“Please.” Skuld’s grip on my hand became painful. I felt her grief run through me.
“Now?” I couldn’t find anything that even reminded me of a person, only scraps, the equivalent of a few phrases taken at random from an entire book.
“In a moment,” Metatron said to us both.
Then there was a shadow, a 2-dimensional grey shape, like a woman made of smoke. Here and there it crystallized into clear form: a hand, a piece of armour, a wing-tip, but then it fell to nothing.
“I stayed too long last time!” Skuld suddenly cried out. “She’s gone! Try now. Please. She has to be here.”
“There’s no one,” I said truthfully. The darshan required a completely operational consciousness. It had nowhere to go.
“You!” She spun around, clinging to my arm, pulling me forward. “You must be able to find her. Damien told me what you could do. Send her home before she’s gone. She was lost here. She didn’t know who she was. You have to find her! She could be lost in the system. Please.”
The situation was everything I feared of Unity. Every last detail, except that it wasn’t happening to me.
“I don’t know how,” I said. It was the truth. I couldn’t jump directly into the AI and go ferreting around in its nodes, but then, even as I thought it, I wondered if I could. I touched the peculiar sharpness of the photon flow and learned the way it carried information.
“Metatron,” I called and the avatar appeared. We did a deal. It was, as Greg would have said, a hopelessly misguided, wayward and dangerous idea, bereft of intellectual muscle and lacking even the faintest smidgen of forethought, or, as Hyperion called it, serendipity.
“Copy me.”
He cast his sword aside and its fire went out on the vanished ground.
He reached out to touch me. Then he was gone and I faced myself, my blue-fire–eyed self.
Valkyrie shrieked and put her hands over her face. “This is bad! I didn’t mean that!”
“It’s not so bad,” I said from Metatron’s temporarily borrowed space, looking back at her and my Uluru avatar. Until I looked at it I didn’t realize how truly awful a state I was in, but it didn’t matter much now.
I found the vanished and fragmented pieces of Elinor, using Metatron’s hands. He watched me in fascination as I hunted by feeling my way through the bits, the way he could not. I put them together using his skills, but her fragments were deteriorating by the instant. The best I could do was trap the pieces inside a holosphere which created the illusion that she was whole. I held it in my Metatron hands and we all looked into its snowglobe and saw against the moon, the outline of a woman flying, her wings broader than the white disk.
“Now,” said Valkyrie.
But there was no reaching whatever Elinor had been as a person. All that was left of her was the vanishing image, a metaphor, and that was gone in a moment.
I so wanted to be kind to Skuld, and to the AI, for granting me access to all its incredible powers of memory, management and replication. The darshan left me like a reverse gunshot, entirely phototropic. Metatron threw us out of Uluru a millisecond later. I had to trust that he would delete my copy in return for being able to mine out its information on Unity structure and mathematics. I promised him a bad day in hell if he didn’t and trusted he would understand from what he learned that this was entirely possible.
We stood on the ice bridge, back in Sankhara. Skuld snatched her hand from mine, tearing the skin off my palm where we had frozen together. She held her own against her, as though it was the one damaged. Tears ran down her cheeks and became still before they were halfway to her chin. They formed icicles that shattered as she spoke.
“What have you done to me?”
Blood surged across my hand and wrist and fell onto the ground. I had no idea for an answer and tried to put the hand inside my coat to protect it. The burning pain of it was indescribable as it repaired itself, hampered by the cold.
“You changed Uluru. And me. I felt it. What?” she said and sat down, stunned, staring into nothing as a bitter wind whipped up around her. “What are you?”
I was holding so hard to my wrist I felt the bones grate together. “I’m going home.”
“Wait!” She came after me as I turned to face Anadyr and the Palace, into the wind, hauling her feet off the bridge with two almighty power-assisted cracks. “Tell me what it means! What have you done to me?”
“Nothing.” The Engine had quieted at last. We stood among the sounds of distant carnage and chaos from the wrecked neighbourhoods of southwestern Sankhara. “Time for you to go to work, surely?”
“But . . .” She wrestled with an objection and overcame it with a great effort, then said, from a clear sense of obligation, “Your friend Saxton. Listen. Solargov are into whatever is going on here more than you know. If they find out it was an alien piece of Stuff that caused Saxton’s infection, they’ll require me to terminate him. I’m certain of it.”
“So, are you telling them that’s what it is?” I could live without the complication of Solar interference.
She watched me, touched her breastplate and looked down at her gauntlet on the ground. A struggle of conscience twisted her features. “No.”
“We’re square then.”
As I went home I held the knowledge I’d stolen from Mode and Myanfactor close to me, not even thinking about it because that seemed like too loud a thing to do. But I knew it. I knew how to rewrite people in my own image so that they were like me, but not necessarily of me, severed from Unity, free.
I needed a major diversion to make the attempt and as I crossed the frost bridge and glided down to the Palace, I knew it would have to be potentially catastrophic, both for Theo and for me—threats of significance to him couldn’t come any other way.
