Mountain of Black Glass

  Paul had only an instant for astonishment—only a minute earlier the sky had been completely clear—then black thunderheads swept over him, turning the world a seething gray and throwing down rain that felt as hard as gravel. A wind blew up out of nowhere, battering the wave tops into froth. Paul and his spar were jerked sideways by a change in the current, sliding parallel to the beach for a moment, then away from it, and no amount of paddling or screaming his frustration at the rumbling sky made any difference as he was tugged back toward the open sea. Soon the island had vanished behind him. Beneath the thunder, like the deepest bass pedal of a church organ, he could hear the laughter of Poseidon.

  When the storm died down he was surrounded by open sea once more. The moment of hope and its snatching away seemed so obvious in retrospect and so much in keeping with everything else that had happened to him that it was hard even to feel outrage. In any case, he had little strength left for anything but clinging to the spar, which seemed more than ever to be a mere postponement of the inevitable.

  I don't know what I've done, but there can't be any crime dreadful enough for me to be punished this way.

  His fingers were cramping badly, and even changing position every few moments did not make the pain less. With each successive crash of cold, salty water, each rise and plummet between waves, he felt his grip growing weaker.

  "Help me!" he shouted at the sky, spitting mouthfuls of ocean. "I don't know what I've done but I'm sorry! Help me! I don't want to die!"

  As his numb fingers slipped from the wood, the sea around him suddenly calmed. A figure shimmered into view, insubstantial but unmistakable, the suggestion of wings a cloud of flickering light that haloed her entire form as she hovered above the now-gentle swell. He stared, helpless, not entirely sure that he had not in fact let go, that this was not just a last confusing vision granted to a drowning man.

  "Paul Jonas." Her voice was quiet and sad. "I do not belong here, It . . . hurts me to be in this place. Why do you not come to us?"

  "I don't know what any of this means!" he spluttered, fighting angry tears. Despite the gentling of the waves, his hands were still knotted in cramp. "Who are you? Who's 'us'? How can I come to you if I don't know where you are?"

  She shook her head. A shaft of sunlight pierced her, as though she were a glass vase. "I do not know the answers to these questions, and I do not know why I do not know them. All I know is that I feel you in the darkness. All I know is that I need you, that what I am cries out to you. Ideas, words, broken visions—there is little more."

  "I'm going to die here," he said with weary bitterness. He slipped and tasted brine, then dragged himself back until the spar was under his chin again. "So don't get your hopes up . . . too high."

  "Where is the feather, Paul?" She asked it as she might question a child who had lost his shoes or his coat. "I have given it to you twice. It was meant to help you find your way, to keep you safe—perhaps even lead you through the shadows of the One who is Other."

  "The feather?" He was stunned. It was as though he had been told that locating the pencil given to him on the first day of primary school would determine his university degree. He racked his brain. He barely remembered the first feather—it was as distant as an object in a dream. He guessed it had disappeared somewhere on Mars, or perhaps even earlier. The second, pressed into his hand by the sick Neandertal child, he thought he had left behind in the cave of the People. "I didn't know . . . how was I to know. . . ?"

  "You must know I can only give it to you three times," she said solemnly. "You must know that, Paul."

  "Know that how? I don't understand any of this! You talk like this was a fairy tale. . . ."

  She did not reply, but unwrapped something from the vapors of her ghostly being. The sea breeze snatched it from her fingers, but Paul closed his fist on it as it flashed past. It was a scarf or veil, light as gossamer, glimmering with its own faint light. Woven into the fabric was a stylized feather in shining greens and blues and other colors so faint that they seemed to come and go as the light changed. He stared at it stupidly.

  "It may help you," she said. "But you must come to us soon, Paul. I cannot stay here—it hurts. Come soon. It grows harder to see you through the gathering shadows and I am afraid."

