by Tanith Lee
And then at eighteen hours a wall opens and a tube comes snouting through, with a mechanical eye gleaming at its tip. peter shifts, not intending to, and his body returns about him with a pang of nauseating heaviness. He is very stiff, cannot roll away from the pursuing serpent, which probes him with its chill eye and with a poreless tasting tongue.
‘No — ’ cries peter.
‘Everything will be quite all right,’ whispers the tube from somewhere in its unessential being, ‘lie still, peter. Let me examine you, peter.’
peter lets out a scream. As he plunges to his feet (like a crashing upward fall), the icon of the woman breaks into stars upon the ceiling and scatters like soft snow which — even as he runs from home — he tries to catch with hands and mouth and eyes.
shashir partly sits and partly reclines in his globe in upper top, and permits his mind to wander through the labyrinth of its own self, after the shade of anna, whose recording he has just replayed.
Once before in the seven decades of his service to the Machine, one of the watchers came to shashir with a request to end sexual meetings with a woman of his class. The request was naturally granted, but a year later, the watcher, a man shashir dimly believes was called millo, developed health problems. He was reassociated with the woman, and their meetings were resumed. millo’s health improved, but for some while, from time to time, he would still try to terminate the sexual meetings. His later requests were listened to but otherwise ignored.
By this juncture, millo has ceased petitioning.
It is as if anna has come to fill the gap.
shashir loses interest in the fundamentals of the problem. He allows himself to sink down through two or three of the upper sleep layers into the half-trance he mostly cultivates, and in which he is most comfortable. Some of shashir’s most profound insights are achieved in this state. It is now he feels closest to the Machine.
The supportive globe cushioning shashir’s body carries out for him all necessary bodily functions, by means of a series of concealed pipes and synapses, shashir, who has grown, over the thirty years of his englobement, into a sort of balloon, itself resembling a globe, has only to meditate and to think.
shashir thinks.
He thinks of anna, but anna has ceased to be either watcher or woman. She has become a rosy feather that floats across the inner screen of shashir’s eyes.
The image is very peaceful. shashir swims through the serenity of the trance. A beautiful yellow thought surfaces like a fish of crystal and he has just the time to see and wonder at it, before the thought submerges and he forgets —
The music of the Machine plays, and shashir hears it in rapt quietude. He senses filaments of himself which stretch out along the hollows of the Machine, which coil and combine with the Machine’s intricacies. He makes medullary love with the Machine, and sleeps, wrapped in the cushion of his brain.
Robot overseers have herded away all the workers from the d levels. There has never before been such an emergency. Gradually, once the levels have been emptied, and the tops vacated by the alarmed watchers, the Machine has concluded its function in this area, closing down with muted sighs and pale flickerings of milky energy.
There is never darkness in the Machine, never any night as there is never any day, only the diurnal, and the obsolete words left behind — today, tomorrow.
At twenty-four hours, forgotten midnight, anna steals along the walkways, creeping from transparent shadow to opalescent illumination, avoiding generally looking down or up. Reaching the platform, she comes to peter’s section, and peter is standing there.
anna stops, twelve metres away from peter. She says: ‘Tell me what you saw. What you see.’
peter turns and stares at her. His eyes are large and dark, with a dense blue colour she has never noticed before, or perhaps which, before, they have not been. He says nothing.
anna tries to be impatient. ‘You must tell me,’ she says, officiously.
Then peter laughs.
‘The lark broke on the floor,’ he says, ‘the talkto doesn’t function. A tube came after me. I got away. What will happen next?’
‘You must go to a medical cubicle,’ says anna.
‘Why? It isn’t necessary. I want to see her again. I want to see her — beauty,’ he says. He stares into anna’s eyes and out the back of them at infinity. And all of anna’s blood, which she knows she has though she has never seen a drop of it, spins inside her. ‘I’m going away now,’ says peter.
‘Where? Where is there to go?’
