“Maybe you are learning a thing or two my good man. At this rate you will earn your freedom in some months’ time.”
Calvin30 lay on the concrete floor of the temple soaked to his bones, freezing as the rains drizzled off the cornices. His cough was flourishing, and he feared hypothermia as the chill infiltrated his core. Nearby him, as far apart as their mat would allow, snored the girl. The brats had packed up with granny, freeing him from midnight interruptions by those squirming vermin. His luck that, just when some peace seemed possible, the thermometer had dropped.
Driven by a visceral thirst for heat Calvin30 nestled into her, holding his shuddering body tightly against the soft warmth. She sighed and surrendered into his grip. He found himself suddenly engulfed in impossible grief, holding this disgusting woman like the mother he had never had. His sobs melded into the shaking of his gelid heart, causing him to cling to her intensely. He felt at that moment all his sorrow flowing into her comforting glow, as if she could joyfully swallow the whole of his polluted soul into the bottomless reservoir of her bosom. He wanted at that moment to stay, fused to her for eternity.
Then, wrenching Calvin30 from this reverie, the wench twisted into him, widening her legs. There was nowhere for him to go from there. Clones were created for many ends, but procreation was not one of them. He pushed her away, flipping off the mat to the gravel. Then he jerked himself to his feet and stalked away and walked the entire night.
Before falling into the dirt from exhaustion a thought occurred to him. Why was the witch so eager for her offspring to play house and share her scant earnings with him? Why did anyone do anything? Self-interest. The witch was playing him for a future meal ticket. After all, weren’t they "family"?
As soon as could be organized, Calvin30 took ‘wifey’ out to meet the relatives. Through trial and error, he invented a suitable position for his alias and made many promises. Slowly the small change came in and added up. That week the turbaned man was more impressed.
Calvin30 widened his strategy. It turned out the town was full of desperate characters willing to divest their cash in return for any kind of promise. In only a week he repaid the turbaned man a main chunk of the compensation. Then things became more difficult. Word had gotten out about Calvin30’s supposed resources and now people were coming to him. These pests greatly impaired his mission. It took time to determine that they were not potential investors, and even more time to give them the brush in a way that would not put off other possible marks. Time was running away - people at Mirtopik were going to notice the length of his absence.
The rain began again. A long storm that flushed the streets of people and stranded Calvin30 on the familiar temple steps. He watched the gutters drip forlornly. One of his ‘sons’ sat behind him blowing spit though something. The slaggy sound was getting on Calvin30’s nerves and he turned around to snatch the offending instrument away from the boy. What he ended up holding was something far more valuable. His horn.
He embraced it in amazement. Sweet music. He was an emancipated man. In moments he could connect to the neuronet, siphon off some Ecos from company accounts, and purchase his ticket home.
His ‘wife’ walked over to him smiling a pathetic grin and pointing at the SlySynth and then back to herself.
"How did you? How much do you want?" Calvin30 stuttered in his limited street Hindi.
The woman stopped and gave him a confused look.
"Money. How much do I owe?"
She was becoming distressed.
"I have money now,” Calvin30 pointed jubilantly at his horn. "How much?"
Her undernourished hand reached over to stroke his chest. When Calvin30 tried to push her away she angrily ripped open his undershirt. He pushed her back. Instead of resisting the woman backed deliberately away pointing at his exposed belly and the tiny letters tattooed on it like a target. C30.
How long had she known? Fear overtook him.
"Don’t tell, please. Anything. Anything. Money. Please."
He was begging for his life, for her not to turn him over. He would marry her. Was that what she wanted? Anything. She returned to embrace him, but he brushed her away, unable to abide her desire. The depth of his revulsion dismayed him while she wept. He could hardly stand the sight of her.
His entourage soon deserted him, the witch and the rest of the wretches stopping only long enough to spit in his direction as they passed. They faded into the rain.
How long had they known? Who had they told?