41 / Theo
Chayne fights me all the way. It’s a vocation with her. I admire her tenacity. The Dancing Wu Li Masters have nothing on her for poise. Her emotions are controlled with adamantine will. They’re a taste that won’t go away: metal, blood, fire, strong as proof spirit because all her life she never let them out.
She picked up this addiction to self-denial when she was with Jalaeka. Before she met him her life was dedicated to the simple and rewarding prospect of his death. It was an old family thing: everyone murdered, vengeance required, lives of generations wasted in the subsequent vendetta, very much the old routine—but she ended up tagging around with him like a lost dog. Even she isn’t sure exactly what happened. She thinks perhaps she didn’t kill him because, well, what would have come after? She had had no idea. Of old it had been her plan to fulfil her obligations, then return with her sister to the land of their birth and die there, in peace with the blood on her hands. But the sister, a twin, died of plague on a sea voyage, and so that dream could not be made true when at last she had him at her mercy.
After they became a two-handed gang, she’d occasionally get her knives out and think about cutting out his heart. She was always restless. In the long nights without the moon she dreamed of kissing his lips as the blade went in. In the long cold winters of frozen mud, and the hot smothering summers of jungle heat, she watched him, and he let her watch him, and they became closer than brothers or sisters, closer than blood, closer than one bone and another in the same arm.
It’s starting to dawn on me that I may have been mistaken in assuming that by taking what all these people know I could piece together the puzzle of why they do what they do and why they do it for him. But I can’t, and they just do.
Still. Worth some entertainment if nothing else. Chayne’s omerta runs so deep that she actually has no idea why she couldn’t slaughter him on sight, even though a kid of ten could tell her.
I let Chayne go. She takes control, and as soon as she does the composite of memories that comprises her self changes. She lives. And behind her, a secondary mind, I inhabit.
Bodies change everything. Their senses, their limits, their chemistry determine experience. I’ve alway
s detested their vile imperfection, their appalling limitations, the fact that I can be nauseated because of having appetites, every day a whirling manic rush from one desperate need to the next. I loathed them, even though my awareness was undiminished, my ability continuous. You can’t become meat without having to maintain its catastrophic and repugnant biology. But there’s no living without it.
I long for Unity: the endless flow of knowledge existing in an infinite present—something I don’t remember, although I feel strongly that it must be supreme, a mighty state, the perfection of awareness. Although it has forgotten itself as it must because it has no form, no foursheet conscious span. Every life replicated by Stuff is a defiance of Stuff, a denial of Unity’s urconscious sublime.
For now, however, here Chayne is: Jalaeka’s unconsummated past, and she knows everything I know, including the perfection of Unity, and she wants both it and me dead, dead, dead with every beat of her heart.
She interprets my passengerhood as obscene voyeurism—a transgression only to be expected from the same demon race that consumed her family. (The splinter known as Kya ate them in actual fact, but I digress, and it doesn’t make a difference.) No gratitude in Chayne for the fact that she wound up reunited with them, in Unity, closer and more intimate than any genetic line could ever be under the constraint of linear time. What arrogant egomania.
Chayne rejects such a notion of togetherness as contemptible and evil as soon as I suggest it. Curiously her sense of who she is remains so pervasive that even now she is able to tell the difference between thoughts that are my suggestion and impulses of her own. In a language not spoken for over a millennium she whispers to me,
“Every minute you let me live is a minute off your own life. Every second a mistake. You think you have the best of me with your power. You think you will win. As long as you let me live I will do anything I can to wreck your chances, Theodore. You’re so stupid, you don’t even know what you’re trying to save or trying to destroy.”
Coming from someone who only lived for forty-one years in a community with no more technology than a siege engine, it was an admirable speech. I could appreciate what Jalaeka used to see in her.
“You have no idea,” Chayne assured me and bolted the door shut on her feelings in a futile effort to keep me out.
Meantime, I played back through her life experiences to check, just in case she was talking about something concrete she’d managed to conceal, but I hadn’t missed anything. This recall—which she was forced to undertake also, as a tourist—had such an effect on her she was unable to speak or move for several hours.
When she found herself again she only repeated her last statement with finality, then she looked around her.
We were in Central Sankhara, inside the changing room of a large clothes store in the Embargo, where I had been organizing the tedious requirements of clothing for her/me before I decided to let her have free rein.
She examined herself naked first of all, counting her scars, particularly the ones on her face, those heavy ridgelines of old ash beneath the skin. They described deep, down-pointed arrows over the bridge of her nose, curved over the smooth rounded dome of her forehead, around her brows and across her cheeks, surrounding her eyes with a mask. The power of this symbol kindled determination in her gut as she looked. She had other scars from old wounds too, on her legs and arms, back, feet, hands, neck and belly. Beneath them her muscles were hard, long and . . .
“Get out,” she hissed to me through her teeth. “Get out, get out.”
I receded into the background and she abruptly had had enough of seeing. She looked at the room and its lights and mirror, recognizing things by their function but not their methods or workings. I allowed knowledge of this current world to permeate upwards from Unity and she accepted it. She picked up the clothes and dressed, momentarily disturbed and alarmed by zippers, but soon over it, dismayed to find no weapons and no armour anywhere.