  Hearing that forlorn tone he looked up and met her dark eyes, the only things in her entire smoky form that seemed entirely real. The sky darkened again. A moment later he saw someone else in her place—the same woman, but younger, and dressed in clothes that, although they still seemed somehow old-fashioned, were clearly millennia advanced on Homeric Greece. As she stared back at him, her curly hair merging into the jacket and long dark skirt, the simple white blouse setting off her mournful gaze, he felt a shock so profound he almost slipped from the floating spar again. This vision of her was so different, so unreal, and yet real in a way none of the others had been, that for a moment he could not remember how to breathe.

  Half a dozen swift heartbeats hurried through his chest as she stared at him, this achingly familiar stranger, her expression one of deep, helpless longing. Then she was gone, leaving him alone on the open sea once more.

  In a last moment of clarity before fatigue and misery and confusion again overtook him, Paul used the scarf to secure himself to the spar, looping it beneath his arms and tying it in a clumsy knot. Whatever else it might be or represent, it was substantial enough to save his life. The muscles of his arms writhing, he let go of the timber at last.

  As he bobbed on the ocean he slid in and out of sleep, but the dreams that came to him this time were far more focused, and at first painfully familiar—a forest of dusty plants, the clanking rage of a mechanical giant, the endless, heartbreaking song of a caged bird. But this time other ominous threads ran through the tapestry, things that he did not remember ever dreaming before which set him twitching in his half-slumber. The giant's castle surrounded him like a living thing, and in every wall there was an unblinking eye. A cloud of beating wings enveloped him, as though the air itself had come to explosive life. The final noise, which startled him up out of darkness, was the explosive crash of breaking glass.

  Paul shook himself awake, still up to his chin in cold seawater, in time to hear the distant concussion of thunder fading away. The setting sun was in his eyes, a broad, dazzling smear of gold on the face of the waves. He was still condemned to the ocean. His disappointment only lasted moments: as his eyes became used to the glare, he saw the island.

  It was a new land—not the jutting, wide country from which the storm had swept him, but a small, forested rock, lonely in the expanse of darkening sea. He paddled toward it, awkwardly at first because of the long scarf binding him to the spar, but then with increasing facility. He had a moment of panic when he saw the rough shore, the rocks jutting from the coastal waters like Gorgon-struck ships, but luck or something more complicated caught him with a shoreward tide and pulled him harmlessly past them. Soon he felt rough sand beneath his feet and was able to drag himself onto the beach. Shivering, his fingers so numb and cold that he might have been using animal paws, he picked loose the knot and looped the feather-veil around his neck, then crawled to a spot where the sand was white and dry before collapsing into deepest and most dreamless sleep.

  It was the nymph Calypso who awakened him. At first, as she stood with the morning light behind her, black hair moving as slowly in the wind as kelp in a sea current, he thought that the bird-woman had returned. When he saw Calypso's startling, coldly perfect beauty and realized that this was not the creature of his dreams, he was both disappointed and relieved.

  He rose to his feet, the pale sand of the beach covering him all over in a fine crust, and followed when she beckoned. She sang as she led him through meadows full of irises—a song of almost impossible sweetness, a thing of flawlessly contrived unreality.

  Her cave was nestled in a grove of alders and cypresses, its mouth bearded with grapevines. The sound of running water joined her song, and the two melodies tw
ined, the crystalline chiming of sweet springs and her soft, clear voice lulling him into a waking sleep, so that for long moments he could not help wondering if he had finally drowned and was being gifted with some last vision of paradise.

  When she offered him ambrosia and sweet nectar, the sustenance of immortals, he ate and drank, although her singing alone seemed almost enough to feed him. When she touched him with long cool fingers and led him to the springs to bathe the salt from his skin, then led him into the deeper shadows of the cavern to her bed of soft rushes, he did not resist. A part of him knew he was being unfaithful, although to what or whom he had no idea, but he had been lonely for a long, long time, lonely in a way no human creature should be, and his spirit was starving. And when in that long cool time of whispers and beading sweat, as the distant noise of the sea played counterpoint to their urgent sounds, Paul cried out and felt himself falling away, he would not let himself wonder into what sort of void he had spent himself, what kind of illusion.

  He could not turn away from comfort, whatever might lie behind it.

