The Glittering World (39 page)

He stared back at himself from every corner of the throne room, a thousand Gabriels when even one was sometimes too much to bear. He could be replaced in a heartbeat. And how replaceable he had felt, for far too long to remember. How insignificant. As a child, just another mouth to feed, and now grown he had become something to be taken for granted, or otherwise mistreated. It was all written there, upon his many frightened faces, and inside his many eyes.

A moment later their appearances shifted, features fanning past like the letters on a train station Solari board. One after the next they had the eyes of insects again, hexagonal compound mounds of shining twin honeycombs, faces hided in bark with mouths knotted like wood. Then they changed once more. In a single instant one stood tall and thin as a bamboo rod, and in the next another shifted with a sluicing sound into a crouching figure the size of a small child, an emerald tint to its papery skin. In a sweeping tide they withdrew their communal gaze and returned as one to their feedings and cleanings and excretions, newly cool in their other unknowable ministrations.

The thing about the Other Kind, though? They don’t care about us. They
can’t
care about us. I get that now.

The way we see ants? That’s how they see us.

They also returned their attention to the Queen. They continued dismantling her with claws and teeth and spaded tongue,
electric green lifeblood leeching down into the pool water and reeking of brine and copper. She fell quiet, her cries silenced for good, and all that remained was a desiccated husk. Gabe turned away in disgust.

Uneasy ripples of brilliant yellow illumination rose from the cavern floor, cresting to one side of the throne room before crashing back in his direction.

“Blue?” he called out, his terror rising. And there was his friend. One among many, Blue glided from his dead Queen with his allotted pound of her flesh in his mouth. He turned in Gabe’s direction, compound eyes glowing brightly in the light from the pulsating growths. He had known Gabe would come. Had he in fact waited for him to see this barbaric ceremony, to prove to them both he was no longer of Gabe’s kind? He, who had once forgotten so much of who he was, dazzled by the glittering world above.

Creatures fanned out synchronously from the Queen’s corpse in an iridescent spray like the eyes of a peacock’s tail, their illuminations reflected off the flooded cave floor. Blue leaped from the assemblage. He scaled the wall on powerful legs that thrust him cricketlike to the cavern ceiling, where he suspended himself among the gleaming multitude. Protean in appearance, they nevertheless shared the same indescribable essence, as well as Blue’s beveled honeycomb eyes. And all the while, the sound of clacking jaws, of dripping water, taut vellums of skin and sharp bone snapping back and forth in a staccato and melodious relay. The diversity of life in motion. All the inhuman wonders Gabe’s father had preached hellfire about and that Gabe always knew were real, but never thought he’d witness in their own dominion.

He spotted Elisa. She was just as he’d seen her in his mind,
perched along the cavern wall and clinging not to one of the glowing sacs but rather to another figure, both of them unmoving. Gabe went to them and shucked the viscid creepers from their arms and legs, hacked away at the wet fibrous matter until he’d freed them both from the rough stone wall. The exposed surface of the rock was veined with white branches and etched with esoteric symbols that reminded him of runes, and the lost tree language of ogham.

Elisa coughed and blinked rapidly as if roused from an unfathomable sleep, and she began to stroke the being in her arms, either by training or by instinct. It was a creature her same size, skin the color and texture of paper birch. She warmed it, ran her fingers across its face and limbs, its chest and back. She passed her hand over its stomach, and slowed, rubbing it there in gentle circles. The creature’s belly was distended, aglow and writhing with evolving life. It was carrying a child, or something that might one day be. Elisa’s child. And Blue’s.

A creation of both places, light and dark, above and below. Persephone unborn.
A stab of diffuse envy pierced him, and he thought of Jason and what he might have felt, or known.

