Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 3

  The product of our joined subconscious minds had turned out to be a library, in the same sense that the Taj Majal was a cottage. If you want full details on the place, and how we built it, I keep that seed as a blue pitcher next to my sink; go ahead and graze it if you want. It was mildly frustrating we couldn’t actually take down and read any of the books, but it was a comfort to be surrounded by them. We met each morning in our little corner, and wandered the stacks of our minds as we talked. She appeared to me as she had in her first Second; apparently I appeared to her as I did when we met. This implies many things that you’re welcome to speculate on or research as you please.

  I was there for less than two minutes before she appeared; she’d always been punctual. I squeezed her—an odd experience, as the sensations were sharper and the emotional impact weaker—and she squeezed me back.

  “How is everything at home?” I said.

  “Would you like to know what your dog did?”

  “Uh oh. What did your dog do now?”

  “Remember that nice teak end-table we used to have?”

  “Oh. Harsh. You know, it was right in the book that they chew furniture at this age. You knew that when you got him.”

  “When you got him,” she said. “I’ve never had a dog.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “How’s the poker?”

  “Good. I won.”

  “Yay! Does that mean you’ll be coming home?”

  “Turned out he wasn’t really trying. Let me tell you what he wants.”

  She listened the way she always did—with total focus. When I’d finished, she said, “Strange.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going to help him?”

  “Unless I can think of a reason not to.”

  She chewed her lower lip. “I wish you were here.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to curl up on the couch with you. BWIMF.”

  She smiled and rested her head on my shoulder. “How is the schedule?”

  “Local time here it’s evening; I’m guessing I’ll usually be with Sandow then.”

  “Should we switch to morning your time? Say, fourteen hours from now? That’d work for me.”

  “Yeah, let’s do that.”

  “So I’ll see you in fourteen hours.”

  “Love you. Pet your dog for me.”

  “Your dog,” she said, and vanished before I could reply.

  I relaxed a bit, drank some water, then sat down again. I closed my eyes and imagined the scent of cherry blossoms and the taste of chive, and I was back in the Garden, this time my own Garden. It appeared to me as a somewhat modified Roman Villa, because three thousand years ago my subconscious had determined it should be. Three thousand years ago, I’d never imagined that there was such a thing as a subconscious, but it seems to have worked without my knowing. Three thousand years ago, there were many, many things about the Garden we didn’t know. A few hundred years ago, Ren, along with a couple of others, had figured out the process by which death sent an Incrementalist’s stub into the Garden, which is how some of us manage continuity of existence; that left everything else. After long, long argument, we leaked that knowledge, which had led to Earthgov’s system of recall tapes, and the ability to restore someone to life if deemed necessary. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, but over-all I think it’s good. My point, however, is that, for the most part, we have no more idea of how the Garden works than we did three thousand years ago; or forty thousand. But it works, and I used it, walking through the interior landscape of my mind, exerting conscious control over things I could, discovering things I didn’t know, holding objects that didn’t exist. I took questions with me, and brought knowledge back.

  I went down imaginary stairs to a place below my villa and walked aimlessly. Upstairs and outside, direction mattered, because I had locked those “places” into my head, planted seeds of memory there. Down here, there were no seeds, no places, nothing. Anything that has ever been communicated in symbol from one person to another in all of human existence could potentially be found here; so full, so packed, so dense, that it was empty; because it is as hard to hear when there is too much sound as it is when there is too little. I walked through the familiar emptiness.

  Francis Sandow.

  I pictured him, and let the little I knew of him roll around in my head. Presently I saw a bicycle—the sort with the oversized front wheel. For reasons I couldn’t remember, it was linked in my mind to a strange 19th Century television show about which I could recall very little. But I climbed onto the bike anyway, and a picture formed in my mind of a Strantrian temple. There were statues there of many of the gods in their Egyptian-like pantheon, but my attention was focused on the one who looked like a man, his hand raised, a quiver of thunderbolts at this side, his skin bizarrely lime-colored.

  Interesting.

  I collapsed the bike into a small stone and put it into a tote-bag that appeared over my shoulder because I wished it there. I moved on, looking through knowledge, sifting it, touching it, feeling it; playing with ideas as if they were tangible things. A little later a stream cut across my path, and I took the cold water into my hand and drank, and I understood more of what it meant to be a worldscaper: to bend nature to your will on a staggering scale. The stream became another stone, and that, too, went into my pouch for later contemplation.

  Further on, a child’s kalidoscope showed that Sandow was psychic. I wasn’t certain I believed it, but that was the claim. Into the bag.

  I listened to an old Irish tune played on the penny whistle, and I learned a little about the god I’d seen: Shimbo of Darktree, who inhabited Sandow’s psyche in a way that I hoped had a lot to do with abnormal psychology, because the possibility that it didn’t was too scary to contemplate. It clicked against the other stones in the bag, and I walked on.

  And on.

