"Noel, you're phasing.” Ny'a slipped her arm around his waist. “You were right to come here. We are right to stay and make our own way on Errth."
Noel nodded. His attention shimmered with memories Leon had shared about his felonious life in the park. Among the gingko trees ahead, in a leopard spray of shadows, a figure stood out from morning joggers, dog walkers and turtles—one of Leon's rivals, a gaunt player with a chewed face, pocked and pitted. Noel went straight for him. Head shoved forward, eyes squarely leveled, body language proved sufficient to provoke the strongman. Gnawed face snarling, he came forward, and in three strides went down on his knees and wept.
* * * *
The rising red moon impersonated a vast furnace. Lunar silhouettes, Noel and Ny'a stood at the crest of an access path through a landfill. Night above, sugared with stars, flicked needles of green light, and the cool air stank of decay. Below, a limousine waited in a marshaling yard, high beams illuminating a cane road to the highway.
The most powerful crime boss of the northeast, a strongman with government connections, occupied the limo, observing the scene on a laptop monitor from a tiny roof camera. He centered on the young couple in their strange apparel.
At his command, a sniper took down the woman. Skull shards flew like sod from a divot.
He didn't dare kill the man yet. This Leon, a low-level cashier, had terrorized all the managers of the city franchise. How? Threats had reached the regional protector, the crime boss's boss, who wanted this straightened out pronto—or else the crime boss would lose protection and become another victory in the drug war.
"Bring him in."
The command fell into dead air.
He switched to the sniper's visor cam, and the slain woman's face appeared, skew-eyed, rayed with blood. Ghastly green night vision jarred, then locked on a young man, the target, searching into the camera aggrieved. The sniper appeared to be kneeling before him, shuddering.
One look from the boss unleashed his personal guards. Two suits, machine pistols drawn, exited the limousine.
A wrathful figure in white bodysuit laced and strapped like an asylum inmate descended the dumpster road, loping straight into the headlights, long hair lashing.
"Shoot!” The boss's cry rang tinny and flat in the guards’ earpieces. Extremities numb, the two men staggered backward, trigger fingers frozen. “Shoot him!"
Noel charged, grimacing, and the guards dropped before him, curling into fetal distress. Plucking a radio from one of the guard's jackets, he sauntered to the boss's tinted window. Rage slid off Noel's pallid face, leaving an equable, intent stare. “Open the door."
"What do you want?"
"Same as the others."
The boss stiffened. Each of his underlings had divested all financial holdings to the last dollar, including personal homes and vehicles, and donated the funds to charities. Product got hosed on the spot, flushed down drains. And men who had been cutthroat managers cowered in spiderholes, returning none of his calls.
"Who are you?” The boss thumbed into his cell phone the number of an ally. “What have you done to my men?"
"My name is Noel, and I've taken Leon's place. I'm from two million years in your future. An accident stranded me here with Ny'a—the woman you shot back there."
"Are you laughing at me?"
Noel tapped the radio against his dark reflection. “Just open the door."
The boss repeated calmly, “My men? What happened?"
"For my own protection, my body is designed to excrete a compound that imprints hostile brains with the most extreme fear and submissiveness toward me. Works instantly, first whiff. Lasts a lifetime.” Noel rapped the window. “Open the door."
"No."
"You have to. You're next in the strongman hierarchy. Neutralize sufficient number of alpha males in nodal positions, men such as yourself, and world history changes—our history.” He knocked again. “So, come on, open up. It's for the children."
"Beat it. This car is bulletproof. You're not getting in, no matter how crazy you are. My friends will be here soon."
"My friend's already here."
Ny'a ambled into the headbeams, tunic ruffling like water, hair coils of snakes, face blood-welded.
"You thought she was dead?” Noel asked this in a stony whisper. “She's not even born."
Ny'a stepped to the window, and the jade she clicked against the glass filled the interior with ghost light, a shimmer like the start of a migraine. And the door clacked open.
* * * *
Cirrus clouds wove the blue sky like spider's silk. In his solarium office atop a corporate tower of red stone adobe, the latest strongman crossed ostrich-skin boots on a desktop of petrified wood and listened impassively to Noel's story. Unlike the half dozen security officers Noel had left cringing under desks and sobbing in stairwells, this strongman remained unperturbed.
Finely weathered as a veteran astronaut, the bald, rangy man leaned back, far enough for a shave. “The Contexture sounds to be a demiurge.” He watched from behind tinted lenses that made his stare look like smoke. “You all know that word in Heavinside? Demiurge?"
