by Dean Koontz
A band of peace criers had gathered before a precinct house, for some unfathomable reason. They had stoned the windows. A phalanx of coppers was charging down the steps as I went by.
At a red light two blocks on, a stream of young militants burst from an alleyway to the right, half a block down a side street. They were chanting something, though I could not make out what it was. Behind them, a howler roared into view, its cupola roof narcodart gun cutting down the young people as they cursed the government, the enemy government, and anyone else who came to mind.
Before the light turned, I saw the howler roll over a young girl, snapping her back like kindling. That was not standard procedure, by any means. And before I could chalk it up to an accident, the driver of the armored vehicle rammed a boy no older than seventeen, crushed him against the steel pole of an arc lamp, and moved on.
I went through the light to avoid the uproar.
I had to detour around the elevated highway ramp I had intended to use, for there were several hundred people on it, setting up roadblocks in a display of civil disobedience. I noticed that for the first time there were adults with the peace criers. In fact, it seemed that there were more adults than young people.
I took the next ramp, went up, and struck for AC at my top speed. In the time since I had heard the morning news, what could have happened to open the adult ranks like this? My heart beat too fast, and I felt a gnawing urgency to do something, anything. But what?
The only thing I could do was esp Child, find new weapons, make our side stronger so that, if there was a war, we would win and at least a semblance of normality would return in which Melinda and I could carve our own niche and be alone.
I suppose such an attitude was not noble. But war itself leaves no room for nobility. Only the clever survive. And not always do they survive intact By the time I reached the government building, I had made my decisions. I loved Melinda. I feared Child. He could throw me out-and perhaps he could swallow me up. There was something behind his repeated warnings to leave his thoughts alone. Something to do with the G association I had chanced upon the day beforesomething to do with God. I could not sacrifice myself in that strong, mutated subconscious. Yet I could not permit the war and its destruction to touch my life, to end the first warm relationship I had ever had with a woman. Life was only now worthy of living. I could not permit the Chinese to snatch it away from me. So I would go in his mind this last time, rip loose everything that I found and send it up. Then I would get out, collect my cash, and beat a hasty retreat. I would tell them first thing when I got there: after this, the job is ended, go in peace.
As with most plans, nothing went that way.
They were waiting for me when I got there. Morsfagen was the center of a flurry of dispatches. Messengers boys came and departed, carrying sheafs of paper. He signed and checked and rejected, and somehow managed to keep track of what was going on with Child at the same time.
Harry fidgeted nervously with his hands, tearing at his fingers as if they were detachable. There were bags under his eyes; the old tic had reappeared in his left cheek; his hair was uncombed.
I esped out to see what was troubling him, breaking the rule which I had established of my own accord. I violated him.
On the surface of his mind, it floated in horrid detail.
The thought symbol his psyche had given it was a bloated body floating in a pool of blood. Beneath the image, I read it: WAR. The rumors were not just rumors any longer. Brushfire stuff had gotten hotter, though the details seemed vague in his mind. A black, rotting corpse, floating in clotted pools of blood...
Extremely shaken, I sat down at the table and looked across at Morsfagen. There were tiny beads of perspiration on his chin and forehead. His big hands were full of communiques, and they seemed to shiver just the slightest bit.
Damn them! Damn them all!
"The details?" I asked.
"Alliance troops attacked the Chinese division which had crossed the Amur River, drove them back into Chinese territory. Forty-seven Chinese killed. Four Japanese. Seven Alliance troops: two American, one British, and the rest Russian. An hour later, Zavitaya ceased to exist. No radio in or but. The nuke missile site there does not respond to calls. Belogorsk reports a tremor and a play of odd lights in the sky. Seismographs say it was a pocket-bomb, a very low-yield nuke. The troops at the border no longer report back. The Asians have moved into Russian territory with a vengeance. No confirmation yet. But you can bet on it."
"I'll help," I said.
"You're damn right you will." His face was not pretty.
"Is he ready?"
Morsfagen looked at Child. "Tranced," he said. "We were waiting for you before administering the Cinnamide.
What have you come up with overnight? What do you think about yesterday?"
I shrugged. "Nothing more than what I've already said.
He threw me out because I was reading some thought stream he did not want me to see. It was easy for him, because I never expected it. I was still underrating his potential. I won't do that again."
"Certain?"
"As certain as I can be."
"How is that?"
"Very."
"Let's begin, then."
"Some things have to be done first," I said. "Wake him from the trance. Tell him I have not been here yet. Tell him I've disappeared and that, until I'm found, you'll have to go on without me. Tell him you'll be interrogating him while he's drugged and that he better come across if he knows what's good for him. Ham it up a little. But make it sound convincing. After he is tranced and drugged again, I'll go in secretly. Maybe he won't even know that I'm there."
A black, bloated body (Melinda) floating...
Damn them to Hell!
Morsfagen attended to removing the mutant from the room and going through the procedure I had suggested.
