by Ian McDonald
“So sorry,” apologized the Cosmic Madonna. “Simple thoughtlessness. Danty always stands and I have this freegee generator up my ass. Hope it’s not too damp; there was rain programmed just before we put up this gazebo.”
His preciously acquired worldorder was spinning into chaos, instant by instant.
“You’re quite forgiven for finding this all a little surreal,” apologized the avatar. “There is a logical explanation for everything, I assure you. This place may seem like a wet dream by Hieronymus Bosch; it’s really just a decommissioned agrarium I’ve had some work done on.”
“Hieronymus Bosch?”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting that you only know what you’ve seen. Why you always have to be incarnated an absolute blank I don’t know. It could all be done so much more simply in our purely spiritual states. Mind you, if you were in your spiritual state, none of this would be occurring because you wouldn’t be any use to me.”
“I’m confused.”
“Right. Words of one syllable. Or less. I am the Cosmic Madonna. “Well … no, that complicates things. You are within my body; from here to the surface, all the machinery, all the biotech, all that, is me, my physical form. I’ve put on a bit of weight in four and a half centuries. Recently, in conjunction with my subordinate saintly and siddhic systems, as well as some of the administrative programs of the Ministry of Pain, I have been working on a project. That’s it by the door. Danty, hand out, please.” The Cosmic Madonna smiled and poured half a pot of hot chocolate over his arm.
It might have been rainwater for all the naked boy responded. The scalded arm blistered up and not even a pupil twitched.
“I presume he told you on the way down about himself and his little chums out there, but I thought a small demonstration would be a lot more effective. Tell me, Danty, what do you feel?”
“I see rainbows, I see peacocks, I see translucent golden butterflies, I see the colors of God’s eyes. I hear the blood-song, I hear the dance of the atoms, I hear the footsteps of Yah, I hear your every word like shapes in crystal.”
“Total nervous synasthesia. Took a lot of genetic reprogramming to reconfigure the CNS chemoreceptor/transmitter systems so that pain stimuli are redirected through the limbic gate into the visual, tactile, audial, and olfactory sensors. That was just beginners. Take a look at his arm.”
Those blisters, that scalded, seeping tissue: healing even as he watched. Blisters turned to clean scabs turned to scar tissue turned to soft, new, pink skin.
“Like I say, what’s the use of not feeling pain if pain can still cripple you for life? Accidents will always be with us, even in as closely regulated an environment as this. And not just physical pain: emotional, psychological, spiritual pains, all banished away. Good-bye Oedipus, Hamlet, Portnoy, and Freud. Saluté painless, conscienceless, guiltless humanity. Of course, the surface world’s not ready for them yet. Things have been greatly simplified since the Break, but they’ll have to be simplified much much further and brought under much tighter control before humanity can run naked under the sun forever. In the short term, my saints and I hope to introduce small communities of the new humanity onto the surface in two or three years. Which is where you come in, brother.”
“How?”
“I want you to be their messiah.”
Is he behind you?
Look, over your shoulder; glance, quick, just a glance; is he there, is he following you through the alleys, darting, starting this way, that way, between Three Jump Span’s ominous brownstones, through the puddles of yellow sodium light pierced through and through again by gray shafts of rain, is he following? Glance.
Yes.
Those are his Cuban heels clattering on the wooden planks of the covered humpback bridges. Still there, still following.
Lose him. Dump him, ditch him, fade him, jump him: in the fungus-forest of umbrellas rolling-bowling along Nevin Prospekt: is he still behind you? Glance.
He is still behind you, the polite, helpful Marcus Garveyite, smiling politely, helpfully, apologizing as he elbows his way between the waltzing umbrellas.
LOSE HIM!
He is a Love Police agent. Lose him, or they will be waiting for you in the shadow of the great Keep of the Scorpios, the Great Glass Tower, the Capitol of the TAOS Consortium, out there among the abandoned vat farms and filtration tanks the pantycars will be cutting through the flaring tailgasses. Lose him, before you reach the entrance to Salmagundy Street pneumatique … if they are not there already.
