Stones (Data) (31 page)

A brilliant white Stone, with the familiar rough shape of a large claw, rests in the Woman’s palm. When the Woman looks back at Matt, their eyes meet again.

With effort, Matt looks away from her face to stare at his own hands, feet and torso, all of them glowing with an internal brilliance. But no matter how hard he tries to look elsewhere, his gaze is drawn back like a magnet to the gentle intensity of her eyes.

They watch each other for a time. No hurry. No awkwardness. Matt feels only harmony, comfort, clarity and affection. He ventures a look at the Stone that lies, cool and weightless, in his own hand. Like the Woman, it is ablaze with white light.

She moves closer and reaches out to touch Matt’s Stone. Warmth surges through his body, and his gaze is drawn to his own arms and legs.

He is enveloped in the same boiling white flames.

Movement within his Stone catches his eye. Its light stirs into shifting clouds. It seems to grow larger and larger until it consumes his entire view.

For an instant, all is blindingly brilliant, and then he sees patches of dark space as a cluster of immense white spheres moves by and recedes beyond him. His senses tell him that he is traveling many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light into the vast depth of space. Galaxies appear as faint spots in the distance, draw closer and then shoot past, falling away into faint smudges of light before fading completely. He has a simultaneous view of every direction, front and rear, up and down, like riding on a transparent bullet train through the heart of Tokyo at high speed.

The whole concept of time is strangely out of place.

As the galaxies thin out, his movement slows down, and a spiral form comes into view. Clouds of glowing light resolve into clusters of star-like blue as he enters an outer arm of the spiral. Slowing further, individual stars fly by until he stops in front of an immense dark cloud of dust floating against a backdrop of white pin pricks in the emptiness of space.

A vaguely round shape grows within the cloud. Matt hears a voice as the shape takes on a fiery glow in the midst of the dark cloud. He doesn’t understand the words, but the meaning is clear. It is the birth of a star. Other spheres resolve and form into planets within the cloud near the newborn star. The remaining dust dissipates until it is gone.

One fiery planet stands out against the blackness, its face cracked with fissures of light. It draws him in.

Dark forms harden and float across its surface as it cools. Gases flow out of the soft interior, the beginnings of an atmosphere. Steam turns to water, oceans form. Clouds swirl. Continents emerge and collide. His vision drops down closer, and he sees great land masses cut through with young mountain ranges and rivers.

He is skimming above the rocky surface. A palpable sense of joy rises up from the desolate landscape. Soft voices play in the darkness around him. Life fills the oceans and spills onto the land. The empty continents take on a green hue. There is an endless variety of grasses and flowers. The first trees appear. The oceans fill with microbes, invertebrates and fish. Insects, birds and animals roam the land. Life extends its reach to fill all empty spaces.

Last of all, Matt sees people like himself. Their faces appear and fade before his eyes. Billions upon billions.

It all happens in an instant, as if time no longer held any meaning. He sees it all and comprehends it all in his mind with effortless simplicity and clarity.

Then the planet and its galaxy, the entire universe around them, all recede to a spot within the white Stone in his own hand.

He looks up at the Woman standing in the air beside him.

“Who are you?” The words tumble from his lips without thought or effort. “What is your name?”

There is an audible voice from the Woman. Matt hears it, not through his ears, but with his entire body. It reminds him of the time that he and his mom and dad went to Niagara Falls the summer after third grade. He remembers standing on the observation deck at the base of the falls, closing his eyes and absorbing the incredible power of the falling water.

The words of the Woman are spoken with the same power.

“We are the Allehonen.”

H
e is bathed in peace.

The sounds of singing birds and wailing cicadas hang in the air. Something bright and hot bores through Matt’s closed eyelids. They slide open, and he looks up, gazing in contemplation directly at the sun on a cloudless morning. Its outer skin is a collection of tiny explosions and flowing plasma. Seconds or minutes go by. It’s like staring at an orange. No need to squint or look away. Suddenly, Matt becomes conscious of what he is doing, and his hand shoots up to shade his eyes from the burning rays. And then, curious, he moves his hand slightly and looks again directly into the sun.

What the hell?

Eyes flip shut. No retinal afterimage.

He sits up and scans the clearing. Green leaves and white flowers of
dokudami
flutter delicately in a light breeze all around him on the ground. The needles of pine trees pierce the air with more vivid green than he remembers ever seeing. A ladybug floats by his nose, and he studies, mid-flight, the deep hues of the black dots on the orange back.

Struggling to stand on shaky legs, he raises his upper body and leans back on the side of the boulder, his chest moving in and out with the effort. His body is like a limp dishrag, drained of energy. The palm of his left hand runs along the smooth surface of the massive rock behind his head.

Strange. Hadn’t the boulder had a rough surface last night so that he could easily climb to the top?

The fingers of his other hand are wrapped tightly around the Stone.

Weakness overwhelms him, as if the strength in his muscles has been sucked out by an invisible hypodermic needle. Pangs of hunger pierce through his stomach. But even more than hunger, he has a deep thirst for water. His mind feels unusually clear, capable, it seems, of following two or three strains of thought simultaneously. He thinks of Jessica back in Colorado, Professor Yamamoto at the University, his dad on the road and the fiery Woman who came down from the sky during the night.

Her last and only words flood into his mind.

We are the Allehonen.

Against his own will, Matt must face the fact of what he saw during the night. And the change it forces upon his life and his belief system so long a part of who he is.

Maybe he’s no longer a perfect atheist. Not that he ever really was one. To be honest, he always longed to believe like Jessica, but just couldn’t make the leap of faith.

