Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (23 page)

“What exactly are you driving at, Carol? Are you threatening me?”

She glanced away. “No,” she said, and he could tell that she was lying.

“Jesus wept.” His skin had broken into goose-bumps. “You’re even crazier than I thought.”

“No we’re not. We’re desperate, and you can’t fight logic. We’ll all die if we don’t do anything, but we can’t do anything without money. We therefore need the money that’s rightfully mine—which you won’t give to us voluntarily. If we can’t
make
you hand it over quickly enough, then—”

“Why
should
I, Carol? You come here raving about a disaster I don’t know anything about and expect me to drop everything to help. Why isn’t it in the news if it’s so urgent?”

“The government wants to avoid a panic.” Her eyes were wide, frightening in their earnestness. “Believe me, Peter. It’s all true; we have spies in Canberra who have confirmed everything. Can’t you feel it in the air? A pressure, as though something’s about to burst— or stretch until the world snaps?”

He waved the imagery aside. He did know the feeling well, but it had nothing to do with the rest of the world. “Is that really it, then? You only came to
execute
me?”

“Of course not, Peter.” She stood and stepped closer, her silhouette taunting him. “I came to give you one last chance to see reason.”

He pulled the gun from his pocket and pointed it at her stomach.

“Stay away from me,” he said. “Take one more step and I’ll blow your guts out.”

She blanched and raised her hands. “Peter, don’t be stupid—”

“Why not? Will it make any difference? Or are you telling me I’m wrong?”

Tears began to flow down her cheeks. “Oh, Peter—”

“Don’t ‘Oh, Peter’ me. You want me dead! What happened to the ‘sanctity of life’ and all that shit? I bet you’d love me to come back as an insect so you could step on me, grind me into the dirt again and again—”

“That’s not what I want, or what I believe!” Even at gun-point she wouldn’t let her beliefs go undefended. “We’re put into this life for a reason—to learn, to grow—and we only move on when we have learnt that lesson.”

“Seriously? You’ve really fallen for this shit?”

“Half the world believes in reincarnation; they can’t all be wrong.”

“Better them than me.”

“Well, at least
we’re
trying to help.”

“A fat lot of good that’s going to do any of us if we don’t
need
help. Where’s your evidence?”

“All around us!” She waved a hand at the garden, the gesture encompassing the entire world. “We make our own lives, Peter, and we have no-one else to blame but—”

“I’ve read your fucking hand-outs.” All his pent-up bitterness poured forth in an unstoppable wave: “If you’re right and the world
is
falling apart around us, then why is everyone paying for bad karma right bloody now? Is this year, this entire fucking century, the karmic equivalent of hell? Is that what you’re saying? That it’s
all
our fault?
Everything
?”

Her hands were clasped in an attitude of prayer in front of her breasts as she replied: “Who else’s
could
it be, Peter?”

“I don’t know—and, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn. But it’s not
me.
You have no right to make me feel guilty for something I haven’t done!”

She shook her head, unable to retreat from her beliefs but unable to convince him either. “Life goes on,” she said. “As long one person’s left alive, there’s still hope. And wherever there’s hope,
we
will be.”

“You and your friends? Or you and
me
?”

“What’s the difference? We’re all grains of dust blowing in and out of Gaia’s lungs. In and out, around and around, forever. That’s what Jean says, and I believe her even if it doesn’t fit the doctrine exactly. In the long run—”

“Wait.” Peter tripped over the hauntingly familiar metaphor. “Who’s this Jean?”

“Just someone I know. Not very well, but—”

“Tell me what else she’s said.”

Carol frowned. “What does this have to do with us?”

“Has she mentioned time? That there may be only one mote of dust—”

“Yes, but how could you have known that?” She stared back at him, startled herself. “I don’t understand what she means. Do you?”

“No.” His empty hand rubbed at his bruised temple. “If anything I’m more confused than ever.”

“That makes two of us.”

Suddenly Felix was standing next to him. “See how close she is to realising the truth?”

Peter jumped. “Jesus! Where the hell did you come from?”

“From the same place when you last asked that question.”

He shook his head. “Carol, if you think Jean is weird, just wait until you hear—”

He stopped. His ex-wife stood opposite him, frozen in place. Her eyes gazed vacantly in his direction, but saw nothing.

“What’s going on, Felix?”

“The truth is breaking free.”

He wanted to scream.
“What
truth?”

“The truth about life and likeness.” Felix’s voice was soothing but couldn’t hide a dark undercurrent. “Traditionally, people believe that reincarnation works only in one direction. They assume that when we die we will be reborn in the future.” He leaned forward to emphasise his words. “This may have been so in the past, when the world’s population was small and niches for rebirth were few. But in this century—with so many children, so many vacancies— when we die we are trapped, forced into a concurrent—even a past—incarnation. Otherwise there wouldn’t be enough souls to go around. Do you understand what this means?”

“Should I?”

Felix leaned back. “Reincarnation in recent decades has been, to put it mildly, something of a disaster.”

“Let me get this straight.” Peter’s hand rubbed harder at his bruised temple, as though trying to keep the thoughts in. “You’re saying that reincarnation works in all directions? That if I died I might come back as—I don’t know—my mother or something?”

“Or your son, or your cousin, or all of the above. There’s no way of predicting.”

A light burst in his head, the bulb of insanity. “You’re about to tell me that there’s only one soul accounting for all of us. That we are, at the deepest level, the same person.”

