Wrong,
VanRoark thought.
Once I saw them in such purity and grandeur, but then I wandered into the cathedral and saw the sterile angels and saints of the mosaics.
But he drew back from himself and acknowledged that, for a year, he had not given any thought to the Meadows outside of the hint that he was going to die there. In the company of who or what had seemed strangely irrelevant; now the literal reality of Heaven came rolling back down upon him with the concussion winds from the Meadows.
"I think," the voice resumed, "that they are much like the men: poor, beaten clowns, called out once again from what had also been promised to them as an eternal peace and sleep. I wonder if their wings can be broken and if they hang from their bodies at hideous angles; I wonder if they bleed where the jellied gasoline or sword strokes of devils strike them; I wonder if they feel pain and the endless frustration."
The voice was quiet for a second; the clouds covered a bit more than half the visible sky, or about all of VanRoark's limited field of vision. It began again, holding in it the vicious malice and groaning sorrow of a moment ago, but now touched with a growing awareness as it heard itself say things it had known, yet never admitted for a thousand years.
All through it, the shapes soared and turned, arrayed like tanners' hawks in tunics of blood-rusted barbed wire. "And do you know what all of this progressively more wretched Creation, this endless succession of abortive Meadow Wars means, beyond the fact of one more abortive ending? It means, VanRoark, that the thing which had given life to all of this in the first place and which had conceived of all the plans is a poor, stupid, fumbling idiot just like the rest of us!
"Ah, that is beautiful! Think of it! The final basis for a million years of theology and a thousand years of philosophy—nothing more than a useless pile of shit!
Noble minds striding the earth, putting their ascetic necks on the block in the name of something which didn't exist. Wars, evolutions, inquisitions, pain, pain: because it was part of the plan, the divinely inspired plan—so full of eternal wisdom that it sickens me now—and therefore how could it be bad?
"The marvelous conceit which must have been in it in the beginnings. The pride, the limitless power, the complete knowledge! And then, when the time came to end it, the first uneasy tremors as it became obvious that things had been created which could no longer be controlled. Time—there was a lovely thing for you, ticking like a seven-day clock from beginning to end and then politely making room for eternity—that didn't stop when it should have. It began doing things it shouldn't, just like the seasons, the air, the stars, none of them behaving as they should have!"
The sobbing currents broke through the words, riding over them like waves of polluted surf. "Oh God, Van-Roark! Look at our Wars and the men who are still trying to get there, even after their own army tried to kill them. After these Wars fail, and they will, there will be another, maybe a bit more successful than this, most likely less. And after them . . . after them . . .
"Man, the only way men know they are alive in this world is because they are still bleeding! Soon, I think, even pain will be lost to us, and then there will be nothing but madness. Ah, to be alive and to have no way of telling it from death! There's a thought to start your mind moving! Carry it a step further and ask how the living will be able to tell when they have at last died! There'll be nothing then, nothing but a darkness filled with gigantic, colliding shapes that will crush men and then tear them apart."
VanRoark lay quietly for a long time looking at the Wars—he dared not close his eyes.
Although now largely with the voice of a man, Timonias still carried with him the power of imagery he'd had at Admiralty Square. VanRoark saw the dark colliding shapes, the torn and mangled skins of men splattering between them, their minds and organs bloody smears on the darkness.
After a while the clouds moved northward again and the detonations all but vanished to thin traces along the horizon.
VanRoark wondered if the prophet was still there or if he had vanished with the burnings. "Timonias? Are you there?"
"Yes." The reply came slowly and in Cavandish's voice.
VanRoark puzzled over this for a moment. "Cavandish, are you there too?"
"I am." The same voice. "I was Timonias."
Oh, Christ-on-a-crutch, aren't the Wars and a dead prophet enough for one evening?
VanRoark thought, with a curiously clear and somehow amused fraction of his brain; he had not felt that part of him speak since the first time he had been at the Burn. But it vanished quickly as the harsh light of an unexpected explosion lifted above the earth and buffeted him.
