Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #12

by Apex Authors

  In the outdoor councils, the ridiculous speedfreak naming rituals of those who remained in the city hadn't caught on so much.

  He became a little friendlier, seeming flattered that someone had actually traveled to see his work. “Just call me Bishop. Are you interested in the ziggurats, then?"

  He appeared to be loosening up. His nervousness about the subject was not unjustified. The Return to Humans Front had started getting a big following in the late twenties. Among their tenets was that all exploration—even research—was inherently patriarchal, penetrative and exploitative.

  "Just out of speculation and fantasy,” I said. “I don't think there's anything wrong with that."

  "Wouldn't that opinion get you in trouble with the Council up in Las Vegas?"

  "We're not Brookline,” I said, recalling the fanatics in Massachusetts who had broken into research scientists’ houses and harassed their families. “Hell, lots of our people used to work in the labs before they dropped out. We like to speculate about stuff. I don't think there's anything wrong with imagination. Actually, I write Babylonian epic poems. Sort of based on what I imagine their culture being like. I've had a few published, under the name Robby the Robot."

  "Oh, yeah,” he said, his face lighting up. “You wrote ‘Kalama Makes the Sun’ and ‘House of the Moons,’ right? Those were cool. I read them in Mother Goose Anton Wilson's ‘zine."

  "The Full Moon Dollar Rag,” I said. “She's so cool. She's given a lot of us a chance in publishing we wouldn't have had these days. Y'know, I'm really interested in what you're doing here. What do you say we go smoke a bowl somewhere?"

  * * * *

  Ernie's Cafe was set up on the location of a famous coffee shop in the late twentieth century and tried to imitate the ambience of that time. There were posters up of obscure rock groups like The Cramps and Steel Pole Bathtub, and the employees all wore oversized t-shirts and denim shorts. The place operated rather openly without a hash license, I was told, so they must have been either paying someone off, or not worth the political trouble of busting.

  "So,” said Bishop, fine blue smoke passing out with his words, “do you distribute art or something?"

  I took a hit off my tube from the double hookah and shook my head.

  "No,” I exhaled. “Nothing like that, but I could see that happening in the long run if we work together."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You read ‘House of the Moons?’ You know how Kalanai travels across the river of night and visits the moons, and each of the different moons gives him something to take back to the Bandi?"

  The Bandi were what I fancied the Babylonians calling their species.

  "Yeah, something like a book with laws, and the secret of fire, and that drug..."

  "The six secrets are Law, the secret of civilized living; Fire, the secret of warmth; Ceremony, the secret of uniting and dividing; Erotica, the secret of right love; Architecture, the art of building towers for shelter; and the Magansa root, which gives visions of how to interpret and use the rules of the other secrets. Obviously, I had the Mayan mushroom ceremonies in mind, or the Native American peyote rites, in which they were granted visions that gave them the patterns of living or the patterns of woven rugs. The thing is, when I wrote that, I didn't know what you were doing. When someone said you were making towers from mescaline visions, it totally blew my mind because it is exactly what I saw the Bandi as doing."

  He looked at me as he sipped some coffee. To my dismay, he didn't seem nearly as excited about the whole thing as I was. In fact, he seemed rather upset by my interest in his method.

  "So what did you have in mind, then?” he asked.

  My dreams of finding a kindred spirit began to vanish before my eyes.

  "We could collaborate,” I said. “You could show me your method, help me to see the visions..."

  "My method is a secret,” he said, almost hostile. “I can't show anyone."

  Immediately, I felt like a total asshole. No wonder he was unreceptive. If he went around showing everyone how to make the sculptures, his work wouldn't be unique anymore. It would ruin his business.

  "No, I mean, I don't want do know how to make them. I'm terrible with my hands. But I believe you're really tapped into some kind of a magic power line there, maybe the same one as the builders on Babylon. If I could see what you can, then I could write on the same wavelength. I guess that sounds weird, but I thought you'd understand."

