White Light (Axoplasm Books) Read online

  “Very well.” The librarian pushed a button. “And The Lives of Felix Rayman?”

  A quick shake of the head. “Complete treatment, but of a partial topic. If he had written all possible lives instead of just…”

  “But we’ve got that anyway…” the man shrugged.

  “Yes. The Rayman book is only a subset of the Lives book on shelf three twenty-eight. If he wants the service he’ll have to do another.”

  “How about Lamps?” the man said brightly.

  The woman on the screen pursed her lips in thought. “Yes. We need a Lamps. Pictures, don’t you think?”

  The man nodded at once. “I’ll see to it.” He clicked the set off and addressed me in his wet reedy voice. “Mr. Rayman. If you’ll go upstairs again Ms. Winston will give you some fuzz- weed and show you where…”

  “Look,” I interrupted, “If you think I’m going to burn myself out just to draw every stupid possible lamp…”

  “You’ll have to if you want the service.”

  “I can use it now, can’t I?” Judy Schwartz broke in.

  “Well, yes. That is, as soon as Ralph…” He punched the button on the desk again. There was a silence. The librarian looked at us blankly, then picked up the thread. “The service, yes. You will be free, Ms. Schwartz, to use our facilities…our catalog, our books, our reading room. And of course you will have access to the typing and drafting rooms upstairs. The fuzzweed and the scoops are always ready.”

  “I’m leaving,” I announced. My voice came out louder than I’d intended, and a number of readers lifted their heads to stare mildly at me.

  I started uncertainly away from the desk, then turned back. “I might as well take my book…if you’re just going to throw it away.” The librarian buzzed the upstairs. In a few seconds my book plopped out of the slot in the wall. He handed it over silently.

  The stairwell door opened then and a skinny man in a khaki custodian’s uniform came shuffling out. He smelled strongly of volatile solvents and seemed a little dazed. He leaned against the counter, smacked his mouth several times and finally said, “Yes, Mr. Berry?”

  “Ralph,” the librarian said, “Ms. Winston needs you upstairs. Some erasing, I believe.” Ralph nodded his loose head extravagantly and began smacking again. The librarian pointed at me. “And please see Mr. Rayman to the door.” He addressed himself to me for the last time. “Just take the tunnel out, and help yourself to skis.”

  Ralph continued nodding, slowly bringing his head around to me. “Goin’ out there again, are you,” he said between two smacks. “The bum’s rush.” He gave a chuckle which got out of control and turned into a deep, convulsive cough.

  “Are you coming?” I asked Judy Schwartz over the coughing. Outside the window rolled a peaceful country landscape, distinguished only by the presence of a few moving points of red light. But now the ground began forcing itself up into humps. The humps grew higher and thinner, became long tentacles straining out of the ground. The ends of the tentacles thickened and turned into fists, and the fists began hammering about with wild abandon. The spots of red light buzzed back and forth fretfully.

  “You should draw the lamps,” Judy said. “I’m going to be working on the Rieman Hypothesis here. It’s just a matter of choosing the right…”

  Ralph took my sleeve in his unsteady grip, and we walked off together. “Where’d you get that suit?” he wanted to know. “Looks like that one Elvis wore. Did you ever see Elvis?”

  “Just on TV.”

  “I died too soon for that, goddammit all. Wound up in Truckee, got in trouble with the Godsquad and came to work here. Here’s the doors. Be sure you close the first one before you open the second.”

  I paused. Something Ralph had said before was puzzling me. He’d asked if I were going outside again.

  “Was I already out there?”

  He gave his slack chuckle. “The accidentals never remember.” He could have been speaking to himself, and turned to go as he said it.

  I grabbed him by the arm and gave him a shake. “How did I get here? I’ve got to know!”

  “Take it slow there. I come apart easy.” I released him and made a vague upward gesture. “The scoops. We pulled you in. The dreamers are no good…they’re the red ones. But when someone goes white and wanders into Dreamland – why, if he comes within a thousand feet of us we’ve got us a new book.”

  “Is – is that ‘Dreamland’ out there?”

