Time's Dark Laughter Part 25

"To be alone. I feel so alone now-it seems only right I should be alone."

"I'm your friend," he ventured.

She ruffled, then settled her feathers. "You . . . give me hope. Also with talk of this clone. My clone would know me, but . . . maybe that would be the same thing as being alone. I already talk to myself."

"It's different, just having another voice answer."

"And it wouldn't hate me, would it? The others all hate me. Because they don't understand me. Everyone is afraid of me. I frighten myself, at times. But you don't hate me, do you."

"No."

"Am / so hateful?" She fluttered off the back of the throne to the floor and stood before him, eye to eye-they were of a height now. She placed her spindly fingers on his cheek.

"No," he whispered, "I don't hate-"

She kissed him, on the mouth. Her full, soft lips pressed his; her long, thin reptilian tongue found his tongue; the cold hardness of her beak nuzzled his cheek.

Pa.s.sively, he opened his mouth wider, allowed her kiss to deepen. His emotions raced wildly from fear to l.u.s.t to complete disequilibrium. He felt her arm feathers ruffle down his back, her chest graze his chest. He looked into her eyes: blackness without end.

He suddenly tensed, became rigid. Her eyes flared. She ripped her talons down his side, cutting his flesh to the rib, then pushed him away.

"/ hate you," she seethed. "Get away from me. Leave me alonel"

Josh backed off, stumbling, bleeding. A flash of lightning exploded through the ceiling and seared the brick. Josh ran from the room.

He ran through the City amidst increasing chaos-fires sprang up from the Earth. The ground itself moaned. The sky seemed to bend.

He ran out of the City and all the way back to camp, where he collapsed in a dead faint.

They couldn't revive him at first. They tried water, words, potions. Jasmine mixed together two solutions from vials hidden in her secret abdominal compartment, and poured the brew down his throat. This brought him around, but he remained largely unresponsive.

He sat huddled by the fire, shivering, staring, mute. Jasmine taped together the borders of his chest wound, but it seemed to cause him no pain. Even when an ember from the campfire sparked out and landed on his leg, he didn't flinch. Jasmine had to brush it away.

She said, "Rose, read his eyes."

Rose sat before him and looked hard into his unblinking, unseeing eyes. She searched the depths of his aqueous and vitreous humors, and beyond, but at the end, she only shook her head, and would say nothing more.

Osi stood beside the whining generator, facing Fleur and Elspeth.

"What is your plan?" The very thought of such a thing made the once proud Vampire weak with excitement, fear, disbelief.

"I've no hopes of saving this city any more. I only want to watch that bird-woman die. Two nights hence. The usurper has announced a banquet for all those who still reside in the City. To honor her," he hissed in disgust, then continued: "My plan is simple. Amidst the flood of stimuli that will be occupying her at the gala, and while you are engaging her with a riveting performance, Elspeth and I will strike. Quickly and from behind. Understood?" Osi nodded, and left Osi stood before the bird-child.

"And when will this a.s.sa.s.sination attempt take place?" she whispered.

"At the banquet. Fleur will strike from behind, with Elspeth, while I am to ... keep you occupied." He wanted to please her with his information-but also, a little, to scare her.

Her feathers ruffled. "And how will you do that?" Her tone was sarcastic.

"He suggested I start an argument." Osi's tone was belligerent, even pouty.

"I suggest you dance."

"Don't be ridiculous." What was left of his haughty racial and personal pride bridled at the suggestion.

"I insist you dance." Her tone was not ridiculous.

"And what is everyone to think?" He would not be made a fool. He would not! Yet, somewhere deep within him, even this public humiliation at her hands was somehow dreadfully seductive and arousing.

"If those who see are coconspirators, they will think you are diverting my attention; if they are not, they will think you a fool."

His teeth bared reflexively. She smiled in mock conciliation. "Ah, poor little tooth," she growled. "Come crawl over here to mother."

His wings flared momentarily, then folded as he fell to his knees. Every fiber of his being was repelled by the scene, yet her will was too strong to resist. He crawled to her.

She watched him with glee, with mastery, with l.u.s.t. She reveled in dominating his spirit, while something visceral within her craved his flesh, quivered at his touch, glistened at the sight of him.

He reached the foot of the throne.

She slid down and sat astride him, her thighs lightly over his shoulders, her eyes closed, her talons in his back, her body steaming in the dark stone room.

There were, perhaps, a hundred creatures left in the City, and all were there: Vampires, Neuromans, Accidents, Cer-beruses, Minotaurs, even Humans. Long tables joined end to end formed a large square, around which everyone sat. The empty s.p.a.ce in the center of the square was for entertainments. It was a night of vile debauchery.

