A Devil's Dictionary

CRASH DIVE-4

THE HOMINID DOESN’T move, doesn’t seem to breathe, as I look at him, and for an instant I think, Dr. Livingstone, I presume. Then I laugh a little behind my visor, marveling that I can do so under the circumstances, and take a step forward, eliciting a growl from the creature I would not want to hear twice.

I hold, looking back at the diver—which is suspended nose-down in the middle of the air— before turning again to regard the creature and his art ... only to find them gone, replaced by a very old man in what appears to be a Tudor-style study parlor.

“Livingstone, Einstein, Hezekiah, we’ve been them all, at one time or another.” He begins moving toward me, casually. “You are ... Diver 7. I presume.”

I just look at him, saying nothing. Behind him is a blackboard which runs floor to ceiling and wall to wall, and is crowded with equations. Noticing my gaze, he says, “Ah, yes. Well. The hominid has his work, and I have mine.”

He stops within a few feet of me, examining my flight suit. “Your helmet. You won’t be needing it.”

I look at him for what seems a long time. At last I reach up and trigger the visor, which glides up and out of the way, and take a deep breath. The air is fine.

“Where am I?” I ask, glancing about the room, noting its exotic décor: a red, cactus-like plant (without needles) which looks as though it belongs at the bottom of an alien sea; a black and silver obelisk the height of a man; a polished suit of armor standing sentinel in a corner. “And who are you?”

The old man smiles, warmly, compassionately. “I should have thought you’d have guessed. As for where, why, you’re stone cold dead in the middle of a blue hole. Where else? The mirrors, alas, have failed—but you knew that already. No, what you really want to know is ... what does it all mean? The Hole, the visions, everything. Isn’t that right, Diver 7?”

I look at the old man expectantly.

“Beats the hell out of me,” he says, and moves toward the blackboard. “A blue hole is where mathematics go to die. No. What I have left is only conjecture, speculation—metaphysics rather than physics, notes as opposed to a complete script.” He puts his hands on his hips, examining his formulas, and exhales, warily. “Of the trail of ink there is no end.”

At length he begins moving again, pacing beyond the red plant and the black and silver obelisk, past the suit of armor which gleams like gold in the umber firelight. “Say, just say, for the sake of argument, that the Buddhists are right, and that reincarnation is real. And that its purpose is to evolve souls, to grow them—from the first spark of sentience to something approaching divinity. Would you allow that this was a worthy end to our travails?”

I don’t say anything, only continue to watch him.

“Say, too, that these incarnations are infinite, or nearly so, occurring not just in this universe but a multiverse, so that, in time, we have experienced creation from every window and every door, every viewpoint—in short, we have been everyone and everything. Mmm? Shall we say it?”

He stops and turns around, begins pacing back toward me. “And that, as we reach the point of infinite progression, we begin to, slide, if you will, back and forth amongst our lifetimes—putting the lesson together, as it were, making of it a sphere, rather than a line, compressing everything into an infinitely dense mass, an Alpha and Omega, a singularity such as is found in the heart of our blue hole. Would you say then that we had solved the riddle of its phantasmagorias?”

He pauses not three feet away and I just look at him: the tired eyes, the deep wrinkles and crow’s feet—at last, I understand.

I lift off my helmet.

“I was you, once,” I say. “We were ... We will ...”

He nods, slowly. “Not only us but all men, all sentient beings. Nothing is wasted.”

My mind reels. “But ... The Hole. My diver. It took those things to—”

He laughs suddenly. “Oh, that. Why, that’s just a happy coincidence. You still don’t understand, do you? You never needed the ship, or the vortex. You—we—were ready. Our infinite progression had reached—”

“Madness,” I say. “Shadows within shadows.”

But he is gone, replaced by Hezekiah. “It’s the shadows that exist,” he says, and I understand him perfectly in spite of his alien tongue. “The objects that create them; those are the illusions. Put another way: The ghost is real—the machine is not. Now—it is time.”

And I am back in the cave, standing so close to the hominid I can smell him, watching him rub chalk on the stone, watching him create entire worlds. Until he looks at me sidelong and hands me the tool—thoughtfully, knowingly—as if he were encouraging me. As if he were saying: You too can do it. You, too, are the Creator.

Until I close my fingers on the chalk and everything fades to black.

And that blackness becomes Light.

––––––––

* * * *

I AM BECOME THE WHITE Fountain, the creator of worlds—the Big Bang which will expand outward, creating a new universe. Nor has the previous universe ceased to exist; for it dreams behind us on the other side of the Hole—its galaxies and star systems safely intact, its sentience growing by leaps and bounds.

Meanwhile, even amidst the crash and swirl of creation, I have remained—the godhead of an entirely new paradigm; the observer, and yet, somehow, the observed; the ghost in the rapidly expanding machine. Nor has every vestige of my former self been annihilated; for something has survived the explosion which even now hurtles outward into the maelstrom, spinning, tumbling, drifting ever further. For a billion years, it drifts, until, caught by a mid-size world’s gravitational pull, it falls like a shooting star into an alien sea—a sea as red as blood—whereupon, again, it drifts.

Until it is retrieved from the water by a pair of eager hands—four-fingered hands—which grip the helmet firmly and place it into the boat, after which it is passed from one being to the other like the physical manifestation of a riddle, and finally put into a box.

Where it will remain—its secrets safe, its numeral ‘07’ unseen—until delivered to the priest.