-VNV Nation, "Forsaken" (1998) C H A P T E R S I X.

Lat.i.tude and Longitude T he lines that hold the universe together, this universe and all others, elsewhere, elsewhen, closed strings and open strings, loops to break or strings held forever open, and the tension sings unfathomable chords along the lines of inconceivable instruments. Symmetry and supersymme-try, wool and water, looking-gla.s.s insects, and the s.p.a.cetime between a boson and its corresponding fermion.

These things happen.

These things happen.

These things happen.

And the mother Weaver at the blind soul of all creations dreams in her black-hole coc.o.o.n of trapped light and antimatter, her legs drawn up tight about the infinitely vast, infinitely small shield of her pulsing cephalothorax. Her spinnerets spew quantum particle lines, opened or closed strings, depending on the dream. Explosions to spray a new cosmos across the common void, and "In that direction,"

the Cat said. The Weaver shivers in her sleep, twitches a fang, and stars die and are born in the gaseous furnaces of her vomit. All paths lead to her, and from her, beginnings and middles and ends, and the event horizons of her bottomless funnel webs leak only the finest, most distilled radiations.

"I don't much care where-" said Alice.

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"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"-so long as I get somewhere."

Eternal spiderweb's dance of worldlines and world-sheets- adagio, pirouette, pas de deux, pas de trois, pas de quatre-and the particles that move through s.p.a.cetime sweep out curves as strings will sweep out the invisible surfaces of worlds.

These things happen. And these.

And the Weaver in her hole opens one eye, sensing dis-cord, shimmering disharmony as lines from here are drawn at last towards there, and for an instant two universes brush or grind or bleed, one against the other. She knows the great price of this contact and looks away.

Oh, you wicked wicked little thing.

But. These things happen.

And in a moment (as she counts moments), the strings will sing true again, in the age between an angel's heartbeats, and she has all the patience there will ever be. Patience drips like venom from her jaws.

But the wrinkle does not pa.s.s unnoticed.

At 2:38 A.M., a man crossing the Bay Bridge on his way to Alameda makes a 911 call from his cell phone. He describes a young Asian woman wearing a blue fur coat, standing at the edge of the bridge, staring down at the water. He tells the operator that he thinks she might be a jumper. When asked for his name, he hangs up, because the girl really isn't his problem and there's a nickel bag of pot and three tabs of ecstasy in his glove compartment. He turns up the radio, and his sleek yellow Jaguar roars east-ward.

At 2:40 A.M., a security camera in the California Academy of Sciences' Hall of Insects records a bright flash and the sound of breaking gla.s.s. At 2:46, a guard finds three cases in the hall smashed and a fine gray powder covering the insect and arachnid specimens mounted inside. Days later, the gray powder will eventually be iden- 179.

tified as a mixture of silica particles and industrial-grade graphite.

At 2:43 A.M., three teenagers walking past Alamo Square along Hayes Street experience what they will later report as a "downpour" of living spiders from the cloudless night sky. The three are forced to take refuge on the porch of a house facing the park and watch as the spiders blanket the ground. The rain of spiders lasts until about three A.M., when it ends as suddenly as it began. Spiders also fall from the sky at the eastern end of Bush Street and at several locations on the campus of the University of San Francisco.

The spiders on Bush Street are all found to be dead and frozen solid. In the following days, zoologists will identify three distinct species present in samples collected from the spider falls- Pityohyphantes costatus, Araniella displicata, and Tetragnatha laboriosa-all native to the San Francisco area. The next morning, great quant.i.ties of a sticky white substance similar to, but not chemically identical with, spider silk will be discovered blanketing several acres of John McLaren Park.

Sometime before 2:45 A.M. a middle-aged woman named Eleanora Collins, living alone near Chinatown, awakens to a vision of five golden-winged angels standing around her bed. One of them smiles and speaks in a language she can't understand and then they disappear, one by one, leaving behind the scent of ammonia and roasting meat. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Eleanora Collins was diagnosed as schizophrenic at the age of fourteen. Three weeks later, she will hang herself, leaving several apparent suicide notes written in a language no one can read.

