Nest of Worlds

127

Her eyes clouded over, her hand grew cold. He kissed her on the lips one last time and closed her eyes gently with his fingertips.

“You want to know how this ends? Very well… There will be one more piece of action for you.”

He went to the red telephone and lifted the receiver. “Give me the president. This is David Death.”

After a moment came the rough voice of the president. “Yes? I’m here.”

“My wife is dead. I was unable to keep her alive.”

“I am sorry, Mr. Throzz.”

“Yes. I solved the puzzle of the epidemic of deaths.”

“What was the cause?”

How do you tell the world that it is a crime novel read by a stranger? A crime novel, moreover, that is too easy to figure out? He smiled bitterly. No, it would be doing a kindness to them to keep this secret.

And if it isn’t true? A game of numbers described by Zef, only his little joke, one of the dozens that he made? And I took it seriously and fell into madness, like Wilcox, after all?

“Throzz, are you there?”

“Yes. The cause is Fate.” Wasn’t Fate the name Wilcox once gave to the main protagonist?

“You mean, a random fluctuation of probability?”

“This fluctuation isn’t random. The epidemic of deaths ends when I stop living. That is the solution.”

And if, in Superworld Minus One, there is a Library that houses all the Nests of Worlds, and they sit on the shelf equally, without regard for degree of nesting? And beside them, on a shelf of its own, is a Catalogue. A complete index of characters. A list of the characters from all the books.

If a book can be a world, then why can’t an Index be a happy place where everyone meets and converses? (Or at least they do when the Librarian leafs through the Catalogue.) A place where Jaspers and Sabine and Gary drink beer, and the cat Roan dozes on the table beside their mugs. That is where I’ll find Ra Mahleiné.

He wiped his brow. This is not insanity, he thought. It’s no more insane than what Zef discovered.

A Catalogue was entirely possible. The Rule of Names was broken, because Ra Mahleiné died as an Intralla, not as an Aeriella. So perhaps there is not the perfect symmetry of nothingness, four incarLands, nothingness.

“Mr. Throzz!”

“Yes.”

“There’s a problem with the line.”

“The phone’s working. No, I have decided to commit suicide.” (Thinking: That’s the only way to get around the reader in Superworld Zero. To go straight to the Index.)

“We can’t argue with you. But please don’t ask that you be killed. The disastrous experience of the Commission of Defense proved that that is impossible. Death cannot be killed.”

“I will do it myself, but I need your help. The help I need is technological. My name is Aeriel. (Thinking: But what difference does that make, now that the Rule of Names has been broken?)

“No one will bomb you or shoot at you from the air,” said the president. “Even if you ask. I will not permit it.”

“I have a better idea. Give me a copter. One of the last three left in Davabel’s air force.”

“We have three new copters from the factory. There’s a squadron of them now.”

“It doesn’t matter. The copter will drop a rope ladder, because there is no place here to land. I will climb on board and jump from the highest altitude.”

“The copter is taking off now. Please wait in the middle of the street, so the pilot can see you. I’ll send an ambulance for your wife’s remains.”

“I’ll wait. I have one more request.”

“What is it?”

“I’d like her body to be frozen, kept frozen forever.”

“You make this a condition of your suicide?”

“That’s right. It’s a condition.” Gavein understood the president’s putting it formally, for the record.

“Very well. This conversation is being recorded, and my decision has the force of law: government funds will be allocated and placed in the Bank of Davabel. They will cover the cost of preserving your wife’s body. Your remains are to be placed beside hers?”

“Yes. Have the copter come at once. I don’t want to be here when they take her away.”

“It will be there in minutes.”

“My regards to Colonel Medved.”

“Medved is no more. He suffered a stroke. Please wait for the copter.”

Gavein sighed. “He too. Did he like beer?”

“I have no idea, Mr. Throzz,” snapped the president.

128

He looked at Ra Mahleiné. She seemed to have dozed off for a moment.

The sky was clear. The buildings threw long shadows as the sun set. He felt light, clearheaded. He would be rejoining her soon—this time forever. The Index, he could almost see it: a thick tome, dog-eared from constant thumbing. Possibly it lay not on a shelf but on the Librarian’s desk.

Before long he heard the growl of the copter. He saw the war machine, large, familiar to him now. This time unarmed.

So many flying machines lately have passed through my life, he thought.

The copter hovered above the street, kicking up clouds of dust. Gavein had to shield his eyes. Someone leaned out of an open bay, looked down, threw a rope ladder. It opened in a straightening line.

At first Gavein had difficulty climbing, because the end of the ladder kept pulling, turning him in the opposite direction. It was easier the higher he went, the weight of the rope below him stabilizing his position. He tried not to look down, to avoid becoming dizzy.

