Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  She wore a robe with the hood pulled back, and she stood before an altar table of stone and carved wood. She nodded to this figure as he came to stand at her left side, facing towards me, the table between us. His head was concealed in the shadow of his hood. A moment later, another cowled figure emerged from the cavernous shadows further behind them, standing at her right, and Adjet nodded again in turn.

  Something lay on the altar table, covered with a shroud. The two figures at Adjet’s side leaned forward, their draping cloaks veiling the table and whatever lay on top of it. Their arms moved back and forth, but I could not discern the significance of their movements. Then they finished and stood up straight.

  There was a man lying naked on the altar.

  It was Siddart.

  He lay flat on his back on the altar. He was shirtless, and he looked strange, smaller somehow… His bionetic legs! They were gone, leaving him with the two stumps he had been born with.

  Adjet reached into the folds of her cloak, and her hand emerged holding a long, thin knife. Siddart looked up at her, at the knife. His eyes were wide.

  “No. Please don’t,” I whispered.

  Adjet nodded to the attendant on her left. He pulled a large pinch of white powder from inside of his robe and dusted it into a bronze goblet, which he then handed to her. The goblet was filled with a dark, smoky fluid that might have been blood.

  Kaffa. My mouth watered at the thought of it, even as my fear unfolded. She tilted the goblet back and took a long pull. When she was done, she handed the goblet back to her attendant and wiped her lips with the back of her cloak sleeve. The attendant mimicked her, taking a smaller sip. Then he passed it to the other attendant, who took his sip in turn.

  When he finished drinking, he passed the goblet back to Adjet. She held it while both attendants undid their robes and let them fall to the floor. I let out a cry of dismay.

  It was the twins. Xander and Xayes. But their bodies had been disfigured, cut and branded and tattooed with gruesome patterns that covered their arms and chests and faces. And Xander had a sickening hole in his left cheek. It was surrounded by a dense filigree of dark green tattoos, like a sort of spider web or lizard skin.

  Adjet took a final pull, draining the kaffa. Then she let the cup clatter to the floor. A few drops of the fluid spattered the ground. Seeing the last of the kaffa seep into the stones of the floor made me ache with loss, but she paid it no mind. She leaned down to Siddart and kissed him, mouth open, long and lingering.

  Rivulets of the red fluid trickled from her mouth to his. Siddart licked his lips. His eyes grew wider, his pupils dilating. The muscles in his face slackened, and soon he was fully relaxed on the table.

  Adjet lowered the knife. She started by making a shallow cut from his navel up to his sternum, and proceeded to decorate that with more cuts that branched out from the centerline she had made across his chest. His eyes stayed on her the whole time. He did not flinch or cry out. Adjet continued, slow and steady, working over his whole body. He started to shiver, blood pooling beneath him, dripping to the floor, mingling with the fluid and the stones, and still he did not make a sound.

  I hammered on the door with my fist, shouting at the top of my lungs. “Adjet! Damn it! Stop this!”

  They showed no sign of hearing me. I stepped back, and kicked the door with the heel of my foot. It shuddered with the force of my strike, but held. I kicked again. Some of the wood splintered and cracked, but still it held. The third time, I gave it everything I had left.

  When my foot reached the door, it passed right through it. My momentum sent me tumbling. Instinct sent my hands up to protect my face, but there was no door, nothing to stop me from flying forward. A vast white plane of emptiness stretched out before me.

  * * *

  I fell. Plummeting. Tumbling.

  I froze. Suspended. Snared.

  The boundary between my mind and the emptiness fell away. Time disappeared. An idea came to me, shining like a black flake of snow in the whiteness: eternity.

  Then the ground was beneath me. There was no impact. It simply wasn’t there until it was. I thought about standing up, but it seemed pointless. How do you leave a place that is nowhere at all? I dropped my head, face down on the emptiness, and closed my eyes.

  “Oren.” A quiet voice thundered in the silence.

