Disciple Read online

  There has been no such danger in half a million of your years. And that time represents eternity for the rest of us. Time for the Stelladren represents all that has transpired and all that will. They don’t only exist in this time and place, they reach far beyond.

  But they can still be harmed, they can still die. You are about to commit a violent transition on Earth. In the wake of killing billions you will cause vast changes in the environment. Just the planet healing itself from all of our poisons will cause life to alter.

  For a long, long time Bron was silent. I spent that time reading and rereading the brief but profound dialogue between us. I wasn’t arguing to save my race. I understood that we were a small and insignificant branch of consciousness barely connected to the Universal Soul. I had seen this in the images Bron showed me on my TV. Just the few minutes watching the alien-made documentary and then the instant of awareness experiencing the deaths of so many lives had changed me from a Man into a Mission.

  Somehow Bron had brought forth in me a sense of purpose that was both terrible and original in the long history of human instinct. I was truly a coconspirator of the greatest enemy that humanity would ever have. If the destruction of mankind would save the endless planes of existence then I would gladly make it so.

  I wondered if maybe Bron had brainwashed me. It was possible. But, I thought, it was more likely that he had chosen his disciple well. I was not married, did not have children, my father was gone and my mother was old and not concerned much with life outside her own comforts. I was black skinned in a country where that was a sin of sorts and I had no other kind of love in my life. I didn’t have a dog or a cat, not even a goldfish. Bron had found an empty vessel in which to pour his awful knowledge …

  Friend Hogarth, you make a good point. For so long we had witnessed the encroaching danger of Man that we have not considered what our violent act might unleash. If this sudden passage of humanity causes changes beyond our ability to see then it might well be that we will doom the universe by our actions.

  Really? Your people had not considered something so simple? I mean you seem to be so much more advanced, more sophisticated than the smartest humans and I am certainly not among the brilliant. I only have a bachelor’s degree in poli sci.

  Again Bron went silent. And even though I didn’t know it at the time he was already my closest friend. I knew him well enough to understand that my questions addressed some secret he was keeping from me.

  I have no people, friend Hogarth. Thirty years ago by your reckoning the Stelladren that connected my race with the Universal Mind sickened. Most of its body died. It is still dying. The attendant loss of our connection caused all my people, except for me, to perish. One solitary light still shines in the dark sea holding me to itself; a lifeline if you will … Through that flickering light I alone on my dead world have watched your people through their electronics. I have studied your world and seen it via my time-sense. I have found you, friend Hogarth. I am not the greatest mind of my world. I am not infallible or all knowing. We are both the same. You are isolated by subtle circumstance while I have been orphaned by the consequences of your race’s ignorance and indifference. I am alone except for you. And now you have shown me that I might have condemned all of existence to darkness. Thank you, friend Hogarth.

  So you no longer believe that mankind should be eradicated?

  I must think on it. I will do this and then call on you again to discuss the possibilities.

  Are you monitoring my world now, Bron?

  Always.

  Are the authorities after me?

  They seek, what they call “a heavyset black man who shook the candidate’s hand” but they don’t know your real name and no one remembers your face. The man they saw had more mass. You can go back to Shiloh. I have e-mailed them saying that you were in California for a meeting with Justin Mack.

  After our electronic conversation was over I felt drained and quite weak. I stumbled back to my bed and fell to sleep with no TV but many qualms. I had decided to play a role in the destruction of mankind and then (maybe) saved the race, all within minutes. I had changed from a data entry clerk to the head of a corporation to a murderer to a would-be mass murderer to a savior all in a matter of days.

  I was the Scarlet Death writ large, Typhoid Mary and all her siblings throughout history in one. Hundreds had died and the lives of billions more hung in the balance. I had agreed to participate in the extinction of the human race. This was, it seemed at the time, a logical decision but my heart quailed inside my dreams. I wondered how the Universal Soul would respond to so many deaths and so much suffering on its consciousness. I saw the emaciated corpses of millions clogging the streets of Manhattan, Paris, Beijing, Timbuktu, and Mexico City. I saw planes falling from the sky and fevered children crying over the bodies of their mothers and fathers and friends. I saw dogs eating the flesh of their former masters, flies filling the corpses with their larvae, and ants feasting on the sightless wide eyes of the dead.

  Would I die also? Or would Bron save me, making me the only living human on the face of the Earth? Would he leave me to wander the cities of the dead as he did on his own world? Could I go through with what he asked of me? There was no doubt in my mind that humanity threatened the God so many claimed to love. Wouldn’t they be happy to lay down their lives to protect the being that encompassed all Creation?

  If I were to believe Bron every solitary death on Earth would save uncounted billions in an existence beyond our comprehension.

  I woke up with a single question in my mind: Would it be right to take one life in order to save billions? If I answered yes to this question then the broader query was just a matter of mathematics.

