The Terminals (18 page)

Chapter 29

I was stunned by the
general's subterfuge, but it held undeniable logic. Angelica was a willing candidate, perhaps the right candidate, excepting the false diagnosis that was clearly on the books only to satisfy me and Deeth. The single reason why the general could be agreeing to my plan to try first was to get me out of the road. I needed to determine if it was worth it. The only way I could save Angelica would be to succeed. Little would be gained should I die and simply disappear; I'd been an atheist for thirty of my thirty-eight years. I had less than two hours to prepare for my final adventure.

I entered the common room and the three men looked up at me from their game. Jaws dropped at the apparition of a soaked, fierce-eyed colonel. I needed their attention.

“Ahem!” I tried to keep the tremor from my hand and told myself it was the Coumadin.

They slowly eased to stand, Sundarshan actually groaning. Arthur still looked too pleased with himself and held his chin in a jutting challenge. A slab of pizza spread between them, laid on the gut of a comatose terminal I'd never met with a scattering of creased ten- and twenty-dollar bills. Grease dripped from Francis's chin, and he swiped at it with a translucent napkin. Each palmed a hand of cards.

“At ease,” I said as I strode to the gurney, leaning against it for support.

“You play poker?” Sundarshan asked. “Could use another now that Attila's busy all the time.”

“What can we help you with, Colonel?” Francis asked.

“I've got a metaphysical question for you.” The man on the table was wasted, and I counted at least six tubes leaving or entering him. The breaths of the ventilator provided steady background noise.

“A metaphysical question? Are you sure, because that's an awfully big word?” Sundarshan grinned, likely disappointed at the sodden trench coat I left on.

“Sorry, Sundarshan,” I retorted. “By
you,
I actually meant Francis and Arthur.”

“Ouch,” he said lightly and went back to studying his cards. I immediately regretted my words, but I hadn't time to apologize. I needed an answer and there were few people who could even understand the question.

“Francis, is it possible that the afterlife is real, but fades? So our energy … belief in it say, sustains the afterlife?”

“We talked about this earlier—” Sundarshan cut in.

“No, not the fading part,” I clarified. “What if the afterlife starts out real, sort of, but fades as our life energy dissipates.”

Arthur held a finger to his prominent chin, but it was Francis who replied.

“Not possible. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Law of conservation of energy.” He took a bite of pizza and closed his eyes in ecstasy. “This is it! Why only at the end do we learn the taste of true ambrosia?”

“That's just your beta-blockers talking,” Sundarshan muttered. “If you could taste, you'd know this was greasy cardboard.”

Arthur tapped his index finger on the patient's thigh.

“What is it, Arthur?” I asked.

“Francis said that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but that is true only of a closed system. In an open system, it could
seem
to fade.”

“Like a glacier melting to nothing. We know the water's still somewhere but we can't see it?” I asked.

“Less definitive than that. Different religions have interim periods. The Zoroastrians believe that the soul sticks around for three days before traveling to the Chinvat Bridge where the deceased meets the embodiment of his conduct in life.”

“A smoking hot maiden,” Francis said, and Sundarshan looked up with interest.

“Or a particularly ugly woman,” Arthur added. “It depends on where she's taking you.”

“I like the Zoroastrians,” Sundarshan replied and went back to his cards. “If you're going to play, ante-up.”

Arthur ignored him. “Krishna said,
At the hour of death, when a man leaves his body, he must depart with his consciousness absorbed in me
… so perhaps you lose what you'd call identity. So if your sense of self fades, so might the concept of afterlife.”

“Oblivion,” I repeated.

“Some definitions of Buddhist Nirvana border on oblivion. It's a complete nothingness, peace, bliss,” Arthur explained. “What's the difference between nothing and bliss?”

“I bet you never realized you atheists were actually Buddhists,” Francis said.

“It's true,” Arthur replied. “Buddhists don't believe in a god, but their concept of the Bardo would be tough for you to swallow. They also believe that the spirit wanders at death for forty-nine days. Up to one hundred if they have a strong attachment, cravings, or resentment. Definitely doesn't fit atheistic philosophy. Does this help?”

I ran through my calculations. What if the transition across bridges, through purgatories, between systems, whatever, what if it broke the connection to Attila? Or if the spirit lost its sense of identity as in the case of Buddhism, or the Gnostic Pleroma even, then how could Attila retain a link? And could an afterlife independent of religion, but dependent on belief, exist? I'd told myself that all religious people were atheists in their own right, in that they didn't believe in the gods of other religions. I simply took it one god further. But if it was belief that mattered rather than a specific doctrine, then my argument was false. If I was going to take a run at Hillar, I wanted to have some part of me think it possible, otherwise everything truly was lost.

Francis must have taken my look for frustration. His half-eaten crust slapped down on the cardboard lid. “Listen, I don't believe this hooey, either. But if the afterlife exists at death, it exists afterward and will keep on existing. But let's be clear that all these religions are talking out of school. There's no such thing as an afterlife. Only an afterdeath.”

My head whipped up. “What d'you mean by that?”

“An afterlife presupposes something like we have here and now, something we can possibly understand. An afterdeath is unknown. Another frontier.”

I caught the glint in his eye. Francis had once made a shot for the South Pole on skis, dragging a sledge, entirely unsupported except for an emergency beacon. After thirty-two days, five of them trapped in a storm, he'd activated the beacon. He hadn't made it to the pole, but death was one adventure he was sure to take.

I thanked the men and left them to their gambling.

