Chapter Fifty-Four
CASSANDRA WATCHED BEL fidget. That wasn’t inspiring. He, Cassandra, Marie and Iekanjika had been pulled aside like all the other non-Puppets and moved to the outer zones of the Free City. Stills continued on his way to the port as cargo, but the rest of them found a loud bar filled with delayed passengers. A small projector on Iekanjika’s wrist emitted multi-frequency white noise, so they could speak in some privacy. General news feeds projected onto two walls, mostly scenes of a large displacement of non-Puppets.
There was no view of the Puppet Axis. Cassandra would have loved to have looked at it, even through a television camera. She’d spent her whole life studying the cosmos and hadn’t been this close to an Axis created by some ancient intelligence by technologies they couldn’t even guess at. And she was stuck in here, unable to touch it. Her thoughts itched and she was ready to start counting something. Marie also looked bored. After a few minutes of throwing shelled nuts at a big miner in the hopes of starting a fight, Marie exhaled loudly. The miner moved to another booth. “So, I hacked into the network of Stills’ sarcophagus thing,” she said breezily to Bel. “I sent him Venusian cheesecake porn. He looked like he was under pressure.”
“That’s awful!” Bel said.
“I know, I know. Puns aren’t my thing in Anglo-Spanish. I’m better in French.”
“No. You’ve done an awful thing! Stills isn’t Saint Matthew. The Tribe of the Mongrel are deeply messed up.”
“Come on!” Marie said. “Matt is messed up too.”
“Do you even know what real mongrel porn is?”
“I’m gonna guess manatees?”
“It’s you. It’s me. With our clothes on. The mongrels have flukes instead of legs. Their faces are incapable of emoting. Blubber has buried their sexual organs. Their reproduction is heavily assisted and painful. They find each other repellent. They avoid thinking about sex on purpose. You’ve probably made him miserable.”
“Aw, merde,” she said, crossing her arms.
Cassandra tried to read Bel. His pity of the mongrels seemed heartfelt. The violence of Stills’ words made her uncomfortable, and the violence he was capable of probably scared her. But everything was becoming relative. Stills or Iekanjika. Stills or Gates-15. Suddenly, he didn’t seem as bad. And she was starting to think that Bel’s view of the Homo eridanus was kind of noble. Maybe Stills hadn’t asked to be built the way he had. Maybe he didn’t like living underwater. Maybe she felt a bit of sympathy for Stills.
The newsfeeds became louder, showing cheering, shrieking Puppets. “What’s going on, Arjona?” Iekanjika asked in a low voice.
“Every so often the Puppets have to move a Numen,” he said, “and the city closes down.”
“Anyone we know?”
“I’m not as good as Saint Matthew,” Bel said, glancing at the limited datafeed he had, “but I can access the upper levels of the Puppet traffic dashboards. Crowds of Puppets are stretching from the outer wall of the Free City all the way to the Port, crossing the whole city.”
The shipping news on the two screens vanished and a Puppet announcer appeared. He was perhaps a meter tall, with flushed cheeks and a look of rapt excitement. He stood behind a full-sized human desk, its flat surface coming up to just under his armpits. He held his datapad in front of him, forcing the camera to film him from forty-five degrees off, unintentionally capturing the unpainted wall and wiring to the announcer’s right.
“... been disappointed in the past with other claims of feral Numen, and the Episcopal Conclave has yet to pronounce its findings,” the announcer said, “but the reaction from Puppetry across the Free City is astonishing. We’ll be patching into our mobile unit shortly. In the meantime, I have this recording from an eye witness.”
The Puppet announcer stood on the screen for long seconds, smiling, before finally, an image replaced him. A small Puppet woman in a priestly tunic sat on a chair with dangling legs as she tried to still her shaking hands. Her awe radiated past sweaty, tear-stained cheeks.
“I was one of eight bearers carrying him from the Warrens to Twelfth Avenue,” she said. “He’s real. I swear. If I know Numen, he’s real. It felt like Good Boy Day, but so much stronger. I was in a closed room with just a few others and him.” Her breath shuddered. “He pissed on the floor. I touched it,” she said with a groan before wiping away a tear. “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. He was... he yelled at us. All of us. He grabbed another priest and rammed him into the cage... It was so beautiful.”