VanRoark tried to think of something to say, but he was utterly at a loss. Instead, after some few more moments of quiet, the voice spoke again. "Amon, Cavan-dish, the one who had come to the Burn on the train, died along with his friend Zaccaharias two weeks after we left the army."
A fumbling silence; the voice lost the bitter command it had possessed an instant before. "Look, my story, the things I told you about the rim nations and about how I used to fly as a bombardier, all that is true—except that it happened sixty years ago.
"My nation, I told you, simply began to break up. I helped it along in this, for while I was still there and flying out against the world I received . . . received . . . " The voice hesitated and fell, searching within itself to express something but not even the prophet's full voice could have explained. " . . . You know, Amon. I feel the way you must have felt as you walked away from hearing me. . ..
"I was given this voice and the visions to put inside it. I was shown things, oh, such beautiful, magnificent things that it makes me sick to think of them. I was filled up, you know, as if I were an empty jar holding nothing but air, and then I was full of these visions and the knowledge. For thirty years I simply moved through this world with nothing touching me on the inside or out. Then, I was . . . was so full of that lovely power that all I had to do was open my mouth and it would come rumbling and spinning out, wrapping itself around the souls of men just as it should have done, lifting their eyes to look into themselves. And then bringing them to this place.
"So I spoke the words, and I could see the things moving behind men's eyes and all of that only made me more full and more eager to see the final, glorious climax of my mission.
"Ah yes, such a climax my Army of Justice and Light and Good and Purity and Beauty gave me. I had left my ship to walk through the camp. . . ." He stopped talking. VanRoark could hear nothing but a barren, crackling noise, like that which usually came out of the train's radios; it reminded him of the brittle crunching of bones at Brampton Hall and underneath the Burn's dust shroud.
Something had to be remembered; Timonias went on. "I was in the camp. I was dressed in robes so fine and white that I think I could have walked at night by their light alone. I began to hear the noises that leather and metal make when they are being readied for something. It broke loose. My lovely army, turning and tearing itself to pieces, killing men from the rim nations whose families I had known!
"No, that's wrong. It just did not matter to me at that moment—until I saw them being dragged away from their machines and soaked in their own petrol, made to drink it, and having torches rammed down their throats.
"I ran through that camp, Amon, not a soul noticing my presence. I had called them there! I, Timonias! But I found that I could not speak. At the moment when my voice and knowledge were desperately needed, when nothing else but that could have stopped the army's suicide, I could not speak a word!
"I was like the Wars. They're the last place, the final move in the game, but they aren't and the game goes along, making up its own rules while the players can only look on helplessly. So I failed too. The words left me as did the visions, and I have felt only fragments of them since.
"Maybe losing my mouth had something to do with it? I caught a nice piece of phosphorus on the lower jaw and throat near the end. I would've bled to death if Cavandish and his crew hadn't picked me up.
"You really should have known them, Amon. Fantastic men, equal to the best I knew when I was still flying. They knew who I was, they
knew,
and they saw what I had done and what I had failed to do. But they stopped the bleeding and took me away. They found you later and another fellow named Johonner, but he was too badly shot up; they gave him a new heart and even some new motor parts for his brain. He died a week out.
"They gave you your arm and eye and put you to sleep to recover. They gave me a voice again, not my own, of course—I had lost that forever in my, ah, calling—but a voice. I was very angry with them at first because it possessed none of the power and wonder it once had. Before, my curses would have literally driven them insane, knocked their brains loose from their skulls; but then, all I could get out, before I learned how to work the new voice, was static and a few random words." There was a crackling silence and then metallic laughter. "Just as I am talking to you now, Amon; just like I was learning how to talk all over again—for the fourth time in my life too!" Again the quiet. "Ah, yes"—very low—"my life."
VanRoark heard the deep skidding noise of big guns with muzzle brakes, firing somewhere over the horizon. "Are you still coming with me tomorrow?" he called out after some seconds.
"No."
"But why?" VanRoark cried to the voice behind him. "Why are you going, in whose name?"
"In my own name."
"Well, I have none now, neither Cavandish, nor Timonias, nor the first one, Arnold."
