Last Plane to Heaven (31 page)

The pen scratched on. Scribing, scrying, painting futures in the ink of the past, though all time was one from the vantage of the angel's copydesk. It had recovered its equilibrium. Angels were pendulums, marking the endless moments of the mind of God, messengers bridging the ineluctable gap between perfected intent and the imperfect matter of Creation.

It had never questioned why God, who was all things everywhere, should require a book to record His doings, or the doings of His creation. It is not the nature of angels to question, only to answer. It is not the nature of angels to devise, only to record.

The Sixth Sleeping King

What the hell was the matter with people? No respect, that was it. His mother had been right. No one ever listened to him like they should.

The man who had been commander in chief poured himself another drink. He wasn't supposed to, had given it up years ago so far as anyone knew. The gap between what he said he did and what he actually did had ceased to matter so long ago that the ex–commander in chief rarely considered it anymore. What he said, what he
believed,
was the truth. The messy details were just that: messy details. No one's business.

Disappointment, that was it. So many things which should have happened never did. Promises from Scripture and politics alike had been betrayed by niggling traitors. No one saw his goodness, his rectitude. Not even Laura, who'd always stood beside him, shrouding her thoughts in a smile.

He really ought to have married a girl like Mom. A man could rule the world with a woman like that at his side. Daddy had, damn him.

The ice in his glass clinked like the fall of coins. The outside sweated cold and heavy. He knew then he was dreaming, he really hadn't touched a drink in years. Not really. Not that counted. The ex–commander in chief simply didn't stand around mixing a highball.

He had people to do it for him.

Even in his dreams, a man had to laugh at himself.

A young fellow in a suit stepped close. Dark skinned, but not obviously any particular kind of colored. The ex–commander in chief didn't recognize the guy, though he wore the regulation gray suit and translucent earpiece.—
Sir.
The fellow's voice slipped through another layer of dreaming into a space of soaring naves and thundering sermons and the safe, blind glory of prayer.

“This is about the red heifer, isn't it?” Where had
that
come from? He wasn't supposed to talk about it. The glory would come, in his lifetime, he'd been promised. He
knew
.

—Sir.
Something hung in the fellow's eyes, expectant as a launch code.

He felt his breathing grow shallow and hard. “Is it time?” The promise, it was coming to pass!

—Sir.

A familiar peevishness rose inside him, that his handlers had so long fought to banish. Too bad for them, he was the boss here. Always would be. Didn't matter how he got to the top, nope. He was here now and not climbing down. No sir. “What is it,” the ex–commander in chief demanded. “Speak up!”

—
Sir.
The voice sounded haunted, as if coming from an empty hallway far away.

He tried to shake off his dream, to wake up gasping amid the sheets. He hated the feeling of being wrapped in self-doubt, and always shed it as quickly as he could. Mother said too much thinking was bad for a man. The ex–commander in chief had learned to trust his gut. Facts changed depending on who brought them to you. Feelings were the hard truths.

Right now he was feeling very worried indeed.

—
Sir.
A terrible fire blossomed behind the fellow's gaze. The ex–commander in chief threw his drink at the flames, but they only passed outward along the arcs of liquid and ice and shattered glass until his dream was consumed by fire and a great voice echoed from the heavens, asking him if this was truly what he intended.

Still, he did not doubt himself. Not him. Nope. No sir.

*   *   *

The angel finally set aside its pen. The book was done, or would be until it was opened again. Words were the oldest, greatest magic. God had spoken in the beginning, and He would someday unspeak the end, swallowing Creation down in a sweeping blur of undoing: oaks shrinking to acorns; cold cinders swelling first to red giants, then reduced to their starry births; old men climbing from graves to step backwards to life until they climb puling and mewing back to the salty delta from which each had first flowed.

As done, undone. As lived, unlived. Time, helical, alive, autophagic, endless as a circle, with as many corners as an egg.

