"Papa!"
I blinked water droplets from my eyes, paddled to the pool's edge. “Minos! I might have guessed, from the fittings."
"Oh, well, yes. We get trapped in these games, you know. Daddy, it's lovely to see you, but I have to confess that you've been in better shape. They let you out early?"
Min and Man stood attendance as I stomped up sea-shell steps and found a towel to wrap myself away from their innocent gaze. Noah, indeed. I whistled a discordant note or three between my teeth. “Yeah. Affairs of state. State vector, that is.” My mostly bald head was almost dry already as I dabbed. “Where's the scamp?"
"Here, Father.” His voice boomed, like an angel standing in the sun. Sarpedon was fated for a grim end, if they chose to run this myth game to its end—arguing murderously over a doe-eyed boy, for Christ's sake!—but surely they had more sense than that, sons of my body. Look where Europa and I had got, playing fast and loose with the underworld and the above-. “Rumors reach us of a tussle in the quantum playground,” my youngest son said. “She's feeling fertile again, eh?"
I cuffed his shaggy head. “Show some respect for your dam, lad. But yes,” I said with some chagrin, dressing again in the Hamletish garments gifted me by the machines of loving grace; no Danish sword at my belt, though, no Glock 22 under my armpit, no throwing knives secreted on bicep or calf, no pepper-spray canister in my back pocket, for that matter, “it sometimes feels like being married to a queen bee."
* * * *
My parents, pious idiots, all but rent their garments when I wed Europa. I'm pretty sure my father would have liked to see me dead, if it weren't for his damned stiff-necked ethics. She wasn't Jewish, she wasn't subservient, she held no objection to dining on the flesh of a kid seethed in its mother's milk (it was my mother's blood that seethed!), and her idées fixes were even older and more preposterous than theirs. Europa was convinced that she had Been Here Before.
"I'm studying Phoenician,” she told me over spanakopitas and stuffed vine leaves at Demo's, on our first date. Her lip sore had healed; it had taken some wooing to get her this far. We sat outside under a Cinzano shade imbibing the peak oil traffic fumes from North St. Mary's, and quaffed retsina, the whole Greek nine yards, or at least as close as you could get within walking distance.
"Charming! Uh, may I ask why?"
"They're my ancestors."
"You're shitting me,” I said. “Say something in Phoenician."
"Listen, know-it-all, could you tell if I got the vowels wrong?"
"So it has vowels? Already they're ahead of Hebrew on points."
"Hebrew has vowels.” Some spinach had stuck in her front teeth; I dared her bite to reach and snare it free.
"Of course it does, but for the longest time they weren't written down. Worse than Srbijan. Grzny. Crveni krst.” I shuddered; how many Jews had died there in the concentration camp, and Romany, too, and communists for that matter? But I didn't want seriousness, let alone ancient griefs. “Worse than Superman's enemy from the fifth dimension."
"Mr. Mxyzptlk,” Europa said, nodding.
Maybe that was the second moment I fell in love with her. The first was when she'd broken my nose.
"Punic derived from my people's language,” she said. “It influenced yours, as well. Belial, for example."
"A demon, right?"
"You're not really interested."
I leaned across our rickety table and took her by the shoulders (bare in her summer top, sunburned, plump), kissed her mouth. “Of course I am. If you are."
But she was serious, taking a distance course at the Catholic University of America, of all noble institutions of learning, in Chicago. Wonders of the early internet. Her real interest would have scandalized her instructors.
"The Phoenicians were those who survived the great catastrophe. There's not much known about my true people."
I smiled. “The hunter-gatherers of the Serengeti?"
Europa shook her head, and sun-coins danced.
"The Sun Kings of Mu."
I knew then, with a racing excitement, that she was completely nuts. What I didn't know, yet, was that I would stitch her delusions, in a wholesale splicing of myth, legend and grotesque fraudulent invention, into the broadcloth of the real worlds. My bad.
"Moo?” I said in disbelief. “Moo?"
* * * *
"I'm tired of walking. It's a pity they never put a rapid transit system in here."
The boys strode beside me, squabbling in a manly sort of way. Sons of the ancient Glorious they might be, but at least their struggles for elevation had not yet reached the hurling-thunderbolts stage. Minos gave Man a buffet to the shoulder, and told me, “I can whistle up some fine Arabians for us, an it please you, sire."
