Gojiro (40 page)

0.0247 Seconds

T
HROUGH THE PREDAWN MURK OF THE ENCRUCIJADA,
Gojiro saw the cameras on the hillside. Maybe that Shig was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a welcher. He’d signed a contract with Hermit Pandora Pictures to make
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
and he intended to deliver. Not that Gojiro would require much direction. You don’t when yours is the role you were born, or reborn, to play.

Ditto for Joseph Prometheus Brooks. With that two-foot golden sphere cradled in his previously empty palms, he stood in his spot, eyes fixed ahead, as always.

That was how they faced each other, Opposer and Defender, bound by a common, solemn purpose.

If it had been a day earlier, a week, or a year, Gojiro wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face. What were the two of them trying to prove anyway, he’d have asked, an old man and a mutant zard playing a high-noon game in the middle of a Valley already steeped with the maudlin sediment of crumbled symbols? The whole thing was absurd—didn’t they know that all the good archetypes have already been taken, beat flat of meaning?

That’s what Gojiro might have thought, before. But this was now. Now, across the Equal Sign’s great divide, the monster’s sense of his own ridiculousness was obliterated. Here was only Identity. Identity and Action. For there could be no question as to the contents of Brooks’s glowing globe. It was annihilation, pure and simple, a hand-held All-Inclusive Crisis of the Evolloo.
Everything
at stake.

From his vantage point five hundred feet above the sand and creosote scrub, the monster’s view was comprehensive, unrestricted. He could see Sheila Brooks come running. It was a heartbreaking scene, really, the way she tried to tell her father she knew everything, that she loved him anyway. Heartbreaking, too, that she knew nothing could make her father put down that golden ball—that he wouldn’t even look at her, much less hold her in his cradling arms again. After all, she’d seen this scene unfold before, hundreds of times. But still, knowing everything, she kept on, petitioning for her father’s love, because that’s what daughters do.

Gojiro could not be moved. To him, Komodo and Sheila Brooks were nothing more than faceless, antish figures, a black-pajamaed guy and his girl, like any couple you might see on a bus or in an airport terminal. Strangers. None of his business. Nothing mattered now except what was between him and Joseph Brooks and that golden sphere. What started sixty-six million years ago would be settled now, once and for all. That’s how it is on the other side of the Equal Sign.

* * *

It was General Grives who set it off.

Some might say he snapped, that after so many haunted nights it just got to him. Poor ole Grives, he never could convince those snide Beltway boys about Joseph Prometheus Brooks. Evil, they snickered when he left their offices; Grives thinks Brooks is Evil. How much easier it was for those prep-school cynics to swallow Stiller’s lustrous line. Gojiro, though, had no quarrel with the chunky soldier. Grives had his excuses. He’d seen the Heater, been marked by its Power, felt its horrible Revelation in his fundamentalist heart. He wasn’t a bad man, just dumber than a stump. In fact, taking into consideration typical sapienistic prejudice, you could say that what Grives did was only human, especially after he saw Brooks standing in front of that looming, leather-wrapped, red-eyed Beast.

“Satan! I’ll send you back to Hell!” the bejowled general shouted, snatching a rocket launcher from the shoulder of a gunnery sergeant, and bouncing a volley off Gojiro’s Triple-Ringed chest. A pointless, misinformed gesture, as any G-fan knows. Nevertheless, it is difficult to tell what might have happened if Stiller hadn’t shown up right then.

“Joseph! You’ve done it again,” the former cyclotronist shouted, stumbling from behind the stone house. His once elegant presence ruined by that exploding oil well, Stiller was carrying Brooks’s blackboard. “It’s remarkable,” he raved, a wild look on his singed face, “your greatest work. Do you have any idea of what this is worth? Billions! Trillions! Something like this will turn the defense industry on its head. I must contact the president immediately!”

At first Brooks paid Stiller no mind, but the ravaged Hungarian pushed forward. “Is this it—this globe? You have created the prototype already? Let me see!” He reached for it.

“No!” Brooks growled, flinging an elbow at Stiller.

The movement threw the worldshatterer off balance. Pitching forward, he tripped on a protruding rock. The gold sphere flew out of his hands and into the air.

Up. “Ah!” Sheila Brooks screamed.

Up. “Oh!” Komodo yelled.

Grives’s voice pierced the morning silence. “Beelzebub’s ball!” He drew his pistol, squinted, and fired.

