Люциус Шепард - Eternity and Other Stories

“So? We been through all this,” GRob says.

“Are we in hell?”

“Yeah… I mean, I don’t know!”

“You do know!”

“Okay! I know! Fuck!”

The way she’s staring reminds him of how Baxter would look at him when he said something Baxter thought was dumb. But this isn’t dumb, this is their only chance, and he continues laying it out for her.

“We’re in hell,” he says. “The Islamic hell. Which means Islam is the way.”

“The way?”

“The true religion. We’re in the middle of a verse from the Qur’an. It’s the perfect fucking irony. An American bomb brings about the Islamic day of judgment. And now the path to Paradise lies ahead. How do you escape from hell? People intercede for you. They make a case you deserve getting in.”

“You’re trashed!”

“How can you not believe it? We’re here!”

She has, he thinks, been on the verge of scoffing again, but when he says this, her stubborn expression fades.

“You see? We’re not infidels… not anymore. We’re believers. We have to believe ’cause it’s happened to us.” He points at the wall of flame. “You said it yourself. We gotta go through somewhere bad to get somewhere good. You felt that. Well, here we fucking are! We have to go through hell to reach Paradise. It makes sense that the last people allowed into Paradise would be infidels… converts. That they’d be the lowest of the low. It makes raghead sense.”

“We’re not converts,” she said. “You hafta take classes and shit, don’tcha? To convert.”

“We been jumped into Islam, we don’t need classes.” He puts his hands on her shoulders. “What’s the name of God?”

She wants to buy into it, he can tell, but she’s hesitant. He asks again, and she says, tentatively, “Allah?” Then she turns away from him. “This is so whack!”

“It’s not! We been going like it wasn’t happening. Ignoring the reality of the situation. It was there for us all along… the answer. Only thing we had to do was accept where we were.”

“But…” GRob swings back around. “Even if you’re right, man, why would anybody intercede for us?”

“I told you! It’s the ragheads! They gotta have somebody to be sweeping up in heaven. What’s better’n a couple of ex-infidels they can rank on? Look! You can’t even question it. We survived! Out of seventy-two—out of the whole world, maybe—you’n me survived. There’s gotta be a reason for that.”

He keeps at her, explaining the obvious, the simple truth he’s excavated from the wreckage of heaven and the fires of hell. He hears himself preaching at her like how Captain Wilts preached him into re-upping, trying to convince her that a walk in the fire is just what they need, a trip to salvation, and recognizing this similarity, seeing that he’s conning her, even if it’s for her own good, even if the con is sincere, intended to instill faith, because that’s what’ll get them through, faith, the foundation of all religion… Recognizing this, he suspects he may be conning himself, and understands that, also like Captain Wilts, he’s not giving her the whole picture. He’s not sure there’s room for two infidels in heaven. Maybe only the last person allowed in can be an infidel… at least that’s the sense he has from what Baxter told them. If such is the case, he wants it to be GRob. He’s evangelical about this, he desires in his soldierly way to save her. She’s his sister in the shit, his blooded friend and ally, and possibly she’s more than that, so he continues banging words into her head, preaching up a storm, until he sees faith catch in her, a spark of understanding flaring into a flame and incinerating doubt. Watching her face glowing with reflected fire and inner fire, he feels his own doubts evaporate. There is a reason the two of them have gotten this far. They’re both going to make it.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he asks, and GRob says, “Loud and clear, man!”

“Where are we going?”

“Paradise!”

“What’re we gonna do there?”

“Walk in gardens of silver and gold!”

“How we gonna get there?”

“With superior firepower!”

It’s not the answer he wants, and he repeats his question.

She falters and then says, “By the grace of God!” but she almost makes it seem another question.

“By the will of Allah!” he says.

“By the will of Allah!”

“Allah be praised!”

He pounds the message into her, motivating like he’s never done before, but it’s not his usual bullshit. He feels it; the words sing out of him like silver swords shivering from their sheaths until at last she’s singing with him, delirious and shiny-eyed, and she lifts her rifle above her head with one hand and shouts, “There is no God but Allah!”

2009 hours

They touch before they enter the fire. Not skin to skin, just resting their helmets together, acknowledging the agreement they have made, a soul contract that will cover either a few minutes, an eternity, or a week in Tecolutla. Then they walk forward into the flames. Wilson watches them on his helmet display, two silhouetted man-shaped robots slipping seamlessly inside the glaring reddish orange wall, and then there’s no time to watch, he’s moving fast, the cooling unit of his suit already beginning to labor.

The floor of hell is plated in yellow metal, at least Wilson thinks it’s yellow and thinks it’s plated. Hard to be sure of color from within the lurid, inconstant glare of the flames, and it might not be plated, it might be a vein of some perfect substance, God in mineral form. It’s neither gold nor brass, for those metals would melt from the heat and this metal is unmarred. It’s inscribed with the serpentine flourishes and squiggles of Arabic characters, each one longer than a man, and they are written everywhere he looks. The text of the Qur’an, perhaps, or of some other sacred book undelivered to the earth. In the depths of the brightness around him, he sees movement that’s not the liquid movement of fire and shapes that aren’t the shapes of flame, intimations of heavy, sluggish forms, and he swings his rifle in quick covering arcs. The rifle is a beautiful thing. Should he fall in the fire, overcome by heat, it will continue to function, lying there to be used by whatever weaponless soldier happens by, irrespective of the fact that no soldier will ever pass this way again. He keeps GRob on his left, concentrated more on her target environment than on his. The roaring of the inferno sounds different now, a river sound, a flowing, undulant rush, and the ruddy light comes to seem an expression of that rush, its flickering rhythms sinuous and almost soothing.

Half a mile in, he knows they’re in trouble. The heat. His suit, sheathing him in machinery and plastic, fitting tightly to his skin, extrudes an ointment and injects him with mild numbing agents. He hears GRob gasping over their private channel. His helmet, already dark, darkens further. According to his instrument array, they are surrounded by a myriad of invisible lives, and everything else reads infinite. He doesn’t switch off the array, but realizes he can’t trust it. Allah, he says to himself, and lets the sonority and power of the name bloom inside his head like a firework, a great inscription of cool radiance, a storm of peace that lets him ignore the pain of his blistering skin. They keep going. It’s who they are. There’s no quit in this bad blond and her sixty-rounds-per-second man, this mad-ass detonatrix and her Colorado killer… The silly lyrics of his thoughts make him gleeful, unwary, seduced by the golden rock ‘n’ roll legend he’d like to fashion of their walk, and, needing to steady himself, he boosts more IQ. Mega-dangerous levels. He’s long since maxed out, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll live or he’ll die by the will of God and by that alone.