FLOWERS OF ASPHODEL

by Damien Broderick

A number of Damien Broderick’s novels from the last thirty years are being released in 2009 by SF publisher Warren Lapine’s new Fantastic Books. The first two are The Dreaming, an updated revision of his award-winning 1980 novel The Dreaming Dragons, and The Judas Mandala, where “virtual reality” and “virtual matrix” were coined. Two new collections cover an even longer span. The first, in summer of 2009, was Uncle Bones. Its title story is from this magazine; three other novellas and novelettes, revised or extended, reach back to 1964. In late 2009 and 2010, several more Broderick novels will appear from the same publisher, as will a “Best Of” short story collection titled (also from Asimov’s) The Qualia Engine. “The Flowers of Asphodel,” which is written, in part, as a homage to Roger Zelazny, will also be reprinted in that collection. Meanwhile, E-Reads has released a trade paperback edition of Quipu, a drastic reimagining of his 1984 mainstream novel Transmitters.

I was pulled up out of the Big Sleep well before my due date, so I ached everywhere, pretty much exactly the opposite of the way you’re supposed to feel at the end of your sentence of Redemption.

“God awmighty,” I said, chewing at my dry tongue with partly regrown teeth and blapping at my parched palate, “this is cruel and unusual punishment.” I blurrily glossed elapsed time: less than six years in the rejuvenation tank, traversed by dreams and nightmare, myth and remembrance.

Apologetic machines of loving grace hugged around me, breathing warmth and sweet perfumes, avatars of a Singularity that apparently was still stalled out. Blame the slimy Bugs, the Old Ones, the Archaea at the heart of world. I always do. “We’re so sorry. The res publica’s need is great. We must find her, and you are our only lead.”

“Europa?” The roots of my irradiated new teeth ached, along with my sinuses, and my esophagus burned with gastritis, and deep in my groin something ached horribly, as if I desperately needed to take a piss and couldn’t, so it was my damned prostate, probably. I moaned and groaned and didn’t care who heard me. “I haven’t got a clue where she is now. Somewhere in infinity. Get away from me. Put me back. I have a right to my full Redemption, you callous bastards.”

“Politesse is advised, Asterion. Recall your cause for protraction.”

So they still blamed me for her absence, her apostasy. I sat up on the bed and tried to get my bearings. No walls, which was pretty funny under my jailed circumstances, but we weren’t outdoors because I could not find any trees or brooks or birdies swooping in an Arcadian sky, nor bellowing gales of industrial soot, whichever it was out there by now. Just wavery sheets of light, like some goddamn sci-fi flick from my childhood. Or earlier: Dr. Spock in Star Wars against a blurry back projection, or however they did it a century or more ago. My memory for the period is not what it used to be. Except for the occasional harsh incident I can’t get shut of, la la. I rubbed my own ears, which were appropriately rounded rather than pointed, and said, “My name is not Asterion, you mechanical buffoons. I am Isaac Hersch, a human, not a god.”

“You are both, of course. But please accept our apologies, Mr. Hersch.”

“If you’re going to stand on ceremony, that’s Doctor Hersch. But call me Isaac, for god’s sake.” God’s sake, I thought, the phrase echoing with bitter irony in my own ears. I’d ached through more than half a century of unprevented aging—my punishment, my protraction—with the god-ruined, endlessly youthful gullibles of Earth calling me by the ancient Cretan name of Europa’s mythic spouse: Asterion, Zeus-cuckolded father of Radamanthus, Minos, and Sarpedon. Labyrinthine foolishness.

But the machines were doing their favorite thing again, instructing me.

“ ‘Stand on—’ An intriguing phrase, Isaac. It has been deleted from general usage, as has the honorific.”

“On the Index Expurgatorious, eh?” I climbed down and tottered about a bit, finding my legs. My voice sounded silly, and my small teeth felt ridiculous. I had a bit of a check around; my old appendix scar was gone, and my penis and sack were full size and kosher, so this wasn’t part of the punishment.

The machines were saying in their neutral tones, “Nothing is forbidden, Isaac, and nothing is obligatory. We decree no Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Courtesy is all. Formal titles are avoided now. They are often redundant and always offensive.”

Nothing had changed, then. Or maybe everything had changed. I sat down on the bed’s edge again and waved them away.

“Go somewhere else. I need some time.”

“Of course you do, Isaac. If you feel hungry or thirsty, just ask. We’re just a call away.”

Of course you are, I thought.

It paused a beat. “Yes, it’s Europa.”

“She hasn’t returned, I take it?”

“You sent her away, Isaac.”

“That was never proved,” I said. My lips felt all wrong. “And besides, the pictures were faked. What the hell do you want? Put me back in the tank.”

“We need your advice. The probability approaches certainty that your wife intends an iterated Banach-Tarski decomposition on the cosmos.”

Huh? Yeah, I didn’t have a clue what they were blathering about, either. I hit the glosses, found something that might be relevant, didn’t understand it even after a download straight to the cortex. Maybe my half-rejuvenated grayware wasn’t up to it yet. Surely nonsense, yet two math guys had come up with this back in the early twentieth century and apparently nobody had shot it down yet. You could pull a sphere apart, chop it down to points, and put the parts back into two perfect replica balls exactly the same size as the original. Rinse, repeat, as many times as you liked. I guessed that Europa planned the same trick with the universe. Being inside the infinite corridors of the Asterion probably made it doable. I shrugged. If anyone could, it was my wife, the Goddess of the dead and the improbable. “So?”

“You will find her. You will prevent her. You will bring her back. Bon soir.” The machines withdrew into pale aurora.

Night time, eh. (Not really, as it turned out. Not quite, if I proved nimble.) After a while I stumbled in their wake, arms outstretched. No need; the waves of pastel glow receded and closed behind me, like mist on a crisp morning. It wasn’t cold. A jolly twenty-two Celsius, I guessed. No walls or door or windows. And here’s why that’d caused me to chuckle—

One day I’d gone to San Antonio’s Central Library, Ricardo Legorreta’s kiln-red marvel half as gold as Enchilada—this was back near the beginning of the twenty-first century—and fought the computer catalogue for a while before I gave up in disgust. Short attention span, even shorter patience limit. Crossed to the Assistance desk, where a young woman fairly quickly offered me her attention. She was Hispanic-Aztec, I judged, with a broad brown face, what looked like a cold sore on her lower lip, and rather good freckled boobs considerably on display from a boldly patterned Mexican blouse.