"But if only to die. . . "
"VanRoark, I am dead! I was dead the moment the special voice of Creation was given to me—as you were made dead when you heard it, as was this fine company of fighters around us, as was the army, as was Brampton Hall.
"You go to die by yourself, and your own little fragment of creation, complete whatever portion of the great plan might have been designed for you. There are worse things, you know."
VanRoark sighed heavily through his hazed world; the far-off automatic cannons sounded like a person tapping on a windowpane on a rainy morning. "I could live in this world, or even bring children into it. Do you think that would be the sin I suspect it to be, Cavandish?"
"Yes."
VanRoark lay without speaking, random thoughts shuttling through his contorted brain without seeming purpose; gradually a pattern, only fractionally perceptible to him, emerged. "Is there any way to end it, Cavandish?"
"I don't know." The voice was old and very tired.
Frustration and anger compacted inside VanRoark's throat, burning toward his head from all his limbs and eyes. "Then, Timonias! Timonias! You tell me, how can this agony be ended?" VanRoark began struggling to his feet; the ground spun and whirled below him; skeletal shapes, aluminum sheeting and the fire-edged horizon alternated in front of him. "
Timonias, say something! How is it to be ended?
"
The silence swallowed up the three visions, replacing them with a uniform darkness, framed only by intersecting lines of color, each thinner than a human hair.
The voice came crashing into the night, quaking with a power it had thought lost, terrified with itself and even more with what it was saying. But it really said nothing, for there were no words; it was not the same as it had been at Admiralty Square: the purity was sadly, viciously flawed by metallic grindings. The voice struggled briefly above them. Against the vanished colorings of the Wars, the inside of VanRoark's head was filled with an awful shattering of hope. All that he had seen and remembered from Admiralty Square was taken and warped beyond recognition; the plans and shapes cracked, flew apart under the brutal pressure. The brilliant colors of new suns and the golden skin mankind had worn in the beginning of the game turned to the stale, dirty maroon and rust of dried blood, the decaying white of rigorous flesh.
Behind this horror was a greater one, accompanied by a sorrow whose immensity filled his body, drowned the softened memories of the rim nations, of the great ships and the men who had sailed upon them.
A single line of stone, the causeway, was formed when all the few, isolated stringings of color came crashing together, fleeing and detesting the crumbling shapes and the sadness behind them. Even this was compressed into invisibility and VanRoark was left alone with the voice. He sensed fissures opening all along his mind and body, vainly trying to let the voice escape.
At last it did, and rushed out of him, leaving behind it memories of a sort he had never conceived before, far beyond those of Admiralty Square, like the filthy, still-burning ash from a cremation pyre. He collapsed into the diamond earth of the Burn, fleetingly thankful that he was too exhausted to dream.
Around dawn, VanRoark was awake, lying where he had fallen the previous night. Even before he opened his eyes he was aware that his brain had assumed a new, fearful configuration, as if it had retreated to within the ruined fortress the memories of the rim nations had left behind; he sat in the middle of himself, shivering, and looked outward upon the inside of his brain at the things that were arranged there, of which the voice had spoken. They hung like pieces of butchered meat; their bloodied, mutilated forms were made tolerable only by the distance he had put between their knowledge and his actual consciousness.
He peered out at them for almost an hour, until he sensed the roaring upon which the butchered knowledge was hung; it was the sorrow, and the sound of it was that of the Sea. Like clods of dirt thrown upon a field of clear crystal and gem stone, the thoughts were crucified in front of him on meathooks of marlin-bills and the unicorn horns of narwhales. The Sea was the sorrow. Just as the voice had told him, they were the same, for it was in the Sea that all lived as it should have. From the Sea, the last and strongest redoubt of God, did all the life and energy of Creation flow; the waters sparkled clean and free as he opened his eyes. The surf was still as white as it had always been; and again, as it had always done, it washed the beach clean of the poisons of the land. As one moved further from the Sea, though, the diseases would become too strong; the same chaos which had gripped the stars and the land would prevent the Sea from touching anything, from healing it or sending it to some final peace.