The Hero King (30 page)

I fell into the Great Earth Mother. My shadow fell before me, and seemed to race away from me. I was losing my shadow, the way Peter Pan did, and that provided a focus for my panic.

Light reflected in wet, glittering patches from the walls of the shaft. The walls receded, became barely visible in a growing distance, then disappeared completely.

And I continued to fall.

At first—a
long
first—I was totally caught up in the fear of falling. There was a moment of utter terror that extended beyond eternity. There was no room in my head for anything else, no sense of how impossible, how
Freudian
the entire scene was … or how appropriate it might be to go out like this. I’m sure I screamed, maybe a number of times, baring my fear, reducing my throat to a raw pain.

The Hero was stripped of both form and substance, tumbling an inconceivable distance down a channel designed for conception.

Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after
.

But the fall went on and on and my mind eventually grasped for some sort of crisis equilibrium.
The fall went on and on?!?
Trying to rank utter impossibilities is even more useless and confusing than trying to rank infinities. As near as I could tell—from everything that my terrified senses told me—I had already been falling for minutes, many of them, perhaps even an hour’s worth. I felt wind streaming past me, or rather (as a misplaced moment of logic informed me) I felt the air as I streamed through it, but I didn’t seem to be accelerating any longer. I had apparently reached terminal velocity, whatever
that
might be under the circumstances.

I spread my arms and legs like a sky diver in free fall. There was enough air whipping around my naked body to make the tender parts ache again.

Full extension of my extremities seemed to slow my descent, just a little. I knew that everything that I was experiencing was impossible.
(There’s that line again.)
There was no way I could really have fallen into a vagina, no way that such a fall—even if it had been possible by any stretch of the imagination or flesh—could have lasted so long.
A bottomless pit? A black hole? Impossible
. It was something to drive a psychiatrist to
his
psychiatrist. Compounded impossibilities finally softened my panic. Some semblance of rational thought struggled to regain control of my mind, even though the surroundings were completely irrational.

The light at the top of the shaft was too far away to be more than the merest pinprick of light, a single distant star in the otherwise absolute void. Around me there was only the deepening darkness and the continued sense of falling.

“In the beginning
…” thundered through my head, but I ignored the litany and it went away.

I rolled over to look back the way I had come, and I had to fight down a resurgence of panic at falling backward. I looked toward the distant point of light and another voice in my head urged me to wish upon a star to have my dreams come true. That seemed somehow more reasonable than the first proclamation. I had to consider this one for a moment before I let it drift away.

“Twinkle, twinkle …”

“Shut up!” I screamed. I twisted back around so that I would meet whatever might be coming head on—as if that made any difference when I couldn’t see anything, not even my hand in front of my face—not the slightest silhouette.

Time. Time. Time.

Seconds ticked and hours donged. My head throbbed in some nonphysical pulsing, an inner metronome. I passed in front of my whole life. Hallucinations were projected against the void I was falling through. But it all whizzed by too fast for me to grasp anything of what I saw.

I have no doubt at all that enough time passed for me to have fallen all of the way to the center of the earth and beyond—if any of the laws of nature that I learned in school still held … which, apparently, they did not, I would have gone through the center, carried by my momentum, to eventually slow down as gravity caught up with me. There would have been an instant when I would have hung in equilibrium, and then I would have fallen back the other way.

If any of this insanity had been possible in the first place, which it obviously wasn’t—even though it was actually happening.

Or I thought it was.

Of all the crazy ideas my father came up with for doing things together while I was growing up, I only flat refused one, when he suggested that we try skydiving. “I don’t see any sense in jumping out of a perfectly good airplane,” I told him, and no matter how many times he brought up the subject, I continued to refuse. Not long after that, I saw a feature on some news show about people tying themselves to bridges with long rubber bands and jumping off, aiming to stop themselves as close to disaster as they could. The reporter called it bungee jumping, or something like that. I knew that if Dad saw that story he would want to try it. For months I worried, but Dad had just gone off on one of his vague “business trips” when the story aired, so he never saw it, as far as I know. Of course, I didn’t know then that his “business trips” took him to Varay, far from any television and all the spiffied-up reporters who went looking for crazy stories to fill airtime with.

I’m fal
        l
           l
               l
                   ling.”

Gibraltar and the Rockies did their crumbling and tumbling, along with all the other clay that made up the world. It all broke down. The universe exploded like a balloon filled with too much air.

Fall down, go BOOM!

I became part of the extended void. There was nothing but me, my awareness, and the infinite hole I was falling through. A hole in a void. Even the point of light back at the entrance had disappeared—sometime. There was no light at all now. The only sound was the vague whistle of wind as I streamed through the air.

Minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries, millennia, eons—who could count? I fell through a time when there was no time, through a distance where there was no distance, no dimensions of any kind.

I fell beyond that void into my memories.

There was a sharp transition at that point, in my mind, in the pit, wherever, a boundary that I will never be able to adequately explain in mere words. There was an alteration of perception, a change in state, a cusp. At one point I was falling through this dimensionless void. At the next, I was walking on air, falling through my mind.

Slower.

Joy, Annick, Lesh, Aaron, Timon, Harkane. Parthet and my mother. Baron Kardeen. Even the Elflord of Xayber. Clear memories—something that seemed to match my notion of what the “Vulcan mind meld” was supposed to do in the original
Star Trek
series. I became them and they became me. And we were all together. Altogether. It felt like something a long way beyond mere memory. It was more a current, an ongoing communion. They were there, inside my mind, realities of this peculiar present, not relics of a now-vanished past. I could reach out and touch….