I gritted my small gappy teeth. “Something with a bit more horsepower than a horse. Hmm. Can you lay your hands on a thoat?"
The brothers shared a glance.
"Mars,” I said. “Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ancient romancer. Oh, never mind.” But they'd done their due diligence, and I heard a vast snorting and snoring at my back, turned in the corridor into a gust of rotty vegetable breath. Two of the great and terrifying mounts waited nervously, vast and trunkless slate-hued elephants with eight yellow legs caparisoned in jeweled harness. One uttered a deep squealing cry that rang in my ears. “Good lads! Help me up, Sar.” I had never seen a thoat before, outside the illustrated pages of an old book, but I was reassured by the memory that they are herbivorous. Did the thoats know that? Surely these were broken to the saddle, and to battle. Sarpedon gave me a leg up—the brutes are lofty, double a man's height, near enough—and followed with a bound to sit behind me. Minos and Radamanthus climbed aboard their own behemoth, and we ran side by side along the suddenly wide-enough corridor, scattering the dead and improbable. “Yah-hoo!” I shouted, and wished I had my hat to wave. “To-wit, to-woo! Tally-ho!"
"He hasn't been out much lately,” I heard Min shout to Man. I didn't mind their laughter. It was true enough. I closed my eyes, fingers clinging to my thoat's pulsing neck, and sought direction, vector. The Wardrobe lay ahead, and Europa on its far side, which since the Wardrobe has infinite variety, like the infinite corridors of the Asterion that cradles it, isn't saying a lot, cartographically speaking. I needed to depend on my nose. I sniffed. I tasted the gray air. Mostly I got heaving thoat breath, but there was that hint of thread—
"Starboard, gentlemen,” I cried, and we went that way. The corridor darkened to a purple dusk. Ahead, like a cheery burger joint truck stop on a lonely highway, the Wardrobe stood brightly lit, beckoned me. I hove to, flung forward into the throat's plated integument as it screeched to a halt. “End of the line! All out!"
Part hyper excitement, part sheer funk. I hadn't seen my wife the Queen of the dead in a good many years, and the prospect was not altogether encouraging. Still, you know what a man's gotta do.
"I would lief attend you, sire,” Man said, every inch the officer and gentleman. How did I come to have kids like this? The other boys chirped up with their own expressions of filial zeal. I shooed them away, but I confess I had moisture in my eye. Like I said, sentimental as an old man, which I mostly still was.
"The machines asked me to do it alone, and they have a better understanding than I do of the way the cosmos wags. Really, you've been a tremendous help, it's been too long, but I'd better get a wiggle on before I lose my nerve. Guys, a pleasure,” and I turned with a cheery wave, back itching, wishing I did have a sword or an S&W .50 Magnum (although I'd never studied foil, let alone saber, and fired only an airgun when I was a kid, potshots at rabbits and squirrels outside my small ratty boyhood town where Jews were not especially welcome), and pushed open the swing doors of the Wardrobe's wormhole.
It swallowed me down, and I left my adopted sons to fend for themselves, as always.
And flung me out in the main drag of the crystalline capital of Mu (Karath, if that was really her ancient name), behind her cyclopean crimson walls and moa
ts, just as the run-up to Richter 10 catastrophe started shaking the towers and campaniles into fearsome shards tumbling in a mess of shredded human flesh. Screaming you couldn't hear through the boom. Blood you couldn't avoid seeing, until the rising tsunami of dust and grit soaked it into blasphemous mud, and then the tsunami of Oceanus washed it into the depths.
I didn't believe it, either, but the nightmares of a goddess have a terrifying palpability. And this one was grounded, after all, so deeply grounded, in an even more terrifying catastrophe of mother Earth.
* * * *
In case you haven't glossed it yet, a Richter 10 quake can tear a continent or tectonic plate in half. These shock measures are logarithmic, so a Richter 11 hadn't happened to the Earth (the earths accessible through the wormhole, anyway) since that stray star pebble the size of Mars slammed into primordial Gaia four billion years ago, give or take, and blew the baked outer skin the hell off, which settled down later, on orbit, as the Moon, and brought the Glorious with it to the core. Trust me, 10 is as bad as you want to see, and I'd rather see than be in one. But I was, because I suppose Europa was having a maudlin fit of guilt, again, wondering how she could fix things. But if so she was whistling Dixie, because Mu was another country, and they did things differently there.
