City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (13 page)

And it was simplicity itself to shove the body to the passenger side and drive to the hospital, where the native medical science would keep Mr. Delvecchio's body alive, draining away his widow's cash, while an ongoing feast of fear-energy fed into the absorption cells of the Psychophage. It was ironic how peaceful a comatose body looked. Just because the muscles of the face could no longer move, and the voice-box no longer scream, his doctors would assume Mr. Delvecchio slept in dreamless peace.

But unconscious bodies and sleeping bodies were still of use to the Great Race. Without a waking mind to interfere, the victim's mind, even on its lowest functional level, still responded as if outside thoughts arose from one's own brain, didn't it?

I woke up screaming.

And dancing. I was naked. When I woke up, I found myself prancing up and down the aisles of the motionless bus, wrestling with the bus driver, spitting and shrieking and pulling people's luggage off the overhead racks. It took me a moment realize what was going on. And when I opened my mouth to ask a question, someone put a fist in it.

The bus driver threw me headlong down the stairs of the forward door. I was just glad he was angry enough for me to put the thought in his head that he wanted to throw something else at me. Otherwise he might not have chucked my fancy coat and ratty clothes at me, or winged my shoes toward my head.

The bus vanished in the distance, taking all light and sound with it. I was naked. I was cold.

I stifled a scream. That cab driver, the one I'd robbed… he was dead. He was worse than dead. Lobotomized, paralyzed, helpless, in constant pain. He was in Hell.

My link to his thoughts still was there. I could hear him faintly in my head, screaming and screaming.

And he had fallen into his torment so quietly and softly. It had been like falling asleep; at first, a shock of cold, but then numbness, darkness, and silence. In the end, the victim was left alone with nothing but his terror.

I pulled on my clothes quickly. I could feel the roll of banknotes still in the coat pocket. Limping (for I could only find one shoe), I made my way down the country road. There was no traffic.

For a long while, as I walked, I felt nothing but fear and terror and helpless fury over what the Soul Slayer had done to Mr. Delvecchio. What it wanted to do to me. But the walk was tiring and gradually the feeling faded.

I wondered why the Slayer had manipulated my sleeping body to pull such antics on the bus. I assumed the Slayer had expected the bus driver to turn me over to the police or some other easily located authority, not to throw me out somewhere along the highway.

The Slayer had guessed wrong about what the human driver would do. But if there was some sort of clue here, I was too tired to see it.

At the crossroads was a truckstop, with a gas station and a diner. It was called Dave's Diner. I laughed. Good luck, Soul Slayer. Even if I had known the bus's destination, I didn't know where I had been thrown off. I didn't even know what state I was in. If all the Slayer knew about me was that I was in a Dave's Diner, somewhere in the world, it would never find me.

I ordered the trucker's special from the tired old waitress, eggs and hash browns. I was careful not to speak to the waitress, or to do anything but grunt and point at the menu. I did not try to understand her. She did not die.

And the food helped. I won't say that my prospects started to look any brighter, but my fear was beginning to turn into anger.

I didn't have the faintest notion what to do, though.

There was a public telephone right next to the booth I slid into. It was within arm's reach behind me. Old habits die hard: even though I had money, I reached into the coinbox in search of any lost quarters. Then I noticed the phone number inscribed above the dial. My attention was drawn to it almost against my will. I read the area code and the number.

And the pay phone rang.

I slowly raised my hand and picked up the receiver. I didn't bother to say hello. It knew I was listening.

Its voice was thin and high-pitched, soft and melodic, like the voice of a little girl. “You will serve me. Either you will gather others on whom I may feed or you will yourself be consumed.”

I said nothing.

“Your escape was permitted so that you might learn the ease with which the contamination can be spread; anyone who understands your words and thoughts can be your prey. Some of my servants desire to arrange the affairs of your civilization into patterns more to their liking or to accumulate the objects and signs of esteem valued by your life-configuration. If there are particular individual victims, warlords or princes or merchants, brought into your section of the mind-web which you find useful for such pastimes, I will spare them, provided your activities produce more victims for my use.”

