Prologue

PROLOGUE


In the beginning, a black hole. Sewer. Freezing pisspot of sharpflecked stone and mortar, faintly illuminated by a tic-tac-toe of cold, distant stars.
Gagging smell of bedding hay sodden with the ammoniac stench of urine. Low moan of wind swirling in from beneath a heavy plank door sweeping along a hardmud floor into black corners of this ... this what? Granary? Stable? Manger? Prison?
Awake again, barely awake, conscious. Conscious, but hardly living. This, some kind of holding cell, limbo between life and death, prelude to purgatory. The soul slipping away, the mind incapable of retrieving it. More likely, the other way ‘round.
I think; therefore, I stink.
Exquisite, their setting. Let me guess. Too cold for Gitmo, too damp for Abu Ghraib. Not austere enough for a lead-encased interrogation room beneath Langley or Denver’s IA. And at ground level, too exposed to be some extraordinary rendition torture factory beyond the scope of satellite surveillance.
Could be anywhere, here in the deepest abyss of night, someplace in time, somewhere on Earth. Earth to be sure. Familiar equatorial constellations. Actually quite comforting hearing the distant whinny of a horse, a dog bark, crickets. Feeling crawly things in my beard, beneath my tunic. Smelling this putrid horseshit...
"Do you understand, you bastards? I LIKE IT HERE!"
Must assume I’m back on Earth. Haven’t determined if in fact I ever left in the first place. More likely all this –- the flight, our capture, this cesspool playpen –- is some kind of vireal devised by the new generation of quantum computer geeks. And I’m a guinea pig for their mindless virtual reality gaming, wallowing here in excrement. I’ve told them everything; I have nothing more to give. They must know that, yet they persist. Hear me, Perelman?
"HELLO!"
Hardly expect a response. They won’t mind if I talk to myself. Better to record these last moments. My last rites. Too weak to care. Let them do whatever they want with me.
"GUARD! I’m awake! Some water! Water goddam it!"
Nothing. There is no one in the forest to hear the falling tree. Therefore it didn’t happened. Plausible deniability. But just for the record...
I count this as the fifth night preceded by four mostly sleepless ones, drifting in and out of consciousness, crammed into a straw-laden cart pulled by an unwilling donkey. In this way, under cover of darkness made more demanding under a moonless sky, we fitfully traversed steep rutted ravines and mountain streams over hardscrabbled, rugged terrain. Whatever they placed in that tepid gruel each morning was supposed to knock me out to save my strength, or perhaps my Western sensibilities at having to listen to that poor animal bray through his beatings. Better I should sleep through the oppressive heat of midday, they thought, while the caravan rested.
Eliminated from every aperture most everything they fed me yet awake when we arrived at this place just after sunset. Had to be carried from the cart, more dead than alive, and collapsed in deep sleep. I dreamed, but even now cannot recall the content. Important to remember dreams I was told. Record them. But the cold has numbed my mind. Need some water, throat parched dry.
"WATER!!"
There’s always a chance, of course, that I may be hallucinating, dreaming still, imagining all of this, in some kind of theta state or whatever new mindgame they’ve come up with. They say they can even project some thoughts now upon a screen, primitive technology to be sure, but with the new implants who knows? Meditate to make the screen go blank, isn’t that how to get around it?
Easier said than done.
Marvel at this albatross around my neck, this advanced Crittercam. Atoms charged as ones or twos, threes and fours -- the quadratic code inherent in every cell. My idea? Zakel’s? It doesn’t matter at this point. They knew they had arrived at a wall; the lowly photon up against a primitive binary paradigm. There was no way forward. Zakel and I simply postulated one way around it. Let them figure it out with those useless new quantum computers of theirs. Let them crack the CARET code and reverse engineer their soulless and sterile existence back into their future.
As we had done? Or so they claimed?
--The very DNA of the Devil himself, Doctor.
Then why not play Faustus when given the opportunity?
Play it to the hilt. Has there ever been a greater role, a greater character in all of history, in all of literature? Isn’t that what they wanted to know? What my role was?
