—and I was in Bezile again.
I could feel her webbed into the pilot’s station, but although she was conscious her eyes were firmly closed and I could see nothing.
The bridgehead was filled with the laughter of Julius and Orela—mad, uninhibited laughter, as if they were celebrating their imminent deaths.
Bezile, meanwhile, was completely focused on fighting down a terror which threatened to overwhelm her. It was not simply the prospect of her own extinction but the vivid and gruesome images of physical decay which were erupting in her mind: visions of unhinged Dementia victims running amuck, of rotting corpses, maggot-infested skulls—endless mortifications of the flesh. They were the products of Julius and Orela’s diseased imaginations, the distillation of a million nightmares wrought from a lifetime of overwhelming experiences.
So absorbed was Bezile in the battle to keep these visions at bay that she scarcely registered my manifestation. I flooded myself through her mind, telling her that we had come to save her, to rescue her from her madness.
There was no response. Amid the relentless cackling of Julius and Orela, I could hear an animalistic whimpering coming from Leanderic. Nina had evidently entered him, and I imagined her struggling with his unleashed madness. She had already achieved greater feats than I, entering the mind of the Augmenter Addomatis, the dead brain of Shivaun. And now she was struggling with a mental frenzy. Leanderic had suffered even more than Bezile and did not possess her resilience. For Nina it must have been like entering a maelstrom of horror.
Yet again I tried to seize control of Bezile’s mind, telling her to unweb, to rise. I tried to fill her with the reassurance that even truedeath held no terror. I had only the remotest fear of such an end myself, and perhaps this was proof that Nina and I were indeed of the past and had been raised in a world where death was a fact of existence, the silence that greets the end of every human drama.
But Bezile was wrestling with horrors, and I could not impinge on her.
And still I could hear the Advocates’ laughter. Suddenly it came closer.
I focused on attempting one small action, pouring every effort into getting Bezile to open her eyes.
She did so.
And I saw Orela and Julius standing there before us.
They were free of their webbing. Entirely free. On their faces were gleeful smiles.
“Did you really think,” Julius said, “you could seize control of our ship?”
He came forward and put a sculpted fingernail to Bezile’s chin. For a moment Bezile’s horrors had subsided; for a moment she was painfully lucid. Julius stroked his finger sharply downwards, slicing into the skin.
“It’s designed to respond to our command,” Orela said. “At a word from us, it would perform somersaults.” She rolled her eyes as if in demonstration, straddling the quivering Leanderic, stroking his cheek. “I don’t think we are truly ready for death,” she said. “Not just yet. There are more experiences to be wrested from life.”
“Always more,” Julius agreed eagerly. “Did you know that some of the Augmenter ships have made planetfall on Earth? Rather enterprising of them, under the circumstances. I think perhaps we will seek them out and join them. Perhaps we’ll even be able to forge a new community there. A challenging prospect, wouldn’t you agree?”
The grisly death visions were seeping back again, threatening to swamp Bezile’s mind once more. And I, too, had begun to feel afraid—afraid that Nina and I were also going to die, our lives ending before they had truly begun. My growing terror also encompassed Julius and Orela: I wanted only to escape from their malignant presence.
“How unfortunate,” said Orela, “that neither of you will be able to join us. But that, alas, is the nature of mortality. Shall we end it with a kiss?”
Orela wrapped her lips around Leanderic’s mouth, while Julius came forward to cup Bezile’s face in his hands.
I tried to reach out and grasp Leanderic’s hand. Tried and failed. Julius’s mouth opened, and he pressed it to Bezile’s. I felt the rank heat and the wetness, felt the teeth being bared as if he intended to bite us to death.
Then Chloe and Lucian manifested themselves in full force. Like a great liberating tide, they rushed in and through us, into the Advocates themselves, washing away our terror and madness in an instant.
Julius and Orela broke contact, the two of them staggering back. A flood of calm suffused them, their wild eyes closing. For a moment they teetered like drunkards, then straightened.
When their eyes opened again, they gazed at us in perfect calm. The flame of their madness had been doused in the instant that Chloe and Lucian entered them, and now I saw them as they must have been in the first days of their Advocacy, as if the good intentions and the proper appetites of their calling had been restored to them. Then I knew nothing.
