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"Isaac?"
The voice could have come from inside or outside. The two were no longer mutually exclusive.
He shook his head, nausea rising, trying to conjure the space back around him. What time was it? What day was it?
Everything- Sandra, Liam, Knightsbridge- everything- had been a fever dream. He had hallucinated them while in twilight sleep, inside the Creature. His eyes ached. The dancing hypnagogic DNA-helix teeth had retreated to the edge of his vision, the center filling with roiling static. And in the center of the static, one black dot.
He tried to conjure the sphere around him, tried to reign in his senses, but they were out of control. A drop- a sickening plunge of vertigo- and his sense of size changed. He was in a vast, boiling void, and the black dot was something huge, millions of miles away from him.
As he became aware of this, he was pulled forward at tremendous speed, hurtling toward the black thing, its titanic gravity inevitable. A black sphere, impossibly dense, at the center of the Universe. A core of something terrible, a primordial chaos- Azathoth- pulling him in, and as he felt the shattering weight of the thing in his mind-
-his perspective-
-changed-
-and it was his own sphere he was being pulled into. He had looked across the curved Universe and seen it- seen himself- and the resulting paradox was driving everything together, destroying the Universe- his own awareness feeding back on itself endlessly-
-an explosion of blackness-
-whiteness-
-nothing.
They stood at a fence that had once marked the borders of something terrestrial. A street, bridge, someone's property- all meaningless now. Beyond the fence, the land sheared off as if broken, clumps of cobblestones edging out over the drop. Past that jagged place where the sidewalk ended, there was only the Void. Nothing and nothing and nothing forever, dotted with stars that would soon wink out, one by one.
A chill wind was blowing.
Isaac crossed his arms. "You should've just told me."
"It doesn't work that way. You know that."
"What was it Crowley said? Either I know or I doubt. I've still got my doubts."
"Time is not what you think it is. Would you agree?"
"From what I've seen," Isaac said. "I have no choice. Or else I assume I've gone mad and nothing matters. Which doesn't sound very constructive."
"No."
"So, what, then?"
"Your view of time as linear- your treating of consciousness as something which grows in one direction- forces a false perspective. What you are doing is ultimately governed by yourself, directed by yourself, and timed by yourself. You choose your own times for enlightenment, and you do so with such perfection- with such Taoistic nonaction- that you are unaware of any 'action' taking place. You know this, instinctually, but you know it so well that you are unaware of it, like the sensation your own breathing or heartbeat. And the reason you cannot see it yet comes back to your perspective on time."
Isaac scowled. "Always time."
Bishop said nothing.
"Fine. Answer me directly, then. Do you know what time is?"
"The problem," Bishop said. "Is that the question is phrased in a limited language, which demands that the question be processed and answered according to the strictures of that language."
"You're not going to tell me, are you?"
"I cannot tell you. I don't have the words."
Isaac turned, suddenly, and looked behind him, as if expecting to catch an eavesdropper. No one was there.
The wind whipped at his coat and hair. He felt haunted.
"Have we done this before?" he said. "Have we had this conversation before?"
"It is possible."
"Bishop?"
In the Void.
"I am here."
"Where am I? When am I?"
"Between places and times."
Been here before, whispered a voice.
Been here forever.
"With you on the railing...did that just happen? Was that before? Or after?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Where am I?"
"You are, in a manner of speaking, nowhere. You are also, in a different perspective, at the borders of Alteria; what the Qabalists call Tiphareth. You are drifting."
And as the voice of Bishop spoke, Isaac found that he was. He drifted, bodiless, in the Void. Not black, the Void, but some non-color that was not white. He found this comforting, and some coiled part of him relaxed. He allowed his mind to spread out, letting go of when and where and- almost- of who. But not yet.
"What happens now?"
"Now comes the part I cannot prepare you for. I would have chosen to do this differently, to share more with you before you came here, but you insisted that it should be done this way. You insisted that you must do this alone."
"When?"
"A long time from here. It isn't important."
"What happens now?"
And as if Bishop had touched his mind, another memory came unbidden to the surface-
"There are a number of theories," the instructor- Venna, her name was- said to the listeners on the green. "About the nature of the Holy Guardian Angel. Most sources agree that the name is misleading- Crowley, in fact, admits that the name is misleading, and claims it's meant to be. The idea being that whatever the HGA 'is' cannot- like the Tao- be expressed, and so any references to the experience should use a term that either conjures no images at all, or conjures images so ridiculous that the mind rejects them. We can..."
The voice faded.
"What happens now?"
"First Death. I will give you my most powerful words to guide you. Listen."
And Bishop whispered in his ear-
"I Love You. There is No. Such. Thing. As. Magic."
...
Isaac drifted.
...
He found himself, once, looking down on a narrow, cramped room. A man lay on a pallet, legs crossed, hands cupped behind his head. His eyes were closed, but as Isaac watched, his eyes opened...and he stared up at Isaac in startled amazement.
That was me. Sorry about that.
...
Isaac drifted.
...
It came first as a sense of well-being. A warmth that suffused him, enfolded him. His thoughts were clear and calm. He felt completely, wonderfully himself in a way that he could not remember feeling before. He felt wonderful. He felt alive. Everything was going to be all right.
And then-
He was not alone.
He did not see anything. He was in a place beyond sight, but what came to his mind was a line drawing of a circle with a single black dot in the middle. It was Outside. It was Inside.
It was so complex he could not look directly at it. It was so simple he could not see it.
"What are you?"
And this alien-familiar macro-entity said:
I am you. All of you. All at once.
...
He arrived back in a body sick with the weight of drugs and vertigo. His insides clenched, gut spasming, burning bile in his throat. He spasmed, retched, shaking in slow motion in the syrupy sludge that encased him.
His stomach turned, and he vomited into his breathing mask. He felt the rest of his insides go, fouling him and the fluid around him.
An alarm bell began shrieking somewhere outside, loud enough for him to hear it in his encasement. The hatch on the sphere popped open and fluid gushed out. Isaac's eyes, freed of the goggles after his spasms, burned in the light that poured in from outside.
A platform was wheeled over, even as the fluid sluiced out of the hatch. Zaldania and her assistants rushed up, sliding and almost falling on the thick goop, and wrestled Isaac out of his harness and mask. He collapsed on the platform, covered in vomit, bodily waste, and clinging muck from inside the Creature. He gasped for breath, retched, coughed out bile and saliva, and took in a lungful of air. He lay head-down on the platform, twitching and gasping.
Dr. Rider knelt down next to him. "Jesus, Isaac! Are you all right?"
"I think-" Isaac coughed. He lay down on his side, face pressed to the cool metal of the platform. "I think that may be...the stupidest question in the history of ever. C'n I have a towel, please?"
By the time Dr. Rider returned with one, Isaac was asleep on the platform.
------
"Quit this world, quit the next world, quit quitting!" -Sufi proverb.
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Take Me Back to the Garden of Love - 22