In a panic, Calvin30 rushed to find the Sikh. He ran through the blinding rain, wild eyes imploring for direction whomever stepped into his path. “At the warehouse,” they waved and dodged out of his way to avoid further contact with the madman. Calvin30, drenched to the core, burst open the warehouse door to find the turbaned calif holding court with the witch and the wife. He had come too late.
"She says you have something to tell me."
Calvin30 nearly fainted from fear. "I-I can pay. Please."
"That she tells me. That and one other thing."
"Yes." Calvin30’s eyes squeezed, waiting for the axe to snap.
"She says that you are a good man."
Calvin30 scuttled on a X-Shuttle bound for LA. His ribs protruding, clothes in tatters, reeking of urine and sweat. The man at customs insisted on fumigation and an intrusive medical before letting him board.
Upon return he had to submit to intense interrogation, led with gleeful abandon, by the same ComSec officer who had approved his travel in the first place. Calvin30 dutifully filled in most of the security breaches he had provided to Bhatterjee, as if reporting on intelligence that the General had claimed foreknowledge of, leaving unsaid selected details.
Dazed, Calvin30 crawled up to his room to watch the walls crawl with his thoughts. The woman’s face kept bubbling up in after-images framed in mealy rice and rats and crap. When it did, Calvin30 was gripped with a fierce desire to see every moment of her pathetic life replayed a thousand times. To see the rough, depressing weight of it grind her into the pavement of misery and hopelessness. To watch the last dull glow slink out of her eyes into a gray eternity. He wanted her to see him watching her - he wanted to see if any trace of the grotesque pity she had levelled on him in that warehouse would be left in those last moments when her own life betrayed her. If there was he wanted to see dogs chew it out of her brain.
He washed and washed and washed.
He reminded himself that it was ridiculous to be this disturbed. The woman was so pathetically beneath him. Like Bonita - so low on the totem pole of life that she could fall for a clone. Just pathetic.
When he awoke a day later, sick as a dog and sore in every muscle, he wandered down for a coffee and headed for the park to play his pipe and to pass-off promised information to Bhattarjee's operatives. It was a bit risky, following so close on the tail of his visit. His work here would be quantum encrypted, but he suspected that he was still under surveillance and the last thing he wanted to do was invite more scrutiny.
To hell with them. He needed to do something interesting to clear out his funk.
Calvin30 inspected his pipe. He was amazed to find that the damage had been minimal after the beating it had endured. The sound had developed some static and had gone a little digital but that could be tuned out. A few valves were dented but all were still operable. His password had held up although the logs revealed that someone had worked hard at cracking it.
It was time to go to work. Building up from a core of security routines embedded in some Mingus tunes, he moved into an improv mix that sent the relevant bytes of bits off to Bhattarjee regarding the facts he had to report to Mirtopik security and, more importantly, the facts that he hadn’t. As usual he left out those critical pieces of information that were necessary for his plans.
The hour glass had almost poured out for Calvin30 to put in place the final granules of his plan. Despite his long respite in Chennai, it was surprising how exactly events in his absence had trac
ked the elaborate map he had implanted in the Com mind. The politics always moved along the groove of its own momentum to a predictable endpoint. Self-interest was a reliable slave master, which did not individuate. Ample time yet remained for Calvin30 to embark on some unpunctual construction duties in preparation for August’s cathartic departure.
Boarding a builder borg body through his neuroview, Calvin30 clambered up the starship launch gantry to August’s nearly finished cockpit and commenced to plant the camouflaged cam. Precision angles were vital to perfect a first-row seat of the Grand Man’s abandonment.
The borg’s anatomy, more ant than man, took adapting to, and Calvin30 kept clattering into things. Fortunately, none of the other borgs’ pilots seemed to notice. It wasn’t too long before he’d got the hang of it though, and soon he’d finagled the cameras into position. One last task to finish - he checked the other borgs’ locations as they crept along the scaffolding, insectile forms backlit by the cerulean seas of the Earth beneath. He clambered his new body’s awkward frame into the pilot’s position and imagined himself in the place of August’s fallen face. So many years in the planning, and it would all happen here.
