Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 43
The way Tex saw it, there was only one hope.
He was going to have to bullshit them.
Fixing the yew dryad with one glaring, psychotically bright eye, he said in a wise-ass voice: "Suppose I could do something to totally amaze you guys. Right here, right now. Totally knock your leaves off. Would you listen to me then?"
They looked at him as though he was speaking in Uranian.
"Amaze us?" said Beale said after a long time. As though such a thing was pretty much out of the question. (Sounding a little amazed already, though, at the very idea.)
"Big-time," affirmed Tex. "Just watch. I'll prove to you that we humans have a few tricks up our sleeves you haven't seen yet. Then it's your turn. You show me how great and powerful you are."
"Oh, sure," rasped the yew dryad, nastier than ever.
"Great," said Tex. "I'll take that as a Yes."
And while his dead-hippie brain churned at high rpm's, trying to think of like, anything, he asked himself fervently
Where's Molly
when you need her?
COFFEE BREAK
Gene Deere staggered, choking for air, through the darkened hangar. The power was dead and the hallways were filling with smoke. Gene reached his office and there, in the dark, stumbled into Sefyn Hunter, who was sitting on the floor surrounded by his cherished plants. His eyes were wet, either from smoke or from crying. He looked up at Gene, who could barely make out the tag that said Native American.
"It's all going to go, isn't it?" said Sefyn. He sounded like a little boy.
"Everything," he went on. "We're going to lose it all."
"No," Gene said. He was not sure why, other than to give Sefyn some small momentary comfort. But no, it was more than that. He found that he really meant it, that he really believed, for reasons entirely obscure to him, that all was not lost. "Here, Sefyn, stand up. It might be safer if you get out of here. The fire's pretty close, the last I saw."
"What are you doing here, then?" Sefyn asked him. "I'd have thought this would be the last place you'd go."
Gene held out a hand and Sefyn took it; he allowed himself to be hauled up to his feet.
"Oh, damn," he said. "I just can't stand the thought of losing them."
He looked around helplessly at his plants, all the objects of his strange but undeniable passion. Gene, a professional plant man, could recognize but not quite understand the syndrome.
"Are you okay?" he asked Sefyn.
"Sure, boss," Sefyn said, lifting his shoulders a bit. "How about you?"
"I might be better in just a little while," said Gene, allowing himself some cautious optimism, though once again he could find no rational grounds for it.
They left the office together.
Out in the hallway, Gene heard someone calling his name.
"Ludi?" he yelled.
He heard a voice—it could have been hers, but there was a lot of acoustical confusion—and he thought it was coming from deeper in the hangar, away from the main entrance.
"Go on," he told Sefyn. "I've got to check on something."
He ran out into the empty cavern at the center of the building and paused in the nearly total blackness there.
"Gene?" the voice came again, more distinctly now. "Is that you?"
"Ludi!" he yelled.
He stepped forward, letting himself be guided by some faculty he could not recognize. Once or twice more he called Ludi's name, and she answered with his own. He thought they were getting closer together, but he could not tell for certain.
Then he bumped into something. It clattered away from him, and the sound it made—plus the throbbing in his upper thigh—told him that he had bumped into a metal chair. He had come, he realized, to the place where an impromptu buffet had been set up for the C.E.O.'s get-acquainted breakfast.
"Ludi," he called, "talk to me. I think I've got a fix on where we are."
"Over here," she said. Her voice sounded close by.
"Okay. Just hold still," he said, moving forward by feel and by memory. "I'm almost there."
"Check this out," said Ludi. They were close enough to be speaking in ordinary conversational voices. "It's something—hey, you know what, I think it's a coffee—oh darn."
Bang. Gene heard a large metal object strike the concrete floor, then roll a bit. After that, for a moment or two, he heard nothing. At last, Ludi made an unusual noise: surprise mixed with confusion, along with perhaps a dose of pain.
"Are you hurt?" he asked her.
"I can't decide," she said.
