“No,” Bayn said. “You yourself were very nearly killed too. You suffered extensive physiological damage. I have kept you in a medical coma for some time while I completed repairs and did what I could to assist in your natural recovery. I spent much of this time talking to you inanely, I’m afraid. I am … not ideally suited to medical care of Áea-folk,” she concluded apologetically.
“I … feel okay,” Moskin said, finally swimming a hand up to his face and feeling around. Everything seemed to be in place – in fact, even the slender, back-swept spines of his hair had grown back. “How long have I been immersed?”
“A few months,” she replied, and Moskin chuckled silently to himself. It hardly mattered, since he had been dependent on the Flesh-Eater for his conception of time anyway. “It won’t be much longer, I think, until you’re ready to be released.”
He finally managed to fumble his eyes open. They’d been gummed shut with something slimy of which he preferred to remain ignorant, but aside from a thick amber blur due to the liquid he was floating in, his vision seemed unimpaired.
He’d been about to ask where Blacknettle was, but even as he opened his eyes he became aware of the familiar stark white room surrounding the pod, and a humanoid figure standing in its doorway with a great blurry white sweep of wings behind her.
“Hello, Blacknettle,” he said.
“She doesn’t speak much,” Bayn said, as the indistinct figure raised an arm in greeting and then receded into the shadowed tunnel, “at least not to me. We have long since dispensed with the need for verbal communication, and that seems to have continued after her removal from semi-integration.”
“So, she stayed on our side,” Moskin said, watching the doorway. It wasn’t, he suddenly realised, a tunnel as such. “Are we–?”
“Yes,” Bayn replied, “a lot of my structure is still damaged, the hull unable to close and many critical components missing. This room is open to the gulf on one side, although I will be able to feed you directly into a pressurised pocket on your release. And speaking of feeding you, Blacknettle and I have repaired the gastroclave so as soon as you are back on your feet you will also be able to enjoy meals not filtered directly into your body from the nutrient suspension.”
“There’s something to look forward to,” Moskin remarked. “What about Athé? Did she…?”
“Blacknettle has not told me,” Bayn said, sounding unconcerned, “but I suspect Blacknettle killed her, or she was incapacitated and dropped into the gulf. Blacknettle seemed indifferent, so I tend to doubt there is any risk of the Adversary acquiring anything useful from anything that might land down there.”
Moskin nodded to himself. As always, the concerns of Angels were a little beyond him.
“Speaking of dying,” he said, “I realised something, just before the … well, before the explosion, I suppose. When I was aruing with Athé, and then with the Vorontessi commander.”
“It was an unavoidable conflict,” Bayn said, “you shouldn’t feel–”
“No,” Moskin went on, “not those deaths. The Pinians. Inside the veil. You remember, we were always wondering how the Pinians weren’t helping, how Gabriel wasn’t able to find them. And yet, if they were dying…”
“They would either come out through the conduit to receive new bodies and resume their existence at the proverbial feet of God,” Bayn said, “or there would be another Farrendohr incident, or…”
“Or they were staying in there and arranging their own bodies,” Moskin said. “It seems almost too obvious, doesn’t it?”
“Help an old Flesh-Eater out, Moskin,” Bayn joked.
Moskin raised a sluggish finger, and grinned in the thick, soapy fluid of the immersion pod.
“They’ve gone native,” he said.
“Meaning what exactly?”
“I don’t understand the mechanics of Firstmade reincarnation,” Moskin said, “probably never will. Much less how it works in a closed system like the sphere behind the veil. But if I have the gist of it … the Pinian is an eternal entity in many parts. When a Disciple’s body is slain, some part of the consciousness – the incarnation, the soul, whatever it’s called when it’s part of the Firstmade – departs to unreality. Firstmades don’t die, they just … file that lifetime away and start a new one, a new soul in a new body but the same overall thing. It’s the thing that is forever.”
“And behind the veil…” Bayn said.
