Люциус Шепард - Eternity and Other Stories

“Is it wolves up there, GRob?” Wilson asks, catching her arm. “Like werewolves?”

She pushes him away and says dully, “Fucking monsters.”

Baxter jumps down, closing the door behind him as he drops, and GRob screeches at him. “Chickenshit asshole! You can’t just leave ’em!”

“Check your screen,” he says, and when she won’t calm down, he shouts, “They’re gone, goddamn it! Check it out!”

Acting stunned, GRob puts her helmet back on. Wilson goes wide-angle on his screen. Werewolves prowling about, bending to sniff at the flowers, then hurrying with a gimpy, hunchbacked gait to another spot and sniffing again. No soldiers are visible, but the fact that the werewolves are hunting for survivors causes Wilson to think some may be alive, their suits shut down, maybe burrowed under the dirt. Three patrol groups. Seventy-two soldiers. They can’t be the only ones who made it. It was all so fast.

GRob lifts off her helmet. “Jesus!”

“Wrong fuckin’ prophet,” Baxter says flatly.

“Could be still some of our people out there,” Wilson says. “They could be shut down, they…”

“Could be?” Baxter spits out a laugh. “We ain’t goin’ back out there for ‘could be.’ Put that from your mind.”

“We can’t stay here.” GRob slaps at the wall. “Something picked this goddamn thing up and threw it. You seen the track it left. Like, y’know? They fucking threw it! You wanna be here when the son of a bitch comes back?”

“We’re not stickin’ around,” says Baxter.

“We’re not going outside, we’re not sticking around…” GRob gets in his face. “You gonna make us disappear, Baxman? You got that much mojo?”

Baxter steps away from confrontation and aims a forefinger at her. “You best slow it down, woman!”

Her cheeks flushed, GRob drills him with a furious stare, and even in the midst of fear and freakery, Wilson feels the pull of an old attraction, this long-standing thing he’s had for her. He wonders how he can think of sex, even fleetingly, even with GRob, who’s muscled up but looks like a woman, not a steroid queen like Perdue. Escape, he imagines. His hormones offering him an out. He still can’t accept that Perdue is dead. She was a mad fucking soldier.

“Punch yourself some downs,” Baxter says to GRob. “Light level.”

GRob doesn’t move to obey.

“That’s an order!” He looks to Wilson. “You, too.”

“That’s not cool, man! We can’t be doing downs, we’re in the shit!”

“Hear what I said? That’s an order!”

“I already did up. When the wolves showed,” Wilson says, not wanting to dull his edge. “I went way light, but I did up.”

Baxter eyes him with suspicion, then says wearily, “They’re shaitans , not wolves. I told you about ’em in the carrier.”

“I wasn’t all the time listening.”

“Muslim hell got some devils resemble wolves. That’s what we saw.”

“I thought this was supposed to be Paradise,” Wilson says, and Baxter says, “Who the fuck knows? Maybe the ragheads back in the village weren’t tellin’ it straight. Maybe they’re chumpin’ our ass. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

GRob, keying up a drug mix, makes a disparaging noise. “We just gonna sit around and get high until the shit comes down? That the plan?”

Baxter checks the mix on her computer, tells her to do up, and then says to Wilson, “Read the pearl for her.”

The interior of the pearl consists of chamber after chamber, what seems an infinite progression of rooms of varying proportions. Wilson reports this and Baxter says, “You got that, GRob? Infinite. There’s this room, then another and another and another… Get the picture?”

GRob’s leisurely tone reflects her new chemical constituency. “Naw, man. I don’t got it. How’s that possible?”

“Right! I’m goin’ explain this whole thing.”

She doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm in Baxter’s voice and waits for him to deliver an explanation. Finally it appears to sink in. Her head droops to the side as if with the weight of acceptance that no explanation will be forthcoming. A smile touches the corners of her lips, the strain empties from her face. She might be seventeen, a sleepy girl waking after being with her lover, remembering the night they had. “This is probably the way to go,” she says.

It’s a vague statement, but Wilson, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, trapped inside a giant pearl that has no end, devils like werewolves roaming everywhere, without the guidance of command, and maybe sixty-nine dead, death by cartoon, understands precisely what she means.

1200 hours

They pass through room after room, more than a hundred by Wilson’s count, all essentially the same. Luxuriously appointed and in disarray, the only sign of previous habitation being the smears of blood on the door through which they entered the pearl. Shortly before noon they open a door and find that it leads out of the pearl, which is lying not in a field of flowers, but in the midst of a brass forest. Perhaps the same forest DeNovo mistook for gold, though Wilson’s not clear on how the pearl ended up in the middle of it. Stunted-looking trees and undergrowth, every vein of leaf and fork of stem and twist of root wrought in cunning detail, rising to the roof of the cave. The temperature of the forest is near scalding. Steam rises from the brass foliage. The vegetation is too dense and interwoven to afford an easy passage. Baxter orders them back into the pearl and calls for a break. Says he’s shutting down for an hour. He tells Wilson to close the door leading to the forest and to stand watch while they sleep. Wilson doesn’t believe this is a good time to rest, but he’s tired and raises no objection. At the center of the room is a fountain, its basin covered in a mosaic of white and turquoise tiles. Liking the trickling sound of the water, Wilson sits on the lip, his rifle across his knees. GRob removes her helmet and lies down among some pillows. Baxter sits against the opposite wall, his legs stretched out.

Wilson’s grateful for time alone. He needs to think and to augment thought he orders up another shot of IQ. He considers adding a jolt of God’n Country, but decides that the interests of the United States of America may well be in conflict with the interests of his own survival, that—indeed—they have always been so and he has, until now, allowed them preeminence. He’s done his duty, and he’s way past the regulation limit for IQ—his heart doesn’t need any more stress. The drug puts up blinders around his brain, prevents thoughts of home and comfort from seeping in, and he concentrates on the matter at hand. Where are they? What did this? That’s the basic question. If he can understand what happened, maybe he can work out where they are. He references a scientific encyclopedia on his helmet screen, reads articles on quantum physics, not getting all of it, but enough to have a handle on what “changes on the quantum level” signifies. If the bomb caused such changes… Well, a bomb being an entirely unsubtle weapon, the changes it produced would not be discrete ones. A chaotic effect would be the most likely result. He looks up the word “chaos” and finds this definition:

A state of things in which chance is supreme; especially: the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.

The place they’re in, the cave, Paradise, whatever, could not, Wilson thinks, be described as disorganized, though the supremacy of chance may be a factor. What are the chances that they have not encountered anything in the cave other than things he’s heard about from either the villagers or Baxter? Distinct form has obviously been imposed on a chaotic circumstance. There must be some anthropomorphic element involved. What you get is what you see or, better said, what you expect to see. Since the villagers were the first witnesses, and since they’ve been expecting to see Paradise all their lives, when something inexplicable happened they imposed the form of the Garden of Allah, the metaphorical forms of the Qur’an, on primordial matter, and then spread the news so that anyone who came afterward would have this possibility in mind and thus be capable of expecting the same things. The devils? Maybe half the village expected not Paradise, but hell—thus the two were jammed together in an unholy synthesis. Or maybe, like Baxter suggested, the villagers were holding back some vital details. This explanation satisfies Wilson. He feels he might poke a few holes in it if he did more IQ, but he’s confident the truth is something close to what he’s envisioned. The idea that there may be a congruent truth does not escape him. It’s conceivable the day of judgment, the day when hell is hauled up from beneath the earth, is at hand and that the bomb was the inciting event. None of this, however, helps him as he hoped it might. Knowing where he is has clarified the problem, but not the solution.