O
O
O O O
O O O
O O
O
I pushed the pad across to my warrior sister and saw her go on high alert.
"Where did you see this?"
I sighed. Maybe we were getting somewhere. "I think we'll need that coffee after all," I told her.
When I was finished telling her about it, Septima stroked at her chin, for all world as if she expected to find whiskers there. "It's either a structural diagram of Jan's dark energy warship, which would be exceedingly depressing, because we didn't think the scum knew about that." Her eyes went out of focus; she steepled her fingers.
"Or?"
"Oh. Well, of course it's the Tree of Life."
"The Yggdrasil again?"
The old warrior smiled. "You could put it that way." She pushed her coffee cup away, nibbled on a chocolate mint. "No, it's a very ancient Kabbalistic formula. You say these nodes were labeled? Might they have looked like this?" She lifted the stylus to her lips, muttered a string of sounds that made no sense to me. Instantly, my sketch changed. Words appeared. I examined them, recognizing nothing particularly.
O
O
Kether
Binah O O O Chokmah
Daath
Geburah O O O Chesed
Tipharet
Hod O O Netzach
O
Yesod
O
Malkuth
"So?"
"These are the Sephiroth, the eleven great stations of the Tree. Each Sephirah is the sign and location and emblem of one of our family. Save for you, young sprat. But I see that the deformers have played a little joke on us." She pointed to the double globe at the top of the diagram. "Kether is the station of the Fool. In the great order of the Contest, I have always assumed this was Ember, our bumbling genocide of a brother who brought the Good Machine into the world. I assume you've met him?"
I gritted my teeth. "Everyone thinks he's my father."
Septima laughed. "I recall making the same mistake. You favor him remarkably. Never mind, both of you resemble our father. Dramen's not on the diagram, of course, nor is our mother Angelina. They stand above, naturally, Ain Soph and Ain Soph Aur."
I had no faintest idea what she was talking about, what the words meant that she'd just uttered, what the annotations on the diagram were meant to convey. I got this much, though. Ember my brother stood at the top, but that left one Kether empty slot. I placed my fingertip on the doubled globe.
"So the extra one is me?"
"It seems so." She gave me a wolfish grin. "Yes, young August. Our Parsifal. We've been waiting for you, we just never knew it. Until you took the excalibur brand, at least. You are the Fool."
I bridled. "I'm ignorant, Septima, I grant you that. It's not surprising. Our parents kept me in the dark until they... went into hiding, and then their revenants continued to keep me in the dark. It's not as if I—"
"No, no, my boy. I'm not insulting you. I'm identifying you in the Tarot."
The what? Oh, dear Christ. One of the sidelines of Tansy's hokey telephone psychic scam was reading Tarot cards. But she played fair. Phone jammed in the crook of her neck, she'd faithfully unwrap her silk-clad Tarot deck and lay out her reading. She refused to let me play with the cards, but I'd overheard her plenty of times, watched over her shoulder as she shuffled and dealt them: the Emperor, the High Priestess, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hermit, the Hierophant, the Magician... the Fool. Good God! What card did Septima suppose she represented? The Empress? The Chariot? Death itself? I felt a chill. Probably Death. Almost certainly.
These people were deranged.
Abruptly, I recalled a line of dialogue from the end of Alice In Wonderland. It had amused me when I was a child entertained by paradox and again later, shaded by adolescent condescension, as Great-aunt Tansy used her silk-wrapped pack to divine the present and future. "You think we're nothing but a pack of Tarot cards?"
"In a manner of speaking." Septima was unruffled. "You could put it that way."
"I certainly fucking will not put that way," I said in a harsh tone. "You might be pleased to think of yourself as a toy or a poker chip. I'm a person. I have memories. I know who I am." But, of course, even that was not entirely true. At least some of my memories were fraudulent. Others seemed to be traces I'd retained from the alternative selves I'd merged with briefly in Tegmark superspace. I recalled the chatbot homeboy's mocking italicized pseudo-voice and the selves I'd been with lightning-flash brevity in other cognate histories. Septima was watching me in a kind of sympathetic silence. I said, "All right, of course I don't know who I am. I know who I thought I was, and even that isn't... reliable." I put my head in my hands, said in a muffled voice, "How can anyone live this way?"
