The floor began to spin. Denton crawled onto his back on his blanket. The fabric was rough and scratchy against the skin of his arms. The texture of the ceiling swam, as if covered with insects. The air grew thick and hot.
These were distant facts, lightly noted, as a co-pilot might assimilate the state of certain levers and lights before take-off. Denton closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but that was like trying to fly through the air after being hit by a truck. He had no choice and no control. He was falling…
He was lying pinned to the blanket, deep under, deep, deep under. He had been under for some time. He became aware of someone speaking in the hut, low, mumbling words that seemed meaningful even though he couldn’t make them out. He opened his eyes.
He could see nothing. The hut was pitch-black. He could feel the rough texture of the blanket under his stomach and chest, felt its fibrous stamp on his cheek, heard his own breath. He turned over on his back and, just as he did so, saw a figure slipping out the doorway of the hut. The figure was dressed in a strange outfit—bare feet and a woolen shift of the type popularized in Christian paintings. It was shining white. And he knew who the man was, even from the back: Kobinski.
Denton called out his name, but nothing came from his mouth. He wanted to get up, to follow Kobinski, but couldn’t move. The fire nearby was smoldering embers. Hadn’t it just been dark? Where was everyone? Was he really awake? Had he been dreaming earlier? Had he only dreamed he had seen Kobinski?
He was about to call out for help when a noise came to him, subtle and soft but absolutely the most terrifying sound he had ever heard. He froze, listening… There. A sound like an enormous, heavy snuffle. It was the sound of some extremely large animal scenting the air, and it was right on the other side of the wall.
A skalkit. There was a skalkit outside the hut. At any moment its jaws would rip through the grass roof, delicately, like peeling tinfoil back from a chicken breast, and Denton would feel its teeth dig into him like ten-inch knives as it grabbed him around his rib cage, swung him up into the air, and bite him in two. He could almost feel the slimy texture of the beast’s throat as he went down, suffocating.
He was suffocating. Where was he? He was on the blanket. The skalkit was only a few inches away, on the other side of a roof made of freaking fronds. Dare he whisper for help? Dare he move? Denton forced his head to turn and now he could see the old man. The assistant was gone; only the old man was there. He was floating several feet above his blanket, eyes shut utterly to this world, not breathing.
Now the beast was pawing the logs of the wall, high up, nearly at the roofline. Denton thought he could see the roof shimmy and shake as the enormous nose pushed at it, testing. His heart was racing so fast it hurt. He had never been this terrified in his life—well, yes, he had, when he’d been watching the skalkits eat the Sapphians. He had never wanted to be that afraid again and now he was. He was that afraid. To be dead and gone would be better than this. The terror was nauseating. It was unbearable. He could die from this fear alone.
But he was creating the terror. He could choose it—he did have that power, didn’t he? A rabbit cornered by a dog cannot choose not to be afraid. But a human can choose, can’t he? A man can choose.
He closed his eyes.
Kobinski. He was the key to all of this. Denton had almost forgotten that. He had read Kobinski’s manuscript but hadn’t understood it, not really. It had rolled off his oiled skin like almost everything did. But now he could almost see the binder in front of him, could sense that this was what he needed, that this was what had been burning inside him and what could give him relief.
What had Kobinski said about these other worlds? About going through the light?
The binder opened. And suddenly the hut and the skalkit were gone. And Denton was looking at, was suspended in, the night sky.
It was breathtaking, so crisp and real. He could see stars by the millions in front of him and then the entire universe filling the dark sky. Its galaxies were mere dots and clouds of dots, their color blazing primarily white but dusted with blue and purple and red, tiny arms spiraling like dancers.
He blinked and everything shifted. Now the universe was far away, no bigger than a harvest moon. And it was not alone. There were hundreds, thousands of universes filling the sky, and then he blinked again and now he could see the ladder. The dazzling wispy balls of light were on a tilted continuum, forming a rectangle in the void. At the right end of the ladder the universes grew increasingly smaller and dimmer until the tip of the continuum was an inky unredeemed blackness. At the left end of the ladder the universes became more increasingly bathed in light until all individual stars were lost from view in a shining brightness.