  He shook his head.

  "No, I understand,” he said, setting down the pipe tube. “But you overestimate me. I'm just an artist. I don't really believe in all that tribal magic you guys out in the wild Councils do. I don't think I could help much. Sorry."

  "Hey, well that doesn't really matter much,” I said, wanting to keep him around longer. “Say, maybe instead I could just write something about what you do in the Dollar Rag. Just a little interview or something. I know MG would publish it and it would be good business for you."

  "Yeah, that would be cool, I guess."

  "So what do you really think the tower builders are?” I said.

  "Did the interview start already? I think I'm getting a little too stoned to want to say anything that'll be in print."

  "That's okay,” I said The hash was really hitting me, too. “I can't find my pencil."

  We both started laughing, and coffee came painfully out of my nose, only making us laugh harder.

  "Why don't we just do the interviewing tomorrow,” I said. “Anything now is off the record."

  "Well, listen then,” he said, suddenly getting serious, “because anything I tell you about the tower builders tomorrow is just going to be the kind of bullshit that makes Councilpeople happy, anyway. The thing is, the towers are the product of a very scientifically advanced race. There's no psychedelic ritual or any visions or any creative process at all. Actually, there's only one tower."

  "What do you mean?” I asked, trying to grasp the weird thread he was on. “There's thousands of them. Everyone saw those pictures."

  "No, man. There's thousands in physical space. But in the ideal, there's only one tower."

  "Oh,” I nodded contentedly, because I like to get philosophical when I'm high. “You're talking Aristotle. There is an ideal form of everything, and everything we see is just a version of its form. So there's an ideal form of a tower?"

  "I've never read Aristotle. I'm a physics major. I mean all the towers are based on the same picture in phase space. I know what it looks like, too, or at least kind of.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper folded four ways. It had been printed by an old-fashioned laser printer, and it contained a square filled with a myriad of looping lines and dark areas lightened by Swiss cheese-like holes. To some degree, it was reminiscent of a picture made with the old child's toy, Spirograph. I looked at it in confusion for a moment.

  "This doesn't look like a tower to me,” I said, finally.

  "It's a cross section,” he said, as if trying to explain a difficult concept to a child. “See, that square contains all the shapes in the towers. But you have to magnify it in some places. See, it's a 2.45 dimensional fractal shape."

  "Yes,” I said, “that definitely clears everything up."

  "Sorry. It's hard to explain, especially when I'm high. What matters is that I don't make anything. It gets made.” Suddenly he shook his head. “Let's not talk about that for a while."

  At first I thought he had maybe done too many drugs and lost it, but I've known some guys like that and he didn't act that way. But then I remembered something I was taught by a grizzled veteran exposé journalist at an underground paper. “Sometimes,” the old vet had said, “someone has something that they can't tell anyone, but they just have to tell someone. They'll tell you enough that you just have to wonder, then back off.” For some reason, I knew Bishop had what he thought was a huge secret he wanted to tell me.

  "Okay, let's not talk about that,” I said, putting the cryptic piece of pa
per down. I remembered the vet's advice about getting the secret out: first, don't push them. They will tell you eventually, but not if they're scared. Instead, be friends.

  "Do you remember,” I asked, hoping I wasn't pushing, “when they first found the towers, where you were?” It was a cocktail-party question, the same question earlier generations must have asked about the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Kennedy assassination.

  "Sure,” he said. “I was in high school, junior year, Biology II. Right away I wanted to be a scientist. From that day, all I thought about was studying another planet. I studied physics in college—graduated in three and a half years from a good school. I got accepted to UC Berkeley as a grad student. Everything went to shit from there, of course.

  "I had to leave California in ‘28 because of the secession riots. By then, though, the depression was going strong, so I couldn't get a job anywhere, and scholarship money had all dried up. I went from place to place, college town to college town, but it was the same everywhere. No scholarship money, no research grants, no incoming undergraduates to teach because of the fucki—because of the RHF, no work-study jobs, no jobs anyway. I lived in my car from March to June of ‘31. Lots of other times I was on the couch tour.