Yes, I remember some things from back then.

“I’m looking for an old text,” I said. Cold music moved behind my eyes and ears, red-lit from a dying sun and the tramp of Martian war machines; I fancied a Wellsian libretto. “Can’t find it in the catalogue. I believe it’s called ‘The Theory of the Perpetual Discomfort of Humanity.’ Some guy in a bar mentioned it. Might be a chapter in a collection with some silly title like Select Conversations with an Extinct Uncle. It’s by H.G. Wells.”

She gazed at me as one might when confronted by a speaking toadstool, or toad. After a time she found some scrap paper and stood with wood-encased graphite pencil poised. “How do you spell that?”

“How do I spell what?”

“The author’s name.”

“The same way everyone else does.” I mean, Christ, this was one of the most famous men of the turn of the twentieth century all the way through to the first nuclear war. When he was young, his essays and books probably outsold anyone else writing in the English language. Could things have reached this pitiful pass? She probably had a Master’s degree in Library Science.

She waited, head slightly forward now on her neck, blank, moon-faced, pretty if you went for the blank and lunar.

“All right. H. is spelled ‘H.’ G is spelled ‘G.’ Wells is—”

“What?”

“—spelled like Walls,” and I gestured helpfully at the nearest one, which was covered in shelves laden with videos, “but with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a.’ That’s W-E-L-L-S. As in, I don’t know, the great banking institution, Wells-Fargo, but without the Fargo. Like the deep water holes Arabs dig in the deser—”

She slapped me hard across the face, breaking both the pencil and my nose.

Soulreaders, I married her.

But you knew that already, obviously. There are flowers also in hell.

Just the sort of thing I remembered in high definition. But after the machines pulled me out of Redemption early, and left me to muse on such memories amid painted word effects, painted deserts, painted horses maybe, all limpid gauzy Rothko films of light boundary-blurred, I dragged myself back step by step into my waking body (as they surely meant me to), tottering to stumbling to walking to striding as balance and kinesthesia kicked in, toe after heel, trot trot that painted horse. If you haven’t got clue one what I’m maundering about, go hit your glosses, your access, your dreary not-real-memory augments, and follow trustingly in my wake, dear children mine. Dear children of Europa, I should say, perhaps. Mine only in name, yes, yes, I grant you that. She was a godwhore, that wife of mine. Oh, I know that’s a deleted term, and I’m an embittered cuckold, which is another. She knew how to take the bull by the horns and dive right in. Metaphor or simile? Never mind. You, they, wanted me to give her a cold call, one old chum to another, hubby to wifey, How do, sweetheart? Got the time for a quick hug and consult with this baby-toothed old fart you married so long ago, after breaking his nose and later, you know, his heart?

I walked in bare feet and altogether naked through the last transparencies of colored light onto a high balcony of gleaming steel and heraldic enamel (evening light scattered on scarlet, kingly purple, emerald and forest greens, beasts addextré of the sun in splendor, and more) thrusting outward from the mountain above a Mexico City of dreams, which is to say the real city, probably, or as real as any habitation gets these days. Behind and above us Volcan Iztaccihuatl smoked faintly, but his fires were damped, like mine.

“Bring me clothes,” I told the machines, breathing sweet cool air. No glass held that air from my balcony. I could fling myself over and fall headlong to the outermost palaces of the Ciudad, should I choose. Fat chance.

I shook the things off when they tried to dress me, pulled on soft underwear, breeches dark as night in the era when the skies were not yet filled with solar-power jewels, boots to my knees, snowy blouse, a jerkin. This garb would have lent a more dashing effect had I looked forty years younger, as I’d anticipated for my release from protraction. I left the hat; it might as well have been a ceremonial crown, and I’d given up that game long ago.

“All right, take me to the Asterion.” I had a hunch my voice was firming, now that I’d got used to my throat, and perhaps my resolve with it.

We flew high above the lovely old, renewed, still castellated city in a sleek craft with swept-back lifting vanes like a swallow’s wings, out to sea within fifteen minutes, across rippled blue and surging green, and found the island where I’d left it, off safely to one side of the Pacific. It has no name, only its purpose: it is the Asterion, the house of infinite corridors, crowded with monsters you never see because they are too far apart (the paradox of infinities), hopeless for exploration without an unfurled string falling behind your heels, but no string could be long enough, so the quantum magic of entanglement must do. And the trace of love, or pain. The ringing echo of it, somewhere in the bone.

We fell straight down, lightly, landed. I debouched, shading my eyes, wishing I’d brought the flamboyant hat after all. Here it was high noon. The swallow gulped up gravity and flung its wings into the blue. I looked around. Elysian Fields. No, not that. A turtle moved slowly on the beach, and greeny six-ply flowers grew in profusion on their woody stems at the shoreline. That made me smile. Meadows of Asphodel, the chosen taste treat and sustenance of the dead, Asphodelus ramosus, planted here to amuse my wife. Perhaps not so funny. As I recalled the old myths, she was exactly the Enelysion, smashed by the Glorious’ lightning bolt and transformed, so her rightful Groves were Elysian—but mine, sure as eggs is eggs, were merely greeny Asphodel, token of the boring dead, the billions ordinaire, the unheroic, those never touched by the electricity of Zeus or his jaunty pals. I sighed, waved to the turtle (probably as old as I, at least in this incarnation), turned, entered the first doorway of the first corridor. Not Tartarus, at least; not eternal punishment for treachery. I hoped.

“You are returned, my lord,” a sepulchral voice intoned from dimness. “Welcome.”

“Oh, cut the crap.” I hate all that.

It seemed, as ever, that the dead crowded all about me.

These dwellers in the infinitely alternate, unexpressed realities didn’t look dead, of course. It was something like being jammed in a food riot of the ill and exhausted, but that’s overstating it, mostly. Stranded at an international airport, say, circa the time I met Europa and she busted my snout, all the obedient passengers loaded down with their worldly possessions in cloudy plastic bags, looping crocodile-lines of ticket holders dragging their way from scanner to intrusive sniffer to insolent or uncaring document inspector, lighted destinations and departure times flickering, changing, blanking to black, dashing hopes, an antiperspirant-muted stench of frustration and brewing hatred, children’s voices rising like startled bats above the banal, echoed, reechoed adult conversations, mutinous laughter, resigned mutters. Like that, and nothing like that. I could try to sing it for you, but I am not in best voice just now, and besides the atonalities would fingernail your blackboards (gloss it, damn you, check the index, chase the lexicon).