• • •
There was a black star on a white field. Hands were gently raising us from the prayer terminals—the hands of Marea and Tunde and even Vargo. They were gentle, kindly.
They led us away from the terminal but did not take us out of the shrine. Bezile and Leanderic were there, Imrani and Cori, too.
And Julius and Orela.
I drifted away, and when I came back again Julius and Orela were seated, hooded. Leanderic had taken their robes and they wore humble white bodysuits. Bezile was asking them if they were certain they wanted truedeath rather than translation to the Noosphere. Both nodded solemnly, lucidly.
The ship’s console had been brought in and was recording the scene. Orela and Julius closed their eyes. Bezile began to deliver a eulogy of their tenure. Her exhaustion barely showed through her determination to carry it through. I couldn’t focus on her words; it was as if I were drugged with nepenthe. Nina, too. She was swaying slightly beside me.
Cori came between us, taking our hands in hers. I smiled down at her, heard Bezile say, “May your souls rest for ever in oblivion.”
The black star blossomed, consuming everything.
Epilogue
The great concourse was thronged with the multitudes of the Noosphere. Nina and I stood, already robed, on the wide platform which overlooked it, the dome of the Shrine of Shrines rising at our backs.
Before us, suspended vertically in a zeegee ceremonial bier, hung Julius and Orela. Their bodies were draped only in the sheerest white wraprounds, their faces composed at last in death. An optic focused on them as Bezile, at the edge of the platform, recounted how they had finally met their end with due dignity in the death-shrine of the scuttle.
It seemed to me as if Nina and I had come here direct from Julius and Orela’s death ceremony. In possessing the Advocates, Chloe and Lucian had restored their sanity sufficiently to turn their flier around and rendezvous with the scuttle. They had been taken on board along with Bezile and Leanderic, whose sickness had been cured with the swamping of the Advocates’ madness. I had a memory of Julius and Orela declining the option of translation to the Noosphere in the calm and reasoned tones of Chloe and Lucian themselves, who for all I knew were the very embodiment of the Advocates’ youth and sanity and had never existed as anything more than that. They had formally accepted Nina and me as their successors, the scuttle’s console recording everything. Then they had seated themselves at the shrine and embraced their dying without a murmur.
I recalled this, but it was as though I had lived it through a dream. Afterwards Nina and I had said our farewells to Marea and the others, who now had the freedom to return to their former lives. Then we had accompanied Bezile and Leanderic back to the flier with the Advocates’ corpses, setting a course for the Noosphere itself.
I had no memory of the intervening period. Was this how it was for the Advocates, that they were only truly conscious when they had a part to play?
Strangely, I felt no sense of outrage at having been so completely manipulated by Chloe and Lucian—or whatever it was they represented. Yet perhaps it wasn’t so strange, because the truth was that I had suspected
their final purpose long before this, before even they first showed us the Shrine of Shrines and gave us a hint of what it might be like to be the Advocates, to dip into the billions of other lives throughout the Noospace. I think I understood what they ultimately intended when they revealed that we could inhabit other minds without using a shrine, that the minds of those whose stories we had lived were accessible to us. I knew then that we were central to the outcome of the tale, that we would be the movers and shapers at the end. And what better role for a man and woman who were empty vessels themselves than to become the new Advocates?
I thought of myself awakening, amnesiac, in the white room. I saw again the view from the window, the first of many illusions. Perhaps it had all been a sleight of mind; perhaps we had never truly existed there except as mentalities which had to be trained and shaped before they could be “born” into this world. Was even the story of our origin merely a convenient fiction, our subsequent involvement in the lives of others the labour pains of our deliverance?
And yet Marea and Tunde and Imrani existed. They had suffered heartbreak and hardship and irrecoverable loss. Shivaun had died as a result of the tale. Already it was like a distant thing, driven and improbable. Did I even, even now, truly exist as a living person? Did Nina? She stood close, beautiful and composed in her splendour. I could smell her fragrance, touch her robes, yet it was possible that even she was a figment, a mirror for my own soul. Would it one day dissolve and would I find myself truly a primitive, surrounded by the dust and ashes of my own creation? Or deeper still, vanishing away entirely so that I, too, would cease to exist?
