Garrison listened to the whispering voice and frowned more darkly, and at his side Suzy whined and tugged at his trousers with her teeth. Finally he said: “I do remember something of it. That you helped me, yes—but also that your reward was greater than your effort warranted.”
“But you paid readily enough in the end,” the voice in his head answered. “Else your life, your sanity, your survival were forfeit.”
“That’s a lie!” Garrison snarled. “I paid grudgingly, despite the fact that I bought my mind, my life. But you had tricked me into a pact, and I would not break it…” He calmed himself down before continuing. “This much I remember, at least: that you sought to serve yourself, not me.” He shrugged. “Still, I suppose that’s in all of us. As for Koenig: he was my true friend. But you—”
“I, too, was your friend, Richard. I am now. I seek only to help you. And night draws on…”
Garrison turned up the collar of his ragged jacket. Schroeder was right, for the sun was almost down and the shadows advanced visibly. But still he was suspicious. “I paid you once for your help, and didn’t like the price you asked. Oh, I can’t remember what you took from me, but I know it had great value. I know that it was worth…too much. What fee is it you’ll demand this time, eh?”
The whisper grew stronger, almost eager, and its reply was instantaneous. “Equality!”
“Equality? Explain. You want to be my equal?”
“Yes.”
Garrison pondered it. What did it mean? What’s in a word? Equality? Is a stone equal to another stone? And men? A man is a man, after all.
“But I,” came the whisper, knowing his inmost thoughts, “am little more than a revenant. A ghost you said so yourself.”
“You desire flesh for your thoughts, is that it?”
“I’ll explain no more. I desire equality. Nothing else.”
“And for Koenig?”
In answer to that Garrison sensed a mental shrug. Then, as if on afterthought: “Koenig is Koenig. I am me. Or desire to be…” The echoes of the whisper faded away, and Garrison suspected that the unseen whisperer had almost said too much.
But…equality. What did Schroeder the ghost who was once Schroeder the man-God mean? This was very important. If only Garrison could remember all of it. But—he could not.
“How can I promise what’s not mine to give?” he asked eventually.
“Simply promise it,” came the eager whisper.
“Very well—” (a sigh inside) “—on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“That you’ll aid me wherever you can, to quest’s end.”
And now laughter, welling up from inside. Pealing laughter from within, subsiding slowly into a dry chuckling and finally petering out. “My friend, how can I deny you? Yes, and you shall have Koenig’s help, too.”
“Agreed!” said Garrison. “And now—show me what you can of the way ahead. Show me my enemies, the soldiers of Death. Show me—the future!”
“Ah!” the whisper was thin now, receding. “Not so long ago you would not have needed me for that. It would have been a very small magic. But your powers are deserting you, Richard. You are their master still, but for how much longer?”
“You’re right!” Garrison snapped. “The Machine is dead or dying, and my powers are failing along with the Machine. But—” his anger went out of him in a great sighing breath, “—why are these things happening, Thomas? Do you know the answer? If you do, and if you really are my friend, you’ll tell me.”
Faintly, a mere tremor in his mind: “Don’t you remember, Richard? You stopped the Machine. You killed the beast. This thing you carry with you is only a cold metal and plastic carcass. Even more of a revenant than I am. Psychomech is dead!”
“Don’t go!” Garrison cried, afraid once more. “The future—you promised.”
“Indeed,” came the very sigh of an answer. “Very well, let’s see what we may see…” And the whisper was gone.
Garrison blinked his eyes, started, gazed wildly all about. The Machine sat there, leaden, dead; Suzy whined and cringed at his feet, her tail tucked between her legs; crag-cast shadows crept closer still and the vanished sun shot up a few last beams to lend a dying glow to the distant horizon. Soon that horizon would be black. Soon night would spread her blackest cloak upon the land. And the canyon still to be crossed. And the tale of the future as yet untold.
Then, when Garrison had all but given up hope—
A spark in his mind. A glowing point of light emanating from that inmost region where Schroeder’s ghost held dominion. A light growing brighter by the second, expanding, blossoming into—a vision!