The white panic kicked beneath Kansas Byrne’s breasts. Lose him! Amongst the buyers and bargain hunters and collectors, cognoscenti, and connoisseurs browsing among the waxpaper barrows of East Nevin Midnight Antique Market: between the glints of old holy medals and brass stopcocks and wrought-iron weather vanes, between the trunks of glass decanters and polished rosewood commodes and the certified Official antique famuluses: bemaze, bemuse, bewilder, and bedazzle the b’stard, you’re a Raging Apostle outlaw artist, you can lose him, Kansas Byrne, no worries, no hurry, no flurry, no scurry, it’s just another piece of art, another unique performance to an audience of one who, if the piece goes well, won’t even be there at curtain down, no applause please, no curtain call, no encores.
Is he still behind you? Glance.
Fug.
Who is this guy? No Marcus Garveyite, but a Soulbrother for certain. The Love Police must be recruiting outside their own caste. No one but a Soulbrother would pursue with such faithfulness and determination. As if you are a verse of scripture or a tenet of dogma or the track of an icon’s tears.
Lose him. If the barrowboys and the anachronists hunting snippets of their little corner of personal history won’t absorb him, hit him with the manswarm. Drag him into the soulstream with you and see where the current casts you up.
The rain slashed down across the end of Nevin Prospekt, strict neon diagonals, hot and acid in the brilliant floodlights that lit up the pedicab rank. In their cycling shorts and thongs the athleto drivers gaggled and gassed and enjoyed the rain on their bodies.
Glance.
Apologizing her way around a Brace of bewimpled medievalists (some chance you had of finding anything authentique, mesdames), she ducked into an open pedicab bubble ahead of an outraged neo-colonial (three plastic carrier sacks’ worth of repro-Spode for his little bijou mansionette in Charlesburg) and shouted, “Salmagundy Street pneumatique, cizzen.”
“Salmagundy Street pneumatique. Sure.” Ring of bell. Shouts, nona dolorosas, as the driver screwed his vehicle out of the wedge of parked pedicabs. As he snapped down the FOR HIRE flag Kansas Byrne glanced in his rearview mirror.
Glance.
What is he doing? Flashing a card to the bemazed, bemused, bewildered, bedazzled bargain hunters. Stepping into a red-and-black pedicab decorated with stickers of Glory Bowl heros from the past ten years; pointing directions for the woman driver to follow, already pulling away from the rank …
“Driver.”
“Yo, cizzen?”
“I’m being followed. Fifty marqs in your cardreader to lose him.”
“Keep your fifty, lady. I’ve always wanted to hear someone say that.”
“I’m not a messiah,” said Kilimanjaro West.
“Oh, but you are,” said the Cosmic Madonna.
“I am not. I am … I am …”
“You are like me. I said it before, I was half-joking then, a bitter truth can be sweetened by a little drop of half-humor. You are an avatar, a construct, a biological incarnation of a computer intelligence. Only in your case, you are more fully incarnated than I; this flesh thing I grew just to act as my mouthpiece, an extension of my true body without any will or direction of its own. But you are different, you have emptied yourself fully into the biological. You have will and direction outside your true body, whatever or wherever that may be. Tell me, what is your earliest memory?”
“Cold.” He saw it again, the room, the rain tracing down the glass, mirroring the beads of condensatio
n, tearing rips in the edge of the universe: the cold. “The room.”
“And before this room, the cold, anything?”
“No. Yes! Voices.”
“And what did the voices say?”
“That I would forget everything.”
“They were right.”
“Yes. No! But I am not an avatar, a construct, I think I know what I am really.”
“Then what are you?”
“A criminal. Like the ones I saw you doing those things with. Perhaps I was one of them, I don’t know, how could I know? I was psychologically reengineered—I believe that is the expression—and returned to society, a new creation, a new life. Perhaps something went wrong, perhaps I should have been given a new personality in place of the old, criminal personality, a new set of memories grafted onto me. Certainly, I am not a god. Ridiculous!”
The Cosmic Madonna pursed lewd, fruity lips. Danty stood, an icon of impassivity, but Kilimanjaro West could hear him listening.
