Eternal Life Inc. (31 page)

A group of laughing mermaids suddenly broke the surface of the lagoon. They were towing nets filled with squirming fish. The children, playing nearby, yelled with delight and swam over to help pull the nets. As they swam for shore, the flick of their tailfins left a rainbow haze of droplets in their wake and the sound of their laughter and singing echoed through the vast ruins of the stadium. Harry watched them swim to a concrete ramp that led up into the bleachers.

Two men dressed much like Harry were waiting to take hold of the net and drag it up on land. There was a great deal of shouting and laughter and one of the young mermaids rose out of the water balanced on her tail fin and shook her ample breasts at the men to whoops of delight and playful teasing.

Harry smiled at this bright ray of normality in the midst of the darkness he felt gathering around him. He looked up at the bleachers and noticed other men working in the terraced fields while others manned gun emplacements high up on the ragged rim of the stadium. Holding back the darkness, he thought.

At last he asked, “What happened to Susan? Who beat her up?” He had a sick, sinking feeling because he already knew.

“The wolves, of course; they wanted you pretty badly and when you came back crazy like you did…” Jericho shook his head. “…Well, we all thought they had you. Even the wolves weren’t sure what happened. We were all waiting for you to wake up and when you didn’t after the first day, things got pretty tense.”

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Harry said in voice so matter-of-fact and without emotion that Jericho looked at him and hesitated. For a second, he felt as if he was standing on an open beach, the air crystalline, perfectly still, the world holding its breath, waiting for the hurricane that was surely coming. He wondered if Harry was aware of the scars that covered his body, like fine hairline cracks in old porcelain. Jericho didn’t think so, not yet. And when he did, would he know what they meant? He
felt a cold shiver of premonition, like the first, faint breeze of that approaching storm.

He shook it off with a resigned shrug. Isn’t this what he’d been working towards all along? There would be no turning back now even if he wanted to. Instead, he said, “When you didn’t wake up after twenty-four hours, Roger made sure that you were as secure as possible and then left you with me. He’d been under a lot of pressure the last few days and knew it was only going to get worse, no matter which way you woke up. He needed to get away from it all for a few hours and made the mistake of going home.

“The wolves were waiting for him with Susan. They were there to teach him a lesson. The wolf that possessed Susan released its grip and they brought her back to full consciousness. Then they tortured her in front of Roger. Afterwards, they told him what they wanted and that this was just a little sample of what would happen if he didn’t do it.”

“What did they want?” Harry asked.

Jericho eyed him, trying to gauge his mood and gave up. “They wanted you of course,” he said. “For some reason, they weren’t convinced they’d taken possession. If you woke up and weren’t possessed, they wanted another crack at you. This time they’d make sure and use black ice if they had to.

“For the first time, Roger felt a glimmer of hope that you might have survived intact, and he began making plans. First, he had to convince the wolves that if you came back intact and they tried to give you black ice, it would be impossible to keep the lid on what was happening at Eternal Life.

“The reporters were already asking questions, he told them. You were usually out of rebirthing within twelve hours, and it was already way over that. If you didn’t show up soon, they would begin taking a closer look at all those stories of demonic possession. It wouldn’t take much to blow the lid right off. Then, no amount of damage control would help.

“You were all they had, all they ever had, to keep control of the situation. People trusted you. As long as you kept coming back whole and sane and assuring everyone that everything was okay, people were willing to accept it. But if you didn’t come back soon or if you came back wolf-possessed crazy, Eternal Life and any plans the wolves had would be blown to hell.

“The wolves made a big show of accepting this, even setting conditions for what they wanted in exchange for not making a run at you if you came back whole.”

“All that about signing a new contract or going on promotion tours,” Harry said remembering Roger’s halfhearted attempts to keep him tied to Eternal life.”

“Nothing but misdirection,” Jericho said. “They even made Roger suspect they’d slipped black ice into the drinking water on your bedside table.”

“Son of a bitch!” Harry said, remembering Roger dropping his cigarette butt in the water so he wouldn’t drink it.

Jericho nodded. “Nothing but misdirection. They already had other plans for you.”

“Susan,” Harry said.

Jericho nodded.

“So they decided to wait and get me someplace alone, where no one could see or interfere, and they used Susan to get me there,” Harry said.

“They always have one of your clones ready at Eternal Life,” Jericho said. “All they had to do was hook it up to the spin-generator.”

Harry shook his head. “I think they had other plans for me,” he said and told Jericho about the wolf dressed in Susan’s body who tried to seduce him and then drive its obscene tongue up into his brain and suck out his mind and eat his ka.

“It was the ultimate solution to their King of the Dead problem,” Harry said. “There would be no more messy uncertainties of resurrection because there would be nothing left to
resurrect. It was neat, clean, and permanent, with no questions asked because everyone knew I was retired and would assume I took a long vacation somewhere and didn’t want to be disturbed.

