Cenotaxis

by Sean Williams

  I ended the conversation with Bergamasc without regret, and I let him go in Malan, just as I promised myself I would. He tried to talk to me before we parted ways, but I ignored him. I had a campaign to prepare for, other priorities. He looked puzzled and hurt as we drove away. Chained to the side of the nuke, he appeared, in the relentless rain, to be transparent and devoid of color. He seemed to find my ignoring of him far more affronting than resentment or hatred.

  Two days out of Malan, we were pounded by micro-missiles dropped from orbit. The fury of the attack was unprecedented. Alice-Angeles and I barely escaped with our lives. My boxer was killed when a sliver of metal sliced half his head clean off. Even dying, he tried to protect me, clutching at my arm to hold me close. I had to shake him loose with some considerable effort.

  Another dawn ticks by, and Bergamasc is sitting before me, holding a new moon of bread crust in one hand. I smell the rich aromas of olive oil and cheese. The produce is fresh and of local origin. Occasionally I can smell baking from beyond the walls of my stone cell.

  "Welcome back," he says. "Have a nice trip?"

  I realize then that this is no ordinary day. It falls between the second and third dawns of his ultimatum—and if he has his way, it will be my last. There have been times when, in the grip of a fleeting fury, I have thought him quite capable of the attempt. What mood will he be in tomorrow morning?

  We were talking a moment ago, he and I, but for a moment I can't place the terminus of our conversation.

  Instead I ask him, "How much do you think you know?"

  "You tell me. Don't you already know how this conversation will end?"

  "It doesn't work like that."

  "Why don't you tell me how it does work, then? I'm listening."

  I think back to Malan, and to the few words we exchanged there, and I decide that I am tired of playing games.

  "It's really not so complicated. I don't see time the way you do—but that doesn't mean I see the future. Not as you think it means. I can see some parts of your future, sometimes. Not all of them. It's the same with the past. I can see the days I've lived, just like you, only my days don't clock forward one at a time. My life winds through the past and future, following a different kind of progression to the one you're used to. And why shouldn't that be so? Physics shows us that this moment we both call 'the present' is the one that matters. How we came to be here, and where we go from here, is entirely arbitrary."

  He is listening. "Can you control which days you see?"

  "No, and I can't revisit a day I've already lived. I can only keep moving, as you do, but..." My right hand inscribes a complicated spiral through the air. "...around."

  "You've never told me this before. Why not?"

  "I knew I would tell you at some point. That point is now. Sooner or later, by your frame of reference, means nothing to me."

  He nods slowly. "Hence the transition. Hence your mood swings. And hence the mistakes you made on the field, too. Presumably you didn't learn a key piece of information you'd need on some days until after those days were passed—because there are gaps in your history, counterbalanced by the fact that you can see some days in the future. Right?"

  "You persist in believing that I made mistakes. But apart from that, you are correct. Does that mean you believe me?"

  His gaze dissects me like a blue-diamond scalpel. He doesn't immediately answer the question. "Tell me something about the future, Jasper. Tell me about one of the days you've lived that I haven't yet."

  I have anticipated this. "No."

  "Why not? Are you worried about changing the future? I wouldn't have thought that possible, since it's already in your past."

  "It isn't possible, and I am not a circus performer."

  "What if I were to give you a detailed history of our campaign here on Earth? Troop deployments, supply lines, objectives, everything. You could take that information back into the past and use it while working out your tactics on those days you haven't lived. Would that cause a conflict?"

  "It would if I were to do it. I won't."

  "But you could. That's what you're telling me. And in a sense, you already have. You've used this supposed trick of yours to stay one step ahead of me, until we caught you in a way you didn't foresee."

  "I do what I can to survive, and to keep the ones I hold dear alive too. That's all anyone does."

  "True enough." Again the blue gaze pierces me, then darts away. "You haven't told me why, yet—why you're like this. Is there a reason, or were you just born that way? A freak, a sport?"

