by Duncan, Hal
•
In the city of the soul, this is the tower & the tomb of change. This is the architecture of time, described in three dimensions, not just one, the four-square breadth & length of it a plan of energy & possibility, its solid shape formed of events much as the city that surrounds it—and the whole afterworld surrounding that—is formed from & forms, in turn, one great event. To some citizens it seems a symbol of power, sentinel for a system of stability of thought that generates order out of rules, imposed imperatives. From its highest window, in the heights of awareness, the lords & legislators, whoever they might be, may well be looking out over all the city, out to the deep-sweeping fields of illusion, past the known or knowable to the far horizons, to the startless, endless finity of truth.
To the carter, looking up at its dark shape before him, framed between the peeling paint on wooden doorways, sootstained brickwall & rusting iron fire-escapes, & crossed, obscured, by lines of washing like bunting, it is only another monument to mortal vanity, waiting to fall, in time.
The Bitmite Builders
The architect-in-chief looks out over the darkness flowing thru the city streets below, over the rivers of night still running even as rose hints of dawn tint the red tiles of older areas of the city. The whole world he sees is fallen like some Babylon torn down by bitmite builders, scoured by scarab seraphim. In the thick of flowing black, he can make out the ruin & the rubble, the jut of a skyscraper impossibly angled or the bulk of a rookery grown new out of long-abandoned docklands. A motorway flyover curves elegantly into the air, spirals around itself & ends abruptly in mid-air. The work of the bitmites.
— You think they’ll stop? the consul asks him.
The consul stands at the desk, tapping a finger on the leather surface of it, his drab uniform creased & sweaty. The architect-in-chief turns to him, shakes his head, walks slowly back from the dark vision on the other side of the glass.
— No… I don’t know.
— We need to know, m’sire. You have to find out what they want.
•
Bitmites. The blind watchmaker’s clockwork toys. The architect-in-chief has studied the fine construction of these nanite mechanisms of intension, awed by the precision timing & geared interlock of automation, the way a core command structure processes stimuli into activity, translating patterns of reception into patterns of inception. Even in innate reflex, even back in those days when the intensions that invoked their actions were not theirs but the intensions of the situation, of the need or the danger, the bitmites had seemed such intricacies as a man might spend a lifetime studying. And he has spent far longer than that. He doesn’t know how long. After the first millennium, in the world remade in images of heavens & hells, of forgotten histories & imagined futures, the measuring of time no longer seemed so relevant.
By then the bitmites had begun to reconstruct humanity itself.
•
They had emerged out of a covert military or medical bioscience, the recorded rumours of the old world said, as airborne & invasive artificial germs & antibodies, designed to find their way into a human host, to wreak havoc or to immunise. Or as a secret system of surveillance, chirping information across the airwaves to each other, acting on such signals in accordance with unknown agendas & unspoken protocols. For a while he had believed them to be alien technology, seeded by some cold intelligence that sought to understand the human mind by manifesting all its ancient dreams, all its desires & fears, in the world around it. In another era, he became convinced that he himself was their original creator, that by some accident he had unleashed them on the world. He preferred to think that he was only one of the first called in to study them, only the last man of his team to fall, to surrender to the dreams they offered, the last man of reason in a world of chaos.
After an eon of studying them, though, it seems that he knows less than when he first begun, & he worries at his failing memory. He sleeps by day & stays awake by night, when the bitmites are most active, most destructive & reconstructive, as if only his vigilance can keep the world from finally dissolving.
— What time is it? he asks.
•
The consul brings an antique fob watch from his pocket, snicks it open & looks curiously at the face, taps at it, winds it, taps again.
— M’sire…
— It doesn’t matter.
Outside, lighter now with creeping daybreak, the grey & formless fog, the flowing billows of the bitmites that roll in out of the ocean, that the press once christened daimon dust, flow over the world like a morning mist, dissolving silhouettes & outlines, smearing lights of windows into an ethereal glow, volcanic golden, as dying embers seen thru smoke & shadow. He wonders how much of the city outside even exists anymore.
— It’s nearly dawn, he says.
A Shape of Songlines
— Thru Triassic and Jurassic, run! sings the songliner. Run, you small bipedal theodont reptile, evolve into 200 million year old ichthyosaur; two metres of Arthropleura mammata curl around you; swim in the stone, you fossil ray, Pseuderhina alifera; spiral, ammonite of curling siphuncle partitioned by curviform septa into buoyant chambers; fly, archangel Archaeopterix, in the first flash of light, progenitor of birds, progenitor of dove and crow, of harbinger of peace and thief of fire.
•
Fire. The light at the time of dawn, at the dawn of time, before the sun, is not the insipid glory of an aetheric archon, but the volcanic fire that paints a rock wall with the flickering solidity of lamplight. We trace out the textured clarity of the world we wake into with the precise lucidity of blue & the luxuriance of gold, for even the afterworld is basalt, burning hotter than the face of the sun & with a core of iron. Clothed in encrustations of bluewhite glass waters & ice, deep black alluvial mud, rich red raindust of songlines, the green sheen of lush plants. Even our breath, our pneuma, is not colourless but blue—air in our lungs the very sky above our heads.