Gabe helped her lower the creature to the cavern floor, where they both dropped to their knees, the two of them supporting the being between them. He dizzied with intoxication. It was like handling a live wire, a current of emotion roiling him. Wonder and dread shocked through his brain, and he felt Elisa’s emotions as his own. Her fear, her amazement, her doubt: all were transmitted to him through the collective consciousness. She had become a part of it, because to be with them was to be a component of the greater whole. All that the Other Kind had seen over untold millennia—visions of the land before and after the time of man—it could fill the unused parts of
Gabe’s brain, a succession of floodgates opened. If only he gave the word.

And maybe that’s what these parts of my brain were for in the first place: to remain empty, until one day they could be filled by the hive mind. A place where all knowledge is shared, each to each, regardless of kith and kin, or species, or origin.

But something prevented Gabe from seeing it all, some part of himself that held back and wouldn’t allow him complete access, though he wanted so badly to be let inside. Maybe he felt that in the end he wasn’t good enough.

“It’s me,” Elisa said softly, her voice worn thin with time though she looked no older, the words spoken so close Gabe thought they might be inside his mind.
It’s me.
He assumed she was confirming her identity, but no, she was referring instead to the creature in her arms. It had her face: her sharp wedge of a nose, her chapped red lips, a damp sweep of the same chestnut hair. There really had been a part of herself she’d left down here, another version of herself. Not only her unborn child, but a substitute of Elisa as well, her very own surrogate counterpart.

“You woke us.” Her tone managed to convey both surprise and inevitability. “It must be time.”

A ripping noise echoed across the throne room, and Gabe’s grip on Elisa and her surrogate tightened. The slumbering attendants stirred. One by one they began to raise their heads, and started to peel themselves from the membrane. The younger Donald pressed his skull to the enlarged celeriac tuber in his arms and released a terrible moan like a father who had lost a child, while a woman beside him rocked violently, the soiled and rent rawhide of her smock flapping across her chest as she moved. All of them stuttered through their fitful reanimations,
all waking to some subdued version of life. Gabe glimpsed one of the large dogs he’d seen, which now looked to be a coyote, kneading its paws against a pulsating grub as if trying to nurse.

As they dropped to the catacomb floor, human and animal alike, a thunderous rumble sounded throughout the warrens. The roof buckled and released a cloud of white dust that glimmered in the tubers’ array of winking lights like fireflies loosed from a jar. Stalactite needles and stone drapery plummeted from the cave ceiling, rocks colliding against the ridged walls and splashing into the dark pool, the vast and unblinking eye at the center of the cavern. It was the sound of a story ending, the whisper of the last page being turned, just before the book was shut tight.

The Other Kind and their followers gathered around the water’s edge. Gabe stepped forward as well, the whole of his body convulsing with desire. He wanted to join them. It didn’t matter what they asked of him, whether they stole him away from the world above. It didn’t matter if he never went back.

no

Gabe fought it.

NO
.

He resisted the hive. Tried to think for himself again, though he was having trouble doing so. Because he wanted to give in, to be swallowed into their communal web of consciousness and perpetual brightness; he wanted to be lit from within. Elisa, she had the right idea, a lifetime supply of the frequency. He could join them too, couldn’t he? Become another one of their servants. He’d never go hungry again, never want for anything whatsoever. How sweet it would be, to give himself over to their ego-annihilating form of oblivion.

I’d never be alone again
.

Gabe studied Elisa’s face. She was resigned, her affect flattened beyond her palpable fatigue.

Is that what I want for myself? To have to rise by collective command and merrily dance for joy, though my feet may be blistered and my heart no longer my own?

The truth was that he had no people of his own and never would, that he was all alone in this life, a burden not even Blue could help him lay down. He clenched and flexed his tremulous fingers upon the straps of his backpack, the pull toward Blue and the rest of his kin near irresistible. Bells clashed in his ears, church bells and school bells and little brass jingle bells, a cacophony of conflicting noise.

