Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Allow me to share some data with you, commander.” Howard routed the dump from his personal nodes through the AOI and into Dewdney. He was gratified to note Dewdney’s eyes widen. “As you see, intense research groups such as yours generally avoid psychosis. But you risk blind spots and self-sustaining inversions that can lead to mission failure. And that would mean that the Kamakirians would get the concession, and take over your precious SCAM.”

  Well, that was a definable fear, and enough of a fear to quash any further opposition from the commander.

  For over a hundred years, both Kamakirians and humans had been aware of the black hole around which the SCAM now orbited. The singularity had been merely a navigational hazard of some fifty standard solar masses, with nothing to mark it as any more interesting than any other piece of dark matter that held the universe together.

  Then a disabled Kamakirian ship had been caught by the greedy dead star. Before being completely sucked into the singularity, its crew had launched a message packet. Picked up decades later, it stunned the Commensality.

  As they fell into the star pit, the Kamakirian crew reported experiencing strange mental adjustments bordering on the transcendental, adjustments that came to be subsumed under the catchall term “metanoia.” And deep within the singularity’s domain, where nothing should be able to exist, they could discern something. Something big in a stable orbit, which wasn’t being sucked into that awful gravity well.

  The Kamakirians announced that they would study the anomaly exclusively, since one of their ships had discovered it (and died doing so). The Commensality ruled for them, but it was an academic decision, since neither Kamakirians nor humans could get anywhere near the hole, and long-range studies proved inconclusive.

  Then a human named Octavia Xibalba-Fitzsimmons developed the gravitic engine, a device that utilized the long-sought Fifth Force and permitted maneuvering in ultrahigh gravity fields. The gravitic engine created an island of stability—like a bubble caught in a vortex; it was able to remain stable by its complex movement and interaction with the forces around it.

  Plainly, this was the means whereby the mysterious Object maintained itself against the black hole’s perpetual desire, deep inside the event horizon.

  The humans declared their right now to study the whole enigma alone, since they had developed the technology to make it possible. The SCAM—existing at this point as only a CAD-gleam in an AOI’s neurons—would be fitted with a gravitic engine, allowing it to swirl round and about the hole, occasionally “surfacing” to take on supplies and download information.

  Diplomacy, negotiations, eventual mediation by the Free Machines, resulted in the birth of the Nepthys.

  Four standard years ago when Howard had first heard of the project, he had written in his Diary: “Nepthys, the Lady of the Temple, goddess of the future of the unknown.” And the oracle function had responded: “What are the secrets they trace in the sky?”

  The unique Nepthys, also denominated SCAM, assembled itself at a nearby red dwarf, and when it was ready, its AOI grown, it called for its citizen crew, all volunteers. Impelled within the hole’s reach, station and crew began a crazy spin orbit, a glyph so plectically ramified that the minicity would never repeat its position twice in the whole of Time. When the “bubble” of low gravity was farthest from the hole, crew and supplies could be taken on, data sent out.

  The first standard year of its assignment passed before the Nepthys shot far enough away from the hole to relay its first databurst.

  It told news of the Object.

  And of the death of its original socio-plectic engineer, the need for a replacement.

  The humans had twice passed between the Object and the hole. At those times Nepthys’s sensors had been able to intercept the infalling radiation of all energies emanating from the Object and to draw a limited picture of it.

  It didn’t look like any ship or station ever seen in the Commensality. It looked like a castle designed by a mescal-crazed Escher. In its angular windows lights glowed, something vast and dark moved.

  The Transvaluator? Howard had since had cause to wonder. Or simply, it would soon be plausible, another mortal victim of that unknown agency?

  As for Howard’s predecessor, supposedly, by training, the most stable of minds, he had inexplicably committed suicide in a novel way, making an EVA outside the protective field of their gravitic engines.

  Was it his ghost, perpetually caught in some wormhole, that was raising havoc onboard?

  Howard had no feeling one way or the other. All theories seemed equally valid.

