"But you did this to him."
"I know you struggle to understand it. It is what my father taught, the only way I knew how to connect to others, and I so much wanted to connect. My father was proud, and I forged something real with Napoleon. From that day on the Suns watched over me perhaps more than the others. Over the years some of them turned against him and were punished, but never me. Many of them became merely the attendees of Courts he held himself, hoping for handouts, too afraid to take risks of their own. He allowed this, tolerated it. But for me, ah…"
He goes quiet.
"You fell from grace."
The next image is of Ruin standing on a beach with the sun setting behind him. The corpse of Napoleon lies beside him. He is dressed in different clothes, there is a pipe sticking gaily from his lips, but he is dead.
"My greatest shame," says Ruin, "is that I never really wanted him to die. What impressed the Suns in my long, extended tortures, was also my weakness." His voice thickens but he pushes on. "That weakness is how you were able to beat me, Ritry, and this is the moment where I realized it. More than anything, I wanted a partner. A friend. All the greatest joys I had taken from Napoleon came not from his pain, but from the closeness the pain afforded us. We experienced so much together, all of it new and exciting, building such stunning memories. I loved him and I believe he came to love me too, in a way."
He turns to Doe with limpid eyes. "I believe you loved me too."
"I hated you," Doe says. "I killed you in the worst way possible."
He smiles. "That's why I know it is true. Great hate stands adjacent to great love, kissing cousins in passion. The two are adjoining chambers of the same heart."
Doe shudders. Looking at the comical figure of Napoleon on the screen, she spots the tell-tale signs of make-up on his face to cover up the burgeoning decay. Ruin wanted to keep his plaything alive even after death.
"You never moved on."
He sighs. "No. My father tired of my resulting depression. His gaze moved on to others and I was left to do as I wished, out of the glow of his gaze with no prospect of ever reaching those dizzy heights of attention again. Of course I tried. I walked thousands through the same path I took Napoleon, but it was never the same. Until, of course, I found you."
The image changes to one familiar to Doe. It is a dark incubator room, where an artificial womb wheezes out its seven-tone pulse. Within the vat lies the baby Ritry Goligh, bathed in a thick purple liquid.
"I felt you from across a city. I had to come see, and when I found you I knew I'd found the one who would save me. I guarded you jealously. I kept you hidden from my father and the others. As you grew I watched. I protected you in the War, and when the time came I prepared a new way that we might walk a path together."
Now he is weeping silently.
"And I was right. You are special above all. I don't want to surrender you to the Suns, Ritry." Here he reaches out and clutches Doe's sleeve. "I don't want him to have everything. It wouldn't be fair. You belong to me."
Doe doesn't pull away. She watches the artificial womb and listens to the odd music it makes, thinking of each tone as a member of the chord she knows.
Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti.
The more she listens the more she begins to understand.
Me sent her here, for this. The Suns has Me, and Me needs her help. She's come this far, now she must go all the way. She will do whatever it takes to save him.
She looks into Mr. Ruin's mad, foamy, weepy face and tells him exactly that.
"I'm going to kill King Ruin, and you're going to help me."
RITRY GOLIGH
20. WRONG
I wake from a Lag, laid out on my chest on a surgical table, pinioned knee and elbow while men and women in white coats saw into my skull.
Vibrations fill my head. What teeth I have left chatter against each other as the toothed blade grinds into bone. There is no anesthetic, there are only restraints to hold me in place. Pain hits as the plating of my skull bores through. There are few nerves in the skull below the skin, but that doesn't do anything for the dread.
They are sawing down to my brain.
I try to speak but my tongue doesn't work and nobody's listening anyway. These are only hands here; I feel the slackness in their movements, operating on autopilot. King Ruin is not here and they are just Soul-less machines completing his programmed work.
It goes on for a long time, the saw thundering like a tsunami in my head until the task is complete and they prize off a skullcap of bone. It pulls away and I feel the strings of fibrous white connecting tissue tug away.
