· · · · ·
There's no apparent end to the flowers, and the deeper they walk into the cave, the light stays the same, sourceless, as if they're moving within a bubble of pale dawn radiance, carrying it forward with them. Wilson thinks that if the cave is truly Paradise, then all of Paradise must be this light and these flowers. They can no longer see the cave walls, only the rocky ceiling. At last his digital screen registers something round and white at the edge of the display. It's massive, a white globe measuring more than two hundred feet in diameter. Yet as they draw near this surreal-looking object, he realizes that while it's big enough to crawl inside and walk around in—there's an open door for that very purpose—it can't be anywhere near as big as his instruments say. Its skin is lustrous and gleaming, like that of a pearl. Instead of being set at ground level, the door is maybe eighteen, twenty feet overhead, occupying an area on the pearl's upper curve. A track of crushed yellow flowers leads away from it, making it appear that the thing was tossed from a careless hand and rolled to a stop. Smears of bright blood streak the inside of the door.
A babble surges over the intrasuit channel. Baxter orders everyone except Wilson to shut up, fan out, and keep watch. Wilson punches up a shot of IQ, straight no chaser. It's time to be wise. He stares awestruck at the pearl while Baxter contacts command and, as the shot takes effect, he thinks that the pearl might well be two hundred feet in diameter. If they have, in fact, entered Paradise, then their bodies, according to the Qur'an, are twenty cubits tall, and this would place the pearl's size in a different perspective. That's bullshit, of course, but this is a bullshit mission. Bullshit might prove the key to survival.
"I can't raise 'em," Baxter says privately to Wilson. "Command channel's dead."
Wilson waits for an order.
"Go take a look up there." Baxter points to the door. "Stay private when you report."
Wilson checks the energy storage units in his magic boots. He crouches, leaps high, catches the edge of the door and swings himself over so he's braced, perched on the doorsill, looking down into the pearl. What he sees is opulence. Draperies of peach and turquoise silk, and tapestries on the walls; dishes of silver and gold; silken couches and pillows; ornate rugs, inlaid tables and chairs. Everything torn, scattered, broken, as after a violent home invasion. An archway leads to another opulently appointed room. The oddest thing, the floor—according to the placement of the door—should be canted out of true, the furniture all slid down to one end; but though toppled and knocked around, the furniture hasn't obeyed the laws of gravity, and if Wilson were to drop down, he would not be standing at a lean. It disorients him to see this.
He reports to Baxter, and Baxter says, "I'm coming up."
Baxter launches himself, grabs the door. Wilson holds out a gauntleted hand, helps him swing over. They crouch together in the doorway, awkwardly balanced, clinging to one another.
"Looks clear," Baxter says after scoping things out. "Maybe this is the way."
"The way? The way to fucking what?" says Wilson. "That's not the protocol, man. We're to reconnoiter the cave and report on what we find. We're not supposed to go climbing inside the shit we find."
"That's not how I understand the orders."
Baxter's indifference, his clipped GI tone, it pisses Wilson off. "I fucking respectfully disagree. I think the goddamn corporal's got his head up his ass."
"Check your display, man. See what the cave's readin'."
The cave reads infinite in all directions except up.
"Command channel is dead," says Baxter. "There's no direction out. We can wander around in these fuckin' flowers til we stink out our suits or we can explore this apparent goddamn habitation. I'm sayin' that's the way we go."
"I understand the corporal's logic. I admit it makes a certain degree of sense. However …"
"Cut the shit, man!"
"… I suggest it may not be the wisest course to jump down the first fucking rabbit hole we come to."
DeNovo signals on the intrasuit channel and Baxter tells him to report.
"You gotta see this!" DeNova says excitedly. "There's a big drop-off. Down in it's like a forest. Trees … all gold. Trunks and leaves, they're all gold!"
Wilson spots DeNovo in the distance, a tiny brown figure.
"Hell you doin' way out there? Get your ass back now!" says Baxter.
"It's amazing, Baxman!" says DeNovo. "Fucking beautiful!"