Her voice was practically underneath him. He bent down, felt the floor beneath his palms, and crawled forward gingerly until he touched her. Then his fingers clutched her clothing as though of their own accord, and he pulled himself to within centimeters of her face.
"Thank god you're okay," he said. He blinked, trying to make out her eyes in the darkness. "Are you okay?"
She sucked in her breath. "You know what I did?" she said. "I think I knocked over a big coffee urn."
"Yeah. That's right." Gene remembered it: a huge thing that hardly anybody had touched because the institutional coffee inside was so typically awful.
"Yeah. Well, so I knocked it over, and it fell on me. And I think it might have broken my leg."
"No," he said. He couldn't believe it. He ran his arm down her side, over her hip.
"Stop," she said. "I'm not kidding. I really think I broke my leg. Can you imagine? I mean, a coffee urn."
Gene let go of her and lay back, supporting himself on his elbows. He looked up at the invisible ceiling and he felt flooded with a dozen different emotions; a hundred. He opened his mouth to say something and he thought he heard himself laugh. Then he thought he might have heard himself cry. It was one or the other.
"Gene?" Ludi said, easing herself over to him. "Is something the matter?"
"I don't know," he said. "I mean yes. Your leg is broken."
"Yeah," she said. "Weird, huh?"
He hoped that weird was all it was. His hand found her head and gently stroked it. "I'll take care of you," he promised.
She kissed his fingers. "To tell you the truth," she said, "I was kind of counting on that."
LEAVING
Molly stood up, rocking easily with the sway of the Linear Bee. Tex was in trouble. She felt that.
She saw that. She saw everything, by this time. Nothing escaped her.
Anyway, she was tired of sitting around. She felt cooped-up. She wanted to get out and go somewhere, do something, get herself involved. She had been out of the swing of things for too long. A member of the audience. When what she really wanted—what she had always wanted—was to be a player. Strutting and fretting. Making a fool of herself, perhaps. But at least making a show of it. Not sitting on the sofa and eating popcorn.
She walked into the galley and poured the contents of her Moon mug into an angel-wing begonia. She placed the mug carefully in the sink.
In the pilot house, she ran her hands briefly over the collection of stones, the framed pictures of fallen heroes, the cool brass of the candlestick holder. She took the raven feathers and tucked them securely into the braid in her long brown hair. Then she picked up the tiny fetish of Bear, guardian of medicine, chief of the spirits of Earth.
"Arth Vawr," she said. "I'm ready to go on."
And she took a deep breath.
And she closed her eyes.
And the Heavenly Bear came for her.
THE RAW & THE COOKED
When the Dublin Volunteer Fire Department arrived (very late) on scene, the Chief could find no one to give him directions. These people dashing about (a lot of them—what was going on here?) seemed to know nothing about the layout of the place. Many wore masks, as if they had come from a costume party. Lacking other guidance, the Chief decided to save what he could of the buildings, and let the fields burn. If anybody had offered any better ideas, he would have been glad to listen.
Chas Sauvage saw the red lights of the fire engines but decided not to turn back. He was cruising in his Mercedes along the road that ran just inside the perimeter fence. The fire had already devastated the field he was driving past. Now it raged onward, closer to the main installation. Chas could see nothing in that direction but a humpbacked mountain of flame.
He wondered in passing about Gene Deere—whether he had indeed come in to the office tonight, and if so whether he had gotten out in time.
Well, that was not an immediate problem. Tomorrow he would look into it, if there was anyplace left from which to look into things. Tonight he had more urgent matters to attend to—first among them, finding out from Jag Eckhart how this "controlled burn" had gotten so quickly and dramatically out of control.
The Mercedes reached the area at the far northern end of the compound that had been, according to plan, Ground Zero of the operation. The plots of mixed hard- and softwoods—Gene Deere's little showpieces—were vaporized. Nothing remained but an even ground-coat of ash. There was not even enough wood left to smoulder. Despite what had evidently been a horrendous blaze, the dirty brown Suburban sat in plain view ahead of him, right at the fence line, exactly where Eckhart had said it would be. Chas braked the Mercedes to a halt a short distance away. The thought of the two cars parked in the same field of vision was mildly repugnant to him.