First came the feast itself. When all were seated, the child selected five of the guests to be cannibalized by the others for their meal. Before they could flee, a Cerberus, two Minotaurs, a Human, and a giant Rat were dismembered by Ninjus's guards. Some pieces were thrown into the great fireplace to cook, according to taste; the rest were eaten raw.

For the Vampires, Humans were pa.s.sed around- dragged from Sire to Sire along the surface of the table, like sacks of grain-or, more precisely, bloated, sloshing wineskins, to be sucked on and handed along until empty. When they were dead, dry, and white, the Humans were pushed thoughtlessly to the floor, and others pa.s.sed around. The ah" was filled with groans, shrieks, laughter and weeping, the salty spatter of blood and hilarity.

They twisted themselves further with drugs in quant.i.ty: opium, alcohol, cocaine, ginseng. The decibel level rose higher, the depravities sank lower still. This was the black heart of the City; these were the survivors, those scabrous enough to ride, screaming, at Chaos's flank.

All during the feast, entertainments erupted, mostly spontaneously, in the central clearing. An Accident dragged a swooning Human into the arena, bit a hole in the boy's belly, and performed grotesque s.e.xual acts, even long after the boy had died. A Vampire jumped in, killed the Accident to a chorus of cheers, then cut the dead boy's heart out of his chest and ate it whole. He then called in one of his own harem slaves, whom he mounted from be- hind, while forcing her to stumble around the perimeter of tables, offering her neck to whomever would have her.

Fights broke out here and there around the room. The loser was inevitably set upon by several others, and added to the desserts.

The child was flamboyant. She took and dispensed favors like a heady monarch. She smoked and drank and chewed and sweat. She commanded the foulest of beasts to satisfy her desires; sometimes, at her whim, she would kill them with a stroke.

Osi sat to the child's left, remote and somber. He occasionally sipped from a filigreed cup of blood on the table before him, though he had no real thirst. His thoughts were elsewhere-on his charred hopes, frayed visions, lost loves; the oxidized empire of youth. He was feeling suddenly very aged.

Then he saw Vera. Vera, his last trusted Human, missing for so long now. She entered through a side door, into the frenzy of the banquet. He half-rose to meet her, but she didn't see him; she walked straight over to Ugo, plopped herself lasciviously down into that foul Vampire's lap, and offered her neck in the crudest manner. And in the crudest manner, Ugo took it.

Osi lowered himself back into his seat, shaken from his reverie. This was the end, then. What, after all, was he doing here?

He ordered another drink, stepped into the center of the ring of tables with it, and faced the bird-child-then lifted the goblet to his lips, and drank the mixture of blood, tears, and rum. He handed the brew to the child. She quaffed it, and dropped the gla.s.s to the floor.

Then Osi began to dance.

Slowly he turned, sweeping veils before and behind him in graceful billows. His wings opened and closed, hiding, revealing. The inebriated child watched in fascination as he touched himself, tauntingly, hauntingly, slowly turning, coming closer, holding her rapt. He rolled before her on the floor, came closer still, flexing and extending himself exquisitely before her, rhythmically undulating. Her eyes were fixed to him as he turned, teased, whispered . . .

Silently, Fleur and Elspeth climbed through the hole in the rear wall where the Queen's cables had once exited, ten feet behind the throne. Elspeth carried a short broadsword; Fleur, a knife. With desperate stealth, they approached the back of the throne, where the child sat watching Osi's diverting dance.

A foot away, Elspeth rose, raising her sword high over the bird-child's head. By the time anyone in the audience even saw her, she was bringing the sword down with all her strength.

At that moment, from a secret crawl s.p.a.ce behind the throne, jumped Ninjus. He careened into Elspeth, and the sword crashed down on the throne itself, slicing off half the feathers on the bird-child's right arm. Elspeth was knocked to the floor.

Fleur stabbed at Ninjus, but the security chief easily knocked the knife away, and it clattered loudly along the stone floor in the sudden dense quiet.

Osi froze. The child spun around. Ninjus drew his own sword and, with a single sweep, cut off Elspeth's head: Hemolube gushed in a viscous pool behind the throne. Fleur stared in mute horror at his decapitated coconspira-tor; he offered no resistance as he was seized by two of Ninjus's soldiers, and dragged before the throne. Osi stood a few feet away. The rest of the crowd looked on as Ninjus stepped into the square holding Elspeth's head. The child turned to face them, alert with fear, bright-eyed with anger. The room was tense, quiet. The child looked at Ninjus, with his trophy, then at Fleur, held by the two guards; then at Osi, between them.

