Yes, I remember some things from back then.
"I'm looking for an old text,” I said. Cold music moved behind my eyes and ears, red-lit from a dying sun and the tramp of Martian war machines; I fancied a Wellsian libretto. “Can't find it in the catalogue. I believe it's called ‘The Theory of the Perpetual Discomfort of Humanity.’ Some guy in a bar mentioned it. Might be a chapter in a collection with some silly title like Select Conversations with an Extinct Uncle. It's by H.G. Wells."
She gazed at me as one might when confronted by a speaking toadstool, or toad. After a time she found some scrap paper and stood with wood-encased graphite pencil poised. “How do you spell that?"
"How do I spell what?"
"The author's name."
"The same way everyone else does.” I mean, Christ, this was one of the most famous men of the turn of the twentieth century all the way through to the first nuclear war. When he was young, his essays and books probably outsold anyone else writing in the English language. Could things have reached this pitiful pass? She probably had a Master's degree in Library Science.
She waited, head slightly forward now on her neck, blank, moon-faced, pretty if you went for the blank and lunar.
"All right. H. is spelled ‘H.’ G is spelled ‘G.’ Wells is—"
"What?"
"—spelled like Walls,” and I gestured helpfully at the nearest one, which was covered in shelves laden with videos, “but with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a.’ That's W-E-L-L-S. As in, I don't know, the great banking institution, Wells-Fargo, but without the Fargo. Like the deep water holes Arabs dig in the deser—"
She slapped me hard across the face, breaking both the pencil and my nose.
Soulreaders, I married her.
But you knew that already, obviously. There are flowers also in hell.
* * * *
Just the sort of thing I remembered in high definition. But after the machines pulled me out of Redemption early, and left me to muse on such memories amid painted word effects, painted deserts, painted horses maybe, all limpid gauzy Rothko films of light boundary-blurred, I dragged myself back step by step into my waking body (as they surely meant me to), tottering to stumbling to walking to striding as balance and kinesthesia kicked in, toe after heel, trot trot that painted horse. If you haven't got clue one what I'm maundering about, go hit your glosses, your access, your dreary not-real-memory augments, and follow trustingly in my wake, dear children mine. Dear children of Europa, I should say, perhaps. Mine only in name, yes, yes, I grant you that. She was a godwhore, that wife of mine. Oh, I know that's a deleted term, and I'm an embittered cuckold, which is another. She knew how to take the bull by the horns and dive right in. Metaphor or simile? Never mind. You, they, wanted me to give her a cold call, one old chum to another, hubby to wifey, How do, sweetheart? Got the time for a quick hug and consult with this baby-toothed old fart you married so long ago, after breaking his nose and later, you know, his heart?
* * * *
I walked in bare feet and altogether naked through the last transparencies of colored light onto a high balcony of gleaming steel and heraldic enamel (evening light scattered on scarlet, kingly purple, emerald and forest greens, beasts addextré of the sun in splendor, and more) thrusting outward from the mountain above a Mexico City of dreams, which is to say the real city, probably, or as real as any habitation gets these days. Behind and above us Volcan Iztaccihuatl smoked faintly, but his fires were damped, like mine.
"Bring me clothes,” I told the machines, breathing sweet cool air. No glass held that air from my balcony. I could fling myself over and fall headlong to the outermost palaces of the Ciudad, should I choose. Fat chance.
I shook the things off when they tried to dress me, pulled on soft underwear, breeches dark as night in the era when the skies were not yet filled with solar-power jewels, boots to my knees, snowy blouse, a jerkin. This garb would have lent a more dashing effect had I looked forty years younger, as I'd anticipated for my release from protraction. I left the hat; it might as well have been a ceremonial crown, and I'd given up that game long ago.
"All right, take me to the Asterion.” I had a hunch my voice was firming, now that I'd got used to my throat, and perhaps my resolve with it.
