Gojiro (25 page)

A Beam

T
HE FLUX TOOK HIM, SENT HIM.
His eyes went blind; only the parietal saw light—light of day, then night. But not the next night, or the next day. It was yesterday’s sun that set and reset, with hastening repetition, yesterday’s and the one before that. Hands of clocks whipped around backward, faster and faster, the counter-flying friction melting their faces. Pages of calendars uncrumpled inside wastepaper baskets, sailed across rooms, refastened to walls. Every Sunday became a Saturday, each November an October, 1955 turned to 1954, then ’53—a hundred years of backflashing montage.

“Whoa!” Gojiro screamed, but the flow kept on. Outside the parietal window, the history’s half gainer withdrew its savage splash, swooped upward, landed its merciless feet once more upon the platform of malign design. Every army marched in retreat, cavalries choked on their own dust, ships of conquerers denavigated, returned to port, were dismantled board by board. Romans disappeared, followed by Greeks, and a hundred hairy tribes beat back to caves, their fires fading to black.

No landscape or life form was untouched. Butterflies became caterpillars, frogs lost legs, turned back to tadpoles. Those that spent a million generations inching from the muck so they might walk on land now regressed, slipped back into the swamp, submerged beneath their own bubbles. Ice fanned down from poles, froze solid, melted to vast pools, froze, advanced again. Old mountains, weathered and rolling, gathered themselves up, shot jagged and virile into the skies, then fell off the map altogether.

“On some crazy rewind here,” the reptile yelled, his panicked shouts fading in the whooshwake, each syllable left a hundred years behind the next. It was like being inside an endless, retrorunning pneumatic tube. Eras whizzed by, too quick to see; ages were swishpans. It was insane! Wasn’t forward motion the Big Wheel of the Universe? What could drive him against that most immutable grain?

It hurt, too. Blasted face-first into the teeth of the tide, the monster felt his snout contort, his leathers smoke. He looked down, was aghast. First he had scales, then not so many scales. His tongue forked and reforked. No configuration lasted very long. Four toes! No, three! Two! “Going Gumby here!”

Then, all of a sudden, he felt himself slow down. Out of the distorting warp came faces. Zards! A million zards, maybe more. A forever flipbook of zards. Lavarock! Was the strange force nothing but another wooly detour into the same old recurring dream? The monster couldn’t say; all he knew was that he was the youngest zardplebe once more, basked out amongst the great carpet of his fellows upon the Precious Pumice. But it wasn’t just an ordinary day in the seemingly timeless sweep of the Bunch’s realm. The buzzy telepathies calling assembly denoted that. The youngest zardplebe looked up, saw the grizzled hisshonkers—Initiates all—begin to gather. Immediately he knew why. It was Ritual of the Molt—gala among galas, the most sacred day on the herpic calendar. For weeks Initiates would ready themselves for the ceremony, speaking in hushed tones of magic words like “renewal” and “reconnection.” A particularly elderly fullgrown, the wisest of the wise, described what would take place: “Together we whirl, from the First Moment to the Last, from then to now, and when it’s done, we’re ourselves again—One.” As for what actually happened during the mystic moment—no more than an imperceptible split second—the youngest zardplebe never knew. The Ritual of the Molt was closed to those who had not yet immersed themselves in the Black Spot.

To Komodo, the Ritual of the Molt seemed central to the Reprimordialization process. “Based as it is on the shedding of old skin and the celebration of the new, the ritual affirms the eternal cycle,” the thoughtful Japanese observed. “Yet what is the medium by which the group collectively whirls ‘from the First Moment to the Last’? Could it not be the Beam?”

Once Gojiro scoffed at this notion. But now, swept up in this coercing pneumatic force, Komodo’s words took on a new resonance.
Beam.
The word seared through Gojiro’s brain. Could that be the source of this insane backdriving energy . . .
a Beam?

Not that there was time to consider this incredible possibility. Because right then, water filled his mouth. He was swimming—swimming for his life. But swimming backward—away from Lavarock! Back across the sea. “Wait! Wrong way!” With every fevered stroke his Hallowed Homelands grew smaller on the retreating horizon until they disappeared altogether. Then the sea itself was gone, and he was back inside that roaring retrogressing tunnel.

Until: bump. Like being thrown out of a truck. “Owww.”

