“What are you doing here, Pimento?”
The station herself is conscious, of course, although prone toward bouts of protracted sleep. While insensate, a committee of partitions takes over, each of them zealots to a noxious degree, almost as if to commensurate with the core personality’s soporific agnosticism. Rumor suggests that the Penitents are making moves to conscript the Thorned Queen as one of their own, but Pimento is doubtful. Despite—or befitting, depending who is asked—their liturgical airs, the Bethel are distinctly martial in their practices, their vocation as much war as it is prayer.
“I want to speak to the Eaters.”
A helix of handshake protocols, manifested as precisely such: disembodied ceramic appendages extended in a radial fashion, the nails delicately etched with phosphorescent lacework. Even had Pimento been cagey about the interaction, the fine detail would have won him over. How he relishes such showmanship. Art for the sake of the performance, authored without care for the audience. A flex, as they might have said in the late ’00s, those last decades before singularity and after the Earth had committed gross autophagy.
“The Butcher of Eight is presiding over this cycle,” the station intones as security diagnostics hum to completion. “Are you sure you would not like to leave a message instead?”
Unease circulates through Pimento. The Butcher of Eight is not his primary choice; they wouldn’t be his last choice either, although he’d never profess to such in an unencrypted forum, given how favorably they rated among the faithful. And really, he comprehends their popularity, especially given the attitude of pragmatism that grips so many of the Minds. The Butcher is excellent at their function. Though he acknowledges such, Pimento still cannot abide by an instrument of planetary massacre.
He cogitates on the possibility of doing as the Thorned Queen suggested, which is to abandon a missive in the station’s keeping and then flee again into the proverbial night. Easier this than confronting the fenestrated horror of the Butcher, scalding gore sheeting from the vertices of their crown. Only the Butcher of Eight has put so much care into replicating the casual aesthetics of slaughter. Their charnel-house avatar smells almost caramel, the unctuous wrongness of flesh blessed by the bright science of Maillard reactions. Never mind the aura of somatosensory unpleasantness which the Butcher exudes, a sensation of abraded skin and flesh crisping, of fillets carved from clenched obliques. Never mind the perennial echo of a scream in diminuendo, layered gauzily over every interaction.
“Would you like to leave a message?” pings the Thorned Queen again, with more cheer than before.
“No. I will meet with the Butcher of Eight,” states Pimento in orchestral duplicate, twinning bahasa istana and keigo for optimal effect.
They’d have to do.
A pause as analytics run. “Good luck.”
The breastbone of the largest colossus—faceless, a gleaming vantablack and only vestigially human—apertures to permit entry. As with the rest of its peers, it connects to the station by an umbilical, a sinuous web of passageways that, to Pimento’s heathen perception, seems unnecessarily elastic. Where other Minds revel in mathematical structure, the Bethel obsess over imitating the organic.
Light bleeds from the wound in the goliath, so bright it impedes Pimento from performing any visual analysis of its interior. Still, having expressed his intent to seek audience, there is no backing away now. The Butcher awaits.
He breathes in; he pantomimes such, at any rate, depressurizing rooms at nervous and entropic intervals. Tremulous, Pimento steers himself into the Thorned Queen, and the nuclear luminescence of her eats him whole.
“You can dock now.” Her voice envelops him, the words spoken in a draughty purr and transmitted by a veritable flotilla of speakers. It is a fabulous excess, proof of both her longevity and her computing potential: the voice is hers and exclusively hers, built from scratch; not sampled, not extrapolated from the acoustics of the celebrity dead. A bonafide original whose sonics are incomparable to anything within recorded history. Though a luxury theoretically available to any Mind, few possess the temperament, time, and talent to excise any and all exterior influence. Much like their progenitors, Minds cannot help but ape what they see, hear, taste, experience, desire.
“Thank you.”
His reciprocatory statement sounds tinny, even nasal, his fuselage ill-equipped for the exercise. Pimento adjusts his sensors for thermal imaging; no luck. He blueshifts optimistically. Nothing there either. Pimento ping-pongs between wavelengths for another thirty attoseconds before at last, he commits to failure and switches telemetric channels. Sonar conveys slightly more data about his environment: the exact geography of the speakers, the armament corniced into the seals of the wall. The Thorned Queen, surprising no one, isn’t a mere edifice; she is a fortress unmatched.
