Chapter 30

  Isaac Milton

  When I consider how my light is spent,

  ? Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

  ? And that one Talent which is death to hide

  ? Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent

  ? To serve therewith my Maker, and present

  ? My true account, lest he returning chide;

  ? “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

  ? I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent

  ? That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

  ? Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

  ? Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

  ? Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

  ? And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

  ? They also serve who only stand and wait.”

  - John Milton, “On His Blindness”

  Isaac played his piano ship to the Bright World. Unprepared, and knowing full well that he was unprepared, he decided to go anyway. He had checked with ARKO. He had scanned the Bright World with every tool available. He had read up on the lore. There wasn’t much to the lore beyond this: the Bright World was powerful and dangerous. It might be fair to describe it as a counterpoint to the Dark World, but that didn’t mean it was on his side.

  He hadn’t found the girl from Anzu’s vision. Jimothy had no guesses about her location. ARKO could not identify or locate her.

  Finding the beautiful girl wasn’t the only reason Isaac decided to go to the Bright World. The place seemed important, yet nobody really knew anything about it. Was it intelligent? Some kind of GM as Derxis suggested, moderating their Narrative? If so, he had questions for it. What had happened to his moon? What wish had he made in the previous iteration of the Narrative? And why? He’d like to know that. It would be a bummer if he messed it up again somehow.

  Derxis, the Laughing God, had been to the Bright World before. His advice: don’t go there. Not unless it really matters. Unless there is no other choice. Derxis either couldn’t or wouldn’t say exactly what the Bright World was like or what made it so dangerous. Just that you always had to pay a price. For everything you took from that place, be it power or knowledge or anything else, you damn well paid for it.

  Isaac’s conviction wavered at these words. The danger was enough to make him anxious, but not quite enough to deter him. So here he was, cruising through the starry dark, approaching the big crystal stars that made the spherical empyrean around the whole Narrative. The stars ranged in scale from the size of Isaac to the size of the ship he piloted. They drifted in a two-dimensional curved plane, occasionally jostling each other, except for when they fell. When they got loose from the Empyrean, they dropped away toward Ardia as if there was some kind of attraction pulling them down.

  Apparently, they were keeping the dark out.

  Being close to the empyrean made for an outstanding view. The stars nearby were big and bright, but they shrank as the empyrean swept away in every direction and curved toward the tiny bright bead of Ardia down in the middle. The stars were like a chaotic matrix that shrank with distance until the farthest stars way on the other side of Ardia were just tiny pinpricks, barely discernible.

  Isaac considered going beyond the stars, past the empyrean into the dark beyond. Just to see what it looked like. But if the stars really were keeping something out, he didn’t want to go past them and find out firsthand what it was.

  The Bright World’s bizarre structure became apparent as he approached. It was smaller than Ardia or any of its moons. Much smaller than the Dark World. It was the size of, maybe, a very big city. Plus suburbs.

  The Bright World had layers. Rivers of molten diamond formed the outermost layer, sharp yet flowing, sparkling with inner light, spraying droplets that froze in the void of space and clinked against Isaac’s windshield as solid diamond. The rivers coiled around the inner parts of the Bright World without beginning or end, a Mobius Ouroboros of thistly liquid light.

  Something stirred in the rivers as Isaac eased his way past, fingers stiff and cold on the keys. A colossal shape swam in the light. Isaac got the sense that it was watching him.

  Within these encompassing rivers, the Bright World became difficult to comprehend. The visual clutter was too great; there was too much light, too much movement. Yet it was not chaos, in the way that complex mathematics (the kind his sister understood) were not chaos. The Bright World was made of reflective material, glass or crystal, arranged into tessellated fractals that collapsed and exploded without end, flexing and folding with the uncanny unity of form seen in a wheeling flock of birds or a darting school of fish. A blinding, mesmerizing, brain-melting pattern. It seemed like communication, cosmic meaning beyond his grasp. His ship drifted for a while as he stared.

  And at the core of the Bright World, underneath all of this lay a sea of brilliance, the pearl at the heart of it all. It was not quite as bright as, say, the sun. He could look at it without feeling that he was doing permanent damage to his vision. And unlike the sun, which derived its light from being essentially a nonstop nuclear explosion of unfathomable heat and violence, this bright core was placid and cold.

  Something swam in that vitreous sea of light—a leviathan in the bright, a creature seeing but unseen. Isaac had learned the name of this creature, which might be called the Guardian of the Bright World, or its angel. It was called the Prothagonus.