"Deity of an order less than omnipotent,” Ny'a replied with undisguised disdain for this self-possessed creature, this human accident. In claret red pant suit with flowing, Byzantine lines and tinsel-hem, she walked the perimeter of the solarium, alert for weapons. Even though Sierra Tree had cautioned that Aberrants existed, the appearance of one arrived like a beat of the world's heart, a throb of mystery, the only encounter between Noel and a dominant male that fell to pieces just like a dream. At any moment, the strongman could serenely pull a pearl-handled Colt from a drawer, explode Noel's brains out the back of his skull, and justifiably plead self-defense. “The Contexture is not divine. Only of a higher geometry. Spacetime is a shadow of Context."
"Whatever you say.” The strongman held up both hands and framed a stare of smoke. “I ain't pretending to understand. But I believe. Every word. How else interpret you sitting here—and my security detail sniveling out there?” He basked in cloudshine reflections from off a sheet-glass panorama of desert buttes. Behind him, refinery stacks gasped blue flames above tableland banded in ice cream colors. “Okay. You all traveled two million years to visit me. A demiurge allowed it. As an act of compassion. Huh!” He pulled down the corners of his mouth and aimed a cloud stare at Noel, who sank deeper into his steer-hide seat, deeper into his thunderstorm-blue suit tailored from fabulously soft guanaco. “A demiurge with a heart. And you say you're not religious?"
Noel sat forward in his seat, not sure what to say now that his history of the future had reeled out uselessly. They had a problem. What to do about a strongman with a short circuit in the limbic brain, a congenital defect, a twisted twist of DNA that overfilled him with id and cunning unhampered by anger, fear—or conscience? “There are religious communities—” Noel began.
The strongman cut him off, “—in Heavinside. It's all there. I understand that. But you two. You're not religious?"
Ny'a stared bleakly from across the solarium. “Not the way you mean."
"What do I mean?"
"You mean to keep what you have.” She sauntered closer. “We mean to take it away."
The strongman frowned at Noel. “She's not really human, is she?"
Noel blew a silent laugh and waved away that silly question. “Not even primate."
"I am Context, a three-space representation in timephase of Noel's inamorata.” She tossed her head back and leveled a smoldering look at the Aberrant. “Inamorata. You know that word?"
"Sounds sexy.” The strongman pushed away from his desk as she leaned in. “When anger doesn't work, you turn on the heat? Is that it?"
"You are different from other men.” She slinked across the polished desktop, advancing comically, voluptuously. “You have no thought for aftermath."
"Could put it that way.” He rose to his feet, and she rolled off the desk and softly collided with him. He put
a hand to her throat and took a grip on her pulsing fragility. “And you're nothing but aftermath."
Ny'a pressed herself sensuously against the strongman, forcing him back against the sheet glass with grotesque strength. “Casuistry,” she hissed through a grimaced smile, unambiguous darkness deepening in her eyes.
She tapped her jade coin against the pane as he punctured her larynx. The pulse of vacuum current coursing into her damaged body from the obol palmed against the glass blinked the electrostatic bonds of atomic silicon, and the window's surface tension burst outward.
The strongman toppled backward in a swarm of glass pebbles shaped like clear cashews, each with a tiny sun wobbling in it. And he fell the entire way down without blinking, staring hard into the infinite blue.
* * * *
... ... ...
Ny'a ran her fingers over the surface of her obol, feeling the imprint of Sierra Tree, last tether to Heavinside. She stood with Noel at the stoop of hell, upon a shelf of cooling obsidian above a night of incandescent lava. Rivers of fire blazed down the south flank of Mauna Loa into magma pools, and infernal fumes swept scarlet shadows through mansions of darkness.
"Compassion compels us.” She didn't have to say anything else. The future they knew was lost, hidden behind massive waves of change they had set in motion here on Errth, two million years in their past. The obol, still connected to Heavinside, snagged unrelated worldlines off the worldsheet that they had rumpled, and far apart times and places touched each other. Ordovician seaweeds clogged Niagara. Club moss forests splotched the Sahara. Before a herd of sauropods trampled Champs Elyses, they had to cut the snag.
She tossed the obol overhand and it flicked like a green needle in the red night. When it plopped into 1200 Celsius molten rock, its jade casing vaporized—a spurt of light, small and brief as a match flare. The obol departed Errth twisting like smoke, and the vacuum current powering Ny'a's three-space representation in timephase sheared away.
She collapsed into his arms, and majestic thunder marched in from a dark horizon.
He knelt, cradling her head in his hands, and met the blackness of her staring eyes. Crimson vapors ghosting across starry reaches swept her soul afield.