“Arrange affairs of… what do you mean?”

“The time-space manifestation you call Earth and History displays a behavior called civilization. Major sections of this civilization-behavior have been usurped by my servants and they secretly direct many actions of the peoples. This allows them to acquire objects they find valuable, such as shiny metal, or rectangles of paper which symbolize such metals. They also murder or torture their enemies, and enjoy the acquisition of various sexual partners. This fulfils desires they possess, but does not hinder my purposes.”

“What purposes?”

“You have read it in the book-object. Fear is the supreme of passions among the slave-species; fear-energy orients all thought-lines into useful configurations. Pain is magnified, life fails, entropy increases, the psychosphere disintegrates. Those are the purposes.”

“Who–what are you?”

“You will never understand us. You will never apprehend our nature.”

“Us? There's more than one of you?”

“Yes. No. The introduction of an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere to this planetary era has limited the exercise of certain of our manipulators. Conditions will be returned to the prior anaerobic configuration.”

It was incomprehensible. And, suddenly, unexpectedly, I did not feel frightened. Because fear is not the strongest passion. Hope drives out fear.

And I had hope. For the first time, I had hope.

“You sure don't talk like something that understands human beings very well. I don't think you are alive, not what we call alive. And I don't think you understand me at all. Maybe Mr. Hobbes thought I was just a homeless bum, or a nutcase. I sure looked like one, I guess. But I've got an education, and I had a job and a life, once. And I had a wife.”

It said nothing.

“Did I ever tell you about her? We were married on a green hill in a park on Midsummer's Day. She liked reading and taking long walks, no matter the weather. She smiled when it rained and she smiled when it shined. We were going to have kids, but we got a cat in the meantime. She named him Rumpelstiltskin; Rumples for short. She used to make lunches for me, even though she sometimes worked longer hours than I did, and she used to write little notes to me on the napkins she put in the lunchbag. Imagine napkins in a lunchbag! She was very neat and clean. Everything in order and just right. She knew where everything was. I lost everything. After she was gone, I never found anything again. After she was gone, I stopped. The company… I was a demolitions engineer for Guthrie Construction… the company gave me a certain amount of bereavement leave. Time to find my life again. But I couldn't find it. I couldn't find the will to work. I couldn't find the rent money. I lost everything. And do you know what is so funny, Mister alien brain-eating horror? I can't seem to find your thoughts in my head any more. Why is that, do you suppose?”

There was silence on the line.

“The way I figure, creatures like you could not have any families or communities. Or friendship. Or love. Any time you understood each other, that would form a mental link, and you would eat each other's souls. And so you can't understand when I talk about love, and you can't read me when I do.”

The horrible voice spoke again. “We ruled the Earth before green life poisoned the atmosphere with oxygen. We do not die. We shall rule again once life-effects have ceased. Already, human slaves are gathered to aid us in the culmination of this project. You will serve us. You cannot elude or escape us. No one can escape the chains of thought.”

“Yeah. Right. That's what the book said. That's what this voice of yours is saying over the phone. But print can lie and so can voices. But if it actually is true, then put the thought directly into my head so I will know you're telling the truth. Or, better yet, tell me what my plans are now. You can't, can you?”

“You observe that my Simulacrum has drained Mr. Delvecchio in a fashion which does not involve pain or death. You observe that I do not have the behavior-emotion of finding a partner to make a small and weak copy or version of myself, the entities you call babies. From this you draw a conclusion. But your thoughts are unclear or irrelevant. I do not care what your thought is. You will serve me, willingly or unwillingly.”

I hung up on the monster.

My thoughts were clear enough to me. I did not need a gun. I knew the warehouse where Guthrie Engineering, my old firm, kept some of its supplies. I knew the combination to the safe-box where the blasting caps were kept. And every gas station sells gasoline.

And I knew from experience that on one point, the book was not lying.

I still had plenty of money left over as well as change from the bus ticket. I slipped another quarter into the phone, called information, found the number, and dialed.

