ARC OF THE DREAM
A. A. Attanasio
Phoenix Pick
An Imprint of Arc Manor
Arc of the Dream copyright © 1986 A. A. Attanasio. Foreword to the Second Edition copyright © 2008 A. A. Attanasio All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Manufactured in the United States of America.
Cover Art: What Is Left by Marco Finocchiaro. Copyright © Marco Finocchiaro. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
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This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.
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ISBN (Smashwords Edition): 978-1-60450-458-3
ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-263-3
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Second Edition
Published by Phoenix Pick
an imprint of Arc Manor
P. O. Box 10339
Rockville, MD 20849-0339
www.ArcManor.com
***
For those who are.
*
Nothing is more real than nothing.
—Democritus
***
Contents
Foreword to the Second Edition
When the Dead Cry
In an Alien Way
Window in the Blood
Arc of the Dream
Epilog
***
Foreword to the
Second
Edition
We are born of the forgotten. What do we know of the origins of our human identity, let alone the origins of life itself?
Nothing.
As human beings, we are befogged by a cloud of unknowing. Our lonely gift among all of Earth’s creatures is to accept the truth that we will never know the truth.
Encountering this central terror of our isolation from all that is real is the task faced by Arc of the Dream. The protagonist, an adolescent bully, who – like all bullies – mediates his pain by inflicting pain, confronts the fiery-cold spirit of the inner world in the form of Insideout, an alien from a deeper dimension of reality. Insideout becomes the ruffian’s innermost secret teacher, who attends our anti-hero’s struggle to create an identity, and thus a destiny, out of the mysterious flux of existence.
Providing a vantage outside our human unknowing, Insideout clarifies what it means to be human:
As the Earth turns, our fortunes roll over from an ever-diminishing future into an increasingly constraining past. Passion is always suddenly pressing hard against our hearts. Fate and destiny, by turns, hunt us. Whichever claims us, the other loses everything, all its fateful or destinal force, and that one surviving power, fate or destiny, necessity or ambition, establishes authority in the wound created by claiming us – a wound we must then feed with our blood and heal with the secret strength of our uniqueness.
This novel is sheer fantasy, of course, because there is no vantage outside our human unknowing. But the secret strength we each possess is true. The strength of our uniqueness, of our individuality, is secret for the very reason that our brains trick us. The reality we see around us does not exist. Though our nervous systems are made of the same material we find in our environment, we feel separate, distinct from each other and the things around us. We cherish a vivid sense of past events and a canny awareness of the future. Yet, for over a century now, Einstein’s relativity theories have demonstrated (time and again!) that time is an illusion.
Kurt Gödel, Werner Heisenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein each in their respective fields of mathematics, physics and philosophy proved last century that reality is unknowable. We will never know the truth about ultimate things – including our ultimate nature as solitary minds, each of us partaking of the otherness, loneliness and alienation of individuality. Whatever we can find in our own intrinsic separateness to meet honestly and creatively the demands of our fate or destiny holds our spiritual energy before we disappear. That is our secret, utterly untranslatable knowing in a world of unknowing. Silence of which to tell. Such silence we feed our angel.
For a writer, that angel – that messenger – is the story. Arc of the Dream is science fiction, a fantasy about transcending science and reflecting on the reality we don’t know. This reflection has no substance really, no actual meaning other than the beauty of the incredible moment when writer and reader meet on the page, in the same nothing as the mirror of a lake, where sky and water gaze into each other and recognize one beautiful world moving through another.
A. A. Attanasio
Kohelepelepe, Hawai’i
2008
***
ARC OF THE DREAM
When the Dead Cry
The land looked evil. Black rocks shaped like knives covered the Earth. Aa lava, Donnie Lopes said to himself as he carefully stepped onto the frozen torrent. Sharp-toothed as a ripsaw, the lava forced Donnie, with his gimpy right leg, to stop frequently and look ahead to where the black flow slashed down slopes of scaly pines to the green sea miles away. Hell vents streaked with blistery colors leaked wisps of yellow smoke, and the air stank like a sewer. Above the steamy terrain and the bunsen blue of the ocean’s horizon, the sky boiled with clouds. Sunlight splashed in evanescent puddles among the charred hills and the tormented oases of scrub trees. No wonder the Polynesians thought this land belonged to the gods, Donnie thought. No one else would want to live here. Mountaintops, ocean bottoms, lava fields—the gods always get the crappiest real estate.
Donnie, a seventeen year old from Honolulu on his high school’s senior class trip, found himself on Mauna Loa, the biggest volcano in the world. Because of his withered leg, he had to forgo the hike along Devastation Trail with his classmates. The class chaperone had told him to sit in the ranger station and read about the rare plants and birds of the volcanic range, but after the others had left he had gone out to the back of the wood-slatted station and had found a trail of his own that gashed through bristly shrubs behind the restrooms and emerged in this scorched landscape.
This trek wasn’t as dangerous as it seemed, Donnie reassured himself. If he fell and lost his cane, he could always shout and holler and someone would hear him. He had spent his whole life being left behind because of his deformity, left to read books while others played ball or danced or explored. He had recently come to feel that he’d read too many books, that he knew more about what the world was supposed to be like than what it was.
Donnie’s sneaker caught in the socket of a burst gas bubble, and he pitched forward. With desperate speed, he swung his aluminum tube cane in front of him and braced himself an instant before he would have collapsed onto the teeth of the lava. A puckish grin lit his round face. The trail his classmates had taken was much safer than the fire-chewed path he had discovered for himself here on the jagged lava. But they wanted to move swiftly and cover the whole two-mile trail. He was content to pick his way across a few meters to a spot where the world looked as it had at the morning of time.
Toppling clouds swept the black landscape with fiery shadows, and from a scarp beside a ridge of ohelo shrubs as gray and twisted as smoke, something flashed. Mica, he thought at first, then immediately corrected himself: Mica’s a silicate, fool. It’s found in metamorphic rock, not in an igneous flow like this. His next thought moved onto bottlecaps and broken glass. The reaving clouds admitted more sunlight, and the flash burned briefly again, diamond-sharp as a star. The hot glint sat in a split boulder that looked like the charred hatching of a phoenix, and he edged closer to get a better look at it.