A vision so dazzling that the earth seemed to reel under Garrison’s feet, sending him staggering, stumbling, falling to his knees. A vision so real that he not only viewed it but lived it, was part of it. A dream within a dream, seeming more vital than the dream itself. A dream of the future. His future.
A dream…and a nightmare!
But in the first instance, the dream. The beautiful dream…
Chapter 6
Garrison saw the Goddess Immortality. Beyond any doubt, even though Her back was towards him, he knew that it was She. And he believed he knew why Her face, as yet, was denied him. For who might guess the consequences of gazing unprepared upon such a face? But certainly it was, could only be, the Goddess Herself.
The beauty of Her form was…undying. Her figure, Her posture, the incredible garment She wore—the very throne upon which She sat, carved from the rock of Life Everlasting—all offered mute witness to Her immortality. But Her face was something which, for the moment, mercifully, Garrison could not see.
Of Her flesh, however, of thigh and shoulder and neck where they showed: they were of the misted Marble of Eternity, the softest and yet most durable surface imaginable, so that Garrison’s entire being seemed to sigh and sway forward, drawn by the magnet of Immortality’s flesh. Her hair was the jet of Deepest Space; the nails of Her fingers and toes were crimson as the Blood of Time; and Her garment: it was of the shimmering silver micromesh of Unbreakable Continuity. But Her voice—that voice when it came—must surely be the final proof positive of Her Identity.
Who might describe it, that voice? Whose texture, if ever Garrison should later attempt its recall, was or would be all things to all men. Soft as winter snows, warm as summer suns, pure as purest gold and yet earthly as living loam:
“Someone seeks my seduction. The million millionth man would live forever,” the voice laughed. And slowly, majestically, She rose up from Her throne, turned and allowed Garrison to gaze upon Her face. And framed by those blackest tresses of space he saw—a void!
The void. The Great Void, which is filled with all things. The roaring rushing reeling sucking space-time continuum itself—into which, in a single instant, he was irresistibly drawn! Sucked in, rushed like a mote across the vault of the universe to gaze down upon—THE ALL!
The sight was blinding, unbearable, and Garrison closed his eyes. Not in terror or horror but at the sheer awesome beauty of it. And the thought occurred to him: “If there is a place I would be, this is that place. If there’s wine I might drink, this is the wine. If for every man there’s destiny, then let this be mine. And if I am not to be immortal, if I am to die, then let it be at once, here and now…”
But that was not to be. In another moment, whirled and hurled out into a cold and cruel reality, he cried out his agony and vainly grasped at that which was already beyond his reach. He grasped, clutched—
—and the nails of his fingers split open where they scrabbled uselessly at stone made slimy under a beating rain.
Garrison cried out again—howled his frustration this time—as crazed lightnings beat all about him, amidst the roaring of tumultuous waters and the earth-shaking pounding of great hammers, or of engines built by gods. He made to rise, found himself upon a steep, slippery slope, slid and rolled and clattered down the face of a scree-littered decline to a jutting roc
ky ledge.
Finally he came to a halt and lay there in the mud and the downpour, all the wind knocked from him, soaked and sucking at sodden air. Here, in the partial lee of black rocks where they balanced on this precarious ledge, at last he dared open his eyes fully and drag himself wearily to his feet. And now he gazed out upon a bleak and monochrome scene, a scene of wild desolation—and of man’s imposition on raw nature—a scene monotonous in its power and wearying to the eye. With one exception.
Lightning crashed again, lending the air a momentary brightness and causing Garrison to shrink down and shutter his eyes. But the scene of a moment ago still burned on his retinas. His location was halfway down the wall of a small valley perhaps a mile across, dammed at one end where a man-made lake reached back its wind-tossed expanse of dark water into the cliff-guarded recesses of a forbiddingly gloomy reentry. Water arced in six enormous spouts from the dam’s face, its thunder the mighty hammering Garrison had mistaken for the engines of gods. He gazed out from a position almost directly above the great wall of the dam, and the trembling of the earth was the vibration of its mighty generators, and the rain which soaked him was that thrown up by the controlled eruption of pressured waters.
