High Tower Gods

by C L Corona

  Poor, damned Aleksia, taken away in the Bonelady’s coach too early. A tremor of memory—a flashing moment like the staccato loop of an early cinephoto—Aleksia grinning under the frizz of her wild hair, her dark eyes bright with fierce excitement. She'd been particularly proud of the Ulixes model. Even though towards the end she'd begun channelling most of her energy into a new project with Judakael. The idea was to upload human personalities into a memory bank. Another project lost to the ether after her death.

  Elian and Judikael had finished their dead colleague's work on Ulixes, breathing life and intelligence into the creature, but both, in silent agreement, had begun to shut down the chimera project after that. In the aching aftermath of Aleksia's death and their own secrets, the two had ceased production on the more human biochanicals and sold off the work plans for the lower-grade machines.

  All their notes on the original biochanicals were destroyed, and Elian and Judakael had each withdrawn from human society.

  "Remarkable," Elian said, after a long silence.

  "Is it?" The voice was sexless, and only faintly artificial in sound. They'd used recordings of Aleksia lecturing as a basis for this final model. The U models sounded the most human, and because of that, the most chilling.

  The chimera stepped past Martyn, only faint hints of the slow-rolling articulation showing it to be machine. The real give-away was the face. Aleksia had never wanted the chimeras to be able to pass as human. She’d made them caricatures of human archetypes.

  Ulixes' face was a bland white gelrubber oval, like a painted mask made for a Ghima-performance. Aleksia had based the chimeras' faces on the traditional masks of the Ghima-theatre—each model using a different classic form. Ulixes wore the face of Dreamer-Moon, white and calmly peaceful. Eyes closed, mouth the softest unmoving smile. "Is it truly?"

  Elian had always found Ulixes' visage rather disconcerting. The emotionless expression made everything it said seem slyly chilling. "Are you remarkable?" Elian stood and made her way to the chimera, and extended her hand. "I believe you are."

  The chimera gave no sign as to what it thought of being extended the simple courtesy of a human greeting, but it took Elian's hand nonetheless, and shook it. The biochanical's hand was cold, the fluids pulsing just under its gelrubber skin were coolants and micro-engine transporters, not blood.

  Elian let go. "But 'Is it a murderer?’ is a far more interesting question, don't you think?"

  "Is it?" It almost sounded like the chimera was smiling, and Elian couldn't help the faint shudder at hearing Aleksia's familiar tones replicated now, so many decades after her death.

  So much for professional distance. So much for isolation. Even when you removed yourself from the world, the world still came for you. "Why don't you tell me? Take a seat, and Martyn will bring us breakfast."

  "Er," said Martyn. "Pardon my ignorance, but...."

  "The Ulixes will convert the food to fuel. You could feed it scraps, of course—it was designed partially to recycle waste household products—but since this could be our guest's last meal, I think we can extend our hospitality to eggs and toast." Elian turned back to the chimera and gestured at the usually un-set place at the table. "Please, do sit down, we shall discuss murder once I've eaten. I’ve always found death before breakfast somewhat unpalatable."

  "This one loved him," Ulixes said, as soon as Martyn had placed the plates and taken his own seat.

  "After breakfast," Elian said. "Til then, hold that thought." She hesitated, then flipped back her veil. It wasn't as though the chimera would care that she hadn't aged like other humans. It didn't even see her in the same way that humans understood vision.

  Ulixes had a range of tiny implanted sensors all over that mask-like face and along its fingers and palms, which relayed changes in light and temperature and pressure to the brain that Judikael had programmed. It made as much sense to say the chimera could taste her face, or hear her face, as it would to say that it saw her face.

  ◆◆◆

  Once everyone had been suitably fed or recharged, Elian leaned back in her chair and gestured for Ulixes to speak.

  "This one loved him," it said again, and there was the faint waver of sadness in its stolen voice, the exact timbre of Aleksia's despair. "This one would never have hurt Francis, this one swears."