When he opened his eyes he saw an immense jungle. Even at his zardplebe dimensions, he knew this place was gigantic. Crenelated swirls of elephant-eared leaves fanned out twenty feet or more. Moss-draped cypresses rocketed upward to a canopy so thick no sky could be seen. Branches heaved under the weight of swelling, redbellied fruits. How lush this world was, how imposing. There was nothing in Radioactive Island’s hysterical thicket to match this majesty. Ah, the monster marveled, instantly drunk—finally a country pitched at a proper scale! Beam or no Beam, that strange flux had snatched him from the hellish White Light Chamber, checked his bags straight through to
EDEN
.

That was when the ground began to shake. Something vast and terrible was crashing through the primeval, smashing flat the undergrowth, crushing boulders like candyrocks. It was coming closer. Closer. The lizard took a deep breath, watched the forest fall away above him. Then he saw him: a Rex. A T-Rex! Gojiro’s jaw hung slack.

It was a dirty secret, the monster knew, a chauvinistic fleck on his otherwise impeccable Anti-Speciesist politics, but he’d never been able to reconcile saurs within the egalitarianism of the Evolloo. To him, saurs had always been
different
—another class, unclassifiable—a presence too grand to be hemmed by even the infinite boundaries of the Magnificent Matrix. The saurs were rulers. Masters, Doms. True Doms.

It was pathetic, Gojiro would remonstrate, the way sapiens pretended to the exclusivity of the Sauric summit. Them—Doms? What a laugh. It was one thing to Attila over everything, smash it flat, squeeze it dry, and another to
rule
. No saur was ever up in the morning and out to school, taking care of business, working overtime. Saurs were Titans, kings, gods. Maybe books say they once ranged across every continent, but Gojiro had difficulty accepting that the great beasts had ever sullied their claw bottoms with the same wretched terra firma over which sapiens now claimed to lord. Full of bluster, he’d charge that when it came to saurs, paleontology was nothing but a hoax. “Ever wonder why UFOs don’t leave hardware?” he’d badger Komodo. “It’s because they know some dumb Okie just gonna pick it up along the highway, nail it to his garage wall alongside the plates off his dead Plymouth. It’s the same with saurs. Why should a God leave a mandible for some museum clod to fit into his tinkertoy vision of times gone by? Fossils! I sneer at fossils!”

This didn’t mean there was no relationship between the sauric and sapien crews. That was clear enough in the way children loved their dinos, took the stuffed effigies to bed. It made sense that younger humanoids, more in touch with the most primal levels of their cameral mentalities, would retain true love for that most transcendent element of their own nature. When they got older, though, watch out. Grown-ups—vicious, insecure—spared no propaganda in their endless effort to demean the so-called Terrible Lizards. Slow-witted, lumber-footed, brains the size of a walnut—was there any misinformation the temporary arbitrators of reality hadn’t spread?

Gojiro looked up at the snarling, gleamtoothed T-Rex, felt his pulse race. Could there ever be a creature more magnificent than this? A more perfect predator? So often, morphologically dim reviewers likened the diffident star of the King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms movies to a T-Rex. Fools! Imbeciles! There was no way the regal beast now towering above that great jungle could be crammed within the deprecating confines of a movie screen. The thought came to Gojiro that he should run, hide. But he dismissed it. If that backscanning energy was a Beam and it brought him to this place for no other reason than to be served up as a tiny hors d’oeuvre upon this master’s table, the monster had no kick. It would be an honor to be torn asunder by those magisterial claws. The monster looked up in tribute; if he had a hat, he would have taken it off.

But right then, Gojiro saw the twinge, that crimp of confusion across the sheen of the beast’s unchallenged ascendency. It was awful to watch, like a cut across the eye, a dirty print in fresh snow. Something was happening to that T-Rex, something the saur could never guess. How could he? Until that instant he’d been invincible, the most ultimate of weapons. By what means was he to respond to that stab of doubt, much less deal with the dambreak of fright that followed it?

Gojiro, of course, knew the sensation only too well. “Oh, no!” But there was nothing to do, nothing to say. The Rex twitched once more, staggered a moment, fell out of the frame.

