2012 (38 page)

“Back down, Dad. Try to put your mind away.”

“I can’t put my mind away! Don’t you see what this is? It’s where we saw the hieroglyphics. But now we’re here in the flesh, and it’s all so-so vivid and so real. This is the most superb example of Old Kingdom bas-relief on the planet. And it’s in the middle of the United States!”

“Dad, listen to me. If you don’t just let it take you over, we’re in trouble. Because we’re not in the United States, dad. This is Abaddon, and the second they realize that we’re here, we are done.”

“We’ve come through a gateway?”

“We’re still on earth, but in the physics of Abaddon.”

“Come on,” Mike said. “We’ve got work to do. Stuff to figure out.”

Martin followed him across the room where Al North had been deprived of his life and his soul. He followed them through a low doorway, which was the source of the light, which was a living light that penetrated the flesh and made you weep to feel it upon your body.

Then he saw why. He was in a cavern, blue-lit like a submarine cave just touched by sun from the surface. Before them stretched a sea of glass tubes, each three feet long, all plugged into huge black sockets, all living, exact replicas of the images on the wall of the temple of Dendera. Except these tubes were sparking with life, and you could see the lights inside them leaping and jumping and struggling, causing the whole room to flicker continuously.

Slowly, Trevor, then Pam and Mike went to their knees. Martin followed them, because the light shining on them was not just alive, but richly alive, and they could see millions of summer mornings, dew on the flowers of the world, signs of struggle and happiness, and hear, also, a roar of voices that was vast.

The flower of mankind was here.

“What do we do now, Dad?”

“I have no idea.”

TWENTY-THREE

DECEMBER 21, 

THE FINAL HOURS ON ABADDON: THE UNION

WYLIE HAD REALIZED THAT HE was being dieseled when he saw that they were crossing the same sodden shopping street again. There were piles of yarn, there were farm implements, there were baskets and paint-brushes, and hatchets polished to a high shine.

He might be a shape-shifter like the rest of them, but he was not on their side. No, he was a Union man, he had remembered that. They were right about him being an intelligence agent. He was, but not a very good one, given that he’d gotten his sweet ass caught just when that was the worst possible thing that could have happened.

Wylie had examined every inch of the wagon, but it was made like a fricking safe. The goddamn driver would open a little hatch from time to time and shit and piss into it. Wylie stayed well back, but the place stank. He wondered if his own shit was yellow now, too?

The wagon had been stopped for some time before he understood that it wasn’t going to be moving again. There was a series of clicks, and the door went hissing open. Even in this place, with its dirty brown sky, coming out hurt his eyes.

He was coming to the crisis of his failure now, he knew.

“Ready for lunch,” his captor said. “Your hands are comin’ to me and mine, I hear.”

His hands. What a place. Trapped in the wagon with nothing to do but think, he had remembered more of his real life. If you looked-really looked-you wouldn’t find a trace of Wylie Dale before December 26, 1995, the day he’d made his transition into a human life that had been painstakingly constructed for him to enter. “Wylie Dale” had already been established as a novelist by the organization that had sent him to the human earth, but the first book he’d written himself was Alien Days, his story of his abduction, which had actually been a looking-glass memory of his arrival on one-moon earth.

As Wylie’s eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself standing before a gigantic version of a building familiar to him. It was the model for the Tomb of Skull and Bones on the campus of Yale University. But the Tomb was not large. This building was two hundred feet tall, a great, ugly monolith.

Compared to the rest of the city, which echoed with roars, screeches, discharges of steam, the rumbling of wagons, and various unidentifiable hoots, laughs, and howls, the silence here was total.

Bones had been founded by William Huntington Russell, whose step-brother Sam had carried opium into China for the British when they were trying to get back the gold they’d spent on Chinese tea. British captains hadn’t been willing to do it. It might have been the 1850s, but drug running was still drug running. Russell had no problem with addicting the Chinese.

“Are you happy?” he asked his grinning captor.

“Yeah, I’m happy.”

“Then fuck you.”

“Could I season your fingers?”

“You going to two-moon earth?”

