Under Heaven's Bridge

by Ian Watson

  **Where is Andrik?** Keiko cried, anguished by her ignorance but determined to forfeit it only in this one particular.

  **Kneeling directly before you,** soothed Alice B, who had perhaps guided Andrik into a paranormal hinterland as yet too ill-lit for her to follow. **But, alas, you cannot cock your head to see him. Imagine Andrik beyond you, beckoning. Still, we fear, he is but a little way from where you wander importunate and grieving.**

  Alice A picked up the thread of its evangelism: **I walked to and from your people’s Platform, Lady Keiko, as a creature in harmony with the dictates and desires of its flesh. During this period and others like it, I was, yes, almost human, one of you in every way but the trivial and finally inconsequential one of physical appearance. Then, having learned all that time allowed and chance afforded, I ceased to come to you. It was imperative to prepare for winter transit.

  **At approximately the ice-heat of water,** it continued after a brief pause, **a temperature that we can induce instantly within our very skulls, we think, let us say, kyberthoughts. We experience the transition to alloy-superconductivity in our secondary cerebral circuits, which race. Race, Lady Keiko, like photons accelerated beyond the constraining limits of the speed of light.**

  **As the Heavenbridge leaps from point to point unconstrained by Einsteinian physics?**

  **Very well, Lady Keiko, if you like. Racing, these circuits shift our thought-phase to kybertempo, which we are designed to reach almost effortlessly, well beyond the petty pace of carnal thought.**

  Where was Andrik? Keiko wondered again, not having been able to see him beckoning to her in the riven twilight. Then, although she was sure that she had not projected her question at either of the aliens, Alice B responded:

  **We are taking him to God.**

  **You see,** fluted Alice A, in melodic glissando gloss, **still further below ice-heat, at winter-aphelion, superconductivity of our prime circuits induces yet another paracerebral phase-shift, this time to a tempo nearly coincident with that of the Control System governing all that is, and was, and will be.**

  God, thought Keiko bemusedly. What did this concept of a Prime Motivator and Controller do to the Eastern belief that all beings were related to one another in harmonious hierarchies constituting a vast cosmic pattern? Given a motivator and controller above these manifold hierarchies, you could scarcely attribute either virtue or vice to the beings arrayed within each level—for in such a system behaviour arose from decrees; or from programmes, rather than from the inner dictates of each being’s special nature.

  The negative of an aurora wriggled like breeding black snakes through the gauze of Keiko’s kybertrance sky.

  How do I escape? thought Keiko, for she rejected the aliens’ proof of God as harmful to the health of the fragile human soul. How do I rescue Andrik from the malaise of Kyber “spirituality”? Or are we the ones who suffer from malaise …?

  **Sped to control tempo, or alarmingly thereabouts, our kyberthoughts permit epiphany, my sweet Lady Kei. The over-reality manifests itself! We peek into the demesne of control by first having peaked into that of death-in-life and life-in-death.**

  **Pun-koan!** sang Alice B.

  **Our biobrains are cryogenically stilled by now, of course, but we thermothoughtfully warm independent portions of our flesh-brains to think these revelatory messages for you. Our secondary kybercircuits transmit said messages to your axon-aerial receivers one and a quarter million kilometres long.**

  Cold intelligence, operating at superspeed. Intelligence, wondered Keiko, fast in its icy captivity, of what?

  **The difference between the speed of operation of the prime circuits of our hard brain and that of the axon circuits of our soft brain, Lady Kei, is the difference between supranormal and normal perception. Our side-eyes, as you have already astutely guessed, are the instruments of vision of the hard brain. We see what outlives the flimsiness of time and fleshly bodies.**

  **While I am blind!** cried Keiko’s spirit. **Andrik and I are blind, and you yourselves are doomed to melt in the dreadful blast of Dextro’s nova!**

  **Not so. Once you yourself believed otherwise, Lady Keiko.** The phraseology mocked her own.

  **But how can you control the orbit of your world? Do you manipulate it with kyberthoughts? Or do you control the very rhythms of your suns?**

