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"Ah! Ja. Ich, uh, that isz, I ... yes, I am the taking-care-of man. Nein ...
vhat isz that I mean ... I am der superviszer ... der superintendent, ja, das
ist ... yes, I am der janitor!" There was a note of almost desperate relief
in
his voice as he found the correct word.
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And she listened as the crazed silk-stocking strangler advised her that the
incinerator in the hall had gone geflunkt or some similar word, and that it
would not be available for trash and paper dumping till after six that
evening.
Then he went away.
Gwen wandered back to the kitchen, certain now that there could have been no
way
in which such a message could have found its way into that sealed box. Not at
the factory, not in the grocery, not any way at all. There had been no signs
of
tampering, no pinholes, inviolate, untouched.
Yet the message had been there, and she knew, now, that it had been
supernatural
creatures. Beings from the other side, the souls of those she had done harm
in
her previous lives. They were warning her, and there was no escape. By
morning,
she would be dead.
She sat at the kitchen table and began to cry.
I haven't lived nearly long enough, she thought. And I'm on the management
track.
She reached across to the counter and pulled down the thick cylinder of
Pringles, husking breath so deeply that her chest hurt; and she pulled the
plastic strip from the container, popped off the metal lid, and took out a
potato chip. It didn't help at all, not even the taste of the world and the
life
she had left behind. She thought hopelessly that she didn't want to die in a
foreign land. She ate another Pringle.
Lying atop the third chip, nested perfectly with the other slim forms, was a
slip of folded paper. She opened it with utter terror consuming her, and read
IGNORE PREVIOUS MESSAGE.
She received only two pieces of mail that day in the IBM courier pouch from
New
York. One was an announcement of Nancy Kimmler's shower two weeks hence. The
other was contained in a plain white envelope with no return address, and the
single sheet of neatly typed message was this: "The life which is unexamined
is
not worth living." Beneath, were two words in pencil: Plato and bang.
He stood now, the man from Zurich, where he had never set
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foot before. He had rented a car in Reykjavik two days earlier, the
26th, and driven to Bu'dhir, where he had taken a room and given sight to a
man
blind from birth. In truth, he hadn't needed a car; no more than he had needed
a
castle, a brigantine, an arbalest, a flat-bed truck, a 451-barrel Vandenberg
Volley Gun, an ethmoid crystal, a 1980 Mustang, or an Icelandic Airlines DC-8
ZurichReykjavik. No more than he had needed special equipment to breathe the
water of the Aegean, centuries before it had borne that name.
But he had wanted to see the riot of colors, the ecstasy of moss growing in
volcanic cinders deposited by the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1970 along a
rivulet on the edge of Thjorsa'dalur; he had wanted to go as a man, to stand
before the black ash cliff at Langahlidh and marvel at the tenacity of the
exquisite, delicate white flowers that grew toward the light from
inhospitable
fissures. He wanted to have the time before the kalends of July to
contemplate
how long, how far he had wandered; to think back to what had been and what
was
now; to reconcile himself to the end of the journey.
He had come much farther than from Chicago or northern Alabama, Quito or
Sydney,
Damascus or Lioazhong or Lagos on the Slave Coast. He had been far afield,
traveling through immense lightless distances; pausing to pass the time with
a
telepathically garrulous plant-creature; spending time unmeasurable observing
hive-arachnids as they slowly mutated and grew toward sentience and the use
of
tools; taking a hand in the development of a complex henotic social system
that
united water and fish and the aquicludes that had ruled as autarchs since the
silver moon had fractured to form Murus, Phurus and Veing. He had returned,
weary beyond the telling, having seen it all, having done it all, come full
circle through miracles, wandering, loneliness and loss.
There had been centuries of despair, followed by centuries of acrimony and
deeds
too awful to recall without unbearable pain and guilt; centuries of sybaritic
indulgence, followed by centuries of cataclysmic ennui; and finally,
centuries
and years and days reduced to odd moments now and then, of wonderful, random,
unpredictable kindness. That were no more satisfying or lasting
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than all the acts of all the centuries that had preceded them.
He was alone. Since the long, terrible night of ashes and screams, and the
closing over of the waters, he had been alone. There were, of course,
diabolists
and fools who believed; but their belief was product of insanity or delusion.
No
descendant of those who had come to the Great Temple walked this world.
Nowhere was there to be found a true believer.
And at last he had come to know that he must return, to the place that had
brought him to existence, and there he must go down alone to find eternal
rest.
He could wander no longer. He simply didn't have it in him to continue.
So he had come by way of Reykjavik and Naefurholt and Brun, in a great circle
across the island of volcanoes, as June came to an end, the last June he
would
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