"Just look at the ground," Tesla told Phoebe. "It's no use breaking our hearts."
Eyes downcast, they continued to climb. Tesla was horribly tempted to look up at the victims, but she resisted. Raul was right. There was nothing they could do. Up ahead, the singer was talking to herself in her blissed-out state.
"Hey, Laguna... ? You hear me? I got them, I got right there. Right there. White they are. So white. You wouldn't believe how-"
Tesla put the gun to the woman's temple. The stream of consciousness stopped abruptly, and the woman's eyes flickered open. She was by no means a beauty: her skin was leathery, her eyes tiny and surrounded with coarse bristles, her mouth-which was similarly ringed-was twice the width of any human mouth, her teeth tiny, pointed-perhaps sharpened-and innumerable. Despite her drugged condition, she plainly understood her jeopardy. "I'll sing some more," she said.
"Don't bother," Tesla replied. "Just point us to the door."
"You're not one of the Blessedm'n's company?"
"No.
"Are you Sapas Humana?" she said.
"No. I'm just the lady with the gun," Tesla said.
"You are, aren't you?" the singer replied, her gaze going back and forth between the two women. "You're Sapas Humana! Oh, this is wonderful."
"Are you listening to me?" Tesla said.
"Yes. You want the door. It's there." Without looking round she pointed off into the mist.
"How far?"
"A little way. But why would you want to leave? There's nothing on the other side but more of this mist and a filthy sea. Here's where the wonders are, in the Helter j Incendo. Among Humana, like you."
"Wonders?" said Phoebe.
"Oh yes, oh yes," the woman enthused, ignoring the gun that was still pointed at her head. "We've lived a shadow-life in the Ephemeris, dreaming of being here, where things are pure and real."
My God, is she infor a disappointment, Raul remarked.
But there was more here than a misinformed tourist "Isn't the lad coming through this door?" Tesla asked her.
She smiled. "Oh yes," she said, almost dreamily.
"So why are you hanging around?"
"We're waiting to greet them."
"Then you'll never see the wonders of the Hefter Incendo, will you?"
"Why not?"
"Because the lad's coming to destroy it."
The woman laughed. Threw back her head and laughed. "Who told you that?" she said.
Tesla didn't answer though she had no difficulty remembering. The first person she'd heard that from had been Kissoon. Not perhaps the most reliable of sources. But then hadn't she had the theory supported on several occasions since? It was D'Amour's belief, for certain. According to him the lad was the Enemy of Mankind, the Devil by another name. And hadn't Grillo told her of men and women across the continent who listed on the Reef the weapons they'd use to defend themselves if, or rather when, the holocaust occurred?
Still the woman laughed. "The lad's coming here for the same reason that I came," she said. "they want to live among miracles."
"There aren't any," Phoebe piped up. "Not here."
The singer grew serious. "Perhaps you've lived with them for so long," she said, "you don't see them."
Ask her about the crucifixions, Raul prompted.
"Damn right," Tesia thought. "What about them?" she said, jabbing her thumb over her shoulder.
"The Blessedm'n wanted that. They're spies, he said; enemies of peace."
"Why kill them that way?" Phoebe said. "It's so horrible."
The singer looked genuinely confounded. "the Blessedm'n said it was best for them."
"Best for them?" Tesia said, appalled. "That?" on't you have it in one of your holy books? A god dies that way-"
"Yes, but-"
"And he's reunited with his father, or his mother."
"Father," said Phoebe. "Forgive my ignorance. I've no memory for stories. Songs; that's a different matter. I hear a song once, and I've got it for life. But a joke, or a piece of a gossip, or even a god-tale"-she snapped her fingers-"forgotten!"
Suppose she's telling the truth, Raul muttered.
"About crucifixions?"
About the lad Maybe we've had the whole thing wrong from the beginning.
"And they're just coming to see the sights?" Testa replied. "I don't think so. Remember the Loop?" She brought her one and only glimpse of the lad to mind now, in all its vastness and foulness. Even now, after five years, the memory made her queasy. Perhaps the lad was not the Enemy of Mankind, the Evil One itself, but nor had it seemed to have love and peace on its collective mind.
