“The time-flux took me and put me here,” she tells him. “And you the same way. Right?”
Her words make him shiver as though he has just inhaled flames. A woman of his own era? Really? In the same instant he feels joy at finding a true companion, and a curious sense of melancholy at the thought that he is no longer unique in this world, that he must share his role in it with her.
“How long have you been here?” he asks.
“Who can tell?”
He accepts the answer. He would have had to give the same.
“What have you done since your awakening?”
“Wandered,” she says. “Talked with the people. Gone swimming. Wondered.”
“What year was it when you left our world?”
“You ask too many questions,” she says, no sting in her tone. “And not even the right ones. Like what my name is. Like how I feel about what happened to me. Don’t you care what kind of person I am?”
“Sorry.”
“Do you want to come inside?” A flicker of coyness in the invitation, a flicker of wantonness. He asks himself how many millions of years have gone by since he last went to bed with a human woman; a real one. He finds himself thinking of the smell of her skin and the taste of her lips and the sounds she will make when he goes into her. “Of course,” he says. “We don’t need to get acquainted out here on your doorstep.”
She leads him into the house. As he enters, he hears a quick catching sound, an unmistakable sob. The house is a shell, a three-sided facade; within it is nothing at all. The woman stands a dozen feet in front of him, her back to him, her arms on her hips; her buttocks are full, with a deep dimple above each cheek. “How do you like it?” she asks. “Be it ever so humble.” There is a hollow, mechanical tone to her voice. She laughs. “How do you like it? Be it ever so humble. How do you like it? Be it ever so humble. How do you like it? Be it ever so—” He rushes forward, berserk. “You said you were real!” he yells. “You didn’t tell me the house was like this!” He has been cheated. He slams his open palms furiously into the small of her back, knocking her to the barren ground. She lies there, sobbing. He attains a robust erection. He will fling himself upon her and mount her as though she were a dog. He drops on top of her; her buttocks are firm cushions for his thighs. She makes a gasping sound and flexes her back slightly, and as he begins to ram his swollen organ home, she disappears, sobbing, and he tumbles with a startling splash into a black pond. There is a Breather in its depths, squidlike, huge, patient. I am Quoi, it tells him.
What—how—?
You are welcome here.
His body is changing. He sinks toward the depths, sprouting flippers and gills, ridding his chest of air. It is a remarkably convincing illusion, but he does not believe that it is anything more than illusion.
He says, You are the same entity who was the woman before.
I am Quoi, insists the Breather. Come rest beside me. Let us talk of the nature of love. Do you remember? The flowing, the twining, the exchanging—
—and the merging, Clay says. You have the jargon down well.
Why are you so hostile?
Because I hate being deceived, he replies.
The Breather seems hurt. A long silence comes; Clay wonders if he should apologize. But he waits. The Breather sobs. Clay says finally, Show me your true form.
The dark waters roil. Nothing else happens. He begins to believe he has been unjust to the Breather. In that instant the pond disappears and Clay finds himself on land again, facing a hideous colossal Eater. Fangs clash. Eyes blaze.
“No,” Clay says. “Please. Don’t run through the whole repertoire. Will you be a Destroyer next? An Awaiter? I’m not interested in these games.”
The Eater departs. Clay stands alone, nervously digging his toes into the rough soil. A bush in front of him catches fire, and burns with a harsh green flame, but is not consumed. And he hears the sound of sobbing out of the burning bush. A grim joke, he thinks, and a shallow one. He realizes that he is at last in the presence of Wrong.
29
Out of the bush: “To help you?”
“What good is it?”
“To be kind to a poor wanderer.”
“Your kindness has a price,” he says.
“No. No. You are confused. You don’t know me.”
“Then let me know you.”
“There are ways of helping you. I will.”
“What are you?”
“Wrong,” says Wrong.
“A god?”
“A force.”
“Standing in what relation to, say, the Skimmers?”
“I do not know.”
“You do not know.” Clay laughs. He tastes a wall of oily porcelain around his head. “Thank you. Thank you very much. What do you want?”
“To help you.” Sweetly. Daintily.
“Help me, then. Send me home.”
“You are home.”