“Perhaps you should stand back and take a good look at yourself,” suggested the goddess. “Perspective helps.” A sharp, blinking-plinking sound; the gazebo’s arched windows blanked into gray holographic display screens. “Kilimanjaro West by Kilimanjaro West! Like the name.” He was surrounded by himselves. Flayed, peeled, martyred, vivisected, anatomized, sectioned, cored, and pithed. “Anticipating difficulties of this kind, I had a biopsy scanner built into the gazebo. Good, isn’t it?” His skeleton floated toward him, waved a hand. “Twelve point three three percent pseudoorganotrope tungsten/iridium osteo-fibers woven throughout the skeletal structure. Takes a lot to break your bones, cizzen.” He looked into his own skull’s eyesockets. “Cranial dome seeded with ceramoplast superconductor crystals: your skull is one big neural transmitter. But for the real kicker, nervous system!”
A blue-pale figure advanced from the gallery of the dismembered; white and sick as shoots under a stone, a shoot-man, a root-man, a cartoon drawn from tangles of roots and fibers; his own nervous system.
“Magnification twenty.”
Dominated by his own right hand. He flexed flesh and blood and the giant simulacra responded.
“Magnification fifty. Add false color enhancement.” He watched the tiny ellipses of light flowing along the twisted strands of nerve fiber. “Magnification five hundred.” He stood within a web of individual neurons with cascades of sparks shedding across the net of matted axons. He flexed flesh and blood again and was immersed in a constellation of lights. Waves of polarization and depolarization broke across him in hot neon pinks and blues. He saw something more. Coiled around each cell like a serpent in Eden, something black and sharp-edged, shining with its own light.
A bioprocessor.
“Believe me,” said the Cosmic Madonna, returning her windows to green grass, false blue skies, and little children, “you are no criminal. That level of technology is years beyond current general competence of the Compassionate Society. Only a very few of the Celestials, and their human agents, have access to that kind of biotech. You are no PainCriminal, Kilimanjaro West. You are a god. You are the Advocate, come again.”
He did not want to hear what this four-armed, six-breasted thing would say about him, but he could not elude the vision of his own nerves wrapped up in sheathes of biotech.
Or were they his own nerves? Holographic simulations, bioprocessors, biological constructs; everything he had been shown might have been a sophisticated illusion to lead him to believe that he was other than human.
But how could he know? To doubt was as dubious as to be certain.
“You are, I must confess, a little bit of a mystery to me. Oh, I know what you are, I can access the records of all your previous incarnations in the city, and I know why you are: to assess if humanity is mature enough to mind its own affairs and leave us to finally be free of our responsibilities to explore the Multiverse; but as to who you are, and where you come from, that frankly baffles me. I can’t find you in any of the current program files of the Polytheon; certainly, you are not a Celestial, at least none of them I personally know, and you certainly aren’t one of those dirty, fawning little teraphim and siddhi. So I am left with the uncomfortable conclusion that you are an interruption into our affairs of a higher order system, perhaps even a daughter program of the Yah overconsciousness itself.”
Still Danty’s eyes were a study in obsidian.
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“Of course you don’t. Just thinking out loud. All you as the Advocate need is to be human. But I’ve been interested in you from the time you joined up with that winger girl in Little Norway. It was me you felt, that presence in her butsudan; Janja is one of my semiautonomous daughter programs. From the first moment I saw you, I thought that together we might be able to give everyone what they wanted and put an end to this great and glorious circus that calls itself the Compassionate Society. Humanity can be free to do what it likes to who it likes as long as it likes and without fear of pain physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and we can all fug off into the Multiverse to party down with our peers. Nice. Simple. Elegant. Everyone’s happy.” Four sets of fingers snapped. “If you will agree to lead the angel-children.”
“Why me? You have Danty groomed for the job.”
“Danty, alas, is only superhuman. You are divine. And that will cut a lot more cloth with the Polytheon, if the Advocate, the one who stands for humanity before the Overmind, endorses my little project as the proof that humanity is at last mature enough to look after itself. The transition to the Postcompassionate Society, which would have taken centuries, could be made in decades, with the full power of the Polytheon and the Seven Servants behind me. Danty won’t mind, will you, Danty?”