‘Everywhere. Nowhere. Out of — ’ he struggles for a phrase and manages, at last, ‘this. Here.’
anna trembles. She leans on a bank of dials and buttons which, quiescent, makes no response to erroneous pressures.
‘There is no other place.’
‘Yes,’ he says. Suddenly he points at his own skull. ‘In there.’ And then he points away into the endlessness of the Machine. ‘In there, too.’
anna stands and suitably watches as peter trots along the platform, metre after metre, and off the bridge and onto a ramp, loping ahead of its rhythm, springing off onto another ridge, along a walkway, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the horizon of the Machine.
anna sits down on the platform and rests her head on some part of the section. She has an abrupt sensation that everything is trembling, as she is, coming unjoined, disunited, that all of the entity about her may unravel, and float away, leaving behind something else, which it had hidden, naked there, burning bright, with colours that do not exist.
Inside the walls of steel and sound, the sheer total silence, inside the deepest wall of used and percolated time, the Machine ticks soundlessly, a pulse current solely with, known only to, itself. And the Machine Is. And the Machine Thinks. In one form the Machine is Thought. Composed of Thought, a cerebral capability made flesh in metal, fissions, clockworks, and therefore in endless powers, as if in archangels.
The Machine, if it can be said to have any purpose left, has become the purpose of Thought. Once, the purpose may have been different. Once the Machine was a mighty servant, which in turn was served. (But service also has become a mere capability, made flesh in flesh.) All service is now redundant. Anything that was ever essential to the service and servitude of, or to, the Machine, continues through a math of infallible mechanical habit. For centuries the Machine has been free to do nothing, and indeed the human infestation of the Machine (like ants in a hollow mound) has been freed. To this freedom humanity, but not the Machine, is blind.
So the Machine Thinks. It has been thinking almost but not quite for ever. The Thought Process is very slow, but extremely deliberate. (It is unlike the thinking dream of such as shashir, the co-ordinator.) Nothing is squandered. Every strand and fibre, artery and node of the Machine is involved.
Thinking.
Thought drips. Like water, and like mercury.
Like rain upon the face of a flower.
The rose lies in the heart of the Machine’s heart, as the rain of mercurial thought drips upon it, curving its petals wide, its radar-bowls of sugar-tint receptors, pulled on tines of lustres, a rose that spills into sentience, wider than the core of the Machine, that softly explodes, passing by a savage osmosis, and leaking like wet fire, getting out by every link, interstice, and microscopic vent.
The levels of d are a desert. Nothing moves there save, now and then, a slender worm of some galvanic passing up or down, or there is the faintest rustle, a vibration, some piece of the whole engaging accurately with another.
A pink bead, part of the overspill of the inner rose, hangs like a butterfly on a panel.
anna has left the platform. She is not there to see the butterfly spread wings, become the angel of the rose, the goddess in a veiling of forgotten dawns.
In the levels, however, of b and k and I and s, the rose-angel-goddess poises like a young summer of the world ill lost. She is waiting, for the workers and the watchers to return and find her. (And peter, as he
lopes beneath the arching bridgeways of l, not glancing, does not see her there.) (And shashir, in his globe, his sleep-mind wandering accidentally to the levels of k, moves aside, finding a horned rose in the labyrinth. He is not ready yet for roses.)
So it is after all anna, lying on her grey pillow, who sees her insomnia take on, like stained glass in the wall, the madonna which the Machine has obliquely created.
anna knows at once what there is to fear.
The terrible eyes of the madonna are full of love.
The terrible eyes of the madonna are full of life.
peter has come to a wall which does not appear to have any aperture in it, or ending. He moves along it, sometimes climbing up the bridgeways that in parts run beside it, or descending again into the lower levels. There is no apparatus issuing from this piece of wall. It is a blank.
After a long while, several hours, peter stops moving along beside the wall. He sits down on a walkway, his back against a girder, and looks about. There is a great sameness. He has absorbed the idea of it, as he ran. Now he examines the blank wall. This is surely cessation. It is a barrier of the Machine. Presumably, the wall is impassable.
peter is conscious of hunger and thirst, but nowhere that he can see are there any dispensers or recognisable buttons.