"Are you sure of yourself, Sim?" Harry asked. He sounded as if he wanted me to quit. But we both knew that was impossible. Only Child could develop the ultimate weapon, a weapon that would make war obsolete. I had to go in there until he formulated it-possibly urge him into it if he was unwilling. But there was no backing downnot with the world and Melinda hanging on everything that transpired in this room.
They brought Child back in ten minutes. He was tranced and be was drugged.
The world was heavy on my shoulders and Death was walking with me... ...and... ... like a cat with cotton feet, I went quietly, quietly, quietly...
Like a ghost in an old house, I went without form.
Like the breezes of spring, I walked softly.
There was no echo of my steps, and the labyrinth was wanner than usual. The walls were actually unpleasantly hot to the touch, a strange change from the clinging cold that had infested the place. I rounded a bend and saw the Minotaur sitting on his haunches, unaware of my presence.
He was reading a leather-bound Bible, completely absorbed in whatever the verses had to tell him.
Slowly, so as to disturb nothing, I passed. He never looked up.
Pasiphae, here is your unholy child.
Minos, your labyrinth is ugly. It needs a paint job and some common comforts.
Theseus, keep your weapons girdled to your hip, for there will be no killing of a sad and unpretentious Minotaur.
The pit was a tangerine color, pulsating with mind-heat which coursed upwards, washed the rim, flowed down the stone corridors, evicting the leeching cold. The center of the pit was a fierce white dot.
I reached out and grabbed the nearest thought. It was a weapon. But it was nothing that could cure the world's ills, no ultimate dragon as I sought.
A formula to cause ratlike mutations in unborn babies...
A beam that could dehydrate living tissue, make a living body into a dry, dead corpse in seconds...
There were many of the G association thoughts, several different progressions of them which led toward one distant point whose nature I could not quite ascertain... ... an inordinately large
number of G thoughts. I was interested in exploring their source and their destiny, but they did not seem to be what I needed.
Then I found it. A stray thought, the ultimate weapon.
F... Field... Force Field capable of stopping all entry by anything, including air, permitting neither bombs nor bacteria passage... Field...
I latched onto it and gently nudged it toward the main stream, toward the waterspout. The ultimate weapon-the weapon to make weapons obsolete.
I thought I was being subtle, but I was underestimating Child. There was a clacking of hooves behind me.
"Get out!"
No. You don't understand.
"It's you who doesn't understand!"
He pounced. I stepped quickly aside, struck at him, and sent him flailing over the brink, into the pit...
Far out at sea, the Force Field Theory was shot up the waterspout. Soon it would be spoken in a dark room, taped, transferred to paper, and sent by special messenger to those who might put it into practice.
Sighing, I turned to go. But with a low, animal grumble, the walls of the labyrinth began to sway and the floor to shake and buck.
From somewhere down in the pit, there was a scream, a deafening ululation which spread throughout the caverns, echoing and re-echoing. Clutching the edge of the pit, the Minotaur was pulling himself onto the earthen ledge. I could see that it was not the Minotaur who screamed, but I could not see anyone else.
What is it? I asked above the noise.
His eyes were wild. He opened his mouth, and I watched horrified as snakes came slithering forth.
I kicked him. He fell back into the pit, all the way to the churning bottom this time.
When I turned back to the caverns, the ceiling caved in before me, dirt and stones spilling over my shoes. And there was no longer an exit. I wasn't going to get out!
I turned to the sea and saw the waterspout dying, withering. There was no hope in that direction, either. No hope! And the situation was so ironic, like Jesus finally sealed into his tomb. But I had given up that delusion, hadn't I?
What, for crissakes, is going on? I yelled above the constant screaming from the pit. Then it occurred to me that I might find the nature of the disaster by latching on to a stray thought. I reached out into the turbulent river and found all of them starting the same way:
G... G... GGGGGGGGGG... leadingG to Grass rollinG over the hills... to G... G... GGG God God God like a tornado whirlinG across the Glen, relentless, relentless... GGG GGod GGod... GODGODGOD... random... what purpose?... trap Him like the wind to find His purpose, find my purpose... GGGGGGG...
I realized the nature of it then. Child's purpose in life had been shattered when he met me-just as mine had been shattered when I encountered him. He could no longer pretend to himself that he was the Second Coming, the virgin birth. But he had no mechanical psychiatrist to treat him and could find no woman to love or who would love him. He was so restricted in his physical existence that he had to turn to theory and intellectual search to find an answer.
GODGODGODGOD... trapped in a cavern to tell answers... GGG...
I followed the thoughts to their end; I was swept along with them against my will. I never should have listened in the first place. It was the ultimate theory, and he had proven it beyond a doubt...
He had tried to contact God.
He had found the whereabouts of the Supreme Being, the plane of existence upon which He lived.
He asked what meaning there could be to life and to the chaotic world in which man lived. And he was answered; he solved his problem.
He asked what was at the center of creation. And he found out.
And now I was trapped down there.
There were three of us.
Child, Simeon, and God.