"You dance well," she murmured to the Vampire.

"I dance at your command," Osi replied without expression.

"You dance, I think, too well." Her thought pressure was icy cold.

He brought himself up to his full height. "Not well enough, I fear." His voice was barely audible, but his meaning was loud and clear. He wanted no more of such a degraded existence. He wanted the memory of his heritage to be once more a living force within him. He wanted to spread his wings and sing of the Vampire. He wanted out. He suddenly thought of Aba, the beautiful young Vampire who had so captivated him once, speaking of dreams and fears and furtive yearnings. "Go in good blood," he whispered, to the memory of Aba, and to Aba's memory of him.

Suddenly, four Neuromans rushed forward and killed the guards holding Fleur, then carried Fleur to a corner table and surrounded him. The delicate, pink Neuroman stood on the table, towering over everyone. His voice was incongruously fierce with grief and hate: "Join us!" he scrpamed. "Join us if you value what you value. And death to the child!"

On the spot, a pitched battle erupted. Creatures ran in all directions, shouting, swinging weapons, attacking the throne or defending it, depending on where they sensed their futures lay. A ring of guards, led by Ninjus, immediately surrounded the child, protecting her against all onslaught. The out-fighting was led by Ugo in the child's defense, by Fleur for the insurrectionists. For ten minutes, the battle raged. The child only watched, to see who would be her friend.

Osi grappled furiously with Ugo for a minute-rolling across the floor, fangs deeply inbedded in each other's neck-until he was torn away by an unseen combatant, and hurled into a far corner. He sat there a moment, bleeding, panting, watching the melee before him, gathering his strength.

The next moment, Fleur jumped on a table again, and yelled, "Retreat! Follow me!" With that, he jumped down and ran from the room, joined quickly by thirty others, running backward, fighting out the door. Without another thought, Osi stood, opened his wings, and flew out the nearest window into the congealing night.

Fifty defiant beasts-the child's army-were left in the room, along with eleven wounded prisoners, who were gathered roughly into a cl.u.s.ter before the throne. The child stared at them demonically, her eyes sparking, feathers on end, and screeched a long, raucous shriek to the sky: the sky answered with a shrill, gut-wrenching wail of its own: in the next moment, the eleven captive creatures had fused into a single multi-limbed, multi-headed beast-a grotesque thing that could do nothing but snap and snarl in horror at itself while writhing, gnashing, twisting painfully on the floor.

To her minions, the child screamed, "Go, now/ Go, and prepare!"

Their blood was up, their champion a black sorceress without equal. Ninjus and Ugo rallied them around the throne, and they all bowed and swore homage, then rose and left to plan for the castle's defense. For they were the black guard, the honor guard of the black magic, and soon-they could feel it, it was in the air-there would be a new world.

The child sat alone, fuming, electricity sparking around her. The fusocreature contorted in slow agony in a shadowy corner. Outside, it began to snow.

The snow fell slowly, in thick, wet globules over the Book-ery camp. There was no wind, no sound. The people and animals hi the camp kept a tense vigil through the night- yet it was unclear what was awaited.

The blackness was profound. Not even the campfires could thin it: they were like coalescences of light perforating a dense lightlessness; like stars in deep s.p.a.ce. It was hard to walk more than two steps without tripping over or b.u.mping into someone-for it was literally impossible to see anything, even inches away; and the entire camp was huddled together from fear. Only the shrunken fires were visible, sidereal and cold.

Nor did sound penetrate the void that pervaded. Animals spoke or whispered as if in a vacuum. The gentle, distant sussuration of the ocean had vanished with an alarming finality. The very substance of the air seemed dead.

The night lasted a long time.

When morning finally came, an opaque feeling seemed to linger. Everyone's movements were m.u.f.fled, their senses dulled. The sky settled in a hazy film. The wind was like a shallow breath.

There was a brief hailstorm, with stones the size of fists. Once, the earth in the middle distance opened wide, creating a sudden maw, then quickly closed again-all this without a sound, like a silent scream.

Isis never left Joshua's lap. She knew he needed her silent, comforting spirit more than anything else, so she sat, sleeping, mostly; waking only to lick herself clean, or lick his hand, or purr as he stroked her without knowing he did, aware only vaguely of her watchful presence.

There he sat, straining to settle the wavering twists of Time he had glimpsed in the child's eye; there he sat, praying to the Word she didn't call him again.

Until sometime later, that long and lateless night, when he was called again.

He walked stoically into the darkness of the City. Rocks burned all around, as did the river itself, but shed no light. Into the castle he stumbled, and into the bird-child's lair. He stepped around the multibeast still writhing fitfully on the floor, and stood before the child.

