Jacob’s ladder.

Denton cried at its beauty and mystery, at the inconceivable vastness of its scale in time and space. He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight, and when he opened them again, he saw the kabbalah Tree of Life, the round nodes of the sephirot shining. Jacob’s ladder was gone and yet it was not. Denton understood that the tree of sephirot was the ladder, that it was somehow even bigger than that, that, in a way, it was God.

The whole of the vision was too overwhelming, so he tried to look at each sephirot in turn. He named each one and its attributes, chesed, chochmah, binah, gevorah, hod, netzach, watching them dance before him.

And then he understood.

Chesed, chochmah. He had identified himself immediately when he’d first read those descriptions. He was chesed, chochmah, netzach, and this world he had come to—that’s what it was, what it was made of, what the people were. He understood. He understood.

Oh god, he understood.

He was the Sapphians. He had loathed their shallowness, their falsity, their disloyalty and selfishness, their frivolousness, their cruelty that was even more inexcusable for being thoughtless… And he knew himself for the first time.

You’ll find a way to do exactly what you want to do, Dent. You always do.

And, even now, if he had the chance, yes, if he knew for certain that he himself would be spared, he would go back to life in the gorge in an instant. In a freaking heartbeat.

There were no words, nor even thought images, for the depth at which he felt this, at which he understood the parallels or how appalling, how accurate, they were, how devastatingly deep they went. There was no expression for how much he loathed himself, or the despair of knowing that there was no escape, that even if he killed himself he could not escape his own soul. These things were chochmah, the wisdom that has no form.

And yet they filled the universe. He felt as though his being, his essence, was a tiny candle that could be snuffed out in sheer scale of it. In the scheme of things, in that almost infinite multiverse of the ladder, he was less than insignificant. Relatively speaking, he did not exist. And yet the fact that he did exist seemed to imply some taint in the fabric of that cosmos, some terrible flaw that threatened everything.

He understood now what it meant to look into the face of God, to really see the good and the bad, in all their splendor. For a moment he teetered on the brink of nonexistence. Then Denton’s tiny candle puffed out.

19.3. Thirty-Seventy Aharon Handalman

In a few hours the closing ceremonies of the Festival would begin. The heretic would be executed, and whatever was going to happen would happen.

My Lord could not sleep. His brain would not give up the fight but continued to flail about like a man in the sea. He knew meditation techniques to quiet his mind, but it had been years since he’d used them and to do so now felt hypocritical. They called on God. Hadn’t he rejected any assistance from God years ago? So the thoughts did their worst to him: Tevach, Aharon, Argeh, the heretic, Wallick, The Book of Torment.

Aharon had asked him, What will happen to you, Yosef? When you die?

He had not contemplated such a thing before. Oh, he had always been aware that he was damning himself. He had damned himself with great willfullness. But with Wallick gone, the thought of his own death became much more concrete. He had been Job cursing at God. And that had been enough, in his anger and despair; that was the role he had chosen for himself.

Just curse God and die, Job.

So Job’s friends had advised him, and there was, in that statement, an implied end, a yearned-for finality.

The trouble was, it was not the end. Certain as the sun rose, even here, pale and distant, he, too, would rise again. And he would not, in his new incarnation, have the benefit of his anger. He would not even recognize the name: Isaac Kobinski. Everything came to an end, even our most cherished torments. That was the law. Just as it was the law, also, that nothing ever truly ended. His soul, his energy, would remain on the ladder long after this lifetime’s woes had sunk into a past so ancient that the entire life of the multiverse so far was but the first shuddering breath of it.

He might reincarnate in his next life on Gehenna, a tiny Fiore infant, sentenced to this world of rocky hardship without the benefit of his memories to give that life a diabolical purpose. The thought of being sentenced here, with no idea that there were places better than this, with no hope of an education, no deep theological reasons for rejecting God—that was true horror. It was one thing to choose rebellion, to have chosen it from a place of high learning, as he had. It was another to wallow in rebellion’s hellhole in ignorance.

Aharon was right. You might as well be angry at the phenomenon of photosynthesis. You cannot win.

My Lord gazed out over the town. It was nearly dawn and quiet now. But earlier in the night there had been stirrings, shadows in the streets: scuttling mice and scuttling rats, hiding and whispering, making plans. He was seated in the deep recess of a window seat, the cold stone around him cushioned and warmed by a blanket. It was one of the largest windows in the House of Divine Ordinance, and although the glass was not clear by Earth standards, he could see the town below, lit by the conjunction of Gehenna’s moons. He turned his head to look at the bed where Erya slept—not for carnal purposes, he couldn’t even imagine such with a Fiore, but to provide some warmth for his aching joints. He looked, too, at Tevach, snoring on his mat at the foot of My Lord’s bed. That little mouse had scuttled out, when he thought My Lord was asleep, and had scuttled back in an hour ago. My Lord had observed both, feigning sleep, and had not said a word.

He could wake either of them, talk, get a massage for the pain, anything to be spared these thoughts. But he didn’t wake them and the thoughts marched on. It was as though Wallick had been the black underpinning beneath the decaying tower of his soul and now that underpinning was gone. His soul was poised over the chasm and starting to fall in upon itself and he could not stop it.

For example, what if even Fiori was too good for his detached soul? When he had first discovered the heavens and hells in his physics, he had tried to work out models of what they might be like. He had anticipated heavier gravity; gravity is gevorah. And although he really had no idea what the Fiore or the landscape would be like, he had not been wrong about the general principle. He had also imagined a world worse than this, a true Gehenna, the far right rungs of Jacob’s ladder. He had imagined a world where gravity was so dense that life was nothing more than blobs of flesh attached to the planet’s surface like stones. There would be no mobility at all in that world, like the hideous punishment of Dante’s ninth circle, where men were buried up to their necks in a lake of ice. And these blobs would congregate like the bubbles in foam or like crystals—how else could they reproduce? And to those who lived in this bubble-mass of base sentience there would be almost nothing redeeming—almost no light and warmth, little food, none of the blessings of family, music, home. It would make Fiori look like Paradise. And God—Yahweh—that evasive magician, wouldn’t even have to condemn Yosef to such a fate. It was the simple nature of the universe: like to like, like to like, like to like. He could end up there.

My Lord was so lost in thought that he didn’t hear the sounds at first. He stiffened as they registered: stealthy footsteps, the creak of the door. There was something altogether too quiet about it—even Tevach sneaking in was not that quiet, and Tevach was asleep on his mat.