by Nick Land
The library building itself was far more severely war-gnawed than its distant impression had indicated. Its great dome – so smoothly coherent to remote contemplation – had been largely skeletalized by dilapidation and missile damage, its integrity preserved solely by the density of its structural mesh. The massive outer walls had been furiously raked and pierced, in successive, overlapping waves, but the deepest scars were now time-smoothed into patterns of irregular undulation, cross-cut by mold-softened fissures, and complicated by twisting cavities.
The entrance was a vast triple gate, externally flanked by giant statues that had been eroded down to a vague anthropomorphy. One face had been entirely sheared away, at an angle that expressed pure violence in the medium of plane geometry. The second face had been centrally gored and blackened by the impact of some super-heated kinetic object, and now gaped in mute ruin, as if consumed by an artificial mouth designed only to scream.
Security was intense. The triple-screen of heavily-armed guards was supported by ancient red-eyed spider-robots and patched-up ex-military drones. Suzy ignored them, except for occasional scarcely-perceptible nods of acknowledgment to a few senior offices, in order to concentrate upon bundling her intimidated parents through the gates, and into the building beyond.
“How are you doing that?” Alison asked her.
“Passing through, you mean? I did a job for them – a seriously big job. More than one, actually.”
“Giving you open-ended security clearance?”
Before Suzy could answer, the exchange was interrupted by the formalities of their reception. On the other side of the inner door, a welcoming party was already waiting, its extravagant display of invitation edging into genuflection. The tallest and least cowed of the hosts – effortlessly exuding seniority – stepped forward, smiling broadly, to grasp Suzy by the hand.
“This is the Librarian,” Suzy said in introduction, his name properly sublimed without residue into the extraordinary dignity of his office, and then, reciprocally: “My parents, Jack and Alison, they’re accompanying me on a research trip to learn about the history of Ashenzohn.”
As expected, the library was a technological mausoleum. Its core radiated into tremendous alcoves, housing a chronologically-ordered collection, whose arc traversed dead computers and media formats, on an apparently distant asymptote towards accessible signs. Countless yottabytes of extinct data had been folded down out of fossil codes, often multiple times, degraded in increments through technical simplifications, re-writings, and ever cruder interpretations, leaving only confused registry numbers and cryptic inscriptions behind. As they followed a curving path along the inner-edge of the immense cultural tomb, their occasional words and soft footfalls echoing through its uncommunicative halls, the librarian joined his hands before his face in a gesture of prayer. “Only Undhu remains,” he intoned, with quiet solemnity.
“You speak English,” Alison said, surprised by this fact for the first time.
The librarian merely stared at her blankly, mouth slightly open, the confused whirring of his brain comically transparent.
“She means Anglossic,” Suzy interjected, a little disloyally. “It was taught oddly, where they come from.”
They had turned into a smaller, elongated chamber which seemed to be an active work-space. A few clerks worked with silent diligence at the catalog arrays.
“Now,” said the librarian, carefully lifting down a thin metal box from the shelf, “this is something very special.” The case was silver, tarnished to blackness, the lid engraved with an ornate Ouroboros. He placed it gently on the desk, and opened it. Inside was a pamphlet of conspicuous antiquity, so thickly wrapped in layer upon aged-layer of protective sheathing that the cover text was quite illegible. The underlying illustration, however, had been less definitively obscured. Among the blurred glyphs, the figure of a steep mound hauled itself up from distant sepia depths. It was less an image than a faint suggestion, but it was unmistakable.
“This is the oldest artifact in this world,” the librarian mumbled reverently. “It’s the key to our world, The Book of Ashenzohn. It slips away from us, by some imperceptible iota, each time we look at it. We say that Yinkko, the Goddess of Dust, reads it over our shoulders. Not that anyone reads it now. It’s a forbidden book. Not because of what it says, but because of what it is. Because of its fragility, its microcosmic recapitulation of disintegration. Naturally, the Inner Council have full authority to inspect whatever they like, but they never come here …” he chuckled oddly “… they have far too much to do. So, practically speaking, I am the only person permitted to touch this box, let alone open it, and I have not done so for close to a Scale-8 Yera.”