  Time was discongealing around him now.

  Howard’s foot, suspended infinitely in midstride, now fell normally toward the floor.

  The second doorway drew near.

  It was very, very hard to be certain, but Howard felt he had three standard days to make it to the escape pod. At the end of that period, Nepthys would be at one of its infrequent apogees. He could launch the pod and have some hope of not being sucked into the hole.

  During that time, he would search the Gradients for any survivors—at least those who could move under their own power and sustain themselves. It would be no favor to bring the irrecoverably ultrawarped out into the glare of a disgustedly fascinated populace.

  In some ways, he felt the decision to leave was the supreme act of cowardice. What human being before him had had the chance to explore Pandemonium? If he could only grasp the mechanics of the Transvaluation, its necessary (?) laws and rules, he would be the first cartographer of hell. Unless Hieronymous Bosch had had similar visions. Did theory not offer the possibility of travel backwards in time? Perhaps the metanoia resonated pastwards, awakening others to the strangeness. Perhaps, he thought, I am the mother of all weirdness.

  His thoughts had gotten more and more unruly. Was this what had overtaken his predecessor? Was his cadre hypersensitive by training to the Transvaluation? Could he turn that training now to his survival? He should be able to channel his thoughts and feelings, however odd. Make a game of them. Even the drug-induced visions of ancient shamans had gained order from the ability of the mystics to think ascriptively.

  Could he summon a spirit guide? A Virgil, an Isis?

  But what if there were no ordered system behind the chaos? A hell of concentric rings rang true for the Renaissance, but the hell for an ungraphable orbit—? Perhaps there is no poetry in chaos …

  He stepped through the second doorway—

  Untouched? Seemingly.

  A large dining hall stretched out before him, pleasingly empty of bodies, though not of looping vines and fleshy flowers. He could smell food. He crossed toward the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. There, he hesitated. Entered.

  One of the rogue ganglia had subverted the servocooks, which now poured out liters of spaghetti and meatballs. The floor was awash in them.

  Howard attempted to assert control, speaking aloud.

  “I am hungry and about to eat. I am hungry and think about five hours of objective time have passed since my last meal. Therefore, I will now eat.” For good measure he added, “I am Howard Exaker.”

  All of this brave facade melted away as pink rose petals began to rain from the ceiling. A woman’s voice trilled out “The Caverns of Altamira,” a hit from the twenty-third century. “They heard the call, and they wrote it on the wall …”

  Howard recognized the voice wistfully as belonging not to a professional singer, but to a musicologist he’d met many years ago on Fezzon. She had been his first real lover. It made him sad and angry that such a sweet memory should manifest itself amidst such alienage. Even the dearest, most familiar parts of his life were being estranged from him.

  He fell to his knees amid the edible slop.

  As he ate and cried and choked, some of the rose-petal rain began to turn blue. By the time he was sated, the blue petals covered every surface. He had eaten several, despite his best efforts.

  Apparently, that had been a bad mis
take.

  As he stood, Howard felt a change overtaking him.

  His arms fused to his side, his legs melded. Rotundity shaped him. Simultaneously, he felt himself stretching upward toward the ceiling, rooting downward.

  In less time than it would take to tell a nonexistent companion, the transformation was complete.

  The reflective surface of a storage unit across the kitchen revealed his new appearance to his eyes.

  He was a fluted column with living kohl-outlined eyes embedded in it. Colorful animated hieroglyphics—including the twin lions Shu and Tefnut—cavorted across his surface.

  Suddenly the kitchen vanished, to be replaced by—

  By a space that could never have existed aboard the SCAM. A space of such alien geometries that even the Transvaluation could not have rendered it with the Nepthys as a starting point.

  Howard knew without a doubt that he was now aboard the Object.

  Futilely, he writhed nonexistent muscles, struggling to break free. Then, enervated by the effort, he tried to study his new ambiance, in preparation for the approach of the castle’s ogre- owner, the barely glimpsed shadow thrower.