  "And yet," Elian said, and sighed softly, "there are cinerecords showing that you did. You drove a garden fork through his face, several times, and very messily." The various newspapers had been quite happy to play that clip over and over again. Grainy and dark as it was, the image had been clear enough. "Interesting choice of weapon, I might add."

  The chimera was silent except for the soft hum of its thoughts. "This one did not kill Francis," it said finally. "This one cannot hurt its master."

  "I am aware of that." Elian sat up straighter. If it hadn't been for her, the chimera would be nothing more than a hyper-aware machine in the rough shape of a human. It had been her alchemy that had given it life. Her creation that ran through the collection of tubes and fluids within. She had transmuted it from machine to—to what? Not a killer, Judakael's programs and her own experiments had been sure of that.

  Fifty years back there had been so much fear of a "rise of the machines", the papers full of headlines about how humans were welcoming their own extinction, how people would become slaves to their toasters, and other such nonsense. The fail-safes had been a practical necessity, they'd all agreed on it.

  Occasionally over the last half a century Elian had wondered if the squawking student activists with their SEMI HUMANITY IS SLAVERY banners and their FREE CHIMERAS tee shirts were the only ones with any sense.

  But one just had to think of what an uncontrolled chimera could be capable of, how it could be drafted into wars, made into a killing machine, and Elian knew that Judakael's program had been the right choice.

  And that choice meant the chimera at her table was not a murderer, cinefootage be damned to the Bonelady's palace. Elian leaned forward. "Why are you here?"

  "This one hopes for you to save it," Ulixes said. "This one had nowhere else to go."

  "Not nowhere. You could have turned yourself in and accepted the sentence of the authorities."

  The chimera shook its head, still dreamily expressionless. "No. You understand. You know why this one is here."

  "Why is it here?" Martyn interjected. "And on that note, are we going to be arrested for hiding a fugitive?" His eyes widened at the idea, obviously contemplating the extremely illegal private haze lab in the basement that Elian pretended not to know about.

  "I should hope not, though one never knows what idiocy humans come up with. No," Elian said firmly, and got to her feet. "The chimera is here because it knows, no matter what it remembers, or what was recorded, that it cannot have committed that crime."

  "How so?" Martyn's brow furrowed. "I mean, the evidence was pretty compelling, and old Francis Olsten certainly seemed rather convinced, you know, right before our friend here shoved a bloody great garden fork in his eyes."

  "If Ulixes had murdered Olsten—an impossibility already—it would have immediately gone into a permanent sleep mode. But there's more to this than a bit of programming. The alchemical process which gave it life is another of the fail-safes. The process of murder or violence would have sent chemical changes through the fluid centres and initiated a core melt-down, which would have completely crippled the biochanical brain. If the chimera had managed somehow to use a lock-and-key to override whatever protections Judakael programmed into it, it would still not have been able to get past that final fail-safe. It would need an alchemist."

  "I didn't realize there was any such protocol," Martyn said.

  "Of course not. It wasn't made public. And after we destroyed all our notes and research, much information was lost to the general human unwashed. But," and Elian smiled grimly at the chimera, "you knew it. That's why you came to me."

  Ulixes nodded. "This one knows you can save it."
/>
  "Not that simple. To prove your innocence I need to know who really killed Francis Olsten. And you're going to tell me."

  A protracted silence followed. "This one did not murder Francis Olsten."

  "Decidedly unhelpful." Elian sighed. A stubborn chimera was not going to be reasoned with, she knew. It was almost, but not quite, as stubborn as she could be when she knew she was right. This mess wasn't about the damned chimera, or poor little rich Francis Olsten. It was about things not working as they bloody well should. It was about greed, and people happy to hide their greed behind a veil of the Chimera Three's apparent incompetence.

  And Elian was not going to let that slide.

  "Martyn, bring us the speaking tube, pack our bags for a stay with the primitives, and prepare some form of transport. There are only two obvious candidates for our criminal, and I'm going to have to speak to them both. Then I can get an idea of which one has the brains to fake this little show. My money's on the son."

