Beyond Page 6

  “Is there a particular reason?”

  “I’ve been . . . traveling.”

  “Traveling. I see. Where have you been traveling?”

  “Oh, here and there.”

  Now the main guy, the first one to speak, was visibly angry. Bingo. I loved it. He put down his drink. I could see his jaw moving as he grit his teeth. “Traveling where?”

  “Beyond the station.”

  “You are aware you’re not permitted to skip appointments especially to travel beyond your designated zone.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “What business do you have there?”

  “No business, really. Just taking in the sights.”

  “This is not a joke. I don’t know what you think you’re trying to prove. Why have you been traveling there instead of meeting your appointments? I expect a direct answer.”

  So at that point I figured I’d give them the whole truth. They’ve waited long enough.

  “Well . . . ,” I said and then cleared my throat. I decided to use the same technique they did when starting a sentence. “Well, I was meeting with Bathas.”

  “The doctor? Dr. Deithar Bathas?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you skipped your mandatory appointments with Dr. McCarthy so you could visit that maniac?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  “Answer it with the truth.”

  “I’m not sure that’s possible considering how you worded the question.”

  I could see my friend Vollmer holding in a chuckle. He had always found me amusing.

  For a minute, no one spoke. I didn’t know if they were trying to figure me out or if they were just trying to come up with a suitable consequence.

  “Well . . . you really leave us no choice.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re sending you back.”

  “Back?”

  “Yes,” the main guy said. “Back to Earth.”

  Yesu meets the young man on the hill overlooking the base.

  “You wanted to talk to me,” Yesu says.

  “I did. I want to know why you’re here.”

  “Where? On this hill? You called me here.”

  “You know damn well what I mean. Why are you here, on Mars?”

  “That’s a silly question to ask at this point, don’t you think? After all, immigration is quite commonplace.”

  “It is. But why are you here, specifically. What’s your goal?”

  “Must I have a goal?”

  “Everyone has a goal even if they don’t know it.”

  “Maybe I don’t know it then. I’m just here . . . to be here.”

  “Stop playing games with me.”

  “No games. You know I don’t play games.”

  “So answer me.”

  “I’m here for the same reason everyone else is here.”

  “Money?”

  “Ha! Money. No, no, nothing as crass as that. I’m here to rip open the cosmos and eat its entrails. I’m here to disembowel Sophia and find the map.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “So are you.”

  “But I’m in control. I’m not delusional.”

  “Everyone here is delusional.”

  “Don’t fool yourself.”

  “I’m not the fool. You called me here for this?”

  “No,” the young man says. “I called you here for this.”

  The young man pulls out a firearm and shoots Yesu between the eyes.

  I feel physically and emotionally tied to this machine, this craft that’s taking me to Mars. It could be the medications, I know that. Side effects. Or just the effects. I didn’t read the pamphlet. But I think my body and mind have gotten used to the effects by now and this newfound feeling of oneness with the ship is something different, something utterly new. I want to melt into its metal, have subatomic intercourse, a conception immune to cosmic abortion.

  Then what? Would I even need the pills? I would think not and I would hope not. The need to cease to exist as this, as a person aboard this craft. I think, or maybe I imagine I think, that I could be something greater than this, a person aboard this craft, something beyond my old and new illnesses that need medications that don’t exist. Maybe I can evolve into a biomechanical basket case, something transcendent compared to the reality of things.

  Then what?

  I have no idea. Or, at least, I imagine I have no idea.

  In the field hospital, Barry looked at his leg. The snipers had gotten to his leg, shattered the knee cap. The hell if he was going to let the doctors amputate it. All they wanted to do was pump him full of drugs, no wait, medication, that was it. That’s what they called it, the same stuff they give to the poor bastards back home. Sure they work but at what cost? He thought about that other guy, Paul, who lost a leg only to have it replaced with recycled Martianite flesh. The man shuddered at the—

  Wake up.

  “I’m a doctor. You’ve been injured.”

  “What? Where am I?”

  “Be calm. We had to amputate.”

  “What?”

  “Your leg is gone.”

  The hell it is. There’s no way the doctors took the leg. No way.

  The man looks down and sees nothingness where his limb should have been. He wants to go to sleep even if it’s a drug induced one.

  Transcendence?

  You’re joking, right? As if you, lowly cosmonaut, would ever be able to split the veil open, enter the penetralia of the temple, and see those things of which we’ve only seen hints.

  You can witness the dissolution of your hopes as the doctors work on your. Life will not get any easier, that I can promise.

  The world is a pitiful and painful place and you’ll watch it bleed while you yourself bleed. Let the canals run red with your drugged despair. You’ve already signed the contract. You might as well burn your eyes out gazing upward. There’s no turning back.

  Make your peace with God.