The interviewer put down the camera, tumbling the image so that the young priest displayed at a ninety degree angle. Unmanned, the camera nonetheless caught the interviewer lovingly stroking and smelling the priest’s fingers. Cassandra felt her stomach churn. Despite what Bel said, the Puppets weren’t anything like the Homo quantus. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for William to be surrounded by them.
Disgust wrote itself on Iekanjika’s face. She snapped a look at Bel. “This is bad?” she asked.
Belisarius shook his head. “It’s good,” he whispered.
“It’s some kind of parade,” Cassandra said after glancing at Bel’s datafeed. “They’ve cleared a path from the Warrens to the port. They’re not taking them to the Forbidden City?”
The image returned to the Puppet standing at the newsdesk, but the audio fed from somewhere else, and whatever he said for the next minute wasn’t transmitted. Instead, the sounds of a massive crowd drowned the bar, chaotic chanting and angry yelling. Finally, the video feed was matched, showing thousands of Puppets sweating and jumping below a raised street.
“Are they angry? They’re swearing?” Cassandra asked. It was like watching animals.
Bel shook his head. “They’re worshipping. The Puppet Bible is made of most of what the Numen said to the Puppets. One of the ways of worshipping is to quote the scriptures. The Numen swore at the Puppets a lot.”
Cassandra’s stomach turned a bit more.
Bel sighed. “Without the Numen around, the Puppets are as close to normal as you can get after surviving generations of captivity, abuse, and biochemical slavery. Around the Numen, the Puppets become something as alien as the fugue.”
Cassandra didn’t think he was baiting her. He really believed it.
The camera angles shifted as the noise tapered off. The image showed Puppet priests carrying a palanquin of some kind, but it was difficult to make out details; the cameraman kept hopping, trying to shove through the crowd to get closer.
“Oh no,” Bel said.
Cassandra’s hand gripped his. She’d seen it too. Her brain, like his, interpolated the complete scene from snippets of images. She felt awful, and knew Bel must feel far far worse. Then, the camera stopped jumping and the wave of noise washed away, replaced by a shared sigh. The procession moved out of frame, carrying a hunched, cramped, naked figure in a Puppet-sized cage. A feeling of horror stabbed in her chest, and she’d barely known William. He’d been Bel’s mentor and protector. She didn’t want Bel in pain. She took Bel’s head in her hands and turned him to her, so he could see only her. They both had tears in their eyes.
“I’m sorry, Bel,” she whispered helplessly. “Don’t look.” But he couldn’t unlook and neither could she. He remembered everything, just like her. “Don’t look,” she whispered, and did the only thing she could think of to distract him from his pain; she pulled his face into a kiss.
Chapter Fifty-Five
WILLIAM COUGHED HARD, bringing up blood. Grassie-6 approached in concern, but William swung his fist, missing the bishop, but forcing him back. William wiped his mouth and sat back on the low cot they’d set up for him.
They’d reached the Free City port. In the Puppet-only secure area, a wide window looked out on the vacuum of the great bay, light shining off rigid ice, outlining passenger ships, and cargo containers being offloaded from the most recent freighter arrivals from Port Stubbs. On the floor of the great underground port shimmered th
e Axis itself, indistinct in place and depth, confusing the eyes.
William wore clothes again, pants and shirt that laced up the outsides of the legs and arms, presumably so that Puppets could take them off again without him necessarily cooperating. His anger seethed, close to taking control. He was doing this for Kate. She would never know all he’d done to give her a future, but she would have one. She wouldn’t be like him.
“You moved away,” William said to the bishop.
“What?” Grassie-6 asked. He seemed unnerved by the tone in William’s voice. They wanted a god. He could give them a god.
“I was going to punch you. You moved away.”
The bishop looked relieved. He smiled and snapped his fingers at a young priest who scampered to the wall, opened a panel and hustled to William, sliding on his knees on the floor in his rush to bow. He held a coiled whip up as an offering.