"We abide by the Unicorn's Bargain," Septima told me. "Speaking of Carroll."
What? I dredged my memory, my fallible memory, of childhood. Oh. " 'I'll believe in you, if you believe in me?' "
"It's a rough-and-ready epistemology," Septima admitted. "And fairly dreadful as ontology. But it'll do at a pinch."
"Band-Aid philosophy," I said. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and after a long moment we both started to smile. I stretched out my lethal right hand across the table, and my sister grasped it firmly. All right. Better to be one of a pack of cards, perhaps, than an isolated, solipsistic lunatic adrift in a sour fantasy, probably in a locked ward, or lying on a filthy mattress in an alley.
And in that instant I believed I understood why the deformers had attacked and destroyed Tansy's house.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lune
A barely detectable breeze carries the reek of salt and putrid vegetation. The very deck of the rotting ship stinks with decay, slopes away from her at a disturbing angle, prow sunk beneath the nearly still water, stern high and tilted. Lune steps carefully, keeping her balance with outstretched arms. On every side, matted kelp and seaweed coat the sluggish surface of the ocean between the trapped hulks that have drifted here across hundreds, thousands of kilometers, fetching up at the still center of an indefinitely slow vortex on a cognate world of oceans seized by locking land masses. Other spoiled vessels hang trapped in the feral vegetations embrace, moving slightly, rocking against each other's hulls with low, grinding vibrations and deep clangs, scarcely audible, like the booming of whales. This ruined ship, the Argyle, must have dangled here in the jaws of the sea for at least a century and a half.
"I can't do this any longer," she says. "I won't."
"How touching." The K-machine wears a heavy yellow canvas mariner's coat and black rubber boots, leaning against the stump of Argyle's fractured main mast. Broken spars and fragments of a fallen sail and tangled rigging cling about it. "You love him."
The timber planks beneath her foot are pulpy, sagging with every careful step she takes. The ocean has invaded the vessel from within, seeping upward through the wood, rusting and corroding the ironwork, without yet swallowing it down into the depths. Perhaps that fate is certain, but it has been delayed for many decades by the matted pelagic vegetation flattening the surface of the water, locking all these marooned vessels into a graveyard without burial. Lune grimaces. The setting is the perfect preference of the thing that regards her approach with deep, gratified irony.
"Yes. I do love him. I did not expect—"
"Because he brought you back from death. This is not love, it's supine and self-interested gratitude. Get over it."
"You would have been quite happy to sacrifice my life to extinguish his. You tried repeatedly—destroying his aunt's house, the asteroid impact. As you admit, you succeeded that final time."
"Your life, like everyone's life, is illusory. Is this not what you believe and argue, philosopher? The Schmidhuber ontology, the blasphemy that computation is the basis of reality?"
She stares at the thing with disgust and a certain enduring fright that she has known since childhood, when it first made itself
known to her. The K-machine possesses power over her in a measure she does not truly understand. Perhaps it and its kin had slaughtered her parents. Or perhaps, as it argues, that destruction had been, instead, and wickedly, the work of cold humans themselves, intent upon creating their own hell world. The Ensemble instructors had evaded that issue whenever she'd attempted, as an acolyte, to raise it.
"If life is illusory," she says, "I lose nothing by living it in the way that I choose. I'm done with you." But still she stands there.