According to the captain's log of the j.a.panese container ship Hirata-Gumo Maru, at precisely 2:57 A.M., as the ves-sel neared the Bay Bridge from the southeast, the captain and two crewmen watched from the compa.s.s deck as a "shallow, bowl-shaped depression with smooth sides"

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formed on the surface of the water directly ahead of them.

The depression was estimated by Captain Takahashi to have been not less than twenty to thirty-five meters in di-ameter, and seemed to glow softly. Before orders could be given to reduce speed or alter course, all three sailors saw a body plummet from the bridge into the center of the depression, hitting the water without a splash. Within seconds, all evidence of the phenomenon vanished completely, and the Hirata-Gumo Maru pa.s.sed beneath the bridge without further incident. Though the captain ordered a search for the body, no evidence of it was found. The duration of the anomaly was estimated to have been less than two minutes.

Ninety-eight years and seven months earlier, Mr. J. P.

Anthony is awakened at 5:05 A.M. in his room at the Ramona Hotel on Ellis Street. He lies very still, silently watching a flickering, transparent apparition he will later describe to newspaper reporters in both Los Angeles and the town of Pacific Grove as "a coolie girl standing at the window, having a conversation with a white pigeon." He will be able to recall few details about the ghost, and almost nothing of what she said to the bird or what it said to her. He will clearly remember only one remark-"Not even the Dragon can stop them, once the hunt begins"-but will not remember which one of them said it, the girl or the bird. At 5:10, by the clock beside his bed, the ghost vanishes, and at 5:13 the city is. .h.i.t by an earthquake that lifts the six-story Ramona Hotel off its foundations and collapses its roof. J. P. Anthony spends the rest of April 18, 1906, trying to escape the burning wreck of San Francisco on foot, one refugee among thousands, and, for a time, he will forget the strange sight immediately before the quake. In 1933, he describes the incident in a letter to Maurice Barbanell, editor of the spiritualist journal Psychic News. Barbanell will eventually connect Mr. Anthony's experience with similar reports immediately before other San Francisco earth- 181.

quakes, including the ma.s.sive shocks felt on October 8, 1865.

These things happen.

A few miles north of Lexington, Kentucky, at precisely 4:48 A.M. CST, a man driving a rusted purple Lincoln Continental with Illinois plates pulls off into the breakdown lane on I-65 South and stares through the windshield at the night sky above the interstate. He knows all the signs of Heaven, the secret tongue of stars and comets and meteors, and tonight he understands the things he sees happening above him. He wakes the woman sleeping in the front seat next to him, who calls herself Archer Day, and yes, she says, yes, she sees it, too.

They don't bother waking the girl sleeping in the backseat, the girl named Theda, the girl they found in Connecticut, because she still hasn't seen enough to understand what the lights signify, the bobbing blue and white lights that are neither stars nor airplanes nor only the man's exhausted, road-weary eyes. The man and the woman watch the lights for almost fifteen minutes, and when they finally vanish, he kisses her and wipes tears from her brown eyes.

She makes notes in a leather-bound book she keeps beneath the front seat, and the man says a prayer before continuing their long drive.

Dreaming in the wide backseat of the Lincoln, the girl who calls herself Theda, because, arranged another way, the letters spell "death," remembers things that have happened and things that haven't and things that still might happen.

"You've always known," the white woman at the foot of her bed whispers, and smiles. "You knew you weren't like them. You were certain you were something more."

And yes, Theda tells her, she has always known these things, always, and she weeps, and tiny white spiders swarm across her bedspread, the crystal, snowflake spiders that 182 have been dripping from the white woman's dreadlocks.

She lets them climb across her skin, burrowing into her hair, slipping inside her nostrils and down her throat, filling her with the white woman's light.

"You will be me," she says, and Theda is starting to understand what she means.

