Broken: A Plague Journal (5 page)

His eyes lit up. “Mindel Frost? You know Breine Frost?”

“My father.”

“He served with me in the first Jaguar war.”

“I know.” She shrugged. “Same here, too.”

“Is he—”

“Pattern erased two years ago standard.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“So what’s your business in this When?”

“Well...” West looked over at Paul. “It’s complicated.”

Frost turned to the author. “You are..?”

“Paul.”

“Right.”

“We’re here to fix some things, but it might not be exactly here. Can we take a little trip north?”

“Where to?”

“Search Judith ME for coordinates for Lascaux.”

“Judith Em Ee?”

Fuck
. Paul gave himself a mental slap to the forehead. “Can you find where France will be?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

the most painful of our memories jarred loose from the recesses and wrinkles of gray-pink flesh by that most poignant of our senses: scent, and I knew watching her wasn’t good for me. Smelling her was worse.

Scent and taste intrinsically linked: mouth-melting mints, fireplace logs, the claw-footed table, the brown ceramic cup into which he’d spit chewing tobacco juice and saliva, the taste of tongues and lips, teeth closed to bar entrance into mouths, adolescent, yearning, to be rid of the heat and roofing nails, the tear of white t-shirt and back, scars now, wounds then (and this is how we heal by primary) intentions uncertain: cigarette smoke and vodka? The pressure of three on a green flannel comforter, giggles, sisters, shaking hands move to breasts, necks, cheeks, and taste and scent collide in their spectrum, lost in themselves, the self a wondering observer from the periphery of my own world, taste and scent collide in the thrash of limbs, descent of clothing to tiled floor, callused fingers within softest folds, the shudder and gasp, the disconcerting slap of flat sweetness, sweat, the tang of exertion and desire, and desire across all senses, all pasts brought forward into tomorrows constructed solely of impossible memory and the loss of

“What’s in Lascaux?”

My attention snapped from Frost, now poised over viewscreens of the battle at Jaguar. Hope Benton beside me: her scent accompanied an entirely different spectrum flood of memory into the conscious. She was adjusting her armored left arm; a snap of her wrist and silver plates
schhhicked
forward.

“Snow. Wind.”

“You know what I mean.”

I knew what she meant. The Judas weren’t supposed to be here, weren’t supposed to be anywhere. Now we were aboard Judas Kate watching Mindel Frost assess the progress of her fleet’s attack against an Enemy insurgence force. Judas? Judith? Where could I have gone wrong? We’d been within two percentage points of A/O stability.

“Maire’s here.”

I saw her eyes flick to Frost and West at the screen. The Muj hit some slight turbulence. The scene required thunder. She leaned in. Whisper.

“That’d explain a lot.”

It didn’t require a response.

“Should we tell them?”

And a commotion from the screen: Frost’s hands moved over controls. “You should see this!”

Walls faded from non-reflective alloy to the snowflake-stippled battlefield around Jaguar. The vacuum chairs upon which Hope and I sat seemed intensely out-of-place from our vantage point in the sky above the battle, a parasite image drawn from the eyes of another Judas.

Frost’s hands clasped, unclasped. Eyes were drawn, slight smile. “Wait for it.”

Hundreds, thousands of Judas soldiers fled from the valley; Enemy stood motionless, flickering. Flocks of Judas focused fire on the upload generator sunk into the lake. Great black shards splashed to the surface, ice cracking from a glacier into frigid Arctic waters. Three focused phase bursts at the spire’s base and it shattered, a wave of purple and silver leveling the Enemy vessels and downloads across the valley floor. The Judas flocks arced to the sky to escape that explosion of stolen souls.

To be above it, to be within that wave of chaos and screams, was the closest I’d found to stillness.

Frost waved a hand and the image merged back to black walls, cold walls.

“We win.”

within

and within

shattered images: a star, an inhalation, silver and blood

the poetry of us
loss is
ruse, a
delta
converge, assess, act
alpha. omega.
hidden from and Delta
purpose will be
forgiveness; please forgive
a gnashing of teeth, a rending of flesh
stutter
c:\format c
It begins.

“You’ve won the battle, but not the war.”

“Nice. Cliché.”

“Thanks. I’m an author.”

Faint look of disdain from Frost. “We’re approaching Lascaux. Want to tell me why we’re here?”

