“But our minds are feeble, brother, by comparison with that glorious lost race which constructed and gave into our care the keys to universal kingdom. Unlimited horizons! Did you know that that’s what ‘aorist’ means? ‘Unlimited’?” the man asked in less fervent tones.
“Well, yes, but it also means ‘indefinite’ which could suggest that Jesus hasn’t quite made up his mind about when—”
“Set your fears at rest! For behold: when AORIST is removed,” and those six letters flared to violet, and vanished, “the sacred name of those constructors becomes CHEER. The good tidings written in the skies at His birth! You know, be of good CHEER?’
“Yeah, pretty convincing all right. But look, mate, I’ll be going through in a tick.”
“Shortly, then, you shall be blessed with contact with the ineffable. Observe: without the RITE of ER,” blue flames dropping from the refurbished slogan, “the mighty plans of the CHARIOTEERS are lost in CHAOS,” and the remaining letters, black ash smoking faintly, closed up to prove that it was so.
The stream of chairs on the laminar flux had straightened now, and plunged toward the Aorist Discontinuity gate, ancient mystery enough for any man, each seat plucked magnetically from the path at the last moment and drawn, empty, to begin again its endless loop.
“ER? What’s the Rite of ER?’
“Elizabeth Regina, brother, the monarch of the Britannic Isles at the time of the discovery of the Teleport miracle. A clear sign from Enoch to the Lost Tribes.”
Ben settled himself back in his seat, his belly closing in on itself again, fear rising. Anla, have you gone through yet? Or have you changed your mind and nicked back for another quickie with your latest lover, you crazy tart? “But you haven’t said where Jesus comes into it, mate. I reckon that’d be pretty crucial.”
“Can’t you see?” the green man cried in triumph, authentic emotion activating his features. The letters shuffled one final time, and the name CHRIST blazed in gold. The discarded phonemes faded swiftly from sight, but not before Ben could pounce with equal and opposite triumph.
“AOEER?” he said incredulously. “REEOA? EAR EO?”
“A theological mystery too subtle for discussion at this point,” explained the cleric, and yelped as automatic safety devices snatched him off the ground and carted him away. His display burst into massed sacred song as he ascended. Unabashed, he lobbed a small faxed volume into Ben’s unprotected lap. “Bear the Master’s words with you into the Place of Mystery and pray that your eyes might be opened.”
The seat slid to a halt before the eye-haunting void of the Aorist Discontinuity, and invisible forces lifted Ben and thrust him unhesitatingly into the nothingness where Act and Potency are one.
Like grass blown in a warm wind, his brain was interrogated by the archaic, incomprehensible artifact; inlayed memory molecules responded with ZIP code and particulars; the field took hold of him and hurled him on his way even as he yelled back, “The bloody thing won’t be transmitted, you cretinous bast—”
Thoughts cold and hazy. No-time began.
2.
On an elastic strand of associations, Ben’s sharp, frosty perceptions twanged to an hallucinatory recall of his virgin launch, four orthoyears earlier, through the Aoristic Closure.
Oh I know him well, this baby scientist of nineteen, stranded on a tropical continent in the long rows of grape vines that marched endlessly across the red dirt. Ben on the upward mobility kick, earning with the sweat of his brow a bit of exchange value in the long vacation, fulfilling his numerous parents’ fantasies.
It was all coming, then: initial degree in a thousand days or so; a good job in a data-farm, with prospects of rising in the ranks of the Imperial bureaucracy; cognatic espousal to little Jini and the others, pimples and ponytails; a nice apartment in the clan-house with a tending machine so that Jini wouldn’t have to mother the baby by hand like the mums had to do with me and Julia (but the stupid bastards, that was supposed to be the whole wonderful point of it all). And the tiny grandchildren, rushing upstairs to see the nanas and grampas, providing endless anecdotes for the neighbors’ delectation, soaking up little bonnets and booties and rompers as fast as they could clack from the knitting needles.
