He laughs, but his heart's not in it. "You asked me a couple of days ago what capturing you made me. I've been thinking about that. If you really are God, am I the Devil?"
"More likely Satan, the adversary."
"But he never beats God. That's why he's in Hell." He doesn't look at me. "Satan sounds more like you than me."
"There are different kinds of prisons," I say, sensing that he is guiding the conversation somewhere particular.
"Yes, that's true. Tell me, have you ever heard of John the Baptist?"
"Of course."
"He's also known as the Precursor. His role was to identify and legitimize the man who would become the savior."
"I know what his function was." Shock and anger rise up in me. "So this is the conclusion you've reached, after all we've talked about! This is the way you will assuage your conscience of my death. You're a bigger fool than I ever thought you were."
"But I'm not as stubborn as you." His lips tighten. "You've given me no choice. Consider this my baptism of fire. I'm now officially a conspirator in your fantasy. It takes one fake to follow another."
"I'm not a—" I bite my tongue. "Damn it. Are you still offering me a way out? Giving me a chance to grant you my blessing in exchange for... what? Peace? My life? If so, I reject the suggestion, reject it utterly."
"I knew you would, so it's not your blessing I'm looking for. It's the Fort. I'm going to need it to govern Earth properly. Neither of us wants me to make a mess of things—but you hold the key. Give it to me, Jasper. This is your last chance."
"Or you'll hold me against the wall and blow my brains out?"
He regards me with tightening eyes. "I'm not so vulgar, but essentially, yes. That was the deal. Because the thing about Satan is: You can keep him in a cage forever and he'll never be a threat. John the Baptist, on the other hand, he has to die. He's God's rival; he's the Precursor only because he's defeated. There's no other way around it."
"Jesus didn't kill John," I say. "And my fate is neither to rot in jail nor to declare you the winner. God is in all of us, even those of who refuse to accept the roles they are destined to play. My true fate will become manifest soon enough, I'm sure."
"Sooner than you might think, Jasper. The thing is, you're absolutely right: Jesus didn't kill John. The sugar has been doped with a smart poison. A tragic security breach, possibly by one of your former allies in the Round, suspecting you've come over to my side. As we speak, the poison is tunneling through your defenses, looking for weak spots. You might be feeling it already: a headache, perhaps, or a fever...?"
My cheeks grow warmer. "I wondered why there was no tea."
"Better than being shot at dawn, surely."
"You call this a courtesy?"
"Give me the Fort and I'll make it quick. That's the most I can offer you now. You don't have long—a minute or two, probably, if you're exhibiting symptoms now. You are, aren't you?"
I nod.
"Then you'd better get your final words ready."
My mouth is dry and I find it hard to swallow. A terrible sensation is gaining momentum in my gut, something beyond pain, a feeling of mortality that my nerves have never before had to communicate. "I'm not afraid of dying. My mind exists outside of time. I am at one with the idea of God, no matter what happens to my body."
"Whatever makes you feel better."
"What will make you feel better, when this is over?"
I fall over onto my side. My right leg spasms, shooting through the bars and knocking the remains of breakfast across the floor. Crockery shatters and food splatters. None of it matters. I suppress a faint urge to laugh, aware that my mind is being affected by the flux of alien chemicals through my body.
Then the voice of God—or someone else—is speaking through my lips again.
"Rescind—" My throat is like sandpaper. "Rescind contingency forty-four. Confirm."
"Confirmed," says the Apparatus without hesitation. This is no rusty machine that needs to be kicked and hammered back into operation. It has been a loyal friend and ally, even in silence, but now my treacherous flesh is betraying both of us.
"What was that?" says Bergamasc, standing with both hands gripping the bars. "What are you trying to say?"
Stop me, I try to scream. This can't be happening!
The demon in me ignores both of us. "Initiate new successor protocol. Instate Imre Bergamasc."
"I acknowledge the instruction," says the gestalt, "but I don't understand. Imre Bergamasc has been labeled an enemy of Earth."
"He is—I mean, was." I blink furiously, trying to stop the world dissolving. My enemy has become a blur I can barely discern. "Delete all prior labels. Imre Bergamasc is—Imre Bergamasc—is—"
My tongue falters, flapping like the organ of a broken machine. I am glad of that much. This new betrayal is worse than any physical pain, even as it crashes through me like a storm surge.
And suddenly he is beside me. The cage has opened. He looms over me like a giant. His mouth moves, but I can't hear what he's saying. One hand comes up to point at me.