The nearer Donnie got, the more careful he had to be, because the land tilted steeply downward. Even someone with two strong legs would have been in jeopardy, and Donnie moved gingerly and with a spry wisdom that he had earned from a lifetime with his cane. On the face of the sheer incline, he tested each step twice with the cane and descended far enough into the pit of sharp rocks to see that the sun-hot glint was not bouncing off broken glass or crumpled foil. The object looked about the size of a twenty-five-cent piece but oblong and blue-silver. Disappointed that it wasn’t something he could recognize from this distance, he would have to go all the way down now.
The brittle lava snapped under his weight, and his bad leg spun free. His cane lodged firmly in a crevice, and his good leg braced itself on a firm jut of stone. He tottered briefly, the sweat of his strenuous effort flying from his face like chipped glass. He squatted, grateful to be wearing his scruffy green denim pants, and cautiously crabwalked the rest of the way down.
The bright object, a slender metallic ovoid, felt cool to his touch and shimmery as a piece of the wind when he picked it up. Sunlight fanned off it in a spectral smile as he turned it with the fingers of one hand, like a monkey with a strange fruit. It offered to his inspection only featureless metal.
He put it in his pocket and began the arduous climb back up to the ridge. Twice the ground crumbled under him, and both times his cane stabbed into the fanged rocks and pivoted him back to his feet. At the top, among tattered ohelo shrubs growing from the black sand, he took the object out of his pocket and held it up to the light.
Rainbows angel-haired about it, and a peculiar feeling welled up in Donnie. The feeling suffused all of him at once like the rush of a drug but softer, more like a feeling of weather or time of day. He thought of October in an old forest, the ember scent of dead leaves glowing in the air, the sky amethyst, the day’s last window, staring through cold vapors into the pins of night, the depths that held all the stars, the void that encompassed all the days of every world, gleaming like a jewel.
Weird. He bent over to force more blood into his head, because he thought the exertion of the parlous climb was affecting him. He rarely worked this hard, and the scintillations he had seen around the metal slug had to be the retinal flares of oxygen hunger. Same with the euphoria: A feeling like the end of day in New England retreated as he caught his breath. He had not the slightest inkling that the object that he held lived, let alone that it was a vaster being than himself.
The alien in his palm knew terror and great pain. It was a 5-space being exquisitely bound to a precise point within the continuum, and by moving it, Donnie was killing it. Within its iridium shell, its brain verged on panic. A conflagration of horror and confusion consumed it.
How strangely fearless the alien had felt when it had first entered this universe. Its jaunt had been an act of play, at first an accident of evolution and then an exuberant experiment with its newfound ability to push outward. Outward! The concept still seemed bizarre to it—though here it was, outside 5-space, outside the pith. Of course, it had been stunned to enter so quickly a universe made of points. Within its 5-space origin, everything was one point, and its transition to 4-space had been abrupt. It had evolved to where it could trespass outward, and so it had—instantly. But the journey back home would be restrained by 4-space physics, which meant it would take time and could happen only gradually. The alien had known this at once, but the full implications were still too strange to grasp.
Time itself opened as something new. When the alien first entered 4-space, it moved at light speed through this bizarreness called a continuum. Its sentience extended into the photon field and along the inertial contours of the universe, feeling the teeming points and all their connections. No point appeared separate or central. All points shone radiantly, luminous in their nets of quantum energies. And all were scattered and scattering farther each instant. Light streamed among them, reaching outward in elastic fields of energy.
Any one of those points could have been a way back home. Each point of energy and inertial mass in the spacetime continuum existed as a monumental gateway of force, appearing to the alien in gleaming archways of bent spacetime winding through a tightening Fibonacci coil to the iridescent gist of the subquantal dimensions. The alien selected a neutrino traveling alongside at the speed of light and focused its awareness on the tiny waveform. The silver lintels of curved space, the spin properties of the neutrino, loomed closer, and the mind narrowed smaller than the waveform. The spin properties manifested to the mind in glassy vaults that blurred by when the alien’s consciousness focused to a point smaller than the foam of spacetime.
Immediately, the being became aware of the song that provided the map of its source. The coma of oneness opened before it, and the mind teetered to the brink of an infinite plunge homeward—then stopped. It knew the way in. The way out was new, and it wanted to explore. It let the neutrino go, and its attention expanded outward again. That was its last chance to return home directly. After that, it belonged to the maze of creation.
Donnie wobbled at the edge of the lava slope, shoulders slouched, mind impelled by the alien’s trance. Like a plant listening to the rhythms of the Earth, he swayed dreamily. The alien’s story continued to rise in him with sap-force, and he saw the strange being as a gush of energy, a bolt of power that had burst from its world in 5-space, was spurting through the cold reaches of 4-space, and would soon fall back to the point of its origin in a fiery arc. That’s what the alien was—an arc leaping across the void. Donnie shivered, and his mind melted back into that arc.
Spacetime loomed molten with radiation. Interflowing oceans of energy swarmed in the void, and the alien felt drunk to be a part of it. Its drunkenness was real. Moving at light-speed through the hive of galaxies, its energy got scattered by the gravity lenses of the stars, and the being multiplied into many beings, all of them bursting off in different directions—each of them as aware as the original and each alone with its own fate in the hungry darkness.
Here, finally, a story could begin, Once upon a time . . .—for here time as humans imagine it began for the alien. Here the raw blackness of space became a trajectory, millions of trajectories, one for each of the alien’s gravity-refracted selves. Each trajectory through the fiery emptiness became a story. This story was the one path that led to Earth.
In its fifth generation of star-lensing, one of the alien’s numerous photon selves slowed to subluminal velocity and translated the inertial difference to a physical shape. The shape, structured by field patterns still directly linked with 5-space, took the form of an iridium-shelled titanohematite brain. Within the daedal interstices of these metal atoms, hypertubules connected the 4-space body of the alien with its 5-space home. When it decided to look for signs of its own kind, a mind that it could meet before its fall back to home, it used the infolded parameters of hyperspace in the subatomic matrix of its brain to scan for psychic fields in spacetime.
