Hearing her speak startled me as much as it had when she had spoken in the woods years before, but I managed to get out, “I was wondering the same thing. I’m Dick Cyrus.”
“Ariel.”
Again she glossed over the R. Back in West Virginia I had not been able to determine the color of her eyes—now I saw they were dark brown, the irises almost indistinguishable from the pupils. Curiosity neutralized my sense of tact and I asked what her surname was.
She made a sad mouth. “I’m using Lang, but actually I don’t remember my name. I’m an amnesiac.”
She went on to tell me that over a period of days she had gradually wakened to the world and realized that she was lost in the woods. Disoriented, unable to speak coherently, she had wandered out to a highway, where she was given a ride by a man who shortly thereafter tried to rape her. After dealing with him, she made her way to Moundsville and there had been attracted to the golden dome of the Krishna center.
“I’m from West Virginia myself,” I said.
“That explains why you look so familiar. I must have seen you down there.”
“It’s possible.”
“I don’t suppose you remember seeing me?”
I understood that she hoped I might have knowledge about her past, but I had no intention of telling her anything—I was afraid she would think me insane. I said I was sorry, but I couldn’t recall having met her before, and asked what she was doing at the party.
“My agent thought I should be here,” she said. “My first novel’s just come out.”
I offered congratulations and, remembering the fragments of writing that I’d read in Moundsville, I asked if she had written anything previously.
“I supported myself for a while doing short stories, but the science fiction magazines don’t pay much.”
Enough, I supposed, to allow her to leave the Krishna center. I castigated myself for not having thought of this possibility.
We had been talking for no more than a few minutes when Jannine materialized from the crowd and said, “There you two are! I was hoping I’d have a chance to introduce you, and here you’ve done it on your own!” A trim and manically energetic woman in her early fifties, she beamed at us with maternal approval. “You have to read Ariel’s novel,” she said to me, digging in her voluminous tote bag. “It has amazing similarities to your new book.” She pressed a book wrapped in a garish dust jacket into my hand, then took Ariel’s arm and guided her away, saying there was someone who wanted to meet her.
The novel was entitled The Atonement and was the first volume of a trilogy. The cover illustration was of a metal sarcophagus cut away to reveal a black-haired woman within, eyes closed, arms crossed upon her breast. A white radiance streamed from the sarcophagus, almost obscuring it, but I could see enough to tell that it was similar in shape to that of the fiery image I had seen in Professor Karlan’s office, the image that appeared on the monitor prior to the explosion that had destroyed Rahul’s project. This further validation of what I knew did not thrill me as I might have thought. I was taken with her on a personal level, reacting like a man in the grip of an attraction. I did not want her to have a connection with the creature who leaped from the crater where my best friend had died.
Two hours later, sitting in the dim seclusion of the Algonquin bar, having read a hundred and some pages of The Atonement, it had become clear that what Ariel had written was her story. Doubtless certain details of the novel, its terminology, names, and so forth, were inexact, but I was convinced that the characters and core events were at least reflections of the real and that though she could not recall her past, the past was streaming up from her subconscious. The most astonishing thing was that her conception of the cosmos was basically the same as the one I had sketched out back at Cal Tech, an infinite number of anthropic universes shuffling and reshuffling, combining on a quantum level. The heroine, Ah’raelle, and her lover, Isha, were soldiers, respectively commander and subordinate, in what was less a war than a trans-universal game of chess. Encased in metal pods designed to shield them from the deleterious stresses of other realities, they traveled on missions to various universes in an effort to maintain the structure of the continuum, which they called the Weave, protecting it against another army of equally advanced soldiers who sought to subvert the grand design and so reconfigure the essential purpose of creation. The pods shed a blinding white radiance and were frequently mistaken for heavenly creatures by the indigenes of the universes they visited. The force in which Ah’raelle and Isha served was referred to as the Akashel, and the force against whom they contended was called the Akhitai. Both forces were led by groups of enlightened men and women who combined the qualities of scientists and mystics, and were in touch with the entities who presided over the cosmos. Not gods, but warlords who dwelled on some incomprehensible plane. Complicating the game played by the Akashel and the Akhitai was the fact that whenever a soldier set forth on a mission from, let’s say, Universe A, there was a buckshot effect and similar missions would be launched from neighboring universes, involving analogues of the soldiers who had been sent from Universe A. Thus there were vast numbers of missions always in progress, and the pods were in essence shuttles weaving back and forth across an infinite loom, one side seeking to repair the damage the other had wrought. If I had come to the book as a casual reader I would have quickly discarded it. Ariel was not a brilliant stylist and her plot exploited one of the most overused of literary tropes, that of men employed in the service of either gods or some cosmic purpose; but though my critical instincts declared that her book was a tedious fantasy with a treacly dose of New Age mysticism, a kind of softcore religious screed leavened with lengthy passages of sex and violence, I was convinced that it embodied a record of her life and I read on.
A conflict arose between Isha and Ah’raelle, one having to do with trust. Isha, in an attempt to protect her, kept information from her relating to a mission. She believed he was trying to manipulate her and that he had gone over to the Akhitai. Nothing Isha said or did could persuade her that he was loyal. Unable to repair the relationship, he became distraught, distracted, and—eventually—deranged. The love he had felt for Ah’raelle changed to bitterness and hatred, and he became a rogue, traveling across the multiverse, seeking out her analogues in other realities. The reasons for his actions were left unclear—but whether vengeful or trying to establish a relationship with another Ah’raelle, he succeeded in wreaking havoc with the Weave, and Ah’raelle was punished by being sent on to kill Isha.
Thus ended the first volume of the Akashel Trilogy.
My mind thronged by suppositions, I returned to my room and saw the message light blinking on the phone. I had two messages, both from Ariel. The first went as follows:
“This is Ariel…from the party. Sorry to call so late, but I wonder if you’re free for lunch tomorrow. I’ve been reading The Willowy Woman and I have some questions. About the book. Uhm…I…If we miss each other for lunch, I’ll be in the city a few more days. I’m in the hotel, too.” A pause. “Room Five Twenty-Three.” Another, longer pause. “I’ll talk to you later, I hope.”
Then the second message:
“If we don’t connect, I’ll be in the coffee shop tomorrow at noon. Good night.”
I fell asleep the second I hit the bed and waked thinking about Ariel in a less than clinical way. After showering, though it was only eleven, too anxious to sit in the room, I went down to the coffee shop and ordered a diet Pepsi. I had been there nearly three-quarters of an hour when a slight gray-haired man with a hunted look stopped by my booth and said in what seemed an accusatory tone, “Dick Cyrus.” Without bothering to introduce himself, he went on, “Your work is interesting, but I find your use of flashbacks annoying.”