Calvin30 could imagine every line on August’s mien. The self-adulatory elation collapsing into confusion. The unstable momentums of false hopes as they faltered against the impossible facts of his calamity. The plunge into hell of a god would be such a long, delicious tumble, and Calvin30 could imagine in detail every moment. The culmination was so close he could touch it. It would be perfect.
That time was so close, so nearly certain, that Calvin30 could commence contemplation of the inevitable thereafter. After. And what then?
The hallowed almost hollowed until Calvin30 reminded himself of his monk in the quantum box. Any instant, one missive from the monk and the victory could vanish - the probabilities could collapse. Calvin30 had locked himself out of the box to cloak his crime behind an alibi of science. However, the dice rolls required to absolve him of murder had diminished to so merely impossible that the monk’s demise had become received wisdom. There would always be some chance, but honestly now nearly none. It occurred to Calvin30 that he was only fooling himself.
His trials in Chennai intruded into that opening. That damn illiterate itinerant girl. Calvin30 stifled a chill. How could such an insignificant peasant evoke such a reaction?
A good man doubtlessly. Who was she to know?
To distract himself he activated his borg to crawl back towards its charging station. He paused in his passage to inspect an adjoining project, rotating in space at a span of some kilometers. It was much smaller than his expectation, its diameter only slightly larger than August’s spaceship. It would be a tight fit. A thin ring of metal with unfamiliar devices, clumsy local adaptations of an alien technology, clustered like tumors outside the periphery.
At the center, framed by an angry fire, steeped in shadow, lay an eerie cratered land, the planet Mercury. The arc of the blue Earth engulfed the whole of it, suggesting a tunnel into the underworld.
It was by banishing his hero to Hades, only through tragedy, that August might rise to his godhood. And only Calvin30, faithful steward to the divine, could devise such a long-sought deliverance. August would probably only die as a man, but it was this risk was what made it real.
And after? To be truthful he hadn’t foretold far beyond the fall. Calvin30 did though bestow a possible channel for the fantasy of August’s return, leaving in the ship a brief epistle to steer him homeward. Perhaps, if he survived, Calvin30 could collect his broken pieces as a souvenir.
Thinking about it turned his thoughts maudlin. What would be left once August was lost?
Having downloaded from the borg, Calvin30 dialled up the aliens’ transmission.
He lived it again, as he had so many times before, the horror and incomprehension of that world’s disassembly. They had been such fools, so smug to believe that divinity came cheap. It was the end of the show that most rapt his attention - that soothed every recess of Calvin30’s dark soul. It was the sublime grief of the Watcher, multiplied perfectly on all those faces, that touched him so deeply.
That Calvin30 could feel so One with his universe made him weep.
Chapter 18 - Kalsang
After Kalsang reached the orbiter he had sat for days in simple amazement that he had survived. He was safe and warm. He had food and atmosphere. That seemed enough. The exquisite pink snowball of Triton rotated below him, unaware and unaffected by the abrupt exit of Life from its frozen surface.
Then it occurred to Kalsang that there were other tasks beyond survival. He thought to re-establish contact with the ground station to determine what had gone wrong. There were many duplicate communications channels by design, so at least one should allow him to reconnect. He was surprised to discover, after a sustained effort, that this was impossible. The problem seemed to be on the Terrapod side as all diagnostics for the orbiter seemed in order.
So strange, wasn’t it?
Maybe the Terrapod had been hit by something, a micrometeor or some such thing. He had been lying right beside it. Did it make sense that he would have been unaware of such a violent calamity? Kalsang reviewed his memory and played back stored mnemes from his neurovisor to verify them.
There he was, walking around the Terrapod, climbing up to look in the window. It was so cold.