For every collection of points whose pattern generated sentience in this strange cosmos, signature waveforms prevailed in the photon field—electromagnetic auras of cellular potentials: Those could be found almost everywhere. But brainwaves – what the alien sought through the time-warped peepholes of its sensors – offered the qualities that the alien wanted: it was looking for mind. And mind was there—broken into multitudinous bits and flung throughout all of creation. Clusters of separate minds glittered in the gloomy vastness, crowding the psychic sensors.
It searched out one mind in the nearest galaxy, a mind that seemed most like its own. And it willed itself toward that consciousness.
The 4-space mind that the explorer had chosen to confront existed in protoplasmic form on a water world swinging about a yellow star on the rim of a galactic maelstrom two hundred thousand light-years away. The journey into the wheeling stars took a quarter million years, though the alien hardly noticed, for it was in empathic trance with the mind that it had selected.
First of all, the mind it had chosen was really many minds, a blowing of radiant atoms, iridescent as the pith of 5-space. Each atom represented one creature, a part of the song and a three-dimensional being, bright and glowing—and then gone. The bodies lived for a while—and then dissolved and disappeared. But these individuals were not really gone. The light cone of each unique existence persisted in the vacuum field that permeated the continuum. The waveforms of each atom, each body, each mind continued to exist and change in the 4-space expanse of the cosmos that surrounded the three-dimensional world. Some of the waveforms in the vacuum field interacted with the three-dimensional creatures again, and for all those bodies that dissolved, blinked out, and became ghost lights, new flashes of the song appeared, and the fire-flicker rhythms among the millions of comings and goings of individuals sang of the savage rapture of life, the travails of awe, and the harrowing abundance of time. It sang of the sun’s incandescent passion for the night and the creaking stars. It sang of the alien poised in the night’s depth, light-years deep, rising toward Earth to share in the song.
Dolphins and whales! Donnie thought from the core of his trance and nearly quivered awake with that recognition. For an instant, the boy’s self-awareness flared brighter, and he saw himself against the heights of the sky, the lava field around him gray with translucence, a thick fog of rock. The air stank with the sulfur of volcanic vents, and he tried to pull himself awake through his nostrils. But that didn’t work. The alien was too strong, and muscles of whale-music closed the lock of the trance.
“Insideout,” the sea-animals called the 5-space mind whom they sensed approaching. That’s what it felt like to them, leaving the songfulness of the pith and being flung through outer space at the speed of light. Insideout, impressed by their awareness of it, used its hyperspace field to reach more strongly through the distance between them. They were clearly one mind in a spray of many minds, and their intelligence fascinated the alien.
The songful water creatures understood trespass between worlds: They had left the sea once. They had lived along the tumbling shores and jarred rocks in tangles of grass and mud. And when the mud had dried and the sun had begun to eat everything, they had come back, stronger and wiser for their trespass. The song had begun then.
Insideout swam with all the tribes: cetaceans—dolphins and whales whose huge, complex brains held the light of a magnified reality. The alien called them by their own whistle names. It communed with them through its hyperspace window, appearing in their minds as a disembodied and remote presence at the fringe of voice. Though still physically light-years away, the titanohematite brain pressed closer to the dolphins and whales than the spume in their clutching airholes. The 5-space core of the alien at that time actually touched every point in the universe, and it could put its consciousness anywhere.
It put its mind on Earth and learned from the cetaceans how to radiate—how to sing in this flying-apart universe. By the time it arrived near Earth, hundreds of millennia later, its song had evolved to a bliss of sharing: It sang of the bedazzling pith and the tranced oneness of 5-space, which the whales called yes-out-of-mind. It listened to the Earth songs in an empathic bliss that melled its consciousness with the collective unconscious of the cetacean psyche. And it knew the gauze of a physical body, the dust of eyesight, and the absorption of sounds pictorializing a benthic world of up and down.
This liberty of mind flowed over generations, riding the crest of life right through the rendings of death, unimpeded for over two hundred fifty thousand orbits of the water planet about its yellow star. Abruptly, toward the very end of its journey, another mind from among the many minds on this planet intruded aggressively.
Insideout, whose point-awareness had fixated on the cetacean psyche, would have ignored this songless mind except that it appeared so suddenly, filling every pock of the planet with its radiation. The serenity of the blue world, which had been luring the arc, all at once blared with screaming energy. Radio noise and microwave sirens swirled about the planet like the aura of a small star, and Insideout thought that its approach had somehow triggered this global response. It filtered the radio flux and listened to military frequencies, radar beacons, and soap operas long enough to ascertain that it had nothing to do with the radioactive frenzy blazing hotter as the alien approached.
The being responsible for this noise was a dim, chittering mind whose thronging spindle-limbed bodies flourished everywhere on the planet’s exposed land.
From inside his trance, Donnie witnessed a magic kaleidoscope of people: prismatic faces, ghostly bodies, fluttery snapshots of bright cosmetics, spike-heeled shoes, cuffed trousers, and padded shoulders. Images from the fifties ruffled before him like reflections on water, and he desperately tried to mentally seize hold of any one of these familiar shapes from the past, hoping to rouse himself from the alien’s spell. Fin-backed cars streaked by, suburban houses appeared and vanished—and he grew smaller, shrinking back into the alien’s trance.
I’m Donnie! he shouted to himself. I’m Donnie Lopes! Afraid of losing himself among this jumble of human faces glittering with makeup and the silent animation of lost conversations, he cried, Let me go! But Insideout could not hear him, and his noise dwindled into the neverness of the alien’s grip.
Humans were without a song, Insideout realized. Only their machines created jangling distortions in the photon field, and their machines made little sense to the alien. It finally ignored them and put its attention back on the sublime blue peace of the cetaceans.
While Insideout’s mind explored Earth, its iridium-shelled, titanohematite-cored body decelerated by using its internal hyperfield to siphon some of its inertia out of spacetime and into the multiverse. But the accuracy of its map of the continuum was fractionally off, and Insideout missed Earth and plunged toward the proton wall of the sun.