“I should be so lucky. No can afford.”

Wylie thought of the shithole the seraph hordes were being sent to. “What does it cost?”

“Whatever you have. Which assumes you have something. They don’t consider an artificial syrinx with a busted jaw and this old wagon worth a ticket. I live in it, you know. When it’s not otherwise occupied.”

“So you’re poor?”

“Poor as shit, which is why-” He stopped. He listened, so Wylie listened, too. Keening came, heart-freezing, getting louder fast. “Knees!”

Wylie didn’t argue. As he went down to the hard earth and little knots of mushrooms like small, exposed brains, a line of flying motorcycles with silver fenders, ridden by figures in gold metallic uniforms and gleaming gold helmets and face masks, came speeding out of the sky and hung dead still a foot or so above the ground, their motors revving as the riders worked to keep them stable.

This was followed by a smooth whoosh of sound, and a jewel of an aircar appeared.

He knew who it belonged to, of course: Marshal Samson. His escort bowed, and he bowed, too. There was a click and he could sense somebody getting down, coming over.

“Hello, Wylie.” The voice positively bubbled. “I knew it from the first. It had to be this. Actually, I’m impressed. I’ll never tell her that, of course, but it was a brilliant operation.”

“Thank you.”

“I just came from raping your wife, incidentally. Bring him.”

He was kicked from behind, and ended up scuttling through the huge doors, which had opened soundlessly and now presented the appearance of a gaping cave.

As Wylie walked through the darkness of the anteroom and Samson opened the inner door for them both, the enormous golden floor struck him with a powerful sense of remembrance. That floor had been a source of scandal at home, a symbol to the Union of the greed of the autocrats who ran this side of the planet.

A tall woman loaded with jewels, her hair sleek and white, dressed in the richest clothing Wylie had ever seen, came striding forward. Her face was so white that it glowed, the scales attractively tiny, the features delicate. He knew that this was the infamous leader of this world, Echidna, whose family had held controlling ownership of the Corporation for uncountable millennia.

All the females in the line were called Echidna. When one wore out, a new clone replaced it seamlessly, without any public awareness. There was never an issue of succession, unlike the Union, which was a simple democracy and in turmoil all the time.

“Come, Spy,” she said, “I want to gloat before dinner.”

As they crossed the great room, he saw Lee Raymond, Robert Mugabe, and Ann Coulter playing a game involving dice on what appeared to be a table made of emeralds, rubies, and a great, gleaming expanse of pure diamond. He recognized the game. It was senet, the Egyptian predecessor to backgammon. In the human worlds, the rules of senet had been hidden away by the seraph, but here, where they had not, players at senet gambled for souls.

He was not sure if they were human, or simply proud of their achievements as human, and showing off their forms.

“I had no idea your penetration of human society was so extensive.”

“But not of both human worlds, not as much as I hoped. This time around, we’re only getting the one, I fear.” She shot him a twinkling glance. “But we are getting it, you Union shit!”

Coulter now shifted into a sallow reptilian form with big, beady scales. Her black tongue darted behind spiked teeth made yellow from too much tobacco. Wylie realized that she was lusting after him. Mugabe, who was apparently her seraph husband, scurried behind her, trying to keep a cloak around her.

“Ann wants to bed you before we eat,” Echidna said. “It’s a particular pleasure of hers, to fuck her food.”

They arrived at a tall window, curtained. “Open it,” Echidna snapped at Samson. “I just want you to see this, Union man.”

Wylie realized that she had brought him close to a great, black wall with huge levers on it. Scalar controls, he knew, that worked the gigantic lenses that were deployed on two-moon earth. But then the curtains swept open, and he saw a lawn so bright green it must have been painted, awash in splendid people, some of them reptilian, others human, or seemingly so. There were politicians, of course, great, grinning hordes of them, military officers in the uniforms of a dozen countries, representatives of various royal families, rock stars, CEOs, television personalities, preachers, mullahs, gurus-in fact, every sort of human leader and person of power. Among them strolled naked seraph girls and boys, their scales bleached so white they looked new-minted, carrying trays loaded with barbecued fingers, ears and toes, and flutes of hissy champagne.