  This exercise was nearly as pointless. Howard couldn’t decide which blocks of improbable color in his vision were the walls and which the space. Acute angles swapped identities with obtuse ones. Dimensions exfoliated and curled around him.

  The strain made his kohl-rimmed eyes drip tears. He could feel them run down his marmoreal column-body. The hieroglyphs there had ceased to cavort, apparently as frightened as he. A buzzing pink light inside his tubular ?body? filled him with a taste of hot pewter. Two other groups of sensations presented themselves to him, but like a blind man confronted suddenly with sight, he had no words or orderings to represent them.

  He floated ?without moving? for twenty-five years or a second or two.

  Then the Object’s resident approached.

  The sensors aboard the Nepthys had seen a “shadow,” and deemed it necessarily a shadow of something.

  But the shadow was the something.

  A convoluted black sheet composed of innumerable scintillating particles, particles that seemed to wink in and out of existence, down ways as complex as the orbit of the Nepthys. Plainly, each mote was independent, yet the whole was cohesive, moving by space-time warpage. Its size was impossible to discern in this alien environment.

  The sheet wrapped itself around the column that was Howard, blanking his vision. An impression of intelligence similar to that of an AOI filtered through to Howard.

  A construct. A matrix of information and processing. This thing was not one of the Object’s builders, but simply one of their tools. The originators of the Object were gone, Howard instantly knew, gone for millennia, Transvaluated.

  Confirmation of a sort seeped through to him. Desperately, without a mouth, he tried mentally hurling questions at the shadow. But the questions just spawned and proliferated horribly in his own ?mind?. All and everything became an incandescent blur as his own thoughts echoed and re-echoed in his ?mind?. Stream of consciousness be came white noise. Without sensory input, a deadly solipsism was threatening to swallow him like—

  Like a black hole.

  Someone, Howard managed to conceptualize, someone to talk to.

  At that instant, the matrix-shadow was gone.

  Everything was quiet in his !mind!.

  Howard stood in a comprehensible yet impossible (because so far removed) environment.

  The sky was blue-green, the sun too large for Earth.

  But just fine for Fagen III, a familiar scene, his last triumph, obviously plucked from his psyche.

  Around Howard stood a few of Fagen III’s famous kilometer-high pinelike trees. Between the pines, binding them to each other—and binding Howard to the trees!—were countless sticky threads woven by—or at least tenanted and traversed by—hundreds of tiny slate-gray caterpillars.

  But none of these features surprised Howard as much as the body he wore.

  That of Beatrice Somerville, the Transvaluator’s first human victim.

  He had once seen Beatrice naked, in the null-gee natatorium. He found her exquisitely beautiful, and an ache to possess her blossomed in his loins. But any pursuit would have screwed up the ’plectics he was trying to generate. So he, celibate priest of social engineering, had acted cold, and she, once appreciative, then quite stung, had dived up into the water bubble and swum away from him.

  First Osiris, now Arachne, thought the bound Howard wryly. The Transvaluator is obviously not a small mind, for it is unbothered by any foolish inconsistencies.

  Several of the caterpillars were making their way across the webbing, heading for Howard’s oddly nonmale pubis. Feeling a disinclination to be crawled upon, Howard—or Beatrice—wrenched violently, breaking his—or her—body free from the elastic webbing. It coiled away from her in all directions.

  Stepping back from the web, she realized that despite the high big sun, it was chilly.

  No garments around, and the idea of covering herself in the webbing was distasteful, almost as if the substance would form a—poison shirt?

  Herself a female Heracles, now? There was a thought. What baker’s dozen of Labors awaited? What could be expected of her?

  Howard knew this was not really Fagen III. Plainly, she was still in the grip of the Transvaluator. She suddenly had the feeling that its goal was simply to communicate with her or another human, had been all along. All the horrid carnage aboard the Nepthys was merely fumbling attempts at speech in a medium it did not fully comprehend.