On its three-hour detour back to the blue planet. Insideout took time from its rapport to calculate how long it would remain on Earth. The stay could hardly be indefinite, because the alien’s connection with 5-space demanded that it stay in motion within the expanding field of the continuum. Its interlope could last only three revolutions of the planet. Then it would use the infinite power of the arc to return home. Any longer and the hyperfield in the atomic spaces of its brain would collapse into the flux of spacetime and the alien would be trapped in this weird, exploding reality, where one was many, each radiating a psychic field for a small time and then—blinking out and becoming eerie, bodiless light cones.
Insideout had sometimes wondered about the light cones. The wraiths of past light interacted endlessly in the vastness of the vacuum field—and Insideout realized that the waveforms generated by the three-dimensional creatures never dissolved or blinked out. Light within the tesseract range of the continuum endured forever. And it was there, among these shapes of light, that the alien would be stranded if its hyperfield collapsed. The thought of persisting endlessly in this blasted apart cosmos terrified the 5-space entity, and Insideout was glad when a close-up view of the planet’s surface diverted its attention.
Pastels of radio emissions covered everything, and the alien shifted to gravitational light to see through the smog of radio and microwave noise. The land surface of the planet registered mostly as wasteland, yet even in the most desolate regions of rock and ice electromagnetic pollution from the radio animals seethed. Insideout was grateful for the weak graviton current of the planet, which revealed the landscape dimly but without distortion from the electronic yammering, and it avoided the wide land masses. The dolphin-sized, narrow-shaped beings filled all the river crevasses and plains of the planet, cluttering the surface with their electrical excrescences. Fortunately, water covered most of the surface, and there resided the cetaceans, whom Insideout had traveled light-years to greet.
The arc circled the globe twice, scanning in gravitational light for the right place to land. The seabed lacked stability: Creatures came and went down there, and the strong currents offered little shelter. The ice sheets of the poles looked good, if it could find a niche away from the wind. Insideout banked toward the bright haze of the frozen Ross Sea when it noticed again the largest mountain on the planet. Surrounded by the warm waters the dolphins loved, the mountain seemed inviting. Insideout had rejected the site on its first flyby, because of the electrical clutter there, signifying again the presence of the photon-loud but otherwise songless animals that the alien had come to fear: Their thought-waves had a sinister texture, and the jumble of radiation that they dumped into the photon field demonstrated an appallingly centerless fervor growing louder with each orbit.
Now, however, its urgency to match the inertial frame of Earth and experience union with the cetaceans before returning to 5-space overrode its anxiety, and it decided to ignore the radar-howling creatures and land at a site on the planet’s biggest mountain, somewhere out of reach.
Insideout selected a rock slope that appeared luminously empty in the gray fabric of gravity light—a barren lava field overlooking black, devastated miles of crusty magma. Barring a freak meteor, the site looked safe from change for centuries, let alone three days.
The sight of the familiar terrain roused Donnie Lopes toward consciousness again. Sunlight pressed on the land. For one clear moment, Donnie became himself once more, holding the arc in his hand. Only an instant had elapsed since he had climbed out of the lava kettle, and the soulful bellies of the clouds still hung as they had when he had first held the arc up to the light. Please, let me go, he whimpered from inside the ice of time. Fear scampered in him. Where were the world’s old noises? Why were the birds he could see stuck in the air like pieces of the sky that had been punched out? Please, please, he cried and fell back into the alien’s dream.
The arc released its expendable inertia to the hyperfield and fell to Earth. The iridium-shelled pod flumped onto the black sand among fists of igneous rock, and Insideout melled at once with the morphogenetic field lines of its old friends in the sea.
Alone inside a dolphin body, in the green sea, it knew again in-ness, inflamed with joy by the ubiquity of this intensely primal feeling: Once more, it was in. Only here, in this strange reality, each being had its own in! Each has its own Point! A numinous feeling gripped Insideout— and it prayed in the click language of its hosts:
“Glory of the Great One—glory to You, the Many. A brief instant ago it seems I hung far yet erect in the fixed attention of the pith, undreaming, with all the one, younging as my life became the hopeful dark, as Being has willed, O as Being has willed from the Last! Great One— you are here! Even in this scattered world, you are here!”
The dolphins shoaled at the surface, spinning with giddy energy in the mellifluous and mysterious presence of Insideout. They sang a soft-eared song as serious as play about the fire of becoming, and the alien was touched,
“You songful ones are like me—so yes-out-of-mind and all one, yet—yet so separate, so far from the pith and not one at all! How can this be? You are one only in song!”
All at once, as if in reply but with violent impersonality, the high blue air of the sky tore by like the wind, and Insideout was flung beyond organic bonding. Silence zenithed in the direction of its plummet, which also felt like a wild ascent. And that’s when it apprehended that it was going to die.
The arc had been moved! Insideout churned with the expanding knowledge of what had happened: Some animal had moved its physical form! It could see the beast in electromagnetic light—one of the radio noise creatures, climbing clumsily over the black rocks, the arc in its hand.
Donnie observed himself climbing up the rocky incline, and when he reached the exact place where he stood now, the trance imploded and all memory of the alien’s memory vanished in him. He stood like a flash of rain, all awareness of Insideout falling out of him.
Horror quaked through Insideout as it realized that it was truly going to die. The arc was now broken. The hyperfield itself could not be moved and remained there on the lava field suspended in the suds of the continuum at the exact point where the arc had entered the inertial frame of the Earth. Unless the titanohematite brain returned to that precise point where the connection to 5-space waited, the hyperfield would weaken and in a few days smear away in the expansion of the universe.
Death had no dominion in 5-space, only here—and here the alien’s only way home meant being torn apart by the bloating fields of the cosmos: It would have to make its own peace with death. But what did that mean? Its mind unspooled calculations. When the hyperfield collapsed, the arc would convert into pure energy. It would become light again—but would it be conscious? How long could it live without its bond to hyperspace? The question took longer to ask than the time the answer offered—and it retracted from its thoughts, stung. Its own intelligence mocked it. It was going to die.
