Mercury Rises (30 page)

Culain nodded. "It's a long story, and absurdly unlikely, but it's all true, I assure you. You know the account of Cain and Abel from Genesis, of course?"

Eddie replied, "Cain kills Abel in a fit of jealous rage. God curses Cain to wander the Earth, and puts a mark on him so that no one will kill him."

"Hmm, yes," said Culain. "More or less. Except it wasn't a visible mark that kept people from killing me. God changed me. Something about my biology. Made me immortal. Impossible to kill."

"The mark of Cain was immortality?" asked Eddie, doubtfully. "Why would God reward murder with eternal life? That makes no sense."

"Reward!" Culain scoffed. "It was no reward. I was a farmer. It was all I ever wanted to do; all I was ever good at. But God cursed any soil that I worked, so that it bore no fruit. I tried being a potter, but the pots I made were marred by my guilt. I tried weaving clothing, but the yarn snagged and tangled. I found work as an unskilled laborer, but failed even at that. Any enterprise I was involved in would eventually fail. Locusts would eat the crops, or bandits would steal the inventory, or fire would destroy the warehouse. In every case, it didn't take long for the proprietor to determine the source of the trouble: me. If I was lucky, I'd have left town by the time they figured it out. If I was unlucky, they'd beat the hell out of me and then chase me away with pitchforks.

"On the rare occasion that I managed to live in peace with my fellow peasants for a few weeks,
angels
would show up and start harassing me. I didn't know at the time if they were specifically assigned to make me miserable, or if angels just have a special resentment for a human who dares to claim the mantle of immortality---even if it wasn't my choice. Either way, they would ultimately force me to move on.

"They could hurt me, but they couldn't kill me. Nothing could, and trust me, I tried
everything
. Eventually I became a writer, like you, Eddie. I found that writing was the one thing I could do where the mistakes I made were never permanent. If I wrote something and the next day I didn't like it, I would just crumple up the paper and write something else. I got pretty good at it after a few centuries. By that time I had had plenty of time to think about the nature of reality, and immortality, and time...and to research many arcane subjects. I met Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Augustine, and many others. In what you call the Dark Ages, I spent some time wandering around Ireland, taking on the name Culain. I wrote a number of treatises on the relationship between matter and time. The notions didn't make much of an impression at the time, but Culain attained a bit of notoriety after his 'death,' and was even canonized by the Church. That was my own fault---I tried to stay out of the limelight, but when you survive a fall from the bell tower of a cathedral onto an oxcart full of rotten beets, people tend to talk. I walked away without a scratch, and somebody asked me how I felt. I said, 'Meh,' and kept walking. That's how I became Saint Culain the Indifferent.

"Anyway, not long after that, I had to ditch the Culain identity and move on. I spent several centuries in obscurity. My greatest success as a writer came when I wrote under the name
Shakespeare
..."

"Oh for fuck's sake," Cody spat. "Do we really have to listen to this? Look, I get it, OK? You weren't big on the family thing. I'm over it. You don't have to make up this crazy shit about being Cain and Methuselah and Hemingway."

"Just let him finish," said Eddie.

Cody glared at Eddie. "You're not buying this shit, are you, Eddie?"

"I suspect," said Culain, "that Eddie recognizes the weariness of a fellow immortal."

"Go on," said Eddie impassively.

"I wasn't Shakespeare, exactly," Culain explained. "Shakespeare was a playwright I ran into in London. He needed some help on a play he was working on about King Henry the Sixth..."

"Oh, so you were Shakespeare's ghostwriter," Cody said glibly. "That's
way
more believable."

Eddie interjected, "Many historians believe Shakespeare didn't actually write his plays. Some suspect that Francis Bacon wrote them."

"I suppose you're going to tell us that you're Bacon, too," said Cody.

"It's possible," said Eddie. "We don't know he's not Bacon."

"Well, I did help him with the whole scientific method thing..." started Culain.

"OK, that's it," said Cody, getting to her feet. "I'm outta here. Nice to see you again, Dad. Good to see you're as full of shit as always."

"Cody, wait!" said Eddie.