Finally, with the assistance of one of the crew, he entered the copter. Powerful and threatening at a distance, the craft seemed pitiful up close: dented, with surprisingly thin metal patches, chipped paint, and twisted struts.

Below flashed the colored lights of an ambulance. As the copter rose toward the zone of time retardation, the rooftops of Davabel stretched to the horizon. Among them, like isolated islands, were the higher buildings. The continent looked the same in every direction from the air.

The pilots in their mirror goggles and green helmets watched him, waiting for orders. Gavein gestured to them that they should move from over his house. The pilot at the controls made the machine hover above another street.

Gavein, looking down, felt no fear. With his belief that he was no more than a character in a story that was nested inside another world, and with his hope in the existence of an Index or Catalogue, he felt strangely disconnected from this reality.

To die quickly, he thought. Before time begins to dull in my memory the face of Ra Mahleiné…

“Just don’t play a joke on me and stop reading at this moment!” he called.

The pilots exchanged a look.

He took a deep breath and jumped, drawing in his arms and legs so that he would fall faster and the impact would be harder. The air beat at his face.

Doubts beat at him also. He had caused none of the deaths. If he had been in contact with the people who died, everyone in Davabel had been, because everyone lived in the same Land. Like a spiderweb of interconnections. Clearly each person was a nexus in that net.

He was Death? Nonsense.

Before his eyes flew faces, names: Bryce, Zef, Haifan, Max, Edda, Saalstein, Thompson, Lorraine, and dozens and dozens of others. How many people had come into contact with them? An endless number.

I’m dying for no reason. I solve nothing this way. People died, and they will continue to die. Not one death has broken the Rule of Names. Ra Mahleiné died not as an Intralla but as an Aeriella. Her melanoma, it was caused by sunlight.

Like a fanatic, I hastened my next incarnation, assuming that this one is not the last… It won’t help, I won’t meet Ra Mahleiné. There is no Superworld Zero, no Librarian in his Superworld Minus One, no Catalogue!

The cold thoughts sped through his brain.

I went paranoid, just like Wilcox. How can a man be Death? Death is a phenomenon, not a person. In another second, I’ll burst open like a worm. Paranoia, not the pattern of reality, led me to destroy myself!

He hit with tremendous force. There was silence, yet his consciousness was not extinguished. He felt a great but dull pain—he still lived.

“It didn’t work,” he groaned. “The president was right. Death cannot die.”

He tried moving one arm, then the other. Overhead was the darkening sky of a spring evening. The silence was complete. The copter had evidently flown away. Gavein could move his hands and feet freely, but something held him down. He turned to look: he had fallen on the roof of a car. The metal had buckled deep, breaking his fall and saving his life. But now it was a trap.

He couldn’t raise himself on his elbows, they were so badly bruised. But, wriggling his buttocks and using his hands, he was able to pull himself gradually out of the depression. He slid down the windshield and lay on the car’s hood. He cried out from the pain. He slid off the hood to the pavement. He could stand on his own, though his back felt as if someone had pulled its muscles apart with tongs.

He knew the place: this was the station wagon that Saalstein had used to drive him from the Division of Science. Gavein had returned in it to Ra Mahleiné, and now it saved his life, against his will, not allowing him to flee the world.

He waved an arm in disgust, and the wave brought more pain. He looked around, not knowing what to do.

“So you didn’t let me escape!” he said. “If only the epidemic of deaths would stop. But you are being read too. You know how to check now, observing the world around you.”

From a nearby doorway emerged a dark-violet cat. It looked at Gavein and, limping, ran to him.

“Roan? You’re Roan?”

The cat rubbed against one of his pant legs.

“Did I make it into the Catalogue after all?”

Gavein looked closer: the cat was missing its front left paw and also a piece of ear. But was it possible for a cat to be so violet?

“Roan?”

The cat retreated a couple of steps and blinked at Gavein.

I don’t recall, Gavein thought, that there were such pretty buildings here. And the colors of the stucco are so rich. And the sidewalk so clean, the seams in it so even.

“I’m to follow you, cat?”

The cat turned, rubbed against Gavein’s cuff, and again retreated. It was waiting for Gavein to limp after it. Bored, it yawned, showing its little tongue.

“Where are you taking me, cat? Is this the Catalogue?”

The cat started walking, every now and then turning and blinking at Gavein. It took an avenue westward.

Gavein squinted at something in the distance. The setting sun shone right into his face.

Is that an armchair on the sidewalk? Is someone sitting in it, and is that a group of people standing around it?

He couldn’t quite see, as much as he strained his eyes.

He walked so fast, the lame cat had trouble keeping up with him.