Gojiro (41 page)
Not me, Gojiro knew. He understood the limits of his mandate. Like Moses of old, if a Reprimordialized Promised Land lay on the other side of his yet unaccomplished Deed, it would not be revealed to him.
0.0050 seconds left. Beyond that, the Continuum cracked, the fiber tore. Permanent Dispersal—flatline ’til the next Year Zero.
“Listen up,” he yelled to all the diffusing molecules within him. “This be your captain speaking. Answer me this: How come the Cosmo crossed the road?
“Give up? Because it was the chicken’s day off. Little levity, courtesy of the Atomic Comic. Lighten things up a touch, you dig?
“Okay! Let’s get this party started! Fasten your seat belts! Reprimordialization is no walk in the park. Who knows how many of your past lives is gonna pass through your eyes? So stay loosey, stay goosey, when I say—move out!”
0.0016 . . . 0.0015. Counting down, counting down.
“Okay! Now! Rock and roll!”
There was no movement.
“Hear me? The gates are open. You’re free! Git! Peel rubber! Return to Walden. Make with the Rousseau scene!”
Still nothing.
“Come on! We only got 0.0006 to Permanent Dispersal here. No loitering! You want to become another asteroid belt? Reprimordialize! Get out of me!” The monster torqued the muscles in his head, tried to get a reverse peristalsis going in the parietal tunnel.
That’s when he thought he saw that dodo’s face. That dodo and all those other residents of the Zoo of Shame. They were just hanging there in front of him, spectral gnats swarming Gojiro’s Learish noggin, as if to remind him it wasn’t every citizen of the Evolloo who blissfully volunteered for passage to the Next Notch. Komodo’s speech about the Equal Sign held true: Identity is not preordained, it can’t be ordered in. It must be sought, seized. The monster’s brows rose in terror. He remembered that he himself had been less than zealous about taking the critical plunge. But it was one thing for a lone zardplebe to equivocate before the Black Spot. This was worse. This was a World Balk.
“Leap, you fuckers!” Had Existence become so disaffected that the world had devolved into a society of dodos? Could Life be so despairing of the future as to reject its own Continuance?
“No, I won’t allow it!” As the gongs of Doom clanged with barbarous persistence, the monster readied himself. There was no other choice. Identity determines action; when you’re the Defender of the Evolloo, you do anything you can to Defend it.
“Come in,” the monster cried to the planet he’d ingested.
“Come in, please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“Come in, all Bunches, all Beams! This is Gojiro, King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms . . . Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Defender of the Evolloo. The world is full of Hope! You will see!”
Then he began to feel it: the kick inside, the coalescence of desire, a universe yearning for renewal.
But the wait had been too long. The remorseless timer’s hand slashed into the monster’s heart. The 0.0246 seconds was up. The moment that Komodo predicted for Permanent Dispersal, the point of no return. All that had begun to come together, pulled apart. It was the greatest pain: the strain toward entropy.
“Aggggh.” The monster slapped a claw over his parietal, held his splitting skull together with the other fist. It was agony, but the leviathan held fast. He would not allow the world he loved to scatter into nothingness.
How long did a single mutant zard safeguard the planet with the sheer force of his Love and Duty? One ten-thousandth of a second? Even less? Still, it was the True Eternity.
Then came the deafening sound, the roaring cry. And it’s funny, with all those ringing voices, those many tones and timbres, you’d figure they’d run together, become a slurry holler. But that’s not how it was. Each call was distinct, beautiful and unique, just like Ebi’s newborn voice at the edge of the Cloudcover.
“Waaaa!” The common squawk, the confluencing call. A whole world’s Freshout Cry inside that reptile’s head.
Then: Zam! A moment’s rush, and everything was as it had been. The red sand, the blue sky. The scrubby brush. Peering over the mountains ringing the Encrucijada, the monster could see the rolling hills, the majestic desert, the vast forests beyond. He saw the magnificent and the spoiled, the great oceans and the city full of smog. He saw every zard flicking out a pink tongue and every fly he caught, he saw the hustlers in the candy stores, guns glinting from those that drive by. He saw everything he loved and everything he hated, all of it returned to where it’d been. And still, he hated what he hated, loved what he loved. He hadn’t gone softheaded, convinced himself to love what did not deserve to be loved. But his despair was gone. Because he knew: Change was possible.
At his feet, Sheila Brooks and Komodo were looking up. Grives and Stiller, too. The soldiers also, scratching their heads. Something had just happened, but what?
Then he heard a scream. “Dad! Where did you go?”
It was Sheila Brooks.
Gojiro’s eyes went to the stone fence where Joseph Prometheus Brooks had stood searching, but saw no one. No old worldshatterer to return his stare.