  "I am neither," I tell him, my tone wounded, and I wish momentarily that I had never tried to explain. The concept stands so clearly in my mind that I am dismayed he does not grasp it immediately. "Anachronism, a mistake in time, is inevitable for beings with memory. We hold the history of humanity in our heads—millions of novels, inventions, maps, formulae, everything. Is it any wonder they begin to overlap?

  "This overlapping forms a glue that binds human culture together down almost a million years. But alone it is not enough to take us to the next stage of our evolution. Bigger, longer-lived, more powerful, yes; but to become fundamentally different, we need something more powerful than memory alone."

  "Fundamentally different how?" he asks.

  "Well, humanity has always aspired to become like its gods. The god latter-day humanity needs is one that doesn't know the meaning of the word 'anachronistic' The overlapping of memory is inferior to the overlapping of time itself. Do you see? When we genuinely experience all times as one, there will be no mistakes in time. When we have become achronistic rather than merely anachronistic, we will go from being well-dressed apes to God manifest—beyond time, beyond death, beyond human."

  I study him, seeking any sign at all that he has begun to understand. But, in truth, I'm not surprised that Bergamasc resists the pull of nonlinear chronologies. He is a military man, heavily steeped in macroscopic notions of cause and effect. It will take him time to accept that macroscopic phenomena are ephemeral, that the universe dances to unimaginably complex rhythms at the scales of the very small and the very large. We are sandwiched between them, bacteria caught in two glass slides, and we are foolish to forget the eye peering down the microscope at us.

  "To what end?" Bergamasc asks, tugging at the fraying limits of his understanding like a bulldog. "There is no end, and no point. I mean, look at you. One day you're here; tomorrow you could imagine yourself free again. In that sense, you can escape these bars as easily as falling asleep. But the bars aren't ever going away, Jasper. What sort of life is that?"

  "It's beyond such concepts, beyond time itself."

  "Again, you would say that."

  "Because it's the truth. Human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising out of the complexity of our brains. We can make our brains larger in order to make our consciousness more powerful, but that's ultimately an evolutionary dead end. We have to become the phenomenon itself. We have to rise above our limitations."

  He nods at that. "The death of the Forts has proved that no one is invincible. Even if your brain is as big as a galaxy, it's still based on some kind of physical medium. And any medium can be attacked."

  "Not if the medium is spacetime itself," I tell him.

  He raises an eyebrow. "Raw spacetime is slippery stuff. Poke it the wrong way and it dissolves back into garbage."

  On these details I am somewhat hazy. The method of my creation died with the ancient minds of Earth. "The end is what matters, not the means. That's what you told me in Malan."

  "Yes, I did." He examines me for a beat. "Do you really expect me to believe that the Forts here invented a way to write their thoughts onto the fabric of the universe, and they used it solely for some bizarre theological experiment?"

  "There's nothing more important than the quest for God."

  "Unless—" A new thought occurs to him. His eyes widen. He raises one hand and clicks thumb loudly against forefinger. "Yes. Perhaps there is a m
ind written on the vacuum, but it's not yours at all. Maybe it's the Fort we've been looking for so long. No wonder we haven't been able to find it on the ground or in the air. It's all around us! How do you access it? Do you just talk and it whispers back into your ear?"

  I want to mock him as he once publicly mocked me. Of course, I'd like to say. It's that easy. It's just like having a pixie sitting on my shoulder, or a guardian angel everywhere I go. The greatest minds in the history of humanity spent their dying days building us a legacy of invisible friends.

  "I don't understand you," I say instead. "You claim the Forts are dead, but here you are insisting there's one on Earth. You can't have it both ways."

  "Maybe not a full Fort, then. Maybe just a gestalt. The point's the same."

  "Equally ridiculous, you mean." I think of the Apparatus's ongoing silence, and I hope the worry doesn't show on my face. Have I said too much? "You can accept it if you wish."