  "What?" Martyn spluttered.

  "Look again." Elian waved her hand toward the widescreen and it flickered back to life. There were more news reports now, all focused on the murder. "Billionaire, owned the largest group of medicinal pharmalabs in the country. It could be a business war, but I think it unlikely. Murder, especially using a method as elaborate as this, is far too personal. And expensive. Expensive could indeed mean a pharma rival, but Francis Olsten was one of those rare creatures who seemed to make no enemies—a true gentleman, even in business. So, we look to the personal," she gestured at the footage of the weeping woman, and the stern-faced young man holding her arm, giving her support. "We have a wife, and a son. The question that we have left is of the two of them, who would benefit the most from Francis' death?"

  "And which would be clever enough to use the chimera as the murder weapon?" Martyn said.

  Elian allowed herself a canine-baring grin. "Why, young Martyn, you’re following along quite nicely.”

  Thirty-two years old, and Martyn still managed to roll his eyes heavenward like a first-year student. "And you're going to work out which one it is how exactly? Will you torture them for information by reading your last thesis at them?"

  "This is why I keep you," Elian said. "That's almost genius." She filed the idea away for later consideration. "But, no. I'll not have to torture anyone this time. I'm merely going to go to the funeral."

  "God help us all—go to the funeral and do what?"

  "Observe." Elian smiled thinly, her eyes narrowed as though she saw not the breakfast room in her isolated house, but a milling throng of mourners in crimson, and all wearing their emotions, their truths, bright as widescreen advertisements. "I shall simply observe."

  This One Cannot Remember

  Leeburg metropolis was not as Elian remembered. True, it had been a good few years since she'd last bothered to make any trips to the sprawling city, but it had grown exponentially since she'd last visited. She frowned. A trip to her grandson Theudor, and what a waste of time that had been—him expecting her to be something else, and she faced with all her failure trapped in a wheelchair, deep in the grip of sickness. An uncomfortable, abortive reunion. Even immortal, Elian was not cut out to be anyone's grandmother.

  Elian crossed her arms over her chest and scowled as the rattling two-ton bakkie tore over the sand dunes, and hurtled closer to the city. The large travel handbag she'd brought with took up most of the space where her feet should be, and it made sitting on the passenger side far from comfortable. "I don't see why I couldn't drive."

  "When last did you drive anything more modern than a horse and cart?" Martyn asked.

  "Watch your tongue, I'm not quite as decrepit as you assume."

  He shook his head. "You may be an alchemical genius, but we only have the one bakkie."

  "Ridiculous," Elian said, but decided not to argue. It had been so many years since she'd needed to drive anywhere—or wanted to.

  She was happy in her isolation.

  Numb. Numb was a kind of happy. The best kind, because it came with no promise of despair on its heels. It was only the young who went chasing after joy—too stupid and human to realise that they would lose it as soon as they'd caught it. Like trying to hold sugar under a waterfall.

  "Are you sure this is the best idea?" Martyn asked. "Gatecrashing a funeral, with the murderer stashed away in our car?"

  "We are not gatecrashing. I secured a private invitation. After all, as Doctor Elian Maxwell, I have naturally been following the life and career of dear Francis for years, and my heart is broken at the loss of such a fine and beloved friend."

  "You never met him."

  "It was a modern friendship," Elian said. "Very modern. I am filled with grief."

  Martyn shot her a sideways glance. "This whole act will be more believable if you stop grinning."

  Elian unpinned her veil and tucked it firmly into her hat band. "Please, I can grin all I like, they're hardly going to know. And we have not stashed the murderer away in our vehicle." She drew in a deep breath. "We have stashed the suspected murder weapon away in our vehicle. There is a difference."

  "Semantics." Martyn swerved to avoid a particularly large new dune that had almost completely swamped a section of road, and slowed down.

  The city ahead was silver and bright as a comet; a flash and a glare of reflected sunlight.