He got out and looked around and called Eckhart's name. There was no response. Or perhaps there was. Chas thought he might have heard some noise from the direction of Eckhart's battered vehicle. A muffled cry, perhaps. It occurred to him that Eckhart might have been injured somehow—badly burned, or overcome by smoke. He might have crawled back to his car and be lying there. Rapidly, in his mind, Chas explored the ramifying paths of evidence and culpability here: whether a surviving but injured Eckhart might somehow be the loose thread that caused a great many other threads to unravel. On the whole he thought not. At any rate he thought that whatever the situation might prove to be, it would be containable. In fact, he meant to take the first step toward containing it right now.
He reached the Suburban, walking very quietly, and peered within. It was empty. Then he saw something peculiar—a window of the rear compartment had been smashed, apparently from the inside. Chunks of glass lay scattered on the ground, catching a bit of the orange firelight and glowing dully, like imitation gems. Chas (who had no truck with imitations) kicked them out of his way.
He was about to go around to the driver's door, but the sound of the phone ringing in his jacket pocket made him start. He yanked it out, flipped open the plastic hatch that covered the mouthpiece.
"Sauvage?" said the voice of Burdock Herne. "Is that you?"
Chas Sauvage never replied. A large timber wolf leapt out of the shadows beneath the Suburban and caught him precisely by the throat, making a clean and quick kill of it.
"Sauvage?" Herne asked, more loudly. The noises coming from the other end of the phone puzzled him, but there was nothing he could identify. He would never in a million years have guessed that these were the sounds of his field manager's body being torn apart by an angry wolf.
WOUNDED KING (3) Burdock Herne laid down the telephone on Chas Sauvage's desk. The air inside the old hangar seemed to shudder, to resonate with the violence of the night. Herne played the flashlight over the shiny wood of the desk: a miniature landscape furnished with executive oddments in semicircular formation, waiting to be toyed with. From there the light-beam leapt like Tinkerbelle through empty space until it found a purchase on the wall, where it quivered. Herne found himself staring at something too large to fit all at once inside the tightly focused light-cone. He moved his wrist from side to side, mentally assembling the image like a jigsaw puzzle—the quality museum gift-shop kind: 4-color reproduction of an Old Master on heavy cardboard.
Suddenly, with a jolt, Herne realized that he was staring himself in the face. Staring, rather, into a likeness of his face, rendered in oil. The Official Portrait. Herne had seen it a thousand times before now, of course. Hell, he had posed for it. Yet tonight he scarcely recognized the thing. Scarcely recognized himself.
Those eyes: they glowed strangely, he thought. A little too much intensity there. The expression was wrong, too. That clench of the jaw; an affected raising of one brow. If you had to characterize this face, this expression, how would you do so? "Aggressive serenity," perhaps? "Kingly hubris"? "Conquistadorial bliss?"
Herne shook his head. He could not recall whether the portrait had even been his idea. It was something one did, was all he remembered. He turned the flashlight away; then on further thought switched it off. The darkness swarmed closely around him, and felt surprisingly comfortable. Creature of the night, he thought. Predator. Top of the food chain.
Nothing to be afraid of.
Gingerly, he felt his way around Sauvage's desk and moved out toward where he thought the door might be. Following my instincts, he told himself. Wondering actually if he still had any of them left.
Elsewhere in the cavelike depths of the hangar, a sound of metal striking metal clanged for an instant, echoed, and then died. There was no further sound that Herne could hear. Even the background noise seemed diminished, as though the struggle outdoors were being abandoned, or already was lost.
Bunk to that, he thought.
Can't give up without a fight. That's what I teach my kids, anyway.
