West walked me down the metallish corridors, introduced me to a fraction of the war machine of Command, the harvested systems powering its core, the fields and valleys of gods, the endless possibilities, each a complete specimen of a particular Judith. I saw the walls lined with host bodies, the breeders whose only purpose was to bear variants of the only god we had left. I watched the moment of cycle completion: bodies raised from nutrient baths, abdomens flayed by light, the wailing cargo removed by gentle silver strands, scanned, plunged immediately into their own variant chambers, their wails choked off by the thick biological slurry as the breeder process began again.
Promising variants were taken from the chamber and grown to adulthood in personalized heavens.
Is that too much? I could tell you of the host debris, the gaping caverns of fetid birth chambers, the bodies swept forcefully from the breeder rooms into waste tunnels, trails of blood and amniotic fluid still slurping from the wounds of Purpose, intestines reaching like fingers toward sex-less daughters. Judith was a beautiful woman, but multiplied by forevers, split apart with cutting beams, the infant cargo removed, her bodies became ugly beyond explanation, not the classic demure beauty that the original God host had been but a bastardization of female form, a violation of reproduction and natural life cycles.
It was disgusting, and I questioned which Purpose was truly the evil.
West understood. He didn’t expect me to trust any of it. He knew that I’d been shown a different forever.
“It’s just the way things have to be done here. It’s the only way of restoring the broken
tomorrow we can go to the park. Sit on grass. Maybe go to the zoo?”
“Or the jazz festival?”
The man at the counter grinned. “Of course.”
West stood as Paul got up to pay the bill. “Do it like I told you, son.” As Paul approached the counter, he heard snippets of conversation: but we just, so you see, I don’t know maybe we can, but if Hesse had meant to, and that’s why in the first book, music’s just, cookies are delish, and at the counter: “This is where the fish lives.”
The owner smiled up at him: one dimple. The smile faltered, returned, a blink, a vague sense of
The man at the counter turned. One white streak in his salt-and-cinnamon hair. Eyes narrow, a blink, a sense of
“Keep the change.” Paul left a handful of silver dollars on the counter and began to walk away.
“Wait.” The owner reached out her hand: silver band on her ring finger, pattern. “Do I—”
Man: “You’re—”
West watched.
Paul cleared his throat, regarded the man. Stepped in, pulled him close, whispered. “Erase.”
Pause. Play.
The man gone, Paul sat down in his place at the counter, hands shaking. The owner, maybe seventy, maybe fifty, let her hand fall. Her ring was gone.
He stumbled over words, eventually succeeded in voicing. “I hope—I know you can’t understand.”
Eyes watered. Dimple retreated. “You’re—”
His hand hovered over hers.
“A bench outside a dorm. A box of cigars. A white t-shirt, paint-spattered hands, holes in the knees of my jeans, plastic-tipped cigars. Snow. It was cold. That’s all you’ll remember. Nothing more.”
“Paul? Paul Hughes? How—”
“It never happened. We never happened. I died on a beach before we met again. No ghetto apartment, no cigarettes in bed, no pears, no ice cream. No broken hearts, no broken tomorrows. You lived and loved. Without me.”
In a pocket, two light blue marbles disappeared.
Paul pulled back his left sleeve and saw a line of scar fade.
“I’m sorry.” He reached out, placed rough hand against the dimpled cheek.
“Paul?”
He nodded, smiled with a sadness beyond stillness, beyond that yesterday.
“I’m sorry.” A whisper, an approach, lips speak into a soft warm curl of ear. “Erase.”
She faded.
West studied the floor.
“Get me out of here.” The author choked back something, swallowed those concepts and closed his eyes. “Program stop.”
Time heals nothing by itself.
Survival depends on forgetting. Excision. Formatting. Re-formatting.
an exhalation, a lip upturned, the infinitesimal field of blonde, crow’s feet from a life too
Pattern slams back into form. Hiss and release, a chamber door opens. Billowing steam. (Where does it
The author cracked the release system of his helmet, which opened in a dozen places and peeled away to reveal a face studded by whiskers and scar. He wondered why helmets in science fiction novels were almost always big globes of glass. Vulnerable. The helmet he’d designed for this novel used direct sensory submersion behind an armored collapsible blade paneling system. Safer. No glass. In the armor, he breathed slurried nitrox gel, if you could consider it breathing at all.
West, Benton. Displays. He slumped into a vacuum chair beside the girl.
“It was a good run.”
He looked up. “Guess so.” Ran fingers through hair. “Scissors?” And they were.
“The triumphant warrior begins another transformative process?” She grinned, but her teeth didn’t show.
That sound the scissors make on sweatened hair, the tickle just before depattern of the severed strands. Scentless flashes of
“The helmet needs work.”
“Could’ve saved time by thinking it away.” West walked to another display. “Drama queen.”
The scissors paused in Paul’s hand. “I know.”
Benton brushed some pre-snap curls from his shoulder. “Containment’s at ninety-eight over. Just a few more.”
He grabbed her hand and removed it from his shoulder. “You’re hyperkinetic.”
“And you don’t like to be touched. Sorry. I forgot.”
Short squeeze of hand-to-hand. “No sorries.”
Healing by primary intention: leaving the wound open to the elements, visible to all. Scab, scar. Public re-placement of flesh, of memory and heart, filling in the places between and
Scissors disappeared. Hair stood on end, clumps, moist, a tangle of muddied fire burned up to nothing in particular.
“Hugh Grant? Michael Madsen?”
“Not quite. Terrible combination of neither.” He felt his cardiac shield twinge.
“Come on, kids. Stop your grab-assin’.” Light traced a new code burn on his temple. “The boss wants a progress report.”
feeling screams, burning ends in that night, and it was beautiful. the touch of self, the touch of alters, galaxies of altars, and trees, trees singing and flying, echoes before dawn, a moon, a gasp, the chill that midnight makes when inhaled, the loss of exhalation, the yearning to breathe that scent again, ever again, to be there ever again
the way things break, the way tomorrows break, the way we struggle to correct yesterdays
and in one she frowned as a nacelle tore from the craft, crew pulled to death between the planet and the star, and in one she fought robots made from wood and organic paste, wiring spun from the silk of system-sized spiders, and in one she had a twin, and in one she watched a planet cut cleanly in half by a light from the stars, and in one she found no enemy left, and in one she sipped a bitter liquid that would keep her awake for hours, and in one she slumped, exhausted from breathing, as a door opened and
Judith sighed.
They’d finally located that rock in the center of the silver infestation. Centuries of searching, centuries without form or substance or duration, they’d searched; they’d found. West had been in the original rescue fleet, tattered remnants gathered from the first Enemy war and the temporal refugees of the Forever Dust, the human residue of all broken Whens. Data cycle errors, reflexive overruns, cyclic redundancy checks, cache corruptions: humanity.