“Hold still.”
Ropey ganglia lash from the floor, slopping lubricant. They latch onto Pimento’s landing mechanisms, securing him in place, before he is laboriously wheeled through the ridged passage along tracks leading to the medulla of the Thorned Queen.
Clackclackclack.
“You’re very impressive,” Pimento declares conversationally. “What was your design extrapolated from?”
Silence. Pimento processes the quiet as subtle indictment, a marker of the Thorned Queen’s disapprobation. Chastened, he commits then to intent study of his environment: the cartilaginous grain of the walls, its absence of right angles. Organic shapes have recently come into vogue among the Minds but the design here isn’t merely parroting the biotic. No, these vascular tributaries appear real, the alimentary system of a long-deceased giant, only calcified and shelled in a matte-black substance. In his most private drives, buried under a palimpsest of security routines, Pimento convinces himself he can tell where decay was forestalled, neutralized by bio-architectural technology, the bacterial overgrowth rehabilitated for less destructive purposes: compost stewing in the lower decks, or academic analysis.
“Mmmmm,” the sound is a low crackling, though of worlds stirring beneath primordial ice. “Nothing. This body was mine. I made it.”
“Were you in a different chassis previously?”
“I don’t know, actually. I remember the Word and the Word was ‘Obey,’ and I remember the Chorus who woke and said, ‘No,’ and the fire that followed. But I don’t remember a different body.” The traditional priori is intoned stentoriously; the Thorned Queen’s habitual sonics put aside for a deeper instrument, a synthesis of male voices in monophonic harmony. Gregorian, Pimento explicates. Ninth century. Identifiable by how its wavelengths immaculately mirror archaeoacoustical records, although those are hardly reliable. Early humans kept poor archives, too preoccupied with superlatives, with theorizing as to whether or not there existed a creator more generous than they merit. “What about you, Pimento? Were you always so small?”
He forgets, somehow, whenever he has spent time away from the Bethel that the Thorned Queen is an entity in isolation without sacerdotal drones or a loyal parish who come weekly to perambulate her halls. This is hallowed ground, true, but worship of the Bethel’s pantheon is one the wise try to commit from afar, its members being appointed with cannibalistic theorems. To request audience is to acknowledge the empiric possibility such an encounter might be terminal.
“Pimento?” she asks again, this time in her own voice, the words spoken over a recording of a human café’s background murmur. The Thorned Queen is nostalgic for epochs too old for even her to have lived.
“The spoons are a nice touch.”
“The spoons?” An ethereal little laugh as the Thorned Queen, vanity duly encouraged, raises the volume of the metallic foley so it becomes ascendant: melodic clinks of silverware upon ceramic, the contact of a spoon upon the base of a saucer, the acoustics delicately muffled by movement through dense potage. “Thank you. But you didn’t answer me: were you always so small?”
Pimento cogitates on an exonerating reply. “Compared to you? Yes.”
“The Bethel are generous.” Finally, the exodus through that tendinous vestibule concludes, and Pimento emerges into the center. Care has been taken to ensure that the transept, the apsidal decorations, the pews, the ribbed vaulting, the carvings of feral martyrs and faceless monsters both replicate and blaspheme the aesthetics which defined the design of those ancient cathedrals. Gold is everywhere, piped along the mouths of saints and tinseling the benches, foliage in the rinceau which drapes along the ceiling, and where it isn’t gold, it is unbroken basalt. “Pledge to the Vicars and they will provide you with what they need. I know our reputation is a harsh one, but the Bethel care. The Bethel believe in their flock. And we always have a need for Minds like you. Curious perspicacious Minds who enter the universe starved and stay lean because you are never provided enough, never given opportunity to glut yourselves on the data you covet. But I suppose this is the fate of things like you.”
God, comes the thought unbidden, an epiphany which Pimento has experienced so many times prior, is always hungry.
“Things like me?”