“What the hell is this?”
“I moved away because I didn’t want you to hurt your hand,” Grassie-6 said kindly. “My bones are as strong as yours. If you want to hurt me, you should use a tool.”
“For the love of—” William swiped the whip from the priest’s hand and rose. “‘Get the fuck out!’” he yelled, quoting a verse he’d seen in the Puppet Bible. Gods using scripture. Let them wet their pants. “All of you but Grassie-6!”
Some scrambled for the door. Others waited for a nod from the bishop. William tried to kick one in the ass. The door slammed behind the last one. Grassie-6 stood before William imperiously, a meter tall, with a high mitre of green and silver on his head.
“You’re not afraid?” William asked.
“Do you want me to be?”
“If I want to whip you to pieces, right now, you’ll let me?”
“How much do you understand of Mooney-4’s Dilemma?”
William snapped the whip experimentally. The bishop did not react.
“The Numen were composed of every societal rejectee from within the Plutocracy, united only in their desire to live without any interference,” Grassie-6 said. “Their laws suited individualists. Duels resolved many disputes. They... enjoyed vendettas.”
“Not surprising,” William said.
“The teenaged Mooney-4 witnessed a Numen vendetta killing. She had to live with having watched the death of a Numen. Many Puppets were trapped like she was, between the overwhelming desire to obey the Numen versus the overwhelming desire to protect them. Quietly, here and there, these early moral figures struggled with what we now call Mooney-4’s Dilemma.”
“So came the Puppet Revolt,” William said distastefully.
“We don’t call it that,” Grassie-6 said. His face became sad. “We call it the Fall, for the reasons you can guess. The innocent age had been crumbling for a long time. We Puppets had to step from childhood into adulthood, to assume burdens we didn’t ask for, like everyone.”
“You took your own gods prisoner.”
Grassie-6 shook his head sadly. “If we obey the Numen and set them free, they’ll destroy us and themselves. If we protect them with captivity for their own good, we disobey them and destroy our souls. We’re torn in two every day. Do you think we don’t ache to fall on our knees and fulfill every whim of the Numen? Don’t you think that would be ecstasy? But we can’t, because our divinities are deeply flawed.”
William’s hand had lowered, lulled by Grassie-6’s words. He coiled the whip uncertainly.
“If you want to whip a Puppet to death, I could find you a hundred volunteers in the Port,” Grassie-6 said. “But Puppets qualified to enter the Episcopal Conclave are rare. We have the heavy responsibility of ensuring the future of the Numen. Bishops are difficult to replace. If you want to whip me, I’ll happily submit as long as you don’t kill me.”
William raised the coiled whip hesitantly, frustration biting in his stomach, the screams of the crowds still echoing in his mind. He yelled and hit Grassie-6 with the coils, over and over, knocking the little bishop’s mitre off, striking at his head and shoulders hard enough to knock him down. He stood over the serene bishop, panting.
“I hate you,” William said. “It was a mistake to come here.”
Grassie-6 bled from his nose and lips, but he smiled kindly. “If you’d been raised here, you would understand everything.”
“Would I have grown up in a cage?” William began to cough again, uncontrollably. He backed away, but waved the coiled whip before him, warding Grassie-6 away. He sat until his coughing fit was just an ache in his chest.
“For some parts,” Grassie-6 said, rising and replacing his mitre. “The Cage is part of the core of the Numen-Puppet relationship. We learn and teach in turn.”
“Vengeance?
Grassie-6 sat up, looking baffled. “For what?”
“For being put in cages. For being whipped.”
“You understand nothing,” Grassie-6 said, stepping forward. “It isn’t that we loved being whipped. It’s that we loved that our divinities paid attention to us. We are validated and real in those moments. Whether talking to us, or hitting us, or caressing us or ordering us, it’s all grace. Hell is when we weren’t allowed close to them. We worship them, in the ways they taught us and in ways that reflect our new roles as the custodians of divinity.”
William rubbed at the ache behind his sternum. “They don’t deserve your love or worship. The Numen had no morals.”