“Right. Behind the veil, there’s no reincarnation in the classical Firstmade sense. They can’t get out. One of them tried once, and it didn’t go well, and none of them tried again.”
“Go on.”
“I think – I think – that first attempt in the Fourth Century post-vanishing was made with outside assistance,” Moskin said. “Maybe it was some kindly attempt to draw out this thing the Archangelic court is so worried about, before things got as badly out of control as they are now. A jailbreak, or a practice run for one. That part doesn’t matter. The ploy failed, but it showed us how things operated behind the veil from then on. If we’d just been paying attention.”
“They’re soul-journeying in there?” Bayn asked.
“They’re soul-journeying in there,” Moskin agreed. “They’ve been doing it for centuries. They may not even know they’re doing it. The Disciples have taken full human guise, but they’re still Pinians. Even if they’ve forgotten.”
“They’ve … forgotten?”
“Of course. Just as the Angels fell, so too the Disciples were brought low. The chaos must have been absolute,” Moskin shivered in the suddenly-clammy-feeeling enclosure. “They went completely native. The bodies they were in aged, matured, broke down, died. And then … they soul-journeyed.
“So when that frail old human disguise’s heart beats its last, that lifetime’s-worth of consciousness goes into unreality and the Pinian, the facet of the eternal Firstmade entity, flits out and possesses a new body. Probably doesn’t even remember it’s happening. Lives an entire human life. A normal human life. In fact, in the absence of new near-matchless Pinian bodies, they’re probably using humans.”
“Using them?”
“Possessing them,” Moskin shrugged slowly. “Except, I believe, when a consciousness occupies a body from the beginning of its life to the end, and is unaware that it’s doing so, it’s just called ‘living’.”
“They are truly lost,” Bayn said, sounding reverent.
“Yes,” Moskin agreed, still feeling cold. “If there really is something inside the veil that is meant to remain trapped, and it really is hiding inside the revered Firstmade’s essence, then this…”
“This is a prison within a prison,” Bayn finished.
“And that’s why the conduit failed and the exile is foundering,” Moskin said. “Because in the confusion at the beginning, the Pinians went into hiding – and were trapped in hiding. And because humans live such a short span–”
“The worlds in exile forgot them,” Bayn finished for him again. “What about your brush with the exiled sphere? The fire? The revered Firstmades obviously still have their power…”
Moskin shook his head. “A reaction to my interference,” he said, “a spark introduced to a volume of volatile material. Unconscious and unplanned. The shock I felt – it fits. The Disciple had no more idea what was happening than any other mortal in that city. May even have immolated itself with the outburst.”
“So what do we do with this revelation?”
“We do what that Farrendese wizard did,” Moskin said, hearing his voice hushing with shock and terror at what he was saying, even though it was a voice only within his own skull and a sluggish pulse through the fluid around him. “We make sure we’re at the right place at the right time, at this end of the conduit, and the next time a Pinian’s human guise dies, we make sure we’re there to snap up the soul and bring it out here.”
“Snap up the soul?” Bayn actually sounded shocked.
“It’s only the memory and personality imp
rint,” Moskin said, “and we wouldn’t keep it the way the wizard did. Just … a brief detour before the soul goes to its final rest. We communicate briefly with this segment, find out what it knows, then let it go. Meanwhile, the Disciple has been reborn on the other side of the veil. In a sense, we will have momentarily accessed one of its past lives, nothing more.”
“And then what?”
“Then we take the next step,” Moskin said. “And the next. We remind them what it means to be Pinians. We remind them what they have to do. Get them to the Elevator, if that’s what it takes, and get things working again.”
“This is not what I expected from you, Moskin,” Bayn said, but there was admiration as well as surprise in her voice.
“Perhaps you should have put me in a tank years ago.”
Bayn tittered, then grew serious once more. “How are we going to snare the soul?”
“Well, I seem to recall you saying you had a certain capacity to rig up a system,” Moskin said. “Something about the Category 9 equivalent of evolution?”