It was all they had ever wanted, it was all Jin and Soo and Flo and the others had ever wanted, it was probably all I wanted then. Sunspots that year had raddled the phones, so Jin sent a text letter to my library, seven thousand kilometers to the vineyards:
dearest ben, just a short note to say how much we miss you. bolte is real dull when your not here. i went out with Jak and Soo to the feelies. just the three of us, i felt real lonely without you, what with Jak cuddling Soo in the dark and me just thinking of you all those leagues away picking grapes, though Jak did give me a cuddle on the way home. Soo has bought a new sari from the free commissary. she looks stunning in it. i’m going to get a shorty with my next pay but i won’t wear it till you come back.
And so it went on, I read every word of it, and started to clear it from Holding but put it into Longterm Store instead, choky with some species of sentiment, stood in the dust and tore at the vines thinking of the night I’d left on the ballistic freighter.
You’d panted in my ear then, little tubby Jini, and I managed to get my hand between your camisole and bodice—one layer nearer than usual.
That was some triumph, Jin, squirming around on the seats of that steamed-up skite. “Oh Ben I love you, don’t please, Ben, don’t, someone’s coming, it’s Jak and Soo.”
And it was Jak and Soo, coming back from their roll around on the beach. Not that Soo was much value in that department either, and Flo’s virtue was a byword.
Ben and Jak and Soo and Jin was the regular team, fiancés and fiancées chaperoning one another in a spare clapped-out Clan Griffith skite. There was a four week cycle. Every second week it would be his turn to spend half an hour on the beach or in the park while Jak and Jin and Jak and Soo enjoyed the superior amenities of the skite.
Alternately, Jak would vacate the plastic upholstery in favor of Ben and Soo or Ben and Jin. Chariots, what a thickwit, coming back to the skite giggling and nudging,
“Now, now, you two, I hope you haven’t been up to anything we wouldn’t do.”
And bugger me, we hadn’t had we? Not anything you wouldn’t do with the girls, Jak, because you were going to marry them like I was, weren’t you, and the agreement was that we wouldn’t spoil the merchandise. Not that there was any chance of that with young Flo.
You respected our womenfolk, didn’t you, Jak? Jak with the flashy clan-ring and the hired puffwig leaning over the table at the babies’ Ball, leering at me, man to man. You’d got it with a hot little piece your mate had introduced you to, hadn’t you? All perfectly hushhush, outside the circle of cognate obligations.
You advised me to get it too. You even offered to fix it up with the self-same hot little piece—just tell the girls I had to stay late for some major memory inlays and the two of us would go out and have us some fun. She was a synaptic therapist you said, she knew her stuff.
I’ll wager she did, Jak, a synaptic expert eh? Trust you to pick a specialist.
But I didn’t go with you and you said I was scared. I said I loved Flo and Soo and Jin too much and that was something you’d never understand. But you understood, Jak, you understood.
Chariots, I was scared of your synaptician with her professional pleasure-center skills, shit scared.
§
Ben stood in the dust and the dust got into his boots.
An organic machine more virtuous than the hard variety, good frontier tradition, wholesome training for the rigors of eternal life, he ripped into the vines, and the juice ran down his forearms, sticky and sugary. Cuts and nicks scarred his fingers, nothing the ruth in his antibody-and-repair system couldn’t heal overnight, and his hands were webbed with the cloying juice.
The tropic continent’s sun burnt his neck and the skin peeled away. He sat in the shade w
ith the other pickers and drank mock-tea and replayed his fiancée’s letter, her sticky, sugary words. Dearest ben, just a short note to say how much i miss you.
And I thought I missed you. I even thought I missed Jak and Soo and Flo. But I left the Bjelke grapefields for Newstralia all the same, I didn’t miss you that much.
In the bunk below Ben’s the old ethyl-drinker cracked up in the night, shouting and laughing. They whispered that the old bugger was a ruth-immune, a social leper with his white hair and chapped skin, fated to die in a few years. Someone threw a bucket of water over him, but he shouted and raved regardless.
In the silent intervals Ben lay in his bunk and listened to the bloodsuckers whining through the pickers’ shed—no insectivore screens for serfs—in search of their own brand of juice. Just as well they didn’t pick up immortality with their supper, we’d be drowned in beating wings.
The next evening he called for his pay to be co-axed through to Creditbank, showered himself and hitch-hiked away towards the closest Teleport.
