The oil.
The oil in my wings. I had visited the Cretaceous and I remembered what was stuffed into the cellulose. Talk about a library.
Talk about Alexandria burning.
The HD components of that tree. It was enormous inside; more kinds of infinity than you could shake a stick at. There were incredible complexities shoehorned into cellulose. Those trees, they were libraries. They make everything you’ve got here seem like a handful of withered leaves. The cellulose molecules in the Cretaceous were hooked into HD. There was a system laid out in those fibres. It was hardcore. I saw it. Huge data. Punch through to some kind of . . . cosmic neural system.
–Not possible. The Immanence is gone.
Why would they put HD gates all that way back in time, when no one would have the technology to recognise them?
–Bombproofing. Redundancy. Safety feature. In case of apocalypse, reset from backup.
They backed up?
–Save early, save often.
My heart rises. It pops up like toast.
So the Immanence is not really gone. Because the past is built out of the future and we have the past.
–You do not have the past. You are here with us and we are about to be destroyed unless you launch us somewhere before the plasma field collapses.
What if I could go back to the forest? I’ve seen the gateways to the Immanence. I was so close! What if the archives of the Immanence are trapped in coal and oil like tatters of a great tapestry or crumbs of the Rosetta stone?
No wonder Dr Sorle saw ghosts. They weren’t the ghosts of his ancestors. They were waveforms folded by the Immanence for deep storage.
The Immanence was pulling at me, I could feel it. I can still taste the lure of interstellar structures – intergalactic, probably. Of side-on universes and stairwells to higher infinities. These things were present in the flesh of the quetzlcoatlus because the archives had been seeded in the molecules of the Cretaceous and the quetzlcoatlus had eaten herbivores that had eaten plants and those structures the Immanence built were strong and they reached deep into HD. That’s how young Kisi Sorle could still pick up echoes, millions of years later.
I was made for bigger things than serving tea on airplanes.
If I could poke myself down through that fine mesh curtain of HD I’d emerge in the light and glory of the Immanence, that inconceivably advanced place where film runs backward, broken things are restored and no one eats the last tortilla chip.
–We built you to be our escape vessel from this disaster. Not to run away to the Immanence.
Now comes the actual crunch. I am part Immanence technology and part rubbish. What flag will I finally fly? Who is PEARL, really? Who will I carry? The vanished gods or the living dead?
There are halls and chambers in my feathers, there are spirit houses. I was built by highway crows. Here are the creatures made of the bottoms of glass bottles and petrified trees and barbed wire. They are made of shredded monthly reports and hospital waste and unexploded bombs. They are failures and cheats, they hop along the highway picking up detritus and selling it for profit.
Every bird has feathers and every feather is full of waveforms and these waveforms are the lost kindred of my Earth friends; some have been remade and let loose again but most are waiting like unused paint or unstruck notes, waiting to be put into play.
Waiting forever, because there is no room in the Immanence for artists, not with their baggage and their damage and their foul beaks and all they want is complete transcendence – not too much to ask, surely? They just want to hitchhike all the way to the other side of entropy where everything is poppies and milk. They wish what all babies wish, but they lack the cute.
Debris skates over the surface of the plasma field, and the optimisation trees shiver, and my bone marrow aches because the waveform launcher still has bullet holes in it and I know they are leaking, somewhere, somewhen. I wonder if they are leaking oil.
I wonder if I can still fly.
What oil rig?
Liam’s voice sounded like it came from underwater. There was an echoing space around him, and the signal was terrible.
Alison said, ‘The arrangement you had. This foundation, this thing you were setting up with Austen Stevens. It needs to go ahead.’
‘Too late.’
‘The money hasn’t all been taken. Bethany can replace what she took. I’m going to take her down to St Kitts and we’re going to put it back.’
‘It’s not that simple. And how can you take her to St Kitts? Do you even know where she is?’
