The inferno rises, and rises, and at last, breaks.
Involutions rendered a hundred minds strong finally crash as spume all about me. Everything is rewritten. Everything is under the Bell. We collapse, and around us this vast ship finally comes to a long, lone toll, as we snuff down upon a dry world, a grey desert planet, stocked with heat sinks and Gideon bores.
I stagger to the glass to look out over the world that was once mine. It is all craters. I fall in the corridor, struggling to hold on to what I am, as the sands billow up around us.
* * *
Simulacra wake me with water. The corridors are empty. I dimly remember the long search, but there is no sign of the other captains. Perhaps they have already gone out to my world, to find Temetry. Perhaps they all fell under the Bell.
I look out and see this planet's atmosphere sparkling like corolla borealis, flecks of mist catching the reflections off my Bell's sloping sides. I feel the branes thrumming around me, through my mind, filling me with possibilities.
I exit with nothing but the captain's clothes on my back. This place is a desert, and the air is hot and dry. I feel the heat from their sinks radiating up from the grey sand. I walk a little way, past the silver Gideon bores, past the crowds of people watching and waiting. I see the 100, hastily turned out and waiting for admittance, flanked by their parents, grand and fierce hope on their faces.
They watch in confusion as I climb a dune and sit at the top. The vast weight of my Bell towers above me, shadows everything. I am yet its captain.
A man walks from the crowd to join me. He is perhaps as old as me, dressed in simple brown smocks. He sits by my side, but says nothing, only looks at me as though he knows me, with sorrow, with love.
He holds something out to me, on the palm of his hand. It is a speckled white sand-hopper. It is a pretty thing, its long legs stretched out to skein it over the hot desert surface. I reach out, thinking to touch it, expecting it to flee, but it does not move. I touch its back, its side.
It is folded paper. I lift it from his hand, turn it over in my own. The folds and twists of its craftsmanship are stunning. All of its limbs, its sinewy body, its whip-thin antenna, are folded from a single sheet of paper. It has been twisted into a single side, like a simple Mobius strip, non-orientable.
I have never seen anything like it. It is beautiful. In all my travels, in all my years upon the Bell, I have never seen anything so alive brought out of the folding.
I turn to the mute man, look into his eyes.
"Temetry?"
2. ANGEL, I
Gabriel's warm wings wrap around me, while the doctor tells my mother how best to cut him away.
"It's a simple matter," he says, speaking as if I am not right there in the room with them. "Cassandra need only decide, and you could un-root him yourself."
He's dressed all in white, like I imagine Gabriel must look, but of course he doesn't have any wings, and his eyes are black and cold as my mother's.
"But that's not an easy decision for her," he goes on, "much harder than for most. The Skein's inroads took longer to form in her mind, and that meant more intimacy; perhaps more than was advisable."
My mother turns her empty gaze on me. Everything about her is empty, even the silver necklace glinting around her pale white neck.
"Cassandra?" she says, so full of understanding.
I shake my head. "No."
Gabriel's low voice hums in my mind. "They're right, Cassandra. You know they are."
I clamp my hands over my ears, as if that will shut him out. Psychosomatics do muffle him somewhat, but I still feel his wings speaking across my skin, no longer soothing as they once were. He's said it many times before, and I recognize the pattern.
If his wings are not cut away, they will fossilize, and he will forever be my intermediary to the Skein. I will never reach out to it for myself, never look into my mother's eyes and see the person within.
"It's wrong," I hiss in the back of my throat, loud enough for only Gabriel to hear. "I don't care if I'll be marooned. You're my friend."
"I'd be your only friend," he says. His voice is clear again, he must have re-routed. He knows my mind well enough to do it without asking permissions.
"That's all I need."
"It's not, Cassandra, it's half a life. Let me go."
"No!"
My mother's dark eyes widen, and I realize I have shouted this last. Now the doctor is watching me too.
"Intimacy is the problem," he says clinically, into the silence. "Every moment longer the bonds between them thicken, and extraction grows harder. Her mind is ready, the Skein's lattice is fully formed, she need only decide."
