Eternal Life Inc. (26 page)

40

Love Opens the Door

Harry sank through cool water while plasma fire boiled off the surface above. He switched off the burnt agony of his charred body, shut down his breathing, and slowed his heart rate as he sank through dark depths, trailing pink swirls of blood. His back struck something solid, and he bounced gently as clouds of bottom sludge billowed up around him. Slowly, his body settled back into the soft muck of the sea bottom. Stale air bubbled from his lips as his burnt lungs slowly collapsed.

He laid motionless, all his attention turned inward, taking stock and doing damage control. He sent out feelers of consciousness, examining the deep gash in his thigh that just missed a femoral artery, the crack in the back of his skull that may or may not have sent bone splinters into his brain, and the multiple degree flash burns covering the front of his body.

He felt his blood pressure dropping precipitously. His body, poisoned by its own emergency chemical response to massive physical trauma, was going into toxic shock. Suddenly, he was fighting for his life, using everything he had learned in the last six months of dying. He tried to flush toxins from his blood, close his wounds, jack up his immune response and maintain his pain blocks all at the same time.

It wasn’t enough. He felt his hold on consciousness slipping as toxic overload began shutting down vital systems. It was like watching the lights of a city going out one block at a time. He had only one chance left. He must put his body into a state of suspended animation and transfer his awareness to his ka. It was as close to death as he could get and still retain a vital spark. Hopefully, it would buy him the time he needed for his ka to begin the healing process.

Time was running out, but still he hesitated. He knew from experience that in a state of suspended animation, with his body resting just this side of death, his ka was going to leave his body with only a thin thread of consciousness tying them together. If that thread broke, his body would die and his ka would be pulled down the resurrection trail and into the jaws of any black wolves lurking there.

Suddenly, there was no more time. His body went into convulsions, shaking like a baby’s rattle. Darkness closed in as consciousness spiraled down into an insensate black hole.

No more time.

With a practiced mental shrug, Harry dropped into suspended animation and jumped out of the decaying orbit of his body into the blazing light of his ka. Every time he returned, it felt like coming home, as if this glowing spirit of seed consciousness was his real self, eternal and unchanging while his body was nothing but a transient meat locker imprisoning glory.

He knew, of course, that as soon as his awareness returned to his body, the reverse would be true. His ka would become nothing but a ghostlike other, while his body became who he was and all he was. It was tempting to think it was all relative, a matter of perspective, but Harry knew better. He’d seen his old bodies die, one after the other, while his ka went on unchanged, putting on each new body like a new suit of clothes. The ka was the unique spark that animated flesh, the seed containing his wholeness. It was the soul, the spirit, and the pneuma of previous ages, the myth become reality, religious truth captured by the spin-generators at Eternal Life.

He rested for a moment in the light of his ka. It still retained his human form even though it floated six feet above his body, like a balloon on a string. The string was a silvery coil of light made of the same conscious light stuff as his ka, but as it descended to his body the string took on the pulsing silver solidity of fleshy awareness and penetrated his navel like a
luminous, silver umbilical. This umbilical of awareness was his lifeline. It gave his ka its human form and as long as they were connected, his body could not die and his ka could not go down the resurrection trail or into the white light of death.

Harry looked down that bright umbilical to where his body lay just barely ticking over, half buried in the dark sea bottom. He could feel the burns, wounds, and toxic shock telegraphing up the umbilical like messages from a distant land. He could see how they left their dark imprint on the bright schematics that gave his ka its human form.

These schematics were drawn with the same conscious light stuff as the umbilical. They were glowing silver lines of concentrated information consciousness, running up and down, around and through his ka in a tangled maze that resembled a three-dimensional blueprint for some enormously complex piece of machine circuitry in human form.

During the last six months, he had painstakingly tried to capture and reconstruct these lines from the fleeting glimpses he caught between the moment of death and the pull of the resurrection trail. Now, with his body balanced precariously between life and death, these lines burned with the constancy of a disaster warning.