The bullet inched through squares of air.

Lips pursed, eyes grew tight. Joseph Brooks looked up at the apexing sphere, then to Gojiro.

There was no sound except the distant click of film through a shutter’s gate. Up in the hills, Shig was getting it all.

* * *

Regarding what happened next, let’s say it came down to something the monster never could get straight, which is what makes a Hero. What do the latest polls say about swordswinging lone cats making their way through the arcane’s labyrinth? Does Courage alone spur them on? Gojiro would say no, nobody’s that brave; he’d say Great Deeds can never be predicted or precognitioned, that Saturday’s Hero is no Hero unless he does what he does in a week that Saturday doesn’t come. (For, truth be told, Sheila Brooks’s scenario for
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
was really nothing but a premise, a concept limited to bringing the key players together. What happened after that was an empty reel waiting to be filled in.)

No, Gojiro would say, if a Hero knew, a priori, what it took to be a Hero, Olympus would be an empty tract. The Deed must lurch like reflex, Prewire. And that’s how it was, a moment later, when, like automatic, he tonguespeared Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s wounded sphere from the desert air and jammed it through the parietal, deep into the Quadcameral.

Techwise, Brooks’s golden ball functioned in much same fashion as Komodo’s Pill, albeit on a larger scale. First it effected total vacuum intake; then, as a second stage, it exploded the matter within the source receptacle. Count one-Mississippi, two, if you want to imagine how it looked: a solid streak aimed between your eyes, a mystery train, a billion coaches long, clackety-clack into your head. Suffice it to say that the planet, and everything on it, was vortexing into Gojiro’s parietal, atomizing inside the Quadcameral.

Sometimes he saw faces, could pick out individuals. Some he knew, like Albert Bullins stunt-flying his mint-condition kamikaze, and Bobby Zeber on his Triumph, heading east. But then there’d come Tashkent and Mexico City, all in a lump. There were mountains, some Holy, some pincushioned with ski lifts. Oceans, too, the swell of mighty currents suddenly rerouted to a single downhill torrent. Forests, no earth beneath them to sink roots, coursed forth as so many densepacked Birnam Woods-come-to-Dunsinane, like straight out of Macbeth’s real bad trip. Australia zoomed in, a jagged frisbee. The planet peeled like fruit along the lines of longitude. All perimeters collapsed, no center held. Nothing was turned away. There was room for Everest, space for the frozen poles and lonely prairies. The noise was incredible, the ear-splitting creak of a giant wooden ark. The world churned, a molecular stew in the most bubbling of cauldrons, the fourth tier of the Quadcameral.

Then it stopped.

Gojiro opened his eyes and saw only the Encrucijada. The Valley hung there, alone. Beyond its red-ringed hills was nothing, only the blackness of space.

No sound. Except: “My own true friend!”

Good old Komodo, alive! Such a comfort to hear his voice. He was down there, with Sheila Brooks, standing at the monster’s feet. Them and no one else, save Joseph Brooks, still in his spot by the stone fence.

“Are you all right?” Komodo asked.

“All right?” Gojiro considered. “I guess so. I feel like the Statue of Liberty after closing time and they forgot to tell the tourists. Be okay, long as they don’t start banging on the windows.”

Komodo looked down, read from a piece of paper. “I have compiled some calculations that may aid you in what you must do next, my own true friend. I am afraid they are quite rough.”

“Rough?” That Komodo, what a guy! He watches the world sandstorm into a hole in his best friend’s head and he’s still counting the quantums. Stick him in Vegas, doubledown, and no house would be left standing.

“Based on the rate of vacuum influx effected by Mr. Brooks’s device, it is my opinion that the Instant of Reprimordialization will become available from 0.0239 seconds to 0.0246 seconds. 0.0246 seconds—that’s the maximum period, from the time of total engorgement.”

“Total what?”

“Engorgement. The point at which nothing is left in the world . . . nothing except yourself, that is. Only 0.0246 seconds, no more. Beyond that point, Permanent Dispersal will take over.”

“Then what?”

Komodo bit his lip. “Good luck, my own true friend . . .”

That was when Joseph Brooks spoke, his voice low and rumbly. “Sheila . . . forgive me.”

Tears streaking her parched face, Sheila reached out, kissed her father. “It’s okay, Dad. I love you.” They held each other, a dad and daughter who’d ridden the highways together, only to have their road return to this desolate and fateful place. Then they said goodbye, Sheila Brooks returning to Komodo’s side. And like that, the two lovers were gone, sucked into the Quadcameral.