“That’s about 18 years,” Suzy explained. Then, to the librarian: “My parents are visiting us, from a distant land. They don’t understand our calendar.” She turned back to them. “It’s calculated in ‘Yeras’ – triadic orders of magnitude. It has to have been a Scale-5 Yera – 8 months or so – before I was able to wrap my head around it.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Alison muttered.
After only a few moments of searching, Suzy identified a calendric ledger, and brought it back to the desk. The book was new enough to be still functional – and in fact, still in use, its final entries incomplete – but its chafed leather cover announced its considerable age. The text, mostly strings of numbers, had been meticulously written by hand. Jack fell upon it, and as its nature became apparent, his avidity tested the limits of etiquette.
“I need some time with this,” he demanded, in an urgent whisper.
“How much time?”
He ignored the question, lost in dates. “Suzy, I know you probably can’t help me with this, but when it says here ‘Scale-20 Yera of Falling Ashenzohn’, that’s …” he paused, quickly re-checking “… over nine million years.”
“You’re supposed to be looking at this,” she said, impatiently. “Don’t you recognize it?”
He reluctantly returned his attention to the ancient pamphlet, his mind hesitating in uncertainty, before adhering to it suddenly, in shock.
“Isn’t it …” Alison began.
The missing signs were unreadable, but the spacing sufficed to jog recollection. They had last seen this same instruction manual only days before, although they had been days of another kind. The cover had carried an audio credit to the beaconsfield sound hub, fashionably de-capitalized. On this copy, the first 14 letters, and also the last, had been deleted by time.
Only after the librarian left, among profuse apologies for the inflexibility of his duties, could the discovery be frankly discussed.
“The idiots,” Jack said. It emerged as a horrible strangled laugh.
Suzy stared at him quizzically.
“Oh, you know, that ludicrous voguish lower-case convention. It’s inexplicable. How would you even begin …?”
“You think it’s an accident?” It was not a request for clarification, but something far more abrasive.
Of course, he was about to begin, but his words faltered before the sharpened iron of her incredulity. Was it really possible to think anything else? Even asking the question was some kind of general cognitive slippage, tripping into an abyss of collapsing time-dimensionality. “You’re suggesting …?”
“You’re nowhere near taking this place seriously yet, are you Dad?” she interrupted, re-emerging tween condescension softened by amusement. “You don’t think anything that happens here matters at all. ‘It’s a game’ – or probably ‘Gosh! This is an extremely complicated game’ – as if that explains anything. Aren’t you seeing anything? People live here. People die here. People die to here.”
“Suzy!” Alison admonished. “You have to stop this. It’s sheer craziness.”
“I have to stop this? Look around you. Go on, dig, explore. I’ve spent most of my life here, and I’ve not even begun to scratch the surface. It’s the world. You know what’s really crazy …?”
&nb
sp; “Enough!”
For several seconds it seemed as if this maximally-escalated assertion of maternal authority was not going to suffice, that it would be called out, and serve only as the mark of a terrible, final break. Suzy glowered, face flushed, as if teetering upon the brink of irrevocable rebellion. Then, with a slow exhalation, some peculiar, visible calm washed back through her. It was a sinister tranquility, alien and void-soaked, the very last thing – normally – to which any parent would surrender a child, but too many lines had already been crossed for that to be a consideration now. Alison wrapped her daughter in her arms, hugging her with raw desperation. Suzy relaxed, pliably, into the embrace. It might have been touching, had there been anything to touch.
“We need you honey. We’re strangers here. You have to help us. Please.”
Alison half-turned to Jack, and took his hand. They both knew, if the worst had happened, there wasn’t anything he could have done. It was OK. It had to be OK, because there was nothing else.
“It’s alright Mom,” Suzy said. “We’re almost done now.” They were all going under.