We flew high above the lovely old, renewed, still castellated city in a sleek craft with swept-back lifting vanes like a swallow's wings, out to sea within fifteen minutes, across rippled blue and surging green, and found the island where I'd left it, off safely to one side of the Pacific. It has no name, only its purpose: it is the Asterion, the house of infinite corridors, crowded with monsters you never see because they are too far apart (the paradox of infinities), hopeless for exploration without an unfurled string falling behind your heels, but no string could be long enough, so the quantum magic of entanglement must do. And the trace of love, or pain. The ringing echo of it, somewhere in the bone.
We fell straight down, lightly, landed. I debouched, shading my eyes, wishing I'd brought the flamboyant hat after all. Here it was high noon. The swallow gulped up gravity and flung its wings into the blue. I looked around. Elysian Fields. No, not that. A turtle moved slowly on the beach, and greeny six-ply flowers grew in profusion on their woody stems at the shoreline. That made me smile. Meadows of Asphodel, the chosen taste treat and sustenance of the dead, Asphodelus ramosus, planted here to amuse my wife. Perhaps not so funny. As I recalled the old myths, she was exactly the Enelysion, smashed by the Glorious’ lightning bolt and transformed, so her rightful Groves were Elysian—but mine, sure as eggs is eggs, were merely greeny Asphodel, token of the boring dead, the billions ordinaire, the unheroic, those never touched by the electricity of Zeus or his jaunty pals. I sighed, waved to the turtle (probably as old as I, at least in this incarnation), turned, entered the first doorway of the first corridor. Not Tartarus, at least; not eternal punishment for treachery. I hoped.
"You are returned, my lord,” a sepulchral voice intoned from dimness. “Welcome."
"Oh, cut the crap.” I hate all that.
It seemed, as ever, that the dead crowded all about me.
These dwellers in the infinitely alternate, unexpressed realities didn't look dead, of course. It was something like being jammed in a food riot of the ill and exhausted, but that's overstating it, mostly. Stranded at an international airport, say, circa the time I met Europa and she busted my snout, all the obedient passengers loaded down with their worldly possessions in cloudy plastic bags, looping crocodile-lines of ticket holders dragging their way from scanner to intrusive sniffer to insolent or uncaring document inspector, lighted destinations and departure times flickering, changing, blanking to black, dashing hopes, an antiperspirant-muted stench of frustration and brewing hatred, children's voices rising like startled bats above the banal, echoed, reechoed adult conversations, mutinous laughter, resigned mutters. Like that, and nothing like that. I could try to sing it for you, but I am not in best voice just now, and besides the atonalities would fingernail your blackboards (gloss it, damn you, check the index, chase the lexicon).
As they noticed my presence, some looked away, ashamed or embarrassed. Others, as you'd expect, pressed forward, mendicant or belligerent.
"Can you help—?"
"Got any change, buddy?"
"My little daughter, I can't find—"
There was not much I could say, so I didn't. They were not really the dead, I suspected, most of them. In that library where I met and anti-woo'd Europa, I had glanced inside enough volumes of cosmology and quantum theory to appreciate the theory of infinite worlds, overlapping, intertwined, shadows of each other, a multiverse. The machines assert that this is the very nature of the Asterion, and I am not theoretician enough to dispute with them. Here, any place is another place. So this multitude was probably a probability of probable multitudes, if you like. It didn't make them smell any better en masse, or calm the short hairs that always rose up on my neck and arms when I passed through their muttered despair. Did each
of them realize at the sinew and artery how small was his likelihood of achieving observed reality, how small hers of persisting beyond a shadow's moment? Was this the source of their grieving?
That ontological concern was not mine, at least; I know myself to be anchored all too firmly in the plenum of Europa's indulgence.