Eventually, with a foul emotion which is shame, he is forced to urinate behind the girder.
He is tired out, and elation and terror have left him together.
He sits down again and dozes on the walkway, missing the talkto, missing the shape of his home. The way back is lost to him, and although the Machine hums here, as everywhere, no mechanical activity of any sort appears to go on. He has achieved an outer boundary before he is prepared for it.
He wonders if he will see her again, the madonna he has not put a name to. But there is nothing, no motion, no colour, no image but the wall, and behind and about, grey horizontals contracting away.
Detecting the disturbances of a life-reading, a rubber snake breaks into anna’s home and locates her trying to drown herself in the hygiene cubicle. Somewhere she has grasped the notions of suicide, and drowning, but she has found the act difficult, forcing her head to remain beneath the spout of the shower, choking and swallowing, sightless through the water, half-conscious, but nowhere near dead.
The medical snake eases her into the outer room and resuscitates her.
No one dies. Dying is long over. Workers finally become watchers, after a supine interval during which the brain is modified. At length watchers become co-ordinators, after a period during which both the brain and the complete psychical ecology are reorganised and adapted. In the normal course, marions and teds and peters change to annas, vaslavs and ritas; annas, vaslavs and ritas to shashirs. shashirs endure neverendingly, until, conceivably, amalgamated into the very nature of the Machine, its very Soul, becoming flawlessly integrated fragments of the godhead itself…
(anna, maybe not in any form aware of this, screams and gags, fighting off life like a tiger her genes may recall.)
Later, lying in a medical cubicle, wired up to life, its claws deeply embedded, unable to escape, anna dreams poetry, and is a blonde goddess rising on a shell from a pink dawn sea.
But if it is certain that humanity is itself at last compounded with the Machine, becomes the machine, they are the ancientmost dreams of humanity, too, not merely the great Thought of the Machine, which are now causing an upheaval in the levels of b, k, l and s.
anna dreams only vaslav lies over her on the shell, in the water. They are drowning, their hands sliding over each others’ bodies in a frenzy of panic and joy.
peter sits before the blank wall for nine diurnals of tearing hunger, sickness, bemusement, calm, until a small mechanical apparatus approaches him, fluttering out of the parallel miles of the Machine, homing unerringly in on him.
When he turns to see, he beholds the small machine is a white bird, with pleated glimmering wings, and in its beak it bears a fibre bar to feed him, and a sealed container of drink.
As the dove settles on his shoulder, peter realises that, in a space of time, long or short, interminable or simply futile, the impassable wall will melt, metamorphose, give way, and he will see the vision, whatever it is to be, the truth (or the secondary dream) which lies beyond it.
There is no barrier which is ultimately infinite. There is nothing anywhere that cannot change.
RED AS BLOOD
Somehow a painting I was doing of stained glass windows — they remain evident in the text — brought this on. I had always suspected her of being a vampire. The clue is blatantly there, with that drop of red blood falling on the white snow…
The beautiful Witch Queen flung open the ivory case of the magic mirror. Of dark gold the mirror was, dark gold like the hair of the Witch Queen that poured down her back. Dark gold the mirror was, and ancient as the seven stunted black trees growing beyond the pale blue glass of the window.
‘Speculum, speculum,’ said the Witch Queen to the magic mirror. ‘Dei gratia.’
‘Volente Deo. Audio.’
‘Mirror,’ said the Witch Queen. ‘Whom do you see?’
‘I see you, mistress,’ replied the mirror. ‘And all in the land. But one.’
‘Mirror, mirror, who is it you do not see?’
‘I do not see Bianca.’
The Witch Queen crossed herself. She shut the case of the mirror and, walking slowly to the window, looked out at the old trees through the panes of pale blue glass.