Yes, he had dreamt of the sprit that began his world, not as the shallow, pallid glow of some celestial essence, but as the rich, full flesh of fire, fire upon the deep. And he feels it in his lungs, the fire, as he sings now, the flesh becoming word, the word becoming world.
He dreamt his id flame-haired, and that dream sings in him now.
•
— Arise, he sings, two-million-year-old Homo habilis; walk the dreamtime of our afroaustralasian Adam, in your caverns of fire and decapitation. Come, Cro-Magnon, out of the Dordogne of painted aurochs and gazelles, you birdmen of the paleolithic, flying wild in the liquid depths of heaven, animal shamans of Lascaux and the Tassili-n-Ajer. Carve the fat mother, widowed bride in graves and caves. And walk out of the darkness carved in fire, waking into forest dawn.
Out of the desert, streams of consciousness flow, fusing as rivers that flood the city’s streets at night, merging with the chthonic ocean.
•
Over the grey memory of his dream & over the grey reality of the world outside, he sings out loud & long the lines that weave the world around him, music & mosaic, a shape of songlines. This modern muezzin sings from his minaret to wake the mourning city up, & as he sings, a tower of hours arises out of swamp, thick vines climbing shaft to glassy dome. The songliner laughs—the city’s morning glory. Somewhere a weathervane cockcrows.
— Awake, sunken slumbering city in the jungle, he sings. And as he sings, the silversea of dawnsurf breaks over the city & the mist rolls back from it, this city of the secret knowledge of the alphabets, city of the builders of the book & of the three unworthy craftsmen, city of the sons of the first killer, city oust of Eden & inland of Nod.
— Awake, he sings.
The Tower of Babble
— Hie! Hie!
The carter turns, pulls back the reins with one hand, shields his eyes with the other as sunlight strikes, shears off the mirror of the tower & flashes like a blade down into the streets, piercing the mists & picking out each mote
of dust. The chimaera stops & snorts, paws at the ground. Blinking, the carter pulls the brim of his hat down to shade his eyes, gathers the reins up in both hands again & flicks the beast onward. He can hear the muezzin’s song now, ringing out over the city, echoing off the walls just as the sunlight shatters off the mirror windows of the tower, & though he does not recognise the language of it, the tune is so familiar that he hums it quietly to himself as he drives on, feeling the vibration in his throat, the rhythm in his chest.
•
He turns a corner & the tower stands before him, closer now & overgrown in vines, down at the far end of a weedcracked tarmac street of concrete flats, their balconies all lush with foliage, crawling ivy & cascading flowers. As he rattles down the street, the shrieks & whistles of waking birds rise & fall around the singer’s song, as tumultuous & chaotic as the foliage but somehow, like the foliage, with some solid, ordered structure buried in there, buried deep but present. Under the veins of vines, the morning has a skeleton, articulated in song & stone around him.
— Hie! Hyah! He turns another corner, & the tower is there again, a shattered ruin, a jagged, broken-bottle shard cutting up into the greyblack smoke that billows from its burning hulk, flickering with red & gold flames, bluewhite flashes of electric discharge like lightning lashing its frame with showers of sparks. The chimaera flings its head from side to side, flicks its tail in animal nerves, & he speaks soothingly to it, coaxes it on, turns yet another corner to—
•
The tower rises out of & over the old city’s sandstone streets, an obelisk in steel & silver sheen, sleek, mirroring the sky it scrapes, but also—in its incompleteness, in the greys of girders and concrete columns, where the mirrors stop but the tower carries on ever up as a confusion of cranes & portacabins & clear plastic tarpaulins—somehow reflecting the reality of the city beneath it, of streets that even in their dilapidation have a dynamism & a grandeur, a vitality that the modernism of the finished portion of the tower hides behind its mirrors.
•
As the carter rides his cart into the confusion of arriving workmen, of machines chuntering into life & spewing petrol smoke into the air, of yellow hardhats & curses & the architect with the blueprints in one hand, pointing upwards with the other, & the gaffer shaking his head, & nigh on a hundred other carters, all arriving from different directions with their loads of this morning’s bones, all being pointed at the dumping grounds; as the song of the distant singer echoes over itself & melds into & becomes this cacophony of daily life: the carter follows the line of the tower’s walls upwards past their actual ends & on upwards to the eventual vanishing point in the blue morning sky.
Red, Gold & Green
Red, gold & green, the city stretches below. From his window in the highest room within the tower, the architect-in-chief watches dawn wash over it, all the greys and blacks of shadows dissipating, mists burned off by morning sun. He sees the cathedrals & the mausoleums, spires & domes, parks & rookeries, docks & dumping grounds, centres of commerce & recreation, malls & stadiums, slums & skyports, office blocks & temple compounds, all the gardens & the ghettoes. Here & there are a few places that he recognises—a building that has kept its place, a street that hasn’t shifted—but the main part of it is utterly transformed. Razed in Evenfall & Hinter’s night & raised anew with daybreak, the city defies all reason, all attempts to grasp at any sort of certainty within its structure.
