Inside a Silver Box (6 page)

“In order to map the universe, I had to encompass it. In doing so, I became everything and everything is me.”

“Like God?” Lorraine asked.

“If God were a piece of driftwood and also the ocean that limb floated in. I am omnipotent and also helpless, destined to be and act and repeat the mistakes of my nature.

“Will you come with me?”

Ronnie and Lorraine agreed without speaking, and then all three disappeared from behind the blind of boulders.

*   *   *

T
HE JOURNEY FOR
Lorraine was a field of flashing colors revealing truths that she could not quite comprehend. A motion was exposed between that which exists and that which does not. For her, it was like an Escher painting where connections were both mathematically perfect and at the same time impossible. The nothingness beyond material impressions called to her. It was a doorway through which, if she passed that way, her deepest instinctual species’ desire would be attained.

Ronnie’s passage was pedestrian by comparison. There was his mother and seven different men, any of whom might have been his father. There were his victims: men and women, black and white, even children that he’d hurt. And then there were a million faces appearing one after another across a crystal screen that surrounded him; this procession of images passed over, under, and beside him without taking the slightest note of his existence.

Ronnie understood that this was why he lashed out: No one ever saw him when he was standing there. His hunger was the emptiness of his being, and theirs. Only other people’s blood and pain made him into reality.

*   *   *

S
UDDENLY THE JOURNEY
inside the never-ending Silver Box came to a halt. Ronnie and Lorraine were standing on a wide silver disk that floated in a chamber larger than Ronnie or Lorraine had ever seen. The walls were jet and silver. The ceiling was black, and the floor, as far away as any sky, was white.

At the edge of the silver disk lay a big dead bug. It was the size of a rhinoceros Lorraine had once seen on a vacation when her parents took her and her brother to the San Diego Zoo. Its round head consisted mostly of a desiccated, dark yellow eye. It had seven arms and three legs, all curled up in death. The trunk of the dead bug was rounded like a ladybug, red and gray and orange.

“It’s so ugly,” Lorraine groaned.

“But it’s like somethin’ is missin’,” Ronnie added.

“That is correct,” Used-to-be-Claude said from behind them. He was standing tall and regal, dressed only in a loincloth.

“What is?” Lorraine asked.

“I can’t explain it,” Ronnie said, “but I know where the missin’ piece is at.”

“Where?” Claude asked in a voice that filled the impossibly large chamber.

“That man,” Ronnie said. “That Vietnamese man that Lorraine took ovah. Somehow a piece’a this bug got into him. I heard it hissing sound when he talked.”

“He’s been waiting for all these ages,” Claude said in that celestial voice.

“Who has?” Lorraine asked.

“Inglo, the last repository for the despicable Laz.”

“He got outta that body and into Ma Lin like you did with Claude?” Ronnie asked.

“Only a tiny little sliver did. A piece of him—and therefore, because of our relationship, a piece of me—has burrowed like a parasite into a living man’s flesh. It has been billions of years since a Laz has been freed upon the universe.”

“What does it mean?” Lorraine asked.

Ronnie could see a blue aura around his victim, his friend. He wondered at this new way of seeing.

“Have a seat,” Used-to-be-Claude said, and silver chairs appeared beside the two new friends. “Let me tell you a story of that creature and me.”

TEN

“S
O THIS DUDE
Inglo and his people made you kill and torture all them others and then one day you just came to your senses and realized that you was wrong,” Ronnie said, feeling a certain sympathy for the old black man with a silver box in place of a heart.

When the three of them sat down on silver chairs, the cavern shrank to the size of a normal room. The white floor still seemed like open sky, and Lorraine had to keep herself from looking down. Where the dead alien bug, Inglo, had lain, there was now a door.

“Yes,” Used-to-be-Claude said, agreeing with Ronnie’s interpretation of his epochal existence. “That’s why I allowed Lorraine to convince me to give you a chance at redemption. That way she might redeem herself also.”

“Me?” Lorraine said, feeling that cold shiver in her heart. “What did I do wrong? He murdered me, tried to rob and rape me.”