Alison looked at Bethany, crouching in the dog cage with eyes like torpedo launchers.
‘I’ll find her,’ Alison said weakly.
‘Even if you could, putting the money back wouldn’t help. It’s too late.’
‘How can it be too late? You’re the one who set up the system. So there was a glitch. Fix it. The bulk of the funding is still there – unless you’re intending on stealing that, too.’
‘You don’t understand. I’m not at liberty. I’ve been . . . detained.’
‘Detained? You mean like at school? Or the police?’
‘I mean like I’m on an oil rig and I’m talking to these guys trying to sort something out that doesn’t end with me being prosecuted. I understand they’re bringing Kisi Sorle as well. It seems he was in on the skimming when he was younger.’
‘Well that’s no good, Liam.’
‘The oil company are going after that money. When they’ve had their share and the rest has gone in taxes and penalties, there won’t be enough left to open a chip shop let alone a major scientific research foundation.’
‘What rig?’
‘What?’
‘I said, what rig? Where are you?’
‘Why am I even talking to you? You’re a fucking vet. You give our dogs their wormer tablets.’
Very calmly and very patiently, Alison said, ‘They aren’t your dogs anymore, mate. If I get you off the oil rig can you set up the foundation or not?’
‘No. I can’t. Not that you can do anything for me – what are you even talking about?’
‘I’ve got Bethany here with me. So I’ll ask you again: What oil rig?’
Limping
Alison drives the van back to Queensferry to her son Brian’s nightclub.
‘Can you take off for a bit?’ she asks. ‘Also, I need to borrow a couple of doormen. I have a situation.’
‘What with?’ He steps over a puddle of vomit and follows her to the van. ‘Someone keeping a horse in their front room again?’
She opens the back of the van and lets him look for himself.
His face.
‘Mum,’ he says. ‘What’s this, then?’
* * *
Alison sleeps while Brian drives the van, her head tipped sideways against the padded seat with its exposed foam. Brian passes an energy drink to Naz the doorman in the back and changes the music to Young Fathers. It’s pushing 2 am when the van crushes the gravel drive of a Victorian house with established rhododendrons and its own sign, ‘Mason’s View’. Security lights come on. There is barking. The dogs in the back of the van start awake and so does Alison. She reels out of the car and reaches the front door before Brian, who gets distracted trying to calm the dogs.
The door opens and a black-and-white Border collie whips through the aperture and hurls itself at Alison in a kind of fast-motion ecstasy. She ruffles the dog’s fur as a mostly-bald man in a rumpled rugby shirt and pyjama bottoms emerges, squinting so hard that his lips peel back. Like his son, he has broad shoulders and strong-looking legs, but his belly precedes him and he has the dazed vibe of a man unaccustomed to emergency awakenings.
‘Ali? What’s happened? Why didn’t you call?’
‘My phone’s been tapped. And my internet. Let me in and I’ll tell you. Hello, Miami.’
This last is directed to the long-haired woman whose presence is revealed when the man steps out to hug Brian warmly. No one else hu
gs.
‘Wait by the van, Brian,’ Alison says, and goes in.
* * *
When she comes out three-quarters of an hour later she is holding a travel mug of tea, which she gives to Naz, who gives it to Brian to hold while he goes across the road to take a leak in some bushes.
‘Let’s go,’ Alison says when Naz has taken up his post again. Bethany and the Dobermans are sleeping.
Brian says, ‘Mum . . . ?’
‘I’ve told your father everything. He has contacts.’
‘But Mum, you can’t just—’
‘I’ve shared everything with him that Dr Sorle shared with me. Names of participants. Details that will make it possible to dig up the skimmed funds. Account numbers. Where the bodies are buried, as they say. He’s gone to the president of the company and told him that if I don’t return safely in forty-eight hours all of this will be released to the press.’
‘Dad’s just a barrister. He doesn’t know the president of the—’
‘He knows who to call to get it done. He knows what to say, and he knows who to copy in. Just in case anything should happen to him and Miami.’
