Cosmos Incorporated (37 page)

A hypersonic rocket. Launched from Capsule 108.

Launched from his own room.

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INCORPORATION OF THE WORLDS

Fire escape.

He has to get away. Fast. Via the fire escape of reality.

As the debris of the rocket falls to the earth of the county in a rain of ashes, blackened metal, powdered refractory resin, carbonized plastic, and fiery polymetallic meteors; as the general alert resounds throughout the city; as the Starnival founders and falls into the glacial silence of half a million mouths open in shock; as the Grand Junction police arrive on the scene, surrounding the Hotel Laika, the narrative-world of Vivian McNellis whisks them abruptly away, him and Jordan, into the Third Time. The
Aevum.

Under the interchange.

Deadlink.

Here, it is always midnight. We are deep in the shadows, deep in the invisible light of what is contained there without being retained.

Gaze on this splendor of pure gold, of astral fire, this supernova of royal whiteness and furious red that encircles Vivian McNellis. She is speaking.

She is saying something.

She is telling a story.

“…Metatron, the angel Prince of the Face, the angel Prince of the Torah, the angel Prince of Wisdom, the angel Prince of Intelligence, the angel Prince of royalty, the angel Prince of glory, the angel Prince of the Palace, the angel Prince of kings, the angel Prince of potentates, the angel Prince of high and exalted, imposing and glorious princes both in Heaven and on Earth, says: ‘YHWH the God of Israel is my witness in this: When I revealed this secret to Moses, all the soldiers of the heights of each firmament became angry with me and said to me: “Why are you revealing this secret to the sons of man born of women, susceptible to sin, impurity, blood, venereal flux, putrid gout, this secret through which were created the Heavens and the Earth, the seas and the continents, the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the lakes, Gehenna and the fire, hail, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life; by which were formed Adam and Eve, the cattle and the animals of the fields, the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea, Behemoth and Leviathan, the reptiles and the insects, the creatures of the sea and of the desert, the Torah and wisdom, knowledge, and thought, the discerning of things on high and the fear of Heaven; why do you reveal this to a being of flesh and blood?”’”

She is so beautiful in this moment that Plotkin falls to his knees.
This time I fell,
he thinks;
this time, I am completely a human being.

“‘I said to them, because the Heavens have given me permission, and I have received permission from the high and exalted Throne, from where all names that are expressed stem like flashes of fire and with sparkles of splendor and
hachmalim
of flames…’”

You are so beautiful, Vivian, that I can’t even speak to you anymore,
he thinks, with the difficulty of a stone trying to move itself.

“‘…but they were only appeased when the Saint, blessed be he, reprimanded them and excluded them with reproach from his presence, saying to them: “I wanted, I desired, I commanded, and I confided the task solely to my servant Metatron, because he is unique among all the children of Heaven. Metatron brought this secret out of My house and gave it to Moses, and Moses gave it to Joshua, Joshua gave to the Ancients, the Ancients gave it to the prophets, the prophets gave it to the men of the Great Synagogue, the men of the Great Synagogue gave it to Ezra the scribe, Ezra the scribe gave it to Hillel the old, Hillel the old gave it to Rabbi Abahu, Rabbi Abahu gave it to Rabbi Zeira, Rabbi Zeira gave it to the trustworthy men, the trustworthy men gave it to the loyal men, to prevent and fight on their behalf all the diseases that were raining down on the Earth: ‘If you truly listen to the voice of YHWH your God, if you do what is right in His eyes, if you open your ear to His commandments and if you observe all His decrees, I will not inflict any of the diseases I inflicted on the Egyptians, because I am YHWH who heals you,’ as it is said in Exodus 15:26.” ’”

The words taken from the Book of Enoch write themselves in fiery letters on Plotkin’s brain. He realizes that she is giving him something. A secret. “We are alone,” he finally says to the light-body that is much more than a body, and infinitely more than a simple emission of photons.

“You’re wrong,” she says. “All of the invisible is with us, even at this very moment.”

All of the invisible,
thinks Plotkin.
The procession of angels…
“I meant…there’s no one here to baptize me.”

“No? What would you say to the angel Metatron himself?”

“I…listen, you…you’re only his temporary incarnation. You’re a woman. Only modernist ch urches accept the ordination of women.”