Shielding his eyes against stinging spray and cold mist, Garrison peered across the valley at a wild skyline, where once more he spied an unmistakable mark of man: a platoon of titan pylons carrying ropes of cable, marching double-file away across the hills. But while both dam and pylons were certainly human artifacts, in the valley itself, towards the far wall and in a timbered belt higher than the course of the old dammed river, there stood that sole exception to the scene’s almost awesome drabness: a hemisphere of golden light like the bulge of some small sun half-sunken in the earth, whose pulsating dome rose tall and dazzling over the tall pines it dwarfed.
Lines, altered by ego, crept into the observer’s mind from some forgotten source: In Xanadu did Garrison a stately pleasure-dome decree…
But—was this really a pleasure-dome? Or might it not be a temple? A temple to a goddess. The Goddess of Immortality! The thought persisted: that this was indeed that temple wherein a moment ago (or a month, a year?) he had come face to eternity with the goddess of his desire. But why here, in this desolate spot, with the works of mere mortals so much in evidence? And the throbbing golden glow of the dome: why should it tug at his memory so? Of what did it remind him?
A good many questions and no time to explore them; time barely to pose them before—
The scene shrank, grew small as Garrison was drawn out of himself, his spirit snatched up in some great unseen fist and lifted at breathless speed into the sky; until he looked dizzily down upon valley, dam, dome, himself and all, from a windy aerial elevation amongst the boiling clouds. Except—
Except that, even as he watched, the scene grew dim, and under his eyes the valley, dam and dome disappeared, were replaced by a parched plain of bones and skulls and hot white sands—and himself, ragged and desiccated now, gaunt as a starveling, with puffed, cracked lips and red, staring eyes. And behind him, dragged inch after interminable inch across those burning sands, the Machine, all rust red and trailing frayed cables and crusts of corrosion.
And now Garrison felt his aerial observer-self being set down upon a floor, and he saw that the desert of bones and the starveling Garrison and the crippled Machine were only images trapped in an otherwise milky sphere. A scene viewed in a shewstone, a crystal ball; and he himself (or his spirit) now sat cross-legged in a circle of wizards or demons, all intent upon the struggles of the Garrison in the shewstone. And the place where they sat was like the floor of a great pit, with smoky flambeaux to give a little light, and the atmosphere of the place was full of the reek of death and the sting of sulphur. Then, knowing these seated beings for his enemies, Garrison gazed upon them each in turn and fixed them as best he might in his mind’s eyes, so that he would know them if ever he saw them again.
And he saw that they were dressed in the various robes of wizards and that they carried the wands and charms and injurious devices of such. One of them wore a black, immaculate evening suit and bow-tie, and his features were dark and greedy. And he spun a small roulette wheel between his crossed legs, occasionally pausing to deal sharp-edged cards at the shewstone, as if to pierce its crystal and so harm the struggling Garrison within. And his wand was a heavy one and hung unseen in his armpit like a familiar toad, causing the breast of his jacket to bulge where he sat among the wizards.
Another was tall and slender and gray as a night cat, covered head to toe in a zippered suit, with bandolier and belt, grapples and grenades and all; and this one’s eyes were steel in his face (what little of it could be seen) which was pale, cold and emotionless. And he toyed with a string of dark prayer-beads (except that its cord was of steel and carried no beads at all!) sometimes slipping its noose over the shewstone, as if to snare the beleaguered man within.
Yet another was small and yellow, with slanting eyes set in a face inscrutable as that of the sphinx, and he sat motionless as carved from yellow stone—except for his eyes, behind whose slanting slits the feral pupils followed each tiniest action of the miniature Garrison trapped in the crystal ball. And there were others, all at odds and different in dress and mode of application; but all of them muttering runes of destruction, so that Garrison’s fear grew in the face of their massed enmity.