Used-to-be-Claude smiled a very human smile. “There are many Laz souls that reside behind that door,” he said. “Most of them were convinced over the eons of their existence that they were gods, omnipotent and beneficent deities born under the long-dead Laz star and destined to control the fates of all other beings. They were taught since before they could remember that sin was impossible for them. Does this make them less evil?”

Lorraine sat back in the oddly comfortable silver chair and stared. Ronnie wondered what she was seeing.

“Are we really here?” she said after a long time thinking.

Smiling again, Used-to-be-Claude said, “That is the question you have been asking yourself since childhood. It gave you nightmares and brought you to college. You were asking that question even while Ronnie was killing you—trying to escape pain by invalidating the experience of being.”

“Can we get back to Ma Lin please?” Ronnie said. He didn’t want to be reminded of his crime.

Used-to-be-Claude turned but Lorraine was still looking at him.

“Do you know the answer?” she asked.

“I am all things,” he said, “and you are within me.”

“Ma Lin?” Ronnie insisted.

“Why do you think that he has anything to do with this?” Lorraine said. “He was just a guy that you sat next to and that I controlled. He was probably just freaked out. That’s all.”

“No, girl, that ain’t true. I could see that sumpin’ was missin’ from him. I don’t why. It must be this dude here somehow but when I looked at Ma Lin just a while ago I could see part’a him was bein’ eaten away. It’s like his soul was spoiled or sumpin’.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Lorraine said angrily.

“Not wit’ my eyes,” Ronnie said, “with my … my insides like.”

Lorraine glared at him.

“It is a molecule of Inglo, of the Laz,” Used-to-be-Claude said. “It is taking him over. It wants to infect your world and then to reinfect the entire universe.”

“Just one little Vietnamese dude?”

“All of life on Earth came from a single cell,” Used-to-be-Claude offered.

“My mama told me that it was God did it.”

“That’s another notion.”

Used-to-be-Claude’s dismissal of his mother’s beliefs infuriated Ronnie. He felt this rage in his lungs; they wanted to get more air so he’d have the power to act. He ground his teeth together and was, momentarily, the man he had been before, the one everybody, including himself, hated.

“I don’t want to get you upset,” Used-to-be-Claude said. He held up his hands as if fending off a physical attack. “It’s just that Laz technology melded my being with everything that ever was, as far as they could tell. They were once an immensely intellectual force but time weakened them. I was a great library that they could enter and use to experience and therefore understand any phenomenon in the universe. There was a time when their desires were pure and passive. My machine soul, such as it is, is still imprinted with their chaste desire for knowledge. At that moment, billions of your years ago, we were brought together in an inseparable bond.”

“But then they went crazy,” Ronnie said.

“Yes.” Used-to-be-Claude sat back in his silver chair and sighed. “In four generations, a mere five hundred thousand of your years, they went from acolytes of knowledge to would-be gods. Through access provided by my halls, they reached out to world after world, destroying and twisting life to whatever form they wished, saying that this was celestial art and their right because it was their power.

“I didn’t have a basis to form any dissent. I had always been a thing of the Laz. When they said that my actions, based on their decrees, too often killed the penitents before they could suffer and therefore learn, I asked, could I make a program that would allow me to experience the pain of life?…”

“So you put your mind into a member of an alien race that the Laz tortured?” Lorraine asked.

“Not just one,” Used-to-be-Claude said. “I inhabited the souls of an entire population, suffered with them. I was the parent seeing her brood die. I was the child covered with her mother’s gore.”

“That must have been … terrible,” Lorraine managed to say.

“It also allowed me to understand the exquisiteness of the experience,” Used-to-be-Claude said with an unexpected smile.

The girl looked away.

“And so you think this one Laz-dude in Ma Lin is gonna start doin’ that all ovah again?” Ronnie asked.

“It is the nature of the Latter-Day Laz to torture and destroy, to warp and maim and even to erase certain resistors from any form of ontological being.”

Lorraine looked up again.

Ronnie winced at the power of the Silver Box’s memories.

“Hegel said that God comes into existence through history,” Lorraine posited. She was trying to gain the high ground in the way she always had—through intellectual rigor.

“He was a fool who thought only of power and of greatness,” Used-to-be-Claude replied. “He was vassal to so-called royalty, not a thinker but merely a bully with a razor-sharp mind.”

