Tony Daniel Read online

  They were so alive and intense that it hurt to look at him. Filmbuff’s physical face vibrated when he was in trance. It was a slight effect, and unnerving even when you were used to it. He was utterly focused, but you couldn’t focus on him. There was too much of him there for the space provided. Or not enough of you.

  I am watching chronological quantum transport in the raw, Andre thought. The instantaneous integration of gravitonic spin information from up-time sifted through the archetypal registers of Filmbuff’s human brain.

  And it all comes out as metaphor.

  “The Tree is burnt out now,” Filmbuff said, speaking out of his trance. His words were like stones. “The Burning’s done. But it isn’t char that I’m seeing, no.” He clenched his fists, then opened his palms again. “The old Tree is a shadow. The burnt remains of the Greentree are really only the shadow of the other tree, the new Tree. It’s like a shadow the new Tree casts.”

  “Shadow,” Andre heard himself whispering. His own hands were clenched in a kind of sympathetic vibration with Filmbuff.

  “We are living in the time of the shadow. The dying past,” said Filmbuff. He relaxed a bit. “There’s almost a perfect juxtaposition of the two trees. I’ve never felt so sure of anything in my life. A new Tree is coming.”

  Filmbuff, for all his histrionics, was not one to overstate his visions for effect. The man who sat across from Andre was only the aspect—the human portion—of a vast collective of personalities. They were all unified by the central being; the man before him was no more a puppet than was his enthalpic computing analog soaking up energy on Mercury, or the nodes of specialized grist spread across human space decoding variations in antigraviton spins as they made their way backward in time. Filmbuff was no longer simply the man who had taught Andre’s Intro to Pastoral Shamanism course at seminary. Ten years ago, the Greentree Way had specifically crafted a large array of personalities to catch a glimpse of the future, and Filmbuff had been assigned to be morphed into that specialized version of a LAP.

  I was on the team that designed him, Andre thought. Of course, that was back when I was a graduate assistant. Before I Walked on the Moon.

  “The vision is what’s real.” Filmbuff put the lhasi straw to his mouth and finished the rest of it. Andre wondered where the liquid went inside the man. Didn’t he run on batteries or something? “This is maya, Andre.”

  “I believe you, Morton.”

  “I talked to Erasmus Kelly about this,” Filmbuff continued. “He took it on the merci to our Interpreter’s Freespace.”

  “What did they come up with?”

  Filmbuff pushed his empty glass toward Andre. “That there’s a new Tree,” he said.

  “How the hell could there be a new Tree? The Tree is wired into our DNA like sex and breathing. It may be sex and breathing.”

  “How should I know? There’s a new Tree.”

  Andre took a sip of his tea. Just right. “So there’s a new Tree,” he said. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “We think it has to do with your research.”

  “What research? I balance rocks.”

  “From before.”

  “Before I lost my faith and became a priest on Triton?”

  “You were doing brilliant work at the seminary.”

  “What? With the time towers? That was a dead end.”

  “You understand them better than anyone.”

  “Because I don’t try to make any sense of them. They are a dead end, epistemologically speaking. Do you think this new Tree has to do with those things?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You doubt everything.”

  “The time towers are a bunch of crotchety old LAPs who have disappeared up their own asses.”

  “Andre, you know what I am.”

  “You’re my boss.”

  “Beside that.”

  “You’re a manifold. You are a Large Array of Personalities who was especially constructed as a quantum event detector—probably the best in human history. Parts of you stretch across the entire inner solar system, and you have cloudship outriders. If you say you had a vision of me and this new Tree, then it has to mean something. You’re not making it up. Morton, you see into the future, and there I am.”

  “There you are. You are the Way’s expert on time. What do you think this means.”

  “What do you want me to tell you? That the new Tree is obviously a further stage in sentient evolution, since the Greentree is us.”

  “That’s what Erasmus Kelly and his people think. I need something more subtle from you.”

  “All right. It isn’t the time towers that this has to do with.”

  “What then?”

  “You don’t want to hear this.”

  “You’d better tell me anyway.”

  “Thaddeus Kaye.”

  “Thaddeus Kaye is dead. He killed himself. Something was wrong with him, poor slob.”

  “I know you big LAPs like to think so.”

  “He was perverted. He killed himself over a woman, wasn’t it?”

  “Come on, Morton. A pervert hurts other people. Kaye hurt himself.”

  “What does he have to do with anything, anyway?”

  “He’s not dead. He’s just wounded and lost.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because Thaddeus Kaye cannot die,” Andre said flatly.

  “That’s absurd.”

  “You understand what kind of being he is, don’t you, Morton?”

  “He’s a LAP, just like me.”

  “You only see the future, Morton. Thaddeus Kaye can affect the future directly, from the past.”

  “So what? We all do that every day of our lives.”

  “This is not the same. Instantaneous control of instants. What the Merced quantum effect does for space, Thaddeus Kaye can do for time. He prefigures the future. Backward and forward in time. He is written on it, and the future is written into him. He’s like a rock that has been dropped into a lake.”