End Note to Fans
S
O: YO! STILL SNAKIN’ AND SHAKIN’,
zealous zardpards? Continually contacking, top ’tile-o-files? Yesireedy, be yours for-true truly, crystallizing via the spire, cooking the cool connection, over the foremost frequency for all G-mungous G-fans—till all hours.
Well, that about knock the docket when it comes to this particular adventure of the big Green Machine? Let me check the files.
Nada más
, unless you need to know about the fabulous escape from the Encrucijada, how Komodo Queequegged Gojiro with one of those shrinkage harpoons and everyone hightailed it to the harbor, where Shig had that SS
Adamski
stoking, and, suddener than Jack Robinson, the Cloudcover was looming from the gloom. A final chase scene like any other.
De rigueur
, Morty. Fill in the blank, Frank.
Other than that, this sector’s just about talked out. Call it colonic, I dunno, but having told thees, it fades, just fades away. A life in the rearview, ever more smaller down the highway.
Just yesterday I asked Komodo if he remembered any of what went down during that 0.0247-second slice of Time out of Time, Space out of Space. “No,” was all he said. Neither did Sheila Brooks. As far as they knew, one moment they were standing there on the early morning desert sands of the Encrucijada, and the next moment they were still standing there. Not that either one of them was tremendously put out by the jump cut on their tape. On the contrary, they loved the idea. Komodo said the very fact that he and Sheila couldn’t remember what happened made them certain that it had. That was the joy in it, Komodo said, having
faith
that my story was so.
That word again—it’s supposed to make you a spiritual millionaire. But even here, this side of the Equal Sign, it’s hard to buy without looking at the prices. Things get crazy. Know what Komodo’s saying now? That what happened in the Valley is likely going to cause “a revolution in cosmologic thought.” You should hear him, he’s so excited. Every day it’s some new revelation. Just this morning he was sliding down the ’cano pole to tell me the latest. “The Encrucijada Incident may not have constituted an Instant of Reprimordialization in the classic sense,” he said, “but rather served to effect definitive terminus of an existing condition.” It’s Komodo’s current theory that the world at large had been laboring under the heavy yoke of a slow-acting All-Inclusive Crisis ever since Brooks first committed the Heater’s equation to his blackboard back in ’45. That act instigated a period of hypermutation causing too many Bunches to acquire too many new traits too fast, thereby threatening Beamic configurations and, eventually, the Evolloo itself. Noting the growing emergency, the Blessed Blueprint, ever lousy with contingency plans, came up with the sequence of events which fall loosely under the heading of
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
. To hear Komodo tell it, Brooks’s desire to see the face of the Deity served as “the dramatic embodiment of the Matrix-wide yearning of all things for a return to the P = I paradigm.” The Personal Appearance of the King of Monsters satisfied this Reprimordial longing.
“Mr. Brooks opened the window of Change in 1945,” Komodo says. “Gojiro closed it.”
“That’s a heck of a long time to leave a window open, you catch a death of colds,” I told Komodo, trying my best to maintain the oppositional stance. Mostly, though, I just listen politely. Right now, Komodo’s going on about how memory, like matter, can never be absolutely destroyed. He’s repeating, yet again, his conviction that it might take a dozen generations for the recollection of what happened in the Encrucijada to bubble up through the subconscious, but that it will, eventually. His idea goes back to Budd Hazard’s Tenacity of Genes and Dreams concept, Komodo says, how visions carry on, make their myths, coalesce to Cosmo and finally, Truth.
The process is already underway, Komodo contends, handing me a copy of what Billy Snickman wrote. The wolf boy stowed away on that SS
Adamski
—maybe I forgot to say. You’d figure Shig would’ve thrown Billy overboard, but the froze-eyed martinet only slapped a plate of slop in front of the wild child as if he were just another Atom. Sheila Brooks remembered Billy from those nights on the freeway, so it was kind of a party. Anyway, as soon as the boat came through the Cloudcover, the kid ran off the gangplank, graffitied his poem on the palisades of Past Due Point. “
Came far on a boat, not planes or trains. / To the world of four brains.
”
“The poets know it first,” Komodo points out, indicating that Billy’s couplet more or less confirmed what he already suspected, that Quadcamerality will be the taxonomic differentiation that will come to distinguish the New Bunch he’s certain will arise on Radioactive Island. It’s only a matter of time until the adaptation is recognized and consolidated, Komodo says. You just have to wait.
But, to tell the truth, I’m not much in the mood to wait. I’m not much in the mood to do anything these days. Feeling kind of dragged, tired. Probably something I ate. Komodo says it makes sense, feeling pooped, tough ruckus I been through. Relax, he says.
So I’m relaxing. Taking a load off, kicking back. Watching the Dish.