§16. After a while, heading inwards, there were only books. Packed shelves as dead as storage racks receded into gloom-smudged vanishing points, bearing astronomical magnitudes of unwanted signs. It was dust condensed into suggestion. There was more history here than could ever be used, for anything.
“This is the story,” Suzy began. “The little I understand of it. I’m going to assume nothing that reaches beyond a Scale-15 Yera can be taken as reliable. It serves only as a prologue.”
“That’s …” Jack was still completing the calculation “… almost 40,000 years.”
“Does that seem a long time?” Suzy asked, her features washed-out into a trance. “The tale goes much further back, before the Aeon of Ashenzohn, when Asttro-Babal reigned, and men mingled freely with gods at the edge of Heaven. It was a time of miracles, when sickness and mortality were unknown. Delight, learning, and work were indistinct. There was only a distant memory of war. Then the Scission came, to end the primordial intercourse of being. Not far above the High Temple, a lesser star appeared. The Whurrld was divided from Heaven, in an instant, and irremediably. The Great Tower of Asttro-Babal was broken, to be thenceforth known as ‘Ashenzohn’ – the reaching-out that touches nothing. That which had embraced the stars was now only a curse cast down upon the planet. Sublime disaster struck. Of the multitudes who survived, the children of gods and men were called the Geniers, and were few. Those of men alone were called the Pralh, and were many. The differences among the Pralh were only those between men, or between men and beasts, but the differences among the Geniers were closer to those between men and gods. In the shadow of the burnt summit, the highest of the Geniers began to think themselves gods, and so to behave as devils. The wounded Whurrld was tortured anew by their magnificent mischief. Casualties beyond numbering drifted into dunes like desert sand. There was no glory that was not also a billion screams, and all-enveloping ruin was the only true God. By the beginning of the Second Aeon of Ashenzohn, the Geniers had sunk so deeply into the crumbling embers of their infamies that even the highest among them was scarcely more than a man – but the Pralh, too, had fallen very far ...”
Had that been the Old Myth from the start? Jack wondered. He could just about see it as something the game designers might have built in. It would fit neatly on the back of a box. Or was it something new – a spontaneous innovation – sculpted by the decay of a world? The ‘Whurrld’? He said nothing. Even the silence seemed to echo here. Shadows were layered like abandoned cobwebs, as if space itself was peeling away into an absent wind. The intermittent plinking of distant drips reached them from an unseen corridor. Alison was scarcely with them anymore, beyond perfunctory indications of physical acknowledgement. He had no idea where she was. And Suzy …
Your daughter has been immersed in madness for a time beyond your reckoning, for over year as you confusedly calculate it. For a while now, your wife, too, has been trawling the catatonic depths of the psychotic abyss. So, Jack – how are you feeling? It wasn’t quite an alien voice. He recognized its silvery tone as a liminal duplication of his own thoughts, dislodged, and drifting away. If not a naked lie, it came from the place of lies, despite its superficial plausibility. He closed his soul. Killing children with greenness, the non-voice sang in an alien key. That had to be about Suzy, woundingly, so he ignored it too.
Suzy had settled into an unearthly rhythm, her breathing and enunciation cycling with perfect smoothness, her tone inhumanly steady, wiped clean. “The Pralh, once partners of the Geniers, then – later – playthings, bundles of spare parts, prey, slaves … had been shaped by the Order beyond time to pull everything down. With the half-gods repeatedly re-decimated, broken, and insane, the Aeon of the Pralh – since known as ‘history’ – had now come, stretched forward to the final horizon of all distance, bounded only by the terminal annihilation of things. And so the Pralh-Wars began, a cascade of blood balanced only by flame, driving the turbular descent of the Whurrld, infolding through phases of catabolic collapse. The remnants of each gyre were fuel for the incendiary chaos of the next. For those who fall, the past is great, and the greatest of all is found at the beginning. So it was with the revolutionary wars of the Pralh …”
At the dawn of the new Aeon, Ja’aab had arisen as the first Holy Leader of the Pralh. The very notion was a distilled blasphemy. There were those – and not only among the superior echelons – who found it simply incredible. Speculative genealogies of various kinds were devised, attributing to Ja’aab some decisive influence of Genier blood, whether through the maternal or paternal line, or even – since the miscegenative hypothesis was scarcely less abominable than the idea of a divinized Pralh – from both. These tales of Ja’aab’s sex-slaved Genier mother, of his lofty bastardry, or of his abduction as an infant changeling, were fitting signs of a breakage in the order of the world. The wave now came from below.