No! It commanded itself to find again the animal that had moved it and to reach into the being, toward its pith, and communicate its need.
A cramped, skullbound sensation squeezed it like the birthhold, and it pulled away in a huff of fright.
The screaming sky sheared through it. The inertial rip in the hyperfield, though still miniscule, inflicted excruciating, dizzy anguish that got worse as its metallic brain moved farther from the hyperfield. Hurt mangled its perceptions, and it reached again, more desperately, for the animal that carried the arc.
A smothering terror enclosed it and fisted harder, pressing out all sensations but a muffled smudge of sound and a pale leaking of light. This wee-minded animal barely provided room to feel anything but the blood of the beast welling in its loops.
Insideout wanted to lift away from this seizure of numb flesh, yet it knew it couldn’t. Until the arc was returned, it had to go on, deeper into the mute flesh of this being. Moments collapsed and sprawled. Sinewy thoughts flexed with aching slowness.
The dolphins called after Insideout in fiery tatters of song, startled by its vehement withdrawal. It went on, ignoring the song. Pulps of visceral feelings globbed thicker and swathed its wounded core. Thinking dimmed. Even so, Insideout went on into the animal darkness, deeper into the deathable kingdom.
The mind that it encountered proved too small to contain the alien’s presence. Unlike the cetaceans, these creatures had no group unity. They swarmed as pinpoint minds, each distinct and separate from the others. Even the light cones of the physical bodies that had dissolved went on in the vacuum as discrete waveforms, melling into each other much more slowly than the light of the cetaceans.
Desperate to save itself, Insideout forced its sentience into the tiny psyche of these loud creatures. Forty centuries of human thought tunneled into it with a luminous frenzy. Donnie’s body, vibrantly contoured in infrared colors, appeared before it. Three other human bodies, chromed in hot light, appeared beyond Donnie. Four human shapes confronted the alien. To communicate with these organisms, it would have to use all four bodies.
Space glittered in icy motes as the interloper from 5-space culled information about these beings from the human light in the vacuum field. The viscera of physical bodies swathed the alien’s senses, constricting its awareness to the one creature holding the arc. This was the one it had to reach. Donnie looked as if he were made of mirror pixels: Each of the millions of gleaming mirrors opened a window on an instant in the creature’s life.
Almost gagging with claustrophobia, Insideout peered into the windows and viewed Donnie’s life. The waveform in the vacuum field that had blinked on with the DNA of Donnie’s first cell, at the boy’s conception, exposed a cruel consciousness, a minatory waveform. Staring across the tesseract range through that waveform, Insideout detected a sooty red vista, heard screams, felt rage and fear. War. This waveform’s last physical shape had destroyed other human bodies, and it itself had been destroyed by its own kind. The fear imprinted on that waveform matched the clangor of the alien’s own terror, and it wanted to pull away. But to live, it had to go on. It shifted its focus to the waveform’s current three-dimensional shape. The atrophied left leg felt numb. The natural flow of energy had been cut off there shortly after birth by an invasion of poliovirus. The tightness of the body felt wrong. Both parents drifted as waveforms in the vacuum, their bodies gone, dissolved after shattering in a car accident. All recent memories depicted the home—limping among other orphans, reading, hobbling among classrooms, reading—
“What’d you find, stooge?” a voice cracked Donnie’s reverie, and immediacy streamed back on him. The sour egg stench from the volcanic fumaroles and the sight of the blasted terrain jolted into place, and he looked toward the voice with a dazed expression.
“You stoned?” a blond face with sunstreaked, windcast hair and a mischievous smile asked. Dirk Heiser, the class tough, lean and restless as a leopard, wore a flouncy white shirt with a wide collar like a pirate’s, open to his navel, revealing a taut stomach. Dirk reached out and plucked the bright object from Donnie’s fingers. “What have we here?”
“Hey, I found it!” Donnie shouted and snatched at the silver disc.
Dirk tossed it in the air like a coin, and it shuffled sunflashes and opals. “It’s mine now, stooge.”
“No! I found it!” Donnie yelled—something he had never dared with Dirk before. Remotely, he experienced awe in the airy twilight feeling that had come from the object and that had led to this defiance.
“Give it back to him, Dirk,” a woman’s voice called from the bushes. A scrawny girl with a long-eyed and sharp-boned face appeared behind the leering bully. Dark, fluffy hair flattened at the back and black sand smudging the shoulders and elbows of her red pullover shadowed the moment before.
“Go sit on it, Lani.” Dirk fit the reflectant shape to his eye, monocle-style, and with one hand pushed Donnie backward.
Donnie staggered to the edge of the scarp, and his bad leg went out from under. He slid into the pit and immediately stopped his fall with his cane. Gravel chuckled down the long slope.
“I don’t like anyone yelling at me, gimp.” Dirk bent over to confront Donnie face to face. Donnie saw himself in the bauble gripped by Dirk’s angry eye: The horse of his face in the curved surface snorted with fear. With a grin that revealed backward bent teeth, Dirk grabbed the cane and yanked it from Donnie’s grip.
Gravity jerked through Donnie, and his hands clutched at the sharp rocks jutting from the brim of the slope while his good leg scrambled for footing. He ignored the hot pain of cut nerves in his fingers and held the frantic weight of his body until his leg found support.
“Dirk!” Lani protested and bent to help Donnie.
Dirk shoved her back. “Get away.” He hooked the cane to a branch of a wispy ohelo and held the other end out for Donnie. When Donnie reached for it, Dirk swung it away. The bully laughed as Donnie fell back and the air gasped out of him. “You still have the stuff I gave you last week?”
“Sure,” Donnie wheezed. “What would I do with it?”
“Some gimps might not like holding swag,” Dirk replied, waving the end of the cane before Donnie. “Some gimps might get the idea of turning it in. But you wouldn’t do that after all these years, would you?”
“Dirk, it’s all still in my locker—just like you gave it to me. Two watches and that car radio.”
“Good.” A dark smile shadowed his face. “Then I won’t have to rough you up.”
