Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  ULTIMATELY INSUFFICIENT EXPLANATION

  FOR AUGUSTUS SLOANE)

  Sometimes, if you want to understand a thing, it helps to start small. And you can’t get much smaller than aactur.

  Well, technically you can. Science-magi in the First Age succeeded in splitting the aactur, resulting in a subspecies, the aactil, that was composed of far fewer conceptual ‘aactur-atoms’. The subsequent containment breach and expansion of the subspecies was one of those disasters of the ‘end of life as we know it’ / ‘destruction of the entire urverse’ variety, and the worst thing about it was, it actually happened and nothing anybody did could stop it. The urverse as we currently know it, in an ever-expanding ring of Dimension after Dimension, universe after universe as the disaster continues through infinity, is the new order that rose from the slagged ruins of the old. Everything in reality is still suffering the consequences. It was widely agreed never to try to split the aactur again.

  It’s not worth thinking of aactur in most readily-accessible terms. You can’t really think of them as things, like motes or mites or molecules or protons. Go in far enough and there is no matter, no energy, there are no waves, no particles, no fields. It’s all aactur, exposing different facets of themselves to the universe.

  Aactur are expressions of a fundamental, founding binary – each one is composed of equal reflections in reality and unreality, perfect halves making up a whole, and these wholes in turn make up everything. And that’s a far broader concept than even most people think. Molecules, atoms, subatoms, spectra, subspectra, energy, all of it, is all made up of aactur. Even thinking of it in terms of ‘made up of’ is misleading, of course, because larger-scale thinking about matter and energy has already sent you down the wrong conceptual path.

  The aactur skitter across the quantum foam like dust devils on the surface of a moon. They make up everything in the universe – in the urverse. They are the urverse and, owing to their binary nature, they are also Limbo. They form it, and thus define it.

  It also doesn’t pay to think of them as life-forms in any sense we really understand, although they are conscious entities according to their own unknowable qualifications. Indeed, they are legally unknowable, their mystery enforced, in the mythic knowledge of the terrible consequences of studying them too closely. Whenever a melodramatic technophobe intones that “some things we were never meant to know,” there is a certain amount of Aactur Plague genetic memory coming into play.

  The question of how aactur define things in reality and unthings in unreality; how they dictate the spark of life and the burning brand of consciousness; how they make up such ephemeral and yet eternal things as souls; how their operation enables the endless variety of undead and near-mortals, ghosts, Gods, soul-journeying Firstmades in their endless march of incarnations … these are disciplines to which millennia of study have been dedicated.

  How, exactly, souls are formed and preserved, and how aactur elements of unreality form into souls and connect to life-forms in reality, is all a matter of conjecture and mystical theory dating back aeons, and may never be satisfactorily answered. But at a certain point, the souls-in-potentia in the aactur making up a life-form reach critical mass and a soul is born, connecting the life-form’s flesh in reality to its shadow-counterpart in unreality, by the functionally-infinite anchors of its smallest imaginable components.

  When does this happen? When does a froth of unwitnessed and miniscule potential turn into a living thing? What is a soul? All vastly pointless questions … but, like all the pointless and unanswerable questions, an inordinate number of people are far too concerned with the answers.

  Sometimes it happens at conception. The aactur that make up sperm and egg, in human beings for example, already have the requisite elements – but it’s arguable as to whether these cellular-scale genetic building blocks have souls in the classically-understood sense – or in any sense, really, any more than a stone or an amino acid chain have souls just because they’re made up of tiny elements that might themselves have tiny soul-elements. Get close enough, and all such considerations cease to have meaning. If everything has a soul, then nothing does. This is why consciousness and communication are held up as more meaningful markers. All in all, though, it is knowledge with inexpressible potential for coldness of vision.

  Sometimes it happens later, just another decoration hung randomly on the tree from the genetic grab-bag of biological features bestowed upon an organism by dint of its gestation inside its progenitor. Offspring functionally indistinguishable from tumours until a certain watershed is passed.