Felix smiled at that. “Remember likeness? The woman I talked about earlier, who married into another community but remains isolated? The local likeness is a single soul interweaved among many people, and she comes from outside stock—from a different soul. Indeed, there may be only a relative handful of true individuals on the planet, each bearing a distinct difference from the others. And even they may be only local tangles in the entire human soul. In a skein that vast—encompassing all of human history—anything is possible.”

“One world: one
soul?”
said Peter. “Is
that
what you and your friends have been hinting at?”

“Exactly. And don’t you see what this means?” Felix’s voice became urgent again. “This congested period of history—with so many lives and so many deaths—is a whirlpool, drawing in souls from all the times around it—past
and
future. It is a vortex from which few escape quickly, and then only with luck. The velocity of the average soul, if you like, is so high that any one soul may spend numerous incarnations re-experiencing trauma from numerous angles. Especially at the end time, when there is nothing
but
trauma. The time that is now.”

“We’re all trapped in here?” Strange as the idea was, it resonated with the way he was feeling.
This
was an idea he could accept, no matter how crazy it sounded.

“You are close to the focus of disturbance, Peter, to the seed-crystal that will precipitate the chaos.”

“What—a plague? A war?”

“No. Those events are symptoms, not causes.”

“Then I still don’t get it.”

“From inside, you cannot. There is no longer a clear distinction between ‘who’ and ‘where’. All is blurred; causality is fraying. I can tell you, however, that the true collapse begins
within
—in the soul itself—and that it must happen soon. If it doesn’t, the vortex will collapse upon itself, creating a singularity beyond which no earth-born life can ever pass.”

Peter shook his head, completely lost. Felix rambled on but he was no longer listening. He turned back to Carol; she hadn’t moved in the intervening minutes. He felt suddenly awkward, confronting his ex-wife with a gun in his hand and debating metaphysics while the planet fell apart around him.

God, she was so beautiful. The sun was still behind her; her hair and skin were all shining and gold. Yet he was surprised to realise that he had stopped loving her some time ago. He had just wanted her back for the sake of it—out of habit, as a matter of principle, motivated by little more than selfishness. The realisation made him feel slightly ill: how could he have been that mechanical, that shallow, without realising?

He didn’t want to hurt her. If OWE really wanted him out of the way then he had to give her the credit for at least trying to warn him. Whatever had passed between them, and however badly he had acted, she had taken the time to think of him, and he was grateful for that. More than anything else in the world, he felt like a long, cold drink in the shade of the house where at last, perhaps, they could discuss their futures more amicably.

“How long?” he asked Felix. “How long do we have to sort this out?”

Silence. When Peter turned, the man had disappeared. “Felix?”

Carol, suddenly animated again, also looked around. “Jean?”

A Toyota wagon pulled up with a jerk to the curb across the road, and two men in dark suits climbed out. Carol saw the car— and stiffened.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “They said they’d wait!”

“Who?”

She turned back to face him, and her eyes were full of warning.

Anger made his thoughts race, backtracking furiously over the conversation. He couldn’t believe he’d been about to negotiate with Carol and her friends—with maniacs of this calibre, the insane Japanese poets themselves. They’d obviously sent her in to keep him home and distracted while they made their approach.

We’ve come for YOU!

(he imagined them chanting with lunatic glee)

We want your MONEY

and YOU can’t stop US!

Sunlight glinted off the pistol as he raised it. The two men saw it and ducked for the cover of his next-door neighbour’s fence. He fired once anyway and dived behind the wall of the verandah.

Answering fire ricocheted off the front of the house. Carol stood her ground in a stunned panic, not knowing which way to run.

Something rustled along the fence, down the side of the house. The two men had split up.

Peter slithered across the verandah.

“Get inside!” he hissed at her, gesturing curtly with the pistol. “We can’t stay out here. It’s too dangerous!”

She hesitated. Another shot whined past her. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her down.

“Jesus, Carol! Do you want to be shot?”

“They’re not firing at me,” she retorted, eyes wide. “It’s
you,
Peter—”

“Yeah? I don’t think they mind much either way. The fewer who know about it the better.”

Her eyes were confused. “No!”

“Yes!” His fingers tightened as she began to struggle. “If we’re all to blame, then we all have to be punished, right?”

“No, I—Peter!”

The screen door slammed like a gunshot behind them as he dragged her into the house. He was sunblind for a second, and the darkness felt as deep as a pit, as deep as despair. The burbling of the radio in the bedroom did little to dispel the gloom. He felt like the prow of a ship smashing through dark, icy waters. If he stopped, they would close over his head and he would be gone forever. And from this black sea, he knew, there would be no easy escape.

~ * ~

The street-lights went out as Jed’s bus pulled to a halt at his stop. He cursed along with the other commuters. Power-blackouts occurred with greater frequency every week as demand placed an enormous toll on ageing turbines that the government couldn’t afford to replace. Faced with further cuts into an already overburdened wage packet, the public had agreed to grit its teeth and bear the situation until better times returned.

Jed shrugged philosophically and walked the rest of the way home. While it was nice to have a few extra dollars every week, that was no help when stranded on an empty street without a light for kilometres. It was hard to know who, exactly, to blame.

As one of his fellow-commuters had said earlier: “It’s like cause and effect when causality works outside of time. This causes that, which itself causes this—round and round, forever, trapped in a perpetually downward spiral. Someone told me that just this morning. It’s weird when you stop to think about it.”

The stickiness to his step when he walked up the hallway of the house alerted him to the fact that something was amiss. Then he tripped over the first of the bodies. Whoever it was had bled to death across the kitchen floor. Fumbling about in the darkness, he found a second body not far from the first. Spread-eagled and cold, definitely female. Next to it was a gun.