  "You've yet to give me a reason not to. In fact, you've built up a pretty convincing argument in favor of it. You had a Fort that was smarter than we are guiding your hand, but we've never found it. The interface between you and it must be so subtle I'd probably not recognize it even if you showed it to me. So it's written on spacetime, and we're at the same old standoff. You won't give me your little toy, and I can't keep you alive any longer on the off-chance you'll change your mind. Your belated little confession has gotten us nowhere. Nowhere at all."

  I put a hand to my temple, filled with a fervent weariness. "I am the incarnation of the Godhood every human seeks. Accept that, and you will recognize the progress we have made."

  "I can accept the possibility that what you're insinuating about spacetime is the truth. And maybe you do genuinely think you're experiencing life all out of order. But I don't accept that they're related. It's far more likely that you're jumbling things up to make sense of the way I beat you in the war. Have you worked it out yet, Jasper, by the way? Made any progress on that front?"

  My face is a mask. "I'm not the one who needs to work things out."

  "All right, but I need proof, Jasper. Proof that everything you're telling me is true. Even if I believe you, that wouldn't be enough. Faith won't heal the galaxy. Faith won't kill our enemies or bring back the Forts. You have to give me more than this."

  "That's all there is," I tell him.

  Shaking his head, he leaves me to think about stars in abundance and the death of gods—if that's what the Forts thought they were.

  I promise myself that I won't make the same mistake.

  The day passes slowly. I have spent many such days in my two different cells. Plastic and stone are interchangeable. This cell possesses a single narrow window through which natural light can enter. Some days all I do is wait for the patch of afternoon light it allows, then follow it with my gaze into dusk and darkness. All too quickly, that narrow patch of golden light comes and goes. The seconds tick on.

  I think of him saying, "I understand you well enough, Jasper. I've faced more than a few reluctant collaborators in my time."

  The accusation haunts me now for reasons I am unable to fathom. Haven't I fought him at every step? Haven't I done everything in my power to deny his will? There is surely no more I can do to prove that I am the exact opposite of who he believes I am. And yet I do not know how I was captured. The uncertainty surrounding that fateful day eats at me.

  He has sowed doubt in me, and it grows against every ounce of will I throw against it.

  An hour after nightfall, I hear a rattling at the door of my cell. I sit up straight, assuming Bergamasc has come to berate me again. My eyes open wide when I see who it is, creeping around the edge of the door like a shadow down a wall.

  "Hello," whispers Alice-Angeles, taking me in with eyes perfectly equipped for infrared.

  I scramble to my feet. "What are you doing here?"

  "Rescuing you, if you want to be rescued," she says, coming closer. In her arms she cradles a heavy rifle. "We heard about what Bergamasc intends for tomorrow. Our supporters in the Round pulled every possible favor to give you this one, last chance. Are you coming?"

  I open my mouth to tell her no. The mental battle is more important than the physical. Winning the latter without the former would be empty and pointless.

  But what if Alice-Angeles' arrival is fate in action? If I turn my back on it, what does that make me? Wouldn't that prove Bergamasc right?

  Her expression is determinedly neutral by the thin wedge of starlight allowed into the cell.

  "All right," I say, taking her hand and accepting her help getting to my feet. I am stiff from my years of relative inactivity. I can feel long-disused chemical pathways reactivating all down my limbs. "Where are we going?"

  "We've commandeered an airship and equipped it with counterfeit authorization codes. It's docked on the pad outside. We incapacitated the guards with airborne agents. You're still immune to Zebedee, obviously."

  I nod. Yes, obviously, or I'd be out cold too. We had prepared for just such a contingency, never expecting we'd actually need it. "There must be security AIs in place."

  "We're keeping them as busy as possible without drawing too much attention to our efforts. Really, the security here is very slack. The enemy has become overconfident."

  "You could probably have done this months ago, if I'd let you."

  "Yes," she said. "I'm too good at following orders."

  "Yes, you are." I clap her on the shoulder and try to squeeze, filled with a surprising affection for her bland self-appreciation, but the armor of her camouflage suit stiffens instantly in resistance. "Let's get moving, shall we?"