  There was no doubt about the evil of the actions I contemplated. My soul would be damned. But what a small price to pay for life-forms so advanced that they shared their spirits across the vast expanses of space and time.

  My argument that we come to some kind of amelioration seemed very unlikely. Bron, after considering my questions, might well come up with an answer that would save the Stelladren while at the same time dooming mankind. And I was ready to follow him; to slaughter, murder, sabotage, and coldly kill lovers and their mothers, enlightened monks and newborns.

  It would be hard for you who have survived the Apocalypse to understand how I could come to such an evil conclusion. I wish I could tell you that it was because of some deep awareness that humanity had a higher plane to aspire to, that heaven awaited those who were sacrificed for the survival of the greater whole. But the simple answer was that when I saw the beauty of the Stelladren I was beguiled, mesmerized. The perfection of life beyond humanity was so superior that our grunting, rutting, selfish spans meant nothing. Our lives were ephemeral static compared to the Unity brought forth by the Stelladren. Nothing I had ever known compared to that Unity.

  But don’t think that I was happy to play my part in genocide. I was sickened by my decision. I was helpless and hopeless but at the same time I would have done anything to save the beings I had seen, the Stelladren who made the universe sing.

  Happiness was gone from my emotional vocabulary. The emptiness that had been my life was now shared by the entire world. I was a hole in space; a black hole that would swallow everything that humanity held dear.

  Good morning, Bron.

  Yes, friend Hogarth?

  Just good morning. I was about to go out to work and I wanted to say hello before I left.

  Yes. Yes. It is like when my people touch as they continue along the Way.

  The Way? What is that?

  My world is made up of a continuous range of mountains. Some of us come into being, are born, up high on the mountaintops while others attain consciousness in the valleys and plains below. Our lives are spent traveling from where we begin to the other place. When we meet another of our kind traveling in the opposite direction we stop. If neither of us has been impregnated we pass through each other carrying with us a part of our hist
ory.

  And you never see each other again?

  From then on we are with each other always, each other and all our ancestors that have ever met and mated, passed on the Way.

  What happens when you have met someone that has already mated?

  We make a sign that means the other should have a good passage.

  Good passage, Bron.

  Good passage, friend Hogarth.

  * * *

  TRINA WAS AT HER DESK working when I got in at 8:37.

  “Good morning, Mr. Tryman,” she said pleasantly, looking me in the eye. “I hope you had a nice trip.”

  I stopped and gazed at her, thinking of the form and formlessness of my friend Bron. I thought of what “good passage” meant and smiled.

  “Yes. Good morning.”

  “We’re working on the projects you e-mailed in,” she said as I moved toward my door.

  “Which ones?”

  “Most of the operations managers reported that they would be doing research that you proposed,” she said, a question in her tone. “Have you lost weight, sir?”

  Sir.

  “Yes. I was at a spa.”

  “Should I order you some new clothes?”

  “Huh. Yeah. That would be nice.”

  * * *

  I TURNED ON MY COMPUTER but Bron was not communicating yet. He was a wartime general considering deployment of the doomsday device while I was a simple soldier; not a man who had either volunteered or was drafted but an ant a waiting the chemical scent that would send me into battle.

  There was a stack of newspapers on my desk, a kind of happenstance clock telling me how many days I’d been gone. I wondered if Bron’s time-sense was like that. I also wondered, not for the first or last time, why I believed in him.

  The front page of every paper talked about the Scarlet Death and its impact on New York and the rest of the world. Journalists covered questions from socio-biochemical politics to immigration.

  I read all the articles and most of the rest of the newspapers. I had never done anything like this before. I don’t, or didn’t, have a very long attention span. That’s what attracted me to data entry in the first place: all that was required of you was to enter a letter or number and then move on. I didn’t have to think long before a new character came up.

  I imagined myself being born under a faraway sun on a mountaintop. I would rise to my feet and begin a long descent that represented my life; in the back of my mind a song was playing, a song that represented everyone that all of my ancestors had met on their ways up and down. It came to me that language was something like that; an impersonal, unconscious version of Bron’s people’s Long March.

  “Mr. Tryman?” Trina’s voice wafted in at low volume over the intercom.

  “Yes, Trina?”

  “There’s a Miss Martini on the reception level asking to come see you. She says she’s a friend. Should I send her up?”

  There was something in Trina’s voice; an insinuation or a warning. I thought that she might have known my old data partner but it didn’t matter. Dora was an aspect of my past. It hadn’t been very long since I worked in the Data Entry Pen but it felt like years. I tried to imagine Dora’s face but I could not. I wondered how Bron’s memories manifested themselves. Did he see his world more clearly than I?

  “Mr. Tryman?”

  I noticed that it was 12:16. I had been lost in thought and reading for hours.

  “Send her up,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” Trina said. “I’m going to lunch now, sir, but Harvey will take my seat.”

  “Have a good lunch.”

