He used to be a physicist, named Robert
Johnson. Like his namesake from the previous century, he achieved
notoriety — for his accomplishments, as well as the many moral
compromises made while in their pursuit.
Together with his childhood friend, he
has cracked the most powerful mystery behind Nikola Tesla's boldest
experiment. He's also slept with his friend's wife, taken money and
technology from the military, and sabotaged the lab he worked in,
resulting in the disappearance of the woman he and his friend loved.
Now he uses the technology to skip to
an alternate Earth, where he steals priceless objects of art, and
tags the empty space with his new identity — RASL (“messenger of Allah,” apparently).
He returns to what he presumes is his
point of origin, where he fences the works to fund his growing
appetite for vice.
He is pursued, of course: by a little
girl who seems both haunted and haunting . . .
. . . by his friend's wife, who by
rights should not exist on any plane . . .
. . . and by a government enforcer,
named Salvador Crow.
Crow's motivations are, for a while,
opaque. He appears unconcerned about retrieving the works of art intact, or capturing Rasl alive. Only when he and Rasl meet within
military confines, is his motivation made explicit.
Salvador Crow's appearance, demeanour
and even motivation bear pointed resemblance to those of another pulp
fiction creation: Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane:
Howard's Kane is, in appearance and
attitude, a Puritan. He strides forward to vanquish any variety of
abomination, unrelentingly confident in his (somewhat smudgy)
Calvinist world view. But there is an existential irony in these stories:
Kane is too thick-headed a lunk to perceive that he participates, in
fact, in a cosmic pagan-pantheist arena, where ancient scores are
slowly getting settled.
Sal Crow, on the other hand, vaguely
apprehends the significance of Tesla's theory of infinite cosmoses,
and Rasl's confirmation of it: humanity's reality is so much smaller,
and more precarious, than Crow has imagined. The tensions and
ambiguities in the new reality are too great for Crow to bear. Like
Kane, he behaves like the god he believes in. Unlike Kane, his
behaviour is rewarded with persistent failure.
So humanity is fraught with greater
absurdity and peril than previously accounted for: where is the hand
of the Divine in all this? If it exists, like everything else, it
does so in a previously unconsidered manifestation.
Some questions are answered. Some of
the answers raise more questions. Rasl, nee: Johnson, who throughout
has behaved with sludgy moral intuition, is fortunate to finally
encounter someone whose moral clarity is more grotesque than even
Crow's. While the final confrontation is
perhaps a bit too tidy (and unsurprising), considering everything
that's led up to it, it does still meet the noir standards that Smith
adheres to.
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