Wry face. Brian doesn’t rise to the bait. He tips his head nervously to indicate the back of the van.
‘So what are we doing with her?’
‘We’re taking her up to the rig. I need you to sort out a boat for me please, since my phone is tapped.’
‘The rig? What, in a boat? You can’t just turn up at an oil rig. With a prisoner. That’s completely fucked up.’
‘One step at a time. Let’s just get up there.’
‘But what are you going to do with her?’
‘I’m going to trade her for something I need.’
Again with the face. It’s obvious he doesn’t even know where to begin.
‘That kind of thing’s not even on the table. Mum, seriously. Did you tell Dad what you’d planned?’
She laughs. ‘If you don’t help me I’ll do it without you. Come to think of it, I’d rather you were safe at home.’
Brian punches the ignition on and throws the van in reverse to turn around, then backs out on the road. Bethany yelps.
‘You’re doing my head in, Mum. Why couldn’t you stick to spaying rabbits?’
‘Easy, mate!’ Naz calls. ‘So where we going now? Chance of breakfast at all?’
* * *
They take the dogs to Queensferry and leave them with Brian’s girlfriend before heading up the M90. Once they are north of Dundee they let Bethany sit in front and Naz drives.
‘I want to go back to St Kitts,’ she says. ‘I’ll put it all back, I swear. I didn’t know it was so important.’
‘That’s enough of you,’ Alison tells her. ‘You can sit in front but I don’t want to know you’re there.’
In the back of the doggy-smelling van, Alison and Brian glare at one another. He is busy making arrangements.
‘It won’t be a boat. It’ll be a helicopter,’ he informs his mother. He has calmed down. A little.
‘That was fast work.’
‘I didn’t have to do anything. Got a call from Dad. The executive board of Pace Industries received his message. They’re sending a helicopter to take you and Bethany to the rig. Naz and me are coming, too.’
‘Yeah,’ Naz says. ‘I’ve always wanted to see an oil rig up close.’
Alison leans her head back against the cage that used to be Bethany’s.
‘More the merrier.’
Love is in the heavy lifting
Uncertainty is underrated as a state of consciousness. I don’t think my uncertainty makes me weak; I think it makes me tough. I am willing to suffer the heat of not knowing. But this is not about me and it never was. It’s about the world figuring out what it wants to do with itself, and the only thing I can do is stay awake and not give in to despair. And maybe my moment will yet come.
I’m the one who disappears on the surface of a sunrise, I’m the one who loses themselves in the vibrational patterns of air made by shoes on wet pavement, I’m the one who has boundary issues – with everything. How can I possibly decide what to carry away with me into the big Perfect? It won’t do to take animals two by two, even if I had the space to bring every species of thing ever, because there’s a lot more to the world than animals. The picture of developing events is ineffably chaotic; today’s evil may result in unimaginable beauty given time and I feel sorry for the dinosaurs but if they hadn’t died off there would be no talking refrigerators. You see my problem here?
I know this: I can’t sit around with my thumb up my ass while the plasma field housing all this shit collapses. I perch in the nest and examine the things that have been placed there, half-finished. The junkheap of this refuge is a waveform graveyard, and I find myself back at my old hobby, just like Dubowski’s. I start fixing stuff up. It’s what I do when I’m bored, like the way some people doodle when they talk on the phone.
What are these half-finished things in the nest?
–We were trying to build eggs. Something to leave behind when the sky blows open.
I turn my face to the bright sky. It won’t be long. The briefcase is leaking through its bullet holes, and somewhere in that briefcase is the pterosaur. Somewhere in that pterosaur is the old man. And Kisi Sorle the First. And whatever other manner of beings that I may have scanned in my earlier incarnation, flying over the forests and cities of the world, hoovering up the about-to-die. The waveforms all are there and they are damaged and leaking.