All of this best stated in the language of dreams. Consciousness was too linear for even the angel itself to properly comprehend the sweeping swirl of God's Creation. How so for His poor creatures of clay and sweat and breath?

It smiled, preening a moment, feeling a rare sense of accomplishment before moving on to the next task: to bear the book away so it might someday be read.

The Seventh King

She is just a girl. She doesn't know her parents, though there are people who live in her house and clothe her and feed her and call her by a name not her own. At night a favorite uncle crawls out of the wainscoting, thin as a shadow, heavy as a star, and whispers to her the dreams of sleeping kings long dead.

Someday she will be so famous that they will have to write down her dreams. When she grows into her power and announces her true name, darkness will settle like a cloak, bringing the nighttime of the soul to all those who have plunged her into darkness.

Which is to say, all of everyone.

For now, dreaming is enough. There is no higher truth.

 

The Fall of the Moon

My grandfather Lake was a man whose presence in my life was as great as the moon's pull over the tides. In a very indirect way, this tale is about me and him.

Hassan polished the twisted beech keel of his boat. The vessel had been a-building for years, assembled only from holy wood—thrown up by the raging Sea of Murmurs which even now coiled on the western horizon frothing like blood—and his grandfather's bones. It was not a large boat, but Hassan was not a large man. All he intended was to ride the Tide of Spring.

His work of late had been mostly in waiting. His grandfather had passed as all men someday do, with a familiar smile on his old man's face and a strange woman's name on his young man's lips. Hassan had carefully burned his grandfather's flesh to send the soul spiraling toward the outer moons, then baked the flensed bones in an oven built from clay mixed with his own blood.

The old man had emerged grinning and polished, pale and harder than he had ever been in life.

Now those bones were fitted into the ribs of the beech-keeled boat. It cost a soul to sail upon the Sea of Murmurs, a sacrifice endlessly renewed upon the smoking waves. Hassan had whispered his grandfather's name as he'd fitted each knuckle, each rib, each long bone, until the syllables had vanished from his mind with the final setting of the jaw in the tiller lock.

His grandfather had become the boat. A soul to sail on the sea, while Hassan remained a breathing man with his eyes open six feet above the welcoming soil.

“I will live forever,” Hassan told his grandfather.

The boat said nothing, though Hassan thought he could hear it breathing.

*   *   *

“You listen, boy. You've ears to hear.” The old man's hand was a crab's claw, twisted fingers bent together to grab young elbows in pain. “There's more to this world, and more, even as God wills us to be here.”

Hassan smiled. “Drink your tea, Grandfather.” He passed a little clay tumbler over to a shivering hand. They lived in a small hut hard by a cypress, as far from Telos as anyone did.

Alone together, thinking thoughts, the two of them.

“Tea.” His grandfather grimaced. “This isn't real tea. More like seaweed soup. Tea grows in little sacks on bushes tended by coolies on the sides of steep mountains.”

“What are coolies?”

After a long pause, his grandfather puffed out a ragged breath. “I don't know, boy. I don't know either.”

*   *   *

Obsidian cliffs towered behind the village of Telos, a wall sheer and hard enough to daunt even the most adventurous boys. Each day their dark glass reflected the setting sun in a multiplicity of dim fetches, a small, stubborn galaxy brought down close to the land for casual inspection. They made a mirrored hell of the Little Moons and the Great Moons on nights when the entire sky danced.

If a boy risked all to tramp across the sands at low tide, he could turn back and see the carved tops of the cliffs. There was a city there, a thousand thousand times greater than Telos had ever dreamed of being with its three waterfalls and single corral.

The contrast between the glittering ramparts high above and the little driftwood homes below could strain even the most stoic heart. Very few ever chanced the damp sand and the red-boiled wrath of the waves for a glimpse.

Otherwise the village and lives of its people unfolded in the strip of hay meadows and salt marshes and twisted cypress trees that stood as stubborn as life between the glassy cliffs and the burning sea. It was a world that reminded folk of their place with each ragged breath and staggering step.