“In all the UHU-tolerated religions, certainly. But you’re making a small mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“Yes, you are forgetting the central idea of the ‘common priesthood of the faithful,’ which Origen uses deliberately in several of his homilies, including the one on Leviticus, I believe. Each of us is a priest by baptism. In the early Catholic Church, exceptional situations were everywhere, and our circumstances are similar to those long-ago ones: if a priest is absent at the moment you are to be baptized, any believer may replace him.”

“But you—”

“I am no longer a woman in the way you understand it. I am the living vector of the
Verba Ignis.
Remember what Origen said: ‘Do you not know that to you too, as to all the Church of God and all believers, priesthood is granted?’”

Plotkin doesn’t reply. He gazes at Vivian McNellis, radiant, so close to him and yet already so far away.

“And so, Sergei Diego Plotkin, I baptize you, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

A burning liquid drips down his forehead, penetrating inside him, consuming everything there is to consume, consigning to nothingness everything he should not have been, leaving him naked as a newborn child, in the pure glory of what he has become.

“Now,” she says to her brother, who has been hovering in the background, “I must cause your continuums to split apart. Our paths will diverge forever.”

“What do you mean, Vivian?”

“In a few hours, the incorporation of the uncreated Light will happen. In me, the dark matter of the Universe will be digitally supercoded, and the globe of light will become a singularity in which I will ascend directly to Heaven. I would like for Lady van Harpel and the young android girl to be witnesses to this. They will be told at that time.”

“And why will that cause our paths to—”

“Time is running short, Jordan. I need you to get out of here as fast as possible. The entire Mohawk territory is in an uproar over this attack, and very soon they will start investigating the area. I am going to translate you directly into the October 22 rocket, whose takeoff will be delayed only twenty-four hours due to climatic reasons. I already know that the Consortium authorities hate to change their plans even one iota. They will strengthen security measures, that’s all. For financial reasons, they have to go ahead with the program as planned. Even as we speak, police from all over the county are invading the Hotel Laika, but they haven’t gotten their last surprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind the details. The main thing is that the overall retrotranscription of the world is happening successfully. The Control Metastructure is going to die. Without knowing it, Plotkin, by substituting the dead body of Clovis Drummond for the semivirtual exorganism of the Machine-Child there in the Box under the dome, caused a phenomenon of entropic devolution the cyberstructure itself cannot control. The first signs are appearing already. The Hotel Laika is one of them. There will be others.”

“And me?” Plotkin asks, after a moment.

Vivian McNellis, in her globe of light, beams upon him with the smile of an escapee who will never be seen again. “You…you are a free man. I can say nothing more to you except that in creating you, I freed myself, and that you, in freeing yourself, are successfully recreating yourself. I mean that you have taken the greatest risk of all. The only one worth taking.”

Plotkin stares at the girl fallen from the sky, the girl who will return there with no need of any claim, any propellant rocket, any cosmodrome, any Jason Texas Lagrange III, any city of Grand Junction.

With no need of anyone.

With no need of anyone…visible.

OUTPUT

METATRON

Thus the words that come from my mouth will not return to me without effect.

I
SAIAH
55:11

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BLACK LIGHT, BLACK HEAT

Why is he driving now, in a rented robotic car, somewhere on Route 299, in the direction of Nexus Road? Why?

There was no transition between the baptism and his reincorporation into this car, speeding through the night of the independent territory.

Everything is synchronic in the Third Time,
he thinks to himself.
I am here and elsewhere, today and tomorrow, yesterday. I am on the path of the Created World through the intermediation of Vivian McNellis’s cortex, and it is simply that this World coincides perfectly with the “real world.”

In a few hours, she will rejoin the Primordial Light; in a few hours, Lady van Harpel and Sydia Nova will stand witness to the Assumption of the girl fallen from the sky, and yet,
at the same moment,
as paradoxical as it may appear, her brother, Jordan, will take off on October 23, more than two weeks from now, for the Ring.

And he—he knows with a prescience so sharp that it could rip the very fabric of the Universe—he is driving toward his infinity. He is ready to drive forever along this end of the world, if there is even a chance to see Vivian again. The world suddenly seems full of absolute truth, of intrinsic beauty that the abominations of man have not managed to sully.

The night and its powdering of stars scattered on the black sheet of the sky; the trees standing like gray and mauve totems on either side of the road; the road itself, this dusty road above which the blue-white rays of the xenon streetlamps glare.

Then, the angel appears to him.

The foremost angel, the Prince of the Face, the Celestial Scribe. It is as if Vivian McNellis’s words from the Book of Enoch have come to life in front of him, both everywhere and nowhere. Everything is fire. The whole Universe bears the face of a man with four faces, each of them brighter than the sun.

