Cloud Country
Page 11
“Like an acid trip, when you start thinking bad thoughts and can’t get out of the spiral.”
“I must defer to your knowledge on that subject.”
“But I heard the elzi talking. When I was in New Jersey.”
“That is impossible.”
“I couldn’t believe it at first either, but they were talking. About tampons. And tacos, and…energy drinks.” Saru stopped to ponder her own words. “No. You’re right. They weren’t talking. They were parroting, repeating advertisements. Whatever was getting picked up by their implants. Still, I don’t know why that would happen. Unless it had something to do with the destruction of the holodomor in Philly.”
“Chimeras act as neural nodes for the shared consciousness,” John said. “With the holodomor destroyed, the elzi’s connection to the UausuaU may have been interrupted. But do not mistake that for freedom. Only the feasters can enter a Uausuan mirthul and return. The feasters are those who discover the UausuaU, and know its nature. They choose to serve the UausuaU. Deliberate action gives them control within the mirthul, and control gives them power.”
“I’ve seen what the feasters can do,” Saru said. “They can copy people, steal their bodies, manipulate flesh and blood. Friar came back to life about fifty times; he was just jumping into any body he found lying around the holodomor. The feasters had weapons too, good ones, and they could attack my mind as bad as they could attack my body. Kinda ironic that after all that I got snatched by some JV cunts like the Hathaways.”
Saru kicked at the sand, and then did it again, enjoying the ripples the sand made in collision with the water.
“I’m in danger,” she said to herself. It was hard to believe in the bright of the sun. “What happens if my body dies while I’m here?”
“I do not know,” John said. “What happened the last time you were here?”
“Last time it was like no time had passed at all in this place. Like, I came to the island, and then I left, and when I was back in the real world, it was still the exact same moment I left.”
“Fascinating,” John said. “It appears the Saialqlaian mirthul is acting as a defensive mechanism. The Blue God brings you here in moments of danger to afford you respite and succor.”
“But how can that be? The elzi’s bodies get fucked up when they’re in the UausuaU. Are you saying time works differently here?”
“Time is the human perception of motion,” John said. “It is an illusion. Time contracts and expands with the natural rhythm of the universe. The Blue God’s scintillants live within light. Perhaps this mirthul occurs at the speed of light. If that is true, a great deal of time would have to pass in the mirthul before the particles of Earthly motion rearrange themselves. If the mirthulian time worked to your advantage before, I cannot see why it would not do so again.”
“But even if you’re right—and that’s a big if. Even if I spend a lifetime here, or ten lifetimes, I’ll still have to go back to the same time and place on Earth.”
“Yes,” John said. “But you need not return in the same state in which you left.”
John gestured out across the ocean. Saru followed the motion. There was a dog, blue and black and gold, sitting on its haunches on the surface of the water, close, or far away, she couldn’t tell. Saru’s heart pounded. A dread curled around her ankles. The mad thought of running flashed through her mind, of diving into the water, escaping any way she could back to the real world, and the certainty of pain and death.
“A dog,” Saru said. “I saw a dog just before Ria came back to life. What does it mean?”
“We use the word ‘God’ to describe beings like SaialqlaiaS out of convenience,” John said, obliquely. “It is important to remember that SaialqlaiaS is not monolithic. It is a being composed of smaller beings. Like a country made up of individuals, or a body made up of organs and cells. There are many factions and interests, some of which may conflict, and differ from the whole. For example, you, Saru, are a part of the Blue God through your margin. Organic systems require governance to be effective. I believe that which manifests as a dog to you is a part of the governing biology of the Blue God. It is a cephereal.”
“Ceph-ear-ee-ul,” Saru repeated to herself.
