Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  I also thought less of him because he was one of those weak-stomached men who cannot admit to their own desires. He had requested one of the house’s courtesans, but his manner with me, as well as his actions, made it clear that he wished to be with a catamite and couldn’t bring himself to request one.

  Since I had resided in the house longer than this man had resided within the Monad, I felt overly secure. Since I despised him, both for his needless lies as well as his pederasty, I told him of a previous age when sodomites were put to death by stoning. I informed him of his luck to reside in a time and a place where such urges could be satisfied for the price of a solidus.

  I realized my error as soon as I had spoken. I had not forgotten the importance of my own obscurity, but to my great regret, in that one moment I had ignored it.

  My words still hung in the air between us when he struck me, knocking me to the ground. He left the house, and I would never see him again. However, upsetting members of the Monad, however petty, had its price. And, with the long lens of hindsight, I now realize that if this man lied about his rank, it was not a lie of promotion.

  The morning after my encounter with the timid pederast, before I had time to plan my leave of the house and the woman I had been there, one of the city’s blank-faced myrmidons came to to remove me. The master of the house could do little. By nature the myrmidon was immune to his bribes, either money or flesh.

  I was taken to the Protectory. A jail whose name was much older than its function.

  The myrmidon, my escort, held me chained before the provost. The provost sat behind a high iron desk, the top of which was above my head. The myrmidon handed the provost my tessera, the small many-holed plaque that was my identification, passport, and license. The tessera was my whole existence as far as the Monad’s Engines were concerned.

  The provost gave a bored glance to that existence and slid my tessera into a slot in his desk. The grinding sound of old clockwork resonated from behind featureless iron. When the unseen gears silenced themselves, the provost asked me my name.

  I told him what the tessera had told him.

  He asked me my place of work.

  I told him that as well.

  The provost then asked me what I knew of that previous age, the time when pederasts were stoned for their peculiar desires.

  And because I wasn’t willing to compound what penalties might face me, I told him what I had told the pederast.

  When he heard, he nodded, as if in silent agreement with my absent and unnamed accuser. The provost charged me with madness, which denied me the right of trial, and cast me into the depths of his jail.

  Part II

  The administration of the Protectory existed under the surface of Thalassus, its asylum levels deeper still, and the level of my cell deepest of all. If I had ever heard of anyone being released from the embrace of the Protectory, I had not chosen to remember it.

  I cannot tell you anything of the routine life of my captivity. Everything between the day the provost pronounced me mad to the day I walked from the Protectory has been banished from the repository of my mind. Even if I were able to recall those days, I would not, even for the sake of this record. It is better that they are gone.

  Of course this means that I can give you no measure of the time I spent within my cell. I can say I left the same comely young woman who arrived, but that is saying nothing at all.

  I can describe my cell, which will imply much about life there. It was long and tall, but too narrow to fully extend my arms. The walls were gray stone that wept moisture. Every stone in the floor and the walls below the vault was square, and set without mortar. On each stone a worn inscription told of the time when this cell was a crypt or a cinerarium.

  Nearly all the inscriptions were too faint to read. Some names were visible, but none complete. “G—atea,” “Min—v-,” and “Mesch—e” are the ones I choose to remember.

  The cyclopean vault seemed to support the entire mass of Thalassus above me. Ribs as thick as my body crossed the narrow space above. The ribs of the vault were supported by the heads of caryatids who, despite being worn by moisture to nearly featureless stone, seemed to assume attitudes of mourning.

  Four things had been added since the jail had overtaken this room of the dead.

  First was my cot. My bed was an iron framework, ochre with rust. It filled half the floor, with no space to either side. A thin straw pallet was all that was between me and the cold metal. An empty steel bucket hung from one of the posts, for use as a chamber pot. The omnipresent moisture had eaten holes in its bottom.

  Second was the light above me. On the walls there were red, black and green stains where once there were sconces. The sconces had long since disappeared, and the light came from a hole bored into the center of the vault above me. My impression is that the room was never allowed to go dark. The light was a dusky yellow, and I am not aware of what the source was; torch, gas, or a lucernal pipe bought from an auslander or an antiquarian.

  Third was the door to my prison. The door occupied half of the narrow wall opposite my bed. Though I have not retained the memory, I suspect it was always my first vision upon waking. The door was gray steel, not iron, but it too was spotted by moisture.

  The fourth addition to my catacomb was the voice of madness. The wails of my fellow prisoners reached me through stone and steel. Pleading, screams, keening, and sounds less human filled the air. I believe anyone imprisoned there without my gift of forgetfulness, if they did not begin mad, would certainly end mad.

  Were it not for Doctor Bel, the historian, my existence might have ended in that tomb. Were it not for him, this record would have no reason to exist. Both my savior and damnation, it is he who bought my freedom. Without that, my only escape would have been clemency or death.

  Neither one was more than a dim hope.