  Sometimes, the individual soul does not coalesce and actualise for some considerable time after the statistically-usual moment of quickening. The result is something that is observationally identical to a living thing on every level, but with a fog of practically infinite almost-souls in the place of a discrete self. It is an organism from which some fundamental but largely indefinable thing is – however briefly – missing. Until it isn’t. The aactur braid together, the formless almost-souls collapse, and what once looked like a living thing becomes a living thing.

  Of course, there is a logical if rather horrifying projection of this phenomenon, and indeed there are myths in many cultures about the neversouled. Infants born without souls and in which souls never blossom … but this is all they are. Myths. A life-form cannot exist without a soul any more than it can exist without a second dimension. A soul may be late to express, but never more than a short time once that symbolic step into life is completed. Otherwise, of course, the life-form simply dies, and becomes nothing more than an assemblage of flesh beginning its natural putrefaction.

  Nevertheless, the myth of the neversouled is an enduring one.

  There is an element of compelling, disturbing truth behind the myth, even if the idea of the neversouled itself is inherently nonsensical. It is because of this grain of truth, and the superstitions and prejudices that have grown around it, that some of the older and more expensive medical establishments and institutions employ Soul Doctors.

  They are extremely specialised and exclusive, their work is very complex and often their talents centred on a single species – it being all but impossible, after all, to comprehend an alien soul. They can see if a soul is ‘missing’, see it when the fog of clustered aactur in the shape of an organism figuratively collapses into the true product, see what impact the soul’s arrival – late or timely – has on the growing creature.

  Soul Doctors typically perform other functions, too, since “watching, eternally vigilant, for the arrival of the neversouled” is a dubious justification for a paycheque at best, but their other tasks mostly fall under the definition of therapy, diagnostics or counselling.

  There were no Soul Doctors on Earth. There weren’t many human Soul Doctors anywhere, in fact, it being a discipline that required extensive training, a broad knowledge base and above all a lifespan beyond the mere century or two afforded to the average human being. And, more importantly, Earth as it was in the first year of the Twenty-Third Century was environmentally unable to support the profession. Soul Doctoring required innate connections to a wider and deeper ecosystem that had long since been sealed off by vast and remorseless powers.

  Still, it would have come as absolutely no surprise to any practitioner of the craft to learn that Augustus Sloane’s soul had only folded into life two point four seconds after he was cut, gasping and squirming, from his mother’s belly as she lay dying in an overdose-related seizure.

  In those to whom the soul blossoms late, it is said, the flesh remembers what it was to be living meat and nothing more. A cloud of shaped unreality, a life without a self, a pseudoconsciousness without the comfort of fellow minds.

  Augustus Sloane. Sometimes, if you want to understand a thing, it helps to start small.

  And sometimes it doesn’t.

  THE BACHELOR PARTY (AN ANECDOTE INTENDED TO LEND CONTEXT TO THE SISTERS VANDEMAR)

  The Vandemar girls’ grandfather
, Bartemys “Bart” Vandemar, had famously celebrated the nuptials of his younger brother Cassius by organising and hosting a bachelor party that he fully intended to be remembered for a thousand years.

  The party was held aboard Black Boonie where he48 sat in dock at the Old Port of Fremantle, known far and wide as one of the most exorbitantly expensive parking places on the planet.

  Black Boonie, the Vandemar family ship, was a perfect replica of the famed Seventeenth Century Swedish warship Vasa, with a couple of modern buoyancy tweaks and slightly more acknowledgement of centre of gravity so, in Bart’s own words, “he won’t fall over when the luggage shifts.”

  Black Boonie was, in turn, the predecessor of the Werelemming, so it was just as accurate to say the Werelemming was a replica of Black Boonie as it was to say she was a replica of the Vasa. Either way, the Black Boonie was an impressive sight.