To one side was a line of elaborate gas grills, all black and chrome. He recognized that they were Strathmores from home, the brand he had on his own deck, except that these were limousine models, with twelve burners instead of the usual four. Most of them were rolling spits, and on them some of the victims still twisted and squirmed. Behind each grill hung a complete body molt on a tall spike, a pale skin attesting to the youth and therefore tenderness of the person under preparation.

Echidna pointed to an empty grill. “That’ll be you,” she said.

He wanted to try to run, anything to avoid what seemed inevitable. But there was more, because he saw that this party was not to celebrate his capture, or not only that, it was also to celebrate an enormous event that was unfolding in a valley behind the building.

In the center of this valley was a gigantic circular lens of purest black, its surface reflecting the wan midday sun. And around it, stretching to every horizon, were what must be millions and millions of seraph, ready to pour through the moment the signal was given. He saw men, women, children, heard the booming of syrinxes, the chatter and whoops of other animals, and above it all the excited, argumentative shrieking of the seraph themselves as they jostled for position and accused one another of trying to break the baskets of black, oblong eggs the women all carried.

He assumed that he would die here today. He’d been living for years in an extremely dangerous situation with a wiped memory, and that made you vulnerable-so vulnerable, in fact, that it was probably just a matter of time before you ended up going through the funny little door in the woods. He loved his poor family, though, his striving, brilliant, lovely family. What would happen to them? Could they shift, he wondered? Did they, perhaps in secret, the children under their covers at night, Brooke in the privacy of her early mornings?

Ann had sidled closer, and he thought maybe he could cause a little confusion. In this class-ridden society, she was bound to have some prerogatives. Time wasn’t on his side, obviously, but distraction might be.

He turned to her. “Must I?”

She squared her shoulders. “Of course you must.”

He went toward her, and thus also toward the wall behind her.

“Guards,” Echidna said mildly. “Stay with him.”

Samson came, and with him his heavily armed escort.

Wylie was still bound, of course, but he came to Ann Coulter and looked down at her. Her scales fluttered and surged, and a black substance that smelled of sulfur began to ooze from under her eyelids.

“Ann,” her husband hissed, “you’re compromising yourself.”

She was really steaming. She loved a man in bondage, that was clear.

Wylie saw that he had a moment, and only one, and it was this moment. He opened his mouth and drew his tongue along the backs of his teeth in the best imitation of a whore that he could imagine.

She tittered. Her breath had in it the flat muskiness of death.

“Will somebody please remove these children?” Mugabe shouted. A number of them had foregathered to watch the fun.

“Part of their education,” Echidna said. Her husband now joined her. Wylie had forgotten the name of this huge being, but he was peerlessly imposing in his sleek black suit, with his shimmering skin and brilliant, watchful eyes. Another ancient ruler riding the ages on a foam of clones.

He tilted his head and felt Coulter’s kiss invading his mouth like a soaked chaw of somebody else’s tobacco.

With all the power in him, his every muscle singing, his whole heart and soul and mind devoted only to this one movement, he sprang upward. These lizard forms were not as earthbound as human bodies. They didn’t feel as much, either, not pain, not love, not pleasure. But they were ferociously strong, and he was strong, he had kept himself well, understanding now the obsessive hammering away he had done at Gold’s in Wichita. He’d scared people, the way he would swim laps like a machine. He hadn’t known why his body was like this, just that he needed the swimming, the running, the boxing, the karate, all of it, needed it and devoured it.

The guard had made one mistake, early on. He’d seen him as human and bound him as human, careful of the delicate skin of a much more fragile creature than a seraph. He ripped his arms free with ease.

Unfortunately, the gun had gone. They’d left it with him only to amuse themselves with his disappointment when it was taken. “These sell for a nice price,” the guard had said as he removed it.

For a moment, there was nobody between him and the great control panel. He grabbed a lever, pulled it. Grabbed another, did the same. The action was so damn satisfying that he growled, he screamed, as he pulled another and another.