The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (57 page)

Yod does a convincing job of looking confused, then
idly introspective. Then he turns his head skyward with a curious
expression on his face—I know they’re all just condescension for us
simpler creatures—and his lips curl into an amused grin.

“That’s interesting,” he mutters as if he means
whatever’s got his attention is a lot more than just interesting.
Then he looks at me, and gives me a sad little sigh, like he’s
sorry about something.

“I apologize,” he says like a parent to a child. “But
this will be rather uncomfortable. And disorienting.”

He begins to dissolve into light. I’ve seen him do
this before, shimmering, sparkling, as if every nanite in his
avatar individually turns into pure white light, until he loses
substance and winks out of existence. (Is it theatrical? Or is he
really systematically converting himself into energy, or at least
his sub-atomic nature?) And I’m about to very foolishly ask him
what
is going to be uncomfortable and disorienting when my
fingertips catch fire.

Not fire. They blaze with electricity. Energy. I see
them turn to light, just like Yod did, cell-by-cell. The light
works its way up my fingers, my hands, my arms. I can’t move, can’t
make a sound. I can only watch myself come apart. I look down, see
it happening to my torso, my legs. I am a man of paper in a blast
furnace.

I hear Star scream my name. Lyra is staring at what’s
happening to me, wide-eyed in terror. But then she’s gone in the
light, everything gone in the light, everything becomes light…

White.

The light has faded, dulled, but it’s left the world
washed away, a matte white surface, like a plain of ice seen from a
great height. But it isn’t. I realize I’m only a few meters from
it, realize it’s almost perfectly flat. I dully remember an
atrocity in a museum of modern art, where someone painted a massive
canvas all one color, gave it a pretentious name and reason for
being, and put a several million dollar price tag on it. It looked
exactly like a painted wall.

I’m looking at a painted wall.

No. A
ceiling
. Textured.

I dumbly track the edges of its rectangle, then the
walls that support it. I’m in a room, about the size of a large
bedroom. The walls are as plain as the ceiling, only sparsely
decorated with simple art. There’s a large mirror, a set of
dark-wood furnishings, a large entertainment screen. One wall is
broken by a shadowy corridor that I expect leads out of here. The
opposite wall is dominated by dull white slat blinds that glow with
muted daylight, which is the only source of illumination as the
light fixtures aren’t turned on.

I’m lying on my back on a large bed, on top of a deep
red comforter. It’s very soft. The pain—the electric agony of
disintegration—is completely gone, leaving only a vague tingle.

I raise my hands up to look. My gloves are gone. So
is my armor. I’m wearing…

I have to look down to make sense of it. That’s when
I realize my head feels unusually heavy. So do my arms.

I’m wearing a kind of business dress suit, made of a
charcoal metallic fabric. Underneath it is a dress shirt in black,
and on my sternum rests the tongue of a steel gray necktie, as if
dropped there by afterthought. On my feet are shiny black dress
boots.

What the fuck?

“Yod?” I call out, immediately regretting it, like
I’m playing into his latest practical joke at my expense. But this
doesn’t feel like one of his illusions. It’s too mundane, too
consistent, in that way that would tell me I’m awake, that I would
never be aware of in dreaming.

I sit up. It takes a lot more effort than it should,
and my butt sinks into the plush mattress.

The air is thick and rich and smells of perfumed
cleaning chemicals .

I roll to the edge of the bed and get my boots on the
floor, which is covered by an industrial-short carpet that matches
the bed spread. I feel so heavy…

“Yod!”

I seem to be alone. And I have no weapons that I can
see. Just the ridiculous formalwear.

It takes more effort than I expect to stand—I
am
heavier than I should be. I consider searching the room,
trying one of the two solid doors in the short adjoining corridor
(I expect one leads to a bathroom), as if this is all some kind of
puzzle to solve, a challenge.

But I decide to go to the window. I find a simple
pull that opens the blinds. The light gets brighter in my face like
it’s trying to slap me backwards.
Sunlight
, and much
brighter than I’m used to.