As the phone rang, I tried to understand. I knew the sort of vicious, hatred-eaten coward who would sell out his own kind to an inhuman monster. I knew because I had been tempted myself. Yes, there was that same viciousness and hatred and cowardice in my own heart. I understood him only too well. And I knew his thought. He would answer the phone and say: “Hello. Hobbes's Rare and Curious Book Shoppe.”

I thought it would take a long time. But the bookshop was on the same side of town as the Guthrie warehouse. It was only a few hours later, nearly dawn, when I heard the Simulacrum's footsteps on the stairs coming down, coming towards me.

I was sitting next to the icebox where the Simulacrum slept, on top of a drum of ammonium nitrate I had circled with blasting caps.

On the other side of me was a pile of the books, fresh from the printer. I had opened the crates with a crowbar and piled all the copies of
De Animus Occisor
into the big pyramid next to me, then drenched the whole affair with gasoline. They were the books he had been planning to send out all over the country.

Wires ran from the deadman switch in my hand to the dynamite placed along the building's structural supports. I had been careful to place the charges to make the building collapse inward. Fortunately, there were alley-spaces to every side, and not much risk of fire spreading.

The air smelled of book-dust and gasoline.

Overhead was a single dim bulb hanging from a fraying thread. The lower stairs were in the circle of the light it gave off. I saw the creature's feet and legs first as it clumped heavily down the steps. Then its body and arms, hidden in the wide trenchcoat. Then its head, hidden beneath the wide-brimmed hat.

I do not know what its sense-perceptions were like. I don't think it knew who was sitting there until I flung the bucket of gasoline at its head. The throw was awkward and one-handed since the deadman switch was in my other hand, but the plastic bucket struck the thing, knocked off its sunglasses, and splashed gasoline all over its coat.

I had been thinking of my wife, of how she had loved me, and daydreaming about what she might have said to me about what I was going to do. I don't think the Soul Slayer could see such thoughts.

But when the Simulacrum straightened up, wiping gasoline off its face, I saw, in the eyeholes of its mask, little swimming points of light, as if many eager worms were shouldered each other aside to gaze out the eye-shaped windows at our world. The wet scarf had fallen to the floor. I could see clusters of spider legs curled around the jawline and earholes, holding the mask in place.

Then I knew fear. And fear was something the Soul Slayer understood.

It did not say: You are a fool. My body is a thousand miles away, buried far under the Earth's crust, in a cavern which still keeps a pocket of this world's long-vanished methane-ammonia atmosphere. What stands before you is a construct, a puppet, nothing more. You cannot burn me. I do not know death.

It did not need to say anything. I felt its contempt as if it were self-contempt. Its hatred for me felt like self-loathing. And I knew it was far away, very far away.

“I know you. There's nothing but hate and fear and more hate in you.” Although it was far away, it was also close. Our minds were in contact.

I knew the Slayer's fear and malice because the only times I got really clear pictures from its brain were when I had been with the cab driver, or in the park; the times when I had been most afraid.

And I knew what caused fear like that. I understood.

“Your life was destroyed, wasn't it?”

No answer.

“You were utterly defeated. Wiped out, along with your world. Or did you guys do that to yourselves?”

Our races are not so unlike. This present world will soon follow. (But was that my thought, or his?)

Then the Soul Slayer spoke aloud. The little-girl voice radiated from the chest of the Simulacrum, not from its spidery throat. “We are far older than you can grasp. The cosmogenic convulsion you call the Big Bang was the discharge of an enemy weapon. The Unendurable Citadel of Yeth was destroyed by Time Wardens of Metachronopolis in order to establish organized and linear time. My masters, the Great Race that made me, lived in the pre-universal condition, when the relations of time and space and mind and distance were not as they are now. Certain elemental energies of the cosmos, under proper applications, can be twisted to recall their old configurations. Telepathy is one such consequence. Mind-absorption abrogates the self-other distinction, which is an innovation unique to this universe. You are telepathic only when you touch my mind. The more you use this power, the more of your thoughts become like mine. You will be absorbed.”