I was the one who'd awakened Mu, or some roaring, stinking simulacrum, from her millennial drowning deeps. There's my own guilt, although that crime is not the one they charged me with. I've never denied it, which is one reason I went into protraction and Redemption without too much whining. It was my song, my opera, my out-do-Wagner Gotterdammerung. Here's my recollection, which might well differ from your glossed authorized edition:
"Honey, it's just a myth,” I told Europa one Saturday afternoon, over nachos—shredded, melting cheddar, refried beans and jalapeno peppers on corn tortilla chips, dipping up salsa and luscious seasonal guacamole—washed down by Cokes. Europa wasn't her name back then, obviously, not her librarian, Social Security number name. We'd moved in together by then; I was teaching Setharean exomusicology at the city college in between running band practice. “A lovely myth, sure. Lemuria, Mu, Poseidonis, Atlantis.” I'd done some Googling. Scott-Elliott, Madame Blavatsky, Donnelly, Lovecraft, Howard, Cayce ... “Tyre and Sidon, I'll grant you those Phoenicians. Maybe they are your ancestors. But Karath of Mu? I don't think so.” My cheese-sticky hands might have hovered protectively before my face as I said it, but I pretended I was brushing away a mosquito.
"Colonel Churchward listed their sacred symbols, their alphabet,” she told me with her blank, intoxicating stare. Autistic and Asperger people, I'd heard, usually didn't like to meet people's eyes, so that might not be her formal diagnosis. My pulse accelerated, and my horniness. Gnosis was Europa's mystery, you can hold the diagnosis, doctor, ha ha. “Look at them. Here."
She handed me an old book, pages of runes. Punic runes, maybe.
"You can read this?"
She shook her head sadly at my disbelief, began uttering the strangest, most unsettling stream of glossalalia I'd ever heard. Had she picked up some of it from my parents’ Hebrew prayers? We'd gone to temple more than once, dutiful, or pretending—or perhaps, I wondered, she was tapping into something truly archaic, a pre-articulate bump in the pre-cortex. (I didn't know about the Glorious, then, none of us did.) Still, I noticed the way her eyes tracked across and down the page, right to left and back, but now left to right, and again. Boustroph'edon writing, they called that—an endless string of utterance scored on the page like the plowing back and forth of a bullock, an ox, in a field. I surreptitiously toggled my pocket recorder (doesn't every composer carry one, putting it aside only for the bath?), and tried to match the symbols (surely bogus) to the breathy yet guttural sounds hushing from her lips.
By god, I can use this, I told myself.
I can use this!
I chose an eleven-tone tuning, exactly to challenge my audience (if any), to evoke the disruption and clash of civilizations that seemed to me captured in this archaic image: the smashed city, its towers ablaze, broken, drowned, the very continent—of which the city was the throbbing heart—cracked and sunk. You want a lullaby for that? My father did, it seemed. I stupidly told them all my plan over festive Shulchan Orekh, the family dinner at Pesach, jittery with excitement at my new idea, no sense of self-protection, no sense at all.
"Is this why we sent you to school? So you could assault the ears of decent people?” I'd played them a tinny fragment of the Karath Submerged recitative, using my cellphone audio linked to the big iron at home.
"Dad, for god's sake!” Talk about bitter herbs.
"Don't take the Lord's name,” my mother twittered.
"Oh fuck.” Not quite under my breath. On the other side of the table, my wife sat mute, eyes fixed on my father's forehead, it looked like. “I'm doing okay."
"With her salary at the library,” my mother said.
"People want tunes,” my father explained. “They don't wish to hear this atrocious noise. Well, the schwartzes, maybe. Those filthy rap songs all day long.” And out of his prim mouth, impelled by disgust and rage, ratatatted a catalogue of this lowlife cussing.
We all went still and stiff and incredulous. My father was then fifty-four, not old, not at all old, but he had caught it on his car radio, I suppose, gangsta rap. Or just couldn't block it from his ears as he walked the dog while the cars rolled by, windows down, drivers slouched on the floor, foulness radiated at industrial volume, boom boom, bang bang. Even I found it got on my nerves eventually. My mother had run into the kitchen to fetch Tishpishti diamonds or Mile High chocolate cake or almond streusel topped apple cobbler or something, sound American-Jewish cuisine, not a single obscenity or cop murder on the bill of fare.