This was to be your legacy, my son, not mine. You, not I, were to be part of this time -- an era when science fiction, breathlessly, literally overnight, became science fact. You were to seize it, revel in it, make it yours, David. My role was storyteller, a sidhe, a poor Shahrazad, a poorer Dante, third-rate Bradbury or worse. And I was to pass the baton on to you. And you – you were to take these dreams and fly to the moon and beyond with them on your new bicycle! When I first saw Spielberg’s E.T. I thought of you, my dear son, who I see only vaguely now in dreams.
You see, David, I’ve never given up on the idea that all of this is some kind of entertaining Cirque du Soleil for them -- an incredible conceit on the part of the Americans or the Australians to make me believe I’ve traveled back, or forward, or sideways astrally, through the Mobius, wormhole, whatever, only to end up in this dismal pisshole for what? To prove astral travel works? Or that virtual reality trumps actual reality?
The hardware has been in place for years. And they have the most amazing Vireals. That’s a given. So I haven’t yet abandoned the notion that all of this is an exercise in... what? Futility? Gross stupidity? It may be nothing more than a psychotropic show for them, some new obscene experiment that needs to be tested out on an 87-year-old with an incredibly good physical constitution. Not to boast, you understand.
But am I supposed to just sit back and take it? Accept their conclusion of insanity? Senility? Alzheimer’s? Alien abduction? Demonic possession? On and on, bla bla blah. That is not me. I still have a little fight left in what is left of me. They’ll have to pull out every last tooth in my head before I give up my right to claim my mind, my rationality. Call me the first twenty-first century’s Guido Fawkes. Serve me my testicles fried on a silver plate. Torture me however you want. The mind still functions. I’m not ready to turn the key as my father used to say.
So just for the record, and naturally there is one, no doubt around my filthy neck –- I have concluded that either I have died and gone directly to Hell (yet I have not passed ‘Go’, and have not collected my $200) -- and this is divine payback for listening to those Kubler-Ross lectures in the nineties, or I am still alive, somehow, somewhere, peeing myself to the everlasting amusement of others.
"I don’t give a rat’s ass what the hell you do with me!"
No answer of course. Hardly expected any.
So David, I’ve given up figuring out what’s on their minds. They had, they said, given up figuring out what was in mine. More lies, it turns out. Told them I wanted only to fade into oblivion on that beautiful beach in Wallidallo, live in that sparten beachhouse they set up for me, perhaps with Diana -- or two, or even 72 why not? -- rather good-looking she was, who, copper hair down to her butt needed no encouragement to sleep with me when first we met in Wally. Aha. With me? Why me? Why not some young stud, someone who checks out? Well, she admitted later, it was for my genes. She wanted to get pregnant. I’d make a good breeder, she said. Ha! Forget about the pleasure of the act; she wanted my progeny. More likely some geneticist back at the Base did, I thought then. Another semen schlepper.
At first I was a bit put off; my pride or my ego overtook me truth be told. Wanted her to love me as a lover, not for some kind of goddamn Mendelian experiment. But she put on some calypso and performed a striptease, slipping out of her nurse’s outfit against the backdrop of a magically radiant ocean sunset which rippled in from the horizon like a golden spiderweb. And I was caught in it. What was I to do? The idea of sliding into those firmsmooth naked thighs of hers (knowing I had been recently loaded with a brimming dose of testosterone) made me quickly see the stupidity of my refusal. The two of us made a night of it, all right. She (or Armstrong, more likely) even supplied the Mumm’s.
"WATER GODDAMIT! BASTARDS!!"
Bring on the other 71 virgins; I’m ready, I laughed. At which time I told my joke about the brave jihadist who is killed in Iraq and goes to heaven expecting his reward of 72 13-year-old virgins. But Allah informs him that the translators of the Koran unfortunately mixed up his account of the hereafter. Instead Allah presents this brave martyr with 13 virgins -- all 72-years-old!
Armstrong laughed again. –-I’ve decided that Diana
will accompany you. You will probably need a nurse’s care and she’ll go through flight training with you.
–-Lance, you devil, I cried in delight, –-ad astra!
