“It’s impossible to describe. Language has no analogies for what you experienced. It goes beyond explaining. But you’ll know what I mean—you’ve already lived through it, and died through it.”
Gregor took him through the motions, telling him to speed up his microprocessor, to shut out an outside influences, to concentrate on the hard boundary between his two lives.
“It’ll take time, because you’ve got to convince your subconscious that you’re really willing to face what you remember. But you have to keep pounding on the door, until it opens.”
Danal closed his eyes.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The microprocessor sped up his mind, slowed down the universe. He focused everything inward, centering on the moment of his death. The last memory. The protective shell that cut him off from anything beyond, making his thoughts slip off its hard surface.
Danal went through the stages of forced relaxation, meditation. Without concern he realized he had begun to feel numb all over, but he refused to relent his pressure on the barrier.
Death had hidden something more from him, something much more significant even than all his other flashbacks. He had so far uncovered only the tip of the iceberg. He hoped he could cope with the rest of it, if he could manage to dredge it to the surface.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Then he began to experience a pleasant rising sensation, a detachment, and ever so slowly a separation that led to an otherworldly ambiance. It was definitely unlike a dream.
And finally the black wall began to dissolve in front of him.
The pain—that came first. The blade of the arthame dagger bursting through his skin, sliding across his sternum, then stabbing deep into his chest cavity; he felt a rip as the tip broke through the pericardium and then cut deeply into the muscle of his heart. Vincent Van Ryman’s every nerve was dipped in hot oil, sending excruciatingly detailed information to his failing brain, but now he viewed it all through a distorted lens.
Then silence, a fresh, clean silence. Danal let himself experience the wonder and the awe of the impressions, unable to put even shadows of words to them. The absolute quiet felt brilliant, clean and sharp. And then slowly swelling from the background he noticed a muffled tonal mixture, a noise like a musical buzzing, bells and chimes.
No sense of touch, warmth or cold… he began to detect motion, though he could not pinpoint exactly what was moving—without sensory organs, all movement became dizzy and distorted. He was pulled along a dark tunnel, spinning upward, dragged by a force he could not understand into a pitch-black catacomb.
With an inaudible pop, he suddenly emerged outside his body, floating up near the ceiling of the sacrificial grotto, stopped by the papier mache stalactites. He looked down at the bloodbath, at himself slain on the altar—but the dead man below no longer even looked like him because of the surface-cloning.
On the heels of that thought came a rapid-fire burst of Vincent Van Ryman’s life, all his memories exploding outward at once. The visual images were vivid and instantaneous, with no definite sequence, but they all made sense to him.
The memory images blurred together, smeared out into a glow that grew brighter and brighter. Around him, Danal began to perceive other spirits, bright colored lights—his escorts.
His thoughts floated in a euphoric, untroubled sea of utter contentment. Ushered by the other spirits, tantalized by the beckoning light ahead, he moved toward a borderland which may or may not have had a physical substance. Danal had almost reached a destination, an arrival.
Then suddenly the black barrier of forbidden memory clamped down on him again. Everything stopped abruptly. Danal tried, needed to break through, but the wall remained firm, impenetrable no matter how much he pounded on it….
“That was deeper than most Wakers are willing to look their first time,” Gregor said after Danal had described his experience. The leader had not moved, or even seemed to blink an eye. “But they always hit a wall somewhere.”
Danal placed both hands flat against the platform to steady himself. In the past few seconds his entire perception of reality had been skewed. In an undefinable way Danal began to wonder if his other concerns were less significant. “But what’s beyond that last barrier?”
“No one’s ever been able to breach it,” Gregor said, defeated. “And that leads me to my biggest question—is there anything more? Or have we seen all there is?”
Danal frowned and said nothing. Gregor seemed impatient. “You don’t see the problem, do you? What were all those memories? Were they just buried in my dead brain somewhere, or were they carried back here with my… soul, if you want to call it that? Is there really a difference between the body and the soul? We have to find the answer to that question—it has such staggering implications!”
More confused than ever, Danal shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“Look, if they are just stale memories buried in my resurrected mind and nothing more, then… who am l? Am I—with a capital letter—just some leftover impressions embedded in this old temporal lobe”—he tapped his forehead—“that didn’t come out in the wash? Is my own soul really back in this body now, or am I just a better machine, one that can access a few old memories from the real Gregor, who is now dead and gone? And how the hell can I tell the difference?”
Deeply upset, Gregor answered his own question. “Of course there’s a way. If I can indeed remember my death, my out-of-body experiences, actually getting into the world of light—if I can remember the whole thing without a gap, from death all the way through to the sudden moment of resurrection again, then it obviously can’t be just some buried memories, can it? The real Gregor wouldn’t have left such visions in his dead brain, because Gregor’s body never experienced those things.”
Danal frowned. “But isn’t what—what I saw close enough? The tunnel, the light, the life flashbacks, the other spirits? How could all that be left in my physical brain if l was dead already?”
“No. Put yourself in the role of a pure skeptic, Danal. And I am, at heart, a skeptic.” Gregor sighed, as if he had been through all this before. “The tunnel, the light, the out-of-body sensations, the chimes and bells—you were dying. Your brain was literally giving up the ghost. Who knows what kind of distorted perceptions you might have experienced? Your nerves giving spasmodic impulses, firing at random, making you think you saw lights, heard sounds, sensed presences. And the flashbacks of your life—couldn’t those have been a colossal memory dump of your brain at the last second? Flinging open all the mental doorways that kept your thoughts neatly organized?”
Gregor shook his head, still deep in thought. “Oh, sure it seems farfetched, but it is a possible rational explanation. Occam’s Razor isn’t sharp enough for me—I have to be absolutely sure. I need to have a continuous memory.”
The leader closed his eyes. “I spend hours and hours alone, meditating, trying to reach the center of my experience. We Wakers don’t really know what to do. Which stand should we take? Should we stop Resurrection, Incorporated? Or should we help them to make certain the resurrection process never produces another Waker?
“Should we voluntarily kill ourselves to go back—like Shannah—if these Heaven flashbacks are indeed the real thing? Or should we instead try to awaken all other Servants?
“No, after my own mental anguish—and the other Wakers seem to be of the same opinion—I can’t condone trying to awaken other Servants on purpose. They’re at peace now, and their souls are… are where they should be, wherever that is.”