The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  While in the flickering shadows near the desk and camera screens, Mary Ash radiated grief.

  “Nickelbaum,” she said, her voice breaking with the admission. “I enjoyed what I did to him too much. I’ve got to go now…”

  Crystal had come over, and now she and Tim traded a look, both sensing what the girl meant.

  “Mary!” shouted Crystal over the din of the Booth equipment and the battle raging behind them. “There’s no need for sacrifice! Please don’t be a martyr!”

  Mary Ash offered her a tight, little smile. “It’s not about that. I wasted it. I wallowed. You saw how I wallowed, Mr. Cale, didn’t you? I could have had my revenge just by living.” Another laugh that ended this time in a sob. “A clean new life! Fresh and warm as a blanket out of the dryer!”

  Neither Tim nor Crystal bothered to answer. Tim wanted to tell the girl that she was being too harsh. He wished he had a brilliant way to articulate the question that needed to be spoken: How could she possibly put it behind her in coming back? Her rape and torture and her own murder. Who had the right to demand of her anything different? She was entitled to mourn the person she once was. She could still live, just as she said, only to her, it was too late. Life insists on constant, expedient re-invention, and she had floated back to this world a glacier, untouched by the relentless changes she could track in her mind for every soul on Earth.

  “We didn’t fix anything with what we brought back,” said the girl. Her voice was soft, but they could still hear her under the noise of Limonov’s guttural yells and the Booth equipment humming and getting louder.

  “Thank you anyway for the Louvre,” she said. “The Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. And oh, yes, the Rodin Museum.”

  “But there’s more to see, Mary! Please!”

  “Thank you. But it doesn’t matter.”

  She opened her cupped hands, and Tim and Crystal saw again the shuddering, filthy miniature version of Mary Ash, naked and being raped, growing out of her palm. Of course, thought Tim. That Nickelbaum was now gone made no difference to her carrying it. She would always carry it, forever.

  “Let me fix something before I go,” she said, and the shrieking, sobbing thing in her hands melted into her skin, and then she was grabbing Tim’s arm. Resigned, perfectly calm, she looked towards the Karma Booth, making her intent clear.

  “What will that do?” asked Tim.

  Mary Ash turned and laughed with abattoir glee. She was leading Tim gradually towards the first chamber, and he halted, shaking away her grip. “How can killing yourself—”

  “Please, trust me!”

  She yanked on his arm to take Tim with her. He knew instinctively that she meant him no harm, but he couldn’t understand why she was pulling him along. As he tried to drag her back, he didn’t recognize the sudden strength the girl had. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, but she was still tugging him with little effort towards the chamber.

  Limonov and Emily took no notice of them, locked in their horrifying duel. Mary Ash and Tim were approaching the chamber at an opposite angle, and Limonov was still fixated on Emily as his obstacle.

  Tim didn’t understand. Yes, Emily had started the equipment, but Mary Ash couldn’t know how it worked. Yet the lights in the chamber kept flashing and now they absorbed her into their sunburst stream, carving into Mary Ash’s slender frame seconds before she poised herself behind the tinted glass. She let Tim go—

  Physically, at least.

  He cried out as a storm thundered in his brain. Lives piled up on each other—thoughts and images from millions, no billions. The remnants of curried dishes for orphan children and slices of wedding cake for a Boston couple, the smell of hay on a Montana ranch for a girl of thirteen and a young man’s first look at the Duomo Cathedral in Milan, the life-light dying for an insurgent in Monsul thanks to a U.S. army sniper. Life and life and life and too many events and he knew what Mary Ash had passed on to him before she walked through the curtain of white photons. He wouldn’t be able to contain it all for long.

  Limonov was still battling Emily—and winning. She sobbed and fell to the cement floor, and Limonov would not be fooled a second time. The nimbus of light around Emily dissipated and faded. The Russian kicked her savagely in the stomach and stepped over her to head to the chamber, still pouring out its display of pulsing colors and flashes.

  Tim ran after him.

  “Splinters,” he muttered.

  Mary Ash had said it once, and he knew now what she meant, and now was the time to use her idea.

  We’re all connected, he thought.

  Mary Ash had passed something along to him, and he had only seconds to master it and figure out what to do with it, but he had no choice.

  “Limonov!”

  Perhaps he didn’t need to scream at the top of his lungs to get the maniac’s attention. Let him think it’s bravado, he thought. Let him think it’s desperation. He knew what he had to do now.

  Limonov laughed, shaking his head in a silent message of “Too late,” but he didn’t guess the truth. Tim no longer wanted to keep him from the chamber. He wanted to help him into it.