In many places, though, they were smudged and had lost their bright glow. A couple of “junction boxes” that should have blazed with concentrated energy from intersecting lines of power gave off only a low wattage flicker. Harry knew from the final moments of numerous deaths that this represented major injury or trauma to the physical body. He also knew that the effect went both ways. In the last few months, he had begun to learn how to influence and even heal the physical body by changing the energy flow through the bright schematics of his ka.

Now, he began to try to balance that energy flow and bring down the toxic shock that was taking such a deadly toll.
Gradually, the low wattage flicker in the “junction boxes” strengthened to a weak, steady glow. As the effects of toxic shock receded, he needed to shunt more energy to the smudged damaged areas to hasten the healing of his wounds and regenerate flash burned skin and lung tissue. The only problem was he had no energy to spare and the only source he could draw on was locked in the unlimited potential of Samuel Kade’s spirit realm or Jericho’s quantum field. The name didn’t matter. It was the same non-space.

Getting to it could be dangerous though. The door that he had slammed so convincingly in the face of the black wolves back at Eternal Life was the same door he now had to open to access the healing potential of the spirit realm.

As soon as he tried to draw on the energy potential out there, the force of the collapsing probability waves would blow that door wide open and expose him to any black wolves roaming nearby. He really had no choice, though. If he didn’t open it, he was as good as dead anyway.

When he had told Chueh he didn’t care if he died for real, he had thought he meant it but now he wasn’t so sure. Finding what lies beyond the white light of death had somehow lost its appeal. He hadn’t realized until now that things had changed, that something had intervened…or rather, someone. He could clearly see her shiny black hair; framing jade green eyes, the high cheekbones, the pale cream of her skin, the air of cool, self-reliant competence…Diana. The thought of dying now and never seeing her again was unbearable. He had only just met her, and already she had become his reason to live. How could that be? When had it happened?

Love at first sight? If so, was he so blind, so out of touch with the deepest levels of his own feelings that it took the threat of death to make him realize what his true feelings were? Or was it that he had finally exorcised Susan’s ghost and now there was room for someone else in his heart? The reasons didn’t matter.
The simple reality of love was enough. He had to stay alive, he had to get back to her, and the only way to do that was to open the door to all the unpatterned probability energy of the spirit realm.

Still, he hesitated. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He’d never tried anything of this magnitude before. In the last six months he’d learned to move his awareness from his living body to his ka and map some of its complex circuitry, but he was only just beginning to learn to manipulate the forces locked in the spirit realm/quantum field. Now, he was going to open the door and let those quantum winds blow through his ka and hope that he could control them somehow. Just thinking about it made him feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice.

No more excuses, he told himself, and cracked open the door. Then, he reached out with his mind and touched a standing wave of probability with a pinprick of desire like Samuel Kade had once shown him, although he’d never tried it himself.

The wave exploded like a balloon, and fierce winds of probability blew the door to his ka wide open. They swirled into a howling tornado vortex that was sucked down into his ka like water down a drain. His ka lit up like a cosmic pinball machine, its schematics glowing with hot-wired incandescence. The dark smudges vanished and the junction boxes went nova.

Harry felt the energy howling through his ka and rushing down the bright umbilical to his body where it kick-started a miraculous regeneration. He felt as if he was standing at an old-time gas pump with the nozzle snugged into the tank of his car, filling it with high test, and as so often happened when you opened a door to the spirit realm, his thoughts took on a ghostly reality.

Suddenly, he was standing in front of a ramshackle desert gas station out of an early twentieth century movie. He was dressed in dirty coveralls with a grease-stained rag hanging out of his back pocket and was holding down the handle of a gasoline
nozzle. He could smell the sharp gasoline tang and hear the “ding” of the pump counting out the gallons splashing into a vintage Ford Mustang.

He grinned with nostalgic pleasure until he heard the distant howl of wolves. The grin disappeared along with the gas station and the Mustang. Once again, he was left standing alone in an open doorway with the winds of probability blowing all around him.