  If that were the case, then there should be further objective correlatives here to the Transvaluator’s intentions.

  She carefully scanned her immediate environment.

  Yes, there, high in the web.

  Twin flashes of green and gold. The objects seemed to swell in her vision, as if the eyes in this (imaginary? artificial?) body had telescopic properties.

  Green earrings, jade wrapped with golden threads.

  Those rings of rare design …

  Half-memories swamped her. She had owned those earrings, perhaps across innumerable lifetimes! They were hers by right. If only she could lay her hands on them, she would remember everything!

  Tentatively, she advanced to the web. The caterpillars ignored her, save for forming complex icons with their bodies. She began pulling the webbing with both hands. This produced the opposite effect of what she had intended. Releasing the tension in some of the strands had caused the earrings—formerly in dynamic balance—to shoot upwards.

  Frustration, intense! She was not Howard or Beatrice in mind now, but only the emotion of Wanting. There seemed to be no rocks or branches to throw at the earrings, only a soft green moss covering the ground, and the webbing certainly wouldn’t support her weight.

  Studying the matrix (was it composed of black motes that glimmered?), she began to discern in it elements of the puzzling geometry exhibited by the interior of the Object. That angle there corresponded to the direction from which the computer-shadow had approached, for instance …

  Slowly, using her modified intuition, she began to see how the webbing held together. If she could oscillate these several strands in just the right pattern, the earrings would fall—if not to the ground, then at least to a reachable support strand.

  After minutes of running mental simulations, she knew just how to do it.

  In a short time the green earrings, which had begun about six meters over her head (and at one point in the process soared to at least twelve), were within grasping distance.

  Her eager hands closed around them.

  A chorus of piping voices immediately sounded.

  “Isolate and oscillate, meditate and palpitate! Make a hole in the system, make the system your whole!”

  Clutching the earrings, Howard turned.

  Hovering in the air were nine winged cherubs. Babyish chubby-cheeked heads without bodies, they sprouted their wings in some improbable fashi
on from where necks should have been.

  The Nine fluttered hummingbird-like, dipping and chittering.

  “Integrate the potentate, exacerbate the precipitate! Take your soul into the storm, take the storm into your soul!”

  After this last Oracle, the cherubs seemed to be gathering themselves to leave. “Wait!” shouted Howard. “Tell me! What happened to those who built the Object?”

  “We ate them,” giggled the cherubim. “They tasted fine, and we learned a lot. But we made a mistake! A bad mistake!”

  Now the cherubs fell to chastising each other, each one yelling simultaneous accusation and defense.

  “It was your fault! No it wasn’t!”

  “We broke the Object’s gravitic-engine controls. We had to go and play with them, didn’t we! It was stuck inside us. We couldn’t make it carry us outside the event horizon. Trapped! Always and forever, trapped!”

  Plainly disturbed, the flock of cherubim began to depart. As they arrowed off, Howard heard them utter a last, disturbing phrase.

  “Until you came! Until you!”

  With the departure of the cherubim, Howard realized that she was clutching the earrings so tightly that they were digging painfully into her palms.

  Reaching up, she applied them to her earlobes.

  The earrings gripped flesh.

  Burrowed—or melted, or fused—inward, with a sensation of frozen hydrogen sublimating.

  One of the pines was now a column. A column with eyes.

  Was it himself? Was he still aboard the Object?

  Howard walked toward it.

  Into it.

  And out.

  Howard found himself in his own body again, sitting at a small table with a clothed Beatrice Somerville. They seemed to be in the private room of a restaurant. Or was it the dining chamber aboard the Nepthys, where this whole madness had begun?

  Howard found words unbidden rising to his tongue. “So, you were the template …”

  Beatrice smiled alluringly. “The human template only. Don’t forget, the hole had already swallowed and integrated a shipful of Kamakirians and the builders of the Object. Who, by the way, called themselves something approximating “Wudocs.”