Guardian

  Her womb split horribly sideways, and a bloody shoulder worked its way out. She was giving birth to herself, turning inside out.

  The screams stopped only long enough for her to take deep ragged breaths. The other shoulder worked through, distorting the mother’s torso into something made of human parts but not recognizably human.

  Both breasts slid out at once—and it became horrifyingly clear that the self she was giving birth to was also pregnant.

  I didn’t know the word then, but she was everting herself. The body split and after the abdomen worked its way through, the rest was swift: the new womb and then her limbs and feet. All streaked with bright fresh blood.

  The newborn mother began to whimper and clutch at the bloodied grass.

  “Oh, my God. She’s starting over.”

  “You see a woman.” He was Raven again.

  “You don’t?”

  “I almost did, as Gordon. Now what I see is the Orion Nebula: the dying and birthing of stars. It goes on all the time, of course.”

  “But this pain.”

  “You think the universe feels nothing, giving birth and dying? Any pain you’ve ever felt was only an echo of that.”

  I watched with horrified fascination as the process started over. “That’s only metaphor,” I said. “The universe doesn’t have flesh and ganglia and a brain to interpret their distress signals.”

  “Why do you think you have them? One of your own said ‘Pain is nature’s way of telling us we’re alive.’ That’s close to literal truth.”

  I was obstinate. “Pain draws our attention to something being wrong with the body.”

  “What did I just say? Your body was perfectly happy when it was a scattered bunch of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon atoms. Life is what’s wrong with it.”

  “Now that’s a wonderful argument against suicide. When I die, the universe will be a smidgeon happier.”

  “This is not an argument. I’m just showing you around. What you do when we return to Sitka … will be what you do.”

  “Including … take my life?”

  “Life was yours to give and it’s yours to take. But I don’t think you will kill yourself now. Let’s go to one more place; then we’ll start back.” I shut my eyes hard and endured the whirling dislocation. It went longer than ever before, and I clenched my jaws so hard against being sick that I could hear my teeth grinding. Finally it was over.

  “This is not a world,” he said as I opened my eyes, “in the sense of being a planet. It’s not even really a place, as your Garden of Eden was not an actual woodland.” The door opened. “But I think we’ll both see the same thing this time.”

  I stepped to the opening and took hold of the edge of the door. We were evidently floating over a landscape, drifting a few hundred yards off the ground. Dramatic mountains and cliffs, but not menacing like the first planet. Everything was subtle shades of warm gray, soft and monochromatic.

  There was no horizon. The landscape stretched out forever, becoming vague with distance.

  “Let’s go on down,” Raven said.

  As we floated closer to the ground, what had appeared to be a kind of granular texture became thousands of individuals, perhaps millions.

  Some few were human beings, but the overwhelming majority were otherworldly creatures. Gargoyles and sprites. Demons and floating jellyfish, an articulated metal spider and a close formation of thousands of blue bees arranged in a perfect cube. Two dinosaurs like we had been and a cluster of six of the translucent angel creatures we saw on the first planet.

  “Only six?” I said.

  The raven bobbed his head. “The six who elected to die.”

  “Wait … everyone here is dead? This is the afterlife?”

  “They’re not completely dead. But they’re not really alive, in the sense of eating and breathing—if they were eating, a lot of them would eat each other; if they were breathing, they’d be breathing different atmospheres, usually poisonous to the others.”

  “Daniel! Is Daniel here?”

  “He might be someplace. I wouldn’t know where to find him, though. And you couldn’t talk to him or touch him.

  “I really don’t understand this place, the where and how of it. The ‘why’ seems to be that it’s a holding area of some kind.”

  “Of souls,” I said. “After they die.”

  “They look like bodies to me.”

  “Waiting for something?”

  “I don’t know. If it’s something like your Catholics’ purgatory, then I wonder where heaven is. I’ve never come across it.”

  “Maybe your room, your ship, can’t get there. Maybe you do have to die and spend some time here, first.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Almost as good, anyhow.”

  There didn’t seem to be much order in the crowd. I tried to pick out the humans, and the nearly human, and there did seem to be a lot of the very old and the very young, as you would expect of the dead. Nobody really looked dead, though. No wounds or signs of disease.

  But nobody was moving. It was like a photograph in three dimensions. While I was looking, two new ones appeared, one like a human woman but with spade-like appendages instead of hands, the other a kind of long-haired monkey with an extra pair of legs.

  “Does everybody come here, good or bad?”

  “Impossible to say. There appears to be room for about everybody.” We started to rise at an accelerating rate. The individuals merged back into the granular texture and then into a smooth gray; mountains shrank to pebbles and themselves disappeared. The horizon didn’t change, though.

  “What happens if you fly in one direction for a long time?”

  “It doesn’t seem to change. You never come to an edge. But a long time’ doesn’t mean much here. The illusion of time belongs to worlds like yours. Here, there’s only will and chance.”

  “What do you mean by that? Time an illusion?”

  “When you studied mathematics, you used the idea of infinity.”

  “Of course. You couldn’t do calculus without it.”