Donnie whined, sweatdrops standing out on his face like the heads of pins. “Help me up.” His eyes reached for Dirk. “Please.”
The shadow of Dirk’s smile flitted away. “See you downstream, fool.” He left the cane where Donnie could reach it and backed off.
Even with his hand on the cane, Donnie recognized that he was going to fall. His shoulders, icy with fatigue, couldn’t pull him up except in wild, lurching movements that would snap the branch holding the cane. He hung there quivering, a whimper opening from the center with the certainty that he was going to take a beating.
Lani looked at Dirk with pinched eyes and rushed away over the gnarled ground. Dirk flicked his middle finger at her and dropped the silver disc from his eye. He caught it below his hip. “Women,” he said with resignation. He faced Donnie, whose round face shivered. “They don’t understand, do they?” He walked the long coin between his fingers, grinned at Donnie like a bat, and walked away.
***
Dirk caught up with Lani at the ranger station, a building of gray planks and unlathed tree trunk posts supporting a sun-battered shake roof. The place was empty except for a husky Hawai’ian woman behind a counter of pamphlets about exotic birds and plants. Lani strode across the gravel parking lot to the charter bus that had brought their class to the volcano park when Dirk took her by the wrist. “Hey, slow down.”
“Let me go,” Lani said with clenched intensity.
“What’s the matter?”
Before Lani could say anything, a shriek sounded from beyond the blossom-fired shrubs as Donnie Lopes took his fall and began crying from the lava field. “You’re cruel,” she said with flat indignation and turned to walk toward the bus.
“Me?” Dirk followed, arms open at his sides, revealing his obvious innocuousness. “You don’t know Donnie Lopes, sister.”
“He’s a gimp, Dirk,” she said without breaking stride. “You beat up on a gimp.”
“So what? He holds stuff for me. I got to keep him in line or he’ll think he has something on me. What do you want me to do? Go back and apologize?”
“Don’t shock me.”
Dirk took Lani’s arm again, and she stopped to face him. The woman at the ranger station hurried out of the building toward Donnie’s cries. Dirk shrugged. “Okay, I was a little hard on him. I’m sorry. I can’t stand the sight of him limping around studying rocks and plants like he’s some kind of scientist. He gives me the creeps.”
“You give me the creeps,” Lani said coldly and pulled her arm from his grip. She had been warned about Dirk. Her brother, gangleader of the Judas Boys, a street-crew of mongrel youths that Dirk had been dealing with for the last year, had warned her. The Judas Boys sometimes used him to move stolen goods, because he knew most of the reliable fences in town. Her brother had pegged Dirk as an angry clown bound to make a fool of her. He was right. “I don’t want to be with someone who steals from gimps.”
“Steals?” Dirk’s face opened wide with incredulity. “I never stole anything from him.”
“Then what’s that metal thingee you took from him?”
Dirk reached into the thigh pocket of his safari pants and pulled out the silver ovoid. “This piece of junk?” He held it out to her, and his fingertips felt chilled and the air around it looked burnished and scratched with hair-thin rainbows. “I don’t even know what it is. I’ll give it back to him if it makes you feel better.”
“You want to make me feel better?” She stepped away from him. “Leave me alone.”
“I would if I could.” He sidled up to her. “You know I’m hung on you.”
His gentle tone mollified her anger, and she didn’t stop at the bus but kept walking to an asphalt path that wended through a brake of banana trees. The arrow-shaped sign there read “Lava Tube.” Dirk had a golden scent about him—a woodmeat odor Lani liked—and when its damp sawdust fragrance touched her, she calmed enough for him to take her hand.
They strolled without speaking down the switchback path under boughs of red ferns and along lava walls glisteny with moisture and splotched with yellow and blue lichen. The lava tube appeared ahead, a dark tunnel loud with echoes of some tourists at the far end. In this darkness cool and silken as the inside of a cloud, Dirk drew Lani closer and was bending to kiss her when a thick hand gripped his shoulder.
“Mistah Romance, you gonna get dirty lick’ns.”
The gruff voice sounded like a boulder trying to speak. Dirk turned and in the blackness faced the denser darkness of two large men.
“Lani, walk,” the boulder said.
“Ipo, leave him alone,” Lani insisted in a quavery voice.
“Mistah Romance get moh romance dan you sistah,” Ipo’s gravel voice crunched on. “Da Judas Boys say bus him up. Poetic justice. Whateveahs.”
Terror quacked like a choking duck in Dirk’s chest, and he couldn’t get his voice to work. He had heard about Ipo and his silent partner, Chud, two legendary Judas Boys who had done time as juveniles for murdering a cop ten years before and had gone on to become hitmen for the Japanese mob, the dreaded Yakuza. “Hey, what’s the problem?” Dirk asked, and his voice sounded like tinfoil.
“Da problem is—you wen feel good an da Judas Boys not.” Ipo’s thick voice chewed the air around Dirk, and he could smell something like squid on the big man’s breath. “You burn da Judas Boys, toilethead—now we wen unscrew your face.”
“Hold on!” Dirk squealed. “I never burned the Judas Boys. You don’t like what I gave you, give it back. I’ll get your money for you.”
“Oh yeah, you fine dat money awright—wit’ interest, toilethead.”
“Sure,” Dirk agreed, the word smoking up from the hot ingot of his stomach. “Anything the Judas Boys want.” Dirk’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he could see the golf clubs that Ipo and Chud carried. Their shaven heads looked like the silhouettes of footballs.
“What’s going on?” Lani wanted to know.
“I sold the Judas Boys some ice and they think it’s been stepped on.”
Lani stared at him with plangent surprise. “You don’t deal drugs, Dirk.”
He never did. His mother had been a junkie. He shrugged off Lani’s disappointment. “I was helping a Hotel Street girl. She’d lifted it off a sailor. It was no good for her. Money’s kinder.”
“K-den, toilethead, you wen geev us a towsand.”
“A grand?” Dirk looked to Lani as if this were a joke. She looked white as a pulled blind. “The ice cost them two-fifty. I spent a hundred of that already, but I can borrow it back. I ain’t got a grand.”