And he started slightly as he noted a pair—seated close together and a little apart from the rest, where shadows obscured them—whose looks were as the looks of two he remembered from a former time. The looks of Schroeder and Koenig! But he could not be certain, for their forms and faces were made lumpish and vague in the flickering light from the pit’s flambeaux. Their interest did not seem inimical, however—rather the reverse, for they shied from the others and their occupations about the shewstone—but still he gained the impression that their business here was a sly one and more in their own interests than in those of the tiny Garrison.
One other he especially noted there in the gloom. This one stood, arms folded, well back from all the rest, and overlooked them. And his outline was very wavery and unsolid, so that Garrison thought perhaps he gazed upon a ghost. A ghost cloaked in a Robe of Secrecy, whose face and eyes, even as Garrison strained to see them more clearly, turned full upon him.
And beneath the cowl of the Secret One’s robe…
…Gray eyes of a keen intelligence, set in a face of stone! A very solid ghost, this, or a most mysterious and secretive man. But certainly not an enemy, Garrison could sense that much. Rather a covert watcher: a guard, perhaps. And perhaps a friend.
A Secret One indeed, this man of stone.
At that very moment it seemed to Garrison that following the lead of the Secret One, all of the other pit-dwellers slowly began to turn their faces towards him. It was as if, for the first time, they sensed that he was here. And such was the malignant effect of this concerted movement—this awful awareness—that he sprang to his feet in a terror; in which same moment he felt himself drawn up as if on invisible strings, out of the pit to hover, light as air, over the concentric tiers of a great amphitheatre of the gods.
Gods, yes, and the amphitheatre full of them about their pursuits—but false gods, Garrison quickly saw, who used their powers entirely to their own ends and not those of their followers. And occasionally one such false god would go to the pit’s rim and look into it, and nod his satisfaction or frown his disdain or disappointment, so that Garrison knew that the false gods controlled and approved the vile sorceries of the pit-wizards.
For these gods were worse than the sorcerers and demons they governed, and in their supreme arrogance and insolence they had put on such robes of honor and wisdom as were never theirs rightly to wear. They wore the great wigs of judges and the bowlers of politicians, the learned aspect of leaders and scholars and the airs and manners of gentlemen—but behind their backs they carried the whetted knives of assassins, and in their mouths were words of treachery,
and one and all they wore in their eyes the monocles of jewellers and did obeisance to One who was everywhere present in the amphitheatre, whose name was Avarice.
And Garrison knew them now, that they were the false gods of High Finance, and occasionally of Justice and Power, and sometimes even of Law and Order and Government. So that even as he was taken up yet again in the fist of the unseen giant—taken up and whisked aloft into a darkness from which to gaze down upon the amphitheatre of false gods—Garrison took note of them and nodded grimly, and vowed never to worship them.
But even peering upon them from on high, suddenly he sensed that he was not alone, that some Other was here who also observed and took note. And hovering there in darkness over the amphitheatre, over its central pit of wizards, over shewstone and all—buoyed up and suspended in air by some force or power beyond his knowledge and great (he suspected) as any power of levitation he had ever controlled—Garrison strained his senses to locate the whereabouts of that Other, whose presence was like a dark omen.
And he heard…the breathing of the Other, slow and measured and deliberate. And he sensed the slow pulse of blood through the Other’s veins, like a throb of power. And he felt the very eyes of the Other, burning through him and unaware of his spirit, as they too gazed down upon the works of the beings below. And in the silence of that high place these signs of the Other caused Garrison’s hair to rise up on his head, so that he shrank down into himself and grew afraid.
But he grew angry, too—at his own fear, partly, but also angry that the things he had seen, which could only be of that future he had desired to know, had not been shown to him more clearly. For which omission, having no one else to blame, he illogically blamed the Other. And so he deliberately turned his eyes upwards to seek out the Other’s form—and what he saw was strange beyond all strangeness.