Feathers covered most of her body now. Her tail was long, scaled; her eyes black ruby lights. She was six feet tall.

He felt all her thoughts as she spoke, now, like a low hum: "Father, why have you created me?"

He couldn't find a way to answer the question. "It was the Queen. The Queen and I, we . . ."

"Father, why have you created me like this, the way I amT "It wasn't planned, you just . . ."

"Why me? Why what I know?"

Josh felt his heart begin to beat like a drum. "What do you know?" he whispered over a dry tongue.

"/ know . . . all. No. Not all. I am opaque to myself. Except for this pitiable knot of stuff who speaks to you now, I know the universe."

"What do you know?"

"Energy, s.p.a.ce, Time, it all flows through my hands- only my own self is blind to my eye, numb to my touch. This will all end, as it always has-but my own end I can- not see. It confuses me, this blindness. How shall I proceed? I am the key, but I feel so sad, Father. I don't know what to do. Why am I this way? What is the meaning?"

"What do you mean, this will all end as it always has?"

"Not always. That is, it is always different. Yet always the same. My name is different, the circ.u.mstances unfamiliar, yet unmistakable. The process is unstoppable, it is all process, we are all process. My name in this process is Krisna. Or perhaps it is Jahweh, as it once was. Process and precess."

"I don't understand."

"What does it mean?" she insisted harshly.

"Nothing means anything," he a.s.sured her. "Except friends. Only friends mean anything." This he knew.

"Only the cycles mean anything. The Universe expands, the universe contracts. Contracts into a ball the size of . . . the universe. And then expands again, with its showers of energy and twisted insp.i.s.sations of light that interact with one another to form you and me all over again and again and again. Until we dissolve once more into the ether, leaving only the shadow of radiation that is our echo, our background noise, like a ghost image marking the event that was you, the process that was me. And I am the process; but a process cannot know itself, so I know myself not, not my present or my future. Expand, contract, form, unform, light, void. I am the neck of the hourgla.s.s. I begin, I end, I return to beginning, I begin again. At the end of the night of Time, all things return to my nature; and when the new day of Time begins, I bring them again into light. I bring forth all creation, and this rolls around in the circles of Time. Thus the revolutions of the world."

Josh was transfixed. He only vaguely understood what she was saying, yet it gripped his attention like a fist.

"Come look into my eyes," she continued, "/ will show you all; come, you can see the fulcrum of Time."

He walked closer, as if hypnotized, stood touching her, his face inches from hers, now centimeters, only millimeters away. Now he stared into the infinite black fire of her eyes.

"All things end and start here." He heard her voice as an omnipresence. "/ am destroyer and creator, I am the fire and the phoenix; join me, come into me, come. Tell me what you see, for I see myself not."

He felt himself begin to fall Into her eyes. Slowly at first, he floated; then deeper and deeper into the singularity, like an asteroid that first feels the tug and tingle of a star's gravitation, he fell.

"As the axis of the Earth slowly changes direction in timely precession, describing its own inexorable circles in s.p.a.ce, so does the axis of the galaxy precess. And so, even, does the axis of the universe wobble in nutant, stately revolution. These are the great precessions, precessions of spa-cial axes over the course of Time, precessions of s.p.a.ce, over Time; of s.p.a.ce, in Time. But behold now, creator, the precession of Time, in s.p.a.ce."

Josh was tumbling now, sinking into the vortex of her eyes. He felt himself fusing into her being, pa.s.sing through the bounds of her substance to meld with the energy being funneled through the knot hi the fabric of the ether that was the child.

"The precession of Time nears its full cycle, now, to begin again at its beginning, to start the precession anew, to circle yet again, and again. We are at the node. And each time we pa.s.s this node, you will appear again, and your friends and their friends, and they will think, sometimes, that they knew you in a different place, a previous life, but they will be wrong-they knew you in this same place, during the last precession of the axis of Time. And every time, I will appear again, to instruct you, to mark the end of the cycle. And until you can see the way to stop it, or alter it, we will each time begin the cycle anew. Thus is the comely precession of Time in s.p.a.ce preserved."

He was vertiginous within her, gasping in the maelstrom of her eyes. He was one with her now, part of her radiant field, his electromagnetic waves like fingers laced in her waves. He whirled, he swam . . . and then, reaching out, caught himself on the lip of his sanity, on the edge of her eyes; and b.l.o.o.d.ying his fingers on this ragged edge, pulled himself out-pulled himself out and crawled across the floor, crawled away from the child; crawled, b.l.o.o.d.y and crying and shaking. Crawled out the door and didn't look back.