“Den you get mess up.” The head of Ipo’s golf club came up swiftly under Dirk’s chin and clacked his teeth together forcefully, sharply nipping his tongue. “You mess up, you stay mess up, toilethead. Now you wen pay. Either wit’ money or wit’ pain. Fo you decide.”
Dirk swallowed the gummy taste of blood. “I’ll get the money.”
“Try get foa next day.”
“We’re just getting back to the Home tonight. How can I get up that kind of money in one day?”
The head of the golf club pushed tighter against his throat, gagging off his breath. His hands moved to pull the club away, and the other club came up between his legs just hard enough to send a jolt of nausea from groin to scalp. “Try get next day behin’ da keiki field—or wen next time, no talk, jess hard rub.”
The golf clubs fell away, and Ipo and Chud turned and slouched into darkness.
Lani stepped closer. “You all right?”
“Yeah, I eat pain.” One hand massaged his throat, the other clutched the throbbing ache of his crotch.
“What you going to do?”
“Get the money,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine how he could pull together that much cash so quickly.
“Was the ice bad?” Lani asked.
He shot her an indignant look. “It was a real bride. I wouldn’t touch it otherwise.”
That news deepened Lani’s frown. “Then you’re in bad. They want to break your face, don’t they?”
Dirk walked out into the sunlight, and plaited scents of water-rubbed rock and blossoms gentled him. “So why are you hanging out with me?”
“My brother says you’re a bad time,” she admitted. “But you know me—I never listen to anybody but me. Come on—let’s get back to the bus.”
Dirk didn’t move. While holding the pain in his pants, his hand touched the object he had taken from Donnie. A peculiar feeling streamed from it, through the pants fabric and into his hand. A worshipful sensation, like the indigo dark of trees at dusk, whelmed through him, and his hurt seemed tiny by comparison. Suddenly, he wasn’t in his body anymore. He lofted through a darkness chained with stars. And though the air brisked very cold, black as oil and filmy with rainbows, a boast of euphoria swelled through him.
Insideout’s scan lasted about six seconds. While Dirk stood entranced by the magnetic stimulation of his midbrain, the alien replaced its images of Donnie with those of Dirk. In the exchange, it saw them together: At lunch in the high school cafeteria, Donnie reading while he ate, oblivious to the clamor around him, and Dirk leaning across the table to sprinkle Donnie’s soup with fishfood from biology class; Dirk sitting behind Donnie on the bus, pelting him with paperclips, slyly tying his shoelaces to the seat post and dropping to the curb with laughter when Donnie tripped and couldn’t get up before the bus pulled away. Inside the laughter lurked more cruelties, memories of trapping Donnie in his locker, rigging a ball bearing to the tip of his cane in the middle of the night, and dropping insects into his ear while he slept.
Dirk hated Donnie, because they both came from the Home—O’ahu State Boys’ Home—and the sight of Donnie staggering around had filled his days for the last eleven years, since Mady, Dirk’s mom, went to prison for prostitution and the State committed him to the Home. He had been six then and used to wandering: Mitch, his dad, had been military, and before a land mine chopped him to pieces, leaving them stranded in Honolulu, he had taken them with him to Germany, Alaska, Virginia, and the Philippines. Dirk grew up as a stranger in the world, and Mitch saw to it that the boy learned how to hold his own. He taught his son hand-to-hand combat when he was three, and he instilled in him a predatory watchfulness before the boy could even speak well. An animal genius possessed the boy, and he excelled at shattering pine boards with his hands and kicking water balloons dangled above his head.
If Mitch hadn’t died three years later, his discipline would have shaped Dirk into a Marine. That’s what Mady told the teachers who called her to the schools because of Dirk’s brawling. Dirk went to five different O’ahu elementary schools in two years. The rage of losing his father had been uncontrollable, and since all that was left of Mitch was the merciless fighting style he had passed on, he fought,
Dirk spent the rest of his childhood perfecting and augmenting the skills his father had taught him. Thinking back on it, as he often did during the long bus ride from the Home to school that passed the gates of the military base where his father had served, he was glad for his fighting heritage: That alone kept him whole when Mady went bad after Mitch died. Alcohol and pills cut the grief of enduring without Mitch, and Dirk spent a lot of time on the street running purchase errands for Mady and her clients. A six-year-old copping pills on streetcorners lured perverts from every rathole in the city, and Dirk became proficient at warding off threats and inflicting injuries.
By the time Mady got busted and jailed, Dirk had become a street viper, spindly from malnutrition and venomous with rage. His face clenched in a defiant scowl, even in sleep, his furiously scrawny body fit with muscles taut as razors, he terrorized the other kids, even the senior boys and the social workers. Small as he was, no one could stand up to him when he was enraged. Fury jagged in him like lightning and moved him faster than most people could think.
Six older boys, blighted by child abuse and toughened from years of vengeance, ganged up on Dirk in the lavatory during his first week at the Home. Three were hospitalized. Shoved into a urinal, bigger than he was at that time, Dirk spun about on the wet, scooped ceramic and gouged the air from the lungs of his nearest assailant. His flash-stab forced fingers under the boy’s sternum and touched his heart with a pain like the silver tip of an acetylene flame. The kid curled up no better than a torched insect, and that happened so swiftly that the other five boys didn’t appreciate the dark skill they had just witnessed. The scowling wastrel whirled, whip-punching testicles, elbowing a kidney, kicking a knee to splinters, biting a half moon of flesh from an arm, and slicing the cornea of an eye with a precise finger flick. No one in the Home ever threatened him again.
Dirk, of course, didn’t require threats to vent his rage, and soon he had used his terror to buffer him from the Home: Other boys made his bed, completed his chores, prepared his homework, and helped him hawk the drugs he scored from his old street contacts. This was a smooth arrangement for him, until Mady got out of prison four months later and left the islands without him. He didn’t blame her. She had married Mitch at sixteen. That was in Stuttgart, where she had grown up near the military base. A war baby, fathered by one of the many occupation troops who had used her mother to flash their lust, she suffered in Germany, especially after her mother’s suicide. It was a tired story. Dirk knew all about it. During Mady’s drunken binges, that was all she talked about.