I have never been more naked.
"Hands," I say aloud to the surgeons in this room, my voice slurring. Slaves to King Ruin. That is all they are and what I will never be. "You're all just hands."
The operation goes on and I drift on the pain. His hands come and go in silence, working on my skull then down my back, digging out the sides of my spine. Incisions are made. More sawing follows though I hardly feel a thing now. Scalpels run the length of my body like fingers etching a secret language.
Blood drips. Bone shears. Memories rise almost close enough to snatch then fall away. At some point King Ruin himself stands before me, holding my face lightly in his powerful hand.
What, I think?
What?
"Nearly done," he says. "Say goodbye to your body, Mr. Goligh."
He turns me. I don't know what he turns. It isn't my face or my body. My eyes, perhaps. I try to speak but nothing in me responds. I see the surgical room from above. I see a body lying facedown on a gurney, slit down the back like a cracked piece of leather. The skulltop has been sawn off and the brain is missing from where it belongs.
Panic strikes as I realize what he's done.
He turns me back to face him; so easy, so light. Eyes, a brain, and what else? Is that all I am? I try to scream but have no lips, no throat, no vocal cords.
"Let's begin," he says.
He hangs me in the tank of an artificial womb. Its tones cycle through an unnatural pulse; a seven-note chord. I am just organs and blood within it, boneless and devoid of muscle, floating in oil.
He stands by and watches. There is a mirror so I can see what I have become, and no way to close my eyes. I don't have eyelids anymore. I don't have arms to cover my face. I don't have a mouth to scream with, though I have ears to hear.
I listen to the seven tones of the womb and remember that they mean something, but I don't know what. So I was born, so shall I die. I study myself in the silvered glass, like a galaxy of brain, nerves, senses, veins, guts and muscles floating in the humming liquid, and wonder. I am hollow at the core. Now I have nothing. I am entirely at King Ruin's whims.
"You were always at my whims, Mr. Goligh," says King Ruin. The words warble through the glass tank, muted. He is standing before me as a beautiful woman now, listening to my thoughts. I can't turn away, can't cover my ears, can only watch and listen.
"All creatures are ultimately my hands," this female hand goes on. "I use them as I see fit. Some I slough off, some I retain. Should I wish it, you will have a new body. Within it I could strip you over again, top to bottom. We can repeat this many times and it will never become comfortable. It will never be easy. How long can you hold to this strange, secret voice in your Core, I wonder? How many bodies would I need to take from you, piece by piece, before you finally break?"
I can't speak, can only think. I imagine my organs leaping out of the womb and choking him. They wrap around his neck and wring the life from his eyes.
She laughs. "Or maybe you never will. It doesn't matter. There are things in our mutual friend that I did not expect, that will tell me what I need to know." She pauses. "In Mr. Ruin." I shudder at the name. "Do you remember him? I suppose not." She leans in and peers at me curiously, as though I am some exotic fish in an aquarium. "What did you do, Mr. Goligh? Something very clever, I think. Something secret. Many of my hands have died to find out, but the moment is com
ing. I think there will be answers inside Mr. Ruin."
I have nothing to say. I don't know anything. All these are just meaningless words in my disembodied ears.
King Ruin smiles. "Maybe there are even pieces of you? Of Doe, Ray, La, and Ti? Of So and the boy Far?"
I don't understand. More words.
Her smile becomes a grin. "I know all about you, now, Mr. Goligh. Or should I say, Me?" She is pleased with herself, but I feel nothing. "Your history. The decades 'Mr. Ruin' stalked you. I salvaged as much from the wreck of his mind. He wanted you for a friend, didn't he? A sad case indeed. But not I. Since the day I was born I have hungered for only one thing, and you know what it is. The power of the bridge. I knew it once, and I will take it either from you, or from those other parts of your chord I have yet to meet."