“From the moment the Saint, blessed be he, took me into his service to serve the Throne of Glory, the chariot wheels, and the Shekhina, my flesh became flame. My nerves became burning fire. My bones turned to bundles of embers, the light of my pupils into the splendor of light, the sockets of my eyes into torches of fire. The hair of my head became sparkling flame. All my limbs became wings of burning fire. My entire body became roaring fire. To my right were those that had sculpted the flames of fire; to my left, a burning torch. All around me was the wind of storm and torment; before me and behind me were the groaning of earthquakes.”

This time, he falls. He falls with his face to the ground. His mouth is full of moss and wet, iron-tasting sand. The trees cast their almost-human silhouettes against the great cosmos of Luna Park.

Plotkin is in the forest that borders Route 299. He can see the unmoving robocar a few meters away, haloed with dancing sunlight. He stands, walks to the gleaming vehicle, opens the door, sits down at the controls, and starts the car.

He is no longer in the rental car—or if he is, it has been transformed into some sort of eight-wheeled chariot, riding a cloud of fire. His form is human, but glowing with radiance. Vivian McNellis is beside him, in full angelic metamorphosis as well; her skin, flesh, nerves, bones, her entire body is becoming a star. Their gazes, meeting, give birth to a thousand galaxies. Everything is fire—eyes, hands, mouths, breasts, chests, abdomens, thighs…

All is fire. I am being consumed in you, Vivian McNellis,
he thinks.

And he hears the voice of the girl fallen from the sky, the girl who is becoming an angel of fire to return there. He hears the voice of Vivian McNellis, or, rather, her voice writes itself directly in his mind.

“Make love to me, Plotkin. Make love to me before it is too late.”

Plotkin knows that the words really mean:
It
is
too late, but that does not matter.

He touches his index finger, radiant with light, to her lips, and then kisses her, flame on flame.

Yes, he understands. He knows. He understands everything about her narrative-world. He finally knows everything about love.

It has taken only a single, crashing instant for him to be illuminated with such knowledge.

Fire you were, fire you will be, fire you are.

Now the narrative-world ends, and you are born at the same instant.

At the very instant when you will die.

Men are waiting for Plotkin, where he did not think they would be—at the junction. The unfinished junction between the strip and the North Junction road.

He sees a large silver-gray train car parked on the side of the road. Four men emerge from it.

A well-directed MPE-impulse ray causes a complete short circuit in the rented robocar. It stops almost instantly. Plotkin gets out of the vehicle calmly, his hands spread slightly away from his body.

He is not a normal man anymore.

He doesn’t have a chance.

He doesn’t recognize three of the men, but he knows immediately that they are professional killers.

The fourth man he does know, but he has not, until now, recognized him for who he is: the fourth musketeer.

Cheyenne Hawkwind/Harris Nakashima.

“I’m sorry,” the man says, in a voice as cold as liquid nitrogen.

Plotkin can almost see bluish smoke coming out of his mouth.

“I work for the Order that employs you, as an operations controller. I presume you know what that means?”

Plotkin knows what it means. It means he is going to die, there at the side of the road, at the side of the North Junction road, at the side of the end of the world.

“You should know that damned android from Flandro fucked you over royally,” Cheyenne Hawkwind says. “He’s been spying on you almost the whole time you’ve been here. He didn’t really understand what was happening, but he knew he too was invisible to the child in the dome. When he learned of his existence from the android girl—don’t forget that androids of the same generation are interconnected in some ways—Ultra-Vector Vega guessed that something strange was going on under the dome, and also with you, the female android, and Capsule 081. He plotted to make you his Lee Harvey Oswald. Every police officer in the territory is on your heels.”

Plotkin understands. It is like the final ironic reversion of destiny. The terrorist android had used against Plotkin the same plan Plotkin had intended during his first “incorporation” as the Man Come to Kill the Mayor of This City.

Plotkin looks at Cheyenne Hawkwind and the three men with him. One of them, a tall, gangly fellow with a head of woolly blond hair, fiddles with a small handheld satellite-emission camera, probably sending direct proof that the execution is carried out correctly to those who have commanded his assassinations—his bosses, his old bosses, his bosses from the time when he was paid for spilling blood. The two other men wait, impassive, just in front of the radiator grille of their big Chinese hydrogen-powered train car.