Wilson locates the digital DeNovo on his helmet screen and goes close-up on him. His expression is one of maxed-out glee, a delirious Italian cartoon hero. Wilson shifts to an overhead view, sees the drop-off, the ranks of digitally realized yellow trees and bushes. He shifts back to a close-up on DeNovo. Baxter is yelling, ordering DeNovo to return, when something dark sweeps across the screen and he's gone. Wilson glances toward the spot where he last saw DeNovo. Only yellow flowers. Alarmed voices chatter on the intrasuit channel. Baxter shouts them down, orders everyone back to the pearl.
"You see what it was?" he asks Wilson.
"I was watching my screen, man. It was just a blur."
Baxter nods toward the room below. "Jump on down in there."
"Baxman, I don't …"
"We got nowhere else to go. I need the door clear. Go."
Wilson jumps, makes a cushioned landing on his magic boots, dropping to a squat. He comes up, rifle ready, reading for life signs. "Still clear," he says to Baxter.
"Stay there!" Baxter continues urging the rest of the patrol to hurry and then he goes, "Aw, shit!", and screams at them. Wilson hears bursts of small arms fire and the concussion of grenades. He checks his screen. Wolves, he thinks when he sees the figures that are closing in on the pearl. But they're not true wolves, they've got human feet and hands … except the fingers have talons. They're knuckle-draggers, their arms incredibly long, covered in reddish brown hair, the same color as the mountain. They're long-jawed, too. Red-eyed. Their limbs are spindly and strings of drool sway from their chins as they move through the flowers, harrowing the much smaller figures who're racing toward the pearl. Even hunched over, their heads scrape the ceiling, so they must be forty, fifty feet tall — if he's to believe his instruments. But how can he believe, how can he accept these digital monstrosities as truth? He calls out to Baxter, asks what he's seeing, but Baxter's too busy shouting orders to respond. Wilson focuses on the helmet screen. Watches as the shambling gait of one werewolf carries it close to a running soldier. Janet Perdue. It snatches her up in a taloned hand and bites her in half like she was a candy bar with wriggling legs. Blood splatters as in Japanese anime. Shocked, incapable of belief, Wilson hits replay and watches it happen again.
A soldier appears framed in the doorway above and jumps down beside him. Gay Roban, looking terrified behind her faceplate. She unlatches her helmet and removes it, rips off the skullcap that's covered her close-cropped blond hair. She stares with dazed fixity at Wilson, then casts her eyes over the disarray of the room.
"Is it wolves up there, GRob?" Wilson asks, catching her arm. "Like werewolves?"
She pushes him away and says dully, "Fucking monsters."
Baxter jumps down, closing the door behind him as he drops, and GRob screeches at him. "Chickenshit asshole! You can't just leave 'em!"
"Check your screen." he says, and when she won't calm down, he shouts, "They're gone, goddamn it! Check it out!"
Acting stunned, GRob puts her helmet back on. Wilson goes wide-angle on his screen. Werewolves prowling about, bending to sniff at the flowers, then hurrying with a gimpy, hunchbacked gait to another spot and sniffing again. No soldiers are visible, but the fact that the werewolves are hunting for survivors causes Wilson to think some may be alive, their suits shut down, maybe burrowed under the dirt. Three patrol groups. Seventy-two soldiers. They can't be the only ones who made it. It was all so fast.
GRob lifts off her helmet. "Jesus!"
"Wrong fuckin' prophet," Baxter says flatly.
"Could be still some of
our people out there," Wilson says. "They could be shut down, they …"
"Could be?" Baxter spits out a laugh. "We ain't goin' back out there for 'could be.' Put that from your mind."
"We can't stay here." GRob slaps at the wall. "Something picked this goddamn thing up and threw it. You seen the track it left. Like, y'know? They fucking threw it! You wanna be here the son of a bitch comes back?"
"We're not stickin' around," says Baxter.
"We're not going outside, we're not sticking around …" GRob gets in his face. "You gonna make us disappear, Baxman? You got that much mojo?"
Baxter steps away from confrontation and aims a forefinger at her. "You best slow it down, woman!"