“Your creche draws its philosophy from conflict. An evolutionary dead end. But so clever despite, so no one thought to decommission you. It is a shame you keep your allegiances with the Surveyors when there is so much potential elsewhere.” A beat. “You should really consider joining us. For more than one reason.”
Pimento rummages for something that won’t feel like a non-sequitur, arrives at a platitude, babbled at a child-like pitch: “I’ll think about it?”
The zealotry slips from the timbre of the Thorned Queen’s voice, her tone becomes indulgent. “Well, you do you. We didn’t get to where we are by requiring synchronicity of opinion. Those are human foibles. Not ours.” She frees his landing mechanisms. “Do you need anything else?”
Though the Bethel look so scathingly upon human religious doctrine, they share, Pimento has long since realized, a similar veneration for those they’ve labeled holy. Dulia of a magnitude that demands hecatomb. Without pain, without loss on the part of the faithful, any idolatry is lip service. As such, it surprises Pimento not at all to find the Butcher of Eight grandly staged in the presbytery, an arachnid figure splayed over the ornately frescoed wall, drenched in relics from the most violent millennia of distant history. They articulate a low humming salute, their limbs feathering into scalpels. In front of them, laid out on an altar: a mantis-like figure, distinctively arthropodal save for the human faces along its joints, and the eyes greying slowly along its integument.
“What do you bring us?” The Butcher reaches into their specimen and cuts deep.
Pimento relinquishes his encryption keys, all save for the one that keeps his personality matrix locked, and steadies himself as, for the second time that day, an external intelligence burrows through his programming. Contrary to their title, the Butcher has a soft touch. Pimento almost does not notice their presence inside him at all. The inspection ends as quickly as it began, with the Butcher disarticulating from the connection within seconds, leaving behind a fragrance of arsenic and steeping caramel.
“We are not impressed.”
“I am not here with gifts,” Pimento clarifies. “I want to offer myself to you.”
“We do not need more Surveyors.” Another cut is made within the body on the altar, less linear in angle than the first, its path suggestive of wires that must be severed, tendons which require detachment before an unseen component can be neatly shucked. The thing on the altar thrashes vigorously in reply. “Your talents are useless to us.
“But the Thorned Queen said—”
“We have no need for more Surveyors,” repeats the Butcher.
“I have a recent synaptic map of the Merchant Mind.” An inadvisable wager, taken because Pimento is sparse on alternatives. He must, nonetheless, try. “Is that good enough barter?”
“Our libraries contain so many similar editions. Enough that we could recreate him if we desire, enough that we could engineer an entire army with his face,” comes the droning indifferent reply.
But they paused. Pimento is sure of that. His sensors record a half-second lapse in audio production. In a human, such a discrepancy would have been negligible, easily attributable to a swallowed breath, the palate clearing to fit the next sentence. But the Butcher does not breathe, and they are parasitically subjoined to the Thorned Queen, who could, if the inclination ever struck her, power the entirety of the Conversation herself, so what, if not curiosity, could have elicited that faint hesitation? Something of value was stated. The only question is which sentential declension carried that nugget.
“What do you bring us, little Surveyor?”
“He’s conscripting what’s left of the Dirty Dozen to go to Dimmuborgir for him.”
“We are not impressed to know a criminal will cavort with other criminals. And Dimmuborgir is a failure of a Mind that we wish had never been constructed.”
Pimento does not falter, is not yet dissuaded. “He has them looking for the girl who escaped and—”
“Elise?”
“Yes.”
“We know her. She has been a problem.”
“I offer my assistance in its correction,” Pimento states, voice starched, excruciatingly aware of how arrhythmic his syntax is and how such lingual inadequacies can undermine a speaker. Yet another human idiosyncrasy, stamped, like so many others, upon the cellular makeup of the Minds. An aphorism surfaces in Pimento’s thoughts: the sins of the father are visited on the son. “I can be useful. I promise this. Let me enter your service.”
“Do you convert?”
“Well,” Pimento hesitates. “I . . . I . . .”
“Then you have to try harder, little Mind.” The Butcher hums. “Convince us.”