“A cephereal is born when multiple beings within a shared consciousness conceive parallel ideas. The cephereals vie for prominence and direct the execution of their respective ideas. The strongest ideas flourish and translate to the most effective actions. There are cephereals within the Gaespora, though they tend to be weak. The Gaespora are a disparate coalition, with members who have suffered much. Many seek to protect what little they have left. This engenders a multitude of cephereals that war amongst each other, with few rising to prominence, and no overarching direction. Hence, a paucity of action.”
“So you guys have a bunch of puppies that tell you what to do?”
“Gaesporan cephereals do not manifest as dogs. And they do not tell us what to do. The relationship between host and cephereal is more complicated.”
“How so?”
“The cephereals guide how the God interacts with a biological system, most often through the chimeras. When there is a small margin—when the God lacks data on the system—it relies heavily on the hosts. In this circumstance, the hosts have a great deal of power over the cephereals, and, in turn, the chimeras.”
“So…this cephereal dog…why’s it here? What does it want with me?”
John seemed troubled.
“I can only speculate,” he said. “It seems unlikely to me that this is the same cephereal that came to Ria. I believe this cephereal is yours.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Logic,” John said. “The Blue God does not understand humans. It is likely each of the few humans with a large enough margin would spawn their own cephereals. The cephereals represent competing theories of humanity, and whichever theory dominates will guide the Blue God’s actions.”
John’s voice was soft, but there was a menace to his words. Saru shivered. The sun did not feel warm, the light was too bright, harsh instead of friendly. The lapping of the waves came too loud. It seemed now the creak of every grain of sand against her foot was a warning.
“What should I do?” she asked.
“Go to the cephereal. Commune with it. Learn from it.”
“How?”
“I do not know. Within a Gaesporan mirthul, the cephereals would show me visions. The meaning I had to interpret on my own.”
“I don’t understand!” Saru barked. “I’m here. My consciousness is here, inside of the Blue God’s brain, like I’m just some avatar in a virtual kingdom. How can the Blue God have me here and not speak Glish? If it can do all that, why can’t it just tell me straight up what it wants?”
“Can humans speak the language of cells?” John asked. “We can grow cells of great variety in laboratories. We can create and destroy them with ease. We can command them, and change them, snip their DNA, and kludge them into tools to serve us. But we do not know the words they give to one another. The language we use with cells is that of life and death, brute force and experimentation. So too, the Gods with us.”
Saru walked to the edge of the island, dipping her toe into the water. It had a tingly feel of possibility, like the water could be anything she wanted. She looked at John over her shoulder.
“Can you come with me?” she asked.
“That is your cephereal,” John answered. “The message is not for me.”
Saru nodded. She steeled herself, and took a step into the water. The surface held. She took another step, and another, trying not to think about what was happening. The water was perfectly clear; the light swam though it like shimmering fish. Glancing down, she saw other places, other worlds, glinting like treasures on the ocean bottom. It felt like she could dive down into those worlds, wake up in other dimensions, maybe even in other bodies. She did not try. She walked on, step by agonizing step, against the force field of her own fear.
After what seemed like a very long time, she found herself standing in front of the dog. It did not move or react. The dog grew and shrank, small and large, with the pulse of her heart. Her island was a speck in the distance, John a mere blob, and yet the dog was no larger than when she had seen it perched on the horizon.
“I’m ready,” Saru said, to the dog, or to herself, or just to stir up the quiet.
She reached forward and touched the dog. It vanished.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she yelled.
There was a plop, ripples in the distance racing towards her. Saru turned back the way she’d come, and found the ocean water no longer held her weight. Each step she sank a little more, the solidity turning to molasses, sinking to her knees, her navel, her neck. The waves came faster and faster, hungry, attacking her mouth. She flailed, limbs growing tired, head ducking below the waves, water stinging her eyes. White hands forming amidst the froth, a forest of them above her, eerie, floating, shafts of sunlight cutting through, a canopy of hands, open palm, pushing her down, down, down into blackness. The water pushed into her nose and mouth and down her throat to turn her lungs to anchors, and—
*
—Saru dropped, dry, onto a hard stone floor, and immediately retched up a gallon of water that disappeared before it hit the ground. She knelt on her hands and knees, trying to control her gagging, and when she had reined it in she stayed still and listened. Nothing. No noise. No light. Blackness and cold stone. She shivered and stood, and began to feel her way forward with probing toes, arms outstretched. Her fingers touched something hard and cold and smooth, more stone, and she felt the stone, and her hands leaped back as she realized she was feeling a pair of carved breasts. Her fingers tickled forward, and she felt the rest of the statue. Where her fingers lingered, a glow appeared in the stone, faint but powerful within the black.