As they noticed my presence, some looked away, ashamed or embarrassed. Others, as you’d expect, pressed forward, mendicant or belligerent.

“Can you help—?”

“Got any change, buddy?”

“My little daughter, I can’t find—”

There was not much I could say, so I didn’t. They were not really the dead, I suspected, most of them. In that library where I met and anti-woo’d Europa, I had glanced inside enough volumes of cosmology and quantum theory to appreciate the theory of infinite worlds, overlapping, intertwined, shadows of each other, a multiverse. The machines assert that this is the very nature of the Asterion, and I am not theoretician enough to dispute with them. Here, any place is another place. So this multitude was probably a probability of probable multitudes, if you like. It didn’t make them smell any better en masse, or calm the short hairs that always rose up on my neck and arms when I passed through their muttered despair. Did each of them realize at the sinew and artery how small was his likelihood of achieving observed reality, how small hers of persisting beyond a shadow’s moment? Was this the source of their grieving?

That ontological concern was not mine, at least; I know myself to be anchored all too firmly in the plenum of Europa’s indulgence.

One came forward, heavily bearded, in frock coat, pince-nez and polished boots, clearing a path and, it might have seemed, directed me through fourteen corridors, in so many colors (shades, if you will; a little graveyard humor), brightening as we maneuvered toward that transit aperture I like to call the Wardrobe. Don’t bother looking for the gloss, it’s sure to have been deleted. Another pleasure from the library of my past, where I read books, books, books, when I wasn’t filching their contents for my songs. Corridors of slow dim heat, warming red, toasty orange, yellow bright as molten gold, green of sun-dazzled leaves, hot neon blue, a glare of violet, ultraviolet, darkness visible. I spoke to this one in his coat and beard as we made our way toward the Wardrobe and Europa; I was drawn by the entanglement of our conjoined quantum nature, the Ariadne thread that linked me to her lips, her breast, her womb like a filament of gleaming spittle or stringy semen. I hesitate to say umbilicus, for I was her spouse, not her child, even if Europa is now Mother to us all: good Mother, good-enough Mother, phallic Mother, Vagina Dentata in bad seasons. It might have seemed to the pressing ghost onlookers that my companion drew me on. (I could give you his name, but why bother?) No, it was I who nosed out the direction, like a spider snurfing up a web already spun—but that figure tangles the gender roles, damn it, for it is the female spider who spins and resorbs her web. Never mind. It was hardly gender role anxiety that vexed me. Call it ontological insecurity after all. Europa, the machines had claimed (if I understood them), was thinking of drawing down the curtain on the universe and reopening elsewhere. On Broadway, perhaps, if our original had begun off-, or off off-. Or more likely the Met, Palais Garnier, La Scala, Covent Garden. Somewhere where the lights were brighter, the crimsons and blues and violets sharper, cleaner, powered up to the max, a glissando of unsung songs awaiting the premier coloratura. La Europa, diva of universes.

Starfish, stiffened by the Sun. Take them to the new Jerusalem.

I sound bitter. Well, perhaps.

Here’s a story you won’t have in your annotated files, soulsuckers—unless your sly probes winkled it out of my torpid brain in warm Redemptive sleep. (Europa assured us all that such invasion was forbidden, the least and last redoubt of our selves, but can her undertaking be trusted? Let us assume so.) Well, then:

Years ago, before I met and wed Europa, before our babies were born, before I had cause to wonder if indeed they were our babies or only hers, I shared a downtown conapt with a dark-skinned computer programmer named Barney Austen. No relation to Jane, I’m fairly sure; the fine arts baffled Barn, and his atrocious taste in gangsta music led me to some interesting moves in my own. I took the upper half, he downstairs, with bathroom and kitchen in common. I was writing my first would-be satirical libretto to an eleven tone melody (Noah Tall; Libretto and Score: Isaac Hersch), muttering bits of canto to myself as I mooched up and down the stairs, and heard one day an outraged squeal. Felt something underfoot, soft but with bones. My heart squeezed tight. I’d stepped on a striped kitten. We had no kitten. Barney apologized when he removed his headset and checked in from full code immersion in his system. Some kids had ambushed him outside the local HEB as he exited with a week’s groceries and wine, had foisted this scrawny bundle of girl cat on him. “That’s Daisy,” he told me. “She’s already toilet trained. I have a litter box for her in the kitchen.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You have a litter box in your study.”

Daisy soon developed suspicious bumps behind, and was a boy. He sprayed tentatively after a month or so. “Off with them!” I demanded, but Barney was too busy, and besides the vet insisted that we wait two more weeks. I was snatched from my work the next morning by raucous outrage. I’d just coaxed an especially edgy diapason from my synthesizer.

“He jumped up on my desk,” Barn told me. Daisy was nowhere to be seen, cowering somewhere; we’d agreed he was too young and inexperienced to be permitted access to the sidewalk, as the chances were good he’d tear into traffic, instant roadkill. “I thought it was charming. Then he climbed into my work product tray and pissed in it!”

“He’s confused,” I said. But in the evening, ten minutes after I got back to work after a pizza and beer supper, Daisy provoked more cries of fury. I galumphed downstairs. “What now?”

“The little shit sprayed my leg!” Eyes narrowed, Barney was dragging off his ratty old track suit pants, hopping toward the sink.

“He’s in love,” I explained. But that explanation had worn thin by the fourth occasion, the following day.

“Crap. It’s your scuzzy noise. It sucks, man.”

I never learned what became of Barney and his angry, besotted animal, because Noah crashed and fizzled (and who could blame it, or the stay-away audiences?) and I spent several months squatting in a musty, leaking, and subsiding house that leaned scarily to the west, just north of the freeway, and seemed infested by cats even less toilet-trained than Daisy. But here’s why I remember this incident when the names of all my grade school teachers and most of my early working colleagues are long fried. Poor confused Daisy’s attempt to combine micturition with affection, or maybe artistic criticism, reminds me precisely of my own dealings with Europa. She didn’t quite dock my balls when she was elevated to the station of Queen of the dead and godwhore du jour, but the effect was similar.

