Pavlov's Parallel Realities

Sometime a few decades in the future: The Planck Telescope hangs almost motionless in the near-absolute zero of (relatively) deep space. Nothing new or truly remarkable to report, really.

Without warning, from the farthest reaches of the universe, thunders in a tsunami of photons. It resolves into a chaotic panorama as hundreds of billions of suns quadrille into new, "other" galaxies, really, really close to the initial moment of rapid expansion.

The Planck's exquisitely engineered symphony of analog machinery, near-perfect primary surface mirrors, lenses, digital sensors and computational devices soak up this revisionist Big Bang - really more of a Messy Kablooey - without judgement. And in their unbiased way, reroll the whole shootin' match into a very big string of zeros and ones.

Then, before they flashcast a narrowly focussed datastream back to the Terran mothership, they perpetrate a serioco(s)mic mindfuck upon certain inhabitants of that blue orb by tying the string into a series of very fancy coexistent quantum knots.

These knots are best described - if by "describing", one means "confusing a picture already incomprehensible to any mere mortal whose name isn't either Stephen Hawking or Zaphod Beeblebrox" - as something resembling - if by the word "resembling" one means "resembling not a whit in some states while simultaneously carrying all the attributes of it in others" - a Schroedinger's Cat's Cradle.

Eminent radio-astronomers and the eminent theoretical physicists with whom they work, long frustrated by virtue of having signed, in whatever passes for blood in academic circles, some serious, serious chits for billions in research bucks that until now have produced exactly squat, suddenly develop a new frustration, at least as unexpected as The Event itself.

Because now they they can't tell anybody what they've stumbled into. At least not without booking mandatory assessments for the psych ward before they scurry for the back door of the news conference.

Naturally enough under the circumstances, they all do what they have to: go AWOL, sneak out of the country on false passports, chip in the remainders of their research grants to rent, very cheaply, an obscure after-hours bar in an undisclosed location where nobody will ever recognize them, and proceed to get really, really blind drunk on a blend of grape Tang, tequila and single-malt scotch. For weeks.

Cosmic plumbing, reasonable rates...

When they returned, six hours later, Francesco was calm but glum. It was Molina whose brow was lined with exhaustion.

"It's clear then," he said tiredly. "I have no time to waste. I have to catch the next plane out of Milano for the States. Things are moving way too fast."

"True, my son. The proverbial poo-poo's gonna hit the propeller at their next concert, if it hasn't already,” nodded Francesco, pulling a decanter from a spacious and well-stocked sideboard. "A vecchio for the road, then, old friend."

He poured the spirit into two ancient metal cups that might have been gold, handed one to Molina and toasted.

"To the good guys."

"To the good guys, then."

Molina drained the cup, set it down and turned to go.

Francesco coughed. The Levantine turned halfway back to him, a questioning tilt to one black eyebrow.

"And Molina? Tell Jerry for me that the last album was dynamite, willya?"

Molina nodded. "If I make it in time."

Then he was gone.

Francesco nodded quietly to the empty doorway. A single dust bunny pirouetted in the lamplight to show anyone had been there at all.

"Yeah. If you make it in time."

He shook his head ruefully, and repeated something under his breath. To a fly on the wall or an angel, it would have sounded suspiciously like, "Jesus. The tools we use on these cosmic plumbing jobs..."

He could have been talking about Molina, but he wasn't.

*****

The next morning, a well-scrubbed monk in a plain brown habit stepped from a second class compartment on the train from Parma, walked out of Milano Centrale train station, bought a hazelnut gelato and hailed a taxi for the airport. The fare came to 45,200 lire, less the price of a gelato, exactly.

He walked to the Al Italia desk, and in a crude southern peasant accent booked a ticket on the first possible flight to Chicago. He charged it to an obscure American Express account ostensibly held by the Vatican.

It was so obscure, even the Vatican didn't realize it existed. But when the female ticket attendant routinely ran the card through a telephone authorization machine, it cleared unquestioned.

The transaction over, the monk - somehow - pinched her fashionably miniskirted ass from the opposite side of the high counter, then disappeared through customs. He carried no luggage except for a handful of excellent Cuban cigars.

"...I hope they know what the hell they're doing..."

The bus lurched to a stop in a cloud of diesel, clutch and brake fumes. Molina climbed off the back exit, moving casually down the hill from the town's main piazza to a large building. He knocked on a heavy, iron-bound door.