  I sleep with the pill bottle next to my pillow and through its translucent orange I see the Martian landscape outside the window. The crosses are still there and on them the Lion’s compatriots. They are most likely full of the same pills now dissolving in my stomach. Good for them. One last grasp toward normality before blast off.

  But I mean no disrespect. YHWH knows I’ve been there, in that same situation except on Earth of course, when I wasn’t the Demiurge’s puppet, all business, a man of industry. Now I see things for what they are and not what I desire them to be. This life is difficult for someone like me but even moreso for the native population, the so-called Martianites, though I imagine we can just call them people at this point. It doesn’t really matter. They are the victims of the slaughter as well as the perpetrators. Aren’t we all?

  The doctors tell the men to concentrate.

  That’s all.

  Just sit and concentrate and everything will fall into place. Their weapons are the latest from the company and will decimate their enemies.

  Both sides are looking at the sky now.

  The doctors give out more medication.

  A pattern explodes against the orange veil.

  A roar.

  A trembling.

  Horns sound.

  The doctors tell the men to rush in, move forward, don’t relent.

  The men are confused as their enemy.

  What enemy?

  The drugs kick in but they kick in the wrong way.

  The men, all the men, collapse in tears and the terrain pumps primeval blood. The enemy rushes forward, blinded and weak, and the entire business is settled in rifts of intoxicated panic.

  He didn’t want to be an astronaut anymore.

  He didn’t even know why he had become one. Nothing in his nature made any indication at all that he was predisposed to that field.

  Maybe he was crazy for choosing this or maybe it was really an obligation, one to his company, to himself, deep down inside, a desire for isolation and po
ssibly obliteration, from birth to annihilation, encompassed within a scatological desire to scavenge the filth of the universe.

  He thinks of Susan.

  He left her in the hospital, catatonic, withered, empty enough that he needn’t feel guilty about walking out the hospital doors.

  But he does feel guilty.

  This last time, his last trip, funny way of putting it, last trip, like it’s a finality, a final trip into a cosmic charnel house.

  The way I see it, we came here for one reason: to expand industry, to make the planetary system one monumental industrial park. That appears contrary to the cosmospiritual (or psychoreligious, depending on your ideological persuasion) foundation upon which the entire society was built. The pharmaceutical aspect cannot be understated, however. Let’s face it: most pioneers of industry were on strict regimes of pills, capsules, tablets, inhalents, and injections prescribed to them by the industry doctors. In fact (and this may be a controversial stance depending on where one falls on the Barryington Spectrum) there is evidence that suggests the first settlement on Mars was a front for one company’s illicit manufacturing of a highly potent and highly addictive substance which was, some say, a precursor to what is widely known today as Taborica. It is also suggested that this was also the primary catalyst for our present political and industrial systems being on the verge of certain collapse.

  Their techniques are kept secret from most though the bulk of them have not survived under the veil of secrecy as a result of varied methods of clandestine divulging caused by advances in what has been christened the future of psywarfare, the method by which a majority of participants have infiltrated the stream of biological data crucial to the machinations that permeate the entire social construct inherent in the pharmaceutical industry since the implementation of measures that built the entire infrastructure which, in hindsight, simply restructured the existing system, the one originated from decades of attempts to reconcile the astropharmaceutical and psychospiritual aspects of the multitude of individuals who, under even the best of circumstances, struggled to enlighten themselves after years of seemingly endless bombardment of accusations set forth by hierarchal professionals who studded the establishment until the reinvention of the aforementioned psywarfare. But I digress.

  For years, the occupants found what would later be called accidental messages despite the cryptic quality of the messages being so obtuse as to veil any indication of their being actual messages, but instead left a trail of nonsequential factoids that presented as simple accidents, random bits that would, someday, be seen as a whole but, to the occupants, who were resistant to recognizing any underlying meaning, simply fluttered in the atmosphere as unidentified puzzle pieces. Recently, however, the occupants have come to accept that there is some truth to the theory that these accidental messages were indeed messages and held some semblance of meaning.

  Suspicion illuminates the industry, revealing the guts of particular medicinal conspiracies, the theories spouting from those men who perpetuate the standards of interstellar treatment. The spectrum on which most individuals fall is dependent upon the theories set forth by the forefathers of techniques established by the industry which, in itself, is not dependent upon those forefathers despite theories to the contrary. That being said, the conspiracies often enlightened the participants despite the faults of the treatment.

  My brain is a space, a void, or something else equally cliché. My body is a fragile universe I have no control of . . . I imagine the pills as spaceships (that is my intent, anyway, and intention is everything up here). They enter my body and I let them explore and explode. Such is life (a fantastic life!). The stench of the unknown, an airless capsule. I pull the blanket over my head, a funeral veil between me and the chipped paint on the ceiling. When will the experiments end? I can see you. I can see you. You’re not in the room but I can see you and you can see me.