My memories of my father, my predecessor as Hero of Varay, and my great-grandfather Pregel, my predecessor as king, were dimmer, vaguer, two-dimensional, fleeting. I saw them laid out in the crypt of Castle Basil, about to be slipped into their niches along the wall and capped over with marble.

Castle Basil. Basil Rock. The crypt. The town. Cayenne, Chicago, Louisville.

I fell through layer after layer of memory, through many repetitions of the strongest recollections, the tightest bonds. Each repeat painted the scene in stronger colors, more vivid, more
real
, cementing the past to the present, extruding it toward the future.

If there was a future.

Vaguely, gradually, I became aware of memories beyond the memories, a widening net of poorly understood rumor and secondhand histories coming from the people I recalled most strongly, tying me to people and places I had never seen myself. There was a statue of the Brothers Grimm. I had seen photographs of it, but now I was seeing the real thing, and I knew, for the first time, that it stood in Marketplatz in some town called Hanau, in Germany. I had never been to Germany.

And, weakest of all, I felt synaptic vibrations of yet more distant connections, a web reaching out even to the stars.

“History is a lie that most people agree on.”

“We recreate our past every minute of every day. Some people do it more effectively than others.”

“He died because he could only imagine one reality.”

    And then, finally, I
knew
what I was doing, what I had yet to do, what the entire point of this vaginal odyssey was. As if to match this sudden inner light of revelation, there was outer light. I seemed to be inside a tight sac, a moving point of ivory luminescence, surrounded by a horde of similar vehicles, each of them containing a replica of me, wrapped closely in a helical structure I remembered from science classes. Many of those other
me
s were looking at the
me
I was looking out of. Repeatedly, I met my own gaze as those other eyes turned to meet mine.

The seed. The sperm. Life offered.

Ahead, below, I could see myriad larger blobs of light, iridescent bubbles, each containing a potential universe, each spreading across the requisite billions of light-years.

The seed. The eggs. Life accepted.

One of me would have to penetrate one of the countless possible universes waiting there in the infinite womb. Each of them was different, with its own past and future, its own rules. We would unite and become one. The future that resulted would draw its parameters, its reality, from both of us, the Great Earth Mother and me. There were possibilities within possibilities. All of the images of myself that I could see in the flood around me were actually ME, as fully as I was. Split personality? That only touches the edge of the reality. I felt my individuality, but I also felt the union of us all.

It might not be me who created the new universe, but it would still be ME. Did I worry that one of those other selfs would succeed instead of the self I was most aware of? Yes, but in a subtle, detached way. There was just too much going on for me to focus on that particular question.

“God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”

Oh yeah?

I knew,
realized, decided
, that I needed to force as much of
me
as I could on the resulting cosmological genes. The crapshoot of heredity: I had to try to load the dice if my memories were to prove dominant over chance, over the efforts of the Great Earth Mother to give birth to a universe in
her
image.

The Great Earth Mother and the Hero of Varay are pleased to announce the birth of their …

Take one from column A and one from column B.

Cheat if you have to
.

I concentrated on Joy and our shared memories. She was my anchor. I could see her, touch her, get inside her head the way I had gotten inside the Great Earth Mother’s womb.
Womb?
Do people still use that word? It did pop into my mind. Joy. I saw her there with me, beautiful, pregnant, warm, wonderful. In a very real way, she was the center of
my
universe—and I was delighted and relieved to have her there.

I saw Aaron and Parthet chanting their magics, moving in a tight circle around Joy and me, part of the helical structure that held me. Aaron and Parthet, a strange pair. Uncle Parthet, Uncle Parker: he was a half-baked wizard if ever there was one, but he came through when he could. Maybe if he could see better, remember better. And Aaron now: there was a constant strength emanating from him, and not just as a result of his magics. He was an enigma with less past than he needed. The streak of elvish white down the side of his face seemed appropriate,
necessary
. Maybe he would disagree. I wasn’t sure.

Baron Kardeen and Lesh were two more anchors in my hurricane, orbiting not far beyond Parthet and Aaron. Kardeen and Lesh were solid men who did their duty and still had room for friendship.

My mother was there in the group as well, but I couldn’t put much thought to her yet. There were still the barriers of memory, of resentment for the years of deception.

Annick was there too, farther out in the electron web around me, half elf herself, granddaughter of the Elflord of Xayber, burning with hatred for all that came from Fairy. That was a waste, draining her of so much that she could be.

Beyond the inner circle, a growing sea of faces and names, people I knew in Varay and beyond, on the other side of nothingness, back in the world that was. Names and faces, little bits of poorly remembered data clouded around me. Strangers stood and swam around and around, outward and outward in concentric spheres around the core.

Castle Basil, the center of Varay. Basil Rock, supposedly the hub of the universe.

The Congregation of Heroes and the genealogical tree of kings.

And dragons. “If we have to have dragons, at least give us
useful
dragons, like on Pern.”

Fact and fancy. Science and magic. Myth and history. Tomorrow and yesterday. Now and then.

Oh say can you see…?

A new world, a new universe.

How about a minor correction to physics? Let’s make nuclear explosions impossible, without subtracting any other use of the equations. Suns are possible. Bombs are out. It violates natural law? Hell, we’re writing a new law, adding an exception, a footnote that invalidates nuclear weaponry without deleting any of the necessary uses of nuclear energy. E=mc
²
, except in bombs.

Little green men and bug-eyed monsters in the merry month of May. Flying saucers and starships that travel instantly between the stars. People, people everywhere … and assorted other beings. Hell, let’s even make room for Alf.

Make Room, Make Room
.