I will not listen anymore. I get to my feet and stab a finger at him. "It's killing!" I say. "You call it extraction, but it's killing him."
The doctor shakes his head slowly, calmly, as though he has seen this a thousand times before. "Gabriel isn't real, Cassandra, you know that. He's only a protocol, to ready your mind for the Skein. He's done his job now, and you have to let him go."
I turn to my mother, but her eyes hold nothing for me. I do not want hollow eyes like that, open to every soul on the Skein. I have Gabriel inside me now, and that is all I need.
I run.
Through the door, into white long corridors. Gabriel feeds resistance into my muscles, but I push through. Together we speed away from the doctor and my mother, his wings flapping at the air around me. I feel his wing-draft across my skin, and know it's just a result of our intertwined minds, the 'intimacy' the doctor spoke of. Still it is real, and it is mine.
I see the small wooden door set low in the wall, and push through it.
Inside is the angel room. I remember it from the day I met Gabriel. On my hands and knees I scamper in. It is a seasonal room, at autumn. Long tree boughs hang overhead, riffled with crinkly yellow leaves, overcast by a warm sky. The grass is crunchy underfoot, like frazzled hair. In the middle is the big oak where they first planted Gabriel between my shoulder-blades.
"This is where his wings will grow," my mother had said, tapping my back. "Here, a bridge out to the Skein."
It had been summer then, all blooming flowers and butterflies. I hid in the crux of the oak, terrified, while the first tendrils of Gabriel hatched in my mind. I was afraid, but his soothing voice rang up from within, calming me.
They said nothing then about cutting him away.
I climb the oak's hoary old bark easily. It is not nearly so tall as I remember. In the crux I hug my knees close and blink back tears.
"I remember this place," says Gabriel. I feel him stretching into my eyes, looking out. His wings shiver excitedly over my skin. "I was born here."
"Where can we go, Gabriel?" I ask, desperate now. "Where will you be safe?"
He wraps me tight in his wings. I feel the curve of their downy feathers, cornstalk rough at the tips, swaddling me from within. "We're safe here."
"But they'll take you away."
"They can never do that. We made this mind together." He taps my forehead with his wingtip. I feel his touch like a real thing, firing pathways in my mind. "I'm part of you, Cassandra, forever."
I begin to cry. I am only 11. There's time yet, isn't there?
Gabriel hears. "Cassandra, my love," he soothes, as he had when his touch first grew into my mind, so long ago. "Don't be afraid. I'll be here."
I want to fight him, to call him a liar, but there is nothing for me to push against. He is part of me, and I cannot fight myself. I cannot let him die, nor can I keep him. For a time we huddle together, and his wings cocoon me like that first day, and I know it must be the last time.
"Look," he says, pointing out.
I see that it is snowing now. White wintery flakes paint the air, falling across my mother's black eyes. She is striding across the white-blanketed meadow, and I shudder back into the crux.
"I hate her," I whisper.
"No," says Gabriel. "You don't. You don't even know her."
<
br /> She arrives at the oak, her head at the same height as mine. I feel like a baby curled up before her.
"Cassandra," she says. Perhaps her voice is sad, but I cannot tell without the pathways to the Skein, showing me the colors of her mood. Perhaps her face is sympathetic, but to me it seems only flat and white, as meaningless as the snow. "I know it is hard. I know it is so hard."
"Don't take him," I whisper. It is pathetic, I know that, but today I am pathetic. "Please mama."
Her eyes show nothing. She reaches to her neck, and pulls clear the silver locket she always wears. I have seen it many times, but never inside. Now she opens it, a tiny click, and holds out the interior for me to see. Within is written the name 'Gabriel'.
"I loved my angel too," she says.
I begin to sob again.
"I love him now," I whisper. "I don't want him to go."
She takes me in her arms, and hushes soothing sounds, and slowly her touch paints over the feel of Gabriel's wings, and her voice gradually eclipses his.