  "Then I got a position with the physics department at UNM, and it looked okay for a little while, but it's the same old thing. The department's practically shut down. What's a department without students or research grants? So here I am, stuck in the middle of fucking nowhere, selling toy souvenirs on a card table."

  It was a sad story, but who didn't have one like it in the last few years? Since the global economy drowned in the greed of the multinationals and nation-states at Kiev, everyone's life story was a sequence of lost jobs, lost homes, broken or delayed plans, and general poverty. Time's Man of the Year in 2033 was a panhandler, reviving the century-old refrain of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” It was that very hopelessness that had driven so many of my generation, me included, to renounce jobs and school and everything and run off into the mountains with the Return to Humans Front to tend organic carrot and potato and hemp farms. Up there, everyone had food and work, if hard work, and a place to sleep. I didn't always agree with the politics, but it was an alternative, at least.

  "Remember how it was supposed to be?” said Bishop. “We had found aliens, and they said we would go off into space and make friends with these aliens, and they'd teach us to go to all the other planets, and they'd be all smart and wise and we wouldn't have any more poverty or wars or stupid nationalist bullshit and the universe would be all perfect and beautiful. I really believed that shit, you know? I really thought I'd be the one to make the starships that would go to Alpha Centauri and meet the aliens and go to other worlds and everything. I think everyone believed it once. Just ... I was a sucker longer than most people. Now it's almost fifteen years later and what do we have? Three days worth of optical fucking photographs taken by Peltier that are sitting around libraries and research departments gathering dust. Shit-ass nothing on a stupid little shit hole planet that we're all going to die on is what we have."

  "But you still believe in the Builders,” I said. “They'll still be there. That's why you still make the towers."

  He laughed bitterly.

  "The great and mighty and wise Builders, yes. The Builders will save us from ourselves. Do you believe in them?"

  I didn't answer right away, while I dredged up a truth I had hidden from myself.

  "Yeah, I believe in them. I believe they can't possibly be as fucked up as we are. I really think that anyone who can build structures so beautiful must be more in tune with the universe than we are. They must be seeing something we aren't. Maybe if we could talk to them, or, well, something. I don't know."

  "Maybe you should see what they look like first. You might have a different opinion."

  "Who knows what they look like?"

  "I do,” said Bishop. “Come on."

  We paid our tab and walked down to Central. He led me over to the west end of campus, where the physical sciences and engineering had been taught. In contrast to the bricks of the mall and earth-toned stucco of the liberal arts buildings, the 1950's-era west half was square, concrete and modernist-looking. The sign in front of the door he led me to said “Reggener Hall, Physics & Astronomy.” There was no structure behind it, but that was because it led underground. The door was held closed by a chain locked with a padlock, and Bishop brought out a key and unlocked it.

  "It's dark,” he said, and it was. I had to feel my way down the stairs with the handrail, even though it was only early evening outside.

  "Can't get them to put new fluorescent bulbs up there,” he explained. “I'm lucky I can keep my own lab lit. To the left in here."

  I could tell the room had once been used for freshman lab classes from the rows of cracked tables and the chalkboard. Two of the light strips in the back of the room came on, revealing what I assumed was Bishop's workspace. The ziggurat sculptures were there, but nothing that looked like carving tools. In fact, none of the sculptures gave any appearance of being carved. Instead, they sat in glass tanks of various sizes, like vertical ships-in-a-bottle, on top of some kind of white sand. Some of the towers were much shorter than anything he was selling, as little as a few inches tall.

  On another table sat a computer, which was drawing images on its screen like the one on the paper Bishop had showed me earlier. To its side were various kinds of electrical equipment whose purpose I couldn't understand and what I thought might have been an oscilloscope.