  When the bag was starting to feel heavy with facts and theories and knowledge, I climbed back up the stairs. I turned the bag into an ancient instrument called a Fender Stratocaster, which I’d never learned how to play very well, and set it on the stone table in my atrium.

  I opened my eyes then, returning from the Garden long enough to get some food and relax a bit, before returning to do what Sandow had asked of me. This time, instead of walking through the unknown of random knowledge, I walked through the known of the carefully organized—bits of my own life, recorded, as it were, for eternity, or at least a reasonable facsimile there-of. They were all there, because once you’ve put something in the Garden, it never leaves. And your own seeds are the easiest to find.

  I limited myself to an hour or so, because if I wasn’t in a hurry to learn about him, he’d better not be in a hurry to learn about me. We would take our time, both of us.

  Then I napped again, because spending that much time in the Garden takes a lot out of you. Still later, Sandow and I ate a late dinner—a less formal meal this time—and we talked about what I learned. Not about him or Shimbo; I kept that research to myself. But I told him about the Earth three thousand years ago, memories that had faded, but were now, again, sharp and clear.

  That set the pattern for the next few weeks: In the morning, I’d go into the Garden and spend some time with Ren, then I’d go into my own Garden and learn what I could about Sandow, which I’d keep to myself; and I’d bring back seeds of my old life, with their clues about ancient Earth, which I’d share with him over dinner. Sometimes, in the evening, we played more poker.

  Sandow learned a lot in that time: he learned how to make a Roman shoe, which market in Judea had the best fruit, where to find salt, which blacksmith made the cheapest needles. And more. So much more. Things I had forgotten that I had forgotten; things it would never have occurred to me to wonder about. Sandow drank it all up.

  I learned things, too.

  I could have learned Sandow’s switches—those bits of sense memory we all have, that generate emotions that generate brain chemicals that make it possible for an Incrementalis
t to meddle with someone—but I had told him I wouldn’t meddle with him, and I meant it, so I didn’t look for his switches. But I did look for him. I wanted to know something about this man, this Earthman whose body was more than a thousand years old.

  I wished the Garden had had more about Strantri; I learned enough to be intrigued, but not enough to actually understand it. It was like Tibetan Buddhism in the way the supernatural elements seemed to slip through your fingers when you tried to grasp them, leaving nothing but practical advice in your hand; it was like Judaism in the way hard lines separated the mystical from the mundane so that it took years of study to learn how the one led to the other; it was like Catholicism in the way its priests functioned as mediators to and from the gods, accepted as normal and natural by its followers. I didn’t run into indications of anything I’d call fanaticism, though there were hints that long, long ago that, too, had happened.

  Sandow, it seemed was a priest—or maybe a high priest, the translations were inconsistent. But it meant that there was some sort of symbiotic relationship between him and the god Shimbo, which relationship was one of the things that permitted him to do the work he did. There were more sources that insisted he could read minds, and, I admit, the evidence started to sound convincing. I remained skeptical. There was some discussion of the magnetic fields generated by planets, and how these generated places called “power pulls” that a Strantrian priest would use to draw the god into himself. All of this stuff walked the line between practical and detailed enough to be believable, and nonsensical enough to be dismissed. For example, according to tradition, the god would chose the man rather than the reverse, but I didn’t find that entirely credible. For one thing, it would imply that the god had an actual, independent existence which, if you have memories going back forty thousand years during which time there’s been no evidence of the existence of gods, takes a bit of believing. And Sandow himself, it turned out, wasn’t entirely convinced.

  But, I figured, I could be wrong. It’s happened before.

  Sometimes, in the evening, Sandow and I would sit in some glade somewhere, or in his rooftop garden, or in one of the seemingly numberless sitting rooms and just talk. It was strange how relaxing it was to me to be able to open up to someone who wasn’t an Incrementalist. For his part, he seemed delighted to speak to someone who had memories that reached back as far as his.

  We drank wonderful booze and ate spectacular food and spoke of his long-lost family, and my long-lost friends. I told him about the first time I died, of something that I’m pretty sure was tuberculosis; and he told me about finding a reason to live, just when he thought there could no longer be one. I explained that, to me, memory was place; he explained that, to him, money was fuel.

  We spoke of loneliness, and we understood.

  And every day I went to the Garden, filled him in on old Earth, and learned about the new Galaxy.

  Even now, after all that’s happened, those seem to me to be good days. I miss them. They continued until one day when I happened to graze some of Sandow’s recent history. It freaked the hell out of me, and changed everything.

  *

  I had been keeping Ren informed of what I was doing, and what I’d discovered; not in any deliberate way, but just as we talked. She told me about what the kids and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren were up to, and the latest adventures of Wolf, our Altaran Bijihound, and her current meddlework, and I told her about Sandow, and we often argued about whether Shimbo might really exist. Ren thought it was possible, I remained skeptical.

  That day, she took one look at my face and said, “What is it?”

  “Something I just learned. A hedge I found. I still don’t understand it, and I’m not sure if I really believe it.” I stopped talking. Frowning. Thinking. She waited. I finally said, “If you want to graze it, it’s the marigolds in the pot just outside my front door.”