The novitate monk who eventually opened it eyed him with a glance as jaded and suspicious as Guiseppe Aldo's. Telling Molina they were fresh out of alms for the day, he began to swing it shut.

Molina stuck his foot in the crack. He appeared completely unmoved as the considerable momentum of the heavy door crunched to a loud halt on his instep. He quietly spoke a name. The novice reversed the door's ponderous progress and stared at Molina with new interest, awe, and not a little fear.

This vagrant, he realized belatedly, could bust his monkly chops in fewer seconds than the kind of loud and costly red Italian sports car that he had officially and forever forsaken lusting after, would need to demolish the speed limit on the autostrada.

The thought sank beneath his tonsure. He grinned a sick grin, bowed, scraped, tugged his short forelock, and fulsomely invited Molina into the monastery.

Molina smiled and accepted.

*****

Two hours later, the Levantine was bathed, shaved and clad in a simple clean brown monk's habit. He was also smoking a very good Cuban cigar and sipping an exquisite Armagnac from a large snifter, all in the beatific company of Father Francesco, 95-year-old conscience and patriarch of the Guidonian Order.

Father Francesco always said Saint Guido of the Apennines approved of Armagnac and cigars. The fact that absolutely nobody in the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy seemed to know exactly who the hell Saint Guido of the Apennines was, apparently left Father Francesco unperturbed.

"I don't know why you don't come more often, Molina," he said, his voice resonating with the power of one half his age. "You could certainly stand the personal hygiene. Thirteen years is a long time."

Molina drew on his cigar, turning it to look at the even ash and savor the smoke before he exhaled. He admired the last light of the sunset as it poured through a Renaissance leaded-glass window that filled one wall. Then he took an unhurried swallow of brandy.

"Yes," he said. "But there's much to keep me occupied out there, Francesco. Milo's given me the slip more than a few times. He's suspicious of me, which is as it should be" - Molina paused to smile his gap-fanged smile - "I don't want him knowing I represent your, uh, clients on a contract basis. But I've had to come very close once because he absolutely needed forceful persuasion. Any more than what I've done could tip your hand."

Father Francesco nodded.

"Milo doesn't trust in anything good anymore. He doesn't trust anything, really. We can't let him know that something good is on his side, and more actively involved than he thinks. He's already poured enough chemicals through his brain to turn any normal person into a vegetable. He finds out about this, he'd freak totally."

The colloquialism slipped off his tongue glibly. Father Francesco was 95, but he stayed current. He had to. He was more powerful than the Pope, although the Pope didn't know it. And wouldn't, if Francesco had anything at all to say about it.

"So what do you need, Molina?" Francesco said. "You didn't come back here for a bath and a cigar."

Molina smiled briefly at Francesco. They'd known each other a long time, and the joke was an old one.

"No," he said. "I gotta talk to the angels."

Francesco blew a thoughtful smoke ring, considering.

"Okay. Maybe it's time. We haven't disturbed them in decades, since they first told us about The Plan, but Pavlov's unpredictability is coming close to forcing their cards. Jesus, the makeshift tools we end up having to use on some of these cosmic plumbing jobs. . . "

The old priest shook his head wearily, for a moment looking every one of his 95 cheerfully misspent years.

"I know everything's ordained in its own time, but when you end up with a deck full of jokers like we've got this time. . . Lime jello, lust, Lenore and a laundry van in central America. The entire American military-industrial complex. And their batshit-crazy political masters. Sometimes I wonder what the divinities let themselves in for, here. I've never had serious cause to question them before, but this time, I find myself rather hoping that they know what the hell they're doing..."

Molina nodded, somehow managing to appear simultaneously sybaritic, businesslike, spring-fresh and Levantine-greasy. It was a talent.

Then Francesco seemed to tap an internal fountain of youth. He roused himself, stood, opened a concealed door in the ancient and rich paneling behind his desk and beckoned. Together the unlikely pair climbed the 106 worn stone steps to the top of the bell tower, up beneath the ancient slate acorn roof where angels dwelt.