  Into the nova of a glass capsule. Into the cleansing light, followed by exploding, shooting stars…

  At the last second, he didn’t know if his plan would work. The chamber’s light bounced off Tim’s face and his white shirt sleeves, and the whorls and nebulae forced his eyes shut, but not before he caught a final glimpse of Crystal, staring at him with terrified concern and much more… A tender gratitude and devotion for his daring to make it right. Eyes almost slits with the bursting whiteness, he fixed his eyes on her, wanting to stay.

  All while he passed on Mary Ash’s legacy.

  Viktor Limonov shrieked in pain. Tim held on, knowing his limbs and extremities were intact, knowing the light would not carve him as it did the dragon he had by the tail. Limonov wasn’t flailing and screaming because of the process of the Booth; it was because of the terrible gift he was passing on. And the thing Limonov feared the most locked him in a posture of hysterical, frenzied defiance, his skin erupting with boils, pustules—but in each sore and inflammation was a face—

  Tim let go and dashed out of the chamber, slamming the door shut. Limonov, trapped inside, quaked in epileptic spasms as his skin grew a mosaic of a billion faces. And a billion more. And another. The light of the Karma Booth opened him at last as it did every executed prisoner, yet the atoms and vortexes kept on shimmering with the features of anonymous souls, until Limonov disappeared in a glistening topographical map of human portraits. The face-face-face-face-face of a palm, with so many portraits like the compound eye of an insect, slammed once against the thick index of glass before the vision tore open into the familiar constellations of the Booth procedure, the horse head nebulae and comets and dazzling lights that signaled Viktor Limonov didn’t exist anymore. Not here. Perhaps not anywhere.

  “What happened to him?”

  The question came from Miller, looking haggard but appearing to recover from his ordeal.

  “I forced him to take what Mary gave me,” answered Tim. “Her ability to know what’s happening to every human being around the world.”

  He looked around now for the girl. Gone. He had expected it, but still… He had hoped. He’d hoped she hadn’t given up her life.

  Let there be peace for her elsewhere then.

  “Son of a bitch put me through the wringer so I’m kind of slow,” said Miller. “He can’t die when he goes through the Booth. We all agreed he can’t die in there, right?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” explained Tim. “I didn’t kill him. Not technically. I figured the Karma Booth still processes him somehow, and that’s where Mary Ash’s ability came in. She saw billions of lives, every minute of them—holding them, keeping them safe. You were right all along, Andrew. Limonov never went after her, and that’s why. When the Booth processed him this time, he didn’t have just his abilities he stole from the other resurr
ected victims. He had an ocean liner of baggage—all the dreams and aspirations and tragedies and loves of billions of people, plus who knows how many sentient animals and insects. All the reincarnation possibilities.”

  “He’s not dead?” asked Crystal.

  “No,” said Tim. “But my guess is that he’s split into a gazillion sub-atomic particles now, scattered in each one of us and countless others. There is no Limonov consciousness anymore. He was overwhelmed by Mary Ash’s power. Evil fueled him every step of the way, and there’s no empathy in evil. So he had no empathy to control this mind-blowing omniscience she had.”

  “You know, man,” remarked Miller. “You compared him once to a pathogen. If that fits then, hey, you’ve just infected the human race with that psycho.”

  Tim rolled his eyes. He didn’t want to argue, not anymore. “Everybody on this planet has been coping with a spark of a bad impulse since time began. I doubt a whiff or a dust cloud of Limonov will make any difference.”

  “Sub-atomic particles don’t travel in ‘whiffs’ or ‘dust—’”

  “Let it go,” Crystal told Miller, patting his shoulder. “Where’s Emily?”

  They glanced around, searching the room, and Crystal checked the TV monitors. Miller poked his head out into the hallway. Emily was gone, too. Of course.

  “Maybe she went home, wherever home is,” said Crystal. “But what about the others? The ones Limonov murdered? Gudrun Merkel, Edward Brewah, the little boy? Do you think they went… back? I mean to their higher planes of existence?”

  “Let’s hope so,” answered Tim. “It’s not like we can ever be sure, but I’d like to think they did.”

  “Faith,” murmured Crystal, with a little smile.

  “Never,” replied Tim. “Guarded optimism. I’m tired. Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  He remembered that Emily Derosier had told him while he was in hospital that she had given him a gift. He could “open it” any time he was ready, and Crystal could even join him if she liked. “If you two decide to move forward together.”

  After a couple of days, he understood. When he explored the Latin Quarter now, there was a palimpsest of memory that could emerge through his consciousness whenever he wanted it to. Her memories. Figures of legend in art and writing sat and smoked and drank and quipped bon mots in the cafés, and he heard the gossip they offered her and could recall her replies. But it was more than that, more than insights into her celebrity friends. Those with cameo roles, fondly remembered in her life, also breathed again, her local butcher and her confidante in a dress shop. He was aware of every fresh loaf of bread bought in a market and every barometric shift in political mood as her local neighbors listened to the radio. She was gone for good, having returned to whatever higher level she called home today, but she had given him her era, that age that he idolized from behind a barrier of time.