  "Sometimes," Elian answered, "Semantics is all we have." She twisted around in her seat and craned to look back at the mound of baggage strewn on the back seat: a small rucksack belonging to Martyn. And a complete set of matched luggage belonging to herself.

  When she'd presented him with the entire set to pack into the back of the car, Martyn had looked more than a little put out, even going so far as to make snide comments about how they were not going on safari to another planet, until he'd worked out that Ulixes had been carefully dismembered and spread out among the series of wood and leather trunks.

  "Isn't that going to hurt her—it—the chimera?" he'd asked.

  "It will hurt less than being eradicated," was all Elian had said, and there were no more questions.

  Instead they had both pretended that the journey in to Leeburg was just a long-deferred trip. They'd shared a Thermos of tea and some of Martyn's home-baked biscuits (mostly drug-free, Elian had noted with a disappointed sniff) and the usual banter.

  But as they drew closer to the city, Elian grew quieter, and even Martyn stopped trying to make jokes. They were going to have to at least pretend to look like they were in mourning.

  The funeral—to which only family and close friends were invited—was being held in the little Temple of Sanursula, not far from the Sanursula Lady's University campus itself, where Elian had once been a young woman driven by her dreams of success and fame, and later, where she'd been driven by something more personal and pointed.

  Bringing the chimeras to life had been almost nothing more than a side project. Her real desire had been even more messianic. She'd devoted most of her research time working on an alchemical formula that would save her grandson before he was born, save him from a life of pain and misery, and save him from an early death.

  In the end, she’d failed to do anything more than prolong Theudor's death sentence. His torture.

  Instead, Elian had given life to machines.

  She would not think on that. Elian shifted her attention from failed experiments, and concentrated instead on what the last two decades had done to her city.

  Leeburg had grown corpulent. Streets that had once been narrow and leafy, lined with red-brick buildings and ornate iron railings, glassed-in lamps and buzzing wires, had transformed. Now sun-shuttles looped the city, their bullet shapes whizzing on a network that threaded between high rise buildings of mirror and glass; they swooped over and under bridges. The lights had changed too, their bowed heads replaced by what looked like ascending rockets.

  Some parts remained as they had for hundreds of years, a little like Elian herself, refusing change and sn
eering at the modern, their stone roots deep. They looked out of place.

  "I'd forgotten just how gloomy the old buildings were," Elian commented as they drove past the looming granite edifice of the Sanursula University with its clipped green lawns and vast broad staircase. In its immense shadow the Sanursula temple lurked like an afterthought, despite its ancient lineage. Elian had memories of working in the converted labs, the walls still covered with inscriptions and blessings in Old Heret, the gargoyles in the shadows.

  The roads around the temple were lined with long, grand cars, latest-model city-clickers, all of them indicators of old money and privilege. Elian's scarred and ancient bakkie bounced past them, until Martyn squeezed into a parking bay between two shark-like monsters, clicker-engines still humming gently as their panelled fins soaked up the light.

  "Look at them all," she added sadly, watching the small crowd being carefully managed by uniformed security. The people who'd come to pay their respects to Francis Olsten were a mixed crowd of harassed-looking middle-aged intellectuals, be-suited money men, and a flotilla of grandchildren and relatives in varying levels of age and distress. Everyone was in funereal crimson, bloody and stark. "All those blank faces. How many of them even cared who he was?"

  "You're a fine one to talk," Martyn said. "And why do you need a handbag that big? Did you decide to bring the laboratory sink, after all?"

  "Never comment on a lady's handbag, Martyn. It's uncouth, and besides, I need everything in here in order to stay ahead."

  "Ahead of what?"

  "Everything. Now, you'll need to help me walk." Elian set her veil back over her face. At least it wouldn't look too out of place at the funeral service.

  "Lost the use of your legs?"

  Elian sniffed. "Hardly, but I am in my nineties. It's going to look very odd if I just stride in there." Something approaching a smirk twitched one corner of her mouth. "Besides, the only way to get you into the main house with me after the service was to have you listed as my carer." She swung open her door and held out one arm for support. "So start caring."