The thing reaches forth an arm and hand made all of black metal, tenderly strokes her cheek. A kind of joyous revulsion rises within her. A memory from just beyond infancy: a figure all in black, shielded against the foul fumes rising to the shattered surface from the piled dead in the concrete caverns below. Dark-clad arms plucking her up, carrying her to safety, her pulse roaring, her terrified childish voice locked in her throat. Septimus, or one of his assistants, she sometimes thinks. Or perhaps, as it claims, this thing slouching at ease before her, or one of its kindred. It is a salvation she can hardly regret either way, and yet she detests its memory. She waits stock-still as the thing draws a line down her face, withdraws.
"And you'll be telling August Seebeck about your deception, I presume?"
Coldness, dread, radiates from the center of her body.
"It is no longer a deception."
"I'm sure that will console him."
Guilt blends with detestation. She has killed these things, the stupid Pawn soldiers at any rate, and the killing has brought her satisfaction. Her sentiment toward this one is more ambiguous. Perhaps she could kill it, perhaps it could kill her if it chose. They are beyond the Accord, beyond the Contest. Her fingers curl.
It glances at her fists with amusement.
"Release the Schwelle," she says. "I cannot abide your company a moment longer."
The K-machines stretches, almost voluptuously.
"Why, no," it tells her. "I find the ambience refreshing. The sea air, the nostalgia. I believe we'll stay here a little longer. You might use the time profitably in devising an apology to the young man you have betrayed."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SgrA*: 1986, Aged Forty-Two
Halley's comet is back in the sky, a pale smudge barely visible even well away from the city lights, hardly worth the seventy years' wait. Not long before his forty-second birthday, drifting toward separation from his wife, he has taken up (when they can manage it) with his philosophy colleague, Dr. Moon Ku. Quite quickly the orbits of their lives spin into chaotic confusion.
His and Moon's mutually declared position includes a devotion to the ideal of existential freedom lightly leavened with promiscuity, preferably with full advance disclosure, though perhaps without the subsequent gory details. While Moon, at thirty, has always operated with fair success under this rubric (she and her partner Barnard take it in turns to look after the cat), it is somewhat theoretical for him, sustaining, as he does, a high degree of evasion on this score with his wife. Emily has made it plain that she does not wish to know. Curiously, and bit by bit, he has found that his new lover, Moon, gets oddly irritated by any suggestion that he has continued to put this program into practice—little enough of late though it's been, he acknowledges somewhat regretfully.
He is, it seems, being unfeeling and cruel.
Well, hey, fuck that, he decided. A deal's a deal. When certain other women he met on the campus expressed more than a passing interest during the brief high-profile phase when he first took up his lectureship in computational ontology, Moon made it plain that activity in this quarter would be deemed, on a number of grounds, perilously sleazy or hurtful. In the interests of his growing fondness, he has valiantly forborne, though his rhetoric continues manfully unchecked.
At one time or another, various onlookers and confidants had pointed out to him that his claims of invulnerability to sexual chagrin were predicated pretty thoroughly on his wife's fidelity. While he found this plausible, he remained convinced that even if Emily decided on a blazing affair, he'd get through it fairly smoothly. Sauce for the goose. He fancied himself a feminist, after all.
Before this theory could be tested, however, he and Emily, childless, decided that their relationship might be most easily salvaged if they lived apart—not that they were splitting up. He contrived the mortgage and moved into a depressingly motel-like apartment.
Moon, for ideological motives, had already moved into an apartment by herself ("An apart-ment," she'd said wryly), leaving Barnard in situ. One day she mentioned that a former lover would be visiting from Adelaide for the weekend. "You have only one bed," he observed. Of course, there was a couch. Days later, he asked if she'd screwed her visitor, now departed. Of course she had. He shrugged. Uh-huh. How was it? So-so.
During his traditional run through Royal Park with the Dobermans and Emily, a custom hardly to be abandoned merely because of their domestic separation, he and his wife congratulated each other cheerfully on having attained, with a pleasing degree of smoothness, the condition of good friends. Although Emily was as yet unattached to anyone else, their present circumstances were, she felt, tolerable enough, certainly better than the bad faith they been sustaining during recent years in their cool and untouching bed.