  Isaac’s pianoship coasted to a slow drift just within the encircling rivers, in front of the twisting, glittering mass of mirrors and light.

  come out, said the Bright World, or maybe the Prothagonus. The voice was made of sound, and the sound was made of a shattering roar—the noise of a thousand panes of glass being crunched up together in a cement mixer, amplified until it rattled Isaac’s cockpit. It wasn’t speaking English, the only language Isaac knew. It wasn’t speaking any Earthly language. He understood it anyway.

  He obeyed the voice. He fastened on his helmet and displaced himself to a location a few dozen feet in front of his ship. Small jumps like this, to places he could see, had become easy for him. Long-distance teleportation remained tricky.

  The visor of his helmet dimmed the shifting sea of light to a bearable level. Jim, thought Isaac, should never come here. One glance and he’d have a seizure.

  The swimming creature, the leviathan in the bright, moved somewhere below. Isaac tried to peer through the churning mass of mirrors to see it, to catch a glimpse of its form or a hint of its scale. He could discern nothing more than vague hints of something vast adrift among the mesmerizing refractions.

  The mirrors turned toward him. Eyes. Hundreds, thousands of eyes—eyes in incalculable array, like the stars in the sky. They were reflections, from mirror to mirror; each of the countless eyes staring at Isaac was the endpoint of an unfathomable chain of reflected images, each tracing a path from Isaac down to the Prothagonus somewhere below. The mirrors turned minutely, tracking the Prothagonus as it swam; each reflected eye remained steady, gazing at Isaac. And each eye was unique. Cat’s eyes, snake’s eyes, fish eyes, coin-slot goat’s eyes, wavy cuttlefish eyes, multifaceted insectile eyes, goofy little shrimp eyes, horrible patchy bloodshot rainbow eyes unlike anything he’d ever seen, and human eyes, especially human eyes, all of them in every color imaginable. It was a mosaic spread before him with eyes instead of tiles, and the image it formed turned Isaac’s blood to ice water.

  I should not have come here, he thought. I shouldn’t have come.

  But he was here.

  “I am here,” he said, wondering afterward if he should have phrased it ‘here am I,’ just for old times’ sake.

  Isaac Milton, the voice crashed in some language unknown. have you come to bargain for a wish?

  “Bargain?” Isaac peeled his gaze away from the mosaic of eyes and glanced around for Charlie. The bird usually flew around with him in space. But his angel, apparently, was cowering back in the ship.

  state your desire. we bargain. my default price is memories.

  What did he want? Why had he come here? And what price was he willing to pay for it?

  “May I…ask a question?” His voice squeaked a little as he spoke, but he felt no embarrassment. He had to be careful, he thought, not to accidentally wish for something or say something that could be interpreted as a wish. He didn’t think the Bright World was like some kind of litigious devil in a fantasy game that would always try to screw him over on his wishes. But he didn’t want to take any chances.

  ask.

  “What can a wish do? What are its limitations?”

  a wish can change something. its power is limited to the Narrative.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  And, by extension, so was the power of the Bright World, maybe? “And what are the limits of its power?” he asked.

  there are none. the mightiest wish requires the greatest price.

  No limits. Scary. So, what, they could all get together and just wish for victory in the Narrative? But the price would no doubt be so great that it wouldn’t seem like victory at all. Wasn’t that what a Pyrrhic Victory meant, like the name of Eric’s moon?

  He remembered Derxis’ words. Wishes should be a last resort.

  “I understand,” said Isaac to himself. “They are like GM points.” The whole ‘wish’ mechanic existed in the Narrative for the purpose of enabling heroic sacrifices. If things got bad, if the heroes got into a rough spot, any hero could come here and pay a price to fix things, or try. The mechanic was in place to prevent the heroes from getting soft-locked, from reaching a fail-state. And for the drama, of course. And undoubtedly, the price would always be steep. It would always hurt. It would always be in doubt whether the wish was worth it. That’s how Isaac would have done it.

  But maybe…maybe a low-value wish would have a price he was willing to pay.

  “If I ask for a wish,” he said, “but we can’t agree on a price…do I just walk away?”

  no.

  A chill ran through Isaac.

  you must fly.

  It took him a moment to understand. Was…was the Bright World/Prothagonus making a joke? Was it trying to be funny? Or was it just being precise? No, of course he couldn’t walk away from here; he obviously had to fly.