As the laptop booted, I set it on the hospital tray table. From where it hung over the chair, my trench coat dripped water into a growing pool. I had stripped to my panties and a white tank top, spotted with damp patches. I shivered in the dry hospital air and slipped my legs beneath the bedcovers, stubble rasping against the coarse sheet.

Beside the laptop lay a permanent marker. I snapped the cap off and carefully inscribed on my forearm the names of the Archons I knew. The names straddled the scar, and that made sense to me.

I knew I needed more information to go to hell on than a communal brain-dump, but I had to start somewhere and pulled the laptop onto my bed and opened the Wikipedia entry for Gnosticism.

The irony of searching for wisdom in a crowdsourcing application was not lost on me, and I wondered if this was why Gnosticism had been unsuccessful. Why Christianity, which accepted everyone willing to believe, had vaulted to popular approval while Gnosticism—a religion that promoted only the few wisest to spiritual discovery—had failed.

As I read the Wiki, my supposition grew more founded with my increasing confusion. The names of the Archons were sometimes called Aeons, or Daemons, or if they were Archons there could be upward of three hundred and sixty-five of them, not seven—and I could barely remember what I did yesterday let alone three hundred and sixty-five different names. It depended on what sect of Gnosticism you belonged to.

Whatever their names, the seven appeared to be called the Hebdomad, which was also a place. The seven spheres—or eight, if you counted what came after—Barbelo—
was that the same as Charlie's Pleroma?

Shit. What if the general was right? How could I understand this ancient religion without understanding the primary sources of its tenets, those esoteric doctrines only recently pieced together from fragments of Demotic and Coptic script? Regardless, reading the complete Gnostic Gospels—much less understanding them—would take far longer than I had. Still, I had to try.

I opened another browser tab and called up the Terminal database, searching for Hillar McCallum and pulling up his file. I recalled Charlie's story of the ancient pact to track the evil Gnostics across the millennia, but I'd forgotten the name of his sect and hadn't come across it again in my research. Waves of shivers rattled through me.

Sethians, Valentinians, Cainites, Ophites … Hillar, it appeared, was a Borborite, which … punching it into Google … roughly translated as a
filthy one.

Why would a group call itself filthy?

The ancient Borborites—Seth and Theudas, I recalled now—engaged in highly sexual rituals, smearing bodies with semen and menstrual blood, consuming it in a weird Eucharist. That won my filthy vote. Some even said they ate the fetuses of babies conceived during rituals. My gorge rose.

“So you did it,” Attila said from the doorway.

I hadn't realized the door had opened; my hands were pressed to the sides of my head as I read.

“I assume since I don't see Julie anywhere that you convinced her to pass on lethal injection for the day?” Attila took a tentative step inside the room.

“Her name's Angelica and the general has her stashed away somewhere.”

Confusion flashed across Attila's face, followed by grim understanding.

“These people really existed,” I said, and waved my hand across the screen when he raised an eyebrow. “These people rooted for wisdom in entrails. It's sick.”

“You're taking her place … It's the same as suicide, you know?” His eyes lingered on my chest. I wasn't wearing a bra. With the tight tank and the chill, it left little to the imagination. I flushed, tucking the blanket up around my armpits.

“It's not suicide,” I replied more crisply than I intended. “I'm saving another woman, and I'm trying to help the man I mistakenly sent in. I'm responsible for his death, too.”

“You're not Gnostic,” he protested.

“And Siam wasn't ancient Egyptian. He just knew about it.”

“Sometimes what people admit they believe is different from what they do believe. They aren't even true to themselves.” Reaching my bedside, he peered at the black lettering on my wrists.

“Charlie isn't a filthy one,” I said. “Small gift.”

“What's a filthy one, anyways?” His fingers were cool even against my arm, which was still covered in gooseflesh. “I don't know whether you'll have that on the other side,” he said, brushing the tattooed names.

“Don't you say,
who you are is what you'll be
?”

“It's meant figuratively, not literally. But I'm glad you're listening.” He bit his lip. “If you're going to go through with this, you should know that I lied to you.”

I pushed the tray table backward, and the sheet fell from around my chest to pool at my waist. Attila didn't notice, but I was keenly aware of sitting exposed in a near-transparent top. “What do you mean?” He shut the door and returned to the bed.

“When Charlie entered the afterlife, I said that he was okay.” I stared at Attila, not giving an inch. “He wasn't. He was in more pain than I've ever sensed from a Euth or a terminal. As bad as any Christian hell. Worse than the Buddhist Naraka.”

“I didn't think the Buddhists had a hell. If they're bad, they just reincarnate as a worm or something.”

“Naraka isn't eternal damnation, but it's pretty darn close.” His voice stayed tense and he sat on the edge of the bed. In my mind, Charlie's pain was all the more reason to venture after him. “And you're trying to change the subject.”

“You're worried about me,” I said softly, suddenly realizing.

“I'm not going to let you do this. It's hard enough watching people die when I know there is a good chance that their sacrifice can save the lives of others.” He shook his head. “There is no chance this plan will work.”

“Why didn't you say you liked—”

“Because of this!” He threw up his hands, and when he started to rise, I grabbed the waistband of his pants. After a moment, he calmed. “Because you're a terminal.”

I drew him closer—the smell of coffee, his hair gel, lingering toothpaste. Simple smells of life and an outside world. I tasted his bottom lip. And held.

He breathed; his eyes remained open, but he did not pull away. I engulfed his top lip, and his hands encircled my waist, drawing me lower and back on to the pillow, he overtop. His crystal knocked against the floor as his vest dropped, and he wrestled briefly with the buttons of his shirt before hauling it over upraised arms, eyes bright.