The Unreasoning Mask

  Suddenly Ramstan had been Muhammad the prophet, yet at the same time was also himself. He was sleeping in a house near the sacred Kaaba in Mecca. He had gone to bed weary and sad because he had gained so few disciples after the angel Gabriel had appeared to him in a grotto, had shown him a scroll, and said, "Recite!" That is, read and then reveal the divine contents to mankind.

  The fatigue, disappointment, and discouragement lasted only for a few seconds. He was awakened when Gabriel entered the house, the archangel Gabriel with his many-colored wings and the glorious light streaming from his face.

  Ramstan described the events following very rapidly. He would have liked to dwell with great detail on them, but he did not want to weary his audience, and time was vital.

  "After Gabriel had purified my heart by washing my breast with water from the sacred well of Zamzam and poured over me the hikma , which is symbolic of faith and wisdom, he took my hand. And al-Buraq appeared, al-Buraq, the Lightning, the fabulous unique animal. It had the face of a young woman and wore a golden crown. Its body was a mule's, its hoofs and tail were a camel's, its harness was of pearls, its saddle was a single carved emerald, and its stirrups were turquoise."

  Before helping Muhammad-Ramstan onto al-Buraq, the archangel told him that Allah had decreed that this night he would travel through the seven heavens and would be allowed to worship the face of the Truth, the Everlasting, the Father of All.

  "No language is anywhere adequate to describe my ecstasy," Ramstan said. "There are no words which can communicate to you more than a very slight fraction of the power and intensity of my feeling. The mystical experience has always been indescribable. How can I describe how many-colored light bathed every cell of my body and how every cell throbbed with ecstasy and how I saw every cell and knew its name? Or how I felt, like a giant glowing shadow behind me, behind my soul, a being that was only a reflection of the glorious face of the Ineffable yet would have blinded me if I could have turned when I felt Its hand on my shoulder and looked upon Its face?

  "I did not wish to turn because I knew that even the shattering light would not blind me to Its shattering beauty. And Its ugliness. At the same time, I felt that I might turn and, horrifying thought, see nothing there."

  Ramstan skipped through the journey on al-Buraq's back from Mecca to Jerusalem, ancient Jerusalem, the holy city of the prophet's time. He passed briefly over his entering the sacred mosque and meeting the prophets of God who had come before him. He did mention that he was greeted by Ibrahim, Musa, and Isa, that is, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

  Then he rode al-Buraq to the first heaven, a sphere the color of turquoise, while Gabriel, carrying a standard, preceded him.

  Heaven after heaven, rank upon rank of angels, greatest of the great men, Adam in the first heaven, John and Jesus in the second, Joseph in the next highest, Idris in the fourth, Aaron in the next, Moses in the one above Aaron's, and Abraham in the last and highest of the heavens. Though he had to be sketchy, he could not stop himself from giving some details of the White Cock in the first heaven, the angel which looks like a bird and whose comb touches the bottom of Allah's Throne and whose feet rest on Earth. Nor could he keep himself from telling some of the terror and awe he felt on seeing the angel, half snow, half fire, who held in his left hand a rosary of snow and in his right hand a rosary of fire and who recited the rosary, telling the one hundred beads, making a sound like thunder as he moved the beads.

  He also could not help revealing some of the terror he felt in the second heaven when he encountered the Angel of Death, Azrael, the decider of lots, who rests one foot on a chair of light and the other on al-Sirat, the razor-thin bridge between Heaven and Hell.

  "And then I heard the voice of the All-Abiding, and I worshiped Him," Ramstan said. "Truly, at that time, I felt that I was indeed Muhammad and myself, two yet one, and that I was experiencing the glory, the unutterable ecstasy, that comes from bearing the voice of God Himself. At the same time, I felt a fear that was so intense that it was also an ecstasy."

  But beyond the seventh sphere was unending Space, and in it hung seventy thousand veils of light of many colors. Beyond the veil was al-Arsh , the Throne of God, a seat made of red hyacinth and so huge that the Earth was a mote of dust beside it.

  There were many things which Ramstan, caught up in a fervor that was still only a pale shadow of what he had felt in those few minutes in the temple of the glyfa, would have liked to tell. But he skimmed through them, even the gardens of paradise, and came to Hell itself, guarded by the awful Malik, the king of shadows. And when Ramstan tried to describe the tortures of the damned, his voice broke, and he wept.

  "And then I was back in the house in Mecca for just a second, and my feeling that I was the prophet faded as the walls of the house did, and I was standing in the giant anteroom of the temple of the glyfa and was being told by the high priest to go into the chamber where the glyfa, the Tolt god, would receive me.