  He was holding the first glass door open for me. “That’s righty. Now git. I’ve got work to do.”

  I walked out the door and he let it close behind me. In front of me was the second glass door, to the outside. The tentacles of a minute ago had branched and woven themselves into a huge green basket covering the Library. I stepped outside.

  It was cold…dry, deep-freeze cold. Right outside the door the ground was hardpacked snow, and there was a sort of path leading through the snow to what looked like a tunnel. The path, the tunnel and the Library stayed constant, but everything else was in flux. The green dome overhead tore into pieces which writhed and thickened. I wanted to get moving fast.

  Attached to the Library there was a rack of cross-country ski equipment. Parkas, hats, gloves, skis, poles and shoes. I picked out a set and slipped my book into a big pocket on the parka’s back. I snapped on the skis and got ready to leave.

  Overhead, the pieces of green had turned into winged lizards. One flew at me. I couldn’t duck in time, but it didn’t matter. It went right through me…insubstantial as a thought. From what Ralph had said, it was a dream.

  I looked around for a dreamer. A ball of red light was sportively chasing one of the lizards. It looked like it was having a good time. There were big scoops like ship’s funnels on top of the Library. Some skeletons were coming around the corner of the building. They had scythes.

  Keeping my eyes fixed on the strip of unchanging packed snow, I skied away from the Library of Forms and up the sloping tunnel.

  No. 13

  The Truth

  The other end of the short tunnel was partially blocked by drifted snow. I herring-boned over it and skied out. All around me were slopes and humps of snow. A steady wind was at work…pulling out a lip here, filling a hollow with ripples there, smoothing, sharpening, continuously creating. The air was filled with streaks and whorls of snow, and I couldn’t see far. Looking back it was hard to pick out the hummock which hid the Library of Forms.

  Except for the drifts, the snow was crusty, and I skied across it without sinking in. I fell into the familiar rhythm, kicking along and digging in my poles. The ground sloped gently downhill and I made the good time. My mind went into neutral.

  The windblown snowscape changed so constantly that it was hard to be sure how fast I was going. There were no landmarks, and I guided myself only by always going downhill. Skiing along, I began to feel that my regular movements were somehow sustaining the scene around me – as if I were the beating heart of this frozen world.

  Occasionally a faint blush of color would bleed up through the snow from Dreamland. But I seemed to be on top of it, and there was no sign of the bizarre animations I’d seen out the Library window.

  I grew hot from the exercise, and then thirsty. I paused and scooped up a handful of the snow. It was fine, powdery stuff, made of tiny dodecahedrons: crystals with twelve pentagonal faces. Each crystal flickered with an internal play of color, and when I strained my eyes I could make out tiny moving shapes and patterns inside each one. Some melted in my hand, and I lapped up the moisture.

  The taste was strange, intoxicating. I began to feel myself splitting up like I had after breathing in that smoke on Mount On. Quickly I spat the liquid out of my mouth.

  What had happened on the mountain anyway? The Guide had been blasting holes in the ground, and the fuzzy little plants had caught fire. I’d breathed in a lungful of smoke. Everything had gotten white and I’d had vision upon vision…all at once. Apparently I had turned into a ball of light, t
ravelled through Dreamland and been scooped in by the Library of Forms. But where had the mountain gone?

  As far as I could see there was nothing but snow. I wondered when it would end. Somehow I had gone beyond the countable level. The books in the Library had c pages each and Dreamland…perhaps still under the snow I skied across… Dreamland was filled with the whole continuum of possible visions.

  I skied on for a long time. The wind around me waxed and waned, finally tapered to a stop. The snow underfoot became harder and harder, until finally I was skiing over ice covered by a thin coating of powder. A glacier. I saw colors flickering through the powder, and rubbed a clear window in the ice.

  I was looking down on a city from above. An eerie purplish glow lit up the grid of streets, but all the buildings were dark. A spot of red light hurried down one of the avenues.

  A jetliner came floating above the city, circled and headed down for a landing. It was following the red light. The space between the buildings was too narrow, but the plane kept on. One of the wings hit, scraped, broke off. Flames and smoke, and the wreckage went tumbling down towards the light, falling in frozen time.

