Страница 75 из 94
There was a gurgle as liquid freon was pumped from one part of the dragon to another.
Jane shifted in the couch. The cabin felt impossibly close. The smell of iron was everywhere. She sighed and scratched an itch on her shoulder with her chin and a spark of light was born within the wraparound. It was pale as a glowworm and small as a mote of dust.
A star.
Without fanfare a second star appeared and then a fourth, more and more until there were billions of suns arranged in galaxies and nebulae, and those arrangements contained in still larger structures. Jane seemed to be standing somewhere aside from Creation, watching dispassionately while everything shrank toward nonexistence. Or else it might be that she was rushing away from everything at unimaginable speed and ever-increasing acceleration. Until finally all the stars and their attendant worlds merged into a single structure whose shape she could hold in her mind.
Jane saw the universe whole then, all of space and time pulled by the totality of gravitational forces into a saddle-shaped solid. Melanchthon rotated the vision through the higher dimensions so that the universe fell in upon itself, growing in complexity from the saddle into a nine-dimensional butterfly and finally into an n-dimensional ziggurat. It was the summation of futility, for the ziggurat was all there was. It had no exterior, no beyond. It was not that there was nothing outside it, but that an "outside" did not and could not exist.
Staring at the radiant involution, Jane realized that here was the perfect and exact model for her life: She was caught in an ascending spiral maze, always coming around to familiar places she had never been before, always returning to dilemmas that in retrospect she should have seen coming. She was moving in diminishing circles, being twisted around in ever more limiting ways, until by some final twist or kink she would arrive at the omega point of inertia, with no options, no directions, no future, no way out.
It was obvious at last how thoroughly, how pitilessly, she was trapped. Everything she tried—trickery, compassion, inaction, patience, ruthlessness—led inevitably to failure. Because that was simply the way things were. That was the way the game was rigged.
The stars had melted together into solidity. The universe burned in Jane's sight like a monstrous white seashell. It was not the first time she had looked upon that shape. With a sickening lurch of revelation, she recognized it and put a name to it.
Jane looked upon Spiral Castle and despaired.
Melanchthon must have been waiting for exactly that, for now at last he spoke. His voice surprisingly gentle, he said, "In the Riphaean Mountains there are still wild trolls, their primitive tribes protected from modern culture and their territories held as vast preserves. They are brutal creatures who lead simple lives. Their males are savagery personified, but the otherwise admirable character of their females is diluted by an inexplicable love of beauty.
"Knowing of this weakness, hunters will leave moonstones alongside the mountain trails. A day goes by, a week, and a troll shambles i
"What makes this a sport and not mere slaughter is that there are two breeds of trolls, outwardly indistinguishable. One of the first breed will die with her eyes fixed on the moonstone. Ah, but in the second the love of beauty is overmatched by her strength of hatred. This troll will gouge out her eyes with her own fingers to free herself of the tyra
"Which is why you should never approach a captive troll alone but always in the company of a friend. A friend who does not realize he is a little slower than yourself."
For a long time the dragon did not speak. The air was chill in the cabin; the air-conditioning had been set too high. At last, fiercely, he said, "The time has come for you to choose. What breed of troll are you?"
"Can you really kill the Goddess?" Jane asked.
"You stupid gobbet of flesh! Don't you understand yet? There is no Goddess."
"No!" Jane cried. "You said yourself—"
"I lied," the dragon said with a fearful complacency. "Everyone you have ever met has lied to you. Life exists, and all who live are born to suffer. The best moments are fleeting and bought with the coin of exquisite torment. All attachments end. All loved ones die. All that you value passes away. In such a vexatious existence laughter is madness and joy is folly. Shall we accept that it all happens for no reason, with no cause? That there is nobody to blame but ourselves but that accepting the responsibility is pointless for doing so ca
"Some bow down before the Goddess and others curse her every name. There is not a fart's difference between the two approaches. They cling to the fiction of the Goddess because admitting the alternative is unbearable."
"Then what—why—what do you want me for?" To her dismay, tears coursed down Jane's face. Oh how Melanchthon must be enjoying this, she thought. What satisfaction it must give him. "You've toyed with me, made promises, gone through Hell-knows-what machinations to bring me here. Why? What's the point of it?"
"I want your help to destroy the universe."
Jane barked a short, bitter laugh. But Melanchthon neither spoke nor by any other sign indicated a
The seashell image burning in the swimming darkness lap-dissolved to a schematic of Spiral Castle, lines diving dizzyingly into one another, swooping in wild curves, always returning to converge upon a central point. "The universe is built upon an instability. A point source of weakness at the begi
It was unimaginable, and yet hooked into the dragon's systems, Jane could not doubt his sincerity. "What happens then?"
In the iron depths of darkness an engine came online. The couch trembled. "You ask a question that ca
"And us?"
"We die." An involuntary rise in the dragon's voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. "We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.