  **There is a control system. We peek into it by peaking into what you have called death-sleep. Yes, we peek by peaking, and dream by sleeping, and scheme by speaking to ourselves with—**

  **Please!** cried Keiko in blind and mind-bound torment.

  **—the tongues of angels, sounding brass and silver! Forgive this alliterative, if assuredly not illiterate, recitation. There is, I repeat, a control system: the Control System. We are its experiment in knowing it, we Onogorovans. We communicate our knowledge of it, to it, in collective kybertrance—at which times we are not merely with it, Lady Keiko, but also of it. Unto the very limits of our understanding.**

  **Andrik!**

  **We have taken him to God, and should you likewise desire that honour, we are ready to escort your consciousness that way, too.**

  This invitation appalled Keiko. She threw back her head, worked to free her hands from the articulate pincers gripping them, and somehow tugged her left hand clear. The world did not immediately spring into being from the twilight chaos of kybertrance, however, and she saw that Onogoro’s sky was still a negative dazzle of ivory and slate, and Andrik only a watery phantom of himself—his eyes were tiny flickering suns.

  If God was a control system, God was infinitely more alien than the Kybers. You could never attain perfect union with that which lay above and beyond you, outside you, manipulative and dictatorial rather than serenely existent and quiescently complementary. Andrik, a Westerner, might approve the concept of such a god; but how could she—or even the cyberneticist Betti Songa, whose professional expertise encompassed the finer points of programming and control, but whose cultural background denied these same mechanistic tendencies in nature—ever surrender to so impersonal a cosmology?

  **We seek union, too,** the Kybers told her, even though Keiko had brought her left knee up from the flagstones in an effort to disconnect her subconscious from its physical grounding in kybertrance.

  **Indeed,** continued the alien voices, **we discontinuously obtain union, and much more frequently than it is given human mystics to do—because we are designed to approach that state.**

  **Then how may you take Andrik to God?** She was flailing about with her left arm, desperate, sightless, cold. **He’s not an Onogorovan, and neither am I!**

  Alice A recaptured her hand, and Keiko was borne to earth again—to be translated with Andrik over the bridge of death-sleep to the Kybers’ alien Elysium? The taste of her guide’s quasi-flesh lingered on her tongue, a welcome sensation precisely to the extent that it tied her to the world beneath this bleak and dizzying bridge.

  She had no human voice with which to scream.

  **We lead you into the presence by hymning in continent-wide chorale the paean of our Way.**

  **I don’t want—!**

  Switches were thrown, circuits were opened, and a sound like the intermittent burr of an overloaded transformer wracked Keiko’s body through the conducting channels of her bones. She was blind, mute, deaf, desensitized to nearly every sensation but pain and fear of pain; meanwhile the Kybers were attempting—insanely, altruistically—to augment the tempo of her perception to that of a control system whose suzerainty she would never accept or acknowledge. Thousands of Kyber families poured their “voices” into the paean lifting her to God, while, bereft of Andrik and the world, she braked her burning consciousness and resisted their efforts. Her body writhed blindly between the Kybers crucifying her above the flagstones.

  **Let her go,** crooned Alice A. **Let her go before her brittle body snaps; before, to daub us culpable, her blood spills out.**

  Suddenly she was free, free of the Kybers’ iron grips, free o
f the universal choiring that had threatened to carry her spirit into the throne room—the control room—of the primordial tyrant; not a deity but a system, not a unifying consciousness but a programmer.

  Maybe Sixkiller had been right. Even if the Kybers were alive by all the standard biological criteria, they were self-confessedly in thrall to … a control system. That made them, yes, machines. Even their intelligence and free will—if you could use those loaded terms—were attributes of the system that had programmed them to know it. The next step in this inescapable chain of reasoning led you to conclude that human beings, despite not having been specifically programmed to know the primordial tyrant dictating the shapes of their lives, were likewise a variety of machine, albeit a less complex or successful variety because incapable of merging unaided with their Controller.

  Or else you could assume that the God-Behind the-Galaxies of the Kybers was not humanity’s Controller at all.