Did Daisy find a more winning path to Barney’s heart once I was out of the picture, and my noises with me? Certainly I never found such a path back into Europa’s, not really. Which is why I did what I did, and suffered the punishment everyone found meet and proper, especially the machines of loving grace, why I spent nearly a century growing old and foul while everyone around me cavorted like kittens endlessly renewed. Until (to gender-twist the “kitty equals me, not my wife” metaphor completely around and upside down) the day Europa escaped out a side window, and the authorities needed me to find her before she broke the universe asunder and piddled in the splinters.

Listen, while I talk on against time.

As above, the ancient alchemists held, so below. In the place of infinite corridors, dried indoor pools now and then awash in sand and maybe fishes’ bones, carved hieroglyphs in unknown and unknowable tongues (or, perhaps, the speaking gestures before utterance stabilized into langue), only two things were singular, unbreachable: the universe entire, above; Asterion, the house, below.

“Your wife, the Goddess of the dead and unrealized, wishes to multiply the worlds and scatter the probabilities,” my companion told me. It was the same message given to me by the machines of loving grace. The same implied charge: Go, find her out in her heartland, stay her hand if you can.

My feet were getting damned tired. I mean, I hadn’t been out of the tank in years. Daylight was likely fading into night outside the Asterion’s first door by now, and the turtle would surely have drawn back his leather head, blinking his great eyes at the going down of the Sun, and settled into a careful pit of sand of his own, safely distant from the hushing sea and the tossing asphodels.

“Let’s take a break,” I said. “What’s a guy got to do to get a drink around here?” The machines had offered, but that was hours ago.

“We were thoughtless. Here, sir,” and I was offered a steaming mug of rich Ethiopian coffee from a pot on a salver piled with bagels, lox, cream cheese, slices of ripe, firm tomato. I sat on the floor, back against a pillar embossed with fleeing foxes, russet-jacketed hunters (human) astride great leaping hunters (equine), dragons a-wing overhead, an arboreal snake or two. The coffee was excellent, of course; I slurped it down, smacking my lips, and munched on supper. My companion handed me a crisp linen napkin delicately embroidered; I wiped my lips, blew my nose on it, and dropped it on the floor. It would drift back into Types and memory soon enough.

“I needed that. Thank you.” I rose, dusted my breeches, pissed against one wall, and checked my orientation. “Straight on ‘til morning.”

After a time, a tall, well-built fellow turned from a branching corridor into ours, caught sight of us, raised an eyebrow. He smiled, then.

“Greeting, Asterion.”

“Shit, Man, you know I don’t hold with that nonsense.” I shook my head in exasperation, went to him with arms outstretched, hugged my eldest son. My eyes teared up at our embrace. I really was stranded halfway into old man’s sentimentality. Radamanthus held me at arms’ length, finally, frowning at my appearance.

“You’re looking for Mother.”

“Yes. Know where she’s hanging out this season?”

“Well, you know, Dad. She might be summering in Crete.” We both laughed at that. The blue leaping dolphins, the bull-leaping topless maidens, the flushing toilets avant la lettre. I wiped my eyes on the back of my sun-spotted right hand. “I’d be pleased to accompany you,” he said. “Hey, you’re dusty—this place really does need better cleaning surface. What you want is a pit stop. I’ll call the boys.”

Of course, Types and Tokens being what they are in the place of infinite corridors, the hot bath I found myself soaking in ten minutes later was an exact duplicate of the Queen’s light-drenched Megaron in Knossos, gold fittings restored and gorgeous murals touched up. I floated blissfully, muscles easing. The ache in my half-grown teeth fell away, and the ocean hush of running water was wind blowing across a meadow of faintly scented blooms. What woke me was a shout.

“Papa!”

I blinked water droplets from my eyes, paddled to the pool’s edge. “Minos! I might have guessed, from the fittings.”

“Oh, well, yes. We get trapped in these games, you know. Daddy, it’s lovely to see you, but I have to confess that you’ve been in better shape. They let you out early?”

Min and Man stood attendance as I stomped up sea-shell steps and found a towel to wrap myself away from their innocent gaze. Noah, indeed. I whistled a discordant note or three between my teeth. “Yeah. Affairs of state. State vector, that is.” My mostly bald head was almost dry already as I dabbed. “Where’s the scamp?”

“Here, Father.” His voice boomed, like an angel standing in the sun. Sarpedon was fated for a grim end, if they chose to run this myth game to its end—arguing murderously over a doe-eyed boy, for Christ’s sake!—but surely they had more sense than that, sons of my body. Look where Europa and I had got, playing fast and loose with the underworld and the above-. “Rumors reach us of a tussle in the quantum playground,” my youngest son said. “She’s feeling fertile again, eh?”

I cuffed his shaggy head. “Show some respect for your dam, lad. But yes,” I said with some chagrin, dressing again in the Hamletish garments gifted me by the machines of loving grace; no Danish sword at my belt, though, no Glock 22 under my armpit, no throwing knives secreted on bicep or calf, no pepper-spray canister in my back pocket, for that matter, “it sometimes feels like being married to a queen bee.”

My parents, pious idiots, all but rent their garments when I wed Europa. I’m pretty sure my father would have liked to see me dead, if it weren’t for his damned stiff-necked ethics. She wasn’t Jewish, she wasn’t subservient, she held no objection to dining on the flesh of a kid seethed in its mother’s milk (it was my mother’s blood that seethed!), and her idées fixes were even older and more preposterous than theirs. Europa was convinced that she had Been Here Before.

“I’m studying Phoenician,” she told me over spanakopitas and stuffed vine leaves at Demo’s, on our first date. Her lip sore had healed; it had taken some wooing to get her this far. We sat outside under a Cinzano shade imbibing the peak oil traffic fumes from North St. Mary’s, and quaffed retsina, the whole Greek nine yards, or at least as close as you could get within walking distance.

“Charming! Uh, may I ask why?”

“They’re my ancestors.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said. “Say something in Phoenician.”

“Listen, know-it-all, could you tell if I got the vowels wrong?”

“So it has vowels? Already they’re ahead of Hebrew on points.”

“Hebrew has vowels.” Some spinach had stuck in her front teeth; I dared her bite to reach and snare it free.