  Part III

  Doctor Richard Bel was a cadaverous man, so much so that, when the door to my cell opened to reveal him, I thought him an apparition. His eyes were shadowed and his gaze deep as the Abyss. He stood silent, watching me. The cacophony from the surrounding cells muted until it seemed the whisper of the dead. He gestured with his long ebony cane and said, “Come.”

  For a moment I believed that he was the angel of death come for me.

  “Come, you are in my charge now.”

  The unnatural quiet had only been subjective. At the most, the sudden near-silence had been an acoustic effect caused by opening a long-closed door. It broke now, and the calls of fellow prisoners reasserted themselves.

  Doctor Bel came in, took my arm, and dragged me out of the cell. I was still quite frightened even though he was now only a man. He was a man who had come down to the lowest level of the Protectory alone.

  In the hall he let my arm go so he could retrieve a brass tessera from a slot in the door. With a clockwork grinding, the door of my cell shut by its own power. I could have run then, had there been a place to run to. Instead, I stayed close to my new guardian.

  He pocketed the tessera, whose brass was green and flaking. Some of the holes were so corroded that I wondered that it could still be of use. Then he grabbed my arm again. He was not gentle.

  Quite unnecessarily he bade me, “Come,” yet again, as he pulled me through the maze of catacombs.

  Cries followed our exit. Many were in languages I could not understand. A few, most likely, were invented by the speaker. Two I remember whose words I understood.

  The first came as I was led through the lowest level of the jail, wherein we passed many windowless doors like my own. Beyond one of those doors I heard a rhythmic thudding, as if someone were repeatedly striking the other side with their fists. I heard the woman inside chanting, “Snakes begone. Snakes begone. Snakes begone.”

  It was a crone’s voice, and it caused me to press closer to Doctor Bel.

  The second encounter came much higher in the jail, after I had been led up several flights of stairs and through two more doors opened by
the doctor’s ancient tessera. The stairs ended at the second door, and I had thought we had reached the upper levels of the Protectory.

  I was mistaken. We had not yet left the asylum.

  The character of this part of the asylum differed from my own. Instead of individual cells, the corridors passed large open spaces where the prisoners were chained in mass gatherings. The Doctor led me through a maze of corridors that were defined only by iron bars running from floor to ceiling.

  Most of the prisoners here were remarkably quiet compared to the wretches below. Many simply sat and stared at us as we went by. A few whispered to themselves. Despite the bars and the chains, this was a paradise of tranquility compared to the bedlam I had left.

  I was completely unprepared when someone grabbed my wrist.

  I turned to see the vilest creature I had ever set eyes upon. Its hair hung in white strings. Rags covered yellow, ulcerous skin. It stared at me with milk-white eyes as it hissed, “Succubus!”

  I screamed as I felt its filthy nails dig into my own skin. The creature had extended itself as far as it could. The chain was taut, from the staple set in the wall to the iron ring biting into this thing’s neck.

  “Deception! Lies!”

  My efforts to free myself were futile. This thing was willing to choke itself to clutch at me, and its grip was the grip of the damned. As I tugged, it brought its other hand to bear, clawing at my skin. “Creature of evil. You’ll never leave the pit. Never!”

  The doctor then let go of my other arm. I stumbled forward, and for a moment I thought myself lost to this thing. It drew me clear to the bars, bringing my face within a hands-breadth of its own. It brought my wrist toward its mouth, and I could see the cords stand out as its neck pressed against its iron collar.

  Then Doctor Bel’s cane descended like a maul upon the creature’s head. The sound of impact was reminiscent of the sound of the crone’s door-pounding below. However, one beat ended this creature’s chanting forever. I was released, and the creature fell back, as if the chain had been a leash its master pulled in rebuke.

  It did not move from where it fell.

  When the doctor pulled me to my feet, he said, “No harm will come to you while you are in my service.”

  His reference to service caused me to smile, despite the horror of the situation. I assumed I now knew why he had purchased my freedom. Of course, I was wrong.

  After that encounter, we made our way to another, more recent, staircase. In the newer parts of the Protectory, where they house the common criminals, the doors were set in pairs that would only open one after another. When the Doctor used his corroded brass tessera to open them I feared that the tessera would finally break within the second door’s mechanism and strand us forever within their embrace.

  Mercifully, that was the only fear the Protectory had left for me, and it went unfulfilled.

  Part IV

  I have said that Doctor Bel had purchased my freedom, and that is how he represented it to me, but I cannot now say that I know this for a fact. While Doctor Bel is certainly responsible for my departure from the Protectory, and to the engines of the Monad, people were simply another commodity to be traded and sold, I have no way to know if it was a legal transaction.

  At the time, such questions were far from my mind. Had they occurred to me, I would not have voiced them. I was not so foolish then to interfere with my own rescue, though it may have been better if I had been.

  What I know is that we passed no guards in our exit, nor did Doctor Bel ever talk to any official of the Protectory, castellan, provost or warden. In fact, we had ascended three levels of ancient iron staircases before I realized that the last of the interlocked doors we had passed marked the end of the Protectory’s authority.