§
He ate a greasy shashlik on the durabond bench of an autocafe and walked out over the endless saltbush plains to the golden planet, Newstralia.
God knows what I expected in the place, it wasn’t you, Jin, and it wasn’t Jak’s hot little synaptic therapist either. And it’s not what I got.
The smart move would have been to wait in the diner for a lift, but he was footloose and happy enough to grab a chance to see some of another continent at close range. As he walked under the brilliant stars, thankful that this world possessed no predators larger than bloodsuckers, his library sent out the hitchhikers’ radio bleat. Wouldn’t do much good unless some compliant soul was tuned to it, but out here away from civilization they tended to do things like that.
Cargo vessels went overhead from time to time, their lights vivid in the empty reaches of the sky. But they would not set down for him in the night, and Ben was in no hurry.
Saltbush receded in choppy little waves to the black horizon. By most definitions this was hardly tropical territory, but it was warm for Victoria, locked down in glacial ice to forty degrees of latitude from its almost perpendicular poles.
He lay on top of his sleeping filament, resting his head on his rucksack, and looked at the familiar stars. In a day or two he’d be in another galaxy, a place so distant from here that it was only a smudge of stellar light. And his cognate kin would take him in, give him a month’s free lodgings, introduce him around the warm, stifling company of Clan Griffith on Newstralia.
A domestic skite whistled low across the sky, its lights singeing the saltbush, bringing the clumps to a momentary blaze as the vehicle swept away, not stopping. Spread-eagled on the plain, Ben listened to the diminishing hum until the vast silence of the night reasserted itself.
He turned the bleep off and closed his eyes.
In the infinite gray-blue morning he stood and stretched, pissed on a handy saltbush, and reactivated the call.
§
He’d walked for three hours before anything appeared in the sky. A battered utility grumbled down, kicking up dust: in the sealed cabin, a man, a woman and a sleepy little girl. Ben shouted thanks and climbed up into the rear hold.
A woman clad in black sat on a duffle bag, her head a gleaming black inscrutable ovoid. Smooth, eyeless, a blind insect’s skull. A sensory transduction helmet, Ben realized after a moment of almost instinctual terror in the face of the faceless maimed.
She moved a muse case to make room for Ben; it had a subversive symbol etched into it. Art transfiguring old political grievances, rendering them docile.
Her mouth smiled at him and, perhaps, her eyes as well. Her long black hair, hanging free from the back of the helmet, streamed in the wind as the ute lifted into the air.
Ben cleared his throat; allowing for the wind he spoke loudly, but the open cavern of the hold served to shelter his voice, so that his words came forced and nakedly nervous. “Hello.” It caught in his throat, but he forced out some more words. “You hitching too?”
“As you see.”
Shit, idiot, idiot! “Where to?”
“The Wagga Teleport.”
His heart contracted in mad hope. What were the odds? One in billions? “For Newstralia?”
“Naturally. It’s our cultural Athens, isn’t it?” Perhaps she sniggered.
“I’m going there, too. Uh, I’m Ben.”
“I’m Anla.”
After a few more banal words they sat silent in the artificial wind, the day’s early heat warming the ute’s plast. By the time the farmer stopped in the broad common dropspace of a two-pub township the mirages had started.
Ben jumped down and took their baggage and the muse from Anla. He placed the instrument delicately but quickly on the grass, determined to offer Anla a hand down, but she had sprung out before he released the handle. The farmer’s ute lurched away, and they went in search of breakfast.
It was still early and the wide common was almost deserted. Those few who were abroad looked at Anla, then at Ben, and back to Anla.
Ben was accustomed to passing unnoticed, insignificant, in any situation, even in piddling little country towns like this one. When he went out with Jin and the others nobody much looked at them, unless Jak was acting the lair. But they looked at this tall woman in her cruel mask, her tangled black hair, her muse and her duffle bag, and they looked at Ben with suspicion and envy. Her man.
They found an open commissary and waited interminably. The woman who was driving the floorwasher finished her task, took the plugs from her temples, and seared them a couple of eggs in rice.
Ben talked to Anla over the diamond-encrusted surface of the diner table. She was relaxed and friendly and more ready to communicate than in the hold of the ute. She’d been collecting scandalous folksongs around the island work camps; and finished up at Moroni the day before.
