The singer looked genuinely confounded. "the Blessedm'n said it was best for them."
"Best for them?" Tesia said, appalled. "That?" on't you have it in one of your holy books? A god dies that way-"
"Yes, but-"
"And he's reunited with his father, or his mother."
"Father," said Phoebe. "Forgive my ignorance. I've no memory for stories. Songs; that's a different matter. I hear a song once, and I've got it for life. But a joke, or a piece of a gossip, or even a god-tale"-she snapped her fingers-"forgotten!"
Suppose she's telling the truth, Raul muttered.
"About crucifixions?"
About the lad Maybe we've had the whole thing wrong from the beginning.
"And they're just coming to see the sights?" Testa replied. "I don't think so. Remember the Loop?" She brought her one and only glimpse of the lad to mind now, in all its vastness and foulness. Even now, after five years, the memory made her queasy. Perhaps the lad was not the Enemy of Mankind, the Evil One itself, but nor had it seemed to have love and peace on its collective mind.
"Will you join with me?" the singer was saying.
"Doing what?" Testa said.
"She asked if she could smoke," Phoebe said. "Didn't you hear her?"
"I was thinking."
"About what?"
"About how fucking confused I am."
The singer was stroking the tip of her reefer with i match flame. Whatever she was smoking, it wasn't hashish. The smoke was almost sickly sweet, like cinnamon and sugar. She inhaled deeply.
"Again," Testa said. "Inhale again." The woman looked mystified, but obeyed. "And again," Testa said, nudging he gun against the woman's head for emphasis. The woman duty inhaled two more tungfuls. "That's it," Testa said, as a soporific smile spread over the woman's face, and her eyelids began to flutter closed. "One more for luck."
The woman raised the reefer to her lips and inhaled a final time. Halfway through doing so the drug claimed her consciousness. Her hand dropped to her side, the cigarette failing from her fingers. Testa picked it up, nipped off the burning weed, and pocketed the rest.
"You never know," she said to Phoebe. "Let's get going."
Only now, as they started off the slope again, did Testa realize that the sound of sobbing had completely ceased. The last of the spies@rucified as an indulgence of their faithhad died. There was no harm now in looking.
Don't-Raul warned her, but it was too late. She was already turning, already seeing.
Kate Farrell was hanging on the middle cross, her belly bared and lacerated. On her left hand they'd nailed Edward.
On her right "Lucien.
He was the most battered of the three, and the most nearly naked, his thin white chest splashed with blood from a face thankfully almost hidden from her by his hair.
The breath went out of Tesla's body in a rush, and the strength from her limbs. She dropped the gun. Put her hands over her mouth to keep the sobs from coming.
"You know one of them?" said Phoebe.
"All of them," Testa gasped. "All of them."
Phoebe had hold of her, tight. "We can't do anything for them now."
"He was alive... " Testa said, the thought like a skewer in her heart,
"he was alive, and I didn't look, and I could have saved him."
"You didn't know it was him," Phoebe said.
She started to coax Testa away from the spot, turning her as she did so. Testa resisted however, unwilling to take her eyes off Lucien. He looked so Pitifully exposed up there, unable to defend himself against the world. She needed to Put him in the ground, at least. If she left him here he'd be a spectacle: pecked and buffeted and gnawed at. She couldn't bear it. She couldn't.
Somewhere in the turmoil, she heard Raul say: Phoebe's right.
"Leave me alone."
You can't help him. And Tesla: You're not to blame. He made his way. We made ours.
"He was alive."
Af@i,be.
"He saw me,"
IJ'You want to believe that, believe it, Raul said. I'm not going to tn@ and tell you he didn't. But if he did, then maybe that's why he lei go.
"What?"
He Could have called your name, but he didn't. Maybe he juvt laid eyes on you and thought: It's enough.
Tears started to fill her eyes.
"It's enough?"
Yes. It doesn't have to be terrible alwayv. Even this.
She'd never believe that, not to the end of her days.
What did he say we were? Vesselsfor something "For the infinite. Vessels for the infinite."
"What did you say?" Phoebe murmured.
"It's what he wanted to be," Tesla replied.
No, said Raul. It's what he was all along. Tesla nodded. "You know," she said to Phoebe, "I have a very good soul in my head." She sniffed hard. "The pity of it is, it isn't mine."
Then she let Phoebe turn her around, and together they headed on, up towards the door.
The tide took Joe at last, claiming him from the darkness and bearing him away, the way it had home The Fanacapan before him. For a while he was barely aware of his passage. Indeed he was barely aware of being alive. He drifted in and out of consciousness, his eyes fluttering open long enough for him to glimpse the heavens boiling overhead, as though sky and sea had exchanged places. Once, when he awoke this way, he saw what he thought were burning birds, falling out of the seething air like winged meteors. And once, seeing something glitter from the corner of his eye, he turned his head to catch sight of a 'shu, darting through the churning waters, its gaze gleaming. Seeing it, he remembered the conversation he'd had with Noah on the shore-"Please one 'shu and you please many"-and returned to his dreaming state comforted, thinking perhaps the creature knew him and was somehow guiding him through this maelstrom. When he was not quite awake, which was often, he remembered Phoebe in the weeds; saw her body rising and failing in front of him, lush and pale. And tears came, even in his sleeping state, thinking she had gone from him, back into the living world, and all he would ever have of her from now on was memory.
Then even the dreams of Phoebe faded, and he floated on through a cloud of dirty smoke, his mind too weak to shape a thought. Ships passed him by, but he didn't see them. If he had-if he'd seen how they rocked and creaked, filled to the gunnels with people escaping the Ephemeris-he might have tried to catch hold of a trailing rope and haul himself aboard, rather than let the current they were fighting carry him on towards the archipelago. Or at very least-seeing the terror on the faces of the passengers-he might have prepared himself for what awaited him on the shore. But seeing nothing, knowing nothing, he was carried on, and on, through the remains of splintered vessels that had foundered for want of captains, floating mortuaries of doomed travelers, through places where the sea was thick with yellow ash, and cobs of fire glittered around him like burning fleets.
Steadily the waters grew shallower and less tempestuous, and at last he was carried up onto the shores of an island that in its glory days had been called the island of Mem-6 b'Kether Sabbat. There he lay, among the flotsam and jetsam, his balls bleeding, his mind confounded, while moment by moment the island he had been carried to was undone, and its undoer, the lad Uroboros, came closer to the shore on which he slept.
The distance between the shores of Mem-6 b'Kether Sabbat and the Mountainside where Tesla and Phoebe were climbing was not readily measured. Though generations of thinkers in both the Cosm and the Metacosm had attempted to evolve a theory of distance between the two worlds, there was little consensus on the subject. The only thing the various factions agreed upon was that this distance could not be measured with a rule and an abacus. After all, it was not simply the distance between two points: It was the distance between two states. Some said it was best viewed as an entirely symbolic space, like that between worshipper and deity, and proposed an entirely new system of measurement applicable to such cases. Others argued that a soul moving from the Hefter Incendo into Quiddity underwent such a radical altering that the best way to describe and analyze the distance, if the word distance were still applicable (which they doubted), was to derive it from the vocabulary of spiritual reformation. The notion proved untenable, however, one man's reformation being another's heresy.