She gestures at the mirror where the parts of me float in their oily artificial womb, dangling like offal in a butcher's window.
"In the meantime, answer me this. Do you find yourself repulsive, Me? This is what people are made of, after all. You are just a fragment, and I have reduced you by weight to your proper size. One-seventh of a man. I must say, the work Ritry has done truly is peerless. To break your own Soul into seven parts? There is poetry in that, and in this. There is beauty and ugliness in both of our works, don't you agree?"
I look at my organs and feel wordless horror. There is no nausea anymore, not without a body to feel it. There is only horror that deepens and settles upon me like a baked-on mantle of mud.
"Perhaps I can help with that."
She reaches down into the womb. Her hand roves before my eyeballs and down into the mass of my hanging organs, holding a pair of surgical shears. I can only watch in the mirror as she snips something away. I do not know what it is, tendon or gristle or veins, but to watch it sink away in the mirror sickens me beyond expression.
"It will always feel like this," she says, almost conciliatory. "Do you imagine you could get used to it?"
I hardly understand what is happening now. What she wants. I can't think of a thing to stop it.
"You can't stop it," she says, almost tenderly, cutting another piece of me away. "Or even help it along. It's just part of a process. Can an egg crack itself?"
I search for something, some solid ground to stand upon but I can't find a thing. How did I resist this far?
"Do you feel like weeping?" she asks, as the shears slice a loop of intenstine. "Do you feel like calling out for your mother?"
I never had a mother, I think, and she laughs, because she knows this too.
not this
Then comes the voice. I'd forgotten it existed. I'm glad it is here.
"There it is!" cheers King Ruin. "I heard it. Now can I find it?"
I sense her shuffling through the raw wounds in my Molten Core even as her shears continue to trim through the remains of my body.
"Maybe it's this," she muses, and drags a memory up from the deepest recesses of my mind, forcing me to re-live something so old that I don't recognize it. I see myself as an orphan child, when my adoptive parents strapped me to a chair. They are seeking their own path to the aetheric bridge, and they jack into me day after day for their research, writing then erasing memories from my infant brain, retarding and scarring my brain. I see an orange rattle then I forget it, then I see the same orange rattle again time after time.
"Fascinating," says King Ruin. "Is this when you learned to partition yourself? I suppose it is. Look at you here, Mr. Goligh! So small but so resilient. You would have been a perfect candidate for one of my experimental Courts. But never mind, I have you now."
She Lags the memory root and branch. I feel it tearing from my Solid Core like skin, scraped away with the thumbnail of her mind. I have no mouth but still I scream for long minutes. I gaze at my eviscerated organs in the mirror and scream as some new conception of what I am takes hold.
me
-comes the voice,
me
-but I don't know what this word means or where it comes from, whether it intends to help or hurt me or just laugh at my pain. I scream but it keeps on speaking, telling me-
me
and,
not this
-until somehow, gradually, I grow calm. The voice gives me a center, and a steadiness, and I find the strength to look at King Ruin again.
"Still?" she asks. "Are you transcending even this? That is truly inconceivable. Is this another of your tones, dear Me? Powerful Ray, perhaps, or shy So? Could it be Far, the boy? Is this how you have succeeded in passing through the bridge so many times?"
I can only think in single words. Stop. Please.
"I could stop," she says, "but why would I when I'm so very close? Will you jack the bridge for me, if I ask?"
No, I think, yes, no.
no
I am torn between the voice and the King.
"Even, could you?" she asks. "I don't think so. There's so little of you left."
She waves at the mirror. Even as she does it the shears slide in and cut off the purple bag of my stomach. I feel it as a short sharp pain, but the sight of it dropping is worse.
"Perhaps you could," she muses. "You have done other wonderous things. To break a Soul across two minds is a truly unique feat. One more thing for you to teach me."
She snips away more tendons and organs and I feel madness beckon. I cannot control anything.
"Even this?" asks King Ruin. "Yes, even this."
