“I know that woman. Her name’s not Camilla. It’s Annie Piper. She was a friend of mine. She’s not a thing to be used. She’s precious.”
If Bridget or Panthea or Sparky was surprised, none of them showed it. We knew we were on a mission of meaning, and that it abruptly became personal only confirmed the feeling I had that our journey might prove to be a quest for some object of redemption.
“Take us to Bodie Emmerich,” I demanded of Timothy, “or those Moujiks wearing shock collars will spend their evening cleaning your brains off the wall.”
|?34?|
Psychic magnetism would have led us to Bodie Emmerich, perhaps so would have Winston, but probably neither would have been as swift a guide as Soul Timothy with a gun to his head.
In the tornado of my rage, I expected that my companions might disapprove of my rash action, but they all drew their weapons and none raised an objection. They were as incensed as I was. Besides, we shared the concern that, with the day soon to end, the task before us might be complicated by eighty-seven other soul children emerging from their rooms under the influence of whatever, alarmed into the defense of their hive and of the guru of the ephemeral and the excessive, who had spent billions crafting the place.
A button concealed in molding released an electronic lock, and a segment of the golden amboina-wood paneling in this third of three large communal chambers slid aside. A staircase led down to the lowest level of the building.
Responding to my question and to the insistent pressure of the Glock muzzle against his skull, Tim said, “Yeah, alone, he’ll be alone with night not yet here. We gotta rebel against the circadian rhythm that says daylight is life and night is death or a preview of it. That’s a construct of the evil side of bipolar Nature, the Queen of the Void. The Queen serves those corporate masters who want us to work our lives away according to their time clocks, and convert us from alpha emitters to gamma.”
As we descended the stairs, I despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion. So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn’t even see it. They were everywhere in our time, controlled by those who taught them to fear what didn’t threaten them and receive with gladness those ideas and forces that would rob them of purpose, of meaning, of security—and sooner than later would take away their lives as well.
The stairs ended in a twenty-foot-diameter circular vestibule more lavishly appointed even than the spaces on the level above. The ceiling was leafed with gold and inlaid with what I took to be rows of real sapphires. Dimensional, layered crystal forms paneled the walls, and through them passed amber light from an unknown source, projecting prismatic patterns on us, so that we looked like puzzles assembled from sharp-edged geometric pieces.
We were meant to be awed, and we were not.
Soul Timothy said that the door to the left led to the rooms in which the Special Selections were, as he put it, “quartered,” when he should have said imprisoned.
The door to Emmerich’s apartment was on the right. Tim pleaded that the fingerprint scanner controlling the lock responded only to the hands of Emmerich or those of the two physicians who, at their election and in return for seven-figure fees, lived in the Oasis.
As she had done at the main entrance, Panthea placed one palm against that barrier, and by the power invested in her, she released the lock and swung the door open wide.
With a pistol pressed to his head, Tim hadn’t shown any physical manifestation of fear. Now, when he crossed the threshold into the sanctum of the Light, he trembled visibly and paled beneath his tan. These were tremors born of the awe that the rest of us were expected to feel but didn’t. When this soul child put two fingers to his forehead, lips, and heart, my contempt for him was softened by pity. His addiction to the Way was worse than dependence on any drug. He was surely lost forever, with no route back to a rational existence.
Inside the apartment, we were led toward our target by light music, voices, applause, a quick burst of laughter. A TV program.
The rooms were palatial in their appointments if not in their scale. But I was so exhausted by the extravagance of Emmerich’s lifestyle that nothing interested me other than finding that emperor of darkness who called himself the Light.
Although he lived day for night, he wasn’t at breakfast now that the declining sun would soon serve to mark his dawn. We located him in a neon-dazzled arcade with at least a dozen pinball machines as well as early stand-alone consoles like Ms. Pac-Man and Galactic Invaders. There was also a large TV on one wall and in front of it a podium. Emmerich stood at the podium, sidewise to us, barefoot and perhaps naked under a red-silk robe. He was facing the big screen, one hand hovering over a white button the size and shape of half an orange. He was watching what appeared to be a classic episode of Jeopardy! hosted by a fortysomething Alex Trebek.