Of course. It’s all so obvious. He blatantly overstepped his bounds; he didn’t meet the deadline of his contract with the Order. And, especially, the fateful day of October 4 didn’t result in the assassination of the mayor of Grand Junction, but instead in a terrorist attack against one of J.T. Lagrange’s rockets, and thus
against the economic interests of the entire cosmodrome
of the Mohawk Consortium.

The fact that the Flandro android used him and managed somehow to penetrate his room to launch, at the fatal moment, a hypersonic rocket, shows that he really has been working for the “radical” faction that refused orbital compromise with the UHU space agency. He is cold, determined, cunning, implacable. He’s probably already at least two thousand kilometers away from Grand Junction. He’s probably in the Southern Hemisphere by now.

The two killers have stepped away from the train car. The third man continues filming, imperturbably. Cheyenne Hawkwind/Harris Nakashima, or whatever his real name is, observes the scene with a gleam of real pity in his eyes, which, Plotkin thinks, makes the whole situation even more inhuman.

“You have not respected your contract. You have betrayed the Order. You know what that means.”

Plotkin looks into the faces of his own end, the double face of his death. A young man, very young, Asian, smooth-faced, violet-eyed, with wavy black hair, sweating under the orange light of the strip’s sodium streetlamps. The hangars of the cosmodrome, vast metallic whales disemboweled on the concrete tarmac, rise sparkling behind the autobridge. The blue lights of police cars flash from the Hotel Laika, a little more than a kilometer away. The second man is hardly older than the first, a half-blood African American of at least four different ethnicities, his head shaved, dressed in an unassuming pearl-gray suit and a vermillion shirt, eyes covered with two high-resolution optical implants. He has moved a few more steps in Plotkin’s direction. He is the one with the weapon. The Asian man holds the MPE emitter that fried the rented robocar’s engine. He seems to be there for the coup de grâce, or as an additional measure of security, or maybe even as the controller’s personal bodyguard. He stands with his arms crossed, watching Plotkin with his black eyes, his gaze boring like a nail into flesh.

They’re starting younger and younger,
Plotkin thinks to himself mechanically.

He came here to kill a man, and he did not comply with the terms of his contract.

He came to kill a man he had never seen, and now he is facing the man who is going to kill him, and who he is seeing for the first and last time, just as he is being seen for the first and last time; except for the “operations controller,” everyone here is seeing him for the first and last time.

“I understand,” Plotkin says.

The African American killer levels a high-powered, magnetic-propulsion, perfectly silent, rotating-barrel, titanium-carbon alloy Sig Sauer revolver at him. It will fire four thousand 0.55 mm bullets a minute, its multiwinding loader good for thirty seconds of continuous fire. There will be nothing left of him but a piece of meat sliced in two, in the midst of a stew of scattered, bloody guts splattered all over the road.

“If I ever really committed as many crimes as my falsified identity remembers, this will be a relief.”

The young killer looks at him without comprehension. “Relief?” He mechanically arms the weapon, starting up the magnetodynamic propulsion turbine.

“I will be purified when I enter the fires of Hell.”

The young man’s puzzlement visibly takes on cosmic proportions. Stupor, fascination, and a shadow—just a shadow—of hesitation.

“It’s true, then, what the controller told us?”

“What did the controller tell you?”

The young man seems uncomfortable at bringing up the subject, as if it is some sort of scatological taboo. Behind him, the American Indian killer is utterly silent.

“You…did you become a Christian?”

Plotkin lets the truth light up his face, the face that is not even his.

He raises his eyes skyward. Soon, in a few days or a handful of seconds—they are, paradoxically, the same thing—Jordan McNellis will return to the Orbital Ring. In a few hours, at the zero moment of his incorporation of the invisible, his sister will leave this world, following an infinite filament of light.

He hears the sinusoidal sputtering of the carrier wave. He looks up into the black depths of the night, scattered with the last stars of his life.

He directs one last enigmatic phrase to the young Order killer: “I wonder which one of my lives will be replayed—”

More than four hundred carbon-carbon microbullets cause his head, his rib cage, and the left-hand part of his pelvis, including his femur bone, to explode; they then smash into a few electric lightbulbs on the pylon of a streetlamp behind him.

He dies, as quickly and mechanically as he was born.

ON/OFF.

Later, his body will be examined by the Grand Junction county police. He will be identified as the “mastermind of the October 4 attack” then he will disappear from the lives and consciousnesses of the men of this city, to whom, after all, he hardly appeared in the first place.

Except for a few who have already left, and an even lesser few who hope to do the same.