In the dream, she wakes, still dreaming, and stares in wonder and secret satisfaction at the Dragon's fire outside her open bedroom window, inferno exhalations sweeping slowly across the sky to sear the rooftops of the Hartford suburb.

Fire to burn everything clean, clean at last, and now she feels the crystal spiders growing inside her, spinning their webs, laying crystal eggs, and the smell of burning drifts across the windowsill into her room on a sizzling breeze.

"Freak," someone sneers and shoves her-every single humiliation reduced to this single word, this single moment, this one act-all the insults and countless embarra.s.s-ments, and Theda turns to see all the hateful faces staring back at her.

"Freak."

"f.u.c.king lesbo freak."

And then the cleansing fire falls down and takes them all at once, their perfect, normal faces melting together like wax and time, becoming indistinguishable, one from the next. But Theda knows she's the one it really wants, the reason it's here, and her tormentors are only fuel for the fire.

"Is it really that petty?" Archer Day asks and shakes her head disapprovingly. "Is that all you have inside you, little girl? Revenge? Is there nothing more?"

"Maybe it's enough for me," Theda replies. "Do you have something better?"

Archer coughs and lights another cigarette. "Go back to sleep. I'm tired of listening to you."

"A psychomaterial conduit," the white woman says, so maybe she hasn't awakened after all. "You are so powerful, so beautiful, you will bridge the void and draw the poison out."

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"I don't want to die."

"It's not death. Only another kind of being, that's all.

The things that you will see-"

Eleven of them waiting in the cemetery that night, and the tall man chose her. Ten chances to fail, to be pa.s.sed over, but she was the one he'd been looking for all along.

"The truth is buried inside you," the white woman promises. "Ancient fragments, but the angels will find you too late, Theda. The angels will never find you at all."

And the big car rolls on through the Southern night, as the girl rolls from one dream current to the next, drowning in herself.

At 4:58 A.M. CST, Daria Parker opens her eyes somewhere above western Kansas and stares at the moonlight washing ice white across the tops of the clouds outside the cabin window of the 767. They look like the tops of mountains, she thinks. They look like the tops of very high mountains covered with snow. And then she remembers where she is and why, that she's on her way back to San Francisco and Niki, and that memory leads her immediately to all the other things she doesn't want to remember, and she closes her eyes again. The airplane hums rea.s.suringly, the steady, everywhere rumble above and below and all around her, and Maybe that's the dream, she thinks. Maybe I'm asleep in my hotel room in Atlanta, and Alex is holding me and this time Niki's okay. Maybe she's never heard the strange message left in her voice mail, and Niki hasn't told her it's already too late, and maybe in the morning she'll be able to figure out a way to fix everything.

And then we all lived happily ever after.

"Wake up, Daria," Niki says, and she opens her eyes.

So, it really is a dream, and that ought to be another comfort, like the thrum of the jet's engines, but then she realizes that it isn't that sort of dream at all.

"I only have a second," Niki tells her. "I can't stay."

"I'm on my way, baby," Daria replies and touches Niki's 184 cheek, her skin so dark against the pale tips of Daria's fingers. "Just like I said. I'm racing the sun."

"I didn't want to ask you to do this. I wanted to let you go and never have to ask you for anything else ever again."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

And Niki Ky looks away, then, looks down at her hands folded in her lap and then up at the movie playing silently on the screen at the front of the cabin.

"We never saw that," she says. "I wanted to, but you didn't have time, and I didn't want to go with Marvin."

"When I get home, we'll rent the DVD."

"It wouldn't be the same, even if we could."

"f.u.c.k it. I'll make the time," Daria says and puts both her arms around Niki, leans forward and holds her tight.

Niki's wearing her blue fur coat, and it smells faintly of dust and jasmine, and Daria wants to bury her face in it and make this be a different dream.

"Listen, Dar. I have to be absolutely sure you understand me, because I can only do this once," and now Niki's speaking with an urgency that makes Daria want to shut her eyes and wake up. Back in the hotel or on the plane to San Francisco, either one, as long as it means she doesn't have to hear whatever Niki's about to say.