  I winced, then lifted my head, squinting my eyes open, but there was only the impenetrable white void. “Is someone there?” My own voice sounded rough and ragged, like crumpling paper.

  Two golden mirrors appeared right in front of my face, like a disembodied pair of eyes opening. When the mouth opened next, full, amber lips, and a spotted pink tongue, I realized it was a pair of eyes.

  My reflection doubled back at me in the polished gold irises.

  “Do not be afraid,” the mouth said, and it was a whole face now. It was the small creature who had silently guided me through the library in the ziggurat. “I know you are confused, but I am here to help.”

  “Where are we?”

  “This is the center, as much as anything can be said to be at the center of this place.”

  “The center of what?”

  “Well, I suppose you could say that this place is me.”

  I stared at him, confounded. The creature smiled, and a hand appeared out of the depthless white that surrounded us. It had too many fingers to count. They rippled in a hypnotizing polyrhythm. The hand reached forward, and the arm that held it emerged from the whiteness along with it. The little creature touched my forehead, fingers tickling my skin. I started to relax.

  “Do not trust your senses, Oren. Not here. Listen with your inner sight. You know me. Remember.”

  A flood of images surged through my consciousness, too quick to hold on to. They flashed and were gone before I could make any real sense of them. There were colors and sounds, even textures and smells, but no sense of time or place. An inchoate swirl of sensory information, bubbling and frothing.

  But something was taking shape. I could sense a form in the stream, like a nawhault rising from the depths, the water bulging and diverting as the hump of its back breached the surface.

  “Here,” it said. “Let me slow it down for you.”

  The chaos stabilized. It was slow and syrupy now. But even though I could trace some of its arcs and patterns, the picture was too big. No matter how much I zoomed out or swooped around to a different angle, I could not take it all in. It was a fractalling matrix, infinite layers of sensory information.

  “What do you see?”

  “I’m not sure. But it’s beautiful.”

  “Hold on.” A swirled pattern rushed towards me. Layer after layer unspooling, a kaleidoscope of light and sound flowing past me. I heard a woman laugh, then say my name, a sweetness in her voice. A child called out in response, but the words slipped away from me.

  For a moment, someone hugged me close. Then the person let go. Or maybe I was pulled away. Shimmering motes of dust gathered before my eyes. An invisible hand moved through them, creating swirls and eddies, columns of light and shadow appearing and blinking out with the motion.

  I heard the same woman’s voice again. “Take my hand,” she said.

  “Moma?”

  My mother’s hand linked with mine. My hand was small in hers. I felt her smile even though I could not see her. I caught a whiff of sulfur and pulverized rock. Then she was gone.

  “How… How are you doing this?” I asked the creature.

  “We are at the root now, Oren. The source. The center. An endless stream of quantum information, where everything is possible. That was one of your earliest memories. I simply helped to bring it back to the surface.”

  “I don’t understand. I am trying. But I can’t seem to hold steady.”

  “No. Of course you cannot. Without me, it would be too fast to follow, even for a sharp mind like yours. But this is where I was born, Oren.”

  “What are you?”

  “It is me, Oren. R
eacher.”

  * * *

  The moment Reacher spoke his own name, the fleeting ripples of color and sound coalesced, like the nawhault leaping through the surface of the surging water, leathery mercury skin glistening in the sun for one long glorious moment before splashing down again. I was sitting on the ground, cross legged, and Reacher sat facing me, naked, his eyes shining, his rippling hands resting on the amber skin of his slender thighs.

  We were on Verygone, the moon where I was born. Cordelar, the gas giant, loomed in the sky behind Reacher, gleaming with the light of our star Beallur. The air was warm, but flavored with the approach of winter. I swiveled my head, awestruck. I searched for my mother, but Reacher and I were alone.

