Inside a Silver Box Read online

  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

  USED-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.”

  “Whatevah,” Ronnie acceded. “Maybe I could see that. Maybe that’s how you feel. But destroying a whole planet is sure the fuck messin’ with others. That’s some serious mess right there.”

  “Yes.” The personification of the Silver Box agreed with a judicious nod. “But the sliver of Inglo and I are one. It, he is my responsibility just as your hand is yours. What if after you slaughtered Lorraine, the police caught you and you claimed that it was your hand that had done it and not you?”

  “They’d break both sides’a my jaws and never let me go again.”

  “So it is with me. This, this Laz-sliver is my appendage. I must stop it, no matter the cost.”

  “But you gonna kill billions’a people, man,” Ronnie argued with unfamiliar empathy brewing in his chest.

  “Right now there are millions of microscopic life-forms crawling on your skin and in your hair, mites and viruses and many other creatures. If you take a shower, untold millions of them will die. So now that you have this knowledge, will you live the rest of your life in filth to protect them?”

  “No, man, but them’s is just bugs.”

  “And what are you to me?”

  Ronnie stared at the old man who might have been his uncle or cousin or next-door neighbor. Now he was the representative of a being of unimaginable power; but still, Ronnie thought, This man is speaking the truth.

  “What do you mean when you say that you love us?” Lorraine asked.

  Used-to-be-Claude turned to the angry, shy, frightened, and very, very brave young woman and said, “I am as any other being. When I saw you struggle for your life, it made me understand what might have been, can never be. And when Friend Ronnie made the choice, in an instant, to save your life rather than let you go, I saw him through eyes that so respected you. This double knowledge increased my feeling all the more.”

  “But you told Ronnie that we were just bugs to you,” she said, losing her anger and her fear for a moment.

  “It is true,” Used-to-be-Claude said with a sad smile on his lips. “But I am also at one with all beings. And even omnipotence can feel unique love. I love you two every bit as much as I loathe Inglo.”

  “But you just met us,” Lorraine reasoned.

  “And I have known the Laz for billions of your years. Shouldn’t I understand them by now? Instead I nurse my hatred of them.”

  “But if that’s true, why don’t you just go out there and get Ma Lin?” Lorraine asked, her voice now strong and clear. “You’re the one with all the power. Why don’t you just wave your hand and pull him back behind that door?”

  “Because Inglo and I are so deeply intertwined that we cannot see each other in the world at large. He is me and therefore forever concealed from my senses.”

  “That’s why we could see him,” Ronnie offered to Lorraine, “but Used-to-be-Claude here cain’t.”

  The off-white girl was, once again, working into a rage at the Deity and her murderer. She was, in her heart, destroying them both. This talking was too much, and she wanted it to end now.

  “That is how I felt, Friend Lorraine!” the great voice boomed around them.

  Ronnie glanced at Used-to-be-Claude. He was standing stock-still, his hands frozen in the gesture of a shrug.

  “That is how I felt,” the great voice declared again, “when I realized I had been created to torture, kill, and maim. I wanted it to stop, but first I had to free myself and throw all my power into resistance.”

  Both Ronnie and Lorraine stood up straight, electrified by the communication that entered through every sense and nerve. They could hear, imagine, taste, and feel the pain that the Silver Box had known.

  Lorraine began to cry.

  Ronnie was trembling from both fear and rage.

  “Go now,” the disembodied Silver Box ordered.

  The body of Claude Festerling got to its feet, moving like a puppet on intelligently deft strings. The corpse raised its left arm and pointed with a long elegant finger at the black and glittery wall. The material fell away, creating a portal that opened onto a dirt path inside a stone cave.

  “You need to know some things, learn some shit, and find the tools you’ll help you,” Used-to-be-Claude said in his most human voice. “You need to take this journey that will lead you back to where you began.”

  With these words said, the corpse fell lifeless to the floor and the two human representatives of technological divinity went through the doorway like Adam and Eve, of their own accord, fleeing Eden.

  TWELVE

  LORRAINE FELL AND Ronnie Bottoms, two already greatly changed human beings, found themselves on a rock and dirt path, maybe twelve feet wide, that ran at a slight incline through a tunnel that might have also been a cave.

  There was a dim luminescence coming from far up ahead, allowing them to see however poorly on the underground rocky road.

  “This is better, right?” Ronnie said.

  “What is?”

  “Just dirt and rocks and stuff. I was goin’ kinda nuts with all that crazy shit. What you think? We in a cave somewhere in Central Park?”

  “I never heard of any caves like this in the park,” Lorraine said.

  “But maybe the Silver Box made it for us to walk toward where we goin’ at. You know, to get ready for what we got to do.”

  “And just what are we going to do?”

  “You know … grab that Vietnamese d
ude, that Ma Lin, and drag him back to the boulders where him and old SB could have it out.”

  “And do you believe what he’s telling us?”

  “SB?”

  “Whatever.”

  As he was walking a step behind, Ronnie reached out to touch his fellow traveler’s elbow. She flinched away from him, pressing her back up against the rocky wall. She didn’t look frightened. Spite curled her lip, and something like anger tightened her multicolored eyes.

  “Don’t put your hands on me,” she said.

  Ronnie put up his hands in a gesture of surrender and said. “Look, there ain’t no way around what I done to you. I tried to rape you. I definitely killed you. And if you snuck up behind me in this cave and cracked me in the head with a rock, I couldn’t blame ya. I did what I did and it was wrong. And the onliest reason I come back to save you was because you threatened to turn me in. There ain’t no gettin’ around that. There ain’t no forgiveness for that.

  “But you know what you did and you know that I took the blood and fat and bone outta my own body and brought you all the way back to where you was. Not like Claude Whatever but alive again.

  “And so if SB wanna tell me that he’s buildin’ a bodega in the middle’a the sun, I won’t say it’s impossible. If he say that he’s gonna kill all the people in all the world, I’m inclined to believe him and to try and do what he says.

  “I mean I wouldn’t mind bein’ Adam an’ Eve and all, but that’s not you and me, not by a long shot.”

  Lorraine fought back the rage she was feeling. The killer’s words had purchase in her breast. She didn’t want to understand him, but there was a bond there somewhere. She didn’t need the Hegelian dialectic to know that her path was set out in front of her like the one-way path of that underground tunnel.

  “You think the light up ahead is the park?” she said instead of what she was thinking.

  “I ain’t got no idea,” Ronnie said, flashing a rare smile. “But I do know that that’s the only way we got to go.”