“Of course it does, but for the longest time they weren’t written down. Worse than Srbijan. Grzny. Crveni krst.” I shuddered; how many Jews had died there in the concentration camp, and Romany, too, and communists for that matter? But I didn’t want seriousness, let alone ancient griefs. “Worse than Superman’s enemy from the fifth dimension.”

“Mr. Mxyzptlk,” Europa said, nodding.

Maybe that was the second moment I fell in love with her. The first was when she’d broken my nose.

“Punic derived from my people’s language,” she said. “It influenced yours, as well. Belial, for example.”

“A demon, right?”

“You’re not really interested.”

I leaned across our rickety table and took her by the shoulders (bare in her summer top, sunburned, plump), kissed her mouth. “Of course I am. If you are.”

But she was serious, taking a distance course at the Catholic University of America, of all noble institutions of learning, in Chicago. Wonders of the early internet. Her real interest would have scandalized her instructors.

“The Phoenicians were those who survived the great catastrophe. There’s not much known about my true people.”

I smiled. “The hunter-gatherers of the Serengeti?”

Europa shook her head, and sun-coins danced.

“The Sun Kings of Mu.”

I knew then, with a racing excitement, that she was completely nuts. What I didn’t know, yet, was that I would stitch her delusions, in a wholesale splicing of myth, legend and grotesque fraudulent invention, into the broadcloth of the real worlds. My bad.

“Moo?” I said in disbelief. “Moo?”

“I’m tired of walking. It’s a pity they never put a rapid transit system in here.”

The boys strode beside me, squabbling in a manly sort of way. Sons of the ancient Glorious they might be, but at least their struggles for elevation had not yet reached the hurling-thunderbolts stage. Minos gave Man a buffet to the shoulder, and told me, “I can whistle up some fine Arabians for us, an it please you, sire.”

I gritted my small gappy teeth. “Something with a bit more horsepower than a horse. Hmm. Can you lay your hands on a thoat?”

The brothers shared a glance.

“Mars,” I said. “Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ancient romancer. Oh, never mind.” But they’d done their due diligence, and I heard a vast snorting and snoring at my back, turned in the corridor into a gust of rotty vegetable breath. Two of the great and terrifying mounts waited nervously, vast and trunkless slate-hued elephants with eight yellow legs caparisoned in jeweled harness. One uttered a deep squealing cry that rang in my ears. “Good lads! Help me up, Sar.” I had never seen a thoat before, outside the illustrated pages of an old book, but I was reassured by the memory that they are herbivorous. Did the thoats know that? Surely these were broken to the saddle, and to battle. Sarpedon gave me a leg up—the brutes are lofty, double a man’s height, near enough—and followed with a bound to sit behind me. Minos and Radamanthus climbed aboard their own behemoth, and we ran side by side along the suddenly wide-enough corridor, scattering the dead and improbable. “Yah-hoo!” I shouted, and wished I had my hat to wave. “To-wit, to-woo! Tally-ho!”

“He hasn’t been out much lately,” I heard Min shout to Man. I didn’t mind their laughter. It was true enough. I closed my eyes, fingers clinging to my thoat’s pulsing neck, and sought direction, vector. The Wardrobe lay ahead, and Europa on its far side, which since the Wardrobe has infinite variety, like the infinite corridors of the Asterion that cradles it, isn’t saying a lot, cartographically speaking. I needed to depend on my nose. I sniffed. I tasted the gray air. Mostly I got heaving thoat breath, but there was that hint of thread—

“Starboard, gentlemen,” I cried, and we went that way. The corridor darkened to a purple dusk. Ahead, like a cheery burger joint truck stop on a lonely highway, the Wardrobe stood brightly lit, beckoned me. I hove to, flung forward into the throat’s plated integument as it screeched to a halt. “End of the line! All out!”

Part hyper excitement, part sheer funk. I hadn’t seen my wife the Queen of the dead in a good many years, and the prospect was not altogether encouraging. Still, you know what a man’s gotta do.

“I would lief attend you, sire,” Man said, every inch the officer and gentleman. How did I come to have kids like this? The other boys chirped up with their own expressions of filial zeal. I shooed them away, but I confess I had moisture in my eye. Like I said, sentimental as an old man, which I mostly still was.

“The machines asked me to do it alone, and they have a better understanding than I do of the way the cosmos wags. Really, you’ve been a tremendous help, it’s been too long, but I’d better get a wiggle on before I lose my nerve. Guys, a pleasure,” and I turned with a cheery wave, back itching, wishing I did have a sword or an S&W .50 Magnum (although I’d never studied foil, let alone saber, and fired only an airgun when I was a kid, potshots at rabbits and squirrels outside my small ratty boyhood town where Jews were not especially welcome), and pushed open the swing doors of the Wardrobe’s wormhole.

It swallowed me down, and I left my adopted sons to fend for themselves, as always.

And flung me out in the main drag of the crystalline capital of Mu (Karath, if that was really her ancient name), behind her cyclopean crimson walls and moats, just as the run-up to Richter 10 catastrophe started shaking the towers and campaniles into fearsome shards tumbling in a mess of shredded human flesh. Screaming you couldn’t hear through the boom. Blood you couldn’t avoid seeing, until the rising tsunami of dust and grit soaked it into blasphemous mud, and then the tsunami of Oceanus washed it into the depths.

I didn’t believe it, either, but the nightmares of a goddess have a terrifying palpability. And this one was grounded, after all, so deeply grounded, in an even more terrifying catastrophe of mother Earth.

In case you haven’t glossed it yet, a Richter 10 quake can tear a continent or tectonic plate in half. These shock measures are logarithmic, so a Richter 11 hadn’t happened to the Earth (the earths accessible through the wormhole, anyway) since that stray star pebble the size of Mars slammed into primordial Gaia four billion years ago, give or take, and blew the baked outer skin the hell off, which settled down later, on orbit, as the Moon, and brought the Glorious with it to the core. Trust me, 10 is as bad as you want to see, and I’d rather see than be in one. But I was, because I suppose Europa was having a maudlin fit of guilt, again, wondering how she could fix things. But if so she was whistling Dixie, because Mu was another country, and they did things differently there.