  Benagur's face was even redder, and his eyes were wilder. For a moment, Ramstan thought of uncovering the commodore's mouth long enough for him to vent what was troubling him. But he thought he knew what Benagur wished to say. That was, that Benagur had also had a Miraj , a miraculous ascension, but that his had been somewhat different.

  Shortly after leaving Tolt, Benagur and Ramstan had had a brief conversation. Benagur had sketched his reactions in the temple. Ramstan had held back on his. In fact, he had said no more than that he, too, had been flooded with light and lost consciousness for a while. Benagur had been far less reticent. He had told of his levitation to the throne of God while accompanied by the prophet Elijah. His experiences had been confined to that which a very devout Jew might imagine. (On learning which, Ramstan had begun to question the validity of his own Miraj .) Benagur, like Ramstan, had not actually seen the face of God, but he had come close. He too had ventured into, or, rather, over Hell. And he had announced, somewhat sorrowfully but with a trace of triumph, that he had seen Ramstan among the damned and witnessed his torture in flames. Though Benagur said that this sight filled him with sorrow, he could not quite conceal his satisfaction.

  Ramstan had grinned then. But he did not tell Benagur that he had seen Benagur's pain-sewn face among the wretches in the seventh and lowest sphere.

  Ramstan had said that he was surprised. He thought that orthodox Jews did not believe in a hell.

  Benagur had replied that a literal hell was not in his faith. But, evidently, he had been mistaken. After all, God did not reveal everything. And it was only just that Christians and Moslems who believed in such a savage place should end up there.

  However, Benagur admitted, though he had seen what seemed to be a literal hell, how did he know that it might not be a figurative one? That the flames and spikes and hooks were only symbolic of the awful terror and grief of Hell's inhabitants at being barred forever from the sight of the face of God and of the warmth of His love? The human mind was incapable of interpreting some events, especially the numinous and the antinuminous, and his brain might have twisted terror and grief into flames and spikes and hooks.

  "I congratulate you on your rationalizing powers," Ramstan had said. He had laughed and walked away from Benagur, but he had felt like vomiting. For a while, he had actually believed in the reality of what he had seen during his own ascension. But Benagur's revelations had convinced him that both experiences were delusions.

  He had then questioned Nuoli, who had been raised in a liberal Lutheran sect and then had rejected all religions. She insisted that she remembered only being overwhelmed by light and then being unconscious for a short while.

  Ramstan now revealed what Benagur had told him.

  "But this was after we had left Tolt. When I came out of my . . . fantasy . . . I went into the gigantic chamber of the glyfa. We were halted a few meters from it and told not to speak unless the god permitted us to do so. The high priest spoke in Urzint for perhaps five minutes.

  "Then my long-dead father's voice spoke
. I was shocked, but I quickly saw that his voice was audible only within my mind. It spoke Arabic. The glyfa didn't know a word of Arabic then, as I found out later. It was transmitting Urzint . . . no . . . not transmitting, since it doesn't use telepathy . . . it was speaking Urzint and beaming it into my unconscious and my speech centers. My unconscious was using some linguistic area to translate the Urzint into Arabic, though the Arabic was not perfect at that time.

  "I realized that the glyfa had been able to stimulate certain nerve paths in my brain. The glyfa can do this through, I believe, electromagnetic means, and it can read the mind of the speaker when he uses spoken or subvocalized language which the glyfa knows. Beyond that, it has no mind-reading powers or extrasensory powers of any kind. Or so it claims. I still do not know if it is lying."

  Ramstan said that the glyfa had been waiting for a very long time for him. Not exactly for an Earthman named Ramstan but for someone like him. Ramstan must return later that night, unobserved by anyone in al-Buraq, and take the glyfa to ship. The glyfa would overpower the guards and priests by momentarily making them unable to see Ramstan. Ramstan must be swift, however, because the glyfa could do this only for a short time and even that was a tremendous drain on its energy.

  "It said that it could give me immortality in one of two forms. The first would make me age very very slowly, though I would be subject to death by accident, homicide, or suicide. The second would preserve me from these, including suicide, though I could kill myself if I opted to do so. The glyfa would arrange that.

  "It then told me, still using my father's voice, that it was immortal."

  Ramstan paused and scanned the faces on the screens. Some of them looked as if their owners thought he was crazy.

  The screen which had been showing the launching port was filled with the face of a marine lieutenant.

  "The shielding is installed, sir. The launch has been stocked, and Lieutenant Davis is in the launch. All ready for launching, sir."

  "Do it now."

  He was glad that he did not have to see Branwen's face. It might have shown the terror and the hopelessness she felt. To be isolated for what might be a long time and to expect that, at any second, the biological time bomb in her body would explode. To know that Ramstan might have to order that she be left behind, and to know that she could then be drifting in space until her food and water were gone. That would pulp anyone's spine, jelly the mind, slush the soul. But she might have enough fire left to show her hatred for him.