Kalsang mentally switched off the thermoception setting in his neurovisor and his shivering subsided. Had it really been so cold? How had he ever gotten used to that?
“What are you looking for?” d'Song asked as she tagged along behind him.
“Just this, I cannot understand what has happened. There are no markings on the Pod. It has not been hit by anything.”
“What sort of anything?”
Kalsang turned around and smiled at her. Several of her faces returned snaggle-toothed grins.
“I cannot communicate with the Pod, but it appears that nothing is wrong with it. The antennae looks fine.”
“Maybe somebody switched it off?”
“Huh?”
Maybe someone had. Kalsang, switched open the communications log and noted a final entry, dated just before his attempted return to the Terrapod. It was impossible to say for sure because the message was encrypted, but what other explanation could there be?
Perhaps it was routine software upgrade that had gone wrong? Such things did happen. Yes, this would explain it. And how fortunate he had been to be outside the Pod when it happened - so incredibly lucky wasn’t it? Certainly there were plenty of back-up systems on board, and why hadn’t he been notified? There was usually much advance notice and quite a drill whenever such changes were put into place. No, this one did not make sense.
Also, why was it the only message in the log that was encrypted?
Could such a thing be true? Why bother? He was only a humble monk, wasn’t it, enjoying his retreat so so far away. He had no enemies. In his entire life, he had never engaged in any activity that could be remotely construed as political. He was not the sort to make trouble and he had no possessions to steal. His great achievement in life was to become as utterly insignificant as possible - all the better to appreciate the incredible opportunity of living.
“Maybe those people didn’t like your message, Melded One.”
“My message?”
The conversation drew the attention of the others and they huddled in closer to show their support until all space seemed to fill with imagined tentacles, face buds, and carapace.
Kalsang felt hemmed in so he covered his faces with his hands.
dSong warned them off. “Give him some space to think.”
Her words warded off the press of bodies as they faded into the periphery of Kalsang’s imagination.
d'Song was right, of course. It was the only thing that made sense.
Kalsang shook his head. The samsaric mind never ceased to amaze him. The terror of the aliens’ last cry out into the universe, how could anyone reac
t to that with a hard heart? Nevertheless, here was strong evidence, right before his eyes. The technological diagrams in the introductory sequence were what they were after. That had been the whole plan, and he Kalsang, in his pride and desire for appreciation by his teachers had made this possible. Samsaric mind? As if he could cast dispersions. The echoes were there in his own mind, for hadn’t he been pleased to see the diagrams himself? Pleased to be serving his purpose to pay back the benefactors for all of their generosity. It was just like that.
Oh, he felt so stupid. Betrayal was something too ordinary to be unexpected. Driven by the greed, jealousy and a one-eyed focus on profit and power that was their DNA, how could anything else be expected from a Com?
Kalsang hung his head low. It was his great shame to be part of this. His mind reeled, the memories of the world devourer turned into projections forward to the same fate for the Earth, with the uncomprehending fright transferred from the faces of those far away and long dead onto the people and places he knew from birth, his family and the close community around his home monastery, his brother monks with whom he’d shared a common circulatory system of the crowded dormitories and open air debate grounds, his dharma sisters whose visiting smiles had made him glad and given him energy, the unexpected kindness of all the strangers he had met on his strange journey to the edge of nowhere. Names and names and names, so many. All precious to him, all doomed, and because of him. Kalsang begged forgiveness from the watching aliens for his crimes.
“I am sorry I have failed you my friends. The warning has become just the opposite.”
The beings began to cry with him, for him. They were looking on him with so much compassion. How? Wasn’t he the one who had betrayed the last moment of meaning for their whole world. It was too much.
“Don’t cry Melded One,” soothed d'Song.
Such a strange saying Kalsang thought. How could he even be imagining it?
“Don’t cry. You are our hope.”
“Your hope? What can I, a simple monk, do from so far away? This is not something I can do.”
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