Some little trip about Grives and Stiller, huh? Ole Grives finally getting the mandatory retirement for going round screaming about a five-hundred-foot-tall Devil turning up in the Encrucijada—that was kind of sad. What happened to Stiller was better. Did you see that crazy scene in Times Square, how cops found him wandering up and down Forty-Deuce street all vacant-faced and gnarly? He was yelling about an equation he claimed would put the Universe’s “ultimate power” in his hands, except he forgot what the formula said. “One moment it was there, the next, it was gone,” he said, over and over, his finger screwed against his temple. But best of all was how Stiller’s lawyer kept pressing that Native Lands case and wound up winning the whole Valley back for the Lizard Clan. They showed the Echo Man, grinning his toothless smile from the window of his brand new four-wheel-drive with the longhorns bolted to the hood. “Oil,” he said, in his airy whisper, “oil here? Worth billions? Sure, it’s a nice surprise.” Then he ordered the TV boys off his land. But not before they got a shot of Brooks’s ranch house, deserted and forgotten, a decayed wreck. “Home to science’s greatest mind,” they said, “until his untimely death years ago.”
Goes around, comes around. Satisfaction in that, sense of loose ends tied.
Yeah.
Komodo was down again, all wowed about the New Beam and the New Bunch. You should see the glow in his eyes.
I told him anyway what I decided. I told him I couldn’t be happier about how it all came out, but I just didn’t see where I was going to fit in on this new, improved Radioactive Island.
Komodo tried to protest, but I cut him off, made him hear me out.
“No,” I said, with only love inside my heart, “I’ve been a mutant zard too long. I’ve done what I’ve come to do. The next world is the one for you and Sheila to live in, not me.” I told Komodo that even though the Triple Ring Promise had been fulfilled, I was asking him to stick to the terms of the Amendment, to snuff me according to the contract.
Komodo took it as best as he could. “If that is your wish, my own true friend, I will try to comply. But the Amendment falls due tomorrow. I will have to make tests, to determine methods to circumnavigate your invulnerability . . . there might not be time.”
“Don’t think it’ll be a problem,” I said, picking a crashed Coke bottle off the ’cano floor where I’d thrown it during who knows what stupor. I raked the jagged edge cross my leathers and heard Komodo gasp. He couldn’t believe how the glass cut through and my blood flowed. “Been happening ever since . . . you know. Some kind of side effect, maybe. Anyhow, I ain’t what I was. All you got to do is stick me on a raft, float me out toward the Cloudcover, the thermoreg’ll take care of the rest. Okay?”
Komodo nodded. His face was white as Virgil’s empty sheet.
“Sorry.”
Komodo bowed. “Do not be sorry, my own true friend. Your wishes are always respected by me.”
“No, I mean about tomorrow, it being your birthday and all.”
* * *
So, Green Scene Fiends—this comes off the hottest press yet. Up to the minute, dateline August 6. Like I said way back in the beginning, I can hear Komodo’s hammer banging, ballpeen to the bamboo. Happy birthday, great soul.
Final thoughts? How about: If you’re on your bike tonight, wear white. I dunno. I guess all the choice yocks have been picked over. I’ll just say, G-fans . . . my fans. I love you more than I will ever let on.
Now the hammering’s stopped, the raft must be ready. Up top, the ’cano cover is scraping, the crescent shaft of light descending. It’s Komodo, come to get me for the final walk. He never misses an appointment.
“My own true friend!”
What’s this? Outside there’s all kinds of commotion.
Some Atom’s crying from the crow’s nest atop the glassine pines ringing Corvair Bay. “Land ho! Land ho!” Another chunk of ravaged earth is flotjetting through the Cloudcover, ready to merge with what was once just ours, ours and ours alone.
“My own true friend! You must come see! It is incredible!”
I see Komodo now. I thought he’d be so somber, but he’s smiling. Ecstatic. Sheila Brooks is with him; they look great together, they really do.
“Please, come to the beach with us.”
I’m trying to get up, but it’s hard. I must be half-dead already. I feel so sleepy.
“You must see.” Sheila and Komodo—they’re picking me up! How are they doing that, two skanks like them lifting a behemoth like me? Man! Been so out of it, I didn’t even realize I was shrinking. Can’t be more than a couple feet long now.
“Look! Look, my own true friend!”
I’m trying, squinting every lid. But I only see the sea.
“There!”
Now I see it, I do. A piece of land coming in.
That promontory . . . it looks familiar. Yes, it does. What’s that covering it—a carpet of ’tiles? Zards from wall to wall?
I feel Sheila Brooks stroke my shaggy leathers.
And the Atoms screaming, cheering.
“My own true friend, it is so!” Komodo’s shouting.
Could it really be my Hallowed Homelands, returned to me?