“Blacknettle and I might be able to patch something together,” she said. “But it’s a highly forbidden practice, Moskin.”
“That’s okay,” Moskin replied. “You won’t actually be using the soul for power, remember? We’ll just be initiating brief contact.”
“Still, with a Disciple…” Bayn said. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then…” Moskin was briefly at a loss. “I want to say, nothing happens?”
The Flesh-Eater laughed again.
For the next few months – or perhaps it was longer, depending on the duration of his sleep-states – Moskin was left to his own devices while Bayn and Blacknettle worked on the next phase of their great work. It was complicated, Bayn said, by the damage she’d suffered, not to mention the fact that Blacknettle’s removal from semi-integration had left their lines of communication patchy at best.
At least there didn’t seem to be any sign of interference from Heaven, for now. The authorities were typically slow to act, Bayn said. Particularly the Archangelic court … but in the case of a Flesh-Eater and an Angel being responsible for destroying a warship full of Vorontessæ, it could go either way. There could be a swift and heightened response, or – far more likely in Bayn’s opinion – they might be more inclined to simply sweeping the whole thing under the rug again. Especially if known agitator Athé was no longer in the picture. Srill, it was probably better if they acted fast.
Eventually, Bayn reported that their communications with Gabriel on the other side of the veil had borne fruit. The Archangel had indicated that he was reasonably certain he’d found the whereabouts of one of the Disciples in its unknowing human guise.
This wasn’t a straightforward physical thing. It wasn’t a matter of tracking down a single person. That would only work once Gabriel knew which person to look for, and there were billions of them on the ballworld. Finding a Pinian Disciple who not only thought he was a human but actually was a human…
“We have a fair idea of whereabouts on our ballworld the Second Disciple has been reborn most recently, into human form,” Bayn said, “but Gabriel will have to confirm it. And any contact, any action, will have to be initiated from his side. Because–”
“It isn’t a fixed place on this side,” Moskin said dutifully. “I know. There’s no corresponding point in motion here in the gulf that we can fly over and say this is the city the Pinian is living in, let alone this is the spot where the other end of the conduit lies. And it wouldn’t do Gabriel any good even if we could.”
“Yes,” Bayn agreed. “No place in the solar system behind the veil corresponds to anywhere here in the gulf. The whole thing is folded up and in constant motion, it’s a kaleidoscope. It’s the only way a solar system can fit into the physical space a stack of flatworlds once floated. If there was a direct overlap or any way of tracking from one to the other, we would have been following the Destarion by now. It’s far more figurative than that.”
“I know,” Moskin said, “but there are points on this side that we can manipulate into points of correspondence with that side, if our theories hold,” Moskin said confidently.
“And you are aware, yes, what you’re expecting that manipulation to entail, on Gabriel’s side?”
“Yes,” Moskin said.
“We’re talking about making the Archangel Gabriel murder a Pinian Disciple.”
“Yes,” Moskin repeated. He was tempted to repeat his argument, that technically they were talking about a human being anyway. The Pinian was so thoroughly buried at this point that the result was practically indistinguishable from the act of killing a human, the only difference being that the death would not actually be a death.
But he knew what it was they were considering. And Bayn knew he knew. There was no lying at this point.
It would be up to Gabriel to decide whether he would commit a crime that would elevate him to Class Four criminal status. And would most likely elevate Moskin, Blacknettle and Bayn along with him as accessories.
Bayn let the accusing silence stretch out for a few moments, then relented. “Well, perhaps it’s murder and perhaps it’s not,” the Flesh-Eater said. “But Firstmades are eternal, regardless of the actual penalties for ending one of their valuable physical bodies. It won’t die. It will just lose the body it’s been riding in, and we’ll have a word with it before it goes to the next one. Or, more accurately, while it goes to the next one. Yes?”
“That’s the idea,” Moskin said.
And with that, there was no going back.
THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF IMMORTALS
(FINAL INTERLUDE)
It was said that to murder a Firstmade wasn’t just a serious crime, it was also a stupid one. Unless you were careful, the victim would turn up again in a short while, and point an accusing finger right at you.
The Firstmades were the first living things created by the Infinites at the dawn of time. They were the first life created and crafted by cooperative effort of the ten Ghååla, in fact, after DaRah had brought the other nine Infinites into being to assist in the administration of the urverse.
Well, perhaps not technically the first. There were, it was said, things that dwelled in the cold darkness Beyond the Walls of the Corporation, things brought into being by the stray thoughts of DaRah when the urverse was wild and the Ghååla were yet to tame it.
Terrible things.
But these unknown horrors, like most of the urverse Beyond the Walls, did not qualify as proper life-forms. They did not show their metaphorical faces41 in the Corporate Dimensions. The Firstmades, after the Infinites Themselves, were it.
As enthusiastically as the Ghååla had tamed the newborn urverse, however, They’d crafted the Firstmades before really figuring out how life worked. The result was ten titanic and everlasting spirits that could not actually die, as the concept of death eventually came to be understood.
These were the ten Brotherhoods, each one divided into various numbers of entities but each one one. And each one eternal.
The Firstmades clothed themselves in flesh. To the greater elements of each Brotherhood, divine forms. To the lesser, the supernatural bodies of Disciples. But these forms were just that – they were clothing. When a piece of the Firstmade perished, it adopted a new costume and went on. Sometimes, by dint of their supreme capacity to soul-journey,42 they used the bodies of lesser beings as puppets – even, in extreme cases, as replacement costumes. Incarnation after incarnation, the Firstmades endured.
There were plenty of quasi-immortals in the urverse. Some, like Angels, were simply glorified souls, lingering imprints of human minds given solidity, housed in divinely-perfected flesh that reflected the bodies in which they’d once lived. Many such altered mortals, so-called near-mortal or undead creatures, existed across the countless worlds of the Corporation. They were, for the most part, little more than animated corpses with varying degrees of their previously-inhabiting consciousnesses along for the ride.
None of them were really immortal, as they could all be destroyed – some more easily than others. But they had it in them to linger for thousands, even millions of years.
Other species mastered the ability to soul-journey from body to body like parasites, or to convert their essences into non-physical forms and exist as ghostly disembodied awareness, either free-floating or stored in some specialised vessel. Some arranged to exist in storage for a time, and then take on new physical forms at will. Such entities were uncommon, but they existed. They were not immortal, either, were not quite the same as Firstmades although they were of a similar category – but the distinction was easy to miss.
Still other organisms possessed great powers of regeneration that allowed them to endure long aeons and withstand unthinkable damage. These, too, could be slain by sufficient application of force, and would in time run down according to the vagaries of their mighty biology. The Ogres, legendary warriors bred by the Pinians of old to do battle with the Damoraks, were one such species.
There were smart machines and biomechanical entities, like Bayn and the Destarion. Functionally immortal, but not invincible.
Then there were the Gods. Like near-mortals, not even the Gods were truly immortal – there was a difference between immortality and just not dying for a long time. All mortals considered themselves immortal, after all, usually right up until the moment they died. That was biological imperative at work. Gods had something comparable, a theological imperative so to speak, and They too could be destroyed, although it took a rather more spectacular set of actions and conditions to end a God.
Others were to be found, though. True immortals, aside from the Infinites and the Firstmades. Life-forms with their souls trapped in their bodies. Unable to be destroyed. For better or worse.
There were ways of achieving immortality. Sorcery, science … these were just names. And overwhelmingly, these methods were hidden, guarded, and forbidden most severely. Limbo, the Caretaker Ghåålus, and the Vultures usually took care of any mortal or near-mortal foolish enough to seek true eternity. Usually, the would-be immortal was granted its wish, albeit in some flawed and undesirable manner.
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