  The centuries have not been kind to our subject who, after multiple revisionary biographies, has developed into a quasi-mystical figure dependent upon the very consciousness he sought to destroy. You had that dream again, the one where you don’t go to Mars and you stay here instead. On Earth. As it is in heaven. No, you don’t get to take part in the expansion of . . . expansion of what? In the dream you swore to get there, to Mars, at any cost. You woke from your dream covered in red sweat, wondering why you had to go to the doctor in the first place.

  The reasoning behind the forced manifestation of the Lion was put to rest years ago. Aside from a miniscule number of individuals who find themselves at odds with the more progressive majority, a majority which continues to disassociate themselves from the inherent qualities it possesses as a result of the manifestations, there is a group dedicated to the Lion exclusively. Those who seek reasons for this find themselves in the Martian landscape, shot at by snipers, the assassins responsible for the Queen’s death. That does not matter to most. It is only the future that exists in the cosmically-inclined minds. Only the future.

  The past weakens me.

  I sit here in this room they’ve given me.

  Forced me in.

  Who am I but the Lion?

  I see you.

  I see you retracing your mental steps.

  Looking for a sign of me.

  I hear you breathing.

  You have hope for me.

  But your hope is a hex.

  They’ve given me pills.

  Told me to concentrate.

  The landscape will change, they said.

  It may be true.

  After all, I don’t claim to know everything.

  But I know I’d like to choose my purpose.

  All of these men working to build, build, build.

  Sell, sell, sell.

  I have a role in there someplace.

  It doesn’t bother me.

  Having a purpose suits me fine.

  It’s their approach that disturbs me.

  Their techniques.

  Methods.

  The pills.

  Capsules.

  Prayers.

  Are you okay?

  I don’t know how to answer that.

  I have never been okay.

  Just give me the pills and let me stare at this wall.

  I stare within the spheres, into them, beyond them.

  Unanswered questions left to rot in my mind.

  The landscape is changing.

  We kill a few of them, sure, it isn’t difficult, understand? They run at us like rabid animals so we just shoot them. Nothing personal. In fact, I understand why they do what they do but still, it is what it is.

  Now, I’m not a great shot but they move clumsily enough that I could get quite a few of them, their brains decorating the Martian terrain, the brains corrupted by the meds they get from our very own doctors and for what? Just to rot inside like the rest of us who have to deal with the constantly changing doses and combinations and whatnot. It blows your mind up, really, just blows it up until you can’t do anything but the task at hand.

  We can’t do this kind of thing back on Earth, not anymore. Too many restrictions, too much red tape, too much bureaucratic insanity.

  I occasionally take sips from my canteen that’s full of whiskey not water because out here, out here you need something stronger than water, and anyway, water isn’t like the water back home so I stick with whiskey like most of the other guys.

  We keep killing until our task is done. We feel bad, we feel some sympathy but, you know, it’s just business and here, where we are, business is the most important thing, well, business and God.

  The forming of a company is a spiritual undertaking not unlike the construction of a temple. That is especially the case here as a result of the rich history of crucifixions. Of course, that particular process was conceived as a primitive method of execution but slowly became a beacon of cosmological birth that remarkably appeared independent yet simultaneously at two different planetary sites. The intersecting of two lines, one shorte
r than the other, creating four ninety-degree angles, solidifies, in the minds of those who form a company, the reality of the formation inherent in the crucifix upon which the taboric-industrial complex could be nailed for all to bare witness.

  In New Merkabah, the snipers make certain the road is clear for the Lion’s arrival.

  Mitchell watches from a hill. It’s been years since he has witnessed actual unsimulated death.

  He readies his gun.

  Things could go very badly, he knows this and fears this.

  But a job’s a job.

  He fears the Lion but not enough to succumb to that fear.

  The corpses on the crosses have told Mitchell all he needs to know, all the knowledge required to transcend this place.

  Business has taken over.

  Mitchell aims.

  The Lion roars.

  Dr. McCarthy injects the old man with what he says is a transition of proper business practices but the bottle simply reads Taborica ER.

  “It will begin to take effect in ten to fifteen minutes,” the doctor says. He sits silently smoking a cigarette and watching the old man wait for the transmission to come through.

  The old man closes his eyes and mutters the first words ever spoken in the history of the universe.

  The doctor roars with laughter. Finally, this version of the medication works. The old man will soon be in the proper viewing state.

  Now all Dr. McCarthy has to do is call his other patient so the final order of business can be concluded.

  He has to call Barry.

  I read the files they have on me. They are all nonsense. When they aren’t outright lies, they are superfluous or exaggerated. Mostly, it was things that were far from relevant to this whole business with Mars.