  “Are you saying he’s God?”

  “No. But if your vision is a true one, and I know that it is, then he could very well be the coming war.”

  “Do you mean the reason for the war?”

  “Yes, but more than that. Think of it as a wave, Morton. If there’s a crest, there has to be a trough. Thaddeus Kaye is the crest, and the war is the trough. He’s something like a physical principle. That’s how his integration process was designed. Not a force, exactly, but he’s been imprinted on a property of time.”

  “The Future Principle?”

  “All right. Yes. In a way, he is the future. He’s still alive.”

  “And you’re sure of that?”

  “I wasn’t—not entirely—until you told me your vision just now. What else could it be? Unless aliens are coming.”

  “Maybe aliens are coming. They’d have their own Tree. Possibly.”

  “Morton, be realistic. Do you see anything that could be interpreted as aliens coming in your dreams?”

  “No.”

  “Well then.”

  Filmbuff put his hands over his eyes and lowered his head. “I’ll tell you what I still see,” he said in a low rumble of a voice like far thunder. “I see the burning Greentree. I see it strung with a million bodies, each of them hung by the neck, and all of them burning, too. Until this vision, that was all I was seeing.”

  “Did you see any way to avoid it?”

  Filmbuff looked up. His eyes were as white as his hands when he spoke. “Once. Not now. The quantum fluctuations have all collapsed down to one big macro reality. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.”

  Andre sighed. I believe, he thought. I don’t want to believe, but I do. It’s easy to have faith in destruction.


  “I just want to go back to Triton and balance rocks,” he said. “That’s really all that keeps me sane. I love that cold moon.”

  Filmbuff pushed his lhasi glass even farther away and slid out of the booth. He stood up with a creaking sound, like vinyl being stretched. “Interesting times,” he spoke to the café. “Illusion or not, that was probably the last good lhasi I’m going to have for quite a while.”

  “Uh, Morton?”

  “Yes, Father Andre?”

  “You have to pay up front. They can’t take it out of your account.”

  “Oh my.” The cardinal reached down and slapped the black cloth covering his white legs. He, of course, had no pockets. “I don’t think I have any money with me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Andre said. “I’ll pick it up.”

  “Would you? I’d hate to have that poor waiter running after me down the street.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “We’ll talk more tomorrow after meditation.” This was not a request.

  “We’ll talk more then.”

  “Good night, Andre.”

  “Night, Morton.”

  Filmbuff stalked away, his silver mane trailing behind him as if a wind were blowing through it. Or a solar flare.

  Before he left the Westway, he turned, as Andre knew he would, and spoke one last question across the space of the diner.

  “You knew Thaddeus Kaye, didn’t you, Father Andre?”

  “I knew a man named Ben Kaye. A long time ago,” Andre said, but this was only confirmation of what Filmbuff’s spread-out mind had already told him. “He was one of my best friends. E-years before he became Thaddeus.”

  The door slid shut, and the Cardinal left into the night. Andre sipped at his tea.

  Eventually the waiter returned. “We close pretty soon,” he said.

  “Why do you close so early?” Andre asked.

  “It is very late.”

  “I remember when this place did not close.”

  “I don’t think so. It always closed.”

  “Not when I was a student at the seminary.”

  “It closed then,” said the waiter. He took a rag from his apron, activated it with a twist, and began to wipe a nearby table.

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

  “They tell me there’s never been a time when this place didn’t close.”

  “Who tells you?”

  “People.”

  “And you believe them.”

  “Why should I believe you? You’re people.” The waiter looked up at Andre, puzzled. “That was a joke,” he said. “I guess it does not translate.”

  “Bring me some more tea, and then I will go.”

  The waiter nodded, then went to get it.

  There was music somewhere. Gentle oboe strains. Oh, yes. His convert was still playing the hymn.

  [What do you think?]

  [I think we are going on a quest.]

  [I suppose so.]

  [Do you know where Thaddeus Kaye is?] asked the convert. Of course, it knew the answer already. That was the problem with talking to yourself.

  [I have a pretty good idea how to find Ben. And wherever Ben is, Thaddeus Kaye has to be.]

  [Why not tell somebody else how to find him?]

  [Because no one else will do what I do when I find him.]

  [What’s that?]

  [Nothing.]

  [Oh.]

  [When the backup is done, we’ll be on our way.]

  Having himself backed up was mainly what this retreat was for, since using the Greentree data facilities was free to priests. Doing it on Triton would have cost as much as putting a new roof on his house. At least, this was the reason he’d given his congregation back on Triton. The only person he’d told the truth to about his doubts and his incipient apostasy was his friend Roger Sherman. That old crow of an army colonel had become Andre’s unofficial confessor the past couple of e-years.

  [Why don’t they send someone who is stronger in faith than we are?] the convert said.

  [I don’t know. Send an apostate to net an apostate, I guess.]

  [What god is Thaddeus Kaye apostate from?]

  [Himself.]

  [And for that matter, what about us?]

  [You ask too many questions. Here comes the tea. Will you play that song again?]