  “Do you want me to graze it, Phil? Or would you rather tell me about it?”

  “It’s something that happened—that may or may not have happened—a few years ago. Um, to make a very long story drastically oversimplified, it looked like another of the Pe’ian gods may have moved from one host to another.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t say it any more clearly. As near as I can tell, one of the Pe’ian gods took it upon himself to change hosts.”

  “But that means—”

  “They’re real. Yeah.”

  “And that means—”

  “I know.”

  “Two people, then? The god and the man? Each one existing independently, but sharing a body?”

  “That’s pretty much it,” I said. “If true. And it seems true.”

  “Then which one—”

  “I don’t know.”

  She frowned. “I have to admit, the bit about recreating the Earth from three thousand years ago seemed dubious. I should have said something.”

  “I should have seen it.”

  “What do you think he’s after?”

  “Sandow?”

  “No, the god.”

  “Oh. Well, what have I got?”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s, I don’t know, horrid. On several levels.”

  “Yeah. One them being, I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Can you leave? I mean, if you asked him to let you just go home, would he?”

  “He would,” I said. “But if we’re right—”

  “Oh. Yes. The god wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “I miss Jimmy.”

  She took my hand. It wasn’t the same as in real life, but it felt good anyway. “Me too,” she said. She kissed my cheek and I opened my eyes to a place unfathomable light-years away from her.

  *

  After that, as far as I could tell nothing obvious changed in my conversations with Sandow, but I was more wary, and I was listening to him in a different way. If he noticed anything, he didn’t let on. And I spent even more of my time in the Garden trying to learn what I could about Shimbo of Darktree, Shrugger of Thunders.

  Shimbo: real or not? Sandow: psychic or not? Me: totally screwed or not? If the first was true, the others sort of followed naturally, and it seemed pretty clear the first was true.

  Information on Shimbo was scarce and sometimes contradictory; The Garden doesn’t seem to gather much information from alien species, which is an important clue about its nature, and someday someone will use that clue to figure something out. I’m sure of it.

  But, both in the Garden and in the real world, I was able to gets bits and pieces. For one thing, Sandow didn’t mind talking about him; or else considered it a fair trade for what I was giving him. I learned of the worlds he’d built, and I looked at them, hanging in space like lanterns of life. I learned of the chants he used, and was able to record one into my i-card. And I found more things in the Garden, considered them, saved them.

  And I learned about a flowering plant called glitten.

  It originally came from the Pe’ian homeworld, and the root is sacred to various Strantrieen rituals. The petals are broad and white, with streaks of pale yellow; the eye is blue or indigo, depending on the time of year. It gives off a scent like oranges mixed with a hint of peppermint. By tradition, the Stranti priests keep the flowers floating in pools as long as they can find flowers in bloom. And, if you choose to believe it, they only grow near a power pull.

  I don’t know.

  I could probably have asked him if he had any of them, and where they were; but the Garden contained the information that he’d dictated instructions about them to his gardener, so I could just go find out, and I did. It was a walk of a couple of miles through woods and fields and past beaches; changes in landscape that shouldn’t exist that close together. Eventually I reached them in a patch of Eastern exposure where they’d be shaded most of the day; a place where it was warm and the humidity was higher than in the surrounding area—I guess a worldscaper can do things like that. I knelt next to
them, inhaled, enjoyed. Then I picked a handful of flowers.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  I turned around. “Hey, Frank. Possibly.”

  “Do you know what you have there?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  His eyes were narrowed, and he seemed tense. It occurred to me that, for all I knew, I could be surrounded by weapons, held by people or machines or both, all pointing at me. I should probably assume I was.

  “I don’t think those will work as a, what do you call it?”

  “Switch.”

  “Yeah. They won’t work as a switch on me.”

  “No, they won’t. And I said I wouldn’t meddle with you. Can’t you read minds? You should know that.”

  “I can’t read yours.”

  Well, that was a relief. “Interesting,” I said. “I wonder why.”

  “The ability doesn’t come with a guarantee. Why do you have the flowers?”

  “Why did you bring me to Homefree?”

  He studied me. He had track shoes on, I was wearing loafers. I suppose you could say this gave him an edge if it came to fighting, but that would be silly—in this Second, I was shorter than him by seven inches and lighter by fifty pounds, and he knew how to handle himself in a fight and I didn’t; he was very possibly armed and I wasn’t. The shoes were beside the point, but for some reason that’s what popped into my head just then. It was late afternoon, and the shadow of an oak tree stretched out behind him. Among the meadows and brooks and woods were some gentle hills that gradually sloped up into mountains, snow-capped and purple majesty and all like that. We stood in a kind of basin, like a scooped out field of wild grass, uncut, with some trees scattered about to provide shade. I had the feeling that if I spent enough time on it, I’d find a pattern in those trees, like, maybe a question mark or something—something that would make Sandow chuckle to himself when he thought about it. He was that kind of guy. I turned to study the sunset.