  The doctor led me up to a weathered gray door whose wood bore the scars of inlay long since gone. This door did not posses the intricate locks that only respond to the correct tessera, and the ornate lock that came with the door—such as might have opened with a pearl-handled key or to its master’s voice—had long ago fused into an abstract lump.

  What held the door shut was a rudely shaped bar of a dull blue-white metal. Doctor Bel removed it from its hooks with one hand, showing a strength his cadaverous bearing did not suggest, though I should not have been surprised, having seen the way he had dispatched the mad thing that had accosted me.

  The door opened inward, and he took me outside before I was ready.

  I was aware, in some dim sense, that we would emerge into the open and I would see the city of Thalassus for the first time since my captivity. I was also aware of the geography of the city and must have known the view that would greet me. Neither offered any preparation.

  The center of the city Thalassus was an island whose form was that of a hump or mound outside the mouth of the river that bears its name. Atop that hump was the vast cube of the Monad itself, the only thing of Thalassus that was visible to all parts of it. Visitors to the city assumed that the Monad, and the humped center of the city, sat on some vast rise in the land underneath. In fact, that mound, extending as far above the surface of the water as the Monad did above that, was nothing more than the accumulated mass of the city itself. It was that mass that we had just emerged from the place where the Protectory claimed as much volume below as the Monad above.

  We passed through a wall of vines that had covered the outside of the door, emerging only halfway up the side of the giant central mound of Thalassus. Even so, after the dolven corridors of the Protectory, it seemed to be the top of the world.

  It was as if a veil parted, revealing the whole of human civilization.

  Below, the city blazed, outshining the stars. The city seemed to have torn its raiment from the heavens itself, leaving the sky barren but for a few stars and the catenulate lines of Gaea’s diadem.

  From our vantage, I could see the city spill out before and beneath us, flowing to the visible horizon, across thousands of canals winding through eyots that mirrored the central city. The network formed the delta for a river so vast that, at its widest point, its banks are invisible to each other.

  Lights of every hue illuminated the city below, the flickering yellows and reds of torches, the blue-white of gas-driven lanterns, the even green of the biolumens, the cloudy reds and blues of twisted lucernal pipes, and ancient flambeaux whose color was so pure that the light it gave appeared to have the mass of a living thing.

  Buildings towered to every side, brick, metal and sculpted stone. I faced spires and bell towers, tarnished bronze idols and gilded heroes, stone buttresses supporting cathedrals while below them steel cables suspended bridges that crossed the wide canals.

  And, if the city seemed a reflection of a surreal heaven, the canals reflected through a thousand portals a third constellation, a submerged phantom city whose lights were more chaotic and illusory.

  The city had grown during my captivity, the towers higher, the canals broader, the inhabitants more numerous . . .

  How long? I wondered.

  I stood immobile before the mass of Thalassus, unaware of things closer at hand.

  After a time, Doctor Bel broke my trance by closing the door behind us. It caused such a clangor that I immediately turned around, expecting the door to have fallen to ruin. Instead, I saw the doctor, unperturbed, lowering his hand from the massive ring that was the door’s centerpiece. The noise I had heard wasn’t the ring, which, though massive and bronze, was welded by age into immobility. I am certain now, as I was then, that the noise had been the metal bar inside the door replacing itself. How, I cannot say.

  The doctor stepped back from the door. Under its ivy drapery the door now looked immobile, frozen by age. He looked at the door, inspecting it, and after seeming to find everything in order, took the corroded tessera from his pocket, the one that had opened all the doors of the Protectory.

  “I shan’t need this any more,” he said, and dashed it against the cobbles at our feet. The age-brittle metal shattered.
The act frightened me more than anything we had passed below, because destroying a tessera was a crime against the Monad. It is a crime against all civil authority, an act of treason.

  He smiled, and I didn’t know if it was for my fear or for his act of anarchism. He looked at me, leaning over his cane, and withdrew another tessera from his pocket. It shone in the darkness like a newly minted coin, or a gem from Gaea’s crown. He handed it to me and said, “This is now you. And you are now mine.”

  I took the tessera. I didn’t need to look at the holes in the metal to know that it was not the same one that the myrmidon had handed the provost when I was imprisoned. This metal was new, while mine had been tarnished by use. The Doctor had just handed me a new existence, and I suspect that if any servant of the Monad, chevalier to suzerain, were to slide it into the engines’ many slots, the record they’d see would not be of the courtesan who had been imprisoned within the Protectory.

  What record they would see—a blank slate, some fiction of the doctor’s, or the life of some real young woman whose death or immigration had escaped the engines’ record-keepers—that I cannot say.

  What I clearly knew was that, while I was no longer imprisoned, I was no less captive. My mastery had simply slipped from the Monad’s Protectory to the person of Doctor Bel.

  I took the new tessera and said, “Yes, sir.” Despite my fear, I smiled. Slavery held no horror for me. Service was nothing new, and the chain of my former masters reaches long past those of the Monad and the Protectory’s gaol.

  “My name is Richard Bel—” he pronounced it ball,

  “—Doctor Bel. If you address me, you will address me as Doctor.”