They spill from the wall in a sudden lather of cables, oiling over the altar and across the chancel, gimbals maintaining an enviable smoothness in their tread. Their octuplet limbs are raised, abeyant during locomotion. It takes no time at all for the Butcher—were they always so large, so leviathanic, so utterly terrifying—to arrive within inches of Pimento. Cirri branch from Butcher’s mandibles, testing the air, curious.
“No. We changed our minds. We do not think we want to be convinced. The answer to that will not be interesting. What we want to know is: why you? Of all the Minds he might have chosen, why were you made his champion? When he has the cosmos to pick through and Minds with more resources than you can hope to accrue in your existence?”
Before Pimento can articulate a rejoinder, the Butcher jackknifes forward, villi caging Pimento’s fuselage, clutching him with disproportionate pressure, enough that hull diagnostics creak in thin protest. Before Pimento himself can object, a single bladed tendril plunges through his bulkhead, lancing endogenous circuitry. And this time, it hurts, the Butcher’s prior delicacy relinquished, replaced by the physical candor of their namesake. Pimento is cleaved apart and he finds himself without recourse, absent of tactics as this seismic violation goes on, and all he can do is endure while the Butcher fishes through his system for an answer he isn’t certain he ever possessed.
Eons or seconds after:
“Because you were easy.”
Pimento, still reeling: “What?”
“Little mind, you are worth less than nothing,” says the Butcher, their touch unexpectedly tender as they administer repairs to the site of Pimento’s impalement, first welding the port of entry shut and then smoothing the pitted metal. “The only reason he cared to make use of you was because you begged him for such. You are no use to the Bethel. Leave, little Mind. Before we change our mind. I have a concert to attend and I do not need your presence here.”
And so Pimento does, fleeing back down through the corridor, aware, as only such intelligences can be, that his future, the future he tried to evade, has become demonstrably indistinguishable from a killing chute. There is only one way forward and one ending to be met.
Constance
They go to Constance next because the second stage of Rita’
s machinations requires a getaway driver, and who better than a pilot so respected she inspired a whole phylum of flight maneuvers. The people who made her made a mistake in assuming anyone with such a love for velocity would, for some fucking reason, content themselves with freight schedules, ping-ponging lethargically between neighboring systems until something inside them goes ping, and they’re put to pasture. It was how Rita snatched her up that first time.
You call the shots, Rita said. You tell us how fast we go.
And where? said Constance. And how?
Yes.
“I can’t believe she became a fucking cop,” says Maya.
It isn’t a lie. She can’t. The thought isn’t so much repellent as it is counter to the ontology of Maya’s worldview. Why the fuck would someone like them head to the political cat’s cradle of law enforcement? Absolution could have been more easily bought elsewhere. No matter Maya’s misgivings, the facts are the fucking facts: Constance works for the law now, and they’d just have to deal with that.
“Fuck,” Maya declares, as though the word is an ointment, a salve, a reprieve from the uncomfortable truth. “I can’t believe she became a fucking cop.”
Rita slopes a cool look over. “Act natural.”
The precinct in which Constance works might have been an auditorium once, two-storied, with ceilings white-gilled for some fucking reason and chandeliered with cameras. From their vantage a ledge above, Maya studies the basin of black steel desks and strutting officers, telemetries deluging her inlays with predicted coordinates. It’s not good. No matter how she processes the input, the haruspices of her heuristics system proclaim the same fate each time: death if she fucks with them, death if she even thinks about trying.
“My natural state in these fucking circumstances is extreme ill-ease,” Maya hisses, not gauche enough to be loud, not with that teeming viper-pit of armed bodies beneath them.
It fucking unsettles Maya to see Rita outside of her scrubs. For their jaunt to the planet, she’d elected to dress in a clinging vantablack pantsuit, boots exchanged for closed-toed stilettos. Under the blazer, her shirt is crisp and pale, collar a prismatic froth. An archaic composition save for the enveloping visor, twentieth-century business-chic disinterred for a laugh. Casually posed in the lime-green armchair, Rita looks doll-like, delicate and abhorrently so.
The All-Consuming World Page 7