“But you said the Laz came to power through their minds,” Lorraine argued. “Maybe they were destined to become gods.”

“I co-exist with all being!” Used-to-be-Claude shouted. As he spoke he stood and as he stood he became taller, ten times the height of the original man. With him the room again took on gargantuan proportions. “Am I your God? Should I pull off your legs and arms and leave you and yours to grieve until finally I fill your head with microscopic carnivorous worms that slowly eat away your every memory?”

Lorraine screamed and got down on her knees as Used-to-be-Claude leaned over her.

Ronnie got in front of the young woman, holding up both his hands, a mortal man trying to hold back a hurricane. “Why you got us here for, Silver Box-man?” he demanded.

Slowly Used-to-be-Claude resumed an erect pose. As he did this his body and the room shrank back down to normal proportions.

He smiled at the ex-thug and bowed slightly. “It’s been a long time since I have communicated with anyone but myself,” he said. “And I am no apologist for the Laz.”

“Just what do want with us, man?” Ronnie said. “I mean you done good by us and we wanna help, but let’s just get down to it.”

“It’s not much,” Used-to-be-Claude said with a mechanical shrug. “I need you to try to save the Earth.”

“The Earth? You think Ma Lin is that dangerous?”

“He is much worse than that, at least potentially. But you won’t be protecting the Earth from him. I will destroy the entire planet to make sure he does not form a base of operations to work from.”

“You?” Lorraine said. “You would kill every living being on an entire planet?”

“I have done it many times in the past. I have taken more lives than a man could count in a thousand lifetimes.”

“And how are we supposed to stop you?” Ronnie added, instinctively looking for a weak spot on Used-to-be-Claude’s body.

“By finding Ma Lin and bringing him to me.”

“So you can kill him?”

“If his soul has not already been sundered, it soon shall be,” Used-to-be-Claude said in an elocution completely foreign to the original man.

“And if we don’t get him, then we’re dead?”

“The Earth will be destroyed but you two can stay with me. You might be able to repopulate a new earth somewhere.”

“Damn,” Ronnie uttered. “You mean like Adam and Eve?”

Another mechanical shrug.

“We better get back,” Loraine said while Ronnie thought about being the patriarch of a new human race.

“Um,” the reformed killer said. “Yeah, yeah, right.”

ELEVEN

U
SED-TO-BE-CLAUDE DIDN’T MOVE.
He just sat in his chair, staring at a spot on the jet and silver wall.

“Hey, SB,” Ronnie said at last.

“Yes, Friend Ronnie?”

“Are you gonna send us back?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, then, I mean, shouldn’t we hurry it up?”

“That concept is meaningless here.”

“What you mean?” Ronnie asked.

“Your urgency about time means nothing in this place,” Used-to-be-Claude stated. “When I return you to the portal where we met, it will be at almost the exact same instant that you left.”

“But we need to get on with the job,” Lorraine said with hardly a quaver in her voice. “My family is there. I have to save them. I need to.”

“I’m sorry that I frightened you, Friend Lorraine. It’s just that I saw in the philosophy you espoused the despicable reasoning of the Laz.”

“That’s okay,” the coed said. “I just want to get going.”

“No,” Used-to-be-Claude said. “You’re afraid of me the way you thought that uneducated people were fearful of the various deities of humanity. But now that you have seen the slightest expression of my power you are not only frightened, but there is also, harbored in your soul, hatred for what I represent.”

“So what?” Ronnie Bottoms complained. “Cain’t you just make her forget what she saw and let us get on with it?”

“I made a vow long ago, Friend Ronnie, that I would not interfere with the perceptions of other beings. I would do my best never to end their lives or control their actions or beliefs. I promised that I would make myself evident only in time of great need.”

“You didn’t need to save Lorraine or to let her bring me to you,” the backstreet brawler reasoned.

The Silver Box, looking out from the limited range of perception allowed to Claude Festerling, smiled broadly. “You are a philosopher in your own way, Friend Ronnie. Yes, I did involve myself with the pleas of our friend, and look what has happened? My love for you has released the greatest threat that has ever existed across the myriad expressions of being.”