Glimmering

Something began to spin in front of Trip’s face: a golden pyramid no bigger than an insect. As he watched it began to grow larger. Beams of light played across it, a clamor of gongs and bells where they intersected. The sky was gone, and the hive of stoned dancers. There was only that monolithic golden shape, and within it a pulsing core that resolved into a vast irradiating eye, its iris sky-blue. The eye wheeled away, growing smaller yet more brilliant, until it hung like a tiny perfect star upon the brow of a boy with glowing blue eyes and sinuously moving hands.

“I possess the keys of hell and death,” he sang, “I will give you the morning star: the end of the end…”

It was the icon. Face tilted upward as it sang, eyes staring into the shattered sky as it danced. From its head reared a glittering ornament like a pagoda that sent forth dazzling sparks of aquamarine and ruby and emerald green.

Fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga
Fear the end of the end.

Trip felt the same stirrings of bewitchment that he had in the studio at MIT. The icon grinned. It was real. Between the crowd of dancers and the earlier image of the girl singing there had still been a veil, the blinkered effect of senses struggling with what was before them.

This icon was different. It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was all but unrecognizable as an analogue of Trip Marlowe, even to Trip himself: if he hadn’t experienced it before, if he hadn’t remembered writing the words and melody it sang, would he have known it wasn’t real? He wasn’t sure; and the uncertainty terrified him. His entire body yearned for it, even as some spark of his consciousness recoiled.

He felt sick and feverish; revolted. The icon commanded desire and adoration and awe: it danced upon an invisible plane several inches above the library floor, and its dance made that unseen stratum more real than anything else. Something crashed beside Trip. He wrenched his gaze from the icon and saw a weeping girl sprawled beside him, her eyes huge and black and staring, though it was not Trip they saw. She had tried to follow the dancer, and fallen.

I will give you the morning star…

The icon spun and flashed. Trip could hear people talking to themselves, whispers of recognition; cries of grief. The music roared on, bells and gamelan; but now Trip could hear how insignificant the song was. Too clumsy, with its words and trumped-up tracking; too corporeal. Like the girl pawing pathetically at Trip’s feet: an ugly reminder that, despite the IZE, they were all still bound to earth by filaments of muscle and meat and memory. They were all still flesh, inherently flawed.

And the icon was not.

He glanced down, saw the girl had been sick. The icon shimmered. There was a break in the image, a subtle rippling that for an instant distorted its eerily beautiful face. Trip felt a brisk clarity at the foul smell that rose from the floor behind him. He shut his eyes, but the impulse to see the icon was irresistible.

“Make it stop,” someone cried out. “Oh God make it stop…”

Trip swallowed. Fear nudged at him; too late he tried to wrest his gaze from the icon, one leg drawn up beneath it like a heron’s.

Fear the end of the end…

Whirling stars swept across its eyes, green trees and blue water, a rippling brown mat of living creatures racing across an emerald plain. The icon opened its hands. Within its palms golden-eyed frogs crawled, throats bubbling as they sang. They leapt into the air, forelegs extended so that he could see their tiny toe pads, their glistening skin. Where they had been an egg trembled in the icon’s cupped hand, its shell a color that Trip had forgotten he ever knew. Cracks appeared upon the shell, the clawed nub of a minute beak. Something pushed its way free until it sat with lidless glaring eyes. Something like a tiny feathered dragon, eagle’s curved beak and claws, pointed ears that flattened against its skull as it hissed at him.

Trip’s flesh prickled. With all his will he forced himself to look away, to stagger in the other direction; and directly into Leonard Thrope.

“Trip…” Trip looked up to see the slight man standing somewhat unsteadily. “Trip Marlowe?”

Trip swung at him. Leonard moved backwards as a hand grabbed Trip’s and yanked him sideways. “Oh, hey, Trip, nice to see you too—”

Flash of crimson as he smiled; another flash as someone struck Trip on the side of the face. He cried out, looked up through watering eyes to see a blond woman a full head and shoulders taller than he was, her body sheathed in pink latex, face hidden behind a Barbie mask.

“Check him, Mikey,” said Leonard.

Within the mask a mouth opened, showing white teeth filed to a point and tipped with gold. “Okay,” she said to Trip. “C’mere, you—”