"He nods," called Fred after a moment.
"Aw, too bad. Tell him he's gift-wrapped for the Devil."
"Cruelty is another good disassembly factor," remarked Rascasse. "But it will eventually have to be given up too."
"Don't anthropomorphize me," said Golze with a laugh. "Have to be given up? 'Man can't will what he wills.' I'm a roulette ball."
Rascasse shook his head. "Schopenhauer. Philosophy will be left behind too. Even rational thought, eventually."
"Can't wait."
"You'll go far. It's time for you to get aboard the bus."
Golze laughed softly and trudged away across the packed sand and disappeared around the lightless front of the bus. A few moments later the bus shifted perceptibly as he stepped aboard on the far side.
We need to succeed at this soon, Rascasse thought as he began taking deep breaths in anticipation of stepping outside his body. I need access to the bottom half of the chalice.
He shuffled to the guardrail and knelt in front of it. It was a horizontal wooden pole supported at every ten feet by a steel stanchion, and he leaned his chest against it, draping his arms over the far side.
He had been twelve, the first time he had left his body; he had simply got out of bed one morning and looked back and seen his body still lying in the bed. Terror had driven him back into it, and for the first time he had experienced reentering his body: like a tight bag being pulled over his head and sliding down his arms and legs and eventually closing over his toes. A few years later he had experienced it again, while breathing through the ether-sprinkled mask during a dental operation. And by the time he was twenty, he had been able to step out of his body at will, with only the faintest reflexive twitch of vertigo.
He felt a flash of cold now, and then he was standing beside his kneeling body, carefully noting that it was balanced and leaning firmly against the guardrail. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, and saw the kneeling body's fingers spread wide.
He leaped forward into empty space, and then he could not only still feel the guardrail against his chest, but also smell the grass of the college lawn and feel oily glass under his fingers — and then he was rocked by the explosion of energy sweeping through higher dimensions as the young man on the bus gave up the ghost, and Rascasse was on the freeway.
Here time was distance, and he was unable to move anything but his attention.
By a perception that did not involve light he could see the bus, and Golze and Fred and the dead boy inside it — and he could see them from all sides at once. Even their organs and arteries, and the valves and crankshaft of the bus, and the secret sap and inner bark of the surrounding trees, were as clearly visible as the mountain. And he could see all sides of the mountain, the fires on the northern slopes and the compacted gravel under the asphalt of the roads.
He moved away from this close perspective, and saw the men now as zigzagging lines, their recent actions and their future actions laid out like rows of tipped dominoes, blurring out of focus at the far ends; the moon was a long white blade in the sky. Golze was beside Rascasse's body, telling him "Ibsen," and Golze was also climbing into the bus, and cutting the young man's throat, and leaving the bus and talking to Rascasse again, and the bus itself was driving out of the Panorama Point rest area, making a loop with the trail of earlier versions of itself driving in.
This was the perspective of the crows in the Grimm brothers's fairy tale "Faithful John" — flying high above the surface-bound characters and able to see things previously encountered and things still to be met.
The young man in the bus was a line of blended figures like Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, and the line ended at the point where the young man's astral body made a turbulence that spread into the sky.
It was a motionless shock wave, and Rascasse's attention followed it outward, away from the precise time and place of the young man's death.
And Rascasse wasn't alone. A living thing that seemed to consist of buzzing or corrugations was with him, its thoughts as evident to him as the inner workings of the bus but far more alien to him than the courses of the stars or the repetitive patterns of cracks in the stone of the mountains.
Rascasse knew at least that it was summoned by the human sacrifice.
The living thing occupied a region that extended far in a dozen directions from the early morning hours of August 18, 1987, and Rascasse's disembodied self overlapped the thing's self.
Lines like arcing sparks or woven threads stretched across a vast vacuum, and he could discern the thread that was his own time line, with several exploded segments along its extent; he was occupying the cloud around one of the ruptured sections now, just as he was occupying the others in his previous and future excursions onto the freeway.
Just as a photograph of lunar craters can seem to show domes and ridges until the eye's perspective shifts to see craters and cracks, the arcs or threads were also visible as tiny, tightly wound coils, like knots in an infinitely tall and wide stack of carpets.
In the shorter wavelengths of his attention, the lifeline of Albert Einstein was discernible — extending from the band that included Ulm, Germany, in the region of 1879 to the band encompassing New Jersey in 1955.
Rascasse had paid attention to the Einstein line before, and knew what he would see. Even viewed as a stretched-out arc rather than a coil, the Einstein line was a tangled mess; it intersected with a number of other lines, one of which showed branches near the intersections — looked at from another perspective, these branching lines could be seen as two lines merging into one, but Rascasse was imposing time's futureward arrow onto the vista — and so the branches were childbirths, offspring.
Einstein's second wife was his first cousin, whose maiden name was Einstein, and their lifelines from 1919 through her death in 1936 were a hopelessly interconnected hall of mirrors; and from the midst of that confusion a third thread emerged in 1928, in the region of the Swiss Alps, though it didn't seem to arise from one of those branchings that indicated a childbirth.
Rascasse's attention was on that spontaneously arising thread. It went on to intersect with another thread at several points, and showed two offspring branches — close focus indicated that these two were the lifelines of Frank Marrity and Moira Bradley — and then the strange thread ended in 1955, in New Jersey, so close to the end of the Einstein thread that they almost seemed to have merged. They were, in fact, extraordinarily similar.
Rascasse shifted his attention forward in the direction of increasing entropy, to Frank Marrity's adulthood.
Marrity's thread intersected with another in 1974, and the daughter's resulting branch was distinct for a distance of a dozen years; but in 1987 a new thread was in their cluster too, and Rascasse's attention couldn't make out where that new thread had come from either. Whatever it was, whoever it was, it made a confusion of Marrity's lifeline—just as the cousin-wife's line had made a confusion of Einstein's. There appeared to be a rupture in Marrity's lifeline there in 1987, or perhaps the rupture was in the newly intruding thread; they were so close and so similar that Rascasse couldn't be sure.
Rascasse occupied the tight-focus end of his attention, and he saw the Marritys' newcomer as a zigzagging line in San Bernardino in a narrow section of 1987; and, sampled at several points, the newcomer's line was in a sequence of cars that were all the green Rambler station wagon. But even in the car the newcomer was hard to follow — at least once the Rambler seemed to end and then begin again in a different place.
None of this was easy to perceive. The whole 1987 region was chaotic, with thousands of lifelines blurring into a cloudy unity, especially at the bands that were Mount Shasta and Taos, New Mexico. This haze was the Harmonic Convergence, turbulent with virtual personalities that arose as points in the psychic fog but that extended no farther in time.