"When we left Birmingham, when we were on our way to Boulder-"

"That was a long time ago."

"-one morning, we had breakfast at a truck stop, the same day we made it to Denver, the first time we ever saw the mountains."

"We were always eating in truck stops," Daria protests and takes her arms from around Niki's shoulders. She turns back to the window and the moon and the clouds.

"This one had a jackalope."

"They all had f.u.c.king jackalopes, Niki."

"You're not listening. You have to listen and let me finish this."

"I'm not stopping you," she says, wanting a drink, wanting a cigarette, wanting to wake up.

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"I gave Mort the rest of my waffles, and you asked me if I was feeling okay."

"Niki, how the h.e.l.l do you expect me to remember breakfast in a truck stop ten years ago? I have enough trouble remembering breakfast yesterday morning."

"You have to remember this," Niki says quietly, just a little quieter and she'd be whispering, and Daria looks at her again. Niki's almond eyes sparkle wet in the dark cabin, in the reflected light from the movie screen. "You have to remember because I can't get back there myself. I thought I'd be able to, but there wasn't enough time. There's never enough G.o.dd.a.m.n time to do things the right way."

"Okay, so there was a jackalope," Daria says, because she doesn't want Niki to start crying, even if this is just a dream, doesn't want a scene and someone trying to help but only making things worse, one of the flight attendants or someone seated across the aisle or in the row in front of them. "We were having breakfast at a truck stop and you gave Mort the rest of your waffles."

"You asked if I was okay," Niki says, wipes at her eyes and blinks. "I said I was, even though I wasn't. I said I was going to the restroom, but I went outside instead, and you followed me."

"I don't remember any of this."

"Then just listen to me, and maybe you'll remember later. I didn't go to the restroom, I went outside instead. It was cold. It was really cold, but you followed me, anyway. I walked across the parking lot and through some gra.s.s and cactus to a place where there was just dirt. I buried something there."

"Wait," Daria says. "Oh, s.h.i.t. Yeah," because now she does remember, all of it rushing back at her-the smell of greasy diner food and the freezing late December morning, the stunted cacti and strands of rusted barbed wire she stepped over to follow Niki.

"I took a ball bearing from my coat pocket. You asked me what it was."

"And you wouldn't tell me," Daria says, and then there's 186 a sharp pain in her chest, a red flower blooming suddenly behind her sternum, and she gasps and reaches for Niki.

"Oh, G.o.d," she whispers. "Oh, Niki. You wouldn't tell me what it was. You just buried it there and never told me what it was."

"You never asked me after that. I never thought it would matter."

Daria gasps again and digs her fingers into the Play-Doh-blue fur of Niki's coat sleeve. In the secret, wet cavity of her rib cage, in the hollow of her heart, the pain flower doubles in size, triples, blood petals and ventricle sepals unfolding, tearing her apart, driving the breath from her lungs, and Niki only sighs and looks down at her folded hands.

"You have to find it for me, Daria. You have to find it and bring it to the bas.e.m.e.nt of Spyder's house."

Daria opens her mouth to say something, something she has to say because she doesn't think she could ever find the ball bearing, not after a decade, but there's only the pain, eating her alive, picking her to pieces, and then Niki is gone, and a white bird is perched on the back of her seat, instead. It watches Daria with beady crimson eyes, and she wants to scream.

"Do not fail her," the bird says grimly. "The Hierophant will need you, at the end," and it dissolves in a small shower of yellow-orange sparks.

"Oh G.o.d," Daria wheezes. "Oh Jesus f.u.c.king G.o.d," and when she opens her eyes-when she opens them all the way and knows that the dream's finally over and done, that she's awake and this is real, as real as anything will ever be-there's a frightened stewardess beside her, loosening her clothes. And the pain in her chest, that's real too, the demon flower slipped out of the nightmare with her, and, in another second or two, it will burst from her chest and she'll die.

"Be still," the stewardess says. "There's a doctor in first cla.s.s. He's coming."

And then Daria sees the blue strands of fake fur 187.