When the Over-God raised Ja’aab up, it was said, he had been instantly emptied of all cruelty, and all pity. The revolution was made in perfect sanity, klaii Ja’aab. Whatever conformed to necessity was upheld. Whatever opposed it was obliterated. The work was done, without prejudice, or qualm. “If every second Pralh has to die, in order for those left to become the instrument assigned to me, the holocaust will have been a blessing unto the people,” Ja’aab said. These words were carved upon monuments throughout the Pralh hinterland, as if they were the lyrics of paternal love. In actuality, consolidation of the Universal Pralh Nation required no greater severity than a general decimation. Less than a billion had to die, to lay the foundations for popular discipline. Henceforth, there would be assent. The Pralh had been re-made for war. Klaii Ja’aab.
Into the Hecatomb of Ja’aab the nation was poured, rejoicing in the greatness of its destiny. … “The Ja’aab Wars were probably nothing but a mashed-up legend,” Suzy said, extracting herself in pieces from the narrative mesmerism. “A succession of five tsunami waves crashing against the stump of Asttro-Babal, savagery and slaughter beyond calculation. There’s even a version – which none of the histories take seriously – that has Ja’aab himself reaching the inner sanctum of Phyl-Undhu, and dying heroically there. Elevated pointlessness, followed by a Scale-15 Yera of chaotic killing and uninhibited atrocity. As you can see, Ashenzohn is still here, and the Pralh certainly aren’t running it. Out in the green hell, rag-tag guerrilla groups still sew ‘UPN’ flashes onto their pajamas, so it has to have been something, I guess.”
“And the Geniers?” Jack asked.
“There are still a few,” Suzy said. “You’ve met some. Mostly, though, they’re gone. Without wanting to get too loopy about it, there’s a story that they fell into a game.”
“So who are we, here?” he mused aloud.
“‘Ghost people’ they say, but that doesn’t really tell us anything. Mutant Geniers, maybe.”
“What’s the point of a story that doesn’t tell y
ou who you are?” It seemed like a gaping design glitch.
“Perhaps puzzles matter to people – a lot. Even more than existence, in the end. Everybody who enters Ashenzohn – every stranger – thinks they’re going to discover their ultimate identity here, eventually. At least, they suspect it. There are hints. That’s what keeps them coming back.”
“To find out, you mean?”
“No. I mean, to not know.”
“Suspense?”
“The end of suspense,” she said. “Understood outside in – the unusual way.”
§17. Assume the myths are all lies. Still, the spire of Ashenzohn had to be broken. Whatever the depths of its cloud burial, certain elementary facts could not be concealed from the mental probes of inference. If there had ever been an Asttro-Babal – an Old Empyre – nurturing what were now-inconceivable cosmic intimacies, it manifestly died, long ago. Ashenzohn no longer connected to an orbital twin. The celestial path was stumped. The name of the city said as much, if Suzy’s sources were to be credited. If they were not, it mattered little. Ruin had befallen it, and any Temple of Phyl-Undhu, situated at its uppermost limit, could only have been blasted and charred beyond all imagination in the catastrophe. Final breakage was the demonstrated reality – the entire movement of the Whurrld. The late poets, even in the gathering senescence of the times, with each of their words caged in the desiccated formulas of an all-enveloping decadence, had still caught a vivid glimpse of the dread contour. O scorched and shattered Ashenzohn! Your highest and holiest place – if it exists in truth at all – is no more than a blackened relic of doomed aspiration. Our damned Way-Stump, rooted in an ocean of blood, crowned with an abolished heaven.