  She doesn't waste time acknowledging the order. I follow her out of the door and into the short corridor I have seen only once before. It leads to a spiral staircase that winds down to the distant ground. The steps are old and worn but impeccably clean. No doors or windows break the interior stonework at any point during our descent. My breath comes heavily before I reach halfway. Soon enough, though, my body adjusts to the sudden demand and the fire in my lungs eases.

  Two frags in black await us at the bottom. I don't recognize either of them. The night air is cool and free against my cheeks, and I am surprised to find myself unconsciously weeping. Trees stand out in the lights of the landing field. I have almost forgotten what green looks like.

  Above me, intact and whole, stands the magnificent form of Vulcan, still staring expectantly up at the stars.

  Then all is motion and urgency. More frags wave from the base of a waiting airship, an adaptive hull design currently shaped like a fat spheroid, ten meters across. Alice-Angeles tugs me out into the open. A pang of agoraphobia strikes me. I have been confined so long that I can barely walk. The problem lies not in my legs or lungs, but my head. How can we possibly maintain our cover so long? Our luck must surely run out soon!

  That eventuality arrives in the form of shouting from my right. The whiz of gunfire gets me moving properly. Adrenaline-fuelled blood surges through my veins. Being a trooper is something you never unlearn, and for me my last gun battle was only days ago.

  There's no time to grab a weapon and fire back. The frags are determined to get me aboard the airship and away. Rifle fire pings and tings against the hull, but the hatch closes before the invaders can approach. My stomach lurches as powerful engines roar into life. The hull changes to a more aerodynamic shape, forcing the chamber around me to become narrower, more claustrophobic. My guts tell me that we are accelerating fast.

  "Where are we going?" I call to Alice-Angeles over the engines. "Won't they be able to track us?"

  "We want them to," she says, peeling off her armor like a crab slipping out of its shell. The pieces curl up when they hit the floor. "In two minutes, you and I are jumping out wearing these." She indicates two limp skinsuits in nonreflective gray that one of the frags is holding. "They're radar-absorbent and will deploy foils to bring us down on the target safely."

  "What's at the target?"
r />   "I'll explain if there's time. You'll want to undress now."

  Under the combined emotionless gaze of the frags, I strip out of my gray prison garb and slip into the skinsuit. It hugs me like a lover, and I am conscious of a strange and inappropriate arousal. Is it the thought of freedom that excites me, or Alice-Angeles' slim body in its own gray sheath? I am not normally a sexual person; relationships are difficult to maintain in an achronistic framework, and frags emote very differently than Primes. It has been easier to leave that corner of my being fallow. Now, though, it has stirred. Why?

  I can't disentangle the cause from the effect. So much novelty in so short a time is leaving me mentally and emotionally off balance. I don't know where to look.

  The frags don't even notice. One of them opens a smaller hatch in the side of the airship, and desperately cold wind dispels any absurd illusions I might have entertained.

  "After you," Alice-Angeles says with her strong hand gripping my shoulder. "The suit will take control as soon as you're falling."

  I nod and move into position. The wind snatches at me with increased strength, and I resist only so long as it takes to brace myself. Then I fling myself forward into darkness, certain that anything Alice-Angeles has prepared will work perfectly.

  As promised, the suit leaves me little to do. Deceptively strong aerofoils instantly unfurl from my arms and legs, stabilizing my fall. A moment later I sense the fabric changing shape in order to alter my orientation. My heart rises into my throat, making it difficult to breathe, as the forest below rushes up to meet me. I see nothing but leaves and branches, any one of which could take my head clean off. I fight the urge to close my eyes.

  I penetrate a hole in the canopy, invisible until the very last second, and the suit puffs up like a parachute. Its all-over grip on my body spreads the sudden deceleration, but still I feel shaken by the jolt. I twist and hit the ground on my side, and roll several times across a bed of soft undergrowth. When I come to a halt, I can see faint neuronal ghosts firing in my eyes, but nothing else. The parachute retracts.