  "Is this where you work?” I asked.

  "Not anymore,” he said, lighting a gas lamp. “I no longer need to."

  He opened a deep desk drawer and began pulling out its contents, which were impressive. It contained ziggurat photographs that most people would recognize from the newsfeeds, but there were also others that they wouldn't. It had been consistently rumored that the Peltier probe had taken much closer and more detailed pictures than those that were released to the public and that these had been classified. Having studied almost all of the publicly available pictures, I could tell immediately that I was looking at classified ones.

  "Bet you always wanted to see those,” he said. “Look at this one. Taken from only ten kilometers up, sent back just seconds before the probe died. Ten to one resolution. So tell me, what's wrong with this picture?"

  The photograph was of the view down between two very close ziggurats. It was like the view a person would get if they had fallen off of a tower and looked down while falling. In this view it was clear that the towers were laid out in blocked patterns, almost like skyscrapers in a city, with flat ground at the bottom between the two. Up close, the detail of the tower windows was even more incredible; they covered the sides in asymmetrical filigree, and each window had smaller supports inside like a cathedral window. There was no obvious logic or pattern to the layout of the windows, except that it seemed so natural and beautiful.

  But that was not what was shocking about the images. I set the picture down.

  "It's like there's nobody there,” I said uneasily. “If you saw New York from this height, you would see glass in the panes, cars on the street, people through the windows. You can see through this window and there is nothing in there except blank stone or whatever it is. It's like someone built a whole city and never moved in. Or moved away. Are they extinct? Is that why the pictures were classified?"

  "That's what they thought at first,” said Bishop, opening another drawer. “But that's not right, because even then you would see artifacts, machines, evidence of wars or damage to the cities, but there isn't any of that. It's even more obvious in some of the other pictures. Actually, you were closer to right the first time. The cities were built, but never moved into. At least not yet."

  "But what...” I sputtered. I didn't even know what to start asking. “What do you mean not yet? Is someone there or not? I thought you said you had seen the Builders."

  "No, no,” he said, p
ulling out another picture. “Our resolution isn't good enough to see them. I said I knew what they looked like. Here you go."

  The picture he put down was black and white and fuzzy. It contained four featureless buglike things with maybe four or five legs or arms, each on an all black background.

  "Electron microscope plate,” he explained. “The bugs are very small."

  "Bugs? The city was built by microscopic bugs? How do you know this? How did you get these pictures?"

  "Not real bugs,” he answered. “Machines. Microscopic machines, about twenty angstroms across. Those aren't them, they're my copies. I'm almost sure I got it right, though, because the towers they build come out exactly the same, scalable of course. Given more materials and air they'd make bigger ones, but they stop when they run out of calcium, which is what they build with. They need a little iron, too; just a few atoms each, but the more iron there is, the faster they build. There's a lot of calcium and iron on Babylon. That's how the towers are so big."

  "I have a hard time believing this,” I said. “How does a microscopic machine know how to build a whole skyscraper? Where's the program running them? How do they work together?"

  "Do you know what the most massive piece of construction on earth is?” he asked.

  "The Yamaguchi building, I guess. Or, well, maybe the Great Wall of China is more massive. I'm not sure."

  "None of those. It's off the coast of Australia, and it's bigger than the Great Wall and all of Tokyo put together. It's made of this stuff."

  "Oh, yeah,” I said, looking at the piece of coral he was showing me.

  "It was made by trillions of microorganisms. Look at the intricate design of that coral, and tell me which one of the microorganisms had the plan to make it. Or where their controller was. Central planning is just a myth of ours; in fact, most of life doesn't work that way at all. The bugs that made the ziggurats work in a very similar way to the microorganisms that made that coral. They take an atom here, an atom there, and put together a copy of themselves. They make maybe ten of these before they poop out. Then each copy repeats the process. Each copy is attached to its creator. Because the number of bugs increases exponentially, their growth can be explosive if there is enough material.