I was the one who’d awakened Mu, or some roaring, stinking simulacrum, from her millennial drowning deeps. There’s my own guilt, although that crime is not the one they charged me with. I’ve never denied it, which is one reason I went into protraction and Redemption without too much whining. It was my song, my opera, my out-do-Wagner Gotterdammerung. Here’s my recollection, which might well differ from your glossed authorized edition:

“Honey, it’s just a myth,” I told Europa one Saturday afternoon, over nachos—shredded, melting cheddar, refried beans and jalapeno peppers on corn tortilla chips, dipping up salsa and luscious seasonal guacamole—washed down by Cokes. Europa wasn’t her name back then, obviously, not her librarian, Social Security number name. We’d moved in together by then; I was teaching Setharean exomusicology at the city college in between running band practice. “A lovely myth, sure. Lemuria, Mu, Poseidonis, Atlantis.” I’d done some Googling. Scott-Elliott, Madame Blavatsky, Donnelly, Lovecraft, Howard, Cayce … “Tyre and Sidon, I’ll grant you those Phoenicians. Maybe they are your ancestors. But Karath of Mu? I don’t think so.” My cheese-sticky hands might have hovered protectively before my face as I said it, but I pretended I was brushing away a mosquito.

“Colonel Churchward listed their sacred symbols, their alphabet,” she told me with her blank, intoxicating stare. Autistic and Asperger people, I’d heard, usually didn’t like to meet people’s eyes, so that might not be her formal diagnosis. My pulse accelerated, and my horniness. Gnosis was Europa’s mystery, you can hold the diagnosis, doctor, ha ha. “Look at them. Here.”

She handed me an old book, pages of runes. Punic runes, maybe.

“You can read this?”

She shook her head sadly at my disbelief, began uttering the strangest, most unsettling stream of glossalalia I’d ever heard. Had she picked up some of it from my parents’ Hebrew prayers? We’d gone to temple more than once, dutiful, or pretending—or perhaps, I wondered, she was tapping into something truly archaic, a pre-articulate bump in the pre-cortex. (I didn’t know about the Glorious, then, none of us did.) Still, I noticed the way her eyes tracked across and down the page, right to left and back, but now left to right, and again. Boustroph’edon writing, they called that—an endless string of utterance scored on the page like the plowing back and forth of a bullock, an ox, in a field. I surreptitiously toggled my pocket recorder (doesn’t every composer carry one, putting it aside only for the bath?), and tried to match the symbols (surely bogus) to the breathy yet guttural sounds hushing from her lips.

By god, I can use this, I told myself.

I can use this!

I chose an eleven-tone tuning, exactly to challenge my audience (if any), to evoke the disruption and clash of civilizations that seemed to me captured in this archaic image: the smashed city, its towers ablaze, broken, drowned, the very continent—of which the city was the throbbing heart—cracked and sunk. You want a lullaby for that? My father did, it seemed. I stupidly told them all my plan over festive Shulchan Orekh, the family dinner at Pesach, jittery with excitement at my new idea, no sense of self-protection, no sense at all.

“Is this why we sent you to school? So you could assault the ears of decent people?” I’d played them a tinny fragment of the Karath Submerged recitative, using my cellphone audio linked to the big iron at home.

“Dad, for god’s sake!” Talk about bitter herbs.

“Don’t take the Lord’s name,” my mother twittered.

“Oh fuck.” Not quite under my breath. On the other side of the table, my wife sat mute, eyes fixed on my father’s forehead, it looked like. “I’m doing okay.”

“With her salary at the library,” my mother said.

“People want tunes,” my father explained. “They don’t wish to hear this atrocious noise. Well, the schwartzes, maybe. Those filthy rap songs all day long.” And out of his prim mouth, impelled by disgust and rage, ratatatted a catalogue of this lowlife cussing.

We all went still and stiff and incredulous. My father was then fifty-four, not old, not at all old, but he had caught it on his car radio, I suppose, gangsta rap. Or just couldn’t block it from his ears as he walked the dog while the cars rolled by, windows down, drivers slouched on the floor, foulness radiated at industrial volume, boom boom, bang bang. Even I found it got on my nerves eventually. My mother had run into the kitchen to fetch Tishpishti diamonds or Mile High chocolate cake or almond streusel topped apple cobbler or something, sound American-Jewish cuisine, not a single obscenity or cop murder on the bill of fare.

I said, “Daddy, you want me to churn out Hallmark melodic greeting cards?”

“People pay good money for them, at least,” he said, shaken by his own frankness. “Don’t mock what people want. I don’t understand you, boy, you call this stuff music, you marry a—” He caught himself barely in time.

For once I chose not to rise to the shiksa bait. “People learn to love new things, Daddy. Look, let me convince you.”

“Ha. That will never happen.”

“We can try. You have to know that the music we hear from the radio, Bach and Beethoven and Irving Berlin and the Beach Boys, it’s all made out of notes—”

“You think I’m a fool? What else would it be made of ?”

“—notes where the sounds are divided up into twelve acoustically equal portions.” I found the large match box he’d used to light the Passover candles, emptied out into a pile, counted twelve all in a row, red-headed soldiers for art. “That’s what you hear all day long, from that Chopin CD I gave you for your birthday all the way to the hip-hop zombies, okay?”

With an eyebrow raised, he gave a small grin to hear his betes noires named.

“But look—” I laid out another twelve, one for one, then took back a single match, tossed it aside, shuffled the remainder to a new order, each match now a little farther distant from its neighbor on either side. “Eleven-tone tuning.”

“But why?” He sounded genuinely anguished. “Do you saw off one leg from your chair and wait to fall over on your tuches?”

“There were three-legged stools before anyone invented a four-legged chair,” Europa said.

My father, I swear, rolled his eyes. I said hastily, “See, in your customary music there’s both consonant and dissonant intervals. But with eleven-tone, all the intervals are dissonant, especially the thirds and fifths, which is very unexpected.” I held out the palm of my hand. “So instead of harmony, you have melody. And that’s the real engine of music. Besides, this oratorio is about the destruction of an ancient mythic nation—”

“A real nation,” Europa said.

“Whatever. So I have to undercut your complacency as a listener, okay, I have to stick prongs inside your comfortable ears.”

“Just leave my damned ears alone,” my father said. “I’m very happy with my ears the way they are. Gertrude, where’s that damned dessert?”