He looks about him. He sees only hot scrubby terrain, unfamiliar, bleak, pocked with alien plants. He tries again, feeling nausea climbing. “Where are my friends?” he asks. “I speak of the Skimmers Hanmer, Ninameen, Ti, Bril—”
Wrong flashes him a numbingly brilliant vision: the six Skimmers sitting in a solemn circle, faces drawn and skullish, eyes cloudy, a nimbus of doom crackling above them.
“They are preparing to die,” says Wrong. “The six of them. It will happen soon.”
“No. No. Why?”
“To die?”
“To die, yes. Why?”
“To discover,” Wrong tells him calmly. “You know, Serifice has been there already. The journey to the first house of Death. But it was not enough for them. It was not satisfying, do you see; it had the wrong texture. Now they look for the real death, the permanent death.”
“For what reason?” he demands. His voice skids awkwardly from pitch to pitch. He feels terribly young.
“To escape.”
“Escaping what? Boredom? Life in eternal summer?”
“That is part of it.”
“And the other part?”
“To escape you,” says sobbing Wrong.
30
He is stunned. His feet grow gnarled roots; his genitals shrivel; tears cut blazing furrows in his cheeks. This dream has turned sour. The fire in the bush is out, leaving bitter white fumes. Eventually he asks, “What can I do to make them change their minds?”
“Very little, perhaps.” The voice comes from the area of sky, just above his head. So Wrong is still with him, somewhere.
Clay turns, twists, sweats, grimaces. “Why do they want to escape me? Am I so hideous? Am I such a monster?”
A long pause.
At length a reply: “You do have a taint.”
“A taint?”
“You know that you carry a great cold wad of cruelty and ugliness inside yourself. You know that you are capable of being crude, vindictive, unfaithful, irascible, jealous, greedy, irrationally hostile, and coarse.”
Clay scowls at the sky. He spits at the indictment. Then, more humbly, bowing his head, he responds, “I am only a primitive. I am a mere prehistoric. I didn’t ask to come here. I do my best; but I’m made of sleazy stuff, full of grease and impurities. Should I beg pardon for that? It’s not my fault I’m imperfect. Anyway, what does that have to do with the Skimmers and their dying?”
“It is difficult to be with you for long,” Wrong explains. “You carry much pain within you. Despite yourself, you share this burden with your friends. You have shared it with the Skimmers. You have hurt them. You have been more than they could handle, do you see?”
“I’ve never been aware of that.” Defiantly, not apologetically.
“Exactly,” says Wrong.
Clay kicks at the baked ground. He plucks up a weed and hears it pop and ping. He tosses it sullenly aside. “They could have told me all this themselves,” he says, wounded. “They could have helped me rise above myself. They’re like gods, aren’t they? They could cope with a
mere smelly beast out of the past. And you say they’d rather die. How does running away from me—”
“It is not as easy as you think for them to—”
“—into death help them in any way that could possibly—”
“—change you,” Wrong says. “They too have their limits. So they will go.”
“Why?”
Wrong materializes briefly in the form of a cluster of vertical rods encircling an eye and a sob. “Out of despair,” she says. “Out of kinship-shock. They recognize you in themselves. You are the ancestor. They did not know your nature until you came, and now that they know it, they fear you, for you are in them. As you are in all of us. So they go to die. They talk of it as a happy adventure. For them it is: but also, as you realize, it is flight.”
Clay’s head spins. There is a fiery throbbing in the back of his throat. He is drowning in metaphysics.
He says, summoning all the intensity at his command, “How can I persuade them not to do this?”
“You keep asking that.”
“I have to know.”
“I have no answer.”
“Who does?” he asks shrilly, with a vulture gnawing at his liver.
“Who does? Who does? Who does?” Wrong’s sob becomes a caw. Clay looks around. He cannot find her. A hot, hard rain begins. He is crumbling. He starts to run, but his feet are gone, his shins are shedding, he must clump around on the bones of his knees. He inhales knives. He sweats acid. He sees a mirage: the Skimmers squatting before him, melting, dying, singing, smiling. How can I prevent it? he asks. The words scoot around inside his head, whirlpooling, funneling, disappearing with a whoosh into his neck. Left behind is the powdery residue of an answer: You might try the Interceders. Vertebrae clacking, Clay nods. The Interceders. The Interceders. “Where can I find them?” he demands. But of course he is again alone.