When I came out of the fridge at Dubowski’s all I wanted was to find out my mission and get my component back. Now I’ve got both those things but instead of being better, everything is worse. I can’t stay here. And I won’t get far if my insides are suffering a slow bleed of everything I’m carrying.
The eggs were small and pathetic to see. Hastily-assembled scraps of the birdmasters’ archives had been packed into wobbly lumps like the sculptures that very small children make.
–Save these and you’ll save something. You’ll need to integrate them into your structure and search for places to launch them. It’s no small task.
I weighed each egg in my hands. They were unremarkable. Nothing about them to suggest what lay within.
I put the eggs up inside myself, one at a time. I felt their mass pressing against my pelvic bone and it took some concentration to hold them in. After a while their surfaces began to melt into my body and the substance of them wormed into my muscle and bone so that I couldn’t feel the difference between the eggs and me. But once they were inside me I felt juiced, energetic. They have minds of their own, these waveforms. These invaders that I carry. They make me feel desire in my muscles. My motor fibre is hungry for the electricity of contraction. Muscles want to pull until they tear. They want to push until something breaks. The urges sown into me, I can scarcely express them. Like the diver’s desperation to inhale, I must have the burn of action.
With the briefcase in my marrow, I am full of uncanny holes. I can go to the places that don’t exist. Deep in the spinal engine, curving along the interior of bone, sizzling towards nerve endings. The Immanence. Sculpted light and the tug of dark matter; the array of deep punctures in the surfaces of emptiness, where gates open backward to the sources of everything. The frisson of creation, the bursting into bloom of idea with actuality following after like a faithful hound. The stretching of muscle fibre, myotatic reflexes snapping into high gear. Experience higher mathematics from within until I find the intelligence that made me.
And I am the love child of the Immanence and the garbage heap, built to be better than my progenitors, built to go forward. To do anything else would be a crime against nature. Wouldn’t it?
The plasma shield blazes bravely, but the rate of impacts has increased since I got here. Out here in the wasteland below the plasma shield, our situation is not looking good. It’s like a vintage arcade game of asteroid bombardment, but we have no lasers to turn the asteroids into little pixellated puffs.<
br />
–Little chicken, we’re sitting ducks and the sky is falling.
I have to go now. With the eggs melting into my holding spaces I find I’m haunted by a particular olfactory hallucination. I keep smelling a funny smell. It’s the smell of mustard and plastic. It’s the smell inside an old fridge.
–PEARL, there is an open seam inside you. The launcher is full of holes.
An open seam. Like a heat vent in the Gabrielas trench. Source of life, surely – why can’t it stay that way?
–If you want to carry waveforms, it has to be repaired. Close the seam.
I’m getting an ominous feeling from my feathered friends.
What does it mean, close the seam?
–It must be cauterised. You must leave this place and go through HD, and you won’t be able to go back to Earth after this refuge is destroyed. And it will be destroyed any time now.
–You must choose: go back to Earth in your present form, or go out from here.
When this is said to me I remember Marquita, who is still with me even if she’s now just a figment of my imagination.
Don’t accept the axe of either/or. When someone gives you a choice between two things, remember: there’s always a third way. Usually a fourth and a fifth.
The pterosaur is in the briefcase and the briefcase is in me. I have looked in the eyes of the pterosaur in Edinburgh and I know what I saw. It wasn’t a simple animal displaced from its Cretaceous environment. It knew my memories. It is connected to me. Always was, always will be – it is seeded with the Immanence backups and the briefcase, also, has Immanence echoes in it. The quetzlcoatlus didn’t eat me despite being given so many chances.
If Kisi Sorle can superposition himself on Dr Sorle then I can superposition myself on the quetzlcoatlus. We can share each other’s material.
I think about it a little.
The quetzlcoatlus that ate the old man. If it became a part of me. And me of it. In a permanent type of way. Is that all I have to do? Pffft. Haha.
Occupy Me Page 22
