The Guardian Part 12

In less than a minute, the jungle reclaimed the ruins on the other side of the water.

"Look at the stars," the raven said.

"I don't see anything different."

"Keep looking. Use that hill on the horizon as a reference."

I looked at the hill for a minute and saw that the circles of stars were slowly crawling to my right.

"What's happening?"

"The Dark Man is turning around to face the sun. The land nearby is moving with him."

"Is that what happened to the city-was it an earthquake when the Dark Man started to move?"

"No. They did that to themselves. Happens."

"People appeared and disappeared just like that?"

"It was actually quite a long time, to them. And they weren't people as such-as I said, mammals are just food here. They were lizards similar to the ones in the jungle-much like you were, but with longer arms and useful hands."

I remembered how it felt. "Just as vicious, though."

"Something they had in common with humans."

I looked out over the expanse, now apparently an inland sea. There was no sign of their civilization.

"The Dark Man has seen this happen before, and it may happen again. He's turning around to watch the sun because it changes on a time scale that's meaningful to him. He'll watch it die, over billions of years."

"Does this always happen?"

"Stars dying? Of course."

"No-I mean the lizards. Does civilization always bring ruin?"

"Not always. Often."

He hopped down the steps to lead me back down the corridor. "It's all timing. Once a species learns how to exchange ideas, a process is set in motion that might ultimately result in permanent peace and harmony. But it's not inevitable."

"As in our case. Humans."

"Timing, as I say. In one way of looking at it, humans discovered fire a little too early; fire and metals.

From there on, it's only a matter of time before a species learns to use the forces that make stars burn. If they haven't grown past the need to wage war by then, their prospects aren't good."

I stepped carefully down the wet rocks, thinking of how I had saved my son from a senseless war, only to have him killed by a senseless man. "So you say that humanity is going to go the way of these lizards."

"You're asking me to predict the future, which is meaningless. There are many futures." He started down the corridor. "Come on. More places to see."

On the last step, I twisted my ankle and fell. He hopped back when he heard me cry out, changing into old Gordon, who gave me a hand.

We hobbled along. "It's only a couple of hundred yards to my s.h.i.+p. The room."

"It seems to go anywhere you want," I said through clenched teeth. "Why not just whistle for it?"

"It can't come in here. Time is funny in here, as you may have noticed."

We came out of the cave into a pelting rain. He carried me the few steps to the yellow light. Once inside, my ankle immediately stopped hurting. The place, or thing, smelled like cinnamon again.

"You should open up a clinic," I said. He'd changed back into a raven. "You'd be the richest bird on Earth."

"I already am, when I'm on Earth."

"You travel like this, most of the time?"

"Time, s.p.a.ce." He flexed his wings in an unmistakable shrug. "I do keep moving, observing. But in a way, I'm always in Sitka. Gordon doesn't disappear for months at a time. "

"I don't understand."

"You will. Soon." We both dissolved into the now-familiar transition state.

A moment later, we were back in the yellow room. "Did something go wrong?"

"No," he said. "We're never far from this place."

The door opened and I stepped toward it. "Don't go outside. Just look. I think if we went outside we couldn't get back in."

"Where are we?" It looked like a quiet woodland.

"There isn't any 'where' or 'when' here. Everybody sees something different. Tell me what you think it is."

I stepped cautiously to the door. There was a disturbing noise.

It was a quiet woodland otherwise. Birds twittering. The smell of green growing things. Buds flowering.

A pear tree with a single large fruit. A snake the size of a python draped among its limbs.

"The Garden of Eden?" I said. "This can't be real."

"Whatever it is or is not, it's real. Do you see the pain yet?"

The room moved over a thick stand of bushes, toward the noise. "Stay inside," Raven repeated.

In a small clearing, a pregnant woman lay on her back. She was covered with streaks of blood, hair matted with it. She was grunting and whimpering hoa.r.s.ely with exhaustion and pain. G.o.d, had I ever been there. I took an instinctive step forward.

Gordon suddenly appeared, blocking the door. "Stay. I mean it. There's nothing you can do."

"All right," I said. He turned around and looked out the door.

The woman-I couldn't think of her as "Eve"-was very close to giving birth. Her womb was dilating and I could see the top of the head, hair black as her own.

Blood oozed around the presenting head. Her body writhed and she screamed, keening.

"Steady," Gordon said, a hand on my shoulder.

"I've seen this before," I said. "I've done it."

"Not like this, I think."

Her womb opened impossibly wide and for a moment the screaming stopped-then in a spray of blood the head came out It was an adult's head.