41

Riding the Probability Plains of the Quantum Field

As long as the umbilical connection to his living body remained intact, Harry knew he could continue to draw on the infinite potential of the spirit realm/quantum field. He could even move across it at will. It wasn’t anything like the featureless gray fog of death, where all the probability waves that made up his life had collapsed into one final reality that pulled him down either into the white light of the Goddess or into the spin-generators at Eternal Life.

Instead, with his umbilical intact, he could let the infinite probability potential of this non-space take whatever form his intention gave it. It was usually Samuel Kade’s spirit realm with its Shining Sea of the Gods or astral planes, but this time Harry’s intention gave a playful twist to both Jericho’s idea of a quantum field and Kade’s astral planes.

This time, Harry stood in the open door of his ka and stared out at a vast plain of standing probability waves composed of what looked like smoked panes of etched glass or maybe old, photographic plate negatives, piled one on top of another into low hills that rolled away to infinity. Contained within these rolling hills of probability were all possible and impossible worlds, timelines, and dimensions of probability.

His unconscious mind had played a word trick with his intentions, converting the astral “planes” of the spirit realm into the probability “plains” of the quantum field. Harry knew that his probability plains were nothing but a useful tool, a construct of his imagination, to make comprehensible that non-space of consciousness that was the basis of the multi-verse. In that sense, the probability plains were no more real than his vision of the
ramshackle, desert gas station. They were both attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible, interface with infinity, and encompass it within the boundaries of the human mind.

Even though he had been riding collapsing probability waves down the resurrection trial for five years, it was only recently, with Samuel Kade’s help, that he’d opened the door to this non-space and taken a few, stumbling baby steps into it. Now, he stood on the threshold and listened to the howl of the Anubis wolves that had leapt out of probability to threaten his world.

He had heard them howling out there before, but always faint and far away. Back then, he hadn’t known what they were, but they still raised hackles of fear. They were closer now. It sounded as if they were passing by without being aware of him. He wondered what they were doing, where they came from, and where they were going. He realized he had a unique chance. The wolves didn’t know he was here. He could follow them, spy on them; who knows what he might learn. It was a chance that might never come again.

He looked down his umbilical to his body resting on the seabed. Its condition wasn’t great but it was stabilizing fast. He should be able to turn his attention away for a little while without too much danger.

No sooner had he made the decision than his ka rushed through the open door. He watched his body rapidly receding behind him as the silver strand of his umbilical unreeled, stretching across the rolling hills of the probability plain. That thread was all that kept his body alive. If it broke, his body would die for real, and his ka would ride a collapsing wave of probability down into the white light of death…if the Anubis wolves didn’t catch him first.

His body disappeared into the distance as he rushed across the mounds of stacked probability, like piles of old photographic plates, each etched with half-formed worlds of mountain, forests, and seas that glimmered with ghostly possibility.

For a second, he imagined that he was riding a wild stallion across this vast plain of rolling smoked glass hills. No sooner did the thought form than it began to take on a ghostly reality, and he found himself riding a spectral gray stallion, his own ghost body, no more real than his steeds. “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, he thought, and his thoughts conjured up a cowboy suit, a pair of six guns and a black, weather-beaten Stetson.

He knew that it was just his mind playing tricks with probability and that he had to be very careful. He had never been this far out before and was playing with forces that could easily get out of control. He thought of the sorcerer’s apprentice again and quickly quashed it.

Then, he heard the howl of the wolf pack far off to his right. His steed reared up, its forelegs pawing the sky, steam snorting from its nostrils as it tested the air. Its hooves crashed down through plate glass probability as it veered toward the sound, galloping flat out across a dry streambed of smoked glass that swam with wraithlike sea monsters.

He closed in on the sound of the pack. Their barking howls grew more distinct. As he drew nearer, it sounded more and more like some kind of growling, guttural, yipping language.

His steed climbed a ghostly ridge, slipping and sliding through layers of shifting gray probability like thick ground fog. Harry could hear the wolves clearly now. He could almost feel them, like dense, black balls of malevolence, condensing out of the fog.