  All of this occurred during the Slash-and-Burn Forties, in the last destructive flurries of the reign of Big Beef. The Princess49 was still a solid half-century in the world’s future, however, and gauche displays of wealth and power were admired and applauded by a general public eager to be distracted from the depressing downward spirals of their day-to-day lives and from a planet that seemed to be treating them like an unwanted infection, alternately freezing and burning and flooding and blowing them from its surface in appalling multitudes.

  Even before the arrival of globally-adored Ariel and her Great Celebrity Paradox, the Vandemars were well-liked for their charities and community projects, avoiding the envy and bitterness that wealth brought with it. For them, the Forties were a golden age.

  This time, Black Boonie wasn’t just going to sit in his dock and act as a luxurious floating cocktail lounge. He wasn’t even going to cruise out into the inky Indian Ocean and run a pleasure-cruise loop around the floating casinos of Rottnest before returning to port. No, this time Black Boonie headed upriver, and Bartemys Vandemar stood at the head of the captain’s table and told his brother and their guests exactly what was on the agenda for that night.

  “By now ye will have found,” he sea-dogged, “that the bar, humidor and hatchery50 be sealed with sturdy locks. I’ve opened the captain’s own grog cabinet and I’ll share what I have with ye, my doughty crew … but ‘twill not long slake our thirsts nor bolster our spirits,” at this, he gestured for his uniformed cabin staff to step forward and bestow tankards of ale and snifters of port and boxes of brite-snuff liberally and arbitrarily to the guests. “Tonight, me lads, we have a mission.”

  At this point, Captain Bart let a picture of a boat whisk onto the wall display behind him – an unassuming Swan Wineries tourboat, lights winking on the water as she cruised past the Point Walter monument.51

  “Here be our target,” he announced, “the Sweet Lady Lillian, sixty-three crew and one hundred and eighty-eight passengers, plump and complacent to a man. We’ll be abreast of her in…” he opened his pocket-watch and glanced down at it, “…forty-five – sorry – five and forty minutes,” he snapped the gleaming platinum device closed decisively. “Ye’ll board her. Ye’ll pillage her. Ye’ll lead the crew a merry chase and so on and so forth. The keys to the treasuries be hidden somewhere aboard, and in the meantime o’course the Sweet Lady Lillian’s own bar and hospitalities are yours to plunder. Return with the keys, lads, or not at all.”

  It had, of course, all been prearranged. The Sweet Lady Lillian had been separately chartered for the occasion, her crew informed of what was to happen and her passengers generously interspersed with hired actors, dancers, acrobats, performance artists and personnel trained in nautical safety and procedures.

  There was not at any point any real crime committed, nor any real peril to the scurvy dogs who marched aboard and began avast-ing and arr-matey-ing for all they were worth. Only one injury occurred, and that was to the ankle of one of the raiders who had ill-advisedly decided to attempt swinging aboard by rope. Bart had originally wanted to board and raid the party that was taking place on the same night for the bride-to-be, but that crowd had persisted on holding their celebration firmly on dry land. And so he had made do with what he had available.

  A certain amount of quaffing, shantying, wenching, boffer-fighting and rigorously-supervised plank-walking ensued. The Sweet Lady Lillian’s minimal bar was drained in short order – she was, after all, a winery cruiser and depended on landfalls to keep her passengers lubricated – and the keys to the pirate booty were duly located at the end of a simple and well-crafted session of live-action role-playing.

  And Black Boonie sailed on, turning his nose downriver once more with his increasingly-incoherent pirate crew. They crept back to their senses two days later to find that the staff had grounded them safely on the Point Walter monument.

  Everyone agreed it had been a bachelor party for the ages.

  Four years after his wedding in ’44, Cassius Vandemar was dead. He’d been twenty-eight years old.

  Bart himself died in ’88, at the far-less-tender age of seventy-six, although seventy was considered the new forty.

  But it had been a different time. Those had been the heady days in the wake of the Atonement, when it seemed like humanity had found its centre once more, and things were only going to improve and improve, height to height, triumph to triumph, decade after decade. And people – Vandemars, most particularly – were going to live forever.