Glad he wouldn’t have to hear that anymore, Dirk nonetheless despaired at being kenneled in the Home until he was eighteen. His despair made him sloppy, and the Home counselors caught on to his drug trade and called in the police. Not much the police could do to a seven-year-old, but his street contacts deserted him, and the counselors isolated him and kept him from abusing the other boys.
Denied human targets for his vehemence, Dirk turned on the inanimate world, breaking windows, clogging toilets, and scrawling obscenities on walls. Punishment fed his furor, and eventually the medical staff sedated him. He was on and off medication for the next six years, examined by countless psychiatrists and childcare specialists and finally abandoned as incorrigible. By then puberty had assailed him, and he found a new outlet for his violence.
Ruddy blond, with eyes pale as water, thick-shouldered and tall, Dirk from the age of twelve attracted women. Several times a year, he’d run away from the Home and seek out the contacts Mady had made in Waikiki. Most of them had left the islands or gone to prison, but friends of friends were always available for a boy as ruthlessly handsome and aggressive as Dirk. He ran purchase errands again for the prostitutes on Hotel Street, and they paid him in favors, which for Dirk at the age of twelve worked better than money.
By the time he reached fifteen, though, he had gotten bored of sex and became intrigued with love. His first lover, Tina, a social worker at the Home, a woman in her early twenties had hair the color of a violin, eyes the subdued gray of clouds, and a voice like the northern lights, bright, shifty with moods and colors, and far away. Dirk fell in love with her beauty and her tranquil equanimity—a sureness of character that he had never witnessed in any of the girls on Hotel Street.
Tina’s attraction to Dirk was pure animal magnetism. At fifteen, Dirk had become a rangy, sandy-haired boy with eyes of crushed glass in a face hewn by summer sunlight. They made love in the attic storage room among shrouded hulks of unused furniture, dim mirrors, and tiger shadows from the window grills.
For the six months that his affair with Tina lasted, Dirk’s mischief stopped. The Home counselors initially thought he might be sick. When they finally came around to believing that the hellion had made a change of character, Tina departed for L.A. to seek her fortune, leaving Dirk bereft. Rejection did not mix with his innate outrage, and he railed against love and women in his graffiti and aloud, in feverish ranting. From then on, Dirk resolved to love only for convenience.
Lani saw him shivering, eyes glazed like blue mints, and she assumed he trembled with fear of Ipo and Chud. She knew then she had been a fool to go for this bullying and deceitful loverboy. She had been attracted to him by his brash good looks and perpetual bravura—though now she saw how shallow that act was. A pang of pity lanced her remorse, and she shook her head sadly, more for herself than for him. Now she’d have to find someone else for good times.
Dirk’s trance drifted off like a cloud shadow. Again he stood in white wine sunlight, surrounded by mossy walls of black rock and long, bashful green giraffes of ferns. He saw Lani walking away, but he didn’t care. Like a crescendo of alcohol, power surged in him. A sound like the music of icicles chimed from the sky. He wondered what was happening to him and suspected that somehow, whatever was happening, it might be coming from the silver disc Donnie had found. But how could that be? This was just a piece of metal, not much bigger than a bottlecap—how could it make him feel anything?
He turned to follow Lani back to the parking lot, a shout of amazement beginning in him before he saw Ipo and Chud watching him from the mouth of the lava tube. In the sunlight, their shaved heads and faces looked like lacquered wood. Ipo, barefoot in red nylon shorts and sleeveless undershirt, leaned on his golf club, sunlight peeling off the globes of his shoulders in a sweaty gloss. His squashed face chuckled. He thought Dirk had been shuddering with fright. Chud, who stood behind him with his golf club across his bare shoulders, stared with the impassive ferocity of a tiki god.
Dirk flicked his shoulders back. Let’m think I’m scared, he told himself, as the incredible trance he had just experienced shrunk to a smell of cider-turning apples and a dewy feeling in his lungs like after a long cry or before a thunderstorm. He didn’t know what had happened to him. The disc had shocked him, not with electricity but with some colder and more ethereal force. He still felt it. The faceless coin in his fist hummed icily, and an exhilaration pungent as autumn smothered all fear. When he passed the thugs, he stared far into their eyes, into the back of their heads, and the frost light in his gaze made them both flinch.
***
On the flight back to Honolulu, the class chaperone sternly reprimanded Dirk for pushing Donnie Lopes down a lava slope, and he had to sit in the front row of the plane facing an airlines ad with the vice-principal and without a window to stare out of. He fell asleep. While he slept, the disc in his pocket hummed at a pitch far above human hearing, and he dreamed that his father sat next to him. An orphan’s dream, he acknowledged right away, and in a fitful lurch of lucid dreaming, he tried to wake up. His body didn’t respond.
“Relax, son,” his father said. A bear of a man, the Marine staff sergeant with razor blue eyes, dented chin, and prizefighter’s brow declared, “This isn’t a dream.”
“Come on, Mitch!” Dirk barked as he usually did when the yearning dreams wouldn’t break off. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead twelve years.”
“That’s right,” the thick-armed man agreed. He wore camouflage fatigues and combat boots. Remnants of green and black war paint smudged his cheeks and buzzcut hairline. “Shrapnel severed my aorta and I was zipped in a bodybag and flown home to Indiana. Twelve years ago. Twelve easy years. Until you picked up the arc.”
“You mean this thing?” He took the silver disc out of his thigh pouch, amazed at the lucidity of the dream. “Donnie Lopes picked it up.”
“You took it.” His gruff features looked wrung, sad as a hound.
“So what? What’s the problem?”
“You’re holding an arc.”
“You mean like Noah?”
“No. I mean like electric arc.” Concern smoothed his father’s voice: “Dirk, you’re holding a live wire. That silver disc isn’t an object. It’s a force, like electricity—only a lot stronger. Unless you return it to exactly where you found it, a lot of people, including you, will be killed. The whole island is in danger.”
“Oh, Christ. Why am I dreaming this?”
“You’re not dreaming it. This is real.”