2000-11-30 at 02:17:43

Well, here's a new thing... part of a novella I've started called "To Dream of Heaven". I thought that if *I* had to be afflicted with madness, I should share it with the rest of the world. Here's the first chapter. Enjoy.

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To Dream of Heaven - 1

by The Vault

The lights were very dim in the room. This meaningless fact kept rising up in his multi-tiered mind, making him anxious. After all, the lights hurt her eyes, and he could always switch to his choice of night-vision, ultraviolet, heat-vision, or depth perception to see just as well. But he couldn’t truly see her beautiful face, lined and aged as it was. It was important, he thought. For she was dying.

He held her hand firmly but gently between both of his, feeling how cool and tissue-thin her flesh felt. His fierce proud face was twisted in an expression of quiet agony and loss that she could not see. It hurt to hurt, he realized. He’d never felt this sort of pain before. Unknowingly, she had shielded him from the experience of grief.

She was in and out of consciousness, in and out of coherence, yet was calm and unafraid the whole time. He thought he recognized the process from his recent thorough studies of dying – a state of conscious known as Nearing Death Awareness, where the person was able to experience a new level of senses because of the body’s preparation for death. She hadn’t yet mistaken him for a loved one long dead but she had, peculiarly enough, forgotten her name several times.

“You are Clara,” he had said, over and over, applying drops of water with gentle fingers to her dry lips. Her eyes were clouded, yet cannily aware.

“And you are Michael,” she responded. Her lifeline: knowing his name, knowing who he was. A lifelong concern was now coming to fruition… where did a human really go upon dying? In her private religious opinions (she’d confided), she thought that the body was a computer and the soul it’s programming. Appropriate metaphor, considering the source of her prodigious wealth. So when the computer was finally shut down, the arc of electricity – the consciousness, the self – was cut off. But there was another, bigger computer out there that waited for the moment of this disconnection, and “caught up” the wave before termination, where it was stored and could be aware and together with all others for eternity.

Heaven.

So she’d lived a good life as present societal morality applied, attempting to be worthy of this redemption. Now as the critical time approached she worried if she’d really done enough or if the theory was even sound to begin with.

“I always thought the Egyptian idea of death and afterlife was closest, you know,” she whispered suddenly, dovetailing neatly into his train of thought as she’d always done.

“Can you really take it all with you?” he teased, forcing a feeble smile.

“Why would I want to? There are few things I’d miss.” She licked her lips, stirring fitfully on the mattress. “Has she been born yet?”

He spread down the clean white sheets. “No, not yet. Your daughter is still in labor.” Reports broadcast from the monitoring machines to his brain told him that although she could feel little to no pain, her liver had finally failed and her digestive system was shutting down as well. She was ending, slowly.

“Goddammit, I’m tired of waiting!” Clara said, a bit of her spitfire reviving.

Now he smiled truly, despite himself. “Reluctant to let anyone take over, hmm? You don’t think anyone could hold it all together like you could.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Thoth guards the scales, and Anubis weighs your heart,” Clara whispered speculatively.

“Against the Feather of Truth, yes.” Repeating the myth together, like rubbing an old familiar worry stone.

“And if it weighs more than the feather, you are fed to the crocodile beast.”

“And if it weighs less, you go on to the Underworld –“

“Where you continue what you did in life, with one exception.”

They both smiled. “You are well-fed,” he completed. “Yes, Creatrix.”

“Feeling religious? You haven’t called me Creatrix since your pre-Avatar days.”

He got up out of the uncomfortable chair to perch on the edge of the bed, a huge, warm dark shadow. “My dear, you haven’t referred to my body as an “Avatar” since my post-machine days.”

She closed her eyes, smiling wanly but wickedly. “It hasn’t seemed like anything less than a body for a long while.”

A machine monitoring her respiration began a loud, worried trilling. He cut it off with a thought and reached down to cradle her in his arms.

“You have been everything to me, Clara: creator, friend, lover. I just want you to know...” His musical voice broke off and for once in his life, Michael found himself unable to speak.

A frail hand bound by wires and tubes reached up, caressed his hair. “My Michael. My angel.”

“Yes.” And he unfolded his huge white wings, stretched them in the sterile confines of the room, wrapped her up in them. He could feel the pressure of the minds of all the others, the living and the never-alive, linking with him. They filled the room like ghosts, all wanting to hold her and cherish her here at the end.