The first thing I see when I
can
see is the
pale blue sky. Then the skyline. Buildings. Skyscrapers. As far as
the eye can see.

Through the double-pane glass, I hear the familiar
sounds of traffic, of people, like a ghost out of memory.
Everything a ghost out of memory. Of before I came to Mars. Of…

No.

It can’t… He
didn’t
…

No no no
no
, you fucker. No!

But I’m here. I’m
here
. This is real.

I’m on Earth.

Author’s Afterward:

An amusing piece of trivia: The book you have just
read is an updated (and hopefully much improved) rewrite of the
very first novel set in this world that I ever wrote, way back in
1981.

I’d
originally outlined the endless serial with a cast of thousands in
the world of a partially-terraformed Valles Marineris that is
now
The God
Mars
way back
when I was in high school. I committed a very few stories to paper
(one prequel having won some encouraging awards), then decided
shortly after graduation—adrift in my first year of college—to
write a novel.

For a
number of reasons that only made sense at the time, I decided to
pull an extreme George Lucas and write a saga that was well at the
end of the series, rather than the beginning. The questionable
result was
Valhalla I Am Coming
(
VIAC
for
short), banged out on an old-school electric typewriter (a treasure
at the time—I think I paid $60 for it in 1970's money), and
coincidentally finished at midnight on the day some
then-semi-famous apocalypse predictor insisted would be the last
day of the world.

Now here I am, 34
years later, having written that novel again, in its proper place,
in harmony with the established canon.

Inspired in
more ways than one by “Apocalypse Now” and other dark Vietnam
flicks of that era,
VIAC 1981
was
a dark brooding (sulking, really) war Odyssey; hopeless, brutal and
generally miserable. (And y’all though
Grayman
was dark.) I thought it was a masterpiece at the
time, the best thing I’d ever written ever. What it really is, is a
good lesson in why you should never attempt to write an entire
novel tanked on tequila.

If you've seen “Apocalypse
Now,” recall the “unscripted” scene toward the beginning where
Martin Sheen is blasted out of his skull and losing his mind in his
hotel room to the music of The Doors. That was basically my entire
writing process from start to finish. Except I was listening to Led
Zeppelin. (Hence the title.)

Thanks to trying to sum up
at least several novels worth of backstory and mythology, it made
absolutely no sense at all. The prose was beyond purple into
ultraviolet. And for some reason I ended almost every sentence (and
partial sentence) with an ellipsis... There were certainly good
ideas... but... the execution was... a whole new level of horror...
the horror...

And here we are again.
Really wasn’t sure I’d get this far.

This was
also the
last
planned
God
Mars
story, all
done, moving on. But fan requests and the inspiration of my
creative team (also known as my daughter Katherine and son
Christopher) have got me committed to a few more. We have more
stories to tell in this world. (And that frustrating double
cliffhanger to resolve ASAP—sorry about that. I am a bastard.)
So:

To be continued in
Book Seven: Earthside
.

I’d also like to take the words to thank said
creative team: Katherine is my artistic director. Christopher is my
science and technology consultant. And both are brutal critics of
plot and character motivation. Thanks to their input, for just one
example, you didn’t have to suffer through another lame zombie
battle there at the end. (The modular tentacle bot design was all
Christopher’s, and they both whipped up truly macabre concept art
for that scene.) Can’t wait to see what they help me spin next.

About the Author:

Michael Rizzo is an artist (yes, those god-awful
covers are his), martial artist, collector (and frequent user) of
fine weaponry, and a pretty good cook. He continues his long,
varied and brutal career on the mental health and social services
battlefield, trying to do good work while writing about very bad
things.

He is also the author of the
Grayman
series,
which features Mike Ram and other characters from this series in
their much younger days.

He causes trouble in person mostly in the Pacific
Northwest.

For updates and original art, visit Michael on
Facebook.com
, and see the Facebook page for
“
The
God Mars Series
”.

Discover other books by Michael Rizzo at
smashwords.com