There was nothing to say to that. We were already fucked so many ways they could have dedicated an entire revision of the Kama Sutra just to us.
As Sam gestured, the line down the middle of the marble rectangle glowed, but only for a moment, a seam of pure white radiance. Then it was gone, as was the wall and everything else, replaced by what I can only describe as a froth of bubbling light. Sam shoved Oxana through, then followed her. I took a deep breath, clutched Halyna’s body close to my chest, and leaped after them.
• • •
Grass. That was the first thing I noticed as I fell forward, grass beneath my feet, then I tumbled, and it was against my chest, my head, all of me, even up my nose in spiky, tickling profusion. When I stopped rolling, I dragged myself to my knees. I seemed to have lost Halyna’s body on the way through, but in the first moments that absence barely registered because of what was all around me.
One of the strange things about being me is the way “beautiful” and “horrible” keep squishing into each other. Only seconds beyond what had seemed like certain destruction, we had landed in paradise.
We were in a forest glade, but what was around us was as far beyond the usual state park picnic area as Heaven was beyond Hoboken. The vegetation was so vividly green it seemed to have been freshly painted. There was never a sky so blue, so triumphantly skylike, and even the gray mountains I glimpsed through the trees seemed to have been constructed specifically to give people a reason to use the word “majestic.” Some extremely eccentric gardener might have watered everything with pure psilocybin, just to grow these beautiful, heartbreakingly realistic hallucinations. But they weren’t hallucinations. This was real.
I would have happily stood there for hours, drinking it all in. But I had just realized there were only two of us in this magic place. Only Sam and me.
“This way,” my buddy said. “Hurry. We’ve got to get rest of the Third Way people moving, get them hidden. Who knows what she’s going to do now we got her really mad?”
Even in the middle of all this perfection, I was suddenly empty and hopeless. “They’re gone. The Amazons, Sam. They didn’t come through.”
He stared at me, then slowly turned and looked all around. “Shit. They’re not angels. Of course, they couldn’t pass through to Kainos.”
“But other souls came here, all your volunteers . . .”
“Souls. Not bodies.”
“But Halyna . . . she was dead, Sam.”
“Then her soul’s somewhere else. Being judged.” He started through the trees. “It’s shitty luck, but now we have to save the ones we can, the rest of the souls here.”
“No, Sam. I can’t just leave them.”
He spun and came back to me. “One of them is dead, Bobby. You just said so.” He wasn’t angry, just confused and hurting.
“That doesn’t matter. You don’t leave a soldier behind if you can help it. You know that. Can you open that passage again?”
Now he was angry. “You want to go back to that museum? To Anaita?”
“Just open the doorway or whatever it is. Oxana and Halyna have to be somewhere. Maybe I won’t have to go all the way back. Maybe they’re . . . in-between, somehow. I don’t even know what that means, but I have to find them.”
He only thought about it for a second. “I can’t come with you, Bobby. I owe it to the Kainos people to stay and help them.”
“I know. Just do it.”
“I can’t just open it, or it’ll dump you right back into the museum, so I’ll try to open the far end somewhere else. But I’ve gotta warn you, I’ve never tried anything like that. And after everything today, I don’t know if I’ve got the strength.” He lifted his hand, closed his eyes. A moment later a shaky vertical shimmer of light appeared beside me. “I don’t know how long I can hold it, or exactly where it’s going to take you. I’m hoping it doesn’t just drop you into—”
“Don’t say it. I’ll find out in a minute, anyway.” I took a quick last sniff at the clean air of this brave new unfamiliar world. Why do I only get these fleeting glimpses of happiness, these moments, then they’re ripped away again? “Hang in, Sam. We’re not beaten yet.” But my buddy looked pretty damned beaten, and I had no doubt I did too. “Remember our motto—confusion to our enemies!”
Then I left paradise behind and climbed back into the light.
thirty-two:
sad and beautiful music
ACTUALLY, I still don’t know why I didn’t wind up back in Anaita’s museum office, especially with Sam in the kind of condition he was in. Maybe there’s more kindness to the universe than I ever guessed. Maybe instead of being one of the world’s unluckiest angels, I’ve actually been a bit more fortunate than I realize sometimes. Whatever the case, Sam’s God-Glove doorway didn’t drop me into the middle of the Anaita-versus-jamblob death match, for which I can only be grateful. Extremely grateful.
• • •
Back in the way old days, when people believed (or wanted to believe) that the Sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, one of those old Greek guys proclaimed that the universe had built-in music, that the very existence of everything was underlined by cosmic sounds, and that even distances like the Earth to the Moon were measures of this “music of the spheres,” the musica universalis.
Later on, that kind of fell apart, especially when Galileo was all, “The Earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around,” and then the Vatican was all, “We’re about to go seriously Inquisition on your ass if you don’t shut up,” and Galileo was like, “Okay, you win,” but under his breath he was all, “But it still totally revolves around the sun. Dicks.”
Anyway, I give you this short history update to prepare you for what I heard when I stepped back into the door of light Sam opened, which was either the actual music of the spheres or an extremely convincing simulation.
I was surrounded by, or maybe engulfed in, what seemed not just white light, but different kinds of white light—not different colors, just different intensities. And as I tried to make sense of my surroundings, I heard something I’ll never forget.
Now, mind you, I’m a guy who’s heard the singing of the celestial choirs in Heaven, and screams wafting up from the deepest pits of Hell. I’m no rookie. But what I heard when I crossed back through, what surrounded me like the breathing of some immense creature the size of a galaxy, was unlike anything else I’d experienced. It was as different from any other sound I’d heard as day is different from night. It was deeper than the deepest rumble, but it had edges—harmonics, I guess a musician might say—that stretched beyond my ability to hear or even perceive, and yet somehow I could still feel them. I was in the heart of the greatest living thing that could ever be, as if I were only a cell in that body—no, as if I were a single electrical impulse in the endless nerves of the Highest, God Himself. The sound, the music, the vibration, whatever you call it, it was all around me and everywhere. I was nowhere at all, but I was also everywhere, and that was right where I needed to be.
This all washed across me in far less subjective time than it takes to describe, then my rational mind (no jokes, please) finally showed up, took my mental hand, and kindly led me back to current reality.
It was literally a sobering experience. The beautiful chaos hardened into something less diffuse, and the different tones of light resolved into a three-dimensional structure of sorts. I stood in an endless white corridor of glowing motes, like billions of tiny bubbles, but each one different, each one shining with its own tiny white fire, some brighter than others, but none of them dark. Everything around me, the floor, the ceiling, the walls, was made of these shining white cells, like the packing material out of the box the cosmos had been shipped in.