One came forward, heavily bearded, in frock coat, pince-nez and polished boots, clearing a path and, it might have seemed, directed me through fourteen corridors, in so many colors (shades, if you will; a little graveyard humor), brightening as we maneuvered toward that transit aperture I like to call the Wardrobe. Don't bother looking for the gloss, it's sure to have been deleted. Another pleasure from the library of my past, where I read books, books, books, when I wasn't filching their contents for my songs. Corridors of slow dim heat, warming red, toasty orange, yellow bright as molten gold, green of sun-dazzled leaves, hot neon blue, a glare of violet, ultraviolet, darkness visible. I spoke to this one in his coat and beard as we made our way toward the Wardrobe and Europa; I was drawn by the entanglement of our conjoined quantum nature, the Ariadne thread that linked me to her lips, her breast, her womb like a filament of gleaming spittle or stringy semen. I hesitate to say umbilicus, for I was her spouse, not her child, even if Europa is now Mother to us all: good Mother, good-enough Mother, phallic Mother, Vagina Dentata in bad seasons. It might have seemed to the pressing ghost onlookers that my companion drew me on. (I could give you his name, but why bother?) No, it was I who nosed out the direction, like a spider snurfing up a web already spun—but that figure tangles the gender roles, damn it, for it is the female spider who spins and resorbs her web. Never mind. It was hardly gender role anxiety that vexed me. Call it ontological insecurity after all. Europa, the machines had claimed (if I understood them), was thinking of drawing down the curtain on the universe and reopening elsewhere. On Broadway, perhaps, if our original had begun off-, or off off-. Or more likely the Met, Palais Garnier, La Scala, Covent Garden. Somewhere where the lights were brighter, the crimsons and blues and violets sharper, cleaner, powered up to the max, a glissando of unsung songs awaiting the premier coloratura. La Europa, diva of universes.
Starfish, stiffened by the Sun. Take them to the new Jerusalem.
I sound bitter. Well, perhaps.
* * * *
Here's a story you won't have in your annotated files, soulsuckers—unless your sly probes winkled it out of my torpid brain in warm Redemptive sleep. (Europa assured us all that such invasion was forbidden, the least and last redoubt of our selves, but can her undertaking be trusted? Let us assume so.) Well, then:
Years ago, before I met and wed Europa, before our babies were born, before I had cause to wonder if indeed they were our babies or only hers, I shared a downtown conapt with a dark-skinned computer programmer named Barney Austen. No relation to Jane, I'm fairly sure; the fine arts baffled Barn, and his atrocious taste in gangsta music led me to some interesting moves in my own. I took the upper half, he downstairs, with bathroom and kitchen in common. I was writing my first would-be satirical libretto to an eleven tone melody (Noah Tall; Libretto and Score: Isaac Hersch), muttering bits of canto to myself as I mooched up and down the stairs, and heard one day an outraged squeal. Felt something underfoot, soft but with bones. My heart squeezed tight. I'd stepped on a striped kitten. We had no kitten. Barney apologized when he removed his headset and checked in from full code immersion in his system. Some kids had ambushed him outside the local HEB as he exited with a week's groceries and wine, had foisted this scrawny bundle of girl cat on him. “That's Daisy,” he told me. “She's already toilet trained. I have a litter box for her in the kitchen."
"No, you don't,” I said. “You have a litter box in your study."
Daisy soon developed suspicious bumps behind, and was a boy. He sprayed tentatively after a month or so. “Off with them!” I demanded, but Barney was too busy, and besides the vet insisted that we wait two more weeks. I was snatched from my work the next morning by raucous outrage. I'd just coaxed an especially edgy diapason from my synthesizer.
"He jumped up on my desk,” Barn told me. Daisy was nowhere to be seen, cowering somewhere; we'd agreed he was too young and inexperienced to be permitted access to the sidewalk, as the chances were good he'd tear into traffic, instant roadkill. “I thought it was charming. Then he climbed into my work product tray and pissed in it!"
"He's confused,” I said. But in the evening, ten minutes after I got back to work after a pizza and beer supper, Daisy provoked more cries of fury. I galumphed downstairs. “What now?"
"The little shit sprayed my leg!” Eyes narrowed, Barney was dragging off his ratty old track suit pants, hopping toward the sink.
"He's in love,” I explained. But that explanation had worn thin by the fourth occasion, the following day.
"Crap. It's your scuzzy noise. It sucks, man."