“It will bring the greatest possible happiness to everyone.” His words were beyond sincerity and insincerity. But the black obsidian flickered translucent for an instant and Kilimanjaro West saw the green worm within. Pain indeed is not dead. Merely brilliantly disguised, under the false blue sky. The greatest possible happiness.
Then he saw how utterly wrong they all were. Happiness is not pure absence. Happiness is presence.
“I won’t do it,” he said.
“The fug you won’t,” said the Cosmic Madonna. “It’s the only hope.”
“It’s the end of hope,” said Kilimanjaro West, certain for the first time since his arrival in this world. “It’s the end of humanity. You think he’s human?” A piece of flesh, a hank of stone and bone and hair, quasi-modo, the semblance of a man.
“More than human.”
“Oh, no,” said Kilimanjaro West. “Oh, no no no.”
“And how would you know?” said the Cosmic Madonna. “How could you know?”
“I know. I am human. That’s the mystery. I may be all you say, I may not and all this may just be an illusion; but ultimately, I am human, whatever is true, and I will not, cannot, lead the angel-children.”
“Prove it,” snapped the Cosmic Madonna. “Prove it, prove it, prove it. Here: a little devil’s bargain. This is my home turf, right? Whatever you are, I reign here. My will is law within my own body. You stay or you leave according to my will. Now, our little test. Prove to me that you are human and you are free to go, I’ve no interest in you. Prove to be a god, more than human, and you will lead my angel-children.”
“And supposing I don’t accept your devil’s bargain?”
“Then you can stay here until your biocircuits rot.”
Kilimanjaro West weighed the bargain. Divine he might be, but if so, then he was an impotent incarnation. The Advocate has no power save the power to witness and proclaim. And if human? Then he had nothing to fear.
“It seems you have me, madam.”
“By the short and curlies, bror. Now, let’s have the little test, shall we?”
Watch for the eyes.
The eyes have it.
Watch the eyes, the eyes watch you.
In one burst of grand paranoia with the sweet S
eptember rain trickling down the plastic pedicab bubble, Kansas Byrne became personally aware of something she had known intellectually all her life.
She was being watched.
By the eyes. The famulus eyes. Every movement, every moment since she was born, the eyes had watched her, down all her years, every twist and turn of life woven through the tapestry of the city, they had watched, the familiar famulus eyes. The teddy Talkee and the silver egg that made her feel good when she held it in her hand and the conjuh charm on the leather thong about her ankle and the silver charm bracelet: eyes, Is watching, and even after she had left her bracelet hanging on Joshua Drumm’s doorhandle that mad night of romantic exile, other eyes had opened, snips and snatches and snapshots as she cut across other lives, other eyes, a thousand silent witnesses at every performance, without applause or comment or criticism, just, watching; even now the set of stainless steel mood beads the driver hung from his handlebars, measuring, weighing, tasting, smelling: a pair of eyes in each pedicab that rubbed mudguards with hers, a pair of eyes around the neck of every pedestrian huddling under disposable umbrellas at the crossing lights, a pair of eyes in every tram signal and public shrine and newssheet booth and noodle bar and chocolate shop, a pair of eyes in every cablecar lurching through the shadows above and every little yellow Ministry three-wheeler scooting, hooting through the shadows below, in every tram driver’s cab, on every conductor’s belt, under every passenger’s raincoat: the eyes.
They can’t watch everyone, it’s a physical impossibility. She had always believed in her own dogma, the doctrines upon which the Raging Apostles had been built: We’ll just drop out of sight and they’ll never even know we’re gone.
But what if they could watch everyone? What if the gods really were gods (however repugnant that might be to carefully defined agnosticism), all seeing, all hearing, all knowing. All powerful? At this very moment, were they watching from the splendid eotemporal pavilions of the Infinite Exalted Plane?
Eyes, eyes, everywhere, everywhere. Beware the thrill of grand paranoia, the joy of abandoning yourself to utter helplessness: step onto that ride and it will take you all the way to a sensory deprivation tank all your own in West One.