  I glanced at an article about a very wealthy New York dowager who had become the victim of her own family when she descended into senility. It came to me that I should ask Bron what happened when one of his race died, if they were victims of each other as humans so often are.

  “Trent?”

  Dora was standing there before me, had probably been there for a while. She wore a sexy red dress that was just barely within the limits of the dress code for Shiloh. She wasn’t smiling but the dismissive disgust she had once shown for me was gone.

  “Hey, Dora.”

  She smiled.

  “It’s still you,” she said.

  “Sure it is,” I said. “Sit down.”

  She sat in one of the big red-lacquered Chinese thrones that Arnold Lessing had for his visitors.

  “Of course it’s me,” I said. “Just lost a few pounds.”

  “Miguel said that you had been made different,” Dora said awkwardly. “He said that it had something to do with that meteorite.”

  “Huh,” I grunted, thinking about how much I liked Miguel. Just the fact that he’d noticed the change in me made him a closer friend than anyone else I knew—everyone except for Bron.

  “So should I call you Mr. Tryman now?” Dora asked.

  My mind had slowed down a lot because there were so many thoughts in it. I looked at Dora. She was young and white and pretty. She held herself with a kind of potent feminine dignity. She had never liked me, had rarely spoken kindly to me.

  I thought about Mink and Shawna sexing me on the floor and in the shower, on my bed … When we broke a leg on my stuffed chair they laughed and laughed, proud of the strength of their sexual prowess.

  I smiled.

  “What?” Dora said, a little miffed I thought.

  “What would you do if I handed you a little piece of machinery like a radio,” I said. “On top of the box was a button and I told you that if you pushed that button every terrorist in the world would die?”

  Dora’s delicate face became fearful. She pushed at her long brown hair even though it was nowhere near her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But what if I were to tell you that there was going to be a terrible attack and that by killing all of the terrorists you would save many thousands of innocent lives?”

  The fear in Dora’s young face became more inquisitive. She considered the question but did not answer.

  “And it’s not just a button that you have time to think about. You have to do it now, this moment.”

  The question had taken her by that time. She nodded and said, “I suppose I’d push it. I mean it would be wrong but it would be right too … more right than wrong.”

  “And now that the button’s pushed you go to sleep and in the morning you wake up to find that not only swarthy foreign men with turbans and beards have died but also the president and the secretary of state; half of the Pentagon and tens of thousands of soldiers and everyday citizens across the world.”

  Dora’s eyes flashed in anger as if I had just tricked her. I couldn’t help but smile. She wanted to insult me as usual but now I was the boss and she needed something. That’s why she was there.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just been reading the paper. It makes me wonder about the world.”

  Dora sat there in her overwide chair wrestling with her feelings. She had had only one way to respond to me for a year and a half before and now her tongue was bound to get bloody—she had to bite down on it so hard. Who was I to be thinking about the world? Who was I to play games with her?

  “I have an AI degree from M.I.T.,” she said. “That means—”

  “Artificial intelligence,” I said. I had been watching late night anime for years.

  Dora’s eye creased in anger but she went on. “And I know that InfoMargins has an AI research center in New Mexico.”

  “I didn’t know you went to M.I.T.”

  “I, I don’t tell people…”

  Like me, I thought.

  I didn’t say anything. I could barely concentrate on the young woman’s conversation. I was thinking about that button on that radio. Why had Bron chosen me?

  “Well?” Dora asked.

  “You can still call me Trent,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that what you asked me?”

  “I asked you about a transfe
r to the AI department in the New Mexico office.”

  “You just told me what you studied,” I said. “And Shiloh does not own InfoMargins, it’s the other way round. I couldn’t transfer you if I wanted to.”

  “Mr. Lessing said that he could do it,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t he?”

  Dora might have lied. She might have said that he left before he was able to make good on his promise. But she stalled, hesitated. She even blushed with anger … and something else.

  “I only have my B.S.,” she said at last. “Their scientists all have Ph.D.s.”

  I remember thinking at that time, before so many hundreds of millions had died, that Dora found it difficult to lie; that she was what we called a good person, an honest citizen.

  “Then why not go back to school?” I asked.

  “I don’t have the money,” she said. “I thought that if I could get a, a job at the lab I could prove myself and get them to send me. They have assistants there. I read about it online.”

  “And what was Lessing waiting for?”

  Dora froze. Too much had happened too quickly for her to trust me. This coming to my office was an attempt at using the power she had over me before the change that a meteorite had wrought. Just a quick request and a friendly smile …

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “Get back to me next month sometime.”

  “Next month?”

  “Or the month after,” I added.

  “Okay,” she said standing quickly before I could make it even later. “Thank you … Trent.”

  She left and I sat back in my space-age chair. I closed my eyes trying to think around the ramifications of that button I proposed. I had already decided to eradicate the human race but there were questions about the pain and guilt. If I could figure a way around the suffering and dread that would certainly attend the annihilation of humanity the guilt would not weigh so heavily upon me.