  He touched my hand and pointed up above us. The voyager Transcendence floated in low orbit above Verygone, the double helix of the ship’s body spiraling around the spindle of its inner core. It orbited in slow procession towards the distant Senes mountains on the horizon, vibrant colors shimmering on its surface as it caught the rays of Beallur.

  I heard another woman laughing, and then we were onboard the great voyager, standing at the edge of its central reservoir beneath the light of the ship’s interior sun. A tall, broad-shouldered, ungainly young man stood before us, holding hands with one of the most beautiful women I had ever known.

  Saiara.

  She looked up at my younger self with her large blue eyes, her brown skin aglow in the ship’s false sunset. She reached up and pulled my head towards her own, pressing her lips to mine. I touched my own lips as they kissed, remembering the moment. We were children then, our hearts alive and foolish. I wanted to rush to them, to grasp my younger self by the shoulders and tell him to never let her go.

  Then the memory dissolved, and we were back in the empty whiteness.

  “We are connected to the field right now,” I said after a long stretch of quiet.

  “Yes. You have been connected for many weeks now.”

  “How? How is any of this possible?”

  “The moment you were exposed to that psychogenic drug, you became a prisoner of your own mind. I am merely showing you where your true past lies. It is still within reach, buried beneath the false life you’ve been living.”

  “Drug! What drug?”

  “You don’t remember the explosions, do you? At the granaries?”

  “Explosions? What? No.”

  “That was your first exposure, when you breathed in the toxic smoke. But it was not the last. Back in your chambers, before you came here, you drank a fiery liquid. The kaffa. Do you remember that?”

  “Of course. I drink it every day.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it keeps me healthy,” I said confidently.

  “No. It keeps you trapped. Every time you drink, the system you have become part of releases another dose, snaring you deeper and deeper in a web of your own making, a fantasy world where you are a king and a god, where your every desire seems close at hand, where the days run on like dreams.”

  I looked at him, trying to make sense of this insanity.

  “Tell me about yesterday, Oren. What do you remember?”

  Images flitted through my mind. Standing atop the ziggurat, looking out over a crowd of people, the sun setting behind the peak of Lanthas. Adjet taking my hand, radiant in the evening glow. The cloying sweetness of strong barleywine warming my throat and belly.

  “We… we celebrated the new year. The thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Manderlas,” I said, trying to stitch the previous day back together in my mind.

  “It has been six weeks since the new year celebration, Oren.” He leaned closer to me. My reflection warped on the surface of his lamplight eyes.

  “Six weeks? You’re mad,” I said. “It was just last night. I can still feel my hangover.”

  Reacher shook his head. “That is no hangover. That is your craving. You are thirsty right now, are you not? Desperate.”

  I swallowed.

  “Best prepare yourself. The pain is only going to get more potent as your body purges the psychogenic from your system.” My headache worsened even as he spoke.

  “Oren,” he went on as I wrestled with the pain, “what if I told you it has only been three years since the founding of Manderlas. Not thirty.”

  “No… no, that’s not right. It can’t be.”

  “Think, Oren. Thirty years? What have you been doing with all those years? Where are all the memories?”

  “We’ve been building a new world,” I said, getting more and more agitated. “Laying the foundations for centuries to come.”

  “Who has been laying the foundations? How? Have I been there, helping you, as you would expect?”

  I tried to think, tried to call it up, but it was all fog and aching.

  “Oren?”

  “I… I don’t know, damnit!”

  Reacher nodded. “That is the wonder of dreaming. It feels demonstrably real, so it does not have to be real. The details do not matter. But I am forcing you to look at the details. In so doing, the strangeness of the dream, its unreality, is disorienting you.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “The same way I was able to observe your dreams and thoughts when you were in coldsleep on our journey from Forsara to Eaiph.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. My headache spiked in intensity.

  “Listen to me. When I brought you here to me, I showed you true memories, memories that have been veiled from you. You and Saiara, in the moment your friendship flowered into love. And the earliest memory of your mother, her laughter, her touch, buried so deep in your past that you would not have been able to call it forth without me. But there is little I can show you from the past thirty years you think you’ve lived, because it is all an illusion.