  Ramstan cut off the screen with a code word, though he felt like a coward. He spoke to the personnel again.

  "If what you've heard so far is difficult to believe . . . well! The glyfa then told me that it had survived the deaths of two universes! Of two Pluriverses, rather!"

  He stopped to swallow. How could he got them to accept the truth?

  They had not seen and heard what he had, and he was not sure that he himself credited his senses and his experiences

  "The deaths of God!" he bellowed. "The two deaths of God! The two births and the two deaths!"

  ... 25 ...

  Benagur struggled violently, and his mouth came loose from the grip of ship's flesh. He cried, "You are a blasphemer and a liar, Ramstan! I ascended to the throne of God! You had your vision . . . !"

  His words were cut off as al-Buraq clamped down again. Ramstan gave an order, and the flesh receded.

  Benagur shouted, "You had your vision, but it was induced by that thing, the glyfa, the agent of Satan, if it is not Satan Himself! Your vision was false! If not false, then you misinterpreted it, perverted it for your own purposes! There Is the Living God, and He . . ."

  Ramstan had ordered Benagur silenced again.

  He said, "Yes, there is a living god, though not in the sense Benagur meant. At least, I think it's a god or it's the closest thing to a god that sentients will ever know. If indeed they can know Him . . . It."

  The tec-op interrupted him.

  "USO detected at 50,000 kilometers, sir."

  A bulkhead screen dissolved the faces on it and showed him the area in which the object was detected. It was black except for a single red star near the center and the tip of a blazing white gas cloud. Shortly thereafter, another screen showed him the magnified image reflected by the rasers.

  "The Popacapyu," Ramstan said. "We're going at top velocity now. They can't catch us before we jump again. It's only 100,000 kilometers to the edge of the bell."

  The tec-op said, "Sir, they've sent a modulated radio signal, frequency 10 megahertz, 1,000 watts."

  "So. We got her behind the shielding just in time."

  His decision had been hard on Branwen, but it was correct. Ramstan again addressed the personnel.

  "I did not take the glyfa from the temple because I was tempted by its offer of immortality. I was intrigued by that, yes. But I did not believe that it could truly give me everlasting life, nor was I going to steal it just to determine if its offer was valid.

  "What led me to take it was another statement, a series of statements, that it made. It said that if I took it, became its partner, I would help save the world. It could not guarantee that we two could do just that, but we must try."

  He stopped and licked his dry lips. Even to himself, knowing what he did, he sounded like a maniac, a deluded Messiah.

  "I know what you're thinking!" he cried. "But don't forget the bolg! That thing which destroyed Kalafala! The thing that has, if what the glyfa tells me is true, destroyed the Urzint, many planets! Which has, according to the Vwoordha, killed most of the life on Tolt! The Popacapyu crew doesn't know it yet. And it will come to Earth eventually, by following either us or our tracks, and slaughter all life there as it has slaughtered it on many planets!"

  He paused, breathing heavily. Though he was getting ahead of his story, he had given his audience something concrete and terrible to think about. They might not be so willing to disbelieve him.

  "It . . . the glyfa . . . told me that all sentients sooner or later develop their science to the point where they invent the alaraf drive or its equivalent, unless they destroy themselves first with atomic war. They never, or seldom, anyway, understand just what the alaraf-driven vessels do or how they travel such immense distances in such a short time. We Terrans certainly didn't. We had theories about where the ships went when they jumped. The most accepted was that the ships somehow bent space so that a star a million light-years away was, briefly, very much closer. Or that there were flaws or anomalies in the space-time structure which permitted an alaraf ship to penetrate those. The theory stated that normal distance was that which the distribution of matter in space had accustomed us to. But that these flaws or fissures were of different arrangements of space-matter, and the different arrangement also made for differences in distances.

  "As you know, these theories weren't even that. They were speculations, means for describing what is still the undescribable.

  "A third speculation, one not taken seriously at all, was that the alaraf drive somehow made the ships leap from one universe through the walls of another. That speculation was based on the fact that a ship on its outward journey never appeared in a known section of Earth's universe.

  "Another speculation was that the alaraf drive was really a sort of time travel drive. On the outward journey, the ship went ahead in time or backwards. It didn't matter which. In any event, the ship stayed in one place, but the cosmic bodies moved on, leaving the ship floating in space and in a space unrecognizable because millions or even billions of stars had passed by. One way or the other. The return journey was accomplished by reversing time, as it were, and the ship got back to Earth at an approximate time corresponding to the amount of time she had been away from Earth."

  Ramstan stopped to get a drink of water.

  "The glyfa assured me that the speculation about the alaraf ships penetrating the walls of the universes was indeed correct.