  The shapes began changing, rearticulating. The falling wreckage became a spilled bag of groceries. The jetliner a carton of eggs. The red light moved up towards me, then flew off. The eggs broke and a flock of roast turkeys flew out, headless and beating their golden safety-pin wings. They followed the red light off to the side. The dark city lay waiting for a replay.

  I skied on. The sky was clear now, a blue so deep as to approach purple, and the ice field I was skiing over began to show cracks. I used my skis to get over a number of them, jumped two more, but finally came to a crevasse too wide to cross.

  I took my skis off and sat down on them to rest. The crevasse was forty feet wide, and seemed to go down forever. The walls were like clear glass, and I could see all manner of things glide up to them and turn away. The ice was full of dreams. I heard water rushing far below.

  There were more crevasses after this one, and the glacier ended about a mile off. It looked as if there was a city beyond the glacier. I longed to be there.

  I saw no other sign of life. Only the flickering lights in the ice, and high overhead a single bird flying towards the city. I wondered briefly what had happened to Kathy. Maybe we should have stayed together. I had promised Jesus to help her. I hoped she would turn up again.

  I left my skis and began walking along the crevasse. Perhaps it would get narrower. Instead it got wider and more jagged. I had just decided to turn back when I spotted something on the other side. A regular sawtooth pattern on the wall. Stairs cut into the ice. And crawling up was…

  “Franx,” I hollered. “It’s Felix! Come help me!”

  There was no way for me to read his expression…he’d told me that on Praha they did it by looking at each other’s leg joints… but I guessed he was glad to see me. He raised his wing covers and flew over. He skidded several yards when he landed.

  “The return of the prodigal,” he said expansively. “But which of us has been through more?”

  It was comforting to see the familiar curve of his back. I took off my hat and used it to polish him. “It’s good to see you, Franx. What happened back there anyway?”

  “There was a fusillade of thunderbolts, token of the Guide’s wrath at our joint success. The fuzzweed caught fire and there were holes blasted in the ground, makeshift shelters where a lesser being might have cringed and grovelled for his safety. But not I. I darted out of my hole again and again, fruitlessly struggling to save my comrade-in-arms, that noblest and mobilest set-theorist Felix Raymor.” He paused to savor his words.

  “The name is Rayman, Franx. But where did I go?”

  “I had assumed that the Guide blasted you back to the Dump you come from. Here today, gone tomorrow. No glot, clom Fliday. Yes we have no bananas. Now you see him, now you…”

  I broke in. “I followed you into the smoke. I held my breath as long as I could, but finally had to take in a big lungful. It felt like c particles in me, glowing white. When I came to I was at a desk…”

  “The Library of Forms,” Franx put in suddenly. “I don’t believe it! You whited out! How could you…a raw fresher, a narrow mathematician, a crass fleshapoid.”

  He really seemed angry. “I’ve sought enlightenment for centuries – and you, you ignorant fool, you walk into a cloud of fuzzweed smoke and come out in the Library – I can’t believe it, I won’t! You’re lying! You’ve just been back to the Dump that spawned you. You…”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, but broke in anyway to challenge blindly, “I don’t see where you get off calling Earth a dump. I’d hate to see what your Praha looks like, you garbage eater.”

  Franx pulled himself together and salaamed placatingly. “A thousand pardons. You labor under a misunderstanding. Although I never had the pleasure to visit your fabled emerald orb, I do not question that it compares favorably with that insect paradise where I lived out my allotted span. But surely your mean intellect can grasp that I was referring to the Dump over there,” he gestured towards the city beyond the glacier. “On the other side of Truckee?”

  Einstein had said something about dumps before. I tried to remember. “I’ve never seen a dump here, Franx. The way I came was to just crash in on a field near Hilbert’s Hotel.”