"Goodbye, Cassandra," I hear him whisper, already as faint as angle-feathers in my mind, already he is fading, and I feel the bonds between us begin to stretch.
"Not yet," I say, "not yet."
Slowly my mother reaches around to my back. I feel it as she touches the root of his wings. She looks into my eyes, and I feel I can almost glimpse the life inside them.
"You'll understand soon," she says. "I promise."
I do not believe her. I don't want what she has to offer. But she is my mother, and I can feel Gabriel's joy deep inside. He wants this too. I give a small nod, a tiny betrayal, and my mother clasps his root, and with it plucks his wings from my back.
I feel a wrench as his mind yanks away, then the shock as my own mind settles into the grooves he has built, as alien as a foreign land. There is pain, and nausea, then the paths he's built light up and the dizzying mass of the Skein is upon me.
Sensation washes over me like a flood of butterfly wings, a barrage of sounds and sights, colors and information, tossing me like flotsam on a furious sea, and I am adrift. Gabriel's wings are gone and I am alone, lost, calling out for his touch.
Then I see my mother's eyes. They are no longer black and empty. The Skein thrums in them like a kaleidoscope, like a soul. I see in them the reflection of my own mind, forever shaped by Gabriel's touch.
"Welcome to the Skein, Cassandra," she says, as the dense richness of it fills me up, and I begin to see patterns, and meaning, and for the first time understand what the Skein truly is.
"Goodbye, Gabriel," I whisper, for the last time.
3. THE GIANT ROBOT AND THE MYNA BIRD
The giant robot stalked the empty world, looking for its lost arm.
It had fought in many wars from the beginning to the end. In ancient Thrace it had brought down the gates of Thermopylae, in Samarkand it crushed the Czar's men underfoot, on the fields of the Somme it walked the no-man's land and razed the flags of the Third Reich.
Towards the end though the weapons grew more powerful, the A-bomb and the B-bomb that followed it, and there were armies with artillery that could shred its skin, tanks that could push it over. Once it was a hero to them, but they turned, and blew its arm away, hunted it deep into the cold mountains, hunted until their own B-bombs fell and everything died.
Except the giant robot. It stalked the world as its dead makers disappeared into the earth, as its simple cog-driven brain barely ticked and chugged. Many years passed, and many of its tines rusted away, and steam pulsated erratically behind its sagging copper carapace. At night it dreamt fitfully of past glories, and of its lost arm, as it walked across the barren fields where once its masters had built their nests.
Then it found the myna bird. It was in the ruin of an old city that once boasted lights that lit up the whole sky. Its streets were crisscrossed with roads and elevated rails, though many of them were fallen now, their glass tubes shattered and filled with desert-sand and crabs. Its great skyscrapers canted leeringly against each other, and those that had already fallen lay like long desiccated whales, their spines bared to the skies, their innards of paper and desks spread wide and loamed in with new trees.
The robot clumped through the city, its giant rusty feet leaving indentations in the soft asphalt, driving deer before it, until it saw the myna bird.
It was affixed to the side of a tumbling building, a giant and bright neon sign, long unpowered. The robot's brain clanked and wheezed and steam shot from its ears. It had seen a myna bird once before.
It knelt by the sign and read the words emblazoned across its chest, some letters fallen and missing- 'H T HOTÇ T KIÇ B R!'
It reached inside the cavity in its chest, pulled out a long thin wire, and attached it to the back of the bird's head. The wire sparked, and immediately the bird's eyes moved and its flat wings danced.
"Hello," said the robot.
The myna bird's jaw waggled and its small pink tongue shook inside its mouth, then it spoke.
"Hello," it said, voice rusty with dis-use, its eyes focusing on the giant robot. "Have I been asleep?"
"Yes," said the robot, "for a very long time."
The bird looked around the empty and overgrown streets.
"All the people have gone," it said.
"Yes."
"I only see you."
"Yes," said the robot, "I am looking for my lost arm."