“We will miss you so,” he said, his voice thick from the sweet tears falling down his cheeks; tears she had made for him, to make him real.

“The child,” she protested. The heart monitor awoke with a sob. Michael stilled it.

“Just like you planned, Clara,” he soothed. “I will watch over her and protect her until the end of time. I swear it.”

She relaxed and lay in his embrace, as she had every night for the last fifty years. She watched him with huge eyes as she continued to strive against death. He could do no more than hold her and rock gently back and forth, until the whispering in his mind carried a new message. He froze.

“The baby’s been born, Clara!” he told her urgently. “She’s safe and healthy... screaming like a Pict, Clyde tells me. Clara, sweetheart, you don’t have to hurt any more.”

Her eyes grew sharp again. He knew what she was thinking. Years of rapport could not be destroyed by something so easy as dying.

He swallowed down his heart, stilled his mind in an instant. “I’ll be fine, Clara. I’ll be okay. You need to go. You can let go, Clara. I’ll carry it all for you.”

He kissed her gently.

“I love you, Michael,” she managed.

“I love you, Clara.” Terrified, he gave into his grief. “You find Anubis, Clara! You tell him they need a damn good programmer in Heaven. Take him by the balls and tell him I said –“ He sobbed.

“Make sure you’re well-fed.”

Michael cried, his meaningless sounds of grief resounding like the tears of Heaven’s host. No dirge could have been more appropriate or more heart-felt than the musical keening of the creation for its creator in the silence of the room. He held her and cried, his biorhythms fluxuating madly as her faded, then stopped completely. He held her while her body cooled, tears slowing at last, mind numb and hurting.

When he was sure her soul had truly flown, he tenderly lowered her to the bed and stood up. He arranged her body neatly, hands folded, eyes closed. A hint of a smile, her private smile for him, remained on her lips. Michael folded the sheets up to her breast, removed the intrusive wires and tubes one by one, his fingers gentle and sure. The spirits were with him as he combed her long thick white hair and arranged it on her pillow. Then he turned on the bedside lamp and looked at her.

No, she didn’t look asleep. Any person with sense, upon seeing a dead body no matter how carefully arrayed, will not confuse the conditions. She looked perfect and at peace, but empty. The others, present in his mind alone, took his grief and shared it, shouldering part of his burden, tasting the bitter sweetness of the new emotion, giving him their strength.

It was part of what tipped the scale. He made himself turn away from the bed and open the door, each step ripping new wounds in his heart.

“She has died,” he told the startled nurse waiting outside. Yes, she was gone. He ducked through the too-small doorway and strode down the hall with forced purpose. People got out of his way in a hurry. He’d seen his own reflection and heard enough comments to know that at the best of times he looked wild and powerful, beautiful and exotic – but when hurt or angry he was huge and terrible.

An “avenging angel” Clara had called him then.

He gritted his teeth and stepped up the pace, flaring his wings in agitation. Doctors and nurses he passed who hadn’t been informed of their famous patient and her infamous protector pressed themselves against the walls, expressions frightened. A seven-foot tall being with olive skin, black hair, and iridescently-white wings was barreling down the corridor at a quick march, bare feet silent on the tiles, loose trousers swishing, the open vest revealing powerful chest and abdomen. His face was blank and expressionless but his eyes blazed, and down his cheeks coursed unending tears.

He had learned decorum quite well, he thought as he walked and cried, but Clara had never let him be taught shame. He would not learn it now.

Michael lifted his chin. He made an abrupt turn for the elevator, stationed himself at the back, furled his wings with a snap, folded his arms across his chest, and sighed.

“Don’t worry,” he said morosely to the two watching him goggle-eyed – an orderly and an aging male patient in a wheelchair. “I’m not here for you.”

Down the cage descended. Fourteen floors later, he let himself out in the maternity ward. Left, right, right – what a maze. He passed “It’s a boy!” and “It’s a girl!” signs on each door, bright happy colors everywhere. Balloons, streamers, flowers. And then he came to the undecorated door and pushed it open without knocking, as if it was his right. As if he belonged.

Because he did. The child was his.

Four startled faces turned. In his highly emotional state he was getting pretty damned sick of people looking surprised at him.

