When Tom Tran whipped around to face the courtyard again, he was inexpressibly grateful that those French doors were made of bronze instead of wood, for this prince of Hell was
The silver eyes were fixed on him, and the mandibles worked as if the creature were imagining the taste of him, and now he thought that the darker shapes within its semitranslucent body, those opaque lumps, might be smaller creatures it had devoured, all of them lying whole in its gut, like the limb-tangled bodies in the mass grave near Nha Trang. This was the very kind of thing that might have come to life—or the animated antithesis of life— deeply buried in the human compost and jungle mast of Nha Trang, Vietnam, never having been born but instead having become aware in the darkness and the decay and the heat that decay produced, the horror of Nha Trang given a suitably symbolic form. At last it had come for Tran Van Lung, known here as Tom Tran, now forty-five, who as a boy of ten had seen that open-air abattoir, the machine-gunned thousands of women, men, and children in the natural cavity of a pond long drained of water, not yet plowed over with a thick blanket of earth. With his father, he had quickly walked one curve of the rim of that obscene hole and safely away among the trees before authorities returned with the bulldozer that they had been too impatient to provide before the killing started. Behind him and his father, the jungle surrounding the grave had stood eerily silent in deep green witness.
“It’s not even trying to get in,” Padmini said.
Tom expected the creature to throw itself against the doors, but it did not. Neither did it shatter a pane of glass with its pincers.
“Why isn’t it trying?” Padmini asked.
The thing turned away from the door and retreated along the winding footpath.
“It must not be Nha Trang, after all,” Tom decided.
“What?”
“Nha Trang will never stop wanting me.”
Although the intensity of his fear declined as his racing heart beat less frantically, a chill pierced him with the suddenness of a dagger of ice falling from a high eave, and he shivered violently.
Deja vu didn’t describe the sensation. Kirby didn’t feel as if he had been here before, in these circumstances, in this Pendleton of the future. Yet as extraordinary as these events were, they did not seem utterly alien and incomprehensible to him. He had been surprised by the things he’d seen but, curiously, not shocked. In spite of the bizarre and radical changes this world had undergone, it was somehow familiar to him, or if not familiar, then potentially explainable. He could not explain it yet, but he sensed an understanding growing in him, a coral reef of theory slowly accreting, still unconscious but certain eventually to rise into view. The apparent chaos might be only apparent, a logical historic cause and a rational order just waiting to be revealed.
He and Bailey left the women and children with one gun and one flashlight, in the Cupp apartment. The encounter with the sporing colony of fungi in Kinsley’s bathroom proved that moments would arise when a quick response was essential to survival, but the larger the search team, the less agile it could be.
They accessed the south wing of the third floor through the Cupps’ back entrance. The high-mounted TV in the corner where the short and long hallways met didn’t pulse with blue light. The screen was shattered. A colony of glowing fungi lived in the shallow tube, indicating that this monitor hadn’t worked in a long time.
To their left the elevator doors stood open, the stainless-steel interior burnished by blue light. To Kirby Ignis, the unoccupied car seemed to be an invitation to go for a ride. Considering Winny’s experience and Kirby’s own encounter with the blood-spattered butler who came out of the north elevator from 1935, shortly before the leap to this future occurred, he would prefer the stairs for the duration.
The top floor of Gary Dai’s two-story apartment was immediately to their right, opposite the south elevator. The door had been broken down. It lay just beyond the threshold, cracked and sheathed in undisturbed dust; the hinges in the jamb were bent, torn halfway out of the wood. Back in 2011, Gary was in Singapore, so the leap would not have brought him with them to this Pendleton.
Nevertheless, they ventured into the upper floor of 3-B, where the radiant fungi were as prevalent as elsewhere, and Bailey called out—“Is anyone here?”—repeatedly as they moved from the foyer into the living room. The words echoed through other rooms and down the internal apartment stairs to the lower floor of the unit, but no one replied.
Beyond the west windows lay the plain of hypnotically swaying luminous grass and the circular stands of craggy black trees down-lit by the moon but also up-lit by the glowing meadow. The disturbing but undeniable allure of this future world was different from the beauty of the world now past, not just in the nature of its landscapes but in its fundamental quality.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty: Philosophers for ages had said that beauty was proof of design by a higher power, because living things could function just as well if they were ugly; if animals—including humans—were merely meat machines and if plants were merely machines of cellulose and chlorophyll produced by blind and mindless Nature, and if landscapes were sculpted by geological processes inspired by no Great Engineer, there wasn’t any reason for them to be appealing to the eye, which seemed to mean beauty must be a grace, a gift to the world.
Kirby wasn’t interested enough to have an opinion regarding the theory of a link between beauty and the divine in the world he had left. But it seemed to him, as he gazed out of Gary Dai’s windows, that what pleased the eye in this world was not good and true but evil and deceptive. What made this vista alluring was not genuine harmony, which it somehow lacked, but its mystery and the sense that anything might be out there, that anything might happen, which had great appeal to the savage aspect of the human heart, which in the old world had to be repressed in the interest of civilization. Here no civilization existed, only the heart of darkness, bewitching in its immensity, charming because it promised raw brutal power, because it promised the freedom of madness, because it promised death without meaning.
From here the rhythmic swaying of the luminous meadow seemed to offer a mystical experience, but Kirby suspected that any walk he took there would be short and marked by exquisite cruelty.
In spite of his grandfatherly demeanor, he was a curmudgeon who found humankind—not every individual but as a species—to be largely foolish in the extreme, selfish and greedy and envious. Most were in love with power, with violence, users and despoilers. Kirby often thought the world would be a better place if dogs were the creatures of highest intelligence who lived in it. He didn’t miss the vanished city, because even the best of cities