Jacob’s ladder.
Denton cried at its beauty and mystery, at the inconceivable vastness of its scale in time and space. He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight, and when he opened them again, he saw the kabbalah Tree of Life, the round nodes of the sephirot shining. Jacob’s ladder was gone and yet it was not. Denton understood that the tree of sephirot was the ladder, that it was somehow even bigger than that, that, in a way, it was God.
The whole of the vision was too overwhelming, so he tried to look at each sephirot in turn. He named each one and its attributes, chesed, chochmah, binah, gevorah, hod, netzach, watching them dance before him.
And then he understood.
Chesed, chochmah. He had identified himself immediately when he’d first read those descriptions. He was chesed, chochmah, netzach, and this world he had come to—that’s what it was, what it was made of, what the people were. He understood. He understood.
Oh god, he understood.
He was the Sapphians. He had loathed their shallowness, their falsity, their disloyalty and selfishness, their frivolousness, their cruelty that was even more inexcusable for being thoughtless… And he knew himself for the first time.
You’ll find a way to do exactly what you want to do, Dent. You always do.
And, even now, if he had the chance, yes, if he knew for certain that he himself would be spared, he would go back to life in the gorge in an instant. In a freaking heartbeat.
There were no words, nor even thought images, for the depth at which he felt this, at which he understood the parallels or how appalling, how accurate, they were, how devastatingly deep they went. There was no expression for how much he loathed himself, or the despair of knowing that there was no escape, that even if he killed himself he could not escape his own soul. These things were chochmah, the wisdom that has no form.
And yet they filled the universe. He felt as though his being, his essence, was a tiny candle that could be snuffed out in sheer scale of it. In the scheme of things, in that almost infinite multiverse of the ladder, he was less than insignificant. Relatively speaking, he did not exist. And yet the fact that he did exist seemed to imply some taint in the fabric of that cosmos, some terrible flaw that threatened everything.
He understood now what it meant to look into the face of God, to really see the good and the bad, in all their splendor. For a moment he teetered on the brink of nonexistence. Then Denton’s tiny candle puffed out.
19.3. Thirty-Seventy Aharon Handalman
In a few hours the closing ceremonies of the Festival would begin. The heretic would be executed, and whatever was going to happen would happen.
My Lord could not sleep. His brain would not give up the fight but continued to flail about like a man in the sea. He knew meditation techniques to quiet his mind, but it had been years since he’d used them and to do so now felt hypocritical. They called on God. Hadn’t he rejected any assistance from God years ago? So the thoughts did their worst to him: Tevach, Aharon, Argeh, the heretic, Wallick, The Book of Torment.
Aharon had asked him, What will happen to you, Yosef? When you die?
He had not contemplated such a thing before. Oh, he had always been aware that he was damning himself. He had damned himself with great willfullness. But with Wallick gone, the thought of his own death became much more concrete. He had been Job cursing at God. And that had been enough, in his anger and despair; that was the role he had chosen for himself.
Just curse God and die, Job.
So Job’s friends had advised him, and there was, in that statement, an implied end, a yearned-for finality.
The trouble was, it was not the end. Certain as the sun rose, even here, pale and distant, he, too, would rise again. And he would not, in his new incarnation, have the benefit of his anger. He would not even recognize the name: Isaac Kobinski. Everything came to an end, even our most cherished torments. That was the law. Just as it was the law, also, that nothing ever truly ended. His soul, his energy, would remain on the ladder long after this lifetime’s woes had sunk into a past so ancient that the entire life of the multiverse so far was but the first shuddering breath of it.
He might reincarnate in his next life on Gehenna, a tiny Fiore infant, sentenced to this world of rocky hardship without the benefit of his memories to give that life a diabolical purpose. The thought of being sentenced here, with no idea that there were places better than this, with no hope of an education, no deep theological reasons for rejecting God—that was true horror. It was one thing to choose rebellion, to have chosen it from a place of high learning, as he had. It was another to wallow in rebellion’s hellhole in ignorance.
Aharon was right. You might as well be angry at the phenomenon of photosynthesis. You cannot win.