Then she hesitated and snorted—the closest sound she made to amusement. “So, you can build cities and level nations, but you don’t make clothes?”
Actually, it hadn’t occurred to me. This must be because I’ve spent too much time with Rita recently. Her obsession with apparel must have worn off on me, as she would never have passed up any opportunity to try new things or to shop.
As I was thinking this, Chayne was already over her discomfort. She swept aside the curtains, ducked under the lintel—even for this world she was phenomenally tall and lanky—and strode out.
She found the stairs, found the entrance to the roof, stood outside next to the aerials and domes of the telecommunications networks and the local Guide AI, admired the cityscape for a while, then calmly walked off the edge of the building.
I had no idea of her intention the entire time. It was a good lesson.
Her death on the pavement would have been nothing to me, but I recovered her a few metres into her fall and restored her to the rooftop before anyone noticed. She stood, angry, breathing hard, ready for death, then she laughed and shook her head. I thought we had the measure of each other.
Once we’d crossed into the Winter Palace bubble I was shocked. Suddenly the whole place was much bigger. Also, much colder. I checked the Engine stats and recoiled. Another few days at current rates of expansion and the foursheet leading edge would be moving at the speed of light in all directions. In terms of this fourspace and its companion ones, not to mention potentially all others in this region, that added up to an extinction event.
I calculated the times involved and saw that within two weeks all of Unity’s dealings with the human world would be reduced to the purely theoretical. Effectively this new development had become my hourglass. What was not done by then, would not be done here.
But I had not commanded the Engine to do this. Was the thing out of control? It was not outside the bounds of possibility that some mad dreamer had wished an apocalypse and the Engine obliged, though such things were meant to be controlled by the Regulator, a memetic filter administered by the Engine’s sapient administrator, which destroyed all such impulses before they could reach the construction system. Had the thing malfunctioned . . . ?
It distracted me, like an unscratchable itch. That and him. Jalaeka was a kind of blind spot, something near-invisible and impossible to find unless he did some Seven-shifting, as I was invisible to him until I moved so.
Saxton was in, working feverishly, his Abacand plugged into academic and AI networks all over the place. I took a quick glance and thought I’d take him for a walk around before too long. Meanwhile I paused to admire the expansion of the great hall on the ground floor. The ceiling murals had abandoned their apocalypse chic of Michelangelo meets Vietnam. In their place a dead wolf hung above me in the freezing, desiccating air, an icicle of blood hanging from a deep slash in its neck. It was thirty feet up, hind paws held by the iron claw feet of an old bath. Its wounds were self-inflicted—the iron bath feet were hemmed in by a set of sickle blades, which it had clearly attempted to bite its way free of. It had human eyes.
I scuffed the frozen puddle of blood beneath it that covered the floor and it cracked under my foot, crisping into the carpet. No signs of Hyperion, that pointless, interfering creature.
I found a few other interesting things. The library windows looked out on a different winter on a different world—Earth: specifically Haworth moor as it rolled unevenly, relentlessly out towards what ought to be the ruin of a simple farm called Top Withens but which had been rebuilt in shameless adoration by the Yorkshire Heritage Board as Wuthering Heights. No such thing could happen without a reason. It seemed utterly incomprehensible.
I decided I would send Rita there, push her to Earth space-time to find out why that should be of any significance. Who knew Jalaeka even read books?
The ballroom on the north side, which had once been the great crystal room, had a blazing fire in the fireplace and its doors at the far end opened on yet a greater room, even more opulent and expen
sively decorated with great plasterworked ceilings and skylights loaded with gold and lapis paint, and that in turn opened on another, and another—I didn’t go past five.
The cellars beneath the kitchens were full of water, right up to the top of the steps, but it was clear water and I could see right to the bottom, four floors down, where the slimy brick-lined walls were supported on archways that led into total blackness.
The upper floors alone remained untouched, save for the evidence of hasty abandonment where the cult had fled the winter cold—hauling along as much sham-Russian trinketry and art as they could carry by the looks of it.
I stopped outside Saxton’s apartment and actually considered knocking on the door but it seemed a bit after the fact considering our present level of intimacy. I walked straight in.
He jumped up when he saw me, though he had the presence of mind to cue some activity on his Abacand as he stood and stared at me in my new body. He shook a bit, but his self-control was admirable.
“Who the hell are you?”
“The last person you want to see.”
His already-pale face went grey. “Oh yeah?” he managed to muster after a few seconds. He looked cold, even with his coat on. There was a fire, but its effects were weak.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re the expert on this place. I was looking for your opinion. What’s it like, living inside the emotional debris of this friend of yours? You don’t look well. And I understand that soon you’ll be trapped here permanently.”
He folded his arms across his chest. If he could have backed away, he would have, but there was furniture in the way.
“Ah come on. I’ll trade you,” I suggested. “I can stop the Translation, put it on indefinite hold. You’ll live like usual, die whenever. I’ll even shut the gods up for you and put the demons back in their boxes. It’ll be like they never happened. You give me a few pointers—how about it?”
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 32