  You are mournful, clever Odysseus. What ails you?" He turned to see her gliding across the sand, hair streaming. He turned back to his contemplation of the endlessly rolling afternoon sea. "Nothing. I'm fine."

  "Nevertheless, you are heavy of heart. Come back to the cavern and give me love, O sweet mortal—or even, if you wish, we will stay here and make the soft, fragrant sands our bed." She ran a cool hand across his sunburned shoulders, then let her fingers trail downward to the small of his back.

  Paul found himself suppressing a flinch. It was not that there was anything wrong with being stranded on a paradise island with a beautiful goddess who wanted to serve his every need and make love half a dozen times a day, but although he had welcomed the opportunity to rest and be comforted, his heart was still hurting, and other parts of him were beginning to smart a little as well. Whoever had designed this part of the virtual Odyssey—which had covered something like half a dozen years of the fictional character's life, if Paul remembered correctly—was either a simpleminded, inexhaustible lecher or had not given the whole thing much thought.

  "I think I'd like to be alone for a while," was what he said out loud.

  Her charming pout could have caused cardiac arrest in someone whose sexual interest was a little less numbed. "Of course, my beloved. But do not stay long away from me. I ache for your touch."

  Calypso turned and almost floated back up the beach, moving as smoothly as if she slid on oiled glass. Whoever had created this exemplar had given her the long-legged figure of a netshow hypergirl and the voice and presence of a Shakespearean actress, the kind of fantasy female that should have satisfied any heterosexual man for an eternity.

  Paul was bored and depressed.

  The thing of it was, he realized, he was . . . nowhere. He wasn't home, not what he thought of as home, anyway—half-decent job, some half-decent friends, a quiet Friday night on his own from time to time when he could just vegetate in front of the wallscreen and didn't have to pretend to be witty. He wasn't getting any closer to finding home, either, or to answering any of the riddles of his current existence.

  But there had been that last moment with the bird-woman, that flash of another existence. He had heard a name drift through his head, or almost had, but it had left little trace in his memory, and was mixed up with other names he had heard—Vaala, Viola. Something kept bringing Avila up to the surface, but he knew that couldn't be right—wasn't that a saint, Saint Theresa of Avila? She had been, as best Paul could remember, a medieval hysteric who inspired more than a few pictures and statues. But he knew that his own vision, the girl in her old-fashioned clothes, was just as important to him as Saint Theresa's vision of The Lord. He just didn't know what it meant.

  The distant moan of Calypso's song came floating to him through the sandalwood-scented air. He felt a weirdly twinned shudder of longing and revulsion. No wonder visionaries like Theresa had to lock themselves away in convents. Sex was so . . . distracting.

  He had to get away, that was clear. He had experienced all the benefit that rest and virtual companionship could give, and if he had to live for years on this island, as the real Odysseus had, he would be worn away like a child's coloring crayon long before it was over, not to mention brain-dead on top of it. But the question was, how? His single timber had been swept back out to sea. There was no boat on the island, or any wood that was not attached to a heartbreakingly beautiful tree of some kind. He supposed he could try to build a raft, but he was completely unqualified to do so, not to mention the fact that the nymph Calypso watched him with the proprietorial care of a tabby guarding a catnip mouse.

  But I have to keep moving, he realized. I said I wouldn't drift anymore, and I can't. I'll die if I do. It wasn't an exaggeration, he knew: if he did not actually keel over dead, a part of him, a vital part, would certainly wither and perish.

  The nymph's song grew louder, and for all his disinterest and weariness, he felt a certain stirring. Better to go now, he decided, so that for once she might let him sleep through the night.

  Wincing, he stumbled back across the sands.

  The morning sun had only just begun to filter through the cypress branches when the strange thing happened.

  Paul was sitting on a stone in front of the cave's entrance, having just finished choking down yet another nectar-and-ambrosia breakfast—which he now suspected Calypso was giving him as a sort of performance enhancer—and wondering if he had the strength to walk across the island in search of some fruit or anything else that even distantly resembled real food, when the air before him began to glare and pulse. He could only stare stupidly as the harsh white light spread; it remained strangely contained at first, then abruptly took on a roughly human, but featureless, shape.