31
He comes to a land where there is no color. Pigment has been drained from everything; he stands at the zero wavelength, fearful of sliding down a crack in the spectrum. Even the sun is without hue; and the light that descends is a fiery paradox. He walks carefully, wonder-smitten. He has seen Antarctica’s all-devouring whiteness, and he has seen Dark’s fanged blackness, but this place is not like those, for, though black may be an absence of color, nothing here is black, and, though white may be a joining of color, nothing here is white. How, then, can he see anything? “You aren’t fooling me,” he says bravely. “I know a little about the laws of optics. Color is nothing more than the effect on the eye produced by electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelength. No wavelength, no color; no color, no vision. So how can I see these things?” He studies his colorless hand. He thrusts forth his colorless tongue. He touches the blank petals of a blank-tinged shrub. If there can be color without physical extension, can there perhaps also be physical extension without color? Surely you would grant that there is such a concept as an absolute color. You can visualize red, can you not, without visualizing a red object? Yes? Yes? Very well. Color in the abstract, unassociated with mass. Now visualize mass without color. Mere form, minus the distraction of resonances in the visual spectrum. Not so easy? Well, yes, but try, my lad, try, try! Clay screams at the droning, pedantic voice to get out of his head. It goes, with the sound of ripping wires. A colorless lizard spurts across the colorless ground: he sees the event as a clash of textures. There is something quite Japanese, he decides, about this mode of perception. One must depend on pure form for the identification of objects; the world has the subtlety of a symphony in one key, of a garden of black pebbles, of a single shimmering calligraphic stroke. He relishes this narrowing of the palette. He moves with great gentleness, afraid that a misstep will jar the spectrum alive again. How peaceful this is, how deliciously empty. Even sound is colorless. “Hello,” he calls. “Hello. Hello. Hello.” The words are like glass rods, chaste, epicene. “Can you tell me where I’ll find the Interceders?” He sees rocks, trees, birds, flowers, grass, insects. This is the ghost of the world. This is the shadow of a shadow. He could stay here forever, bearing no responsibilities, purifying his mind, cleansing it of the dregs of old colors, all that gritty dried accumulation of fading greens and yellows and ultramarines and scarlets and myrtles and bistres and vermilions and sepias and bronzes and emeralds and carmines and blues and grays and oranges and indigos and purples and lilacs and cerises and golds and slates. To see a blank sunset spread peacefully across the blank sky, to look into the quiet heart of a blank forest, to think blank thoughts while the wind stirs the trembling blank leaves—but he remembers the Skimmers. He goes onward, passing through a sandy strip and a place where millions of bits of glistening glass, smooth-edged by time, sparkle silently all about, and he enters a district of dense brambles where wicked hooked thorns sprout from thick vines that rise and move about. Sighing and hissing, the vines circle him like moody snakes, making tentative passes at his eyes, his genitals, his calves. “Go on,” he says. “Cut me, if you have to, and get out of my way!” Still the vines hesitate. He laughs at them. Then one of them whisks across his hip in a quick kiss, drawing beads of blood, and the sprouting droplets too are colorless at first, but suddenly they tumble into insistent redness; by that startling bright blaze on his skin he learns that he has crossed the boundary. Color leaps out of everything here, obscenely profuse. He is dazzled. His retinas fold and stretch under the barrage. Red! Orange! Yellow! Green! Blue! Indigo! Violet! All texture is lost in the spectrum’s furious shriek. Parting with colorlessness is sad; he looks back into that place in the hope of catching one last glimpse of its unique bleachedness, but his battered eyes cannot detect that quality of absence now, and, shrugging, he faces the intense bombardment. Those channels of his mind that had been drained of color residue now fill up again like replenished wells, making thirsty sucking noises as the shattering light pours in. How can there be such brilliance? Everything pulsates. Everything radiates. From the core of a single leaf come a thousand gradations of tone. The sky is a prism, and he dances under its awful beam. His own skin is ashiver with undecipherable, cavernous mazes of light and shadow. His eyeballs are adrift, sliding in his skull. He is learning the limits of his senses: if he does not somehow lessen his receptivity, he will overload and burn out. Close your eyes! Close your eyes! Close your eyes! “To close the eyes is to die a little,” he answers fiercely, and stares at the sun. Go! Do your worst! He flings his arms wide. He hammers his heels into the warm moist yielding soil. His manhood rises. He drinks the many-colored radiation and, gasping, finds room for it within, and pumps his hips and clenches his