I said, “Daddy, you want me to churn out Hallmark melodic greeting cards?"
"People pay good money for them, at least,” he said, shaken by his own frankness. “Don't mock what people want. I don't understand you, boy, you call this stuff music, you marry a—” He caught himself barely in time.
For once I chose not to rise to the shiksa bait. “People learn to love new things, Daddy. Look, let me convince you."
"Ha. That will never happen."
"We can try. You have to know that the music we hear from the radio, Bach and Beethoven and Irving Berlin and the Beach Boys, it's all made out of notes—"
"You think I'm a fool? What else would it be made of ?"
"—notes where the sounds are divided up into twelve acoustically equal portions.” I found the large match box he'd used to light the Passover candles, emptied out into a pile, counted twelve all in a row, red-headed soldiers for art. “That's what you hear all day long, from that Chopin CD I gave you for your birthday all the way to the hip-hop zombies, okay?"
With an eyebrow raised, he gave a small grin to hear his betes noires named.
"But look—” I laid out another twelve, one for one, then took back a single match, tossed it aside, shuffled the remainder to a new order, each match now a little farther distant from its neighbor on either side. “Eleven-tone tuning."
"But why?” He sounded genuinely anguished. “Do you saw off one leg from your chair and wait to fall over on your tuches?"
"There were three-legged stools before anyone invented a four-legged chair,” Europa said.
My father, I swear, rolled his eyes. I said hastily, “See, in your customary music there's both consonant and dissonant intervals. But with eleven-tone, all the intervals are dissonant, especially the thirds and fifths, which is very unexpected.” I held out the palm of my hand. “So instead of harmony, you have melody. And that's the real engine of music. Besides, this oratorio is about the destruction of an ancient mythic nation—"
"A real nation,” Europa said.
"Whatever. So I have to undercut your complacency as a listener, okay, I have to stick prongs inside your comfortable ears."
"Just leave my damned ears alone,” my father said. “I'm very happy with my ear
s the way they are. Gertrude, where's that damned dessert?"
* * * *
The Wardrobe always takes you straight to the right place, if you're the right person to go there. The Glorious that fathered my stepsons designed it that way. I walked up the winding path to the old farm house, plucking a posy of yellow asphodels (what else?), and found Europa rocking absently in a rope-and-canvas hammock on the porch, out of the direct sunlight. Not that it was especially bright, nor ever was, here. Her broad pale brown face had its own glow. Moo moo, the great Bull-god's lover, Mu the lost world, Moon the face, it's all melody.
"Hello, wife,” I said.
"Hmm.” She regarded me with unnerving blank directness. “You've let yourself go."
I did the barking laugh that fits so well with dissonant tuning. She did not look like an old woman. Who did, these days? “My punishment for letting you go, my dear."
"For dismissing me into this place."
"Oh, don't.” I saw an old bentwood chair in the far corner, dragged it back, sat beside her. We did not touch. I suppose you'd have to consider ours a companionate marriage at best. “I just saw the boys. They've done good. Well, what can you expect, sons of the Glorious and all."
Europa sighed and looked away. “They are the children of your body, Isaac."
"Yeah.” I whistled a few notes of The Crushed Lotus aria, watched her cramp up her lips. “Well, anyway, babe, I hear you're planning some renovations. I bear a message from the machines: they'd prefer you to leave well enough alone."
The sky went totally black for an instant. I saw everything in solarized reverse, Europa's eyes ultraviolet. We sat on top of a huge rust-red rock, and all about stretched arid rusted desert under a sky harshly, radiantly blue. Africa? Arizona? Mars? I still had air to breathe, anyway.
"I found a way to set them free,” she said then, not apologizing, not explaining. “All the dead. All those who perished in the fall of Mu and her daughters. The dead of all the stupid wars. All the dead who died anyway, of age or disease or broken hearts."
"Heaven on a stick, eh?” I was abruptly furious. “Don't talk to me about broken hearts, you mad bitch. You and I know the truth. You weren't pushed and you didn't fall. You walked out and left me with the kids."
Asimov's SF, October-November 2009 Page 14