I never learned what became of Barney and his angry, besotted animal, because Noah crashed and fizzled (and who could blame it, or the stay-away audiences?) and I spent several months squatting in a musty, leaking, and subsiding house that leaned scarily to the west, just north of the freeway, and seemed infested by cats even less toilet-trained than Daisy. But here's why I remember this incident when the names of all my grade school teachers and most of my early working colleagues are long fried. Poor confused Daisy's attempt to combine micturition with affection, or maybe artistic criticism, reminds me precisely of my own dealings with Europa. She didn't quite dock my balls when she was elevated to the station of Queen of the dead and godwhore du jour, but the effect was similar.
Did Daisy find a more winning path to Barney's heart once I was out of the picture, and my noises with me? Certainly I never found such a path back into Europa's, not really. Which is why I did what I did, and suffered the punishment everyone found meet and proper, especially the machines of loving grace, why I spent nearly a century growing old and foul while everyone around me cavorted like kittens endlessly renewed. Until (to gender-twist the “kitty equals me, not my wife” metaphor completely around and upside down) the day Europa escaped out a side window, and the authorities needed me to find her before she broke the universe asunder and piddled in the splinters.
Listen, while I talk on against time.
* * * *
As above, the ancient alchemists held, so below. In the place of infinite corridors, dried indoor pools now and then awash in sand and maybe fishes’ bones, carved hieroglyphs in unknown and unknowable tongues (or, perhaps, the speaking gestures before utterance stabilized into langue), only two things were singular, unbreachable: the universe entire, above; Asterion, the house, below.
"Your wife, the Goddess of the dead and unrealized, wishes to multiply the worlds and scatter the probabilities,” my companion told me. It was the same message given to me by the machines of loving grace. The same implied charge: Go, find her out in her heartland, stay her hand if you can.
My feet were getting damned tired. I mean, I hadn't been out of the tank in years. Daylight was likely fading into night outside the Asterion's first door by now, and the turtle would surely have drawn back his leather head, blinking his great eyes at the going down of the Sun, and settled into a careful pit of sand of his own, safely distant from the hushing sea and the tossing asphodels.
"Let's take a break,” I said. “What's a guy got to do to get a drink around here?” The machines had offered, but that was hours ago.
"We were thoughtless. Here, sir,” and I was offered a steaming mug of rich Ethiopian coffee from a pot on a salver piled with bagels, lox, cream cheese, slices of ripe, firm tomato. I sat on the floor, back against a pillar embossed with fleeing foxes, russet-jacketed hunters (human) astride great leaping hunters (equine), dragons a-wing overhead, an arboreal snake or two. The coffee was excellent, of course; I slurped it down, smacking my lips, and munched on supper. My companion handed me a crisp linen napkin delicately embroidered; I wiped my lips, blew my nose on it, and dropped it on the flo
or. It would drift back into Types and memory soon enough.
"I needed that. Thank you.” I rose, dusted my breeches, pissed against one wall, and checked my orientation. “Straight on ‘til morning."
After a time, a tall, well-built fellow turned from a branching corridor into ours, caught sight of us, raised an eyebrow. He smiled, then.
"Greeting, Asterion."
"Shit, Man, you know I don't hold with that nonsense.” I shook my head in exasperation, went to him with arms outstretched, hugged my eldest son. My eyes teared up at our embrace. I really was stranded halfway into old man's sentimentality. Radamanthus held me at arms’ length, finally, frowning at my appearance.
"You're looking for Mother."
"Yes. Know where she's hanging out this season?"
"Well, you know, Dad. She might be summering in Crete.” We both laughed at that. The blue leaping dolphins, the bull-leaping topless maidens, the flushing toilets avant la lettre. I wiped my eyes on the back of my sun-spotted right hand. “I'd be pleased to accompany you,” he said. “Hey, you're dusty—this place really does need better cleaning surface. What you want is a pit stop. I'll call the boys."
Of course, Types and Tokens being what they are in the place of infinite corridors, the hot bath I found myself soaking in ten minutes later was an exact duplicate of the Queen's light-drenched Megaron in Knossos, gold fittings restored and gorgeous murals touched up. I floated blissfully, muscles easing. The ache in my half-grown teeth fell away, and the ocean hush of running water was wind blowing across a meadow of faintly scented blooms. What woke me was a shout.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2009 Page 13