She cuts away my heart. Its pulse stops and it drifts to the floor of the tank, leaving only the soft seven tones of the womb for a pulse. She cuts away everything that remains; the last feathery fronds of my nerves, the last shreds of muscle and ligament, until only my eyes, my ears, my brain and my spinal cord remain.
"Now we are here," she says, the hand breathing heavily. "This is what you resolve to, Mr. Goligh. This is what all that pretense was for, a few pounds of meat in a vat of oil. Do you feel foolish now for ever defying me? Do you wish to defy me further?"
I have nothing to say now. The total dislocation has remade me. I'm no longer a person. I'm barely a fragment. I cannot affect the world in any way; all I can do now is watch, and judge.
I judge her.
This is wrong. I think it like a mantra, keep thinking it as she scowls and Lags more, and digs more. The words fall away but the intention can't be shed even as she tears into my brain, cutting away the frontal lobe, digging down through gray cortex to the white bulb of the hypothalamus at the center, seeking the seat of the Solid Core.
In the process I am reduced to a word; a single word that chimes in time with the word from inside, bleating out what I am and what I mean with no longer any fear of death or hope for salvation.
wrong
wrong
wrong
wrong
wrong
"Very well," she says, bringing the shears down a final time, "let your chord show me the way."
THE CHORD
P. TI
The sound of helicopters grows louder like the churn of the ship's screw fighting through dense lava, and Ti hunkers in position atop the wall, manning the projectile QC and howitzer.
Ray's propped-up bodies are lashed into an elasteel trigger line, ready to fire on Ti's yank. Now Ray is gone, in hiding, and it falls to Ti. She watches the darkening sky as the helicopters grow larger. These are bigger than the others, with triple rotor-hubs and multiple howitzer ports, grim batteries of missiles under their bellies like strange black crustaceans carrying their own eggs.
The particle QC won't do much to these machines but keep them warm; they have rippling QC shields. The howitzer will play a tinkling tune off their hulls. Even the Lag worms might not have much impact, certainly not in a single leaping bite.
And there are twenty of them. Each one looks to harbor eight marines, so four pulses, meaning one hundred and sixty votive-ready marines coming in all.
And only two of them; Ray and Ti, and Ray with bones still made of jelly.
The heat of the twin suns is nearly scalding now. The whole black sky is tinged red like an infected eyeball. There can be no doubt now that the gravity of the suns is holding this Sunken World together. Without them all of this would have deflated under its own weight long ago.
"T-minus five," Ti whispers to herself. They resolved not to communicate on blood-mic as the incoming marines might catch the transmission. Her presence here should come as a surprise to them; the only advantage they have.
Four.
The sound of rotor blades becomes impenetrable, a hammering wall of noise she can only endure as the rampart shudders around her. In her heart Ti is fairly certain she is going to die. She doesn't want to die but she misses La so much already; it isn't right for twins to be apart.
T-minus three.
She peers between the gap of the howitzer and the projectile QC. The great black dripping machines are so close it stops her breath. She ducks back down and reaches for the first elasteel line, which she gives a tug on. Eleven muskets down the line fire in ragged unison.
CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK
A hail of tiny lead balls flows out toward the incoming force, to be met by implacable black armor. The thunder of blades sucks at Ti's breath and she clamps down her HUD.
She can't be seen now. To be seen would ruin everything.
T-minus two.
The front rank of helicopter-tanks drop missiles from their bellies, which whine as they catch the air then-
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
They tear into the wall where the musketfire came from, erupting the stonework in relentless explosions and showering the air with sharpnel and mortar-sand. Ti reaches to the second elasteel line and tugs it.
The trebuchets in the courtyard all drop their counterweights at once, their long arms arc upwards and fling their payloads out to the enemy; the bodies of dead soldiers. Ti barely breathes as the first of the corpses apexes then falls. It comes close to the slowing helicopter line but doesn't quite reach them.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 36
