Transcendence (60 page)

And yes, I can see them now, too.

There a stained-glass Father, his silverplate phallus gleaming bloody after his first punishment of the foul daughter, the dirty girl no longer pure—
Woman!
—must be purified by the vessel of God. . . .

There a leather-winged Eyes the cyborg, his skin bristling with hypodermic needles and microscopic lenses that burn holes in my skin and expose the muscle and sinew beneath, scorching, his eyes part of his whole body, his whole self one robotic cycloptic eye to bore through me and drag me beneath the suffocating weight of Father. . . .

There a girl melted into a woman, the two part of one and when seen from this direction they are Siamese twins, their intestines leading from one to the other, mouth of one end anus in the other, the heart separate from both as it tries to beat all the blood away, no blood, can’t emit filthy blood, for the blood of our Lord was given so we should not sin; the Original Sin my sin and yours—
don’t you see? We can’t purge it! We’re trapped and sinking and burning and Hell awaits us like bedsheets aflame and swarms of flies chewing away my rotten filthy flesh; no, my God no, I can’t step back there
—

*My friend Janus, now you must destroy your demons! Look, they are only things. They are smaller than you. You are everywhere, and they are small!*

Pang: *This is you:*

The Milky Way galaxy brightens atop the roiling scenes, the bobbing bubbles, the girl begins thrashing on the blood-stained bed as soon as her door clicks shut.
Stars are here all along, you just couldn’t see them. See them now? Know they are always within you, all of us. See how you love the stars?

A young woman, observing 3VRD through a massive plasma-mirror telescope in orbit around Earth. A nebula, spanning light-years, glowing with the reds and oranges and greens of life, knotted here and there with the elements of worlds and air and plants and people, the remains of an ancient star that collapsed upon itself because it was given too much body when born; but it knew, it understood that it was not alive for itself, rather for countless sets of futures and it can see the myriad eyes and ears and noses and mouths that taste the bee-honey and wind swishing through green-rustling leaves high and cool above a river that shifts and chuckles across rocks that are as beloved to it as it was to itself only ten billion years before, because those rocks are as akin to it as it was to the galaxy, as the knots of gas and dust are to sister Rachel’s bright blue eyes because I made damned to Hell certain that Father never gripped her with his punishing mallets which alleluia-barking Christians paid so much credit to watch him shake over their heads as he purged them of sin.

She feels herself part of those knots, then part of the star before and after:

“
Thank you, Pang, for your eyes and mind, yes I can see the universe through you now and it is beautiful”—
But still I see the demons, and they are to me as entropy is to this whorl of stars. They may be few moments in my universe, but they are massive and powerful. I may be a multitude of moments, but I am weak and damaged
. Always Janus has striven for power and control of her life, yet her life ended twice by the hand of Man.

“
Janus, now you make me angry!” My friend Miru. “You think these demons are powerful? Let me show you one of them. You will see just how powerful it is.”

What are you doing, friend Miru?
thinks the constellation called Pang. Pang’s stars flicker for a moment—dimming? redshifting? *Are you drawing away from me, Miru?*

One star accelerates toward I and I and I, growing from insignificance to brilliant white, and now it is a sphere—and now it is a universe unto itself, a supercluster of galaxies, each galaxy within separated by chasms wider than humans could cross in our spacecraft before the heat-death of the universe, and within each individual galaxy lie individual stars, each separated by gulfs wider than spacecraft could leap before the death of their crews: Each star is a moment, crystalline-crackled, semi-clear yet obscured by fractures, and now when one star closes close enough to see within, I and I and I see that this is a preserved moment from the life of Lonny Marshfield.

“
No.” Janus’ word nearly destroys the moment, her resistance a hammer slamming down against the already fragile preserve of a life long lost.

“
You must. You must face the demon. See how small it is?”

And before I can object, I am inside the crystal ball as if it is a moment from my own life. I am standing still beside the turgid Atlantic waves rising against the Boston shore, I am a boy— *Why is my skin crackled like blown glass dipped too soon in cold water?* *Be silent and live this moment*—I am a boy whose cracked surface glistens with the blood of
. . .
of
. . .
Father, you can’t leave me now!

And the crystal ball shatters as I, the eight-year-old boy, run my feet banging along the wooden boardwalk beside the ocean huge and wet, roaring, the storefront explosion roaring in my ears with, “Why wasn’t it you, boy? Why the man I love?” and then another crystal ball of life’s moments crashes against this one as it shatters, spilling out the contents into the sea where in this new sphere I the boy am a young man living with older men, one feedrapt and overlaid with Daddy, as I call him, the other lying splayed on my clean operating table; see how I love you, Mommy? Where are you, Mommy? See how I carve such splendid incisions on my arm? See how I remove the parts of me that sicken you? Yes, some day soon, Mommy, there will be no Lonny Marshfield; I will be Daddy with scalpel in hand and silver wires running through my body electric. And the ball fragments—

Stop it
.

Just as I smash through and into another. I am an eight year-old boy again, but this moment is an hour earlier. Daddy’s fine brown eyes sparkle with the light of the Boston sun, for nowhere in the world is the sun as fine as in Boston; see how his strong, fine surgeon’s hands hold mine? See how his strong, hard arms lift me from the ground and spin me around as he pivots one heel in the sand, Mommy standing nearby with that strange expression she gets. . . .