  “So just to be clear,” he said, “If I reject every price that is offered…I can leave without paying anything? Nothing changes?”

  you will change. you will have failed to bargain. your conviction will have proved unequal to your desire. and there is this: if you reject the bargain and leave, you may never ask for the same wish again.

  “I get it.” He took a deep breath. He thought about that girl he saw in Anzu’s vision. How important was finding her, really?

  Dwayne Hartman answered in the back of his mind. Every person is the center of a whole world, Isaac. Isaac had asked, long ago, why Dwayne had jumped into an icy river, risking his own life and almost drowning to save a child swept away by the swollen spring current. People think you save the world by helping a lot of people all at once. Well, that’s fine. But helping just one single person is no different. You save one person, you save the world. That’s all there is. Can’t do more than that. Ain’t really no such thing as ‘everybody.’ You remember that.

  And this: At any moment, a man may be required to provide an account of his existence.

  And this: You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.

  And finally: HOLD FAST.

  “I’m making a wish, Bright World,” he said. His voice was steady. “I want a way to contact the girl I saw through Anzu.” He’d said it a bit impulsively, but he thought he phrased it well. All he wanted was a way to contact her. That would be enough, he thought. He could work the rest out on his own, and surely such a small wish would not be too costly.

  for love of beauty, the knowledge of beauty. for desire, the means of desire.

  …what?

  this is my price, Isaac Milton: your sight. your eyes.

  “My…” He swallowed. Nope. No. Too much. “Not…memories?”

  not for this. memories are too costly for such a wish.

  “More costly than my sight?”

  I would take your memories of beauty, Isaac Milton. every strain of music, every sunrise, every star.

  Isaac swallowed. He felt cold, and he realized that this was because his suit was cooling him, having detected his sweat. But it was a cold sweat, and now he was shivering, and now it was heating him up.

  Isaac thought hard, desperately, though he knew instinctively that there was no time limit on this. He could stay here, under the awful gaze of countless unblinking eyes, for as long as he liked.

  He prayed. God, what should I do? There came no answer, none that he could discern.

  But he thought of Saul, blinded by God on the road to Damascus, blinded by a brilliant light. Ray Charles had been blind. Stevie Wonder had been blind. And, um…Aldous Huxley?

  A Bible verse came to mind, an odd but relevant one he was surprised to find in the archives of his memory: “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” That was from Exodus or Leviticus somewhere. And here was another: “I will lead the blind by ways they do not know; along new paths I will guide them. I will turn darkness into light and make the rough places smooth.” That was…Isaiah?

  Of course, the Bible was full of passages about blindness, usually the healing of it.

  What were his eyes? Nothing God could not easily restore, if ever He thought Isaac needed them back. Not much when weighed against the sorrow and despair he had seen all over the girl in Anzu’s vision. And with ARKO’s help, he could still ‘read’ just about anything. With some practice, he could still play piano. Ray Charles, right. And hey—he’d never need to bother with glasses again.

  It was, in the end, a decision made with the heart and with faith, rather than with logic or reasoning. Maybe it was only that he had a childish yet powerful infatuation. Twitterpation, Dwayne might have said with a twinkle in his eye.

  Regardless, though he never remembered quite what had happened, he left the Bright World blind, but with a new number entered into CHIME.

  He was cold. He was shaking. He was weirdly happy with a kind of panicky exhilaration. He took the helmet off in the cockpit of his pianoship. He ran his fingers over the cool keys. He knew them still. Music hadn’t been taken from him.

  He touched his eyes. They were still there, but hard. He tapped them with a fingernail. Glass eyes. They didn’t hurt. He felt fine. Except that he could see nothing, not even blackness.

  Charlie chirped nearby, concerned. Isaac couldn’t tell what kind of bird he was now. “Don’t worry,” he said to his angel. “I was just, uh, blindsided by the offer.” Charlie didn’t laugh; he never laughed. “Oh, and, uh, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Oh—and, like, it was an eye for an eye situation in there.” Silence from Charlie. Isaac sighed, fighting a wave of hysterical laughter.

  “ARKO,” he said, his voice shaky. “I’m gonna need a lot of help from now on.”

  Eye-eye, captain.

  Isaac laughed for real. His laughter lasted until he realized that ARKO hadn’t said that out loud. “Okay,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “Connect me to this new number.”

  He waited for the soft beep. He took a long, slow breath. Then he spoke.

  IM: Hello?