  This was Keiko Takahashi’s instinctive assumption even as she fell back from the kneeling aliens and begged for the world to reassert itself around her. …

  EIGHTEEN

  Slowly her ordinary sight came back. There in tableau were the two kneeling Kybers, Andrik suspended between, his face and eyes aflame with the atmospheric riot of decoupling. Or, rather, the whites of his eyes were aflame, for his irises had rolled up into his head like a dead man’s. His mouth hung open, and spittle made an icy lacework on his bottom lip. Behind him, pregnant and unmoving, the Kybers gestating new life in their joint womb, great metal icons on a bier filigreed with frost.

  “Andrik!” Keiko shouted. “We’ve got to go back! We’re leaving Onogoro, all of us!”

  Alice A—Izanagi; her former pupil; once the family’s septa-prime—released Andrik’s hand, came gracefully out of its kneeling posture, and hoisted itself upward on its extensible limbs. It ceased growing only after attaining a height that overawed and intimidated Keiko. Its peripheral eye-bulbs diminished in size and brightness as it grew. This was no Onogorovan embodiment of Kannon but a vengeful alien saint hungry for devotion.

  “He’s there,” the Kyber said gently, belying the vengefulness which Keiko had just attributed to it. “He’s there.”

  The alien apparently meant to imply that Andrik—obviously feverish rather than supercooled, being, after all, a creature of flesh rather than of miracle metals and alloys—stood at last on the threshold of the ultimate Control Room, peering in with astonished inward eyes and longing to take the fateful metaphysical step that would unite him with the Controller even if that step extinguished the life sheltering his own microscopic spark of the divine. The Kybers had taken Andrik there, as far as he could go, and Keiko suddenly understood that it would be impossible to budge him from that threshold without taking back to the Platform a mere husk of the man she had loved. A zombie, one of the living dead, a straw man nodding in the ion winds of night.

  Keiko’s body ached. She had nearly unsocketed her left arm struggling to get free of the Kybers, and each time she took a step—as she did now, discreetly backing away from her confrontation with Alice A—a pain jolted through her side, stabbing upward beneath her ribs like a well-aimed spear or poniard. How was she ever going to get back to the floater?

  “You’ve hurt me,” she accused the alien. “I don’t think you understand how badly you’ve hurt me.”

  “You’re welcome, Lady Keiko,” said the Kyber evenly, without a note of sarcasm, although it well understood how humans wielded that verbal weapon. “May you evolve most craftily beyond the hurts.”

  “Evolve …?”

  “I am sorry only that you could not anticipate the pains that we inadvertently inflicted, in order to parry them by adjustments in advance of their disclosure. Still, we released you at your pleasure.”

  “Too late,” Keiko said. “Much too late.”

  Then, to her astonishment, the Kyber began singing—with perfect pitch and an archaic music-hall flair—one of the popular songs that she had used as an instructional aid during the early days of her involvement with the alien in the knowledge centre. Piano Roll Blues. An old American ditty, joyous and cornball.

  “‘I want to hear it again’,” crooned the Kyber, tottering toward her menacingly, “ ‘I want to hear it again: that old piano roll blues!’”

  Incongruous, incongruous.

  “You are no better or worse than we, Lady Kei,” said Alice A by way of explanation. “We are the notes of the piano roll of our genetipsychic heritage, after all, and so are you of yours. That which slotted the rolls and plays out our melodies on the upright piano of consensus reality is one and the same composer/performer. Sometimes, however, we Kybers are permitted to slot the rolls and tickle the keys ourselves. You need not fear us simply because we are able to influence the performance more often than you. What we wish to do, Lady Keiko, is … Show You the Way.”

  “Kybertrance is madness,” said Keiko, looking behind her. “Your death-sleep is insane. Your world view is a vile, melancholy thing. I leave you to your deaths.”

  “Our Weltanschauung, our world view, will prevent those deaths, O little teacher, or at the very least permit us to trot foxily around them.”

  No longer listening, Keiko shouted again at Andrik, knowing that she would not be able to rouse him. His name—the living word—echoed in the pit, rang against the icy rocks. Tears came to her eyes, salt in her blurred apprehension of the night, and at last she broke and ran.