The Angels of Bardi

Bardi is a small medieval village set on a mountain above the junction of three intersecting river valleys. It was for that reason, and because one of the valleys was a well-travelled trade route, that a farsighted and ambitious 12th-century Italian duke who recently had been expelled from Florence for questionable banking practices, along with some lesser de Medicis and Borgias, had built a modest summer keep on a commanding volcanic outcrop and set himself up in a new business. He named the watchtower Castello Bardi, after himself. The business was freelance tax and toll collection.

Later when he, the de Medicis and the Borgias returned to political favor in Florence, the duke left a few trusted family members to mind the shop. He returned to the intellectual stimulation of early middle-ages banking, and they continued to extort pike fees from merchant travellers for walking-around money.

It was about then that double-entry bookkeeping was invented. Some say it was due to a lack of provision for a zero in Roman numerals. Some say the Duke Bardi may have had a hand in it - that he and other civic-minded Florentine bankers didn't hold with that Arabic shit. Some say it was all just coincidence.

In the event, Castello Bardi turned out to be as lucrative as big-city book-cooking and money laundering. The country cousins prospered, and like good business people everywhere, plowed their profits back into improving capital assets and equity. They gradually expanded the original stone keep into one of the largest fortresses in southern Europe, replete with massive ramparts, parapets, chapel, bell tower, grand hall, porticullis, and a hell of a lot of little slits in the outer walls, through which many dozens of paid retainers could rain crossbow bolts upon anyone of whom the Bardi family didn't approve dropping by for a casual siege.

The town that sprang up outside the walls prospered to the point where, although its population never grew much beyond 4,000 people, it boasted four largish churches and three bell towers. By a complicated set of negotiations between the religious orders attached to each of the churches, monks took turns ringing the Angelus, hours, half hours, quarter hours, and a little carillon lullaby modelled after "Ave Maria" before they booked it and turned in at midnight.

It had been a diplomatic process worthy of a renaissance United Nations. It had taken a century to settle. And as a result, Bardi was a very noisy little village. Every 15 minutes, bells rang. Then startled roosters dozing on the hillside would crow confusedly. Then dogs all over the valley, disturbed by the crowing, would howl.

This was the first reason Molina regarded Bardi as his spiritual home.

"You never have to wear a watch in Bardi," he'd told Joe McCarthy one night in a Virginia roadhouse, during a rare moment of drunken, apparently complete, candor.

The second reason was that there was, in the medieval section of the village, a low Roman stone wall his father had been particularly taken with, before he had married Molina's mother. Molina the Elder had furtively taken his son aside one day and rhapsodized about it in tones usually reserved for regretfully lost romantic opportunities brought on by looking through old high school yearbooks. The boy was forever impressed with both the extreme unlikelihood of his own birth and the staying power of Roman architecture.

The third and last reason Molina regarded Bardi as his spiritual home was the bell tower of the most impressive of the medieval stone churches, set on a volcanic outcrop across a small valley from the one that held the castle.

The tower was tall for such a small village. It was a square spire of reddish-gray volcanic rock, topped with a slate-shingled dome that looked like nothing so much as the top of a giant petrified acorn. It had survived innumerable earthquakes, some of which had set the bells ringing faintly, looking no worse - and certainly no better - for the wear. The masons who had built it were rough and practical, given more to trued foundations and thick walls than to spitshined exteriors. The tower could charitably be described as craggy. It had been since day one. Day one was probably sometime shortly after the castle was built.

In the tower were four monumental cast bronze bells on worm-riddled hardwood mounts. Around the mounts lived pigeons, bats and swallows. The pigeons were common. Nobody saw the bats. The swallows circled and played around the tower top each sunny afternoon, like small dark shadows of angels.

Angels congregate in many guises and places in northern Italy. For example, there are the quiet and patient shaggy dark ponies that live wild, high on the mountainsides above Domodossola near the Swiss border; there are the hundreds of pure white cats which inhabit a blind side-alley just off the Chiesa di San Giovanni Chrisostomo, near the Grand Canal in Venice; and there are the myriad tiny quick swallows in the medieval church tower of Bardi.

So in fact they were angels. Only Molina and one ancient Italian priest knew.

Italian intermezzo

Guiseppe Aldo sold bus tickets from the Azienda Consorziale Trasporti kiosk on the sun-dappled plaza across from the Parma train station. His ticket window, with its little round speaking grill, oversaw a piazza dominated by a mossy fountain, in the center of which a plinth supported three twice-life-size statues. The tallest was a circa-18th-century Italian conquering hero type, flailing triumphant sword and boot over two generic cringing African natives prostrated either side. It was a memorial to Italy's best-forgotten colonial period.