  He and Crystal walked hand in hand on an afternoon down Boulevard Raspail past the Café de la Rotonde, and she told him how her mind was flashing on people she didn’t know… and yet she did. Conversations were so vivid, and there were faces she recognized, belonging to strangers she felt affection for. Emily’s friends—now theirs. Orlando Braithewaite’s necessary doubts and the horrors of the Karma Booth had bound her and Tim together, but there was also this gift that they could share.

  “I miss her,” said Crystal as they walked on. “Not so much the woman we met as… the woman we know.”

  “I do, too,” said Tim.

  Maybe that was Emily Derosier’s point in leaving them this unique view. Maybe she and Mary Ash were not so very different in some respects.

  Tim and Crystal both had debriefings and reports, people to answer to. Tim flew back to Washington for another session with the President and select cabinet secretaries, while Crystal had another appointment with 10 Downing Street.

  Two days later, back in his office in New York, Matilda handed Tim a set of interview requests as thick as a pad of Post-it notes. He swept it into his recycling bin. He would have been happy months ago to appear on CNN or even Fox News, which he detested. It was good for business and brought in the clients. No more, at least not for a long time. Thanks to his hefty fees billed to the government, he wouldn’t need to work for months, except for his lectures and duties at the university. And he had no desire whatsoever to speculate on karma with armchair pundits.

  Andrew Miller had somehow got his direct line and had left him a voice mail. He was being awarded some prestigious science medal next week in Washington, and Tim was invited to the banquet if he cared to come. He could naturally bring a date, and yes, Miller had a good idea of who the consultant would bring if she were in town, always easy on the eyes—

  Delete. Tim wouldn’t be going. He decided Matilda could send the young genius a congratulatory card.

  He managed to dig himself out of his neglected correspondence, including an email to his faculty’s dean over a suggested new course curriculum, when his phone rang. Matilda put Crystal through.

  “Some old business to cover before the personal stuff,” she announced. “MI6 has unconfirmed reports out of Tanzania that Orlando Braithewaite is in a private hospital. Now that we know where he is, he hasn’t bothered to hide much. Maybe he doesn’t need to anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s dying, apparently. Pneumonia of all things, in the middle of Africa.”

  “How quaint of him.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We don’t know what dying means as far as he’s concerned,” mused Tim. “Huh, check that. We don’t know what it means anymore for any of us.”

  “You helped me when I had my little crisis of faith. Take some time off and let me help you.”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve any prayers,” warned Tim.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it with you. We did good, Tim. It’s over. Someone can try to put one of the Booths back together, but we know they’ll never get them to work.”

  “I know,” murmured Tim.

  Matilda had left the television on in his study, and he reached for the remote. Some amateur footage caught his eye, and he couldn’t explain the impulse to watch, he just knew he had to. But then the blur and jump cuts were gone, and there was a new item on about a garbage workers’ strike in Italy. Despite the Booth’s revelations over the infinite, the world was getting on with its prosaic material concerns.

  “You sound tired,” said Crystal.

  “I am. About that help you offered… How much leave time they give you at Counter Terrorism, DI Anyanike?”

  A brief laugh, and he was grateful that she could keep a light mood, that she could push the concerns of the Karma Booth away now. Yeah. A rest was the answer. You can never escape the world, he thought—well, not in this lifetime anyway. But there were places where you might enjoy the view and dream of simply existing, without a thought for what happened after or what deity might be responsible for Creation.

  “I get enough,” she answered. “And I can certainly file this rubbish under psychological leave. You like Scotland?”

  Not particularly, he thought, but he kept that to himself. The news channel on the television was doing the fifteen-minute wheel of top stories, and now it was replaying the amateur video.

  “How about Spain?” he asked.

  “Turkey. Nice beaches.”

  “Done. I’ll email you my flight details.”

  She said great and hung up as he turned up the volume on the television. The amateur video was for a story about big cats at a zoo in San Francisco. Greta, a female mountain lion born in captivity that had known the zoo’s chief veterinarian all her life, had suddenly lunged from her cage on Tuesday. She had torn out the woman’s throat. The mountain lion had to be put down.

  As the digital cam zoomed in, Tim saw the flicker of higher sentience in the yellow feline eyes. Then he had to snap the television set off. He didn’t want to know any more.

  About the Author


  Jeff Pearce has had an eclectic career as a radio talk show host, a farm reporter (without ever seeing a farm), a ghostwriter for an Indian community newspaper and a journalism teacher in Burma. He has also written several works of historical non-fiction. He can be found on Twitter @jeffpropulsion

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  http://www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London, SE1 9GF, UK

  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  http://www.harpercollins.com