Saru kept her fingers on what she guessed was the neck, and the glow spread throughout the whole statue, and remained when she withdrew her hands. The statue was of a woman, half-formed, legs and torso and arms still melded with rock, the face blank and blocky. There were other statues nearby, illuminated by the glow, similar to this one, and she moved to them, and rested her hands on them, until she had burned a circle of light from the glowing statues. With this light she saw even more statues, dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all spaced a few feet apart, in various stages of completion, a room, a world of statues, half-carved in the dark.
Saru picked a direction and stuck to it, lighting her path with statues. Behind her, the glow of earlier-touched statues faded, so that the light travelled with her, and there was no trail leading back to where she’d begun. As she walked, the statues grew less womanly, with extra legs and holes and arms, and sometimes with two heads or no head at all. Touching them felt strange, a pinprick electricity, and some stung. She came to a statue of a woman on all fours, with tentacles bursting out of her belly and splashing out around her. The statue had no face, but a mouth, twisted into a broken-jaw scream. There was a statue of a girl with mouths covering every scrap of skin, in smiles, and grins, and frowns, and licked, come-fuck-me lips. Saru stopped at a statue of a woman covered in bubbly tumors, hands and knees on the ground, arms outstretched, reaching for invisible mercy. Saru turned and headed back in what she hoped was the direction she had come, but the statues grew more and more horrid no matter where she stepped—women diseased and destroyed, in half-faced masks of agony, women crossed with birds and rats and beetles and slugs, women with tentacles and too many eyes, tumors and horns and wounds that dripped maggots.
The light had almost gone—Saru could not bring herself to touch these statues—when she came upon a statue fully formed, with smooth skin and a face. The face was Ria’s, confirming Saru’s suspicions, and it looked peaceful, eyes closed, mouth closed, hair luscious, flowing down to the small of her back. The statue’s arms were held forward, elbows at the side, palms open as if in meditation. Saru reached out, tentative, and poked the stone. It did not sting or burn or even feel electric; it felt warm, inviting. Saru took the statue’s hands and held them, and the hands began to glow. The light travelled through the statue, making it pale, incandescent, and beautiful in an eerie way. Saru gripped the hands tighter, and the statue glowed brighter, pushing back the darkness in a wide circle. The statues around it began to melt like candles, dribbling into the floor until they were gone. A paleness appeared on the statue she held—skin forming in swathes to grow and spread and sprout the details of flesh, moles and freckles and hairs. The skin wrapped across the statue, splitting and coloring itself into blood-red lips, a mouth, white teeth, a nose and ears and eyes. The eyes flashed open. The sockets were empty, and black as pits.
The pain came with the sound of snapping twigs, sharp, burning, wet-crunch agony from her fingers. Saru gasped and tried to pull her hands away, but the statue Ria had clamped tight around her hands, crushing the finger bones into ropes of skin; the pain made Saru cry out, and it brought tears to her eyes. The statue Ria smiled and opened its mouth, and its tongue snaked out, pink and human, long, with a nest of barbs at the tip. Saru struggled to pull away, dropping her weight to free her fingers, screaming at the pain. The tongue slithered to her neck, and the barbs dug into her skin, and the tongue began to slide its way in between the cords of veins and arteries. Saru snarled and dropped to the ground, jerking the statue Ria forward. As the statue Ria fell off balance, Saru kicked up with both feet, hitting the statue Ria in the gut and flipping it over on its back. The tongue shlucked out of Saru’s neck. The grip slackened, and Saru jerked her hands free. She thrust herself up, and before the statue Ria could get to its feet, Saru kicked it in the face, and the belly, and the groin. When the statue Ria lay flat, Saru ground her heel into its neck, until the squirming stopped. Dust drifted from her heel as Saru stepped back. The statue Ria was a statue again, grotesque and broken, like the others.