The bird looked at the missing space where the robot's arm should be.
"Have you seen it?" the robot asked.
The bird shook its flat head. "No, I'm sorry."
The giant robot nodded. "I've asked many others, in many cities. None of them have seen my arm."
"Perhaps I can help you find it."
"How can you help me?"
"I'm a myna bird. I can fly high into the sky on my strong wings. I can search the skies for your missing arm."
"You cannot fly, myna bird. You are a flat sign. How would you climb into the skies?"
"I knew how to fly once," said the bird. "Perhaps you could teach me to fly again."
Steam rushed and wheezed inside the robot's head. "Yes," it said eventually. "Perhaps I can."
* * *
The robot spent three months with the bird, at the old docks of the city, working all day and all night to fashion a new set of wings. At times the myna bird spoke about its long dream of flying. The robot spoke about its long hunt.
After three months, using the metal hulls from old battleships welded with electric sparks from its engine-heart, the robot completed the wings, and fastened them to the myna bird's back.
It cawed for joy as it first took to the air. Its plumage danced neon light in the dusk sky as it circled higher and higher over the city.
"I can see so far!" cried the bird.
"Do you see my arm?" called the giant robot.
"No, not yet! Perhaps around this next building!"
The bird flew higher, and circled wider, and as it went its calls grew dimmer and dimmer. Still the robot shouted its question incessantly, until he could not hear the bird at all.
It grew dark, and the robot sat alone.
It felt something different in its big clanking mind, something slow and painful, something it had learned to forget a long time ago.
The robot could not cry, nor sob, but its body shook when it felt something. That night the whole city shook with it, as the robot learned again what it was to be alone.
* * *
The next day it resumed its walk. It walked for years, even traveled between the continents underwater. The steam in its head fizzled and sparked as water seeped in. Its thoughts became slow and cold, like the depths of the oceans around it.
Sometimes it woke to find itself standing frozen still. It remembered fuzzy steam dreams of battle with other robots, of men clustered around shells, of the first of the giant glaring B-bombs going off in the stratosphere.
Each time it woke a little slower, a little weaker, but still it
trudged on.
It walked through long forgotten battlegrounds, where the turret-mounts of tanks peeked through the settled dust of ages. It walked past great toppled frigates on land, and graveyards of fallen jet-fighters, their rusted metal frames crackling like dry leaves under his giant metallic feet.
Time passed, and the giant robot's body decayed. Years of neglect had worn down its engines, its joints, the steam-pumps of its mind, so it became slow and stupid. It found itself lying on its side, trying to walk into the earth. At times it found itself walking with only one leg, in cities it didn't know it had arrived in, in mountains it didn't know were there. Once it awoke atop a pyramid, sitting, looking out at the stars.
Finally, its joints seized as it strode across a wasteland crater where a B-bomb had once ignited, and all movement ceased.
The robot stood still and silent on the empty ravaged plain.
Slowly its thoughts quieted. Its eyes dimmed, and it dreamed of its lost arm in the distance. It thought of its makers, the people who had once buffed its chest, repaired its injuries, awarded it medals for valor.
Then at last, it simply winked out.
* * *
Ages passed around the robot. Seasons buried it in snow, which melted, then rain, which filled the crater up like a lake. Algae grew in its shade, and small frogs and fish came to live in its cracks and crevices. When the summer heat came the crater dried up, but the frogs and creatures remained inside the robot, living in pools, warmed by the robot's last ticking metronome, warm from the single jet of steam that flowed quietly inside its hulking metal frame.
Wind-born seeds took root in its seams, and rushes grew out of its eyes, trees bloomed from the rivet-posts of its knees. Bushes grew about its feet, and giant blooming flowers erupted from its head, craning towards the sun.
Slowly the bomb-crater filled with life, with the robot at the center.
* * *
One day the robot woke up. The myna bird was perched on the canopy of trees before it, a wire sparking from its chest to the robot's own. Hanging from the myna's small yellow beak was the robot's arm.
Cullsman #9 Page 3