Gojiro looked around, saw Shig. The froze-eyed boy was still in the hills, his camera running. Weird kid, nothing fazed him, not even the sudden disappearance of a Universe. Even now, he gave Gojiro the creeps. But zap—he went in there with the rest. Too bad he’d miss shooting the climax, but that’s just the way it went.

* * *

Now the Big Throwdown could begin.

They stood there—Brooks and Gojiro, worldshatterer and King of Monsters, Opposer and Defender—etched out in a field of nothing, two to do the dance of the Evolloo. Twice before, their gazes had collided, fused, locked on. On Lavarock, they’d been a famous scientist and an unknowing zardplebe awaiting the confirming plunge into the Black Spot. The second time, just a few days ago, it had been between a dead man and a depressive movie star.

Now, the third time round: Scramble the riddle of the chicken and egg in a teflon pan and ask, who between them, Brooks or Gojiro, be which piece of Paracelsus’s puzzle? God makes Man?—Man makes God? That’s your toss-up question, Teachers’ State. Slap that buzzer down—either way, it’s no news.

Strange, Gojiro thought, how much he once hated Brooks—hated him more than hate itself!—and how that passion had turned the full 180. From Lavarock’s seamless quilt of zards, Brooks had chosen him. Made him Gojiro. Now the monster would repay what he owed.

The leviathan bent down, opened a clawfist. Brooks stepped onto the giant palm, stood there as the reptile raised him up. Up and up, so high that Brooks could look around and be sure that the task he set for himself had been accomplished: He’d vanished a World, and before him stood the Being whose calling was to Restore it.

Brooks smiled now. His eyes, freed from their search, almost twinkled. They were kindly, boyish. Brooks nodded to Gojiro, and Gojiro nodded back, proof their deal was done.

Then Brooks began to schag. He arched himself and jumped. Higher and faster than you’d figure an old man could, he flew through the still air, into the hole in the monster’s head, and was gone.

* * *

You know what it’s like to be alone, completely on your own, and in your head . . . a Zone? To have a billion Beams, a billion Bunches, every Line crisscrossing between your ears? Do you know how that feels? Of course you don’t. How could you? If you did, you’d be Him.

Maybe, someday, an old clipping will appear in Corvair Bay’s mucky surf, a report from an extraterrestrial reporter. A column inch, no more, it’ll say, “At 5:48:34.9089 pan-stellar synchronization, earth, stone 3 of solar system #9078A, was removed from orbit and replaced by a mutant reptile of the varanid type. Cause of the occurrence is unknown at this time.” Next to this item, there’ll be a splotchy photo, a shot no clearer than those of the long-necked resident of Ness, a likeness of a shellshocked zard plying Kepler’s oval, desperate for an aspirin to soothe that one biggest headache.

Until then, rely on this. How it looked: the Void, where there was nothing to see. And how it felt: apart. The Eternal Present, where no past image lingered on, where there was no future to foretell. The numbing evernow.

Amid all that black, the monster asked one question. He wanted to know how come, if he’d truly become Eternal, a circle without circumference, a point without extension or duration, then what was that ticking?

“Damn!” Gojiro screamed. 0.0245 . . . 0.0244 . . . Komodo’s sums! Even here, the countdown never stopped. What good was Infinity if it came strapped to your back like a time bomb?

0.0236 . . . 0.0235 . . .

A horrible idea crossed the monster’s overstuffed mind. He couldn’t have been the first, could he? There must have been others before him, other would-be, conveniently forgotten, Defenders of the Evolloo—those who went forth to bridge gaps, link lines, those with whole planets crammed between their earwhorls, dudes that didn’t get over. Maybe that was the real origin of the primeval swirl, Gojiro thought. Maybe the Big Bang wasn’t nothing but shrapnel from a great Zardic cosmohead gone blooey.

“Keep cool,” he told himself. No need to flip out. Plenty of time, 0.0130 seconds left. All the time in the world.

“Be positive.” He thought about Ebi, what she always said while she did her taxons. The Evolloo was not only impossible to anticipate, Ebi said, it was silly to even try. The real joy was in the expectation, waiting to see Life’s new gift. The monster sighed. Here, now, thinking of Ebi. How she would have loved to be alive to stick her labels on a world makeover. Now someone else would have to do it.