I stopped myself. Perhaps this was how Julius and Orela’s insanity had first begun. Was this the ultimate fate of the Advocates? Or were they driven to madness because it was really true that there was no afterlife, the Noosphere merely a sop to the unbearable truth that the fate of every one of us remained extinction? The dome, with its multitude of optics, awaited us. For better or worse, Nina and I would soon know.
The crowd below were eager for a better view of us. Nina and I clasped hands while Leanderic approached to lead us forward to the edge of the platform. Had it not been for Bezile and Leanderic’s presence there before us, it would have been easy to imagine that everything had been an illusion and that the stories Nina and I had dreamt were mere fictions, Marea and the others existing only within them.
The idea was intolerable to me. I imagined Marea in a pastoral idyll on Europa with Vargo, pet cloak enfolding the newly restored daughter Rashmi while her husband regarded her with bluff fondness, through two good eyes. I could smell the swampmat habitation, feel the heat haze rising. And Tunde, remarried to Adele, taking their children on a blimp tour of Titan’s hatchling canyons, Cori studiously chaperoning her step-siblings as they watched the dashing courtship of jewelled darters over twilit crags and canyons. And Imrani, returning Shivaun’s corpse to its resting place on Charon, discovering that her daughter Niome is the living image of her, the perfect replacement who laughs with delight as he serenades with a new set of pipes and an improbable moustache. It would be the least any one of them deserved.
I knew—without knowing how—that several days had passed since the battle between the Augmenter armada and the plagueships. None of the latter had survived, but many of the Augmenter ships had indeed made planetfall on Earth. There was to be a public vote on whether they should be allowed to remain there permanently—if indeed they could survive the hostile environment. Nina and I were to give a deliverance on that very subject as one of our first official acts following our investiture. I knew that we would speak in their favour, arguing that diversity has always been a characteristic of our species and that there must be accommodation. We intended our Advocacy to be marked by tolerance and acceptance of the Augmenters, though urgent and covert steps would have to be taken to ensure that no more entities like the thing in the lake existed, and to eradicate them if they did.
With the deaths of Julius and Orela, the Dementia had also died. There had been no more reported cases, and a mob had reduced the palace at Icarus with plasm-torches. There was general outrage when the worst of the former Advocates’ excesses had been revealed, but now the crisis had passed and Bezile was assuring everyone that a new era was about to begin and that Nina and I would serve no more than a fifty-year term. I had no recollection of us discussing this, let alone agreeing it, but fifty years seemed long enough, a daunting prospect indeed. What would become of us when our term was ended, if we survived it with our minds intact?
Bezile came between us and formally introduced us to the crowd. She had made a swift recovery and seemed perfectly at ease in her role as Prime Arbiter. I felt confident that Nina and I would be able to work closely with her for the good of the peoples of the Noospace: after all, we knew her intimately.
Optics closed in around us as we were vested in our scarlet and grey robes. Thousands of millions would ultimately watch the occasion throughout the Settled Worlds. They would be looking to us for guidance and solace after the upheavals of the past year. To some we would become like gods.
My head filled with the roar of the people. It was a terrifying and exhilarating moment. The Shrine of Shrines beckoned, the Dome of Uncountable Eyes. Bezile was telling us that it was time we began our duties by taking our place within it.
I hesitated at the brink of the platform, and was suddenly seized with the notion of hurling myself and Nina off. The moment passed, and instead Nina and I embraced.
Our kiss was formal, ceremonial; it was almost as if we were each in awe of the other. I understood that whatever private moments we had once shared would no longer be possible: now we belonged to everyone. Nina’s eyes reflected my own inconsolable sense of personal loss; but any words I might have spoken were drowned by the acclamation of the crowd.
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Also by Christopher Evans
Aztec Century
Capella’s Golden Eyes
Chimeras
Icetower
In Limbo
Mortal Remains
Omega
The Insider
The Twilight Realm (as Christopher Carpenter)
Christopher Evans (1951–)
Born in Wales in 1951, Christopher Evans won the BSFA award in 1993 for his novel Aztec Century. In the 1980’s, he co-edited three Other Edens anthologies with Robert Holdstock, and as well as the science fiction and film novelisations published under his own name, he has written a number of well received books for younger readers under the pseudonym Nathan Elliott. His recent work Omega was his first for adults in almost a decade.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Christopher Evans 1995
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
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is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10250 7
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Mortal Remains Page 33
