golden sphere. What started sixty-six million years ago would be settled now, once and for all. That’s how it is on the other side of the Equal Sign.
* * *
It was General Grives who set it off.
Some might say he snapped, that after so many haunted nights it just got to him. Poor ole Grives, he never could convince those snide Beltway boys about Joseph Prometheus Brooks. Evil, they snickered when he left their offices; Grives thinks Brooks is Evil. How much easier it was for those prep-school cynics to swallow Stiller’s lustrous line. Gojiro, though, had no quarrel with the chunky soldier. Grives had his excuses. He’d seen the Heater, been marked by its Power, felt its horrible Revelation in his fundamentalist heart. He wasn’t a bad man, just dumber than a stump. In fact, taking into consideration typical sapienistic prejudice, you could say that what Grives did was only human, especially after he saw Brooks standing in front of that looming, leather-wrapped, red-eyed Beast.
“Satan! I’ll send you back to Hell!” the bejowled general shouted, snatching a rocket launcher from the shoulder of a gunnery sergeant, and bouncing a volley off Gojiro’s Triple-Ringed chest. A pointless, misinformed gesture, as any G-fan knows. Nevertheless, it is difficult to tell what might have happened if Stiller hadn’t shown up right then.
“Joseph! You’ve done it again,” the former cyclotronist shouted, stumbling from behind the stone house. His once elegant presence ruined by that exploding oil well, Stiller was carrying Brooks’s blackboard. “It’s remarkable,” he raved, a wild look on his singed face, “your greatest work. Do you have any idea of what this is worth? Billions! Trillions! Something like this will turn the defense industry on its head. I must contact the president immediately!”
At first Brooks paid Stiller no mind, but the ravaged Hungarian pushed forward. “Is this it—this globe? You have created the prototype already? Let me see!” He reached for it.
“No!” Brooks growled, flinging an elbow at Stiller.
The movement threw the worldshatterer off balance. Pitching forward, he tripped on a protruding rock. The gold sphere flew out of his hands and into the air.
Up. “Ah!” Sheila Brooks screamed.
Up. “Oh!” Komodo yelled.
Grives’s voice pierced the morning silence. “Beelzebub’s ball!” He drew his pistol, squinted, and fired.
The bullet inched through squares of air.
Lips pursed, eyes grew tight. Joseph Brooks looked up at the apexing sphere, then to Gojiro.
There was no sound except the distant click of film through a shutter’s gate. Up in the hills, Shig was getting it all.
* * *
Regarding what happened next, let’s say it came down to something the monster never could get straight, which is what makes a Hero. What do the latest polls say about swordswinging lone cats making their way through the arcane’s labyrinth? Does Courage alone spur them on? Gojiro would say no, nobody’s that brave; he’d say Great Deeds can never be predicted or precognitioned, that Saturday’s Hero is no Hero unless he does what he does in a week that Saturday doesn’t come. (For, truth be told, Sheila Brooks’s scenario for Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision was really nothing but a premise, a concept limited to bringing the key players together. What happened after that was an empty reel waiting to be filled in.)
No, Gojiro would say, if a Hero knew, a priori, what it took to be a Hero, Olympus would be an empty tract. The Deed must lurch like reflex, Prewire. And that’s how it was, a moment later, when, like automatic, he tonguespeared Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s wounded sphere from the desert air and jammed it through the parietal, deep into the Quadcameral.
Techwise, Brooks’s golden ball functioned in much same fashion as Komodo’s Pill, albeit on a larger scale. First it effected total vacuum intake; then, as a second stage, it exploded the matter within the source receptacle. Count one-Mississippi, two, if you want to imagine how it looked: a solid streak aimed between your eyes, a mystery train, a billion coaches long, clackety-clack into your head. Suffice it to say that the planet, and everything on it, was vortexing into Gojiro’s parietal, atomizing inside the Quadcameral.
Sometimes he saw faces, could pick out individuals. Some he knew, like Albert Bullins stunt-flying his mint-condition kamikaze, and Bobby Zeber on his Triumph, heading east. But then there’d come Tashkent and Mexico City, all in a lump. There were mountains, some Holy, some pincushioned with ski lifts. Oceans, too, the swell of mighty currents suddenly rerouted to a single downhill torrent. Forests, no earth beneath them to sink roots, coursed forth as so many densepacked Birnam Woods-come-to-Dunsinane, like straight out of Macbeth’s real bad trip. Australia zoomed in, a jagged frisbee. The planet peeled like fruit along the lines of longitude. All perimeters collapsed, no center held. Nothing was turned away. There was room for Everest, space for the frozen poles and lonely prairies. The noise was incredible, the ear-splitting creak of a giant wooden ark. The world churned, a molecular stew in the most bubbling of cauldrons, the fourth tier of the Quadcameral.