He reached the top of the ridge and broke out of the fog. He spotted five wolves far below, loping out across a flat, desert landscape. Three of them carried limp, gray, rag-like shapes clenched between their jaws. The rags fluttered weakly. Harry heard a faint wail of despair and terror and realized that these were the kas of the recently dead. The wolves had probably snapped them off the resurrection trail from the battle in the Sinks.

A few seconds later, he saw one of the wolves bite down hard on the ka it was carrying. Then it tilted its head back, opened its mouth and gulped it down without even breaking stride.

They eat kas, just like that Susan thing tried to eat mine, Harry thought in numb horror as he followed the pack out onto the desert through a shifting mirage of rattle snakes and dust demons, through spectral sagebrush and tumbleweed. At last, he rode out of smoked glass probability onto the solid alkali flats of a dry lake bed where probability had collapsed and reality condensed around two ancient black, basalt pillars, standing beneath a burnt blue sky.

Harry looked around uncertainly. The alkali flats seemed to go on forever in every direction. There was no sign of the wolf pack or of the shifting gray worlds of probability. For as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but alkali flats and these two pillars. They stood about fifteen feet apart and were at least twice the height of a man. The basalt was polished to a deep mirror-like sheen and perfectly carved into the shape of a man with the stylized head of a jackal. Its red ruby eyes gleamed malevolently down at him.

Harry recognized them instantly. He’d seen pictures of Anubis, the jackal-headed guardian of the underworld and Egyptian god of the dead, in Jake Lloyd’s book. When Jericho first called the wolf-headed invaders, the Anubis, Harry just assumed it was a convenient metaphor. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Were the ancient gods rising again? Could these pillars be guarding the entrance to the underworld, the home world of the black wolves of Anubis? Were these the Anubis gates of Jake Lloyd’s book? Had he once stood on these alkaline flats and stared up at these two statues?

Harry felt a shiver of premonition. He turned and looked back. Nothing had changed. He could see the faint shimmer of silver thread that bound him to his body extending back over the flats and disappearing into thin air about thirty feet away.

Everything out here had a bright hard-edged solidity, everything except for that thread and Harry and his steed. They were as insubstantial as ghosts. He raised an arm and looked right through it, like looking through a faint mist. He stepped down off his mount and walked towards the pillars. Behind him the stallion dissolved into a cloud of flickering motes of light. They swarmed around Harry like moths around a flame and then swirled down into his body and disappeared.

As he approached the two stone pillars, they began to change, running and flowing like melting wax. Then, between one step and the next, they snapped into two roughhewn granite posts, moss covered, cracked, and weathered. They stood less than five feet high, leaning towards each other with an old, rusty, wrought iron gate between. The gate leaned open on one hinge. Beyond it Harry could see an ancient, overgrown graveyard with cracked, broken headstones sinking into the rank undergrowth. The sky was a lowering gray drizzle.

Harry smiled grimly. It seemed that even though probability had collapsed into some form of reality, he was still in the spirit realm where what you expect is what you get. This was supposed to be a gateway to the land of the dead and reality conformed to his unconscious idea by serving up a graveyard. The original pillars were probably only a reality residue of how the Anubis wolves saw the entrance to their world.

He studied the scene and hesitated. There was no telling what lay beyond those gates. “You’ll never get another chance like this,” he told himself. “You mean a chance to commit suicide?” he answered. “Just a quick peek and then jump back again,” he told himself. “Just make sure you don’t get your umbilical caught in the door. Okay let’s do it!”

He stepped through the gate. He felt a moment of disorienting vertigo as his umbilical lifeline gave a sharp, painful tug. The cemetery vanished, and he stood in some kind of prehistoric jungle instead. The air was hot and humid, with a steaming mist
sifting through the thick undergrowth. The place was a riot of all the wrong colors. The sun was an arc welder blue, white dwarf, and much too close, while the sky was tinted a garish Halloween orange. The vegetation ranged in color from bruised blacks and blues, through corpse greens, to livid violets.