  Three steps, five steps, seven.

  Then Keiko, quivering and alert, halted in the first interior spiral of the labyrinth. Looming ahead of her were the three aliens who had earlier taken up sentry duty around the floater. They were returning from work, tall mahogany-and-metal sylphs glowing blue about their halo-crests, radiant with the Onogorovan equivalent of St Elmo’s fire. They came toward her in stately procession, amiable, inexorable, strange. Her heart began to pound, and she retreated to the atrium of the Kyber palace wondering what had happened to Sixkiller and Captain Hsi.

  Fearful of what the aliens might do to her now that she had rejected kybertrance as an agency of either revelation or human growth, she sidled along the atrium’s wall hoping to conceal herself just long enough to let the Kybers enter; then she would dart past them into the maze. Alice A, her student and would-be mentor, regarded her indulgently, the set of its lips conveying an aloof, alien humour. With one outstretched arm draped with ragged kyberflesh, it resembled a Meiji Era geisha in a tumbledown tea house.

  “Goodbye, Lady Keiko,” it said. “I am very pleased to have met you.” It then shut itself off; “died” as Andrik might have said; descended into death-sleep to meet its maker. …

  Keiko looked up. Drifting toward the atrium under the pyrotechnic barrage of the sky was the floater. It played blinding searchlights across the entire landscape, then manoeuvred into position above the Kyber palace as if Sixkiller was testing the finesse and delicacy of his touch at the controls. Keiko stared. The spindly legs of the aircraft swayed from side to side about fifteen metres overhead, glinting like giant lag screws in the auroral glare. Arctic gusts buffeted the floater occasionally, but none with enough force to dislodge it from its hover.

  Then the hatch came open, and she saw Captain Hsi braced inside the opening paying out the rope ladder of bonded silicon whiskers.

  The ladder unravelled soundlessly in a swift, switchbacking fall—like a double strand of linked glass beads “clattering” against each other in absolute vacuum. The bottom rung of the ladder swung back and forth several steps from Keiko, about a forearm’s length above her head. She hurried to clutch it, to pull herself out of the atrium with her good right arm. Her other arm, she knew, was going to be no help whatever.

  “Dr Norn!” shouted Captain Hsi from the floater’s hatch. “Get Dr Norn, too! We can’t leave Onogoro without him!”

  “There’s no helping it, sir! We’ll have to!”

  She leapt and caught the ladder’s bottom rung. The ladder itself, havin
g fallen into the shape for which it was designed, was rigid now, supportive of her weight—but, alarmingly, she did not have enough strength in her right arm to pull herself any higher.

  Helpless, she dangled.

  The Kybers were coming, the remainder of Alice A’s family. Turning her head, Keiko saw that the three mechanized sylphs who had guarded the floater on the ridge were pushing into the atrium together. Even though they resembled geese hurrying to get through the same gate, a formidable panic seized her. They were coming to capture her as Andrik had been captured, and if she could not escape them now, no hope of future escape would ever sustain her—for she would exist beyond the pale of hope. Gritting her teeth, she chinned herself even with the ladder’s bottom rung, only to find that her entire strength had lapsed.

  “Hang on!” shouted Captain Hsi. “I’ll pull you up!” Braced in the opening, he attempted to haul the ladder in like a fisherman hauling a net, his own heavy coat an encumbrance too bulky to overcome.

  “Tell Sixkiller to lift us out of here!” Keiko cried.

  Captain Hsi shouted, “If he lifts us up and you fall, you’ll be killed!”

  “Tell him to go ahead! Tell him to—!”

  She felt alien pincers under her arms, a pair of armoured hands whose grip was irresistible. Keiko screamed, and the floater’s hanging ladder buckled and twisted as she was dragged away from it.

  Her right hand released the rung, and the ladder snapped back into place, sparkling glassily.

  Captain Hsi stood up in the hatch opening, his face contorted, a cry frozen in his throat. Whatever he was shouting or trying to shout was lost upon Keiko, who relaxed like a rabbit in the devouring jaws of the wolf, regretfully acquiescent.