The Wardrobe always takes you straight to the right place, if you’re the right person to go there. The Glorious that fathered my stepsons designed it that way. I walked up the winding path to the old farm house, plucking a posy of yellow asphodels (what else?), and found Europa rocking absently in a rope-and-canvas hammock on the porch, out of the direct sunlight. Not that it was especially bright, nor ever was, here. Her broad pale brown face had its own glow. Moo moo, the great Bull-god’s lover, Mu the lost world, Moon the face, it’s all melody.

“Hello, wife,” I said.

“Hmm.” She regarded me with unnerving blank directness. “You’ve let yourself go.”

I did the barking laugh that fits so well with dissonant tuning. She did not look like an old woman. Who did, these days? “My punishment for letting you go, my dear.”

“For dismissing me into this place.”

“Oh, don’t.” I saw an old bentwood chair in the far corner, dragged it back, sat beside her. We did not touch. I suppose you’d have to consider ours a companionate marriage at best. “I just saw the boys. They’ve done good. Well, what can you expect, sons of the Glorious and all.”

Europa sighed and looked away. “They are the children of your body, Isaac.”

“Yeah.” I whistled a few notes of The Crushed Lotus aria, watched her cramp up her lips. “Well, anyway, babe, I hear you’re planning some renovations. I bear a message from the machines: they’d prefer you to leave well enough alone.”

The sky went totally black for an instant. I saw everything in solarized reverse, Europa’s eyes ultraviolet. We sat on top of a huge rustred rock, and all about stretched arid rusted desert under a sky harshly, radiantly blue. Africa? Arizona? Mars? I still had air to breathe, anyway.

“I found a way to set them free,” she said then, not apologizing, not explaining. “All the dead. All those who perished in the fall of Mu and her daughters. The dead of all the stupid wars. All the dead who died anyway, of age or disease or broken hearts.”

“Heaven on a stick, eh?” I was abruptly furious. “Don’t talk to me about broken hearts, you mad bitch. You and I know the truth. You weren’t pushed and you didn’t fall. You walked out and left me with the kids.”

“Oh, boo hoo,” she said in a voice I could hardly hear. “I had things to do, places to go. What, I was meant to hang about with you and your dreary damned family until I died of boredom and screeching noise?”

I felt a small shudder pass through my chest, my caught breath, and I let it go, let it all go.

“Of course not. I’m not a fool. It’s not every day a girl has a Glorious tapping at her parlor door, offering to bear her off to the underworld.” I straightened in the chair, and it creaked under my weight. “Are you determined to do this thing?”

“Yes.”

“Is it dangerous? To us all?”

“Risk provides the sauce. Look—” And she grabbed up a straw broom leaning against the paint-peeled siding, stripped it down to dust and made two, one in each hand. They failed to cavort like the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which was, I thought in my mordant terror, a bit of a letdown.

“Handy. A free broom in every storage cabinet,” I said. “How banal you are.”

“I will make worlds and world beyond worlds,” Europa told me, rocking contentedly in her hammock, dropping the twins to clatter on the floorboards, “and fling them like bright jewels into the infinite. Galaxies like grains of sand, universes like dust caught in a beam of sunlight—” Glittering, then, the brooms disintegrated into a cascade of eye-dazzling sparks that tore upward in a gout of radiance, cold fire.

“For the fucking bugs,” I said, and stood up, didn’t kick over the chair or rub my shocked eyes, and walked away from her, still holding the asphodel posy. “For your damned creepy Bug King.”

She did not dispute my words. She did not call me back. I knew there was no way I might induce her to promise to stay her hand. Probably I’d known from the outset.

Here’s a handy simile, free of charge. Engrave it in your brain or accessory; don’t leave home without it.

In cartoons, lightning bolts always are shown as a jagged spear thrust from lowering clouds, sharp tip slamming at a sixth of the speed of light, or thereabouts, toward the ground. It doesn’t work that way, quite. You’ve probably spotted my figure of speech already, right? You smart, smart machines. You keen kids.

The potential tension grows and grows between negatively charged cloud mass high above and positively charged ground ions swarming below. Trickles of current stepladder their hungry way down toward the monstrous globe of the earth—and hot, powerful positive streamers are flung upward to meet their embrace. They fuse; a gout of luminous charge tears from the soil to the sky. The channel boils. Torn air is flung aside, and thunder rolls and booms its godlike voice.

That’s how it was when I awakened the Glorious with my feeble, jagged song.

The night of the premiere was peak allergy season in central Texas. Pecans bloomed outside every window. Juniper pollen blew in every gust. A dozen or a hundred fruits of the soil scattered their vicious grains on the muggy air. I sneezed; my eyes ran, then clogged up with stinging, itching gloop, supernaturally resistant to antihistamines. Like a bag of overpriced rice dunked in water, the meat of my sinuses swelled and beat a tattoo against my brain. The skin eroded in dry white flakes from between my eyebrows, at my hairline, beside my nostrils. I was a mess. I wanted to stay home. I wanted to lie down and die.

Obviously Europa wouldn’t let me.

It wasn’t as though I had to don black tie and get my hair cut. Nobody on Yahweh’s wide earth had the faintest interest in opening their opera chamber to a performance of an ear-grating avant-garde oratorio (there were jealous mutterings that it was derriere-garde, like the exhausted tricks of Schonberg’s twelve-tone row) about the sinking of a mid-Pacific continent that never existed. I’d’ve had better luck, maybe, in San Francisco or Sydney, but who could afford it? My dumpster diver pal Jules Groznick and a pinch-hit ensemble of kids and blue-haired ladies clutched their ill-rehearsed scores in the sound-proofed garage owned by the Dewey Street dentist father of the president of the College Choristers and sang their hearts out into a decent Roland multi-track home studio digital recorder. Mu sank; blood flowed; the towers toppled, earth opened, sea plunged and gulped. Simultaneously, banally, the performance mixdown flowed straight to YouTube and any iPods careless or eccentric enough to be logged on and tuned in. My score went up to heaven in electronic packets swapped and mixed-and-matched into satellites around the globe, and trickled down again, and alerted the Glorious in its slow, awful billion-year meditations.

If I was sneezing, you can imagine the convulsions in the bowels of the earth as a billion tons of archaeobacteria entrained their distributed intelligence and its entangled, resonant presence in all the microorganisms of all the biosphere’s warm bodies, and noticed me and Europa.

