Later that night Brendan was standing in one of the little street parks so common in modern New York, watching the passing scene with a mild disinterest. There seemed to be a lot of bums out tonight. Probably most of them were just posing as bums, for it was a fun role that many people enjoyed playing. Some of them might be real bums, he supposed, people far gone in volitional alcoholism.
"Hi!" He turned about and saw one of the young girls from the Intro to QTD course that he was teaching. Cathy, um . . . no, Lori something-or-other. The rest of her name escaped him.
"Hello. Having a nice night?" She was slim and had lots of bushy red hair framing a cute, bland little face, with a light dusting of freckles. She was, he knew, something like eighteen years old. She shrugged. "OK, I guess. I'm getting a little bored."
"Tired of studying?"
She nodded. "Your class is a little hard for me."
A glinting supposition appeared in his mind. "Tell you what," he said, "come on up to my apartment and I'll give you a nice body rub. Fix you right up."
She seemed startled and stared at him, hands on her hips. "What is this, some kind of come-on?" He held his hands up before him, palms outward, grinning broadly. "Perish the thought! Look, I'm trying to do something nice for one of my students for a change. This'll be the ultimate in refreshing experiences. I promise not to fuck you."
She still seemed doubtful but went with him. Once there, she stood quietly while he spread a soft blanket on the floor of his living room, watching him closely. He turned to face her, and she said, "What do I do now?"
"Stand still." He began to undress her, unbuttoning her blouse, pulling off her tattered, cut-down shorts. He slid her out of a pair of green silk underpants and she stood naked before him, obviously uneasy. He looked her over and shook his head, smiling. Youth held its own special beauty, something he had not noticed when he had been that age. She blushed before his gaze, redness suffusing down onto her chest.
"OK, now lie face down on the blanket." She did his bidding.
He got out a small bottle of almond-scented oil and poured it onto her back. She shivered as he touched her with his hands, beginning to knead the slippery stuff into her skin. She was tense at first, frightened by the way it had gotten out of her control so quickly, but later relaxed, surrendering to the experience as his hands squeezed her buttocks and worked their way down her legs. He turned her over and worked on the front of her soft body. Her breathing quickened when he massaged her breasts and sweat began to bead across her brow and upper lip as his hands moved down her abdomen. She had at least one orgasm when he rubbed the oil slowly into her groin, but he kept his word to the end.
Morning found him sitting cross-legged on the beach, staring out across the steel-gray sea, watching the mists disperse before the oncoming day, waiting for the sun to rise out of the sea, a dull, fat orange ball. This was the day. He breathed in deeply, smelling the tang of ionized air, the scent of the land, sailors called it, and feeling it invigorate him, fill him with renewed life. I love it here, he realized, just like I loved my childhood.
This time, I'll not let it get away. New York, Comnet, the life in the streets, all of it. I don't think I've ever been happier. How could I ever go away?
Scenes passed before him, women clustered thickly round, friends and experiences everywhere. His work was fulfilling, sex could be had just by stretching out his hand. He treasured the nights spent alone in his apartment, the times of close and somber thought. What else could anyone want?
The Games awaited. He got up and stretched carefully, feeling the solid muscles rippling across his back. Montevideo, he thought, and glory before my peers, then I come home again. He strode off into a gathering cloud of darkness.
Demogorgon felt himself going down the drain, like a childhood nightmare come to life at last. He swirled down and around and down, the darkness growing all around him. His memory and life were coming apart, and he felt himself fragmenting, subsystems flying off in all directions, preceding him into the night of nonbeing. He was silent and felt nothing as his emotional drivers were stripped from him. In the end, he was no longer a person, just a disembodied consciousness dropping in a tight spiral. As he fell, other subsystems were being sucked up the center of the spiral, pieces of Brendan Sealock being reassembled by the process of his fall. He was succeeding. He recognized the bits as they swept past him, scenes from Brendan's life in which he had had a part. I will not completely die, then, he realized, for bits of me rise again, embodied in all the past that was his. Had he been able to feel, it might have been comforting.
He fell and the black clouds gathered him in. He fell and, in just a little while, he was gone.
Brendan Sealock felt himself rising through cottony layers of unconsciousness. It was like the journey that imagination sent him on in the old films. The doctor was peeling away the endless layers of gauze bandage that covered his eyes and he waited, frightened. Will I be able to see again when he's done? I don't want to know. The light grew as the layers ofcloth between him and the world diminished. He fancied he could see the grainy texture of the gauze. What will I see when the last layer is gone? Will I emerge into a life of light and color or will the world always be a blur to me? Is a life of light and shadow without any detail better than black, blinding death? He was in agony, but he waited. Suddenly, the last layer was gone.
Brendan Sealock awoke and opened his eyes.
TEN
The world-lines were beginning to darken. In the sea of light that had delineated their existence, lines of dull ebony were beginning to penetrate, threads of blackness that advanced on their rigorous courses, heralding the extinction of individual subsystems. They felt themselves go with little keening cries of dismay.
Night overcame them in the midst of their lives, throwing them down as their tales strove to resume. Stories of an infinite past buckled in upon a common center, coalescing into a single bright dot, a spark which swiftly winked out. The walls of castles, then entire cities crushed together, imploding into nothingness. The horizons of the world were a swiftly closing circle, a fiery limit that wound itself tight, drawing the cosmos together like a death noose closing in on its vanishing point. The towers fell and were no more, shards of dull glass tumbling from the sky.
The universe became a plane which flattened itself with an effervescent hiss and was still, a black, tideless sea lying beneath a dark, featureless sky. The entities lay dead in its depths, become a mass of quiescent data. It ended.
They rose, like bubbles drifting buoyant through an endless sea, seeking the surface and light. Beneath them the detritus of their deeds was left behind, the wreckage of lives become as nothing. In the delimited world that fell away below them, they had but little consciousness, a sense of self that grew ever stronger as the blue light grew about them and the spectrum slowly broadened, taking on ever longer wavelengths as their separation lessened. They rose together at first, then one of the eight leaped ahead, taking on a teardrop shape as it flew, leaving behind a contrail of lesser bubbles. The false security of an artificial sun blossomed above; a burnished, wavering disk that beckoned them to come forth. Far below, the shambles rested, waiting. All the pieces were there, whole but quiet, from stilled program to dead souls.
Brendan Sealock awoke into his body. He lay still for what seemed a long time, savoring the resurrection of physical sensations that had so long eluded him. It all seemed clear to him now, but he knew that it was a false reprieve from his own special reality. The lives of men are often immutable, no matter what they go through. In the distance he could hear the soft sighing of life-support machinery and, all about him, the whispering breaths of his still sleeping comrades. A smile tugged briefly at his lips and then vanished. I am mad, he thought.