I feel myself retreating down a long, narrowing tunnel. I try to fight it, but there's nothing I can do. It can't be right, I tell myself. It can't end like this.
It can't.
Sensation:
a flavor never experienced directly by humanity until our understanding of the laws of the universe became both powerful and subtle enough to crack the secret of the vacuum. Like a nut, or a diamond, the empty fullness of the void is revealed only to those skilful and patient enough to chop away at its defenses without destroying the prize within. And the prize? A blank page.
Image:
an ammonite fossil, each of its many sections curling around an infinitely small centre. But the ammonite is only an interpretation, a metaphor, and in reality each cell encloses a moment of time, not a parcel of space. A second, perhaps, or an hour. Or a single day. And an ammonite's chambers are only empty when fossilized.
Words:
"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
Perspective:
Imre Bergamasc's enemy had a grasp of military strategy on a par with his own. Fifty years of warfare was enough to convince him of that. And like all great leaders throughout history, he has a love-hate affair with resistance.
On achieving victory, however, the illusion fails to hold up. A new challenge overtakes the old. Success becomes more than just a military objective—although that too is paramount.
His quest is now to understand the strange being he has captured, this man who limps through the days like a broken-down machine, and whose mind exists in fragments that simply won't knit whole.
"Trapped inside a story that never ends," he says, searching for the angle that will make everything clear. "Jumbling things up to make sense."
Sometimes it seems as though the prisoner glimpses his own tragic impotence, his incompleteness—but always true acceptance slips away. The promise of those ancient God-builders, whose grand experiment was interrupted by the Slow Wave, cannot be shaken. The axiom that God can never be wrong or defeated is immovable.
"You see what you want to see," he tells the prisoner, "just like everyone."
But the man who calls himself God will never acknowledge defeat, even if he does, in the end, give up everything that he has.
In the depths of that strange doublethink lurks the saddest of consequences, and the man who captured him is not unfamiliar with living at odds with one's actions.
"What sort of life is that? The bars aren't ever going away. There's a limit to how much we can work out on our own."
Everyone stands alone before death. Only a few are truly alone while they are alive, too.
Understanding:
the Apparatus is the ultimate observer. It lays down everything it sees and hears in
to a record that will last as long as the vacuum itself. It cannot, in other words, forget. Neither can it interpret. It cannot cloud fact with speculation or lies.
Conclusion:
the dots on an LCD aren't a picture. The letters in an alphabet aren't a story. Individual grains of sand aren't a beach. Deeds and words alone do not make a life.
At the sound of a single gunshot, I wake up to a brand new day, again.
Dawn sees me locked in a stone cell, somewhere. The details will come to me in time, I know, but for now the contrast is shocking. After the forest-filled vistas of my birth, after Vulcan and his arrow proudly thrusting at the sky, I had thought myself the golden offspring of humanity's finest minds, the apex of creation, unassailable and untamed. My idyll, it seems, is not destined to last forever.
A stranger walks into the room: a man with white hair and blue eyes, cutting a striking figure in some kind of militaristic uniform and moving with the economy of an accomplished fighter, or a dancer.
"Good morning, Jasper."
I want to ask who he is and why I'm being held in captivity. Instead, my mouth moves and words I haven't scripted emerge in a tone that sounds both surly and aggressive. "I wouldn't know about that."
Ignoring my incivility, my jailor squats with his back against the door and asks me questions about events and people I know nothing of. I long to tell him that I don't understand, that even if I knew the answers I couldn't give them to him. All my willful mouth will do is grunt. I flail about within my own head, seeking by logic the meaning behind my strange situation.
I am the attainment of humanity's desire for the divine, to become like God, undoubtedly, but at the same time I seem not to be omnipotent. What does that mean? There must be a reason for it. Could the experiment on Earth have failed somehow, without me knowing it? Could I be wrong about who I am? Or —
A cold shudder rolls down the length of my mind.
Has another experiment elsewhere been more successful still?
I watch my jailor for any sign of his possible role in humanity's existential struggle. His name, it seems, is Imre Bergamasc, and I'm sure he isn't the source of my strange imprisonment; more likely, my newness to achronistic life has caused a slight glitch that will soon repair itself. Of greater importance is the question of whether Bergamasc is another aspect of God or God's enemy. Right now, with my tongue tied so, it's impossible to ask him. He might not be aware himself. The truth might be hidden from his conscious mind, manifesting only in actions that he cannot explain, as my body's actions are uncontrolled by me. Together, we could spin and turn down the ages like model planets in an orrery, our paths defined by minds and fates unknown.
