He shrank until he existed as just his central, inviolate core that even she could not expose without sending him insane; a spasming boy, naked, forever scowling. She stood upright as a normal woman. The struggle was over. She leaped back, laughing, weeping tears of joy. Two stains lay on the grass where Fnfayrq had been vanquished. Nuïy lay like a small jelly before her, quiescent, forever banished into the world of his childhood memories. Already he was fading, as his body died. But she remained alive and potent.
She had proved that she was the true symbol.
She sat back in her granite chair and swung her legs in the air, beating the armrests in joy, laughing until her throat hurt, crying until she could hardly see for tears. At last, exhausted, she sank back, and gazed up at the blue sky.
Some time passed. She let the coolness of the stone take away the heat of her empowered body, until her skin was its usual pale colour.
She stood up.
Outside the arbour she first walked to the boundary of the Inner and Outer Gardens, but then she had a thought, and she returned. She would need a special reality when she took up her role as Independent Interpreter. Marshalling her strength, she closed her eyes, reached out and somehow plucked the Core Garden from its position inside the Inner Garden, rolling it onto her back, then raising it up, as if she carried a boulder. With a great push she flung it into the sky. She gasped for air, then opened her eyes.
The reality was flying away. It seemed to spin into the heavens, where it settled to become, like the Cemetery reality and the orange semi-reality on the horizon, a satellite disk of the Garden. Her own private space. She would work there, forsaking the rest of the Garden. This new disk lay like a waning moon, halfway between horizon and zenith, green and pink with white streaks.
She leaped up and entered it.
It was the arbour, as before, except that the stains were gone, and so was Nuïy. The chairs had been replaced with benches made of what seemed to be hardpetal. Moss grew amid the grass, birds sang, and there were new flowers, campion, cowslips, and brass orchids, all wild flowers in recognition of the connection she still enjoyed. Nothing violet. Above her in the mild, pastel blue sky, she saw two disks, the Cemetery reality and the Garden. She felt she had at last arrived in the networks.
And now it was time to depart.
Abstract information died away and she saw the blue bowl of real sky. Insects everywhere. She smelled grass, and the fragrance of orchids.
Birds twittered and insects stridulated.
“Manserphine?” said a voice.
Abruptly she sat up, causing the insect horde to buzz away, as if frightened. She looked at the faces of Zoahnône and Shônsair.
“Are you returned? What happened?”
Manserphine looked into the undergrowth, where they had hidden Zahafezhan. “Pull her out,” she said. “Quickly!”
Zoahnône followed her direction, while Shônsair said, “Did you do the deed? Is all done?”
“Yes, I did the deed,” Manserphine confirmed. She looked about the sky, scanned the bushes, ran here and there over the grass. “Where is it?” she said.
“What?”
“The black bee.”
“There it is!” Zoahnône called out, pointing north.
Manserphine peered into the sky to see a black shape approaching, roughly oval, its flight slow and deliberate, resolving into a fat insect with all its legs lowered. It was the black bee. Shônsair grabbed Zahafezhan and lifted her into a sitting position, but Zoahnône tried to stop her.
“I want to hold her,” Zoahnône told Shônsair.
“But I want to hold her!” Shônsair retorted.
Manserphine said, “You both hold her. Stay still!”
The black bee descended to hover a foot above Zahafezhan’s gleaming crown. Manserphine watched, breath held. It dipped, then landed. For just a few seconds it scurried amidst the reflective petals atop Zahafezhan’s head, before rising and buzzing away.
Manserphine knelt beside the gynoids and hugged them both. “We did it!”
Zahafezhan stirred. They sat back. She sat upright of her own accord, no longer a lifeless doll. Her skin was glossy and her lips rosy.
A purple haze entered her eyes, and her plastic skin wrinkled as she smiled. She looked at them in turn, and said, “You are Manserphine, Zoahnône, and Shônsair. I feel I know you.”
Manserphine wept.
CHAPTER 30
Veneris in spring was a place of new flower networks grown from the seeds of the previous year.
They rose in some cases to heights of ten feet, gigantic blooms a yard across, sometimes more, white roses and helebore, cream coloured tulips and foxgloves, lemon clematis winding its way across a thousand rooves and fences; and hundreds of other species.
Many back gardens were choked with blooms, with just an occasional path between the thickly set stems, but no damage was done. The flowers expanded to make a pastel canopy above the streets, creating an agreeably pleasant environment below, protected from wind and the worst of the rain, and lightly perfumed. The early complaints of startled residents, who had only just got used to the recent chaos, were soon changed as they appreciated, often with awe, the natural beauty of their new environment.
Because the streets became impassable, new avenues had to be created, and since these invariably involved rear gardens and fields of common ground, new communities found themselves thrown together. This was, by and large, greeted with enthusiasm. And it seemed as though the weather had altered. A mini-environment was created in Veneris, an environment of luxurious sensuality, with pale light and perfumed air, where the breeze was always soft and people could wander out into their gardens and marvel at the ever-changing quality of the light, as the sun shone through cream, pale orange, or translucent violet petals.