  The days before steak replaced Ra on the list of the most expensive and fiercely-controlled substances on Earth. Before The Princess marched across the globe and stamped the average lifespan of First-worlders back to the mere threescore and ten that Second- and Third-worlders had enjoyed since the Nineteenth Century.

  Still.

  It had been a Hell of a party while it lasted.

  THE CORTANA

  He stopped overday on an aircraft carrier, the Cortana. The reverend on duty in the vast ship’s small and utilitarian multi-denominational chapel was actually a senior sergeant, a large cheerful Intervangelist from the American Floods by the name of Barnaby Hoat.

  “No relation,” he’d said by way of introduction, with a little star-struck titter that sounded odd coming from the six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-eighty-pound man.

  Gabriel took this to mean that Barnaby Hoat was supposed to be a name he found amusingly familiar, perhaps even famous, and so he smiled his broad, toothy smile obligingly and let Senior Sergeant Hoat (no relation) think his joke had hit its mark.

  “And I’m Gabriel,” he said, “no relation either.”

  Gabriel’s relationship with men of the cloth was a complicated one. On some level, they knew on sight who and what he was. On that level, they saw through his aura and recognised the personification of their lives’ work, standing before them with his oddly-bandy legs, his too-long arms, his bulky clothes and his stubble everywhere. But on another level, they let themselves be fooled, let his presence go unquestioned, let him sit out the daylight hours on their holy ground without much in the way of comment. They seemed to know instinctively that now was not his time to step forth in front of the world, that he was waiting for something.

  They accepted that convenience and expediency demanded that he stop in their places of worship, and then move on, without a sign that he had ever been there.

  It was, of course, an overwhelming experience for the poor creatures at the time, but they usually adjusted to it with the flexibility of the human mind, and – after a bit of fish-like flopping and gasping – wove his existence into the fantasy they built around themselves inside their own heads. Reality was, to humans, the sum of their senses filtered through the infinite kaleidoscope lenses of their imaginations.

  Then there were the crappy clergymen, who didn’t have an ounce of faith or wonder and who could simply be leaned on, imprinted with any old opinion and certainty like the weak, rationality-bound clay they were.

  Although it was easier for him, Gabriel hated running into those and he was glad Senior Sergeant Hoat wasn’t one. He’d be
en knocked very briefly on his backside by the revelation, and had then recovered admirably.

  Hoat had, Gabriel discovered as they chatted idly during the Senior Sergeant’s breaks, heard of Ashley Vandemar. She too was a Senior Sergeant, if of a slightly different and rarefied discipline to his own. She was also part of a darker, more secret and above all un-American wing of the great globe-engulfing monster that was the armed forces. But she was a legend in her own right, and Hoat was almost as excited to hear about Gabriel’s mission to the Vandemar home as he had been to meet Gabriel himself.

  And this was an Intervangelist, meeting the Archangel Gabriel.

  That was humans for you.

  The thought was mildly amusing to Gabriel – especially if he was right about the Vandemars at long last. Hoat had no idea how right he was.

  “Do you know her?” Senior Sergeant Barnaby Hoat asked eagerly.

  “Can’t say I do,” Gabriel replied. “I’ve done some research, but never seen her in person.”

  “I hear she’s … quite something.”

  “Deadly and beautiful, my Senior Sergeant friend,” Gabriel sat back in the small metal pew and grinned. “Deadly and beautiful. I hear she has over four thousand confirmed kills, although the closest I could find on any official record was two hundred and forty.”

  “I think it’s all a myth,” Hoat said with a wave of a huge, meaty hand. “And nothing to be particularly proud of, besides. We don’t exist to take lives, we exist to protect them.”

  “Good man,” Gabriel approved, “I couldn’t agree more. If it makes you feel any better, Vandemar herself has gone on record as saying that she doesn’t keep count beyond what’s required by her superiors, and doesn’t classify them as kills in any case, so much as tumour surgeries.”

  “That’s right,” Hoat said, regaining some of his enthusiasm. “Her unit take out slavers and kiddy porn rings and brothels and stuff, don’t they?”