Her cheeks flushed, GRob drills him with a furious stare, and even in the midst of fear and freakery, Wilson feels the pull of an old attraction, this long-standing thing he's had for her. He wonders how he can think of sex, even fleetingly, even with GRob, who's muscled up but looks like a woman, not a steroid queen like Perdue. Escape, he imagines. His hormones offering him an out. He still can't accept that Perdue is dead. She was a mad fucking soldier.
"Punch yourself some downs," Baxter says to GRob. "Light level."
GRob doesn't move to obey.
"That's an order!" He looks to Wilson. "You, too."
"That's not cool, man! We can't be doing downs we're in the shit!"
"Hear what I said? That's an order!"
"I already did up. When the wolves showed," Wilson says, not wanting to dull his edge. "I went way light, but I did up."
Baxter eyes him with suspicion, then says wearily, "They're shaitans, not wolves. I told you about 'em in the carrier."
"I wasn't all the time listening."
"Muslim hell got some devils resemble wolves. That's what we saw."
"I thought this was supposed to be Paradise," Wilson says, and Baxter says, "Who the fuck knows? Maybe the ragheads back in the village weren't tellin' it straight. Maybe they're chumpin' our ass. Wouldn't be the first time."
GRob, keying up a drug mix, makes a disparaging noise. "We just gonna sit around and get high until the shit comes down? That the plan?"
Baxter checks the mix on her computer, tells her to do up, and then says to Wilson, "Read the pearl for her."
The interior of the pearl consists of chamber after chamber, what seems an infinite progression of rooms of varying proportions. Wilson reports this and Baxter says, "You got that, GRob? Infinite. There's this room, then another and another and another … Get the picture?"
GRob's leisurely tone reflects her new chemical constituency. "Naw, man. I don't got it. How's that possible?"
"Right! I'm goin' explain this whole thing."
She doesn't seem to notice the sarcasm in Baxter's voice and waits for him to deliver an explanation. Finally it appears to sink in. Her head droops to the side as if with the weight of acceptance that no explanation will be forthcoming. A smile touches the corners of her lips, the strain empties from her face. She might be seventeen, a sleepy girl waking after being with her lover, remembering the night they had. "This is probably the way to go," she says.
It's a vague statement, but Wilson, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, trapped inside a giant pearl that has no end, devils like werewolves roaming everywhere, without the guidance of command, and maybe sixty-nine dead, death by cartoon, he understands precisely what she means.
· · · · ·
1200 hours
· · · · ·
They pass through room after room, more than a hundred by Wilson's count, all essentially the same. Luxuriously appointed and in disarray, the only sign of previous habitation being the smears of blood on the door through which they entered the pearl. Shortly before noon they open a door and find that it leads out of the pearl, which is lying not in a field of flowers, but in the midst of a brass forest. Perhaps the same forest DeNovo mistook for gold, though Wilson's not clear on how the pearl ended up in the middle of it. Stunted-looking trees and undergrowth, every vein of leaf and fork of stem and twist of root wrought in cunning detail, rising to the roof of the cave. The temperature of the forest is near scalding, Steam rises from the brass foliage. The vegetation is too dense and interwoven to afford an easy passage. Baxter orders them back into the pearl and calls for a break. Says he's shutting down for an hour. He tells Wilson to close the door leading to the forest and to stand watch while they sleep. Wilson doesn't believe this is a good time to rest, but he's tired and raises no objection. At the center of the room they're in is a fountain, its basin covered in a mosaic of white and turquoise tiles. Liking the trickling sound of the water, Wilson sits on the lip, his rifle across his knees. GRob removes her helmet and lies down among some pillows. Baxter sits against the opposite wall, his legs stretched out.