You see, I’d be content with that. I’d give them all the piss, shit, blood, saliva, pus, semen and earwax they’d want, for Chrissake. Anything else they wanted, that they hadn’t already extracted from me one way or the other. They could have it all; I no longer cared. They didn’t have to drag me away, put me through this lunacy. They could have tried to bribe me with that place, say something like, ‘tell us some more, Doctor, anything else that’s on your mind, any little thing, idea, postulation, brainstorm and we’ll leave you in peace.’ Any scrap, any piece of garbage I could invent would be enough for them. There was a time I could recite the Manhattan phone book and they’d lap it up like dogs. They never fully understood they were dealing not with a poor storyteller but rather a master con-artist.
Although in the end I had to give up that conceit. They had developed sophisticated diagnostic tools that finely measured brainwave action. I could make a claim for Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia or whatever, but I realized it wouldn’t be substantiated on the screen. They were not at all impressed with my playacting, they said. It probably served me well back in the Nineties and the Oughts, but this was, after all, 2012; the new Age of Reason. Sociopaths and psychopaths were demonde. Insanity, feigned or otherwise, was so not with it. There were no insane asylums, Creedmoors, Payne-Whitney’s left in which to hide. (Ah, but while it was fashionable, it was the latest rage! Anyone who was anyone acted crazy as a bedbug. And here I am surrounded by crawly insects seeking a crazy warm body in which to burrow from out the cold. I see some irony here.)
Where to hide, that was the question. Whether it was more noble to blend unnoticed in some urban barrio eating scraps of garbage from a dumpster -- or forage in the open countryside where one was at the mercy of the guerrillas, insurgents, terrorists, banditos, Minutemen, or those few prescient homeowners who had stockpiled enough ammo in their basement bunkers as they huddled watching the latest Gibson travesty titled The End of Times. $79.95 from Netflix. And by so doing, end it. End it once and for all!
Where to hide. What was the backup plan, Plan C? (Plan B recall as being the morning-after abortion pill which mocked the impotence of millions of semen-stripped men) –- No, Plan C for Car --the plan of escape, the road less traveled, the modest bungalow in the tiny town just off the GPS scan? What backwater Sector was left that wasn’t infiltrated with the WCA or their Minutemen goon squads that purportedly kept the peace? What country could you bribe your way into where your I-chip wasn’t dug out of your palm, C-card ripped from inside your jockstrap or bra, identity stolen the first bloody night of your unwelcomed arrival?
I Suppose with enough money laundered from banking scams or drug deals you could fortify yourself with your own security squad, hide out behind the broken bottle topped walls of your hacienda, grow your own pinto beans. Some did that, I’m sure, survived, and are surviving still. Others with something to trade could barter a houseboat or a small yacht and make it to their Island In The Sun while sipping their Bicardis and coke with the Belefontes... But then, they’d have to come ashore every so often for gas or water or provisions. And you know damn well who’d be waiting in the shadows by the moorings: The pirates who sold them the boats in the first place. Boat people just drifted away, the sardonic joke went.
A place in the sun. A continent removed.
--Australia, Ruth. We’ll find a way.
--They take no prisoners, Jerry. The entire perimeter is eye-in-the-sky. They blow boats out of the water with laser cannons. Makes our southern border look like a stroll in the park. Big Bend, she added ironically.
--You can’t patrol the circumference of an entire continent like you can a land fence, I persisted.
But they could, it turned out.
Where to hide? Better than South Sea islands, better even than Australia’s outback.
--We could try to get back on a rig, I proposed to Ruth. --Demand to be re-renditioned. Is that so crazy?
You see, when I was incarcerated my first impression was the Honky Dory was the end of the line, the final destination like Auschwitz, killing ground for the Believers, Quantum Agnostics, and others charged with sedition. Only after being released did I realize this was the government’s way of placing us out of harm’s way, of hiding us. Rifkin had been right all along, it turns out. --There’s that possibility, he said, --that the government is keeping us here for our own protection, something like a witness protection program. Out there we would be torn up like dogs. Here, at least, we have the means for survival, if we choose survival.
--Choose it! cried someone in the back with a cutting sneer, --Choose survival! Well, I’ve been here for over three years, and let me tell you it’s getting harder and harder to choose survival when these conditions get...
He was cut off with a rough chorus of agreement.
--Classic Darwinism! a man I knew as Roberto Gomez shouted over the din. --Survival of the fittest!
--All right, shouted back Rifkin, --suppose that’s true. Suppose that’s the test they’re putting us through. We make it a point, then, to all pass the test. It’s no accident we’ve been chosen to be put here while the rest of the world is going to hell. We’re here because we’re strong...