Then came the holocaust. Hadros, spinos, a thousand birdy dromis, spunky parkies, bonehead pachycephals, saurs of every kind, pantheon members all, stumbled through the near impenetrable haze, gasping as if the air itself was poison, then tottered, thumped down. “They’re dying! The gods are dying!” the monster screamed out. The worst of nightmares: paradise crumbling, descending in flames. The ground shook. Towering treetrunks splintered like so many arthritic femurs, bushes curled and shriveled, the jungle’s shielding canopy slid away to reveal a sky not unlike Bayonne’s own. Crevasses ruptured the land, opening hideous gullies running for miles, mass graves for the thundering herd.

“It’s the End! Death’s knell!” the monster shouted out. He felt he should plunge into one of those voracious chasms, that if the mighty saurs should succumb, certainly he had no business living. But he couldn’t make himself. Something made him go on. Forced him on, toward the steaming hillside looming before him. Up and up he went, over the ruined hulks of allosauruses, across fields of heaving, doomed ultras. Then, at the top of the hill, he could look down to the other side. “Oh, wow!”

Even through the consuming murk he knew these hills, that sky. “The Encrucijada!” But it wasn’t the same Valley he’d just left, not the Heater’s birthplace, that stark, moribund place where Joseph Prometheus Brooks stood and stared. It was rockier, raw and seething. And, somehow, the monster knew there was no choice for him but to cross that terrible bowl, to pass the falling bodies of former kings, to traverse extinction itself. His course was set, immutable.

“Death behind, her ahead.” The message blazoned unconditional in his head, driving him on.
The pheromone!
Here, as he journeyed, no bigger than a zardplebe, across a world’s killing fields, the pheromone had returned to him.

“
Wrong!
” He screamed out the mistake, tried to explain that he’d treaded this exact path before, through this same redrimmed Valley, that it had led only to disaster. To that horrible whirlpool and Kishi’s death. “No! This is not for me!” But the pheromone wouldn’t listen. It kept pushing, as if the whole force of the Evolloo were behind it.

Then, up ahead, in the center of the Valley, he saw a figure, blurry, too far ahead to make out . . . “No!” he screamed again.

But it didn’t matter, because then, as if some unseen, all-powerful hand had reached down and plucked him from his path, the monster was lurched backward once more.

The trip wasn’t long. A local hop, less, even. But there was a finality about it. This, he understood, would be the last stop. Like the sidewalk springs up on the absentminded jumper, he saw a wall ahead, knew there would be no dodging. He girded for the splat, but it never came. Instead, a viscousness enveloped him, a warmness, wetness. He found himself in a very small, completely curved room, enclosed in a diaphanous darkness. He expected death, a final crush, but it wasn’t that at all. He felt safe. Safe and new.

All he heard was the steadiest of rhythms. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Gojiro thought he could listen to that sound forever. It was like nothing he ever knew, being in that dark, feeling the generous dampness about him, listening to that beat. That . . . heartbeat. The beat of the purest heart!

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Is it possible that the womb is so safe and sure that no child would ever want to leave it, and, to make certain the world continued, the Evolloo felt the need to invent some measure to make that most perfect place somewhat less than perfect? Gojiro would say yes. He would say that once one hears that beat and realizes what it is, whom it belongs to, that perfect place becomes a prison. Because in there, the child cannot see the mother’s face.

“Mom!” It was absurd, biologically impossible. How could that thump come from his mother’s heart? The maternal zard lays eggs in a burrow, moves on. It’s the Law, an affirmation of the all-succoring power of the Line. For a zard, to be secure within the bosom of the Bunch—that’s mothering enough. Yet what was that sound?

Thump. Thump. Thump.

“Mom!” The audacity of dreams!

He used his special hooking tooth, the one included with his morphological set-up for this task and this alone. He slashed through the leathery shell, nudged a nose out, triggered his fresh-issued claws to dig up through the sand.

“Mom!” Four to six inches—that’s how much ground the schedule said he had to get through before he hit the surface. It’s all right there, spelled out in the program: the proportion of how deep a zard’s eggs have to be buried so as to afford the freshouts protection against sniffing mammalians while not be so deep as to exceed a newborn’s strength to burrow up.

“Mom!” Four to six inches? He’d already gone eight and still it was dark as night. He thought he couldn’t make it, that his new-issued body had used up all its energy, that he’d suffocate before he ever saw the light of day.
Before he saw her face!

“Mom!” She’d dug her eggs too deep! How could she make a mistake like that?
His
mother? “Mom!” His limbs were too heavy, he couldn’t make it. He was sinking down. Dirt filled his mouth. Birth and burial—all before dawn!