Only Hassan's grandfather had been different, and through him, Hassan.

*   *   *

The night Hassan's grandfather died, Etienne the hetman burned the village library. Hassan stood in the flickering light of blazing paper, watching sparks arc from the useless, melting datacubes.

“It does us no good,” the hetman told Hassan. The village leader was an older man, blocky and stolid, uncle to Hassan's late mother, and had always claimed a soft spot toward Hassan.

“It's what we know,” Hassan muttered.

“No.” Etienne's voice was a quiet, intense reflection of his grandfather's. Like a version of the old man kept in a bottle. “We know the tides, and when the sea burns and stings, and to avoid the splinters of the cliffs. We know how the rains come and when they stay away. We know when to plant the maize and when to walk the fields plucking the borers from the stalks.
That's
what we know. Not the names of kings and admirals and who discovered each of the metals.”

Hassan stared into the spitting fire. “He always said we were lost.”

“Maybe. But here is where we are found. Here is where we will stay.”

“Here.” The obsidian cliffs gleamed in the night as Hassan raised his eyes to the empty stars.

“It's a good life,” said Etienne.

*   *   *

The hetman had missed one book. When Hassan went to fold his grandfather's bedroll for the last time—Martine needed it for her middle son—he found the ragged volume beneath. It had a spine of split bamboo, that had been bound and rebound many times.

His grandfather had taught Hassan much about what few books they had. But Hassan had never seen this one.

He turned his find over in his hand. The cover was stretched leather, perhaps an eelskin, though he couldn't be sure as it was worn with long handling. When he opened the book, the pages crackled.

Whatever the original creators had meant to say had been long lost to the scribings of dozens of others. Writing crabbed across the pages, up, down, sideways, on a slant, in the colors of different inks and the soft gray of clay and the dark red of blood.

Voices from the past.

He even recognized his grandfather's hand.

Hassan sat down to read.

“Boy,” it said in the old man's shaky block printing. Hassan had never been able to master writing himself. “First, you'll need my bones.”

*   *   *

Once there had been boats which sailed the seas, both the mercurial Sea of Murmurs and the seas of ordinary water that stretched on all the worlds dreaming in the harsh light of the evening stars. Once there were boats which sailed the air, some fast as forked lightning that split the night, others slow as thought. Once there were boats which rode the tides of light that bound the stars together.

Now there were no boats at all.

The book told stories under stories. With practice, Hassan could pick out each hand. As he prepared his grandfather's bones, then searched the beach for the right wood, he would take moments and read the different stories. The hand which had written rounded letters in blood could be picked out of the confusion of the pages just as Maryam's drum could be heard beneath the singing of the village on Round Moon Festival.

Each story was a voice. The book was a chorus. Hassan knew that he would be the last.

The book told him many secrets:

“We are bound here between life and death. The black city on the cliffs behind us is our past. The deadly sea before us is our fate.”

“You will need to spend a soul to cross the fiery waters. Do not trade your own.”

“Our life was never meant to be this way. I cannot believe that either God or any man intended such for us.”

“Love while you can, live as you must.”

“I will be free beyond the horizon.”

“Beechwood thrown up by the sea will make a suitable keel. Cypress smokes until the oil bursts into flame.”

“This is the way to build a boat: attend to the pictures of my poor hand.”

“Sail away.”

“Live forever.”

“Sail away.”

*   *   *

Etienne came to Hassan in the month after his grandfather's death.

“The old man needs to be within the soil,” the hetman said.

“He goes there piece by piece,” Hassan whispered. It had been among the first lessons of the book, marked with some urgency.

You will need to spend a soul.

“There is talk in the village.”

“There is always talk in the village. I do my duty.”

Etienne grabbed Hassan's shoulder, squeezed it, a sort of distancing hug. “You are not healthy out here. Move into the town. Woo Maryam. She sees you as being … of interest.”