fists, and defies the giant prism to destroy him. And triumphs. And absorbs. And gluts himself on reds and greens. And enters ecstasy, sending his seed spurting in a soaring splendid arc; it flashes purple and blue and gold as it travels, and where it lands it creates fiery homunculi clad in winding folds of flame. He laughs. A cloud passes in front of the sun. He kneels and stares into a universe he finds within a single oily drop of water and a thick round blue leaf. All the tiny creatures, suffering, loving, rising, falling, striving, losing: he sends them his blessing. “Where are the Interceders?” he whispers. “My friends are in danger. Where? Where? Where?” The colors fade. The world returns to its expected hues. Clay is assailed by doubts, phantoms, hags, harpies, phobias, fogs, infirmities, decays, taboos, rigidities, bogies, infections, impotences, pharisees, extremes of temperature, and spiritual distress. He wades through these miasmas as though through an ocean of sewage, emerging coated with slime that withers and falls away at the first touch of the sun. Ahead of him lies a sweeping rocky headland, a single spectacular scarp that sprouts from a commonplace plain and shoots rocketlike to a height of hundreds of feet, forming a long flat-topped pedestal dominating a somber landscape. Nestling at the base of this promontory, far across the plain, are the ruins of some immense building, some great stone structure that even in its disheveled state retains extraordinary power and presence: it is a columned edifice in the classical mode, gray an
d stolid and self-assured, fitted by style and grandeur to have been the supreme museum of Earth, the repository of all that has ever been achieved on this planet. Many of its columns are smashed, the mighty portal hangs from its marble hinges, its pediments are in disarray, its lofty windows gape. Yet Clay realizes that he has come upon no minor work, but rather a place of enduring significance, and he feels a strange confidence that here he will encounter those whom he has sought. He creeps toward the colossal structure as though he were an ant.
32
He comes upon the building from the west. The side that faces him is a massive unbroken sheet of gray granite, unpunctured by windows, almost untouched by time; only the disruption of the row of ornamental reliefs near the roofline indicates the injuries the years have done. A scaly green lichen clings to the roughnesses of the wall, creating patterns of choked color, continents sprouting on the ancient stone. Weeds have begun to straggle across the portico. The door is gone, but, staring through it, he sees only darkness inside the building. Cautiously he begins to walk around it. As he proceeds, legions of chittering insects fall warily silent, dropping out of the rustling chorus in groups with each step he takes. There are scratchy brown thistles nearly half his height; they jab their ugly brushes at his naked body. Now he stands before the building. He had not realized, from afar, just how tall it is; it rises and rises and rises, claiming so much of the sky that he wonders why it does not topple from sheer giddiness. Yet it is no skyscraper, phallic in verticality. It has the blocky bulk of a proper museum. Nine huge marble steps lead to its main entrance, each step running the width of the building. Clay mounts the first step and the second, and then, losing his courage, decides to complete his inspection of the exterior first.
He follows a pockmarked step eastward and turns the corner. This end is dismal. The columns are shattered stumps, jagged as broken teeth. Green strangling vines lash them together. The pediments have fallen altogether, and fragments of masterpieces, half-buried, jut from the ground. He tries to discover what scenes had been carved there, and, going close to one cohesive sculptured mass, beholds the images of beasts more strange than any he has yet seen, things with bulging eyes and grillwork mouths and rasping skins, monstrosities out of a nightmare’s nightmares; with cool fascination he examines this gallery of horrors until, taking it with the impact of an icicle in his ear, he comes upon what surely is his own portrait, delicately carved in gleaming stone. He flees. Turning the corner, he attempts to tour the building’s rear; but it has been set close against the sheltering promontory, and there is no fourth side. He retraces his steps, avoiding a sight of that dreadful pediment, and returns to the front face. Shall he go inside now? He backs off, considering. The terraced roof is, he sees, overgrown with vegetation that has taken root in the fissures and niches of the entablature’s intricate cornice. A whole forest lives up there: frizzy underbrush, clumps of gay flowering shrubs, streamers of glossy ivy, great-boled trees that must have seen many centuries. Even the largest of the trees, though, is dwarfed by the grand sweep of the roof itself, so that the whole tangled mass of undisciplined growth seems like nothing more than a trilling layer of casual accretions. Birds and animals nest in the trees. He watches a speckled yellow serpent writhe in a proprietorial way along the friezes. Enough. He will go in. He advances to the steps.