"It's all right," Culain said. "Cody and I will catch up later."

"Whatever," Cody said. She walked out and slammed the door behind her.

"She always was an impetuous child," Culain mused.

"OK," said Eddie. "Get on with it."

"My tenure as Shakespeare garnered me a little more attention than I wanted," Culain went on, "so I went underground and redoubled my efforts to find a 'cure' for my immortality. At first I had hoped that science might provide the answer, but after a century of experimentation and research, I gave up. The answer always seemed to be just outside my grasp. I then dove headlong into the world of the occult. I met Eastern mystics, attended séances, took part in voodoo rituals, et cetera. I concluded, after some two hundred years, that it was all a lot of bunk. These people were desperate to connect to something beyond the material world, but if there was something out there, it had no interest in connecting with
them
.

"Unbeknownst to me, my dabbling in the occult had piqued the interest of Lucifer himself. One day, as I was about to pack up and leave town once again, Lucifer showed up and offered me a deal. He said that he had discovered the secret to my immortality, and that he could bring my torment to an end: all I needed to do was to write a series of books for him. He gave me a copy of an ancient manuscript that told the story of an orphaned boy who became a heroic magician, and instructed me to read it and then write a series of seven books featuring the same character. That was it: write seven books about a teenage warlock and I would become mortal. He gave me a generous advance and even promised to see to it that the angels left me alone so that I could focus on writing. Upon the publication of the each book, I'd get a one-million-dollar advance to write the next one.

"Cody was fifteen years old at this point. I hadn't been around much for her, what with being cursed to wander the Earth and all. Her mother had just died of cancer, so this was a rough time for her. For me, too, of course, but after the first couple of dozen wives, you learn to cope. I promised Cody, though, that things were going to be different soon. The first Charlie Nyx book was due to be published on her sixteenth birthday, and after that, I would finally have some time for her---not to mention a million dollars to buy us a decent house for once.

"I realized after completing the first Charlie Nyx book, though, that something wasn't right. What I had written was more than a book. I knew that nothing good could come from publishing it. I was pretty good at disappearing without a trace at this point, and I decided to take Cody and run away somewhere where Lucifer couldn't find us. But he anticipated my reluctance to follow through on the deal: he kidnapped me and faked my death in a plane crash. He told me that as long as I kept producing Charlie Nyx books, Cody would be taken care of---but that if I ever tried to contact her, she would be killed. Once I delivered the seventh book, I'd be allowed to see her again. And he would live up to his side of the bargain: upon completion of the seventh book, I would become mortal.

"Lucifer let me go, giving me enough money to hole up in a flat in Ireland. After an initial period of defiance, I decided my only option was to buckle down and finish the series. At first I churned out a book a year, but it got more and more difficult with each book---and Lucifer's constant threats didn't make it any easier.

"The Charlie Nyx books, I came to realize, were an abomination. Somehow Lucifer had caused me to tap into something, an arcane power from beyond our own reality, and each successive book was an assault on the very fabric of the Universe. Each time a Charlie Nyx book hit the shelves, the state of the world would deteriorate. Wars, earthquakes, flooding, epidemics, the
Clash of the Titans
remake...things were getting truly out of hand---and I say this as someone who has been on Earth for a
long time
.

"It finally became clear to me how Lucifer was going to deliver my mortality: I was going to die along with everyone else, when the world itself came to an end. This is why you don't bargain with Lucifer, by the way: the devil really is in the details.

"The end came sooner than I expected. After the sixth book, I hit a wall. I just couldn't figure out how to wrap things up. And then the Anaheim Event happened, and I knew the series couldn't possibly be resolved satisfactorily. Real world events had trumped the story of Charlie Nyx. I tried to explain this to Lucifer, but of course he didn't understand. Or maybe he understood but didn't care. All he knew was that there had to be a seventh book---a book that I knew I couldn't possibly deliver, even if I wanted to.