My Lord gazed out over the town. It was nearly dawn and quiet now. But earlier in the night there had been stirrings, shadows in the streets: scuttling mice and scuttling rats, hiding and whispering, making plans. He was seated in the deep recess of a window seat, the cold stone around him cushioned and warmed by a blanket. It was one of the largest windows in the House of Divine Ordinance, and although the glass was not clear by Earth standards, he could see the town below, lit by the conjunction of Gehenna’s moons. He turned his head to look at the bed where Erya slept—not for carnal purposes, he couldn’t even imagine such with a Fiore, but to provide some warmth for his aching joints. He looked, too, at Tevach, snoring on his mat at the foot of My Lord’s bed. That little mouse had scuttled out, when he thought My Lord was asleep, and had scuttled back in an hour ago. My Lord had observed both, feigning sleep, and had not said a word.
He could wake either of them, talk, get a massage for the pain, anything to be spared these thoughts. But he didn’t wake them and the thoughts marched on. It was as though Wallick had been the black underpinning beneath the decaying tower of his soul and now that underpinning was gone. His soul was poised over the chasm and starting to fall in upon itself and he could not stop it.
For example, what if even Fiori was too good for his detached soul? When he had first discovered the heavens and hells in his physics, he had tried to work out models of what they might be like. He had anticipated heavier gravity; gravity is gevorah. And although he really had no idea what the Fiore or the landscape would be like, he had not been wrong about the general principle. He had also imagined a world worse than this, a true Gehenna, the far right rungs of Jacob’s ladder. He had imagined a world where gravity was so dense that life was nothing more than blobs of flesh attached to the planet’s surface like stones. There would be no mobility at all in that world, like the hideous punishment of Dante’s ninth circle, where men were buried up to their necks in a lake of ice. And these blobs would congregate like the bubbles in foam or like crystals—how else could they reproduce? And to those who lived in this bubble-mass of base sentience there would be almost nothing redeeming—almost no light and warmth, little food, none of the blessings of family, music, home. It would make Fiori look like Paradise. And God—Yahweh—that evasive magician, wouldn’t even have to condemn Yosef to such a fate. It was the simple nature of the universe: like to like, like to like, like to like. He could end up there.
My Lord was so lost in thought that he didn’t hear the sounds at first. He stiffened as they registered: stealthy footsteps, the creak of the door. There was something altogether too quiet about it—even Tevach sneaking in was not that quiet, and Tevach was asleep on his mat.
Kobinski leaned forward, his knees screaming in protest, to peer around the wall.
A Fiore was sneaking up to his bed. The dark shape raised its arms high—he could see a knife in the furry hands—and plunged it down into the bedclothes.
My Lord gasped. The sound was covered by a wet thunk as the knife made contact. There was a soft cry from the bed. The intruder took a few steps back, arms wide in alarm, the long, bloody dagger in one hand. He made a panicked animal noise and turned to Tevach. As he leaned over the sleeping mouse, the intruder’s face fell into the moonlight from the window: it was Sevace, Argeh’s bodyguard. Sevace would have seen My Lord in the window, had he turned his head, but he did not. He dropped the blade at Tevach’s side and fled. Even brutal Sevace was frightened, murdering a god.
For a few moments My Lord sat stunned. Argeh had finally tried it. It was almost a relief that it was done, that the long years of waiting were over. He moved, painfully, off the window ledge. He could see the shape beneath the covers as he approached the bed. He saw, too, the blood spreading across the skins. Erya. He lowered the blanket and saw that she was dead, stabbed through the back into her heart. It had been a quick death at least. He pulled the blanket over her. Tevach still snored, though his twitching limbs indicated disturbed dreams. My Lord picked up the dagger that had been left near his trusted servant’s hand.
This is what comes to you, Tevach. This is what happens when you play with treason. Your allegiance with the heretic, your sneaking about, made it simple enough—get rid of me and blame you.
The strategic nature of this thought cleared away his shock.
His guards were slumped in front of the doorway. He checked Decher—his pulse was steady. Perhaps they’d been drugged, but they were alive. He tried to rouse his captain and was rewarded with a groggy growl.
“Get up,” My Lord whispered tersely. “Go check on the messenger and make sure he is safe.”