But the quest for meaning is all I have. It is, arguably, all any thinking being has, whatever prison they find themselves in.
My interrogation ends on a note both sour and sweet. As frustrated as me by my body's incommunicative stance, my jailor stands so abruptly that my recalcitrant head comes up to look at him.
"I guess I'll come back tomorrow," he says, "when you'll hopefully be in a more cooperative mood."
And suddenly I am at one with my body. Something subtle has shifted. Gone is the odd feeling of separation and syncopation. All is perfectly meshed.
"Life," I tell my jailor, "is a perpetual search to understand God—and by searching, even unknowing, to bring the divine into being."
He half-turns in the entrance, and sighs. "Typically obscure."
"Not deliberately. God may be hidden sometimes. That's true. But we can't give up trying to find it. It's there to find, if we look hard enough."
"You see what you want to see, just like everyone."
"Why would anyone see what isn't there?"
"To make life bearable. To make sense of things that were never supposed to make sense. To cover up when we let ourselves down." My captor looks haunted for reasons I can't yet fathom. "Life is nothing but a web of lies."
"There can be no lies," I tell him, "without truth."
"Sometimes I can't tell if you're serious or joking," he says with a snort. "Maybe I've been in politics too long."
"Maybe you have."
"Don't expect me to retire any time soon," he says, and sweeps through the door, which slams shut behind him with a solid boom.
I think about my jailor's pain for a long time afterward, wondering at its source and how I might be complicit in it. His talk of webs makes me think of insects fighting each other to the death, entangled in each other's snares. Our days coil around us like snakes. We are strangling each other, poisoning our lives.
One of us will have to back down, eventually.
I lean back against the cold stone and wait to see what opportunities my days will bring for peace, and an end, at last, to pain.
Notes on Sources.
"Cenotaxis" (Greek kenos empty + takis order) is a stand-alone story. It does, however, also sit between the first two novels in my Astropolis sequence, following the events and some of the characters of Saturn Returns. It is able, therefore, to pick up certain themes and run further with them than I had originally hoped to. Anachronism is one such, permeating every layer of this story, from its broad structure to the literary references that pepper the text.
The latter come from almost a thousand years of the written word. One such is Edward O. Wilson's keynote address to the OECD Forum, "Future of Life," delivered on the 14th of May, 2001. "The Skeptic" is another, by eleventh-century poet and mathematician Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Omar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi Khayyami (better known as Omar Khayyam), in the Edward FitzGerald translation.
Jasper's full name, mentioned only once, was an early pseudonym of nineteenth-century gothic author Robert Charles Maturin. The Persian name "Jasper" is sometimes said to mean "guardian of the treasure."
I remain deeply grateful to Gary Numan for permission to use his lyrics in Render's dialogue. Seek elsewhere in this book for the official credits.
Henry Lawson's "When I Was King" was published in a volume of the same name in 1906, exactly one century before this story was written. Each section of "Cenotaxis" takes its title from the same poem. The opening quote comes from the penultimate verse, and the emphasis on the last two lines is Lawson's.
Here's the final verse. It strikes me as a resonant note on which to end this story, and to start the next.
"I rose again—no matter how —
A woman, and a deeper fall—
I move amongst my people now
The most degraded of them all.
But, if in centuries to come,
I live once more and claim my own,
I'll see my subjects blind and dumb
Before they set me on a throne."
About the Author
Sean Williams' first book was published in 1994, a chapbook called Doorway to Eternity containing two short stories and a novella. Since then, he has delivered three more collections and twenty-two novels aimed at adult, young adult and child readers around the world. His work has been published in numerous languages, on-line, and in spoken word editions, and has appeared more than once on the New York Times-bestseller lists. Multiple winner of Australia's speculative fiction awards, in the science fiction, fantasy and horror categories, he also works in the Doctor Who and Star Wars universes and has a long list of collaborations with friend Shane Dix behind him. He is a former winner and now a judge of the international Writers of the Future Contest.
He lives with his family in Adelaide, which Salman Rushdie described as "an ideal setting for a Stephen King novel" and Jules Verne once claimed was the prettiest city in Australia.
You can access more information and his LiveJournal via www.seanwilliams.com.
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