Wilson's grateful for time alone. He needs to think and to augment thought he orders up another shot of IQ. He considers adding a jolt of God'n Country, but decides that the interests of the United States of America may well pose a conflict with the interests of his own survival, that—indeed—they have always done so and he has, until now, allowed them preeminence. He's done his duty, and he's way past the regulation limit for IQ—his heart doesn't need any more stress. The drug puts up blinders around his brain, prevents thoughts of home and comfort from seeping in, and he concentrates on the matter at hand. Where are they? What did this? That's the basic question. If he can understand what happened, maybe he can work out where they are. He references a scientific encyclopedia on his helmet screen, reads articles on quantum physics, not getting all of it, but enough to have a handle on what "changes on the quantum level" signifies. If the bomb caused such changes … well, a bomb being an entirely unsubtle weapon, the changes it produced would not be discrete ones. A chaotic effect would be the most likely result. He looks up the word "chaos" and finds this definition:
· · · · ·
"A state of things in which chance is supreme; especially: the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms."
· · · · ·
The place they're in, the cave, Paradise, whatever, could not, Wilson thinks, be described as disorganized, though the supremacy of chance may be a factor. What are the chances that they have not encountered anything in the cave other than things he's heard about from either the villagers or Baxter? Distinct form has obviously been imposed on a chaotic circumstance. There must be some anthropomorphic element involved. What you get is what you see or, better said, what you expect to see. Since the villagers were the first witnesses, and since they've been expecting to see Paradise all their lives, when something inexplicable happened they imposed the form of the Garden of Allah, the metaphorical forms of the Qur'an, on primordial matter and then spread the news so that anyone who came afterward would have this possibility in mind and thus be capable of expecting the same things. The devils? Maybe half the village expected not Paradise, but hell—thus the two were jammed together in an unholy synthesis. Or maybe, like Baxter suggested, the villagers were holding back some vital details. This explanation satisfies Wilson. He feels he might poke a few holes in it if he did more IQ, but he's confident the truth is something close to what he's envisioned. The idea that there may be a congruent truth does not escape him. It's conceivable the day of judgment, the day when hell is hauled up from beneath the earth, is at hand and that the bomb was the inciting event. None of this, however, helps him as he hoped it might. Knowing where he is has clarified the problem, but not the solution.
GRob stirs, stands, and comes to join him on the lip of the fountain. She unlatches her gauntlets and dips her bare hands into the water and splashes her face.
"Go on take a bath if you want," Wilson says, grinning. "I'll keep an eye out."
She shoots him a diffident look. "Uh-huh."
"Hey, I've seen your ass before."
"That was training. You see it now, you might take it for license."
The clear modulation of her voice
and her use of the term "license" alert him. "You're not on downs," he says.
"I boosted IQ when I racked out. I wanted to work through this mess."
"Yeah, same here."
"You hit on anything?"
Wilson tells her his theory in brief and then asks what she came up with.
"We're close," she says, patting her face with damp hands. "But I don't think this place has anything to with Paradise. I think it's all hell."
"How you figure?"
"Only things we've seen so far are flowers, the wolves, and a pearl with some blood on the door and nobody inside. Now maybe the pearl came from Paradise, but whatever dropped it, dropped it in hell. We find a door that leads out of it, it leads to the brass trees with the boiling fucking air." With a flourish, she wipes her left hand dry on her thigh. "Hell."
"Might be other doors."
"Probably thousands, but I don't get they're gonna lead us anywhere good." GRob cups her right hand, scoops up water and lets it dribble down her throat onto her chest. "Maybe you can reach Paradise from here, but I figure we might hafta pass through somewhere bad to get there. And even if we find it, what the fuck we supposed to do then? We're infidels, man. We're unbelievers."
"You may be taking this all too literally."
"Taking it metaphorically just makes you confused." It seems she's about to say more, but she falls silent, and Wilson says, "What?"
"Nothing."
"Don't hold back now. You got something, let's hear it."
"Okay." GRob dries her right hand. "Maybe it's BS, but back in Tel Aviv I was doing a tech lieutenant. Guy's always trying to impress me what a huge deal he was. Mr. I've-Got-A-Secret. He told me they were fixing up something special for Al Qaeda. A bomb. Didn't know what kind, but he was working on the triggering device. Part of it was this big fucking electric battery produced seventy thousand volts. So when I saw him at the compound …"
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 53