  “And you believe the universe is infinite.” I nodded. “So stars and planets and nebulae go on forever.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I have news for you: they don’t. Within your lifetime, scientists will suspect that there’s an edge to it. Within another lifetime, they’ll prove there is.”

  “That’s curious. So what’s beyond it?”

  “Another universe. And another and another. Every instant, from the universe’s birth to its death, exists side by side, in a way. Think of it as an Edison cinematograph, writ very large: one frozen moment, then the next, and so on.

  “Furthermore, every possible universe exists as well. Many where the Civil War didn’t happen or was won by the South. Many where you did kill yourself Thursday evening. Many where you had biscuits for breakfast, instead of toast. With everything else in the universe unchanged. There’s room for them all.

  “What you perceive as time is your translation from one possible moment to the next, because of something you did or something the universe did to you.”

  “Free will and predestination?” I said.

  “Decision and chance,” the raven said, “inextricably intertwined.”

  We had risen so high that a featureless gray plane faded off into mist. Above the mist, blackness, no stars.

  “But this place, this is beyond that?”

  “Yes. This is where people go when they stop moving from moment to moment.”

  “So maybe this is heaven?”

  He just looked at me. “Close your eyes. We’re going back to the angels.”

  I didn’t close my eyes, at first—after all, while we were traveling, I didn’t seem to exist as an assemblage of body parts, so what did “closed eyes” mean? In a few seconds it became pretty obvious, if not describable. Like seasickness, but somehow larger, longer, with the threat that it could last forever. I did something like closing eyes and the room disap
peared, and I only felt miserable. The smell of musk changed to lemon.

  Then it was cinnamon and we were there, on the Dantean planet. Through the open door, the seven angels braided together in the oven heat.. “Let me speak to them first,” Raven said. He hopped over to the dark soft patch he called their brain.

  They were momentarily still, rigid, and then resumed a rhythmic twining. “Now you,” he said. “Shoes off.”

  The ground was like hot flour between my toes. But I remembered not to dig in when I stepped onto their coolness.

  At first I didn’t hear or feel anything. Then there was something like a quiet song, a wordless hymn in my mind. I concentrated, but couldn’t make any sense of it. Then it was gone.

  “Won’t you use words?” I said. But they just curled and uncurled in silence.

  The raven was back in the yellow room. “I think they’re done. Come on.”

  I crossed the hot sand, looking back at them. “Did they tell you anything?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know. They like you.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off them, as I backed into the cube. “Then why didn’t they say anything?” It smelled of mint tea.

  “They don’t so much say things as do things.” The yellow wall appeared. “Close your eyes.”

  This time I obeyed. “Are we going back?”

  “Yes and no.” I squeezed my eyes shut. The dislocation seemed about as long as the first one.

  “You can look now.” The door was open on a scene of incredible desolation, stone buildings battered to rubble, a few steel skeletons standing. Everything blackened by fire.

  “Where is this?”

  “Times Square, New York City.” He had turned into Gordon, who blinked away tears. I had never seen him cry. “Your world, about a hundred years after you were born.”

  “Like … like the lizards’ world?”

  “Exactly. No human left alive.” He turned to me with a kind of smile. “I feel like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. This is what usually happens. Not always in the middle of the twentieth century. Sometimes it takes another hundred or even a thousand years.”

  “But it always happens.”

  “Not always.” He changed back into Raven. “You don’t want to go outside here. You would die. Close your eyes.”

  “Where are we going?”

  He didn’t reply, but I felt weight on my body, the compression of stays around my waist, and took one quick look. Instead of the strange skintight suit, I was wearing my warm-weather teaching clothes, the light gray Gibson Girl suit I’d mail-ordered from San Francisco.

  I screwed my eyes shut again, against the rush of nausea. “We’re going back to Sitka?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll freeze to death in this!”

  “You’ll manage.”

  The machine stopped. I felt a breath of cool forest air and heard crickets.

  We were back in the woods where we’d started. But there was no snow. The light of a full moon filtered through the forest canopy. An owl called and flapped away. I stepped out onto soft humus and the yellow room disappeared behind me.

  “Months have passed,” I said. “It must be June or July.” I slapped a mosquito.

  Raven beat the air with his wings and rose to an eye-level branch. “Something has passed.”

  I had a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. “You said you were a guardian, but not my guardian. Are you going off to save someone else now?”

  “I think I’m done here. I don’t save lives. I save life. By making the smallest change I can.”

  “Life?”

  “Think about what I’ve said.” He hopped around in a full circle, the moonlight glinting soft rainbows off his feathers. Then he cawed, like an actual raven, and flew off into the night

  “Wait!” I said, but he was above the trees and soaring.

  For a moment I was totally lost, and started to panic, but got ahold of myself. Sitka was an island, after all; if I walked in any direction I’d eventually come to the water, and there take my bearings.

  Bears. I whistled, the way Gordon had taught me. Raven. They won’t attack you if you don’t surprise them. Unlike some other mammals.