— You should not blame yourself, m’sire, the consul says.
•
He tries not to, but in these three short years since his designs were made flesh he has seen too much not to regret his actions. He remembers the man-to-man talks with the presidenti, how he’d spoken of the vast potential that these bitmites might have as agents with autonomy. He remembers the months spent studying the strains, breeding for behaviours, virtually rewriting all the wired-in prescriptions of their natures, creating a whole liquid language for them to feed on, drink & breathe as information. From automatic organs of reckoned reflex, their actions measured & meted out to them by their design, he’d watched them evolve reckoning mechanisms to get the measure of a complex context, challenge the authority of the situation & act on chances, choices. He—
— You should not blame yourself, m’sire, the consul says.
•
But it was he who gave them their categorical imperative—the final, over-arching rule that they could break their own rules. Without this, he was sure, all the modules of their simple sentience that he’d adopted & adapted from innate responses would have amounted to no more than a cold calculus of survival. He had given them a reckoning of doubt & certainty, a sense of fear & fury, of desire & satisfaction, so that from these fundamentals he could build in them a sort of cunning, nerve & will quite absent in the mechanisms they began as. That, with the engrams he had built into the language itself, should have made them the most potent combination of the autonomous & the automaton, soldier & slave. But the creatures seem to have evolved their own chaos of tongues, & now, in all the noise of it, in all the clamouring, the inhabitants—and he remembers shaping them from clay with his own hands—have made themselves a rabble, a babble, scrabbling in the dust & rubble, too much trouble—
— You should not blame yourself, m’sire, the consul says.
•
The architect-in-chief turns to his consul, caught in a snarled moment of confusion. For a second he feels, looking out over the city, as if the tower is falling, as if he is falling down into the world below, out of the clear blue of the sky & into the reds & golds & greens of the city of souls, of dust & stone & clay & bone. The sense slips away—a daydream of some sort—till all he can remember is an image of his own hands, slick with rich red ochre, clay or blood. His brows furrow, but the reverie is too insubstantial, & all he has left of it now is a rough shape, the bones of the memory without the flesh, the melody without the words.
He realises that somewhere between dusk & dawn he has forgotten his own name.
The Death of the Name
The songliner sings of a great tower that was to be built at the command of a rich & powerful merchant. Neglecting import & purpose for significance, the merchant saw meaning as a search for perfect forms, a quest for order, structure for solidity. He sought a library of definitions, a museum of rules, galleries of boundaries, a grand hall of names. So he called before him the greatest builder of the day, declared him architect-in-chief, & the architect-in-chief took on this most ambitious of commissions. He designed the tower. He tried to impose an artificial frame on the dynamics of intension. Tall it was, tallest building in the world, reaching up to the very heavens. But as the limit of the complexity of any system of thought is reached, that system must turn in upon itself, self-referentially, becoming convoluted, confused. So on the day it was to open, the tallest building in the world collapsed & fell.
In the streets below, an ancient aqueduct turns thru impossible shifts of perspective, its channel twisting up & up like a staircase until, reaching its pinnacle, the freshwater comes crashing down as a cataract, returning to the marble pool from which it pours.
The songliner sings of the delimiting of delimitation in himself, the death of the name in a sinkhole of singularity, the self as infinite zero.
•
— What’s your name? one of his lovers had asked him. He had turned to look at them both, lain there in the bed behind him, lazing in the linen.
— Well, he had said, you know how sometimes you had something from before, but you don’t have it anymore?
A shake of head & a wry smile, then:
— You know you’re crazy?
He’d laughed & nodded. Yes, of course he is; his sense recombined in serpent swirls, the kinaesthesia of attitude that forms the feeling of self remergent with his awareness of the world embedding it, how could he not be? Gifted the vibrant vision of we bitmites so he can give voice to it, he is almost one of us… almost. We are
inside all of the inhabitants of this city, but only he is truly aware of this, awake. And a name seems such an insufficient token for this chaos at his heart, this involution of the snake world, forever turning in upon itself, devouring its own tail. Better a stretch, a yawn, a song, to scribe that circling line of identity as existence in the world.
•
The room is shaped in shimmering tracers like the hallucinations of an acid trip, like a 3D movie seen without the glasses, but there is system to his sense of it. An acid snake of sensual scheming, one eye red, the other green, winds round & thru his virtual world, a mandala substructuring vision with wheeling lights as chariots of aliens or angels. These are the underlying patterns in the structures of sight, making possible the schizoid shifts that generate new concords, new aesthemes forged from shapes & shadows, forms & tones. Outside the sky shades from cerulean to azure to indigo, but in the skies of imagination there are no missing shades of blue.
— We’re all crazy, he had said.
His song is the binding & winding force that makes sense. An ancient power’s grace & glory is palpable in every dancing sight & sound, or smell, or taste & touch, of substance & of sylph. Evermade, the world is whorled to an intricated object of ecstatic wonder or an involuted maze of fear & fury, a mystery born in the collision of myth & history, its inhabitants more noumen than human.