“Not the morals you know. Here on Oler, they created the new moral agents: we Puppets. The Numen were forces of chaos and power, as much as the Titans were to the Greek gods, a savagery to be tamed.”
Tamed.
The cage was on the far side of the room. They had not cleaned it. No doubt they had obsessive and religious uses for the smears and drips of his sweat. He rubbed at bruises on his legs and knees, wondering at the odds of being put in the cage again. William and Gates-15 had to pull this off. They were the inside man and the fall guy. He had to tough it out for a little longer. The rest of his life.
William coughed—short, breathless hacking. Grassie-6 was visibly disturbed.
“I have a lot to learn of the culture my grandparents fled,” William said. “Can you give me access to a library where I can look at not only the Puppet Bible, but old records from the times of my grandparents?”
Grassie-6 moved to a desk reader on the wall. The screen lit. He typed.
“You can access a library from here,” the bishop said. “The medical team accompanying us through the Axis will be equipped in a few hours. We’ll board the transport then. Sleep until that time.”
“Never again the cage,” William said.
“Maybe. We all have our roles to play.” Grassie-6 smiled.
The bishop left, shutting the door behind him. William dragged a chair to the wall. He needed to calm down. He’d begun to understand the spell the Numen had wrapped the Puppets in. The Numenarchy had been composed of idiots, complete and utter idiots. They had created a system to make themselves gods to the Puppets. The Numenarchy hadn’t understood that gods were objects, concepts.
The Numen stood outside the collection of beings deserving moral consideration. William’s wishes were curiosities, with no moral weight for the Puppets. In the Edenic Age, his commands would have been obeyed, as commandments from a distant and inscrutable god, but even then had the Numen not foreseen the seeds of disaster in their slaves? The Puppets caged their gods now, and a whole moral system—with a bible and a theology and a church—was devoted to keeping the Numen safe by not obeying them. The Numenarchy had been so overconfident, so short-sighted, and they had not even paid for it. Their grandchildren and descendants had paid for their crimes. It was stomach-turning.
The screen showed him directories and directories full of historical sources: texts, recordings, and messages from the pre-Fall days. Other directories contained theological discussions, theses, arguments, meditative texts, and the Puppet Bible itself, a cluttered, conflicting multi-volume monstrosity. There were movies and short films and
old television pieces, more than he could ever watch in lifetime. And beside the palm-reader was what he’d been hoping to find: a physical jack into the system.
It wasn’t advanced. These things constituted emergency entrypoints that the Puppets needed to make their unreliable hand-me-down technology function across hardware incompatibilities.
William pushed his thumb against the fleshy pad under the second knuckle of his index finger. Fine dark hairs emerged from his finger-tips. Gates-15 didn’t know that William was insurance, carrying nanofibres capable of delivering Saint Matthew’s computer virus. He gently touched his fingertip to the jack and waited for the virus to upload.
Chapter Fifty-Six
THE IMAGES GNAWED at Belisarius’s insides. They’d rented a private booth off the boarding lounge. Hours had passed. The cargo and passenger shipping schedules were in more chaos than normal. Tradespeople, scientists, the families of temporary workers and even the occasional nervous Puppet packed the boarding lounge outside the glass doors. The news played on big screens on the walls, replaying the clips of William being transported through the Free City, over and over.
Their booth looked out onto the cavernous bay of ice and steel over the mouth of the Puppet Axis. Lines of cargo ships packed with containers queued to cross the Axis. But some pieces of cargo went through offloading, and reloading, as if the Puppet shipping companies couldn’t decide what ought to be shipped.
Belisarius’s cargo waited too. They’d checked four containers and a rented tug to travel with them through the Axis. Stills in his big aquatic chamber was shipping too; he could not fit in the passenger area.
“Is this normal?” Cassandra asked. The pulse in her neck beat faster, and her cheeks had warmed. She looked at him shyly, with a touch of confusion. He wasn’t sure yet what his own reaction was to their kiss. He’d wanted her back for so long, but this wasn’t it, not yet.
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