Guiseppe Aldo had never cared enough about it to walk over and enlighten himself as to the conqueror's identity. He'd sat behind his window, regarding the swashbuckler's corroding green backside with a jaundiced eye, for 12 years.

He'd also watched, with jaded interest, the quiet and less-so antics of old men, Algerian and Tunisian youth, tourists and assorted gypsies who sat on marble benches set into the fountain's edge.

So when a short figure in a long, dirty duffle coat, greasy dark hair and Levantine features stepped from the railway station's main entrance and sauntered toward him across the piazza, Guiseppe's eye color shifted from jaundice to the kind of stony black found in veins of Carrara marble. He knew trouble when he saw it. He hated gypsies.

Even though he was behind thick tempered glass, and every exchange of lire for tickets took place through a theft-proof turntable embedded in the counter beneath that bulletproof sheet, he was wary. Especially of lengthy excuses and protests that would-be passengers plied in futile attempts to cadge free tickets.

Guiseppe didn't give free tickets. He was a rock. So he looked over the duffle-coated figure, correctly sensed a tenacity nearly as formidable as his own, and steeled himself for world class beseeching and wheedling.

He was thus a little surprised when the creature stepped to the window, proffered the correct 5,000 lire note and asked, in flawless upper-class Milanese Italian, for a biglietto to the village of Bardi, 50 kilometres south in the Apennine Mountains.

There was nothing wrong with the money, other than the fact that the nominally light-green note was smudgily stained the color of very strong cappuccino. The same smudged brown, in fact, as the creature's hands. It also bore a whiff of an overpowering fetid odor, like Gorgonzola cheese gone unsubtly overripe in the hold of a slow ocean freighter becalmed in the Horse Latitudes.

The man scooped his ticket and 200 lire in change from the turntable, smiled a polite brown snaggle-toothed grin, and sauntered to the fountain to sit on a smooth marble bench in the sun and wait for his bus.

Guiseppe Aldo had seen countless variations on that smile upon gypsies in the square many times. Alarmed, he reflexively slapped his pocket to feel for his wallet, even though he knew there was no way on heaven or earth that the gypsy could have reached him, or it, through the armored glass. It was still there. He breathed a sigh of relief.

It wasn't until his coffee break, after the Bardi bus was long gone, that he discovered all the money in his wallet had unaccountably vanished.

He could not fathom how the short strange man with the terrible personal hygiene and the faultless Milanese accent had done it. He knew it had to have been him. But it was impossible...

*****

The short strange man smiled an enigmatic smile, fingered 45,000 lire in loose bills in his duffle coat pocket, and watched the flat green Italian countryside turn to mountains as the dusty blue Fiat bus thrashed its slow way up the twisting road to Bardi.

The beautiful, shadowed late-afternoon scenery across the valley could have been lifted bodily from behind the Mona Lisa, and Molina felt content.

He seemed oblivious to the fact that his presence on the overfilled bus' rearmost bench had driven everyone else aboard to cram eight rows forward with wrinkled noses. It was no mean feat. Rural Italians have been known to smell plenty, but his aura was of far sterner stuff than theirs.

Yggdrasil

I know that I hung on a windy tree

nine long nights...

on that tree of which no man knows

from where its roots run.

-- The Edda

Men and women clutching hastily-grabbed pails and flashlights worked themselves into a ragged bucket brigade, snaking up the ridge toward the growing flames. More and more came running from the lower shacks to help. Hippies frantically passed water, drawn somewhere below, hand to hand in a futile effort to douse the fire. But it was an inferno now, roaring higher by the second.

The dancing circle of light spread, finally, to the spot where Milo lay stunned.

Azalia Dawn spotted him first. “There he is! Get him!!”

“Not again,” Milo thought. He tried unsteadily to winch himself to his feet, and managed a few steps before hard hands grabbed him and threw him back down.

“You goddamned pyro!” Azalia Dawn screamed at the top of her lungs. She kicked him viciously. “The instruments! My guitar's in there!”

She was weeping great tearing sobs. Then her face contorted even further and she screamed, “String him up!”.

Her voice was husky, the veins in her neck stood out like unearthed tree roots, her eyes wide with wrath.