Her own head? Nowit started screaming; even louder. With a start, I saw that the mother's head and neck had disappeared.

Her womb split horribly sideways, and a b.l.o.o.d.y shoulder worked its way out. She was giving birth to herself, turning inside out.

The screams stopped only long enough for her to take deep ragged breaths. The other shoulder worked through, distorting the mother's torso into something made of human parts but not recognizably human.

Both b.r.e.a.s.t.s slid out at once-and it became horrifyingly clear that the self she was giving birth to was also pregnant.

I didn't know the word then, but she was everting herself. The body split and after the abdomen worked its way through, the rest was swift: the new womb and then her limbs and feet. All streaked with bright fresh blood.

The newborn mother began to whimper and clutch at the bloodied gra.s.s.

"Oh, my G.o.d. She's starting over."

"You see a woman." He was Raven again.

"You don't?"

"I almost did, as Gordon. Now what I see is the Orion Nebula: the dying and birthing of stars. It goes on all the time, of course."

"b.u.t.this pain."

"You think the universe feels nothing, giving birth and dying? Any pain you've ever felt was only an echo of that."

I watched with horrified fascination as the process started over. "That's only metaphor," I said. "The universe doesn't have flesh and ganglia and a brain to interpret their distress signals."

"Why do you think you have them? One of your own said 'Pain is nature's way of telling us we're alive.'

That's close to literal truth."

I was obstinate. "Pain draws our attention to something being wrong with the body."

"What did I just say? Your body was perfectly happy when it was a scattered bunch of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon atoms. Lifeis what's wrong with it."

"Now that's a wonderful argument against suicide. When I die, the universe will be a smidgeon happier."

"This is not an argument. I'm just showing you around. What you do when we return to Sitka... will be what you do."

"Including... take my life?"

"Life was yours to give and it's yours to take. But I don't think you will kill yourself now. Let's go to one more place; then we'll start back." I shut my eyes hard and endured the whirling dislocation. It went longer than ever before, and I clenched my jaws so hard against being sick that I could hear my teeth grinding. Finally it was over.

"This is not a world," he said as I opened my eyes, "in the sense of being a planet. It's not even really a place, as your Garden of Eden was not an actual woodland." The door opened. "But I think we'll both see the same thing this time."

I stepped to the opening and took hold of the edge of the door. We were evidently floating over a landscape, drifting a few hundred yards off the ground. Dramatic mountains and cliffs, but not menacing like the first planet. Everything was subtle shades of warm gray, soft and monochromatic.

There was no horizon. The landscape stretched out forever, becoming vague with distance.

"Let's go on down," Raven said.

As we floated closer to the ground, what had appeared to be a kind of granular texture became thousands of individuals, perhaps millions.

Some few were human beings, but the overwhelming majority were otherworldly creatures. Gargoyles and sprites. Demons and floating jellyfish, an articulated metal spider and a close formation of thousands of blue bees arranged in a perfect cube. Two dinosaurs like we had been and a cl.u.s.ter of six of the translucent angel creatures we saw on the first planet.

"Only six?" I said.

The raven bobbed his head. "The six who elected to die."

"Wait... everyone here is dead? This is the afterlife?"

"They're not completely dead. But they're not really alive, in the sense of eating and breathing-if they were eating, a lot of them would eat each other; if they were breathing, they'd be breathing different atmospheres, usually poisonous to the others."

"Daniel! Is Daniel here?"

"He might be someplace. I wouldn't know where to find him, though. And you couldn't talk to him or touch him.

"I really don't understand this place, the where and how of it. The 'why' seems to be that it's a holding area of some kind."

"Of souls," I said. "After they die."

"They look like bodies to me."

"Waiting for something?"

"I don't know. If it's something like your Catholics' purgatory, then I wonder where heaven is. I've never come across it."

"Maybe your room, your s.h.i.+p, can't get there. Maybe you do have to die and spend some time here, first."

"Your guess is as good as mine. Almost as good, anyhow."

There didn't seem to be much order in the crowd. I tried to pick out the humans, and the nearly human, and there did seem to be a lot of the very old and the very young, as you would expect of the dead.

n.o.body reallylooked dead, though. No wounds or signs of disease.

But n.o.body was moving. It was like a photograph in three dimensions. While I was looking, two new ones appeared, one like a human woman but with spadelike appendages instead of hands, the other a kind of long-haired monkey with an extra pair of legs.

"Does everybody come here, good or bad?"