Another moment overlaps without shattering the previous—“That’s better, Janus-san. You need not destroy”—and I am a seven-year-old boy, asleep in my bedroom, only not so asleep that I do not sense the hall light as Mommy creeps into my room and kneels beside my bed, her forehead against my chest and silken hair hanging all over my face; “Don’t you dare take my man from me, boy. He is the one I love. You are the accident, the tragedy of my life. Oh, but I had to tell him!”—her whisper sharp as an edge of stainless steel—“I had to let him know he’d impregnated me, and oh, how he wanted a child! Had I known you’d steal him away. . .” And that look again, that look which overlays the look as Daddy spins me a year later on the beach, an hour before the “Terrorist Bomb Kills Three!” as the newsfeed screamed nearly simultaneous with Mommy’s scream and my inward scream which lasted until
Cap’n Jack tricked me inside this place and You dared strip away the skin of all I was!

Janus drifts out of the final moment of Lonny’s life, having lived it as had Miru, as had Jack; she knows this, though Jack isn’t here right now.

I am this galaxy
, I think to the little boy Lonny as he watches me from within his cracked sphere.
I am this galaxy, and yours intersected mine only when you’d become the demon. But you are not the demon; the demon destroyed you. You are the little boy
.

Little boy Lonny smiles.
I am forever eight
.

Beyond that, the demon festered within, the cancer grew until it consumed all I was, and I tried to consume you.

*Yes,* Janus tells the universe that is her—for now my universe has incorporated the tiny preserves of a shattered life—*yes, you tried. But it was not you. It was only the cancer which had consumed you, as well. Young Lonny, all is forgiven.*

*All is forgiven? But look what I did to you.*

*Remember, that was not you. That creature which lived in your body was not you. I forgive you, and I pity the creature.* And then:

“
Thank you, Miru. Now I understand. It is as Jesus said: To enter the kingdom of God, we must become like little children. This is the kingdom of God—all this, I and I and I and even I the little boy Lonny. . . .”

And now it is also Pehr Jackson, his life is mine as I grow up to the same age as Lonny in the eight-apartment complex, my friends, my dearest friend Teresa whom I soon after lost contact, living with the old couple who so dearly wanted a young one until the boy caused the death of their friend. . . .
Yes, yes, all you have told me, Jack, it all comes to life as I watch you fill me up inside like sweet wine I pour into the empty chambers of my life
.

Do you see? You are right, Pang; we are whole galaxies, whole superclusters of moments. Yet each are separate universes outside of this place, this wonderful alien place; and within, we are even separated from every moment of who we are.

“
I forgive you, Lonny.” The demon-figures flapping their wings around the image of Janus—tall and glowing at the edge of one of her moments aboard
Bounty
—the Hell constructs dissipate as the vacuum between her moments closes, as she grows closer to Pang and Miru, and even to the absent Pehr Jackson and the dead Lonny Marshfield. I begin to laugh with relief, as if I am as weightless as air, as permeable and as impenetrable.

There is no gulf. It is only a perception we carried with us from outside, from where we wore our shells.

“
Father.”

The second demon still remains, especially visible now that the Eyes-Beast has consumed itself.

“
How can I forgive Eyes—no, Lonny, whom Eyes destroyed—how can I forgive him but not my own father?”

*But Janus, look. Look closer.*

*I see what you mean.* What had once been an inhumanly massive and cosmically powerful figure becomes only a man. Even a small man. Yes, he shaped all those moments there, near the core of my life, those old brown stars orbiting near the heart of all I am
. . .
yet
. . .
yet look at me:

I am I, and I and I, and we are five universes of superclusters of galaxies, each a hundred billion moments—

“
Pearls. They are all pearls.”

*All right. We are all these pearls. What is the man whose sperm made my body half of what it is? He is nothing now. I will make who I am.*

*You are not ready to forgive, but he no longer possesses power over you. Over me. Over us.*

The second demon scatters to dust, old dark dust near one galaxy’s core. That could strangle me some day.
Yes, but we will rid ourselves of it before then. Yes. As long as I know not to hate. That is the only poison, and can only be self-inflicted
.

“
Look.”

The universe falls, billions of spheres merging into a single glowing ball of light, opalescent, ever-growing until it is all that is visible:

“
The pearl.”

*Now I understand what you mean, Miru. Of course; you are me. I am I.*

The pearl: When we enter the artifact, this place, our ugly, fearful, lonely, hateful, isolating shell is vaporized, leaving exposed the hurt and lonely, forgotten child. We are fully aware of every minutiae of our lives here, and unafraid, unashamed. So no longer do we wear our barriers: The oyster shell—scarred by the knives of our demons, even if demons are what we later became—is tossed away, and all that remains is what lay sheltered or imprisoned inside, our soft and fragile and wonderful hidden treasures. But those treasures could only have been created by long years of suffering and fighting the abrasion successfully.

“
Successfully is the key.”

“
Lonny—rather, Eyes—was destroyed because he tried to be the shell in here, where the shell means nothing. The greater our resistance to ourselves and each other, the more damaging the wave of understanding. That becomes hate. Yet the wave has not damaged me.”

“
Look at how strong you are now.”

Janus is the pearl, the time-spanning, multiple-universe encompassing pearl. Miru is, Pang is—

“
But Jon Pang, who are you?”

This is me:

Simultaneously, the singularity expands until within it we see galaxies of stars, yet also it contracts until it becomes only one moment among billions.

This is me:

And it is only different than I and I in the details. We are all at our cores afraid of others and of change—though we thirst for them at the same time—and sometimes that fear, combined with ignorance, leads to hate. Yet that fear is only fear of ourselves; we think so little of ourselves that we are terrified to reveal who we are, so we allow no one inside. So we hate people who somehow penetrate to the soft tissue within. Unless we shed our shells, we even hate those we allowed inside. During static and barbarous times—We all have lived those during our lives—fear and anger are survival tools. But in here, fear and anger lead to death. And to a species, it leads to extinction.