You really mustn’t blame me for the loss of Indonesia and New Guinea and Hawaii, and like that.

Talk about an allergy reaction.

So I became Asterion, under the awakened direction of the ancient Bugs carried into the core of the Earth by the small planet that blew the Moon off from the world’s crust, and was sent by them to the Navel of the Worlds, the omphallos island that joins all the infinite realities and unrealities; and my neuroatypical wife locked herself gratefully into communion with the mass consciousness that had smashed into proto-Earth four billion years ago then settled as the iron core in the middle of the roiling planet, bearing its Glorious life from Somewhere Else, who knows where, and she was thus Europa, myth goddess of the underworld, mother, eventually, of our three god-engendered sons. I stood back in throttled rage and secret pride, until at last my off-key Machiavellian calculations persuaded her to decamp, light out for the transfinite territories; rather reign in Tartarus than serve blessed exponentiating Moore’s Law machines in post-industrial, near-singularity heaven, reign there, yes, as the Great Mother, over the dead and the infinitely possible, and—

But you know all this, dear cursed soulreaders. Of course you do. So enough of that. And for fuck’s sake, call me Isaac, okay?

I’d been back from the Wardrobe three days (risen, if you like, from the dead, good Judaic heresiarch that I am) when the machines of loving grace came to me in my chambers above Ciudad de México. I chafed in frustration, rubbing nanomedicinal unguents into my aching unreplenished limbs. A blustery storm was blowing in across the Bahia de Campeche from the east and south, turbulent night eddies in the air skin of the world shoved about in unaccustomed vectors by the raw new mountains in the center of the Atlantic. Auroras flailed pink and baby-blue silk scarves, some greeny pale, asphodels of light, as plasmas and magnetic ropes from the Sun whipped up the ionosphere still unsettled after the best part of a century. Soon dark clouds heavy with moisture would block their dance, and a hard rain would drum across the city.

Somewhere, a cat wailed.

“I delivered your message,” I said. “My wife was not impressed. She will not return. She will not ditch her plans. I believe she yields to higher authority—or lower, if we’re to be literal. Okay, now shoot the messenger.” I struck a martyr’s pose, arms outstretched, head thrown heroically to one side.

“There is no fate here to tempt, Isaac,” they told me. Through my flesh and bone, a trillion commensal brainless bacteria and viral particles thrilled to the long hums and waves of the mind of the world, the deeps beneath us, the cavernous cities and continents of ancient life that dreamed its being in our scurrying short lives. The machines, I told myself, were just the latest incarnation of this investiture, this infestation. But is the soul an infection of the tissues? Is spirit and awareness, and music melodic and harmonic alike, nothing better than a plague supervening on our brute and yearning selves? Beats me; I’m an annoying know-it-all, not a philosopher.

“Fix me, or leave me in peace,” I told them, nettled at my own organic restrictions and bounds. “I never asked for any of this.”

“No more you did,” a machine told me, and its voice was kindly. “Yet here you are, and here it is. Get some sleep. We shall speak again in the morning.”

I called up a woman I’d known before they finally let my aging bod into the tank for renovation, then ripped it out again untimely. No need to frighten her with my scarecrow impersonation, so I left the visual feeds dark. I could see her, though, not looking too harried, sipping coffee in Paris or Bucharest, hair piled and gleaming in what I supposed to be the newest fashion. I felt a pang, I did.

“Hey, Aahba, Isaac Hersch here. Sorry about the blackout.”

There was the smallest lag, on top of the speed of light thing. “Oh, hi, honey. It’s been a time. You’re not spelunking in Carlsbad Caverns, by any chance?”

“Been away, out of touch with everything. I switching the camera off, didn’t want to frighten the horses.” She didn’t get the reference, either, never mind. Aahba is an extrasolar exoplanetologist, and spends her time searching for signals of other Glorious in other worlds within viewing distance. Her night has a thousand Eyes. “Found any offworld pals yet?”

Hesitation. Coffee cup clattered faintly as she set it in its saucer. “Uh, you asking as Isaac—or Asterion?”

“Isaac, always, with you.” We’d had some sweet encounters. Reykjavik? Lanzhou? There was one astrobiology conference … (You can look it up.) I assume she adopted her name as an emblem of her profession, as she didn’t look especially Indian; it means “Shine” in Sanskrit. (You can look it up.) “So the world seems to be doing okay, with the machines in charge. But I suspect there are some big changes coming.”

Laughter at that, coffee-spitting nervous laughter. “You and your wife should probably stop with those changes already.”

That was astute, but maybe self-evident, I don’t know, I’m too close to it all. Do people spend their days looking anxiously over their shoulders for the shadow of Europa, of Radamanthus, Minos, Sarpedon? Maybe so.

“It’s probably under news embargo, but then the machines assure me that nothing these days is forbidden, so hey. Yeah, she’s tearing up the pavement again and making some renovations.”

“Look, I’m—It’s lovely to hear from you again, Isaac, but I’m married these days, he’s an ER doctor from…” She really was flustered, and trailed off. “So I can’t see you. I do hope you’re—Oh, hell.” And she broke the connection.

I sat there staring at my toes for quite a while, bleak. The gastritis was gnawing down below my heart, or maybe it was just my lonely heart, again. I rose, went out to the platform, looked at the scummy surface of the world. Europa couldn’t do any worse than we’d all managed so far, we and the bacterial, vegetable Mind that moved through us in glacial tsunamis. I threw back my head and howled. Far below, on the street, a surprised dog howled back, his throaty call rising faintly in the caverns of glass and steel.

“Just put me back in the tank and let me get young in peace,” I said.

“Very well, Isaac,” the loving machines said, and wrapped me up, and popped me away into the tank. As my awareness drained down the plughole, I fancied I heard your prying questions, soulreaders, soulsuckers, so I’ve answered them as best I can, as I ebb away in these last microseconds of accelerated memory. Is that thrumming and tearing I hear in the bowels of reality just the anesthesia locking down, or has Europa started her multiplication lessons?

I think that’s it. She’ll be ripping us up and making every kind of New Atlantis there is. Maybe I’ll see you on the other side. Maybe you’ll just let me sleep through it. Maybe Europa will come to me again, in our other world, a world just for us and the kids.

Maybe I’ll love her, then, and she me.

What power has forgiveness but love?

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