The one on the bed, female, looking tired but smug and cradling a suspicious pink blanket wrapped bundle said “She’s dead.”

“Yes,” Michael rumbled in his melodic voice, rough with grief.

The woman on the bed looked strangely relieved. “I’m sorry to hear that, Michael. We know you greave heavily.”

“So do I,” he said. Clyde rose from his alert but comfortable post on the floor, hooves clattering. Clyde was a centaur, with a tendency towards passionate emotion and melodrama, but as loyal and true as anyone could ask for. His first loyalty had been to Clara, and now that she was – now that she had gone, he was faithful to Michael, and to the blanketed bundle in her daughter Cameron’s arms.

He was in the mood to hate anyone right now, up to and including the unknown nurse, Cameron’s mostly inoffensive husband and biological father of the child, and Clyde – one of his closest friends. But especially Cameron... for what she hadn’t been to her own mother, and what she could not be to him now but most of all for wearing the look on her face that meant “To get my child, you’ll have to go through me.”

Even though she had signed that agreement, and not contested the official will. Bitch.

But he gritted his teeth again and didn’t let anything show. “May I hold her?” he requested, and saw Cameron flinch slightly.

It was his voice that did it to her. The Avatars’ voices were all peculiarly harmonic, seeming to carry the weight of a full choir and pipe organ behind each sentence, by virtue of the half-metallic, half-latex composition of their vocal cords. Some semi-skilled poet with a Byronic slant and a letch for one of the angel girls had christened them the Singers, and so Avatars had been in popular vernacular ever since. From her very first memories Cameron could recall distrusting anyone with a voice that sang even when speaking.

She had reason. She would not fight this agreement, no matter how absurd she thought it, for two reasons. One, she had already signed it in a moment of greed, and to attempt to reneg or take legal action would result in her never even glimpsing one penny of her mother’s billions. Two, her mother had a piece of blackmail information on her, as terrible as it sounds – some dark and horrible secret. Now Clara Willow was gone, true, but everyone knew… Clara’s secrets were Michael’s knowledge.

“Give her to me,” he commanded again in a louder tone.

The nurse looked at Cameron, who hesitated for a long moment and then nodded. A complicated exchange began, trying to make sure that head and bottom were duly supported and all the bits tucked in as they transferred the limp, sleeping newborn. Cautiously the nurse advanced across the tile, well aware that she carried the richest child in the world. Having studied the prior exchange, Michael was able to take the baby with considerably more finesse than he would have had otherwise. The nurse stepped back.

Suddenly he realized he was holding her, by himself. He was holding a baby for the first time. He hadn’t known they were so warm, or that they had a real present weight unbelievable for one so small. But the gently snoring bundle was fragile, too. If dropped, she would break.

With a trembling hand he smoothed back the blanket. They’d dressed her in a little pink outfit, soft to the touch. Her tiny chubby hands rested just below her rosebud mouth. Long lashes fluttered on her cheeks.

He held her more carefully, feeling those old flames mounting up again. She is mine, Michael thought fiercely. I will take her and dress her in every color of the rainbow. I will feed her and bathe her and put her to sleep each evening. I will be the face she sees when she laughs for the first time. Her first steps will be towards my open arms. I will be her all.

And he mused as he stroked his ward’s soft cheek with a thumb… perhaps she and her grandmother had passed each other in the ether like trains in the night, one coming in and one going out. Could they have met, touching ever so briefly? Would they have known?

“Welcome home,” he whispered. “Welcome home, little Clara.”

**********

That night, since they would not let him take her home yet, he stationed himself across the hall from the clear-windowed infant’s ward. There she slept, on the third row, fifth from the right, her fist pressed to her lips. Mothers, fathers, and siblings passed in a nearly endless cooing procession, but he towered above them all and never lost sight of his ward, his child. Tired and emotionally drained, he locked his knees and went to sleep standing up, an open-eyed, ever-alert statue.

He dreamed of Heaven, as usual.

Clara had done for her brain-child what no one could have done for her. Michael had nearly always known where he as a sentient, soul-bearing entity would go when, by choice or by chance, he had to forsake his physical form. For all his life corporeal, he’d dreamed of Heaven every night.