Now a round of derisive laughter.
--Yes, strong! he went on, oblivious to the catcalls.
--We’ve held out, held up through everything they’ve put us through. So many others have cracked. They must see that. They must see that we are the truly strong ones, we who remain. Believers! Q/A’s! Ya!
But the news only got worse. After the second bird flu pandemic there were sketchy reports of new food riots breaking out all over Africa, the Far and Middle East, India and China especially. Someone had dialed a city in China that was cementing the food bowls of those deceased into a encircling protective wall that was about a meter high and more than a kilometer in circumference. In Bangladesh, a tin measuring cup for rice rations was the new fashion statement –- being worn as a ghastly pendant around the necks of an army of living skeletons. Thousands were immolating themselves daily by dashing into petroleum pits benevolently set up by the Indian government on the putrid banks of the Ganges. And so the stories filtered in with every new arrival.
Like many others, I said a silent prayer before having
my morning biscuit and coffee. Somebody, somewhere out there over the choppy desolate North Sea was providing for us. But who? Whatever for?
Learned not to question, nor do anything to provoke an argument. The most benign of us could strangle one even more benign in his sleep. You made sure you were a good winner at chess or cards, always offering a re-match, often losing purposely, watching, constantly on guard for...for...
Some movement there? Something there, a snake or a dog -- there perched on a sack in the far corner watching me. An empty sack the shape of a person? Can’t make it out. What is that thing?
"Hello?"
No answer of course. Playing hard to get, are you?
"You there... Do you understand water? I need some water."
My friend, don’t let me die this way. You wouldn’t let a dog die this way, freezing and thirsty. Do you expect this tunic and this flimsy goatskin to protect me from hyperthermia? You can see this frail form, this shitstink, this tired relic. I’m slowly dying here, my friend. Or are you simply a doppelganger. Perhaps it is nothing more. Out of the invisible ...
"Show yourself! Come out!"
Surely the elders can see it is to their benefit to keep me alive. After all, if I die they lose everything, they must know that. I realize we can’t presently communicate very well, but we both have languages and ideas to exchange.
"Shalom! Salaam!"
It’s a sack after all. Perhaps a dozing guard. Should get up and see for myself, but perhaps it’s better this way. Too tired to be stupidly adventurous now, too old to be slapped around, put in shackles, trussed up like a pig. These are primitives, terrorists, after all, who care nothing for the niceties of 21st-century civilized behavior, let alone the Geneva Convention, such that it was.
Assuming of course this is December, 2012. It is only reasonable to think this. The other possibility is that all of this is in virtual reality, a new Vireal Apple is trying to promulgate. Take our minds off the depressing present into some awe-inspiring future. A new world beyond the stars where there is at least some hope for future generations, that hope being snuffed out daily in our present-day world. Bread-and-circuses, some stunning new photonic technology that can hologram astral travel along the Mobius into the future or the past or whenever ...
So I doubt this is actually the past, but a ghostly shroud, a cheap depiction of it, say two millenniums ago, possibly more. The exact place continues to elude me, but most likely this is someone’s idea of the savant. The imagery of a mediocre technician. But you see, David, I have no choice in the matter: I am simply a character in their creation, and I can’t escape this idiotic conceit of theirs.
And so as to bring you up to date, my son: Recall at sunrise today I refused to take -- or rather retched up their oatmeal; a sickening stew of grains and herbs that had quickly put me out during the four preceding days so as to be blissfully oblivious to the furnace-like heat of midday, but something I simply could not keep down this morning. I went in and out of sleep during the day and as the afternoon waned we started again and arrived here in twilight after a particularly brutal stretch of trail, filled with axle-deep craters and winding up and down tortuous ravines. I was too exhausted to even take notice of these surroundings, and in fact, passed out while being pulled from the cart. I vaguely remember being carried here into a kind of vaulted storehouse or cellar, with a gridwork of iron bars across the small square that serves as a window above me.
There are no crewmembers left but me; the other are all dead. Four died in the crash, poor Diana in the desert, Balasar and the Captain back at the jail. For the record, put down the last two as suicides. They were hacked to death, but it was clearly their own doing. They had been plotting to end their lives since the crash, or even before, I surmise.