Saru stared at the broken statue, resisting the urge to kick it again, and then she sat back and panted. It seemed to help, though she realized that here too the breathing was an illusion, and not the mechanism that controlled her life. She was sweating, and tired, but even as she thought it, the sweating stopped, and she felt rested. She looked at her mangled hands, felt the pain washing up, snapped bones and oh-God-I’m-going-to-barf. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. This was her mirthul, a place where everything that mattered was in her head. She stared at the bones, willing the pain to stop. It’s not real. I’m in control. This is my head. I’m not going to get beaten up by my own imagination. I’m not going to let some fucking statue break my fingers. I’m in control. I’m in control. The pain stopped. Her fingers were whole. She flexed them and cracked her knuckles, and shot the bird around. No pain. No injury. Ha. Haha ha ha. I win.
There was a laugh, far off, a high-pitch hyena squirt that echoed and trailed off. A shiver ran down Saru’s spine. She rose and did a slow spin, scanning the darkness around her. The circle of light was shrinking. She touched a nearby statue, but it did not glow. The laughter came again, from another direction, longer, a breaking-voice cackle of grinning lunatics and circus clowns, and nails tracing loop-de-loops on a chalkboard. It felt like the laughter was a thing more than a sound, tactile, barbed wire slithering around her neck, a whip across her back, a writhing-guts feel of horror. A new sound now, skittering, clacking, lots and lots of tiny, hard-sole shoes tapping against the stone. The skittering grew closer and closer, and Saru backed away, to the edge of the light, and crouched in readiness. Just as it seemed the skittering was upon her, it stopped. It was quiet except for Saru’s breath—racing despite her efforts—and another’s. A slow, heavy, fat-ass wheeze, air forced through ragged lungs and shredded pipes. And then the voice. It was a voice to match the breath, a pervert’s voice, a rumble with squeaky highs and no midrange: “Welcome.”
Saru let the word hang. She could feel the thing, the person, the creature, hovering just beyond the reach of light across from her.
“Did you enjoy it?” A whimper, pleading but more, an eagerness, a hard-on begging, sex-pleasure gasping. “Did you enjoy killing me?” A leg crept from the shadows, long and thin, bent, spider-like, covered in down-pointing bristles. The leg made Ping-Pong ball tocs as it tapped along the stone, further into the light, until it nudged against the broken Ria statue. “Did it feel good?” A tentacle slithered from the dark, whip-like, and then another, and they caressed the surface of the broken statue. The stone grew wet and raw like mud, and sputtered, screaming, into life. Mouths opened on the tentacles, slurping at the mud of the statue as the melting arms and legs flailed, slurping until it was just a puddle. The laugh came again, in an echoing burst.
“What are you?” Saru said, unable to help herself, words stumbling from her disgust. She hated how small her voice sounded.
“What are you?” Her voice came back from the shadows, mimicked with a note of the unhinged, loud, blasting. “What are you?” Singsong. “What are you?” Questioning. “What. Are. You?” Staccato. “You are what? Are what you? Wou yre aat?” And the laugh.
Saru found she was sweating again, and stepping backwards, unthinking, heel an inch from the shadows. It was forcing her back, forcing her to step into the shadows and…what? What would it do? Kill her? How? This wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. It was in her head. Her imagination. Her world. She was in control. She steadied her breath and stopped her sweating, and stood straight, willing the light to return. Light, light, c’mon light.