Then it stopped.
Gojiro opened his eyes and saw only the Encrucijada. The Valley hung there, alone. Beyond its red-ringed hills was nothing, only the blackness of space.
No sound. Except: “My own true friend!”
Good old Komodo, alive! Such a comfort to hear his voice. He was down there, with Sheila Brooks, standing at the monster’s feet. Them and no one else, save Joseph Brooks, still in his spot by the stone fence.
“Are you all right?” Komodo asked.
“All right?” Gojiro considered. “I guess so. I feel like the Statue of Liberty after closing time and they forgot to tell the tourists. Be okay, long as they don’t start banging on the windows.”
Komodo looked down, read from a piece of paper. “I have compiled some calculations that may aid you in what you must do next, my own true friend. I am afraid they are quite rough.”
“Rough?” That Komodo, what a guy! He watches the world sandstorm into a hole in his best friend’s head and he’s still counting the quantums. Stick him in Vegas, doubledown, and no house would be left standing.
“Based on the rate of vacuum influx effected by Mr. Brooks’s device, it is my opinion that the Instant of Reprimordialization will become available from 0.0239 seconds to 0.0246 seconds. 0.0246 seconds—that’s the maximum period, from the time of total engorgement.”
“Total what?”
“Engorgement. The point at which nothing is left in the world . . . nothing except yourself, that is. Only 0.0246 seconds, no more. Beyond that point, Permanent Dispersal will take over.”
“Then what?”
Komodo bit his lip. “Good luck, my own true friend . . .”
That was when Joseph Brooks spoke, his voice low and rumbly. “Sheila . . . forgive me.”
Tears streaking her parched face, Sheila reached out, kissed her father. “It’s okay, Dad. I love you.” They held each other, a dad and daughter who’d ridden the highways together, only to have their road return to this desolate and fateful place. Then they said goodbye, Sheila Brooks returning to Komodo’s side. And like that, the two lovers were gone, sucked into the Quadcameral.
Gojiro looked around, saw Shig. The froze-eyed boy was still in the hills, his camera running. Weird kid, nothing fazed him, not even the sudden disappearance of a Universe. Even now, he gave Gojiro the creeps. But
zap—he went in there with the rest. Too bad he’d miss shooting the climax, but that’s just the way it went.
* * *
Now the Big Throwdown could begin.
They stood there—Brooks and Gojiro, worldshatterer and King of Monsters, Opposer and Defender—etched out in a field of nothing, two to do the dance of the Evolloo. Twice before, their gazes had collided, fused, locked on. On Lavarock, they’d been a famous scientist and an unknowing zardplebe awaiting the confirming plunge into the Black Spot. The second time, just a few days ago, it had been between a dead man and a depressive movie star.
Now, the third time round: Scramble the riddle of the chicken and egg in a teflon pan and ask, who between them, Brooks or Gojiro, be which piece of Paracelsus’s puzzle? God makes Man?—Man makes God? That’s your toss-up question, Teachers’ State. Slap that buzzer down—either way, it’s no news.
Strange, Gojiro thought, how much he once hated Brooks—hated him more than hate itself!—and how that passion had turned the full 180. From Lavarock’s seamless quilt of zards, Brooks had chosen him. Made him Gojiro. Now the monster would repay what he owed.
The leviathan bent down, opened a clawfist. Brooks stepped onto the giant palm, stood there as the reptile raised him up. Up and up, so high that Brooks could look around and be sure that the task he set for himself had been accomplished: He’d vanished a World, and before him stood the Being whose calling was to Restore it.
Brooks smiled now. His eyes, freed from their search, almost twinkled. They were kindly, boyish. Brooks nodded to Gojiro, and Gojiro nodded back, proof their deal was done.
Then Brooks began to schag. He arched himself and jumped. Higher and faster than you’d figure an old man could, he flew through the still air, into the hole in the monster’s head, and was gone.
* * *
You know what it’s like to be alone, completely on your own, and in your head . . . a Zone? To have a billion Beams, a billion Bunches, every Line crisscrossing between your ears? Do you know how that feels? Of course you don’t. How could you? If you did, you’d be Him.
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