--Are you with us, Myer?
--It’s suicide.
--So, said Gaspar wearily --it’s suicide. What’s the big deal. You think it’s some kind of thrill to be living like this? A freak show? Let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right, Doc. Let’s say that they put us into some kind of Vireal to play with us, to fuck up our minds. Who knows what the reason is? Mere entertainment? Maybe Armstrong’s as crazy as you are Doc, okay? Okay. I’ll buy that for the moment. So now what? I don’t want to play any more. I’m ready to exit.
--Except there’s no exit button, Balasar put in.
--Exactly, said Gaspar. --So what’s the point? Why go on with this? There’s no way we’re gonna be able to get out of this warp. There’s no way to contact Lunarbase, that’s for damn sure. And I’m not giving them the satisfaction of torturing me to death.
--They’re not going to torture us, I countered.
--We’re invaluable to them, don’t you see? Without us their game can’t continue. Until you went berserk and killed that guard we were being treated with respect.
--Oh yeah. Respect with a spear up my ass!
--Give it up, Myer, said Balasar. --In the desert, yeah, those nomads may have figured we were some kind of royalty or some bullshit like that, but when we hit town the mood changed, from bad to worse. Everyone’s screaming at us from the moment we got here.
--Yeah, and they’re not screams of joy either, added Gaspar. --These people are out for our blood. I don’t know why, but it sure as hell isn’t because we got royal blood.
--Give it some time, I said. --Let things cool down. If we can buy a little time, maybe we can talk to...
--You’re fuckin’ screwed up, man, said the Captain. --What language you gonna talk to them in, Hebrew? Shalom? --They understand shalom, I said. --Problem is, I don’t remember much Hebrew. Some Yiddish, that’s all.
He and Balasar laughed in unison. --Should have memorized your Bar Mitzvah, said Gaspar, derisively.
It was no use arguing with the Captain. And Balasar was at the point of throwing in with him. They began plotting an escape, a suicide mission. I wanted none of it. I still thought there was a possibility of a rescue, although admittedly I had never heard of any contingency plan for one. But how would they find us with the laser beacon destroyed?
–-Jerry... Jerry!
Tiny sandgrains were bouncing off my helmet in a deafening roar. Over the raging storm that completely enveloped us I could barely hear her voice crackling in my earphone. --Here, over here!
It was pitchblack. The xenon lamp fronting my helmet shown out only about ten feet. Sand whipped by horizontally, streaming across its beam like pellets of hail around a streetlight. Somehow Diana saw the beam and ran towards it.
She was screaming hysterically, clutching her stomach, her hands covering a stain of blood leaking through her suit. I caught her from falling and carried her over to the Terraintrak, laid her down in the backseat, then went back into the fuselage again and looked for the others. The smoke was now thicker and more deadly. I met Gaspar staggering out of the main cabin with a helmetless Lt. Balasar coughing, fighting for breath, his black skin ashened gray by smoke and particles.
--Where’s Diana? he gasped.
--She’s on the trak.
--The breeder compartment ... on fire! the Captain shouted. -–Get out!
--It’s hopeless. We’ve got to abandon ship now.
--My journals...
--Fuck your journals! he screamed at me. --The fire is heading for the ion reactor. We got about two minutes to get outta here before that heliumtres blows.
--Get the transmitter, at least.
--You want the beacon, Doctor? he snarled. --Go get it!
He was right. Thick black smoke was now pouring out of the fuselage, obliterating everything inside. Our last link to Earth was going up with the ship.
The three of us climbed aboard the Terraintrak and headed across the dunes into a black unchartered sea of blinding sand. The Captain drove, the Lieutenant by his side, Diana and me secure in the rear compartment. I found my laser penknife in my kit and with some difficultly began to cut Diana’s suit away from her midsection.
Balasar turned and seeing Diana’s plight, fought back tears that began welling in his large black eyes.
--How is she, Doc?
--Looks bad, I said. She was passing in and out of consciousness, perhaps from a lack of oxygen as much as shock I surmised. But the Lieutenant wasn’t wearing his bubble, and I noticed he seemed to be breathing more normally now.
--Did you oxygenate the trak? I asked.
--I’m about to do that, said the Captain.