Odd thoughts enter the minds of the condemned. Azalia Dawn suddenly seemed alluring to Milo.

Several men dragged him to a nearby arbutus tree, rabbit-punching him as he writhed, trying to break their hold on him. The gentle faded patchwork colors of their hand-me-down, hand-embroidered threads contrasted sharply with cold, dark murderous faces.

They began chanting: “String him up...! String him up...!”

“Yo-you don't understand!” Milo gasped through blood-laced snot and spittle. “I didn't mean to...”

“Too late, brother! You gonna pay!” a single venomous voice rose above the rest.

Then the mob fell silent with anticipation.

The only sound was the roar and crackle of the blazing ruins behind them. Somebody threw a worn hemp rope over a heavy branch. Anonymous eager hands fought with each other to tighten a crude, hasty loop around Milo's neck.

Suddenly, Rory materialized, flying, like an angel, chest heaving with the effort of running up the hill. The flames painted her face and her disarrayed halo of hair bright as she waded fearlessly into the mob.

She raised both hands in either benediction or protest, and opened her mouth, gasping, struggling to speak. She held the mindless mob briefly, silently still, willing it to draw it back from the tipping point, to grant life instead of death.

She'd been just too late. The pent-up frenzy she'd held back crashed around her like storm waves, engulfing everybody around and sweeping her back to the mob's edges.

“Say your fucking prayers, freak!” Azalia Dawn shouted, darkly triumphant

The rope went taut.

“No! No! NO!” Wheeler bellowed, striding with authority from somewhere in the darkness below.

He pushed to the front of the mob, where Milo spun half-hoisted on precarious tiptoes, eyes tight shut, jaw clenched, bracing himself for the final snap of the rope.The mindless rabble recomposed itself, became sentient again, realized Wheeler was there, still in charge.

Bill whiffed a strong, uncharacteristic rank smell, and concluded, correctly, that Milo had shit his pants. Instinctively, to stop himself gagging, he turned back to face the crowd, gulped unfouled air, and swallowed hard.

Milo relaxed one eyelid to a bare slit when he felt the rope slacken, but could see only exploding stars on a field of pulsing red. He gasped raggedly for breath, felt the air pound in to his starved lungs, and strained to listen.

“This is Ahimsa!" Wheeler was saying, almost quietly. "If you do this, everything we stand for -- everything I have worked so hard to build here -- dies too!”

The fire crackled agreement. The only other sound was Milo's quiet, sobbing breathing. Fearfully, as the red explosions cleared from his vision, he tried to make out his tormentors.

His focus pulled out past Wheeler's near, half-lit outline, picking through the tiny rabble's shamed faces, until he could make out the half-darkness beyond. His head snapped forward as far as the rope would allow, when he saw.

“Thank the gods! Just this once...!" He mumbled mushily through his broken, swelling mouth.

“You don't hafta vorry about him no more,” shouted Furlonger.

Surprised, the unraveling mob spun backward, from where a giant of a woman and a vile-looking, shrivelled old man came. Behind them, stretching far into the darkness and flickering like a Super 8 home movie flashed on pale wind-blown curtains, was a long ectoplasmic chain which might have been fleeting, transparent forms of tens of thousands of past lives. All seemed to wear the uncomfortable slumped posture of a certain M. Pavlov.

Suddenly, there on the ridge at Ahimsa, it seemed as if all of the world's air had been sucked noiselessly away. There was a cosmic pause. An involuntary, protracted hesitation. A collective, universal blink in space/time. Then air rushed back into the inexplicable void.

“Where'd he go?” someone yelled.

As one, the disoriented hippies turned back toward Wheeler. He stood, dramatic under the arbutus tree, the empty noose swinging gently behind him. The crowd swivelled their faces back out again, but there was no trace of ectoplasm left on the crisp air of the late winter mountain evening. There was nothing to see now but their own flickering shadows, falling downslope from the fire light.

What had they seen? Stunned silence gripped them all again. Many more long seconds passed.

Azalia Dawn's radiant anger was gone, deflated. Furtive shadows of shame had darkened her to something quite ugly.

Rory wouldn't look at her. She hugged her own chest and stared out over the darkened valley at something unseeable. Her mouth twitched wordlessly as silent, fire-brightened tears cascaded down her face.