  [It was Mother’s favorite,] said Andre’s convert.

  [Do you think it could be that simple? That I became a priest because of that hymn?]

  [Are you asking me?]

  [Just play the music and let me drink my tea. I think the waiter wants us out of here.]

  “Do you mind if I mop up around you?” the waiter said.

  “I’ll be done soon.”

  “Take your time, as long as you don’t mind me working.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Andre listened to mournful oboe and watched as the waiter sloshed water across the infinite universe, then took a mop to it with a vengeance.

  Jill

  Down in the dark there’s a doe rat I’m after to kill. She’s got thirteen babies, and I’m going to bite them, bite them, bite them. I will bite them.

  The mulch here smells of dank stupid rats all running running and there’s nowhere farther to run, because this is it, this is the Carbuncle, and now I’m here and this is truly the end of all of it but a rat can’t stand to know that and won’t accept me until they have to believe me. Now they will believe me.

  My whiskers against something soft. Old food? No, it’s a dead buck; I scent his Y code, and the body is dead but the code keeps thumping and thumping. This mulch won’t let it drain out, and it doesn’t ever want to die. The Carbuncle’s the end of the line, but this code doesn’t know it or knows it and won’t have it. I give it a poke and a bit of rot sticks to my nose and the grist tries to swarm me, but no I don’t think so.

  I sniff out and send along my grist, jill ferret grist, and no rat code stands a chance ever, ever. The zombie rat goes rigid when its tough, stringy code—who knows how old—how far traveled to finally die here at the End of Everywhere—that code scatters to nonsense in the pit of the ball of nothing my grist wraps it in. Then the grist flocks back to me and the zombie rat thumps no more. No more.

  Sometimes having to kill everything is a bit of a distraction. I want that doe and her littles really bad, and I need to move on.

  Down a hole and into a warren larder. Here there are pieces of meat and the stink of maggot sluice pooled in the bends between muscles and organs. But the rats have got the meat from Farmer Jan’s Mulmyard, and it’s not quite dead yet, got maggot-resistant code, like the buck rat, but not smart enough to know it’s dead, just mean code jaw-latched to a leg or a haunch and won’t dissipate. Mean and won’t die. But I am meaner still.

  Oh, I smell her!

  I’m coming, mamma rat. Where are you going? There’s no going anywhere anymore.

  Bomi slinks into the larder and we touch noses. I smell blood on her. She’s got a kill, a bachelor male, by the blood spoor on her.

  It’s so warm and wet, Jill. Bomi’s trembling and wound up tight. She’s not the smartest ferret. I love it, love it, and I’m going back to lie in it.

  That’s bad. Bad habit.

  I don’t care. I killed it; it’s mine.

  You do what you want, but it’s your man Bob’s rat.

  No it’s mine.

  He feeds you, Bomi.

  I don’t care.

  Go lay up then.

  I will.

  Without a by-your-leave, Bomi’s gone back to her kill to lay up. I never do that. TB wouldn’t like it, and besides, the killing’s the thing, not the owning. Who wants an old dead rat to lie in when there’s more to bite?

  Bom
i told me where she’d be because she’s covering for herself when she doesn’t show and Bob starts asking. Bomi’s a stupid ferret, and I’m glad she doesn’t belong to TB.

  But me—down another hole, deeper, deeper still. It’s half– filled in here. The doe rat thought she was hiding it, but she left the smell of her as sure as a serial number on a bone. I will bite you, mamma.

  Then there’s the dead-end chamber I knew would be. Doe rat’s last hope in all the world. Won’t do her any good. But oh she’s big! She’s tremendous. Maybe the biggest ever for me.

  I am very, very happy.

  Doe rat with the babies crowded behind her. Thirteen of them, I count by the squeaks. Sweet naked squeaks. Less than two weeks old, they are. Puss and meat. But I want mamma now.

  The doe sniffs me and screams like a bone breaking, and she rears big as me. Bigger.

  I will bite you.

  Come and try, little jill.

  I will kill you.

  I ate a sack of money in the City Bank and they chased me and cut me to pieces and just left my tail and—I grew another rat! What will you do to me, jill, that can be so bad? You’d better be afraid of me.

  When I kill your babies, I will do it with one bite for each. I won’t hurt them for long.

  You won’t kill my babies.

  At her.

  At her because there isn’t anything more to say, no more messages to pass back and forth through our grist and scents.

  I go for a nipple and she’s fast out of the way, but not fast enough and I have a nub of her flesh in my mouth. Blood let. I chew on her nipple tip. Blood and mamma’s milk.

  She comes down on me and bites my back; her long incisors cut through my fur, my skin, like hook needles, and come out at another spot. She’s heavy. She gnaws at me, and I can feel her teeth scraping against my backbone. I shake to get her off, and I do, but her teeth rip a gouge out of me.

  Cut pretty bad, but she’s off. I back up thinking that she’s going to try to swarm a copy, and I stretch out the grist and there it is, just like I thought, and I intercept it and I kill the thing before it can get to the mulm and reproduce and grow another rat. One rat this big is enough, enough for always.