Paul walked to the screen, still guttering with images from Jaguar: smoke, flame, stars. “Show me the Stream.”

Frost paused, looking skeptically into eyes torn between green and mud. Fingers slid over depressions and the image changed: the linear temporal path from Alpha to Omega, branches of charted Whens and alternities spidering out in the pipecleaner cartography of the collected knowledge of eons.

“Illuminate known Enemy progress in this fragment.”

Fingers: a pale blue-green field washed a majority of the time/space in the direction of Alpha from Omega. With few exceptions, blank areas on the Stream’s spine, the Enemy had already uploaded a majority of this universe.

“See those?”

“What?”

He pointed. “Magnify this.”

The area he indicated filled the screen; there was a noticeable fluctuation in upload success during that time.

“Bring it to two-dimensional.” The image flattened. It could have been a depiction of a recorded waveform. Just below his finger, there was a severe decrease in uploaded pattern. “There it is.”

“What am I looking at?”

“Delta Point.”

maybe it was the interlocking of those life strands that made the loss of both so poignant, so unbelievably painful.

I’d considered writing it into
Enemy
, but it was one of those ideas that just wakes me from hesitant sleep, accompanies me through a cigarette, two, three, and the hours of trying to return to dreams, only to have left in the morning (afternoon) light. Judith had told me of the next book I’d supposedly written; there was no mention of it there, either.

i met her again after two years at the first performance of his i’d seen in two years. the last time i saw him was with her. a month separated their physical and metaphorical deaths.

Writing histories into existence, writing men and women into life...

the most difficult part has been convincing myself that i’m not the focal point of these destinies, that i have no right to ascribe my ownership of these histories. i’ve been selfish and vain to assume that i linked anything together.

Alpha and Omega.. and Delta. How could I have forgotten that strand?

i’m not the focal point of history, but a simple man swept along within it. i don’t deserve to be the intersection of life paths; i’m just paul. just paul.

Maire. The name tasted like blood.

i am ugly in every way.
i am bitter and selfish.
i could take pills, but they’ll never help.
i am incapable of love.
i’m sorry. i’m so sorry. 

“Don’t—Just stay back.”

West grabbed Benton’s elbow to stop her forward motion. She looked into his old gray eyes with cold precision.

She activated the panel above her right forearm. Blade shielding retracted from her hand and she—

“Stay shielded!” Paul shouted back from the impact crater. “I don’t know if it’s still active.”

Blades slid back into place.

Frost surveyed the frozen plane. “What are we dealing with here?”

“Silver.” West’s grumbled answer.

contained multitudes.

and I felt like weeping, knew that I couldn’t, forgot about it for a while.

what have i done?

Knowing that each time I put pen to paper, each time callused fingertips traced lightly over plastic lettered keys, a world began, a world died, knowing that each time I thought too much, that each time I woke from a nightmare, a daymare, knowing, just knowing that it was real, it was blood and bone, the gasp of terror or lust, the cry of pain or release of

I knelt next to the mark her body had made in the earth. In the Earth.

Imagine a bipedal alien, cold eyes and flowing hair, jettisoned from a galaxy whose death she’d guaranteed, thrust into the veil of black between galaxies, caught in the wake of a vessel: a glorified photographer, an artificial lover, a traitor with two broken hearts. Imagine the impact of a body, a body and the snow, ice, the wind between then and now, and silver.

I knelt by the human-shaped crater, dragged armored claws over the compressed snow. Ice. I carved faint paths across its surface.

I could see the silver crawling. Merging, diverging, coalescing. Still very much alive, still very much a threat. She’d been here recently.

The husk of Task’s vessel had stopped smoking. A path of footprints and blood stretched to it, around, to the caves beyond.

I stood. Melting silver dripped from my claws, puddled and danced across

“Frost?” Paul returned from the crater, holding his right hand before him. “You shielded?”

“Shielded? I—”

“Have phase armor on?”

“No, but—”

“Shift up. Just a little. Have something to show you.”

She flickered into the shift. Lazy light spilled over Benton and West.

“What is that?” She reached out to touch Paul’s silvered hand.

“Don’t.” The light from the shift bent toward his hand, shivered.

“But what—”

“Silver.”

Paul reached to finger the release mechanism at his neck.