Wheeler drew a rasping breath.

“And if you ever come back," he said, quietly, nearly conversationally, "I'll kill you with my own bare hands,” He sounded oddly humble. Perhaps even contrite. Almost as if he was giving a benediction.

The group fell silent again.

They watched as, far below them, dozens of dim cones of yellow incandescence that flashed and bobbed almost randomly, raking through rolling dust clouds thrown up by turning wheels on the gravel road. They neared the base of the ridge, and the cones resolved into tiny automobile headlights weaving a winding pattern that converged on the commune's gate.

Members of any isolated rural community knew too well what flames of that size boded, and were heading to offer what help they could. Hippies, the residents of Ahimsa may have been. Viewed with ambivalence, certainly. But they were also neighbors in need, and the code of such places in such times was unbending, even when those who would offer their help knew they were already too late.

Dante's El Cabino

Milo lingered after the humble vegetable-greens-and-broth supper, playing with a half-used book of paper matches at the communal table. He sensed instinctively that he was at the center of the uncommon silence. People here were usually more outgoing, even with new arrivals.

He crouched over his empty bowl and the matchbook. He'd kept his eyes down enough to memorize the jostle of print jamming the tiny cover: First and Last CHANCE...Jack London's Rendezvous... THE HISTORICAL SHOWPLACE OF OAKLAND... George Heinold, PROP.... 65 Years At 50 Webster Street... OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.

Often, as he'd furtively lifted his eyes from this literary birdshot to scan the room, he'd caught others on the long benches staring at him in an unpleasant, conspiratorial way. He had eaten only a little, and sat in silence after supper, striking matches to relight the candle down its smoke trail as a desultory personal challenge. He had balanced the spent ones on the bowl's lip, and the last one he'd placed there still smoked. When it fell onto the toilet paper he had used as a napkin, it smoldered unnoticed until the paper suddenly burst into a bright orange flame.

A quick, small hand reached past Milo and smacked it out. The pungent reek of paper smoke cut through the sharp aroma of Chinese five spice wafting from the kitchen.

“You are some kind of little pyro speed freak, aren't you?” said Azalia Dawn nastily. Fellow seekers of enlightenment who had swiveled toward her sudden movement, chortled.

Milo jerked guiltily to his feet.

“Sorry. I guess I'll go and see what Bill has for me.”

Someone pointed, as if ordering him out. Milo followed the direction of the outstretched finger up the hill to Bill's studio. From the loosely collected shed where he had shared his uncomfortable supper, it was more of a climb than it looked like, but he didn't begrudge it at all. The air was crisp, almost calm. Toward what he thought was the east, the sky was inky purple, to what must be the west, still cerulean. Touches of orange and yellow and a narrow band of green emerged above the russets as the remains of the day darkened into hues of evening in a vast circular dome above him.

Milo reached Bill Wheeler's studio. Although still only a shack by any measure, it seemed far more beckoning than many other whimsically furnished but squalid hovels he had cataloged in a leisurely two hours before the dinnerbell had sounded, after his arrival. It was a real bell, rung frantically and at length, to call the scattered commune members to bread.

He knocked meekly on the recycled wooden door. He could still make out scarred, peeling paint on the inset panels. Not hearing an answer, he tried the knob, pushed, and sidled into Bill's studio. The north wall was all windows, and there was still just enough light to just see the broadest shapes in the deepening view across the valley.

Milo was feeling increasingly antsy, as his carefully-crafted afternoon wineshine began to cook off into the gritty dregs of an early hangover. He took a few careful steps and banged a shin into a low table. Stopping in the darkness, he took out his matches and struck one. In its small yellow globe of light, he saw that the top of the table that had kneecapped him was strewn with a heap of random articles that looked to have been tossed haphazardly between a clutch of tall, fat candles. He lit one, and picked it up to explore.

Like every other hut on the property, Bill's place was really a semi-derelict, airily mended with serendipitous bits of flotsam and jetsam fitted into cracks and holes to create a rather charming construct. Ramshackle and lived in, for sure, but not nearly as disorderly or grungy as most other reclaimed dwellings on the property seemed.

An army-surplus silk parachute fell down from the rafters and drifted to the floor in places, like the roof of a nomad's tent in the Arabian Nights. A couple of dozen musical instruments were strewn everywhere -- bongos, guitars, ukuleles, accordions, even a homemade wooden marimba. Some rested in battered open cases, or hung by loops of string from randomly spaced spikes in the walls. Others just leaned against pieces of hand-me-down furniture.