He realized he was standing in the dark entrance to a large stone structure. He turned and looked up. The entrance formed a truncated triangle at least three hundred feet high, framed by huge basalt plinths. He had to step out to get a full view of the building. It rose out of the rampant jungle growth, tier by stone tier, a gigantic black pyramid, like some fabled lost temple from a B-movie adventure.

A narrow dirt track led away from the pyramid, and Harry started to follow it. Lavender-colored fog steamed up from the jungle floor and curled around his legs. The air tasted of copper and cyanide. Suddenly, someone screamed nearby. It was a very human scream, followed by a loud barking shout that wasn’t human at all.

Harry heard someone running towards him, crashing wildly through the thick jungle growth. A moment later, a man, his eyes bulging with blind terror, his naked body crisscrossed with bleeding welts burst out of the jungle and ran straight into him. Instinctively, Harry stepped back and raised his hands to take the hit, but the man just ran right through him as if he didn’t exist, which in a sense, he probably didn’t.

Once again, Harry felt that sharp disorienting tug on his lifeline and a moment later a transformed Anubis wolf charged out of the undergrowth. It was over seven feet tall with the body of a man and the head of a jackal, like the two pillars on the alkali flats. Its body was as black and shiny as polished basalt. The fur around its head stood out in a thick ruff as stiff as porcupine quills. It wore a bright red harness that consisted of two tank-top like straps that went over its shoulders and merged into one wide strip that went down between its legs and up its back. A wide
black belt was cinched around its waist with some kind of weapon hanging from it in a long black scabbard tied down on its thigh.

Harry wondered momentarily if this was one of the Anubis wolves he had been trailing that had now taken on its jackal form. If so, then maybe that poor, frightened human was one of the kas, the rags of dead-soul stuff, they had been carrying back with them, but how did this poor human get a solid body while Harry remained a ghost? Could it be because Harry’s body was still alive in another dimension with a lifeline back to it?

He had no time for answers, no time to even step aside before the jackal-headed Anubis crashed right through him. Unlike the human though, the Anubis staggered momentarily and shook its shaggy head in confusion. Then it sighted the fleeing human and whipped out its weapon in a lightning fast, gunfighter draw. The “gun” resembled a spun glass ankh, one of those ancient Egyptian crosses that had a round handle instead of the bar above the cross piece. The Anubis wolf held it by the handle and fired without even sighting.

A cone of blue-white light shot from the end of the ankh and struck the fleeing man high in the back. He screamed in agony and froze in mid-step as the energy beam peeled the skin from his back in a cloud of sparkling molecules that were sucked up the beam and into the ankh.

Like a human vacuum cleaner, Harry thought in horror, as he watched the beam peel the body from the bone in seconds. Then the skeleton crumbled into sparkles of dust that were also instantly vacuumed away. The beam cut off, leaving only a faint wisp of smoke and a burnt circle of vegetation where the man had stood. There was no sign of his ka.

The Anubis slowly turned and stared at the spot where Harry stood. It squinted and tilted its head from side to side as if trying to find just the right angle to see what was hiding there. Harry decided it was time to leave. He turned and started to run down
the dirt tail. He imagined Anubis all around him, flitting wraithlike through the lavender fog that hissed and sizzled with the bright blue sutures of their beam weapons.

Just then, he felt another rush of vertigo and a sudden tug on his umbilical, this time more powerful and painful than before. The Anubis howled triumphantly and lifted its weapon just as Harry was snatched backwards with a powerful yank from his umbilical. He felt as if he was on the end of a recoiling bungee cord that had been stretched to its elastic limit. The world of the Anubis wolves vanished in the blink of an eye.

Harry felt the instant his umbilical snapped. One moment, he was being pulled back to his body; the next, he was like a balloon with its string cut, tumbling toward the white light of death, the resurrection trail, and the wolves that were probably waiting to tear his ka apart.

He had a momentary vision of Diana’s face crushed with sorrow and defeat, and he screamed in denial.