No, she didn’t think it was very dangerous for a girl to travel alone. It was certainly a lot quicker. Ben felt an uneasy despondency. She’d want him to piss off after the snack.
But Anla talked easily and cheerfully about the rides she had got, the buzzes cargo pilots had bought her. They left the commissary and walked toward the end of the township, where the commercial vehicles landed.
“Do you want to travel alone?”
“No, of course not, unless you do.”
She laughed at him. This girl dressed and masked in black, Ben thought with sudden joy, wants to travel with me.
§
And the first bitter, lonely ascent to the cold high place.
He’d been inducted through the special gates reserved for those who had never voyaged before, those innocents for whom the Teleport Authority had prepared interrogatory machines of peculiar thoroughness, jollity and avuncular tone.
Knocked halfway on his ear by soothing drugs, he’d gone into the maw of the Aorist Closure and dreamed away the pseudo-time of transition with fantasies of lust and childhood, and when he’d come out and pulled on his hired clothes he’d almost screamed with the pang of loss. He’d never see her again!
And the liquid relief when he’d stumbled out of the Men’s Lounge into the principal metropolis of Newstralia, stretching away indifferent on every side, hostile in its indifference, and found Anla waiting for him, whistling and swinging one leg.
A woman from beyond the clan system. No rules to help, no norms of protocol. How can I ask her if I might see her again? He ran possible phrases over in his head, but before he could speak she said, “Where are you planning to stay, anyway?”
“Well, I’m Clan Griffith,” he explained in confusion, “so I guess I’ll phone the kin-center and get my room allotment....”
“Much better,” she said firmly, “if you come and stay the night with my friends.”
“Won’t they mind?”
“No, they’re our type.”
What the hell are our type? Not clan-kin surely. Better not to ask, he decided, he’d find out soon eno
ugh.
§
Anla had credit enough for a cab; they flew to a precipitous series of terraces that fell away to the harbor. They walked down the hill to Anla’s friend’s place on El Cheapo Street.
A weakly-flickering holo on a downstairs window advertised an exhibition of pottery that had ended two months ago, if he had his date conversions right. A fellow with a thin goatee and an informal red ruff opened the door, embraced Anla, thumped Ben on the shoulder and showed them in.
The corridor was active with holos: for zam clubs, recondite feelies, acted drama, art exhibitions, semi-legal political rallies: a fey red fist wiggled its stiff thumb up imperialism’s arse. Between the holos of one wall three doors stood at regular intervals. Pandora’s Jar was stenciled in neat gothic script above one. Another advertised itself as The Vatican, whatever that might be.
They entered a room at the end of the passage; sunset lit, half a dozen people sat around vidding their libraries or simply doing nothing.
Gregorian chant.
Steam drifted across the room in puffs from the bright oblong of the kitchen door, dissolving in red gloom. A large, tortured, unframed painting on one wall confronted a creditable meme-copy of a primitive mask originated, no doubt, on one of the New Guinean worlds.
Anla appeared to know everybody in the room, introducing Ben with the speed of a racing commentator. Dazed, he sat on a huge transparent cushion next to a girl in a patchwork jacket who sat cross legged flicking up images from an expensive fashion program. He felt extraordinarily tired; the Authority’s tranquilizers had not worn off. The strong, welling voices of the monks filled his head with the need for sleep. He tried to recall the names of the people he’d just met but could only manage that of the girl sitting next to him: Julia, the same as his sib.
He watched Anla talking to the man in the red ruff. She hadn’t taken the glossy helmet off. In the dark room its perception augmentation doubtless gave her a subtle advantage. What would she look like without it? Beautiful, probably.
Chariots, he was tired. The monks echoed on, the wide reverberating spaces of their cathedral fitting uneasily into the cluttered room. The Christers were very big this year. Wasn’t their god due to put in an appearance? Millenarian number, or was it next year? 4000, or 4001? He never kept up with such controversies. But then again, whose calendar did they employ in their reckoning? Orthoyears, one would imagine, hinged on Old Earth’s paradigmatic round, so that definitely made this 4000. There were problems with simultaneity, of course.
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