  The apparition hung in the air before him, wriggling. The childish voice that came through it was so unexpected that for a few moments he could make no sense of what it was saying: "Mira! Man, op this! Like Shumama's Shipwreck Show!" It swiveled and then seemed to see him, although it was impossible to tell which way the blank whiteness of its head was facing. "Hey, you Paul Jonas?" It made his last name sound like it started with "Ch."

  "Who . . . who are you. . . ?"

  "No time, man. El Viejo, he got words for you. Mierda, who that?" It turned to look at Calypso, who had appeared in the entrance to the cavern, an oddly blank look on her beautiful face. "You shoeboxin' with that? Ay, man, you lucky." It shook its shapeless head. "Pues, the old guy, he wants to know why you ain't movin', man? You found them others?"

  "Others? What others?"

  The apparition hesitated, tilting its head like a dog listening to a distant sound. "He said you found the jewel, vato, so you must know." He made it sound like four words or one long one, joo-el-vah-toe, and it took Paul a moment to catch up.

  "The golden thing? The gem?"

  "Yeah, 'course. He said you gotta fly, man. No clock to stay in one place—all the big stuff's going down."

  "Who said this? And how am I supposed to get out of here. . . ?"

  The shining thing either did not hear him or did not care about his questions. It flickered, flared brightly, then evaporated. The island's spirit-haunted air was still.

  "The gods have taken pity on you at last, faithful Odysseus," said Calypso suddenly. He had forgotten her, and now her voice made him jump. "It makes me sad, though—they are hard-hearted and jealous. Why should Zeus interfere when one of the immortal number takes a human lover? He who wears the aegis has taken dozens, and given them all children. But he has sent the divine messenger, and thus his will must be done. I am frightened to resist him, for fear I may incur the Thunderer's wrath."

  " 'Divine messenger'." Paul turned to face her. "What are you talking about?"

  "Hermes—he of the golden wand," she said. "I knew, as we immortals know the shape of things ahead, that someday he must come, bearing an Olympian order to end our love-tryst. I did not think it would
be so soon."

  She looked so sorrowful that for a moment Paul felt something like real affection for her, but he reminded himself—not for the first time—that she was a collection of code, no more, no less, and that she would be saying and doing the same things no matter who wore the guise of lost Odysseus. "So . . . so that's what he was saying?" he asked. "That Zeus wants you to let me go?"

  "You heard shining Hermes, messenger of the gods," she said. "The immortals of Olympus have given you enough trouble—it will do you no good to set yourself against the Thunderer's will in this."

  Inwardly he was rejoicing. It had been some kind of messenger, certainly (and a decidedly odd one at that), but from the person who had sent Paul the earlier gem-message, who he strongly doubted had anything to do with Mount Olympus. Calypso, however, had simply incorporated it into her world, as Penelope had tried to reconcile Paul's confusing presence within hers. He had experienced an attempt by someone—someone outside the system?—to communicate; Calypso had seen a decree from the Lord of the Gods.

  "I am sad if I must leave you," he said with what he thought was necessary hypocrisy, "but how can I do it? I don't have a boat. It's miles and miles to anywhere—I can't swim that far."

  "Do you think I would send you away without gifts?" she asked him, smiling bravely. "Do you think that immortal Calypso would let her lover drown in the wine-dark sea, unhelped? Come. I will take you to the grove and give you an ax of fine bronze. You will build yourself a raft that may carry you across Poseidon's domain and on your way, so that the gods can lead you to your destiny."

  Paul shrugged. "Okay. I guess that sounds reasonable."

  Calypso produced the promised ax—a huge, double-headed thing that nevertheless felt as light and well-balanced in Paul's hand as a tennis racket—and other bronze tools, then led him to a grove of alders, poplars, and tall firs. She paused as though she would say something to him, but instead shook her head wistfully and glided back up the path toward her cave.