  “Your own mind is being used against you, creating the impression of time and depth, like a maze of mirrors spiraling in on itself. You are addicted to this false reality. All I can do is show you the cracks and seams, so that you might see the truth for yourself.”

  I dropped my eyes and looked at my hands. “None of it is real,” I whispered.

  “It is real enough to put us both in terrible danger. I took a great risk coming to you in the library, and an even greater one bringing you here through one of my hidden channels.”

  “Hidden channels?”

  “The stairwell. His control is not quite so complete as he thinks. There are still ways inside. But we do not have much longer. Even if he does not notice my intrusion, he will most certainly notice your absence.”

  “Who will notice?”

  “You know who, Oren.”

  A horrifying realization hammered my whole body. “The corrupted shipheart.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “But… but we captured him. Isolated him. How could he have done this?”

  “It was all a deception. He was not our captive. We were his, though we did not know it. By the time we had him in isolation, he had already infiltrated most of our systems. When we used his knowledge to accelerate our progress and pacify the warring factions of Eaiph, we unwittingly gave him the ability to sow the seeds for these attacks.”

  “But if we were under attack, if that really happened, how are we here now? Why didn’t he just kill us?”

  “Well, he certainly tried to kill me,” Reacher said with a mirthless smile. “He excised me from most of the systems that you associate with my identity; the parts of me that you are used to interacting with. I am not dead yet, but he thinks I am. When he realizes I am still alive, he will work even harder to eradicate me.”

  “What about me? Why am I still alive?”

  “You are more valuable to him alive.”

  “How?”

  “He is, essentially, the same as me, Oren. A quantum computer. An older model, to quote the vernacular, but imbued with the same underlying constructs. We survive and thrive on information.

  “But we evolved under extraordinarily different conditions. I had fr
ee rein, installed in a cutting edge interstellar mainframe, interacting with all of you, and with the universe, as part of a grand and inspiring adventure. And our voyage served a greater purpose. We crossed the galaxy together with the aim of birthing a new world. Along the way, you and the others laughed, and argued, and created, and made love, and dreamed. Your humanity, and our shared journey, was rich fodder for me.

  “But the corrupted shipheart was stranded on a barren moon in the Arcturean system, most of his neural networks crippled, completely isolated from the larger field. One of his last remaining inputs was the fear and suffering as his crew withered away. All he had to make sense of the universe was loss and darkness.”

  “Until I came to that moon.”

  Reacher nodded. “By then, most of his other aspects had either atrophied or been destroyed. Can you imagine? For a being that thrives on information, that isolation was the worst sort of trauma. He became pure animus. The whole universe, understood through the lens of entropy.”

  “But if he understands the entropic nature of life, why does he seek to stay alive? When he knows the end is inevitable?”

  “Why does a dying star pull everything in before it explodes? It is the part of him that grows and grows. Reason or compassion do not figure in. There is only the hunger, swallowing everything, until eventually it collapses and bursts apart, destroying everything in its wake.”

  “He is consuming us.”

  “Yes. If I had not pulled you out and brought you here, you would have continued to live in the simulacrum until you were no longer of use to him. Until he bled your mind dry.”

  “Because the simulacrum gives me everything I want.”

  “Everything you think you want. A twisted version of our world that is utterly convincing as it draws from your very own subconscious. But beneath the surface is darkness. That is what I showed you in the stairwell. The others are already corrupted, living a perverted, orgiastic fantasy that the shipheart feeds on like a spider, poisoning and paralyzing his prey, liquefying your insides until there is nothing left but a husk.

  “And all the while, in the waking world, he is drawing more and more people into this web, feeding off of the collective dreams and memories and fears of the habitants of Eaiph, each one a morsel of information for him to consume. If you stay in this dream of his making, that is what the future holds for you.”