Herne groped his way through the door and stood in the blackened hallway. He could sense the emptiness around him. He took a step—
but in that instant the emptiness moved from without to within—
bottomless
—and Herne felt as though he had stepped off the edge of a precipice. And the abyss into which he was falling was himself.
AS THE DAY DISSOLVES
From his vantage point high on the hill, Jesse could see the fires spreading, seemingly out of control, and for a time it seemed that the whole world was going to be consumed by them, that everything he could see would be relentlessly devoured by that strange growing and mutating mass of chaos. Still he felt reasonably certain that something would happen to prevent that. Some new thing would appear, a thing he could not have imagined, nor could anyone. And after a while—long or short, he didn't know—some Thing did.
Out of the darkness of the sky above Dublin Harbor, stars flashed coldly and variably, their rays oscillating as they raced toward the Earth, deflected by gravity and slightly refocused by the lens effect of the atmosphere. As Jesse watched, a group of these stars—seven of them, the cluster known as the Great Bear, Ursa Major—appeared to grow brighter and then to coalesce into a greater light: a newly formed heavenly object too warm and golden to be a star, or even many stars together. The light grew, and it moved closer. It assumed a form that was hard to recognize—too big to encompass with your mind, it might have been—but Jesse had the feeling it was something he had known, something he had seen or been told about.
This light-thing moved down and inward: out of the sky above the harbor, into the night-black landscape of Dublin, Maine. For an instant, it actually seemed to take notice of Jesse's presence. Two great eyes appeared to rest very briefly on him. He raised his arm to shield his face from their burning glow.
Beside him, Gus the timber wolf howled and pranced and leapt high in the air. It was like he was celebrating.
Then the light-thing moved on, and Jesse lowered his arm, and everything was the same again. The same in the sense that, for example, the world was still turning and would go on turning for a while. The sun would keep on coming up and the plants would continue to grow. In that way, the world was the same.
Otherwise, it was completely different.
And Jesse Openhood—let's be clear about this—was the very first person to notice the change. Jesse and his wolf. Though he reckoned that when he got back home, Syzygy would probably say she had known it was coming. And Ari would affect to have heard about it long before anyone. His raven Jack would have told him. Because they were all of them part of the world, and the world was like that.
KEEPER OF MEDICINE
Molly felt large.
Comically large. Cosmically large. She felt the whole world in her belly. She felt the stars in her eyes. She felt men and women scurrying around at her feet—or were they paws now? Men were on one side and women on the other. Don't ask Molly why.
Arth Vawr, she said. What do we do now?
But the Heavenly Bear said nothing. And Molly realized with some discomfort (and then elation) that she was the Bear now.
Far out, she thought. It's just like the bumper sticker. You know: thou art goddess. Temporarily, at least.
On a hillside below her, she noticed Jesse Openhood sitting with a bottle of Andrew's in his hand and Gus, the timber wolf, at his side. Molly winked at him. He raised his arm, possibly waving at her.
Enough socializing.
She turned to face the Goddin base, which was a mess. A typical male mess, if you don't mind her saying so. Lots of large-scale destruction. Teams, with leaders. Big fat hoses squirting fluids. Loud noise. Bad smells. What fun. Molly sighed. It would serve them all right, in a way, if she did nothing. If she just let the fire burn and everything be lost. Maybe they'd learn something from their mistakes. But the problem was, as Molly knew, they never learn from their mistakes. Wars, car wrecks, drinking bouts, it makes no difference. They lie down and feel bad for a while, then they get up and do it all over again. And they leave the women to clean up after them.
Molly was tired of it, both as a woman and as a goddess (if only a temporary one). But she couldn't think of anything else to do. It was infuriating, and it made no sense; but was it better to just give up? Let the world go all to hell?
There had to be a better way. Maybe in the next life, if there was a next life, she would think of one. In the meantime...
Molly sighed. The effect of this was a gust of wind out of the south, warm and moist. The flames moved over the fields, spreading to new territory. A fuel-storage building caught fire, to fairly spectacular effect.