Fourteen years ago, another woman had stood at this window, but she was not like the Witch Queen. The woman had black hair that fell to her ankles; she had a crimson gown, the girdle worn high beneath her breasts, for she was far gone with child. And this woman had thrust open the glass casement on the winter garden, where the old trees crouched in the snow. Then, taking a sharp bone needle, she had thrust it into her finger and shaken three bright drops on the ground. ‘Let my daughter have,’ said the woman, ‘hair as black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.’ And the woman had smiled and licked at her finger. She had a crown on her head; it shone in the dusk like a star. She never came to the window before dusk: she did not like the day. She was the first Queen, and she did not possess a mirror.
The second Queen, the Witch Queen, knew all this. She knew how, in giving birth, the first Queen had died. Her coffin had been carried into the cathedral and masses had been said. There was an ugly rumour — that a splash of holy water had fallen on the corpse and the dead flesh had smoked. But the first Queen had been reckoned unlucky for the kingdom. There had been a plague in the land since she came there, a wasting disease for which there was no cure.
Seven years went by. The King married the second Queen, as unlike the first as frankincense to myrrh.
‘And this is my daughter,’ said the King to his second Queen.
There stood a little girl child, nearly seven years of age. Her black hair hung to her ankles, her skin was white as snow. Her mouth was red as blood, and she smiled with it.
‘Bianca,’ said the King, ‘you must love your new mother.’
Bianca smiled radiantly. Her teeth were bright as sharp bone needles.
‘Come,’ said the Witch Queen, ‘come, Bianca. I will show you my magic mirror.’
‘Please, Mamma,’ said Bianca softly. ‘I do not like mirrors.’
‘She is modest,’ said the King. ‘And delicate. She never goes out by day. The sun distresses her.’
That night, the Witch Queen opened the case of her mirror.
‘Mirror. Whom do you see?’
‘I see you, mistress. And all in the land. But one.’
‘Mirror, mirror, who is it you do not see?’
‘I do not see Bianca.’
The second Queen gave Bianca a tiny crucifix of golden filigree. Bianca would not accept it. She ran to her father and whispered, ‘I am afraid. I do n
ot like to think of Our Lord dying in agony on His cross. She means to frighten me. Tell her to take it away.’
The second Queen grew wild white roses in her garden and invited Bianca to walk there after sundown. But Bianca shrank away. She whispered to her father, ‘The thorns will tear me. She means me to be hurt.’
When Bianca was twelve years old, the Witch Queen said to the King, ‘Bianca should be confirmed so that she may take Communion with us.’
‘This may not be,’ said the King. ‘I will tell you, she has not been Christened, for the dying word of my first wife was against it. She begged me, for her religion was different from ours. The wishes of the dying must be respected.’
‘Should you not like to be blessed by the Church?’ said the Witch Queen to Bianca. ‘To kneel at the golden rail before the marble altar? To sing to God, to taste the ritual Bread and sip the ritual Wine?’
‘She means me to betray my true mother,’ said Bianca to the King. ‘When will she cease tormenting me?’
The day she was thirteen, Bianca rose from her bed, and there was a red stain there, like a red, red flower.
‘Now you are a woman,’ said her nurse.
‘Yes,’ said Bianca. And she went to her true mother’s jewel box, and out of it she took her mother’s crown and set it on her head.
When she walked under the old black trees in the dusk, the crown shone like a star.
The wasting sickness, which had left the land in peace for thirteen years, suddenly began again, and there was no cure.
The Witch Queen sat in a tall chair before a window of pale green and dark white glass, and in her hands she held a Bible bound in rosy silk.
‘Majesty,’ said the huntsman, bowing very low.
He was a man, forty years old, strong and handsome, and wise in the hidden lore of the forests, the occult lore of the earth. He could kill too, for it was his trade, without faltering. The slender fragile deer he could kill, and the moon-winged birds, and the velvet hares with their sad, foreknowing eyes. He pitied them, but pitying, he killed them. Pity could not stop him. It was his trade.