Then it dawned on Balasar. --Hey, he cried, --I’m breathing!
I cautiously opened the throat guard on my helmet. The air was filled with a fine silica dust, to be sure, but it was breathable! The first planet we encountered that had truly breathable air like Earth’s.
--My God, I shouted, --there’s an atmosphere here! We found something!
The thought occurred to me then: could we somehow have landed back on Earth? Earth present? That we never crossed the Mobius after all? But how could that be? How could we have traveled light years to all those galaxies yet never cross the Mobius? Unless it was all bullshit, another one of their insidious Vireals. That had to be it, I concluded: This was all a monstrous game! Another one of Perelman’s Roman Colosseum spectacles.
--It’s only natural to feel you’re in virtual reality after what you’ve experienced, Doctor, said Perelman, my first week on Lunarbase, --but I assure you we wouldn’t waste our time and energies, not to mention the incredible cost, on virtual reality gimmicks when these discoveries far exceed anything so trivial, so banal. That would defy logic, common sense.
--Explain it to me again, Professor.
--We now believe the universe, or at least this universe, has the topography of a Mobius, a creation we thought was impossible to exist in nature. Think of an elliptical circumrotational inverted toroid.
--A what? I asked, completely bewildered.
--Well forget that, he laughed, smoothing down his unkempt hair. --Think of a tube, a bicycle tube, say. Cut the tube and twist one end l80 degrees. Then reconnect it. Our Sun is a speck on the outer edge of the tube, along with all the other suns of all the galaxies we see out there. Imagine that the universe is just a larger version of our own planetary system, except there is a massive black hole where our Sun would ordinarily be. Over time, our universe inflates, expands.
--A twisted bicycle tube.
--Exactly.
–-Galaxies moving forward in time and space?
--Exactly, said Perelman, --all in virtual lockstep together, elliptically curving into the future.
--And on the inner edge of the tube?
--That’s where we’ve been, our history, the past. Everything on the other side of the plane is curving backwards in time. To get there we simply travel between the two planes, across the time-space Mobius of past and future. Naturally, we have to make allowances for the minute orbital perturbations that result from the curvature of space and time caused by matter, as Einstein correctly postulated.
--Naturally.
Vas chu der Sharlie?
Yes, I was there
Un ven vas dat?
April of ‘45.
Un vere vas dat?
A picturesque little place called Hell.
You see, David, this story has a story that encases it and another that encases that one and so on -- much like that set of Russian patrushka dolls you had as a child. You can strip it down or build it up and it comes to the same thing. Like one big holographic computational substrate. You can divide it up into the smallest element and still find a scaled-down but complete representation of the whole system.
They tried that -- tearing me down, reconstructing me, breaking me down again, rebuilding me, on and on. In the end they discovered no more than what they parsed from me in the beginning. And as they peeled away the layers of my story, even less than before. It was my trump card, so to speak. To destroy me would mean the end of my narrative. Then they would never be able to get back to the beginning.
That’s why, even in this pisshole, I have hope of being rescued. I still have enormous value to them if they can get me out of here. There’s no reason to play this aging Tithonus, hopping from past to future worlds and back again when a flip of a switch can bring me back to time present. I can still be of great value to them in present time, there on earth. Armstrong knows this. Perelman knows this. Do you hear me, Perelman?
"Enough! Enough of these mind games. I don’t know what else you want! Do you hear? What else do you want? Get me out of here! Perelman!"
Unless ... unless they reason that if they drive me mad, drive me to the brink of insanity and death, I will do anything to save my mind ... the authentication of soul ... this existence, this raison d’etre. Is that your purpose Perelman?
"Please ... for God’s sake ..."
Yet there is a point of no return, a point where the rubber band is so stretched thin, it breaks. And nothing can mend it back. You are playing with a dangerously thin membrane, and you must know it.
"Do you hear me Perelman? In the end I won’t even try to save my sanity. I’ll simply slip over the edge into madness. And I’ve reached that fine line, my friend. Do you hear?"
Nothing but the howling wind. Once more a dog barks.
Then silence. But now ... now ... from over in the darkest corner, where before I sensed that entity watching me ... an expended breath, a tentative, barely audible,
"I...I ... I am not Perelman."


End of Prologue