“They let me walk out of Eternal Life and didn’t try to stop me because they were keeping an eye on me and knew I was heading for that side door and told Susan just where to wait.” Harry closed his eyes and once again saw her battered face as she looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “I saw what they did to her, what they wanted me to see,” he said without opening his eyes. “She told me Roger did it. I believed her. I had the feeling something was wrong, but I still believed her enough to go down into the Sinks.”

He opened his eyes and looked up at Jericho. “Jesus, Doc, they were good. They knew all the right buttons to push, the guilt, the anger, the distrust of Roger, even the self-serving need to protect her against him; they got it all just right. Even that thing down in the Sinks dressed in Susan’s body must have had complete access to her personality matrix and all her memories.”

“Now you know the kind of pressure they were putting on Roger,” Jericho said.

Harry looked away, out over the lagoon. “What happened to the real Susan?” he asked in that quiet, uninflected voice that was like the stillness before a storm.

Jericho eyed him warily. “Roger said they took her with them back to the Nevada Quarantine.”

Harry sank back on the recliner and stared up at the sunlight flickering through the palm leaves overhead. He remembered Roger standing in the recovery room, cajoling, apologizing, threatening; doing everything he could to get him to sign another contract. Then finally, when he knew it was all in vain, turning to the two-way mirror and flicking his cigarette at it with the bravado of a man facing a firing squad and giving it the finger. Now that he knew who or what was probably sitting behind that mirror and what was at stake, he could better understand
the hopeless courage and desperate defiance behind that gesture.

“I should have stayed at Chueh’s and listened to him,” he said half to himself. “If I hadn’t been so pigheaded…” He stopped. Beating himself up wasn’t going to change anything. “Where’s Roger now?” he asked.

“He and Diana left for the Nevada Quarantine four days ago,” Doc said.

47

The King of the Dead

“Four days! How long have I been here?” Harry asked.

“The mermen brought you in two days ago.”

“And Diana left for Las Vegas four days ago?” Harry shook his head in disbelief. “Is everybody crazy? You told me the wolves moved the whole Nevada Quarantine out of our universe. How does she expect to get in? Even if she does, it’s a suicide mission!”

He sat up and stared angrily at Jericho. “How could you let her go? You knew what she was getting into!” he said, turning his remorse and despair into an angry denunciation of the old man for letting her go and of himself for not staying to help her.

“There was no way I could stop her,” Jericho said. “She’s a Jaganmatri Valkyrie, Harry. They can usually take care of themselves. She waited for you though, despite everything. Even after the monitor on your ka flat-lined that night, she waited. But by morning, when there was no word, she and Roger figured there was no reason to wait any longer.”

“But didn’t Chueh tell you what happened?” Harry asked. “His people found me alive that night.”

“Chueh was having his own problems,” Doc pointed out. “Communications weren’t that great. All hell was breaking out down in the Sinks. When he went in to get you out, the Seraphim and the wolves hit him hard.”

Doc reached into a pocket and pulled out some kind of medallion on a silver chain. “His intelligence agents have been warning him for months about a new messiah uniting the Seraphim.” He handed the medallion to Harry. It was the Seraphim double-bladed cross like the one he had seen down in the Sinks seven years ago. The only difference was the gun sight
circle was replaced by a triangle with a growling wolf’s head nailed to the center. Harry felt his hackles rise and a low, animal growl start deep in his throat as he stared at the medallion that combined the two worst nightmares of his life.

“Are you all right?” Doc asked.

“Yeah, copacetic,” Harry said with a crooked, unconvincing grin. He nodded at the medallion. “I guess we know who their new messiah is.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t only New Hollywood types that got to try black ice,” Doc said. “The Norma-genes and their Anubis wolf allies have been busy down in the Sinks. They made sure the Seraphim leadership got the first taste of paradise. After the wolves got control of the leadership, they spread the good news.

“They didn’t need to take possession of the Seraphim rank and file. It was enough just to give them a taste of what the wolf temples offer, a night or two of paradise, running with their new god, raping, killing, fulfilling every bestial desire as the biggest meanest predators on the planet. After that there was no stopping them. The Slavers, the renegade Tongs, and all the rest of the sink rats got a taste too. Now, they’re all true believers united under the wolf’s head banner.

“Paradise was within reach and anyone who dies as a martyr to the new messiah gets their ka gathered up by the Anubis wolves and taken to their world to live forever, fulfilling every animal desire. They’re told that they will be rulers of paradise with the kas of their slain enemies to serve them as slaves for all eternity.”

“It sounds like they borrowed a page or two from the old Koran,” Harry said.