  “Extraordinary!” Franx exclaimed. “Not for Felix Raymor the laborious pilgrimage from city to city, across the snow and through the sea. No! At one stroke he descends…or is it ascends? At one stroke he reaches Flipside, land of promise, land of Mount On.” His legs were bunched under him and he was staring at me intently. “One says that those who do not pass through the Dump were never alive…angels and devils is the expression, I believe…” Suddenly he reared up and seized my neck in his mandibles. “Which, Felix? The truth!”

  He had gone mad. I pushed him off me. He fell onto his back and slid across the ice towards the crevasse. “Look out, Franx,” I called. “You’re going over.”

  And then he did, disappearing over the edge of the ice-cliff with a gibber of terror. I strode forward to peer down into the abyss. Dreams were flickering through the walls of ice, and far below a torrent of water thundered. With relief I saw Franx’s bulky body spiraling upwards. He’d gotten his wings out in time.

  When he rose out of the crevasse he continued to circle some twenty feet over my head. For some reason he was scared to death of me. What had I told him? Only that I hadn’t started out in one of the dumps on Mainside. In his eyes that meant I’d never lived, that I was a supernatural force, possibly in league with the Devil. I cupped my hands and called up to him. “It’s because I never died, Franx. Not that I never lived. My body’s still on Earth. I swear I’m not a devil.”

  The frantic buzzing of his wings lowered in pitch and he drifted closer. “Let’s hear you say the…the Lord’s Prayer,” he called suspiciously.

  I recited it without stumbling or saying anything backwards, and that seemed to satisfy him. He landed near me with a thump. “The Devil does nab a few of us now and then. I apologize for my well-founded, but perhaps excessive, caution. There are press-gangs intent on shanghai. I’ve seen it happen, seen souls snatched up by the Evil One’s minions. I’m not too sure about those Guides, for instance. And there’s the flames in the Dump.” He began to regain his usual expansiveness. “But if you never died, that’s another matter, a different kettle of fish entirely. You have so much to learn, my dear Felix.”

  “Why don’t you start by explaining what the dumps are?” I suggested. “And keep it simple. I’m getting cold.”

  “The Dump,” Franx corrected. “Singular. In a word…the Dump is a congeries of rebirth centers. When a person shuffles off his mortal coils to Buffalo, his essence wings to Cimön.” I nodded encouragingly. “Each species is drawn to a characteristic spot on Mainside. These spots are located along a line which cuts Mainside in half. The line appears to be a, and is known as the,
Dump. Do you see how short I keep my sentences, Felix? How crystalline my exposition?”

  The sweat from my hours of skiing was evaporating and I had started to shiver. “And you get your body at the Dump when you come here?”

  “How right you are. At the Dump you get a body, and if that body is destroyed, it’s back to the Dump for a new one, not always of the same cut as the redeceased, but…”

  I had one more question. “Does a person without a body look like a spot of light? White light?”

  “White or red or green,” Franx said. “It depends. A dead or redead person on his way to the Dump for a new body is green. Not a brilliant green, you understand, just a sort of chalky dead- fish green, a shade not unlike…”

  “I’ve seen it,” I interrupted, remembering Kathy in the graveyard.

  “Hasten on, O river Lethe,” Franx cried dramatically. “Dead people are green. You see how brief I can be. Then there are the dreamers. They are red. You would like to know how they get here, but there is no time. You are in a hurry. I pass, therefore, in silence over the inter-dimensional link. Ignorabimus…we will not know. But the white lights, such as you so recently were, adrift in Dreamland till the tireless librarians scooped you in to squeeze a book out of you…”

  He lost the thread of what he was talking about, and clacked his chitinous jaws in silence for a few seconds, his forelegs frozen in mid-gesture. For some reason the thought that I had turned into a white light seemed to upset and annoy him very much. I pulled my book out of the parka back and handed it to him. “Here,” I said, “you can look at it. They didn’t want it.”

  He took the book, but didn’t look at it yet. “The white lights, I was saying, are the forms of those few who can spontaneously dissolve and reform their body, travelling hither and yon during the hiatus. It is a difficult technique, although perhaps a bit more accessible to humans…particularly in the presence of fuzzweed. Only recently I, too… But what is this?” He turned his attention to the book. “What did you say this is?”