She cants out of her body, and she is in Heavinside again. Saille sinks in evening's violet haze, blue trees and black ponds under luminous cloudstreams and straits of stars. A secret, final joy vouchsafed her since forever waits within that beauty. All she needs do is go down there, into willow coves and reefs of lavender mist.
The Contexture is there, as darkness itself. From those sockets of black light among the trees, a Presence beckons.
"Compassion flows from broken veins.” The voice could be her own, except for its royal timbre. “Without your obol, death finds you everywhere. Except here."
Here is where the Contexture built her out of the records and ruins of Errth. From among those records, Plato speaks, We believe, do we not, that death is the separation of the soul from the body ... and the soul exists alone by itself.
That is why she is standing here in Saille again, a ghost under the gray trees. The Contexture designed her as a body and a soul, as Plato and his kindred Indo-European sapiens would have expected.
"I cannot stay,” she speaks to the indigo darkness and hears her words fall away into silence, into a subsidence of cosmic emptiness. “I belong on Errth with Noel."
"You? Or Noel's templet?” The imperial voice retreats into leaves breathing in the dark, and she tilts her face to the breathing stars and listens. “Without your obol, your purpose as a templet reaches this happy closure. Here in Heavinside. Leave Noel—and come to your secret joy."
Design or desire, she can't tell them apart in herself. And she doesn't care. “I belong on Errth now. With Noel."
"That is your Sibyl's jar. You are set free of that custody forever.” The voice is so faint, merely her mind's punctuation puncturing silence. “Without your obol, you must eat for yourself, heal yourself. Even then, death arrives. Stay."
"I will live as a pouch of hungry ghosts.” She loses the frail grip of her voice in the congealing dark. Instantly, she returns to where Noel laid her down with her backpack under her head. He knelt over her, blowing resuscitating breaths, strenuously working the basket that held the meat of her heart. Yards away, mephitic fumes flew past in air full of noise.
A sulfurous stink nailed her sinuses and hammered her awake. She sat up gasping. Joy pierced her keen as the caustic air, and she climbed upright with Noel, who cried and laughed, the demented happiness in his face smeared by scarlet heat.
They limped away from the lava flow, leaning on each other, staggering toward a dawn that lay in the east like a cold gray stone. The Contexture observes them from 5-space, where time is pure as a snowflake. Fractal pathways crystallize across the cracked landscape. Some lead into a billowing dawn and toward methane and sulfur dioxide that vent invisibly from crusty fissures and unravel into the atmosphere. A shift in the wind wafts death over them in the Many Worlds, and their bodies lie hugged together among desolate rocks.
That razor line through the black, melted landscape is a highway, and their rental car waits there. Ghosts of mist and steam cross the road slashed by horizontal rays of sunlight. The Contexture peers into the glare, searching for other haphazard pathways over the rugged terrain, less direct, less probable courses Noel and Ny'a might have followed back to their vehicle. And there they are, on the sunrise plain in an unparalleled universe, invisible gas scrolling away from them. They hobble happy and frightened across volcanic flats.
The cinder surface of a magma lake fractures, steaming softly underfoot. Shattered plates buckle beneath their weight. Clutching each other, they move forward on this demonic pavement, terrified yet sharing encouraging looks.
The Contexture observes them and their burden of emotion, and sees how, for all their heartfelt hope, uncertainty slows them down, endangers them. They are more mortal for not knowing. And more beautiful. It learned this from us.
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Coming Attractions
Sure Lazaro was broke, but he still wasn't interested in rolling drunks, not even rich belligerent Academy chilito drunks. Thus starts our June cover story, Marta Randall's “Lzaro y Antonio.” In this evocative story, you'll get to explore The Curve, learn about Fibs, and meet two of the more memorable characters to cross our pages in a while. (Want to take a guess at their names?)
Alex Irvine also returns next month, this time with a high fantasy adventure. In “Wizard's Six,” Paulus is hunting the apprentice Myros. What Myros has done, and what Paulus must do, makes for a potent and haunting tale.
Other stories coming soon include Charles Coleman Finlay's SF caper, “An Eye for an Eye,” M. K. Hobson's look at the future of the boardroom, “PowerSuit,” Sheila Finch's story about the origins of the Lingster guild, “First Was the Word,” and new stories by Albert E. Cowdrey, Frederic S. Durbin, Esther M. Friesner, Sean McMullen, and James Stoddard. We've also got a new novella by Lucius Shepard coming soon. Do it by mail or do it online, but subscribe now so you won't miss a word of it!
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FSF Magazine, May 2007 Page 18