Heaven really was a big computer, buried in a deep cement-lined vault beneath Clara’s mansion. Powered by a generator fueled by both electricity and alternately by an underground stream/solar battery, it was built to withstand and outlast the end of the world, if necessary. It had only existed for forty years or so now and no one had yet died, thank Goddess, so currently the only permanent residents were the Seraphim.

The Seraphim were beings that had never had a physical body, programs that constantly tended the larger program “Heaven”. While all the Singers had access to the greater Willow database, they were limited in the fact that they had to take interesting in something and search for the information – such as the book “The Count of Monte Christo”, Michael’s favorite so far – before they would have that knowledge in their minds. The Seraphim were not so limited. They had access to the entire database at once, which made them a bit on the deep and thoughtful side.

Heaven was a huge and airy place, with ever-changing seasons. When Michael came to himself in the garden, it was autumn and the air crackled with cold. He stood from the marble bench, wild and magnificent, and surveyed the gathering.

First he saw the faery people, numbering fifty or so now, male and female playing in the falling leaves, iridescent wings flitting, none of them over five feet tall. There were more angel girls than he previously remembered seeing. The females were from five to six feet tall, their wings various shades of peach and pink feathers. The angel men were a bit taller, with feathers ranging from deep blue to pitch black. Michael was alone in his stature and color. While the faery people remained garden inhabitants and exotic but pleasant dinner companions, angels tended to be majordomos, accountants, tutors, and body guards. The sylphs, female for the most part but with some beautiful slender males, inhabited the huge fountain, leaning on the sides to drink their wine and converse with other Singers. Even in Heaven, being out of water made a sylph uncomfortable.

Unicorns, centaurs, and griffons populated the park as well, along with several animals – dogs, cats, birds, and so on – that looked fairly normal except for being two or three sizes too large. It reminded him of Narnia; the moonlit night, the strange menagerie that was a meeting of citizens.

And, perched on a high branch talking down to a centaur was the brilliant glittery form of Gyrfalcon, the young phoenix. He was rather special, true, for all of the winged creatures here he was the only one functional. That is, he could fly in real life as well as in Heaven. Technology had come a long way, as they all knew. But it still had far to go.

They were all there, for Clara’s wake and Clara’s welcome. It was almost as confusing as British succession, but twice as personally significant. Faces were turning his way, like flowers, smiling in welcome. Some of the unattached angel girls had knowing looks on their faces as they advanced on him, swaying in their beautiful walks. Suddenly sickened, he backed away from the exotic crowd and launched himself into the air with a mighty beat of his wings, headed for the temple.

There was something new, he noticed from the air. Curious, he landed on the steps right next to the thing and examined it for a long moment.

They had erected a statue to honor Clara. No, thank Goddess, not on a pedestal. In life she wouldn’t have allowed it, as they knew. No, the bronze likeness of her younger self – as he remembered her – sat comfortably on the marble steps of the temple, wearing her customary blouse and loose pants. In her right hand she held a book, on whose blank pages her bronze eyes were intent.

Like always. If she couldn’t be here in spirit, she would stay forever in simulacrum.

He sat down heavily on the step beside her, wings flaring. He watched the brown leaves blow by, then spoke softly.

“I don’t know what to do. I’m scared. This feeling… it doesn’t leave me. No one feels it as much as I do. Everywhere I look, I see something that reminds me you are gone.”

He sighed. “You never let me hurt before now. I don’t know whether to chide you or thank you, but there it is. All I have left is a huge estate to handle, your daughter who hates me, and a baby. Nothing makes up for you.

“My mind, it runs in circles now. It tosses up memories. I remember the crinkle at the corner of your eyes when you laughed. I remember when you’d run your hands on my wings, make me shiver. I remember the scent of every inch of your flesh. I remember touching your belly when we made love, wishing I could make you pregnant with my seed – our baby! I can’t stop remembering!

“You’ve left me no one to cry to. All I have here are Seraphim who know everything about life and nothing about living, and beings that are children compared to me. Oh, and human – but you know how generally useless they are. I have to be everyone’s shoulder, everyone’s father. Except for the unattached angels, who just want to *do* things to me.” He shivered. Angels had interesting sex lives and although Michael was uninhibited in lovemaking, his passion for Clara had made him monogamous almost by accident.

“I miss you. I want you back. Do you know that, throughout my memories, there has never been a time that I’ve spent more than a day outside your presence? Every time I turn, every voice I hear, every flutter of motion – I expect to find you there.