This concord freed his spirit to an unexpected extent. He found himself responding to his lover Moon with a new access of intensity. The shadowy influence of his moralistic upbringing, no doubt.
Two weeks later, his wife took him out to dinner.
"Something's happened," she told him. "I've been to bed with someone."
He'd had a presentiment that she might be going to ask for details of his own dealings with Moon prior to their separation, but no; quite the reverse. She was buoyant with delight. Her new lover, as it chanced, and here her voice tightened a little, was that nice young person who had been coming around to use Emily's word processor: Rene, the girl next door.
He nodded, poured out a glass of cabernet sauvignon with a certain smug satisfaction. This revelation exactly fulfilled his hunch that Emily's affections would take this direction when his absence was settled, if not before. It had seemed to him quite plausible that she might turn to another woman, at least for a time. After all, she had trodden that path briefly in her late adolescence, as had so many.
What's more, he'd rather supposed that Rene was developing an interest in Emily, and as Rene was a droll, energetic person, another artist, he thought it likely that Emily would respond in kind if and when the occasion arose. As indeed she had. Everything worked out quite nicely, although there were some tricky bits of social interfacing. Rene's lesbian chums were not entirely enthralled by the intrusion into their world of a visiting straight woman; it was hard for Emily to introduce a new lover to family, friends, and workmates—the obvious catalog.
Was he really this cool? Not entirely. A couple of shaky days found him uttering informative slips of the tongue that suggested his unconscious was up to no good. By and large, though, it was all extremely agreeable and even satisfying, for now he could surrender an admission of his own affair with Moon. His wife accepted this news in a kindly way. For a time, evidently, she had feared that he might not actually get it together with this excellent person who was, after all, a fellow feminist. Nor was the case absolutely news to her, since Rene's friends on campus had swiftly borne word to her lover's ear.
In the cleansing air engendered by this full and frank exchange of views, this inner-city glasnost, he found himself during the following days opening quite poetically to Moon, to her amazement and delight. All the following weekend they made love with fiery lust augmented by unbounded sensitivity and tender beauty, and after a charming stroll by the Sunday sea and declarations of mutual love, he took Moon for the first time to visit some old mutual friends of his and Emily's. They proved to enjoy Moon's company and she theirs, and when the afternoon was done, she set off to a prearranged dinner a deux with Harry, a fellow academic. As it chanced, he had known
Harry slightly since undergraduate days. "I'd rather you kept out of his bed," he'd told her, early on. Now he saw Moon to her car in a haze of wine and love. He was rueful. "Have a nice fuck." She drove into the twilight. He rejoined his friends and drank wine.
Under the terms of their agreement, Moon called him next morning.
"I'll give you the bad news first," she said cheerfully.
His lights powered down and went out. The sea moved through his head.
It had been a pretty dull evening, all told. She'd been about to leave at eleven, in fact, and zip over to visit him, but as she drew on her coat and made for the door her colleague had urged her to stay, so what the hell, why not, she'd been wondering for months, and it was okay but nothing to write home about, truly she loved him the better for it, and the chances were she'd only fuck Harry another four or five times before she got quite bored with him.
All those things you see in movies, read in short stories, all those clichés. The last time this had happened to him was in 1971, in Sydney, when Emily told him that he would have to go back to Melbourne alone because she was going to remain with her first husband. The time before that, he was totally wet behind the ears, twenty-one years old, the start of 1966, when his first love broke his heart by responding to an offer of marriage with an announcement that she'd been screwing another guy over the vacation period and didn't wish to see him again.
He is holding the phone against his ear, attending to Moon's news. His stomach drops out, smack! Gut full of acid, muscles paralyzed. He looked it up later in his paperback medical reference. Taken aback, Moon said she would come over in a few hours for a cuddle. He hung up. He sat down in an armchair, more or less regarding the digital clock on the video machine. The little number jumped from one position to another. Hours later turned out to be five minutes. Half a second proved to be half an hour.
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