Murder by Grace


(Edited from the original, "Control," from January of 05)

One night the King shows up in a dream. "My card," he says, and he flips it toward you gambler style and it drops into your hat. You see that the hat has been placed upside down on the bed. The card is the Queen of Spades. You wake up hungry for pancakes.

The moment is here. You started out as a fan. Then you became an impersonator. You stand on the ledge and the drunken onlookers dizzying years below shout, "Merge! Merge!" Beyond you the lights of the city conspire on the event horizon to reveal a mathematical formula you do not understand. You fling yourself into the fire department's not for commercial release best videos. You wake up a second time and wonder if you should call somebody.

"Relax," the captain says. "You have to get used to the controls. It's like a helicopter."

You look in the mirror and see that the transformation is complete. You have become Elvis. It's everything you could have imagined and more. There's just this one detail you didn't count on. You have a wife who does feng shui in depth, as she's wont to say. A shape shifter, she is the daughter of the Old Man of the Mountain himself, and, once married to Elvis, she seduces with abandon. The seed of individuality which allowed her to exist was the dynamic between Hassan i'Sabbah and Elvis Presley. They generated it as a buffer zone between them, as they were both powerful archetypes, but had some problems in agreeing on what their true relationship to each other was.

What reconciles the secret cult of assassins, hiding out in the caves of Islamic history, with "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You?"

There was no solution that did not dissolve their individual identity, and neither of them wanted to surrender to the other. The solution they imposed onto the situation was the creation of a third thing which they could share, and through which they would communicate. Grace came into existence as the wife of Elvis where cause and effect can't be separated. She was a woman on the shoulders of the Master of Assassins. But now something new had come in.

As only related to her father, Grace had not known herself through the possibility of comparison. Now she had the possibility of choosing. As a third thing, she had identity.

Elvis seemed to find her some priceless jewel he'd found, for which he made the setting. He expressed his emotional body toward her and she felt the Feng Shui. There was a moment of spiritual transcendence, in which she saw her role not as just a killer, but as an artist.

Killing, she realized, is almost always an energy flow around objects. Sometimes it's money and sometimes it's an objectified person and sometimes it's raw material. People come into conflict because they want the same objects. She closed her eyes and saw them, like bugs coming up from the ground, horses loosed from the starting gate, the race is on. How much can you get into that cart before the bell rings? And sometimes somebody is just in the way, like a lamp can be all wrong in a living space. You just move that lamp and everything clicks. "Perfect."

Through his arrangement with the Old Man, Elvis had survived not being assimilated and losing his identity, but, as the Old Man said with more than a trace of irony, "I am always with you."

At first he didn't understand what it meant to be "married into the family." He was young and immortal, and amplified. "I just want to do my number," he said. But how could he refuse his father-in-law a favor and not carry a message to a family friend while he was passing through in a movie?

"Yea, why not?" You've got plenty of splits. More people every day surrendering to Elvis. You send one of them on the errand. Before you know it the Old Man is using you to carry contracts everywhere and your wife is doing dinner theater murders as a cosmic art form and becoming increasingly demanding that you sing Love Me Tender to her one more time.

But everything ends up back in Ash Fork, because that's the ship where the probability drives interface with the singularity, where time collapses, and lost strings of information advertise for each other on Craigslist. "'Seek completion. Players only. Dual Processor. Wire Paladin, San Francisco." A woman rings for the servant.

"Yes madam?"

"Giles, go out there in Cyberspace and get me properly laid. But be subtle, Giles, we don't want anyone dangerous at the house."

"Yes, madam."

But after awhile madam realizes it's her imagination she's really after, and her lovers are trained dogs by comparison. Giles is lingering around, giving her insolent looks. "I know a place," he says, his voice full of insinuation.

She is distracted. "I'm sorry, Giles? You know what sort of place?"

"The sort of place where you can have it your way, baby."

"Really, Giles. I should dismiss you."

"Have it your way, like I said. I still know the same place."

Later that day she and Giles share a cigarette. "It really is just a matter of having a safe place for your feet, isn't it, Giles?"

"Yes, madam."

Ash Fork is where the probability drives decide what rides point on the event horizon, and what falls just behind, on the shadow of conscious perception. But this space ship has no control room. It has a Mission, inside which is a singularity where all physical laws break down. On one side of an event field everything is spread out along a line of history, which is a description of cause and effect. On the other side of the event horizon there is no law that applies. Suns are crushed into basketballs. Everything is reduced to numbers, and can only communicate through them. They can escape because they can cloak their light.

The only thing that separates the chaos from the stabilized reality is the measuring instrument, the ordering consciousness which imposes itself on the event horizon, and holds the seal between life and death.

It was the special talent of Grace that she could probe this seal so craftily that there would be at most only a passing chill or sometimes hearing a voice from nearby, probably on the street, easily dismissed. She would find the weak place and open it just a bit, hardly enough to discern, like a small gas leak, but slowly draining energy.

From i'Sabbah she knew poisons with no name, so substance, no residue. They worked entirely by insinuation.

At the right moment just a tap in the right spot would tear the leak into a gash, and consciousness would rush out of the container. "It's like cutting a diamond," her father explained. "You have to hit it in just the right place or you ruin the stone."

And Elvis kept multiplying, and showing up at every new outpost for a conference with whoever put out the word for Feng Shui. "Here's my card," he'd say. "Feng Shui. It's a family business. If you want to get hold of me I'll be at the bar." Somebody would drop off a sealed envelope. He'd carry it home and leave it on the dresser.

Once in awhile somebody would almost remember him, back when he was a singularity. But that was a different lifetime, before he was commercialized and turned into an army of contractors, swarming through Space, making the energy flow more efficiently.

"I used to be somebody," he would lament.

"Hush," Grace would say. "We all used to be somebody."

Posted: Wed - February 28, 2007 at 10:15 AM