Bill also seemed to be an aspiring oil painter, and to Milo's eye, rather a good one. He shuffled along a wall opposite a bed, studying photos and framed pictures that looked to have been bulletin-boarded there in a growing accretion. The candle threw jerky, shadowbox grotesques across the room in the air currents of his movements.

Milo heard a small thump behind him. He turned, expecting to see Bill's big fuzzy grin beaming at him from the doorway. Instead, still sporting the strange butler outfit, replete with moldy green top hat, that he had worn in San Francisco, stood Furlonger.

Milo's whole body convulsed in a giant spit-take.

“I knew it! I knew this would happen!”

“Ja,” agreed Furlonger. “I guess you did.

"This place is built right on top of a Ley line," he continued conversationally. "Did you already know dot, as well?

He pointed past Milo, out the giant window. "Und did you knew dot vas coming, too?”

Milo's fish-mouthed gape twisted of its own accord toward the window. Uncomprehending, he watched a small yellow-orange dot describe a slow, beautiful arc across the sky, gathering speed, until it blasted straight at the shack with astonishing velocity. In an instant the room was as brilliant as if the rising sun was about to swallow them. Suddenly, Milo knew.

The blinding flash - physical, mental, possibly spiritual - was the most painful thing he'd ever felt. He closed his eyes against it, but the light burnt through his eyelids, scorched his retinas and ripped along his optic nerves into his skull. Blinding, indescribable hurt surged through him and lodged in his Cave of Brahma. It was less a single blast of light than unending millions of minute staccato bursts spaced barely apart, in a giant rolling wave that seemed unending.

Milo's head snapped back and he tried to scream. He couldn't. He froze in mid-movement, in a hot stasis of shrieking silence for long seconds. Then the light faded and he could move again and he finished the recoil he'd started. He reeled into a set of congas, lost his balance, dropped his candle and crashed elbows first onto a guitar, smashing it to matchwood with a loud dissonant twang. His face smacked flat into the varnished body of another guitar that slammed onto the rough pineboard floor the briefest second ahead of him.

Stunned, Milo wondered if he had a head wound. He could see a lot of red at one edge of his eye. Then he realized it was the candle flame, widening where it had caught the gossamer parachute fabric. The whole ceiling exploded into hot flame shockingly fast, and all the charming, airy flotsam strewn across the walls and floors and furniture began to flash over. Panicking and coughing violently, Milo struggled outside in a frantic head-down crawl, and rolled gasping onto his back.

“Now look vot you done!” cackled Furlonger, looming over him, his rotting hands on his insubstantial hips.

Milo closed his eyes to block him out. Down the hill, he could hear the dinnerbell begin to ring with the hysterical urgency that fire brings when water is scarce. Shouts began as the nearest hovels emptied, and heavy running footsteps started nearing.

---/---

Callie watched Furlonger's trail as he returned, then peered far past the edge of their table. It was still set up to play cards. She and it floated gently, still, in in the black void, as if suspended by hidden wires, backdropped by galaxies and star systems in their hundreds of millions.

“Did it work?” she asked as he came near.

Furlonger enjoyed milking the moment. He paused to adjust his verdigris trousers and pinkie-check his fly buttons. Then, seating himself amid a veritable flurry of dander, he finally nodded.

“Yup! Like a verdammten. Whose turn to deal?”

“Yours. So, all the Milos, from all the universes that he split off...?” she probed inquiringly.

“All the bosons is auf der thermos," he said, ticking off one transparent fingertip, then another, as he enumerated. "Und all the Milos is squashed now inside der same tiny skull.”

He tapped the side of his own head for emphasis. A tiny rockfall of dust sifted down in a straight line from behind his ear.

Callie smiled, her red tongue tantalizing her azure lips. “Which means all the other Milos...”

---/---

Milo blinked back into consciousness. Somewhere nearby, there was a wide flickering light, and a lot of shouting. For some reason, he was more intent making out what a much quieter, closer voice was saying.

“... which means all the infinite other Milos that split off into all the infinite other of universes after the big hoo-hah in Kannenberg's lab are dead,” he heard himself mumble, as if from an infinite height.