“I don’t know how to cope with this pain that doesn’t leave… this misery. How could you leave me with no one to love? With no one who loves me? How could you, Clara?”

He ached, down in his gut, knees shaking, shoulders bowed, every inch given to despair as he put his head in his hands.

“I love you. I miss you. My Clara...”

Michael felt the hand on his knee, the sudden closeness of a presence sweet and familiar. He froze.

“The magic is this... we meet, we know, we love. In dying we are reborn – to meet, know, and love again. Through love, nothing is *every truly lost*.”

He could hear her breath as she recited the passage from the Rede, feel it on his shoulder, his throat. A surge of passion and terror rose up in him, paralyzing his voice even as it hardened his loins. He was just turning, his eyes hungry for a glimpse, when the indignant voice rang out.

“You Bent it!” the Seraphim said. “Wait a moment, I’ll Bend it back.”

Heat and light descended on Michael. He looked around hurriedly when normal sight returned but it was no good. The statue looked as if it hadn’t moved and if any other spirit had been there it was gone.

“What have we told you,” the self-righteously angry puffball of feathers, eyes, and flames continued, “about Bending things in Heaven?”

Ezekiel the Seraphim was the first such of its kind, and perhaps a bit too pompous for the fact. The trouble with Singers out of Avatar, as they were in Heaven, was that they were powerful sentient programs released on other, unprotected, less intelligent software. So when a Singer made a conscious effort of will or had an uncontrolled surge of emotion, the virtual reality program involved was Bent. Although this was a quick and easy way to modify software, done improperly it could be lethal to the program.

But instead of chanting the usual mantra of “Don’t Bend anything in Heaven unless you have the express, and we mean express, permission and guidance of a Seraphim”, he stammered “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – but did you see her?”

“What?”

“Clara! She was here!”

“All I saw was the statue, leaning to one side with its hand extended.” The Seraphim paused, uncertain. Within the ever-batting, ever-blinking tumble of eyes and wings one could see on just the edge of one’s imagination the figure of a beautiful naked man. You could catch glimpses as the Seraphim hung in the air – the echo of an elbow in a gout of flame, the suggestion of a thigh in the curve of a wing. Never the man altogether but he was there, overlaid on the Seraphim body like that picture of the old woman that turns into the young lady and back again when you look at it in different ways… an optical play.

“Are you okay, Michael?”

“I’m just peachy,” he replied sullenly.

“Bullshit,” Ezekiel said calmly, startling Michael again with his raw use of the vernacular. He fluttered his wings – laid his hands – on Michael’s forehead. Michael could appreciate the symbolism: the gesture was of a human checking another for fever, while Ezekiel was really scanning the program known as Michael for errors or viruses based on unusual output.

“You should take it easy,” the Seraphim said at last, having found no obvious illness. “You’ve just had a heavy loss. I’m surprised you’ve not been seeing more strange things.”

“Thanks a lot, Mom.”

“Shut up, I’m serious.” He floated closer, and several of his eye locked on Michael with strange unreadable gazes.

“Are you trying to flirt with me?” Michael said at last.

The puffball shuddered, all indignant again. “Baby, you aren’t even my type,” Ezekiel huffed. “Now, is there anything else I can do for you before I go stop everyone else from ripping up my realm?”

“Suggest something for me to read,” Michael begged. “Anything to occupy my time.”

A tiger’s eye and a shadow gave shape to a pursed pair of lips. “I have just the thing. ‘The Once and Future King’.” A book materialized out of the air, heavy and leather-bound, and landed in Michael’s lap.

“This is an Arthurian legend, isn’t it?” Michael said suspiciously. “How could this possibly help my grief?”

“It’s long,” the creature said. “And it’s beautiful. And it has nothing to do with grief and all to do with life. And it’ll last you till the morning. Ta, now!” With a last wave of a wing, Ezekiel was gone.

Michael opened the book and read each page; slowly, like a human. He drank in the prose, assembled each scene in his imagination. It was long, and it was beautiful, but it still couldn’t make him resist cupping the statue of Clara in one wing, warming it against his body as he read.

But the bronze neither moved nor breathed, and Michael opened his eyes on the infant ward in the morning, and not on the face of his beloved.