And we were all three quite insane.
* * *
TWO
Humanity
Restored...
I
Trapped within the convoluted miasma of Child's mind, I eventually lost all consideration of what was real and what was not. Here, in the fascinating chiaroscuro ruins of his subconscious mind, the shattered mental analogues were every bit as concrete as the world I had known outside of Child. The stones were textured by the weather as they were in the world beyond; the trees had as many leaves of as many different shades of green as any I had seen before; the wind was not a constant, but changed from bitter cold to almost suffocating warmth, and was moderate more often than not. There were birds and a wide variety of land-bound animals, which, though subtly different or wildly mutated from their "real" parallels, were always believable, detailed and rich with color and habits. At first, I catalogued the differences, the fine points of distinction between the real world and this analogue of Child's interior, but that only made me melancholy, unsatisfied, and soon had me acting like a manic-depressive. I realized that, if this were to be my home for the remainder of my days, I would have to forget the other world I had known. And for my own peace of mind, I would also have to forget that when Child died, we all died, trapped here inside him. It was bizarre, but it was my new reality and required my swift adaptation.
So I adapted.
At first, there had been a time of madness. When I recovered my wits, I did not know how much time had passed, and I could not remember much of what I had done. I remembered running along canyons of stone which shimmered and changed colors around me, thrust up, dissolved, formed new projections, a living rock that sang mournful dirges and sometime burst into long, wailing screams that made me fall and cover my ears and scream in sympathy. There were visions of mottled skies that were sometimes all shades of yellow, sometimes all shades of red, sometimes an ugly whirl of black and brown. I had climbed in cold places and had followed descending trails into warm ones. I had been on strange seas with waters thick like syrup, and in lakes where the surface reeked of brandy. I had seen dark shapes, like huge spiders, dancing along endless webs of sticky white thread, and I had seen maggots crawling in the walls, disappearing in the stone when I came close enough to examine them. At times, a force of monumental strength passed me, a whirling madness of surging energy, which was He, which was God, the maddest of the three of us. And then I was sane, lying on the floors of a wide tunnel, stretched full length, as if I had fallen while running from something that terrified me.
I sat up, looked around me, knew that it was so, that I was trapped here, and decided there was nothing to do but make the most of it.
Besides, I nurtured a grain of hope. Perhaps the mind of the wizened boy, this Child, would regain its sanity.
Perhaps, then, there would be a way out, a way to return to my own body. They would keep me alive, back there in AC, feed me through my veins, keep my body processes functioning, hoping for my return just as I was. If Child returned to normal, I could go upwards through the now blocked conscious mind and return to my own flesh. Free.
With even the smallest minim of such hope, it was better to maintain my sanity instead of losing it again and being able to return to my own body as a madman.
And, too, there was the possibility that, with my mind intact, I could search out this nightmare landscape and find some chink in the cold stone that kept me from leaving. I could explore for days on end, having nothing better to do, and perhaps discover the passage out. I knew the chances were small. Child's mental analogue was immense, as big as an entire world. It would require years and years just to investigate each corner of it. And a mind destroyed, a mind seeking total refuge from reality, would hardly leave any breach of its seal against the world, no matter how small that breach and no matter in what distant corner it existed.
But I had hope. It was all I had, and it was warmly nourished.
II
Sane and determined, I set out on foot to know the place where I now found myself. There was no need to provision for the journey, no matter what its length, for I no longer held the needs of flesh. There was no such thing as hunger, only a vague memory of what thirst ha
d once been. I couldn't know pain, nor pleasure-except on an emotional, mental level. Though the world seemed physically as tangible as the real one, I moved through it like a spirit, autonomous. I could have formed food and drink from the air-as I had formed that sword to fight off the Minotaur, for I still contained the same level of psychic energy. But it would have been a charade with but a single purpose: to make this world less alien and more like the one I had left. And I had decided that I could only survive by forgetting that other reality and accepting this one fully.
There was no need to rest as I walked, for my analogue body did not tire. I could run, letting the wind whip my hair, for hours on end, without feeling a sore muscle, the tugging fingers of gravity.
I came out of the caves onto a ledge no more than two feet wide that wound out of sight along the side of an immense gray mountain studded with shrubs and gnarled, weathered trees whose extensive roots tangled through the rocks like tentacles. Above, mists obscured the skies, thick roiling masses of gray clouds that moved fast from horizon to horizon. Fingers of the fog came down now and then, slithered along the mountainside, touched the trees and wrapped my legs so that I could not even see my feet I walked upward along the trail, deeper into the darkness that lingered there. At places, the trail disappeared, and I had to climb across to where it started again. I feared nothing, for I could not be hurt. As long as Child lived and as long as I was trapped within him, I was invulnerable.
Days or perhaps weeks later, I had gained the summit of the great mountain. It was constructed of four pinnacles, each as tall as a man, which formed, between them, a nest large enough to stand in. I nestled there, hunched over, and looked out across the world that was his tortured mind.