"Will you join with me?" the singer was saying.
"Doing what?" Testa said.
"She asked if she could smoke," Phoebe said. "Didn't you hear her?"
"I was thinking."
"About what?"
"About how fucking confused I am."
The singer was stroking the tip of her reefer with i match flame. Whatever she was smoking, it wasn't hashish. The smoke was almost sickly sweet, like cinnamon and sugar. She inhaled deeply.
"Again," Testa said. "Inhale again." The woman looked mystified, but obeyed. "And again," Testa said, nudging he gun against the woman's head for emphasis. The woman duty inhaled two more tungfuls. "That's it," Testa said, as a soporific smile spread over the woman's face, and her eyelids began to flutter closed. "One more for luck."
The woman raised the reefer to her lips and inhaled a final time. Halfway through doing so the drug claimed her consciousness. Her hand dropped to her side, the cigarette failing from her fingers. Testa picked it up, nipped off the burning weed, and pocketed the rest.
"You never know," she said to Phoebe. "Let's get going."
Only now, as they started off the slope again, did Testa realize that the sound of sobbing had completely ceased. The last of the spies@rucified as an indulgence of their faithhad died. There was no harm now in looking.
Don't-Raul warned her, but it was too late. She was already turning, already seeing.
Kate Farrell was hanging on the middle cross, her belly bared and lacerated. On her left hand they'd nailed Edward.
On her right "Lucien.
He was the most battered of the three, and the most nearly naked, his thin white chest splashed with blood from a face thankfully almost hidden from her by his hair.
The breath went out of Tesla's body in a rush, and the strength from her limbs. She dropped the gun. Put her hands over her mouth to keep the sobs from coming.
"You know one of them?" said Phoebe.
"All of them," Testa gasped. "All of them."
Phoebe had hold of her, tight. "We can't do anything for them now."
"He was alive... " Testa said, the thought like a skewer in her heart,
"he was alive, and I didn't look, and I could have saved him."
"You didn't know it was him," Phoebe said.
She started to coax Testa away from the spot, turning her as she did so. Testa resisted however, unwilling to take her eyes off Lucien. He looked so Pitifully exposed up there, unable to defend himself against the world. She needed to Put him in the ground, at least. If she left him here he'd be a spectacle: pecked and buffeted and gnawed at. She couldn't bear it. She couldn't.
Somewhere in the turmoil, she heard Raul say: Phoebe's right.
"Leave me alone."
You can't help him. And Tesla: You're not to blame. He made his way. We made ours.
"He was alive."
Af@i,be.
"He saw me,"
IJ'You want to believe that, believe it, Raul said. I'm not going to tn@ and tell you he didn't. But if he did, then maybe that's why he lei go.
"What?"
He Could have called your name, but he didn't. Maybe he juvt laid eyes on you and thought: It's enough.
Tears started to fill her eyes.
"It's enough?"
Yes. It doesn't have to be terrible alwayv. Even this.
She'd never believe that, not to the end of her days.
What did he say we were? Vesselsfor something "For the infinite. Vessels for the infinite."
"What did you say?" Phoebe murmured.
"It's what he wanted to be," Tesla replied.
No, said Raul. It's what he was all along. Tesla nodded. "You know," she said to Phoebe, "I have a very good soul in my head." She sniffed hard. "The pity of it is, it isn't mine."
Then she let Phoebe turn her around, and together they headed on, up towards the door.
THREE
The tide took Joe at last, claiming him from the darkness and bearing him away, the way it had home The Fanacapan before him. For a while he was barely aware of his passage. Indeed he was barely aware of being alive. He drifted in and out of consciousness, his eyes fluttering open long enough for him to glimpse the heavens boiling overhead, as though sky and sea had exchanged places. Once, when he awoke this way, he saw what he thought were burning birds, falling out of the seething air like winged meteors. And once, seeing something glitter from the corner of his eye, he turned his head to catch sight of a 'shu, darting through the churning waters, its gaze gleaming. Seeing it, he remembered the conversation he'd had with Noah on the shore-"Please one 'shu and you please many"-and returned to his dreaming state comforted, thinking perhaps the creature knew him and was somehow guiding him through this maelstrom. When he was not quite awake, which was often, he remembered Phoebe in the weeds; saw her body rising and failing in front of him, lush and pale. And tears came, even in his sleeping state, thinking she had gone from him, back into the living world, and all he would ever have of her from now on was memory.