The obvious question comes to mind. Who is the Woman that came to him? Is she God? He can’t be sure, but recalls that she used the term
we
. Does that mean there is more than one? She made no mention of religion. Perhaps the Woman is an angel or a
seraph
from the Bible. Or a Buddhist
bodhisattva
. Or a
malak
in Islam. Or any number of otherworldly beings recognized by religions and non-religions around the world.

Maybe they are all the same thing.

Whoever or whatever she is, at least part of the message is clear. The Woman has the power to make stars and planets, and she does it with a Stone exactly like Matt’s.

The sound of a woodpecker in the clear morning air reminds him that he needs to get moving. Time to get back to the University. Time to get some water. Time to find out as much as he can about the Stone in his hand.

The Stone.

He uncurls the fingers of his right hand and looks into its purple surface. His eyes instinctively close as he begins to count backwards from ten.

An image opens in his mind. A small boy with a yellow cap and a bright red backpack runs slowly away. The boy glances back and smiles at Matt as he rushes into the street in front of a convenience store. It has a banner with white
kanji
characters on a blue background draped across its front. The letters float and shimmer, making it hard to read them. From the looks of it, it’s the 7 Eleven at the bottom of the mountain across the street from the park.

Somewhere behind him, a woman screams. At that instant, a black Mercedes Benz shoots silently in front of Matt, moving right to left, and slams into the child, sucking him under its front fender. The child disappears beneath the car. A group of teenage schoolgirls in their sailor uniforms stand in front of the convenience store, and they raise their hands to their mouths, screaming as they look at the little body lying crumpled on the street like a discarded rag.

The image fades.

Matt looks up from the Stone, blinks his eyes and shakes his head, trying to clear the picture from his mind.

Feeling the strength to stand, he finds his way through the brush and back to the deep path he came up just hours ago. He starts down the mountain and lets gravity pull him into a gentle jog. The gigantic appetite and thirst in his belly cry out for a quick breakfast, maybe a liter of water and three or four fresh
onigiri
rice balls wrapped in seaweed with a bright red pickled plumb at the center.

Thirty meters down, a dark blue suit jacket lies crumpled on the side of the path. Something about it is oddly familiar. There’s a necktie hanging in a zigzag fashion on a bush a few meters away.

Matt stops. Just off the trail, a ripped shirt is strewn on the ground. A line of broken branches and trampled weeds lead in the same direction through the underbrush. Matt follows the tracks off the trail. A white T-shirt hangs from a tree branch above him, as if it was torn off in haste and thrown there. He walks past pants, shoes and socks, all discarded haphazardly.

A flash of light in the weeds catches his attention. He picks up a thin silver tube shaped like a long straw. He knows he has seen something like it before, and then he remembers. In his mind’s eye, he sees the Yakuza man in the airport tapping a similar tube against the palm of his hand.

What could it possibly be for?

There’s a mumbling sound in the weeds straight ahead.

Matt finds its source. A man lays in a fetal position on the ground, motionless, eyes open, staring straight ahead. He has nothing on but a traditional Japanese
fundoshi
loincloth. A dagger is strapped to his lower leg. Matt recalls reading something in a local newspaper about the comeback of the ancient loincloth, especially among the Yakuza and other gangs. The man’s skin has an unnatural red hue that almost hides the menagerie of dragon, carp and snake tattoos that crawl over his body like a collection from an exotic zoo. The skin color makes Matt think of a cadaver he once dissected in a college anatomy class. There’s something familiar about the man and his massive enhanced pec muscles.

He moves closer for a better look.

The eye twitches. Matt moves away too slowly as the man jumps to his feet and lunges at him, arms outstretched as if groping for a lifeline.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” The man speaks roughly as he snags Matt’s shirt in his fingers, gets a grip and pulls Matt down close to his face.

A long black ponytail runs down the man’s back. There’s a thin red scar stretching from chin to ear.

Silence passes as the man holds Matt’s shirt and tries to look into his face, opening and closing his eyes, squinting, struggling to see. Matt stands for a moment looking down at the gangster and the thin white film covering his eyes. The beat of his own heart jars him back to reality, and he thrusts the naked man away with a violent push of his palms, sending him tumbling down the hill, chest heaving.

Matt stumbles backwards against the trunk of a pine tree.

The man stops rolling and struggles to his feet. As he stares uphill, he seems to lose Matt’s direction and turns his body several times with outstretched arms, his eyes sweeping and scanning. When he stops, he’s looking off at an angle.

Matt freezes, afraid that the man might hear his heartbeat or breathing.

“I know it’s you.” The man looks into empty space. “I saw you last night, up on the mountain. I followed you there from the University.”

Matt crouches down, says nothing and pulls in shallow breaths.

“You climbed up on the rock. Flames poured down from the sky. I saw it swallow you, the rock, the trees, the flowers. The whole world was on fire.” He falls to his knees and runs his hands over his face and chest. “Eyes, skin, arms, legs. Everything hot. Everything burning.” His hand moves down his lower leg and slides one of the daggers from its sheath.

Matt remains motionless, barely breathing through his nose.

“Someone very important wants you. I heard it from the boss himself. I don’t know who you are or what you’ve done, but they’ll come to find you. Everything you have, everyone you love, they’ll take it all away. Layer by layer, like peeling an onion.” The man pauses, looks around, straining to listen.

“Who?” Matt opens his mouth and whispers the sound before realizing that he’s given himself away.

The naked man turns to Matt with a smile and flicks the dagger from his hand.