A massive communal effort saw all the deactivated hoverflies recycled into useful items.
Already the new networks were changing culture. The new communities realised that they could utilise their more pleasant environment to extend the growing season of many vegetables, making themselves interdependent with other communities, whilst retaining an allegiance to the culture of Our Sister Crone.
The wild flowers of Veneris also grew, forming, in fields and narrow valleys, impenetrable masses of flowers that could only be accessed from blooms on the edge. The power of these networks was immense. Data flowed like river water. New realities, smaller than the four main ones, sprang up, as clusters of knowledge spread, sophisticated, and interacted with other realities, to turn themselves into hundreds of coloured stars amidst network space. Against these new stars, the five larger realities shone like planets.
There were drawbacks. When word of the new Veneris spread to other urbs, particularly Novais and Blissis, many families found themselves suffering an influx of relations the existence of which they had forgotten, but who had returned to share in the bounty. The civic authorities, acting under the instruction of the Garden, had to organise these people so that Veneris was not swamped. Inevitably, shanty communities sprang up around the urb, while those living in the centre, and the ancient northern districts, were generally envied. Inns had to cope with a massive upturn in business.
Many centres of learning sprang up. Some new realities were in fact societies of network entities, who attracted human and gynoid students with promises of lore.
~
Zahafezhan became pregnant within weeks of her awakening. She subscribed to a peculiarly gynoid school of eroticism, discovering for herself—because only she could—the joys of artificial life.
Manserphine rarely saw her. She returned with Vishilkaïr to the Determinate Inn, where, for a few days, she helped rebuild the place, before the return of her grief forced her to leave. She felt that Kirifaïfra’s death had removed spontenaity from her.
For the remainder of the autumn she wandered the urb, staking out her place as the Independent Interpreter, who would generously accept visitors via the pleasant confines o
f her reality. As winter came, mild and without snow, she settled in a rambling manse with a view of the Venereal Garden and the Gazebo Azure, which now lay shrouded in twenty-foot violets, its roof surrounded by a corona of the palest purple. Above her own house the sky was mottled orange, cream, and yellow, here and there dotted with the blue of the real sky, or the blackness of night.
She became the Independent Interpreter of Veneris. In the end, the Shrine of Our Sister Crone decided to annul her expulsion, and she was asked to return. She did not, although she welcomed the opportunity to see her old colleagues and renew friendships. But she had changed. Death had changed her, as had what she knew of the urb and its networks. Although she accepted the input of the Shrine of Our Sister Crone into the life of the urb, she felt it was time to strike out, to use the best of the old culture in the making of the new.
And after two years she found a new lover, a man named Mezesaïs, who sang baritone for a wandering theatre. But she never forgot Kirifaïfra and his sacrifice.
CODA
Two figures stand beside one another on cliffs east of the River Zaïd, snow settling at their feet, light snow that falls from dark clouds tumbling over rough seas. It is midwinter. The land behind them is a maze of snow drifts and bent trees, here and there an isolated building, hilltops fading to the distance, from which the unearthly music of sonic petals emanates like the reverberated wail of a captive dryad.
Far away behind the hilltops lies an urb where the snow melts to form a fine mist falling from pale petals, a mist that is warm by the time it reaches the earth.
Shônsair and Zoahnône look at each other. Shônsair says, “Have we truly entered an era of emotional intelligence, Zoahnône?”
Zoahnône nods. “We will be a century older before we notice the deeper effects, but already I think I see changes. Veneris is now a tightly packed ecosystem, firstly of real components—flowers and networks and the semi-covered environment itself—and secondly of abstract components. New centres of learning have sprung up, and people are being attracted to them, like abstract insects to abstract flowers. Learning is a kind of cross-pollination. We can live in a self-sustaining ecology if we want to.”
“And will Venerisian culture now spread across this land?”
“Let us hope so. Nothing is certain. Let us hope that the long delayed redemption of conscious life on this Earth can now begin.”
Shônsair says, “It is fitting that here there exists a subtle balance.”
“Yes.”
“We must exist in bodies in order to experience the deep emotions that mark the conscious condition. We must love our bodies, and disdain the lure of pure intellect.”
“Yes,” agrees Zoahnône once more. “If we worship the intellect then we risk moving into a state of fracture, where we as individuals, and as a society, are alienated from our environment. For it is distance that breeds aggression and uncaring mores. Closeness brings unity.”
“And do we rest now, or do we go out and spread this culture?”
“I think we must leave Zaïdmouth,” Zoahnône says. “We two fought before. Now we must go together.”
About the Author
Stephen Palmer is the author of seven published SF novels – Memory Seed, Glass, Flowercrash, Muezzinland, Hallucinating, Urbis Morpheos, and The Rat & The Serpent (originally published under the name Bryn Llewellyn). His short fiction has been published by NewCon Press, Solaris, Wildside Press, SF Spectrum, Eibonvale Press, Unspoken Water and Rocket Science.
Ebook editions of all seven novels are available, most of them from infinity plus. His most recent novel, Hairy London, is published by infinity plus in December 2013. He lives and works in Shropshire, UK.
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