  I could have gone in any direction, but made the assumption that Raven’s room, or ship, had come down in the same place from which it had left, in the same orientation. I picked my way through the undergrowth in a straight line for a few minutes, and was rewarded with a game trail. I turned left and walked down the hill.

  I thought I knew where I was, but the place where my cabin should have been was just a small clearing. In a few more steps, though, I was on the path that turned into Lincoln Street.

  The moon was high, but somewhat west. It was probably about two in the morning. The town was quiet except for faint noise drifting up from the harbor.

  I came to a slight rise and looked down in that direction. There were work lights arranged around one of the boats, which looked vaguely familiar.

  A chill gripped me. It was the White Nights, and the noise was from a work crew belowdecks, banging rivets into the boiler.

  I broke into a run, as fast as my skirts would allow! I ran downhill to Baranoff Street, paused to get my breath, and walked swiftly to the Baranoff Hotel.

  There was a light on in the lobby. I rushed up the steps, but the door was locked. When I tapped on the glass, the little old lady came ’round, thumb holding her place in a dime novel.

  She unlocked the door and a hundred wrinkles pinched into a frown. “What on earth are you doing about at this hour?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I improvised, “and went down to check on the ship.”

  She looked at the key in her hand, evidently trying to remember having let me out. “Down to the docks after midnight,” she clucked. “You’re daft. But ye must have a guardian angel.”

  “Yes!”

  I rushed by her and up the stairs to the room that Daniel and I had shared. The door was locked, I tapped, and then knocked loudly.

  He opened the door and stood there bleary-eyed, completely alive. I grabbed him and hugged him so hard his joints popped. “My son … do I have a story to tell you.”

  The incredible tale.

  With the spirit-lamp I made us some tea, trying not to talk too fast. He became more and more alert.

  After about ten minutes, after I’d left him and Doc and Chuck in Skagway and come back to Sitka and teaching, he said, “Wait. What about Soapy Smith and his gang?”

  “What about him? He was killed in a shoot-out before we came to Sitka.”

  “You really think that?”

  “I remember it clearly. Reverend Bower told me about it before we left. And then I read about it in the Skagway News, too; about the man who killed him later dying in the hospital.”

  Daniel shook his head. “Mother … Soapy Smith isn’t dead. Not yet, though they’ll hang him for sure.”

  “Isn’t dead?”

  “No. There was some sort of town meeting about what to do with him, and he and his gang went to break it up, and it turned into a massacre. Then a lot of the town joined in, one side or the other, and there was a lot of shooting, all through the night. By noon the next day, the army had come down from Dyea and shut down the town. It’s under martial law—you don’t remember any of this?”

  “No.” It was a different world.

  “Mother, we talked all afternoon about it! Whether or not to go on!” Hysteria edging into his voice.

  “And … what did we decide?”

  “We didn’t. Me and Chuck want to go on, at least to Juneau, and wait and see. You and Doc, you wanted to chuck it, sell the gear and go back to the States.”

  It was sinking in. I had a funny thought. “So Chuck wants to dock it, and Doc wants to chuck it.”

  He nodded rapidly, smiling with relief. “That’s what you said over dinner. Is it coming back to you?”

  I thought about Raven’s cinematographs—millions of them clickin
g along in unison; one frame changing, and then another.

  “Where did this dress come from?”

  “What?”

  “I distinctly remember buying this dress by mail order from a discount house in San Francisco, five or six weeks after you left for the Yukon.”

  “Mother, I—”

  “Of course you don’t keep track of your mother’s wardrobe. But do you ever remember me wearing anything but black since we left Kansas?”

  He picked up his tea and then silently set it down. He stepped over to the bureau and brought back a bottle, and poured an inch of whiskey into the cup. He stirred it with his finger and took a reflective sip.

  “No. All your clothes are black. And there’s no place you could have bought that tonight, after we went to bed.”

  That amused me as much as it annoyed me. “Daniel! You think I would go out and buy a new suit just to back up some crazy story?”

  He cringed a little. “But it is a crazy story.”

  “I suppose it is.” I poured a tablespoon of the liquor into my own tea. “And it gets much crazier.”

  I condensed my teaching and missionary work to about a minute, and then spent another minute explaining the role of the Raven in the Tlingit religion.

  “What’s so important about this raven?”

  I told him about his death and my reaction. He shook his head, openmouthed.

  “I was … going to kill myself, and then a raven appeared. Just as I cocked the gun. He walked through the door as if it weren’t there, and said, ‘God wouldn’t want you to do that.’ Or something to that effect.”

  “A magic bird talked to you.”

  “Indeed. And then he changed me into a bird. An eagle.”

  “Mother …”

  “Just hear me out. I know this sounds like madness—maybe I am mad! But if I don’t tell someone, I’ll burst.”

  “Go ahead.” His mouth was trembling, his eyes wide.

  I hesitated. Could I tell him about Eve birthing herself, about my transformation into a ravenous reptile, about being the Dark Man and watching a world’s birth, growth, and death?

  “Do you remember Flammarion’s Lumen?” He shook his head. “It’s the book I read on the Mississippi, that the two French girls loaned to me.”