“It’s an even more effective witch’s brew today than it was a thousand years ago,” Jericho said. “The martyrs today have already had a taste of paradise to wet their appetites. It’s turned a squabbling configuration of Seraphim, Slavers and Tong thugs into a fanatical army of martyrs.

“Unfortunately, Chueh’s intelligence hadn’t prepared him for anything of this magnitude, especially when the wolves showed up in their crystal warships and began turning his army to dust and shutting down the grav-units on his battlewagons. He lost so many soldiers that first night that he was forced to call in all his markers from the other Tong Godfathers.

“It didn’t take much to convince them, though. The Tongs have had an uneasy truce with the Sinks for years. The deal was the Sinks keep out of New Hollywood and the Tongs keep out of the Sinks. Black ice has been straining that truce for months. Once the other Tong Godfathers realized what was really going on and what it would do to business, they put all their forces at Chueh’s disposal. Nobody wanted religious fanatics running amok with something like black ice and the Anubis wolves pulling the strings. Even with the support of all the Tongs, Chueh had a full blown war on his hands, and it was getting nasty.

“The Seraphim holy warriors proved all but unstoppable. They came in waves and fought like berserkers and were unafraid of death because they had their living gods fighting beside them. These seven foot tall, black, wolf-headed deities rode in on crystal warships, unlike anything we’d ever seen, and they carried weapons that could shut down grav-units and bring down a fleet of battle-junks in seconds. On top of that, they’ve got blue death rays that strip a man to the bone in seconds. You can’t hide from them; they penetrate solid walls and spider-spin armor. In less than twenty-four hours, Chueh and the Tongs lost over seventy percent of their troops and half their fleet to the Seraphim.”

Harry had an instantaneous memory flashback. “I think I once saw a weapon like that strip a man to the bone,” he said in surprise. “It was out on the astral plane.”

“On the astral plane?” Jericho asked uncertainly.

“No, not exactly out on that astral plane,” Harry shook his
head as if to shake the memory free. “I think I followed the wolves back to their home world, and I…”

“You what!” Jericho said. Then he raised his hand. “Stop, just a minute and go back and tell me exactly what happened,” he said with barely repressed excitement.

Harry eyed him curiously. “What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that no one knows where the Anubis wolves come from,” Jericho said. “It’s their most closely guarded secret. It’s why Isis risked her life to steal a Pathfinder. It’s…Just tell me what you saw,” he said impatiently.

Harry felt like a poker player who had just been dealt four aces. “And Diana has the Pathfinder now?” Harry said.

“Yeah, so what?” Jericho said irritably.

“Is she going to use it to try to go there?”

“Go where?”

“The Anubis home world, of course.”

Jericho looked at him in momentary confusion and shook his head. “No, why would she go there?”

“So where is she going with it?”

“I told you, Las Vegas to try to rescue her sister.”

“And she needs the Pathfinder to get her there, is that it?” Harry asked.

“Ah!” Jericho nodded as he suddenly realized what the game was all about and nodded reluctant acceptance. “Yes, she’s going to use the Pathfinder to try to get to Las Vegas,” he admitted.

“And?” Harry prompted.

“And to do that she has to get to a place that her father found years ago,” Jericho said reluctantly. “A kind of interface with all possible dimensions and worlds of the quantum field.”

“Like one of those power points that shamans talk about, where the wall between worlds is thinned out?” Harry suggested.

“Exactly,” Jericho said and Harry heard the relief in his voice and knew he was lying, but before he could do anything about it, his mind began opening up like an origami Pandora’s box,
releasing a host of repressed memories. They rushed up and swarmed around him, a multitude of accusing ghosts that would no longer be denied. An instant later, he came face to face with the King of the Dead. “No-o-o-o!” he screamed and buried his face in his hands. “What have I done!”

Jericho reached out instinctively. “What is it, Harry?” he asked and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” Harry screamed. “Keep away!” His voice rose to a hurricane roar. It filled the stadium and shook the heavens. Birds rose from the surrounding trees, flapping and screeching in fear, and the distant laughing voices of the mermaids and their children fell into cowering silence.

Jericho stumbled back and fell into his chair. The storm he was expecting had finally come, and he was terrified at what it brought with it. No human voice could have made such a sound. It was like the cry of a crucified god.

Harry raised his head, his face a mask of ecstasy and despair. He seemed to look right through the old man, out past the distant walls of the stadium, and into a hidden place of terrible wonders; and his eyes burned with the cold, blue fire of that place. “So much power, so many chances to fail,” he muttered to himself. “So many worlds to die.”

All the hairline scars that covered his body began to glow like the coils on a toaster. His face became an eerie mask of glowing dendritic scars as if his blood was on fire. The fire went from cherry red to the intense blue-white of an exploding star. Harry opened his mouth to scream again and all the scars in his body split open in a blinding burst of energy.