"One night I walked into a dingy pub in Cork, and I saw a man hunched over a stack of papers, writing. Except I could tell that he wasn't a man---I had seen enough angels to be able to recognize one. Curious, I came back the next night, and there he was again. And the night after that, and the night after that. I thought, 'Why is an angel sitting in a pub by himself, night after night, writing? Shouldn't he be out doing the work of Heaven?' I laughed to myself and thought, 'Now that would be a funny story: an angel who has been abandoned in Cork, writing desperate and unread pleas to his superiors to please extract him from this miserable place.'

"And that's when I realized it: the seventh Charlie Nyx book wasn't a Charlie Nyx book at all. Reality had overtaken the story, and now it was time for the story to reassert its supremacy over reality. The seventh book wasn't a Charlie Nyx story; it was a story
about
the Charlie Nyx story!"

Eddie stared blankly at Culain.

"Don't you see, Eddie?" Culain asked excitedly. "There are levels to reality, just like there are levels to the Universe. Above human beings are angels, and above the angels are what you angels call the Eternals. As we near the end of the Universe, all the levels converge. The barriers between the tiers break down and the tiers collapse on each other. That's why so many strange things are happening in the world these days. The earthquakes, the Anaheim Event, the war in the Middle East, the runaway mutant corn in South Africa...the rules are breaking down. The rules of Earth are giving way to the rules of Heaven, and the rules of Heaven are giving way to whatever is above it, and on and on. Everything collapses into a singularity, to borrow a term from physics."

"You've lost me completely," said Eddie. "What does any of this have to do with the Charlie Nyx books?"

"Think of it this way," said Culain. "I am to Charlie Nyx what the angels are to human beings: I'm a mysterious being who exists outside Charlie Nyx's universe, but who somehow controls Charlie's destiny. Mostly my hand is unseen, but occasionally I break into the story to keep the plot moving in the right direction. But I don't have carte blanche; I can't simply intervene arbitrarily to mold the story to my will. You're familiar with the term
deus ex machina
?"

"God from the machine," Eddie said. "A device that a lazy writers uses to save his ass when he's painted himself into a corner. God basically comes down from heaven and fixes things."

"Exactly!" Culain said. "The problem with deus ex machina is that it destroys the illusion that the characters in the story actually affect their own destiny. If I step in and 'fix' the seventh book so that it goes where I want it to, it stops being a story about Charlie Nyx and becomes a story about me. And that's all well and good, but I don't have the proper perspective to write a story about myself. That's where you come in."

"My head hurts," complained Eddie.

"You see, Eddie?" Culain went on. "The report I commissioned you to write, that's the final book! The story about the story. The levels are collapsing on each other!"

"But then," Eddie said, wheels turning in his head, "doesn't that imply that someone somewhere is writing a story about me writing a story about you writing the Charlie Nyx story?"

"Probably," replied Culain. "And he---or she---is just a character in another Author's story!"

Eddie cradled his head in his hands and moaned. "So when this book is published, it's going to cause the Universe to collapse on itself?"

Culain laughed. "Forget the notion of causality, Eddie. Causality belongs to the world of science, and we're well beyond the bailiwick of science here. What's going to happen is going to happen---or, more accurately, has already happened. Think of yourself as a character in a book that's already been written. You can't
cause
anything."

"Gaaaahhh!" Eddie suddenly screamed, jumping to his feet. "Get out! Get out!"

Culain appeared genuinely surprised. "I'm sorry?" he said.

"I can't think this way!" Eddie exclaimed. "I can't
live
this way! Get OUT!"

Culain got to his feet. "Ah," he said. "Denial. I should have seen that coming. It's part of your character. Good luck, Eddie. I know you'll do the right thing in the end."

"Gaaahhh!" Eddie screamed again.

Culain smiled, and left Eddie alone in his room.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Jacob was escorted by armed guards to the elevator, which brought them back to ground level. The guards then ushered him to a metal door in the base of the Eden Two dome. One of them tapped a code into a keypad at the door and it slid open. They walked into a small, metal-walled room that seemed to be a sort of airlock. An LED display on the wall lit up with a progress indicator, red bars creeping across the screen from the left until they reached the right side. When it was finished, the words BIOSCAN COMPLETE appeared below. The far door slid open and they were hit by a blast of warm, humid air. It had an earthy smell, like the garden department of a home-improvement store.