Then even the dreams of Phoebe faded, and he floated on through a cloud of dirty smoke, his mind too weak to shape a thought. Ships passed him by, but he didn't see them. If he had-if he'd seen how they rocked and creaked, filled to the gunnels with people escaping the Ephemeris-he might have tried to catch hold of a trailing rope and haul himself aboard, rather than let the current they were fighting carry him on towards the archipelago. Or at very least-seeing the terror on the faces of the passengers-he might have prepared himself for what awaited him on the shore. But seeing nothing, knowing nothing, he was carried on, and on, through the remains of splintered vessels that had foundered for want of captains, floating mortuaries of doomed travelers, through places where the sea was thick with yellow ash, and cobs of fire glittered around him like burning fleets.
Steadily the waters grew shallower and less tempestuous, and at last he was carried up onto the shores of an island that in its glory days had been called the island of Mem-6 b'Kether Sabbat. There he lay, among the flotsam and jetsam, his balls bleeding, his mind confounded, while moment by moment the island he had been carried to was undone, and its undoer, the lad Uroboros, came closer to the shore on which he slept.
The distance between the shores of Mem-6 b'Kether Sabbat and the Mountainside where Tesla and Phoebe were climbing was not readily measured. Though generations of thinkers in both the Cosm and the Metacosm had attempted to evolve a theory of distance between the two worlds, there was little consensus on the subject. The only thing the various factions agreed upon was that this distance could not be measured with a rule and an abacus. After all, it was not simply the distance between two points: It was the distance between two states. Some said it was best viewed as an entirely symbolic space, like that between worshipper and deity, and proposed an entirely new system of measurement applicable to such cases. Others argued that a soul moving from the Hefter Incendo into Quiddity underwent such a radical altering that the best way to describe and analyze the distance, if the word distance were still applicable (which they doubted), was to derive it from the vocabulary of spiritual reformation. The notion proved untenable, however, one man's reformation being another's heresy.
Finally, there were those who argued that the relationships between Sapas Humana and the dream-sea were all in the mind, and any attempt to measure distance was doomed to failure. Surely, they opined, the space between one thought and another was beyond the wit of any man to measure. they were accused of defeatism by some of their enemies; of shoddy metaphysics by others. Men and women only entered the dream-sea three times, they were reminded. For the rest of their lives Quiddity was a lot further than a thought away. Not so, the leader of this faction-a mystic from Joom called Carasophia-argued. The wall between the Cosm and the Metacosm was getting steadily thinner, and would-he predicted-soon disappear altogether, at which point the minds of Sapas Humana, which seemed so pathetically literal, would be revealed to be purveyors of the miraculous, even in their present, primal state.
Carasophia had died for his theories, assassinated in a field of sunflowers outside Eliphas, but he would have found comforting evidence for his beliefs had he wandered through the minds of the people gathered along the parade route in Everville. People were dreaming today, even though their eyes were wide open.
Parents dreaming of being free as their children; children dreaming of having their parents' power.
Lovers seeing the coming night in each other's eyes; old folks, staring at their hands, or at the sky, seeing the same.
Dreams of sex, dreams of oblivion; dreams of circus and bacchanalia.
And further down the parade route, sitting by the window from which he'd so recently fallen, a man dreaming of how it would be when he had the Art for himself, and time and distance disappeared forever.
"Owen?" Buddenbaum had not expected to see the boy again; at least not this side of midnight. But here he was, looking as invitingly languorous as ever.
"Well, well-"
"How are you?" Seth said.
"Mending."
"Good. I brought some cold beers."
"That was thoughtful."
"I guess it's a peace offering."
"Consider it accepted," Buddenbaum said. "Come here and sit down." He patted the boards beside him. "You look weary."
"I didn't sleep well."