Jericho squeezed his eyes shut and turned away until the flashbulb afterimages burned into his retinas disappeared. When he turned back to look, all the hairline scars had closed into a circuitry of softly glowing filaments, and Harry was surrounded by a shimmering blue-white aura. Like the halos around saints in ancient icons, Jericho thought. “Harry, can you hear me?” he
asked, not daring to touch him again, not even daring to move. “Are you all right?” he asked fearfully.

Slowly, Harry turned. His eyes still burned with that cold blue fire. Instinctively, Jericho tried to look away, but it was too late. His eyes snagged on that fey light and instantly it blew his doors of perception wide open and unhinged his mind. He looked into an infinity of possible and impossible universes; of myriad worlds being born and dying, of space-time eternally folding in on itself through countless dimensions and, overlaying it all, were the branching lines of infinite probability that were also the branching lines of his own nervous system. “Too much! Too much!” he moaned as his old Darwinian monkey mind began chittering and screeching with terror, and all he wanted to do was curl up in a ball and bury his face in his crotch.

After an eternity that was no time at all, the vision passed, leaving Jericho dazed and shaken. He looked around the ruined stadium, across the lagoon and up at the sky, trying to fit the broken pieces of reality together again, to make the world make sense again. He looked everywhere except at Harry.

“Have you ever thought about how terrible it is to be a god?” Harry asked, and the pain and despair in his voice touched Jericho’s guilty heart and drew his gaze back. The aura of power that surrounded Harry had disappeared, the hairline scars no longer glowed, and only a faint residue of fey light still flickered in his eyes, but he looked like he had aged fifty years.

Jericho avoided those eyes with guilty self-reproach. What’s done is done, he thought, it can’t be undone. He looked up past Harry to the collapsed, overgrown stadium bleachers and the blue sky filled with fat, white cumulus clouds like cotton candy.

“The mermen, who brought you in, treated you like some kind of holy, religious relic,” he said at last. “They claimed you worked miracles. They swore that when the Seraphim ambushed them down in the Sinks and S-s-sarge was killed, you suddenly woke from the dead and stood on the water in a halo of light and
called all the mermen to you. The Seraphim were shooting from everywhere and not a bullet, particle beam, or laser ray touched you or the mermen gathered around you.”

Harry cocked his head and listened intently.

“They say you raised your arm and pointed at the Seraphim,” Jericho said, “and your whole body cracked open and an expanding bubble of light poured out of the cracks and behind the light came an army of gods and demons, pushing the bubble before them and wherever they went, the earth and sea, the ruins of the city, the ships and the Seraphim were all wiped away as if they had never been.

“When there were no more Seraphim left, you called your army of gods and demons back into you, and you and your mermen were left on the floor of the seabed, in the center of a vast empty crater, surrounded by a bubble of light that sliced through the surrounding ruins and held back the waters. Then, you dropped your arm and the bubble collapsed and the sea rushed back into the crater. Later, the mermen found you floating as if dead on the water.”

Jericho paused and looked at Harry. He sat perfectly still, his head cocked, his eyes hooded as if he was listening to something only he could hear.

Jericho shivered. “They took your body with them,” he went on doggedly. “And the next day they were attacked again, this time by the crystal gunships and a battle cruisers of the Anubis wolves, and the same thing happened. You came back to life and not a ship or wolf survived.

“I’ve seen the aerial reconnaissance of both areas,” Jericho said. “It looks like ground-zero, a perfect circle of destruction. Everything within a two hundred-yard radius has been scoured away and a six hundred foot deep water-filled crater is all that’s left. There’s no sign of the buildings, bodies, or ships that were there. It’s as if they’ve all been erased.”

He risked another glance at Harry. Except for the faint flicker
of weirding light in his eyes, he could have been carved out of stone. “It’s hard to imagine what could have done that, son,” Jericho said gently, nudging Harry towards the truth.

Harry said nothing.

“The mermen say you were burned to death and buried in the bottom of the sea when they first found you. That you came to life, that they saw new skin growing out beneath third degree charred blisters. They say later the blisters sloughed off like an old snakeskin and even your hair grew back overnight.”

Harry reached up and touched his face. It felt like it had always felt. He looked closely at the back of his hands. He could just make out a pattern of branching scar-like lines, so fine he might not have noticed if he hadn’t been looking.

“Yeah.” Jericho nodded. “Those scars are the real miracle. I’ve never seen anything quite like them,” he lied. “But the back of your head is completely healed,” he went on hurriedly, “not a scar in sight except for those, whatever they are, and no brain damage that we know of. The mermen say they watched the bone splinters being pushed out of your brain pan as the skull grew back and the wound healed. They say that the medivac monitor went nuts.”