The first of the Other Kind descended into the pool, which shivered with new life, a birthing canal in reverse. Another of its kind followed, and another, and another. Opalescent forms tumbled into the water in rapid succession, each dodging the cascade of stalactites and falling dirt with the wondrous elegance of a trained acrobat. Their servants followed. The enchanted workers peeled the pulsating sacs from the cavern walls and carried them forward. They slipped into the black pool, the squirming roots in their grasp, with no apparent thought or trepidation. One of them was a badly burned woman, skin mottled beside a star-shaped red birthmark on her back. Gavina Beaton; Gabe recognized her from Elisa’s photographs. A swollen tuber cradled in her working arm, she dove beneath the water’s surface, the throbbing brightness from the sac and its burgeoning life fading from sight as she vanished.

Blue dropped down beside the fervent procession and approached, his movements dignified and assured. He hoisted the surrogate Elisa from the cavern floor and into his sickled arms,
and it languidly molded itself to him, its body lengthening to take hold of his chest. The viridescent ball of its pregnant womb pressed into him like an external organ, its serrated mouth latched on to Blue’s neck, and the surrogate suckled at him, a bee feeding on nectar. His eyes remained wide open and lidless and trained upon Gabe.

time

it is time

to go

deeper

“Please.” Gabe reached out to stop him, but then thought better of it. “Don’t go yet.”

time

it is time

for the new

hive

for the new

queen

below

Gabe turned to Elisa, whose expression was one not only of hunger but of a strange satiation. “You’re going with them,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“You can’t understand what it’s like to leave all this,” she said, and crossed her arms as if chilled, though the hive was sweltering. “Not yet.”

His stomach lurched. “Then you’ve already made up your mind.”

“I thought I was cast out the first time, but I was wrong. I chose to leave, to return to familiar things. And once I came back, I knew I couldn’t be without them again. Besides,” she said, “you can only leave once.”

She spoke with the certitude of a fairy godmother, a seasoned practitioner relating a storybook rule involving potions and curses and spells.
Don’t stray from the designated path. Don’t drink from the enchanted well. You can only leave once.
The rules were always so simple, which was why they bound so tightly.

Elisa’s eyes grew teary and heavy with exhaustion. “Tell Jason I said—” She stared at the flooded cavern floor, at the trembling cathedral ceiling, and finally at her surrogate in Blue’s arms. “Tell him I found what I was looking for.”

She and Gabe embraced. “We found him, though,” she whispered in his ear. “I told you we would.”

And with that she pulled away. The surrogate dropped down from Blue’s arms and attached itself to her, fitting to her body like a second skin. Its distended belly became Elisa’s belly, its limbs her limbs. It was as if the creature had moved inside of her, where it peered out from her now-glowing eyes.

Elisa and her twin turned, the cavern pool before them, and dropped as one into the abyss.

Flowstone keeled and toppled to the ridged cavern floor. But the mournful leave-taking continued, a legion of Other Kind gliding toward the black pool as the throbbing lights dimmed and the cave unraveled around a threnody of buzzing tongues and fluttering wings. And their followers as well: a rail-thin young man about Gabe’s age in full hiking regalia and bearing an enormous rucksack; a tiny Mi’kmaq woman in native garb, the furred hem of her caribou-skin robe in tatters; a naked and hirsute gentleman, eyes wide with a hand extended before him as if moving through a waking dream. They all dropped down into the dark water, one after the next.

A massive column crashed down right beside Gabe. It was all coming apart now. But still he could not leave.

go

Blue, pleading. Compelling. His dewy wet eyes a fractalized maze of surfaces, all reflecting Gabe’s anguished expression back at himself.

go

now

He shook off Blue and his command. Why would he go now? He had nothing to live for above, not when everything he wanted was right here in front of him, down in this scorched world.

But this world was ending. The colony—the real colony—was gone. Just like the old Blue.

And that was the one Gabe wanted. The
old
Blue, the stressed-out, chain-smoking chef who was his best friend, his only friend. The only one who ever made Gabe feel special rather than freakish, who let him believe that all would be well in the end. Now Blue had become like the rest of his kind, both awesome and fathomless, and there would be no more knowing him, not entirely. Not unless Gabe were to lose himself to the colony, and even then it wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough.