It had been the last kiss. There would never come another, not like that. Beyond that moment lay only hurt and sadness. At the end of the line Ravi lay bleeding in a cornfield. Now his DNA hummed within her, and that was the closest they'd get to having a child together.
She looked at the boats. Her army of lepers shivered and flashed behind her.
"Goodbye," she said, for the last time, not just to Ravi but to a dream of a life she wouldn't now lead. Then she turned to her army and gave them her orders. The angels were almost there.
She jumped to meet them.
INTERLUDE 6
The voices spoke louder than ever.
It had been many years since they'd ruled him. In those early days after the Lazarus pull, torn from moment to moment like a soul splintered through a twisting kaleidoscope, it had been chaos. Clinging to any one moment of reality; to words, to visions, to facts or a clear concept of time, had been impossible.
Olan Harrison had glided through the world in a new body that hadn't felt like his own. Little Olan had spoken in his ear. He was guided by the artificial intelligence of his own self, and in time that guidance had come to drown out the rest of the voices.
But they were never truly gone. He rarely slept, because they spoke loudest in his dreams. At night he felt the severed ends of himself reaching up like banshees, calling for their constituent parts lost upon the line.
Standing now in his suite at the top of the Redoubt, moments after Rachel Heron had left with her battalion of angels, he shuddered at the fresh profusion of voices in his mind, proliferating after his battle with the Last Mayor
They were not his own.
He'd never known who they belonged to. Many of them were in a constant state of agony. Many were perpetually lost, panicked, afraid, alone. He'd been one with them for the longest time, barely kept afloat by the fractured spine of Little Olan, cobbled together from impressions like a badly stacked communications network.
He'd come to think of the line like a satellite array, with the voices as stray signals broadcasting foreign messages into his mind. Little Olan had seen it and offered prescriptions. Through long, meditative training he had coaxed the pieces of the real Olan Harrison to the center, bringing if not peace, then a kind of stability. The things done to him while he'd floated on the line for a year were nightmares, so he did everything he could to sever them from himself. For a time after returning to the Redoubt, that meant cutting pieces of himself away, those that were too tightly intertwined with the voices to separate, but that in turn had led to clarity.
He was still Olan Harrison, but sleeker, like a shark. There was little room for emotion. He rarely laughed, rarely enjoyed himself except in the exercise of power. Severing the revolution at the root had given him the most overwhelming rush of well-being. To reduce others to helplessness made his own suffering infinitely more bearable.
It became a habit, and a crutch.
Punishment worked, and across the years his powers only grew. The voices whispered secrets and he listened, allowing them their time in the light in return. They taught him how to control others, how to jump across vast distances, how to project force out of nothing, and they taught him the one truth that mattered above all others.
He couldn't leave the Redoubt.
He'd tried it once, a jump outside the shield, and he'd almost died. Away from his people in the Redoubt, his mind had cracked back into pieces. Without their salving presence around him, reflecting back the core Olan Harrison he'd chosen to be, he was flung back into a tumultuous cauldron of voices.
He'd raved. He'd cut gouges into his thigh with his fingernails. Rachel Heron found him banging his head against the shoulder of a type one in the body hills, and jumped with him back to the Redoubt.
For the failing of seeing him so weak, he'd determined to one day Lazarus her too, so she would know how it felt. Yet since then he'd only grown more dependent on her. Using her mind as a substitute for his own made his days pass by simply. Her voice was consistent. She, alone, seemed to be a real person, and sending her up and bringing her back down would ruin that.
The rest of them were ants doing just as he said, with no will of their own. He used them like a man drank water. Only Rachel Heron saw him, knew him, and that helped. Tomorrow, he told himself with every passing day. One more day, and she'll be gone.
Standing at the glass, he ran his fingers over the scabbed wound in his throat. If anything, the pain helped to center him. He'd passed through phases where he'd punctuated his meditation with self-flagellation. He'd brought the ants in to administer punishments to him. The skin of his new, perfect body was graced with a thousand marks of torture, from burns, breaks, and lash marks to excisions of skin, tiny implanted needles that pricked with every movement, extreme body modification and mutilation.
It all helped.
There were no other drives. Whatever he'd cut out of himself had left only this; power and pain.
Finally snaring James While had been a panacea. To look into that man's eyes and see the same agony ticking away inside him, the same fragmentation, had given him strength. To know that James While was finally locked away without a voice, without any means to escape his captivity, had given him a kind of joy.
And losing him? He'd feigned ignorance for Rachel Heron, but there was nothing he didn't see. He'd felt James While slip away under her touch, and accepted it. Her mission now was an essential one. And there were always costs.
It came down to what was right. He'd been many things in his time; a billionaire businessman, an innovative philanthropist, but in truth he'd always tried to do what was right. He'd wanted to help humankind, to be good.
Perhaps he was still good. There were always costs. It had taken the colonization, enslavement, and ultimate destruction of millions of native peoples around the world to build the modern world he'd come to straddle. Eggs were always broken. The omelet was worth it.
Now he moved about his lush space calmly, fetching a fresh shirt, fresh slacks. Before a full-length mirror he looked at his body. Every scar, every distending of his flesh, every mark rooted him in this time and place. He traced his fingers over them and shivered.
This was the new Olan Harrison. The voices were nothing.
He pushed them down.
He washed the wound in his neck. Already the edges had sutured together. Accelerated healing had been at the top of his list thirty years earlier, when he'd wanted only to build a more sickness-resistant human species from the genetics up: Homo Dominus, Man the Master.
He'd succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He'd ended the world before it could end itself, and in the ashes he'd planted a seed that might survive. How could they denigrate him still?
He smiled, as he remembered the things the Last Mayor had called him. He shrugged on the shirt. There was nothing to fear there. Parlor tricks. Arrogance in a past version of himself, that was what Rachel had once said. He cut those past versions away, and what was left? Pure, distilled Olan. The process of pruning was always ongoing. Every setback was a chance to improve what he was.
And he was beyond Homo Dominus now. He was Homo Deus, Man the God. Who rivaled him in power? As a God, it wasn't surprising that he needed his followers around him. Gods needed praise, and soon he would get all the reflected praise he needed from one man, one incredible engine of power.
The Last Mayor.
It was only a matter of time. Soon they would flow together in a terrible wave across the world, severing, enslaving, until every person in every part belonged to him, and lived only to reflect his glory back.
There would be no limits anymore. At last he would be whole again, and every one of his tormentors on the line would be dragged back to Earth, where he could punish them for all the ways they'd punished him.
It was a good thing, really. There had to be order; that was one thing the humanitarians never understood. Man could never be kind because man was simply not kind. Systems had to be built to constrain him, an
d Olan Harrison understood systems better than anyone alive. Everything had been planned.
He smiled, looking out at the mountains and doing up the last few buttons of his shirt. The Last Mayor knew nothing. Olan's power could not be questioned.
He would go to him one final time. It would be worth it to see the fear grow in the man's eyes. There was nothing better than that for giving him relief, as the wicked saw their punishment coming nigh.
He brushed his hair. He tucked in his shirt. He squeezed all his slaves on the line, and sucked in the strength as their breath failed them for five seconds, ten. Then he jumped back to the wall.
18. STONEHENGE
After I lurch out of the crushing rain of the wall, I collapse on the body hills and gasp for a while.
Good God.
While the migraine fights with the black eye inside my mind, I try to sort through everything I learned about Olan Harrison in those few startling moments when I plunged the black eye into his throat.
It scares even me.
He's barely human. He is what I was when I beat down Arnst and humiliated Feargal, when I watched Keeshom and the others die and didn't care; but he is fractured into a thousand more pieces. He is voices screaming in the darkness for help.
I had Drake in my mind and it drove me insane. There are no excuses for what I did, I see that now; only reasons. I had my darker and my better angels, steering me on, but Olan Harrison doesn't have those angels, he is them. He is a jeering mob whipped into shape by the memory of a memory. He's a chimera. He's more like a non-player character fresh out of the Yangtze Darkness, repeating lines as they're spooned in from Internet feeds, building a sense of self through a constant process of whittling the 'weaker' parts of himself away, leaving only pure diamond power and a parade of terrible victories behind.
I recall the worst of those victories, his 'severing' of everyone in his Redoubt. I see his immense power and wonder, can I possibly beat that?
The sky is gray and heavy. The air smells of summer dust. Perhaps it'll rain; a storm out here on the body steppes. How much time remains? I feel cogs clanking into position for the end, with me and Olan at the center.
On my feet, I survey my army. Quite a lot of them are broken. He sent diamond lances out that tore them to bits. Plenty lie torn and twitching around the hills. Perhaps I was lucky to survive.
The migraine settles to a twinge. I reach out and collect my army's knowledge about the extent of the invisible shield. They didn't find a weak point, it seems, but they did find opportunities. There are places behind certain hills, close to the wall, with no easy line of sight. Places they can dig into the gray bodies and not be observed.
I start walking over the uneven gray ground toward the nearest of them, and my army follow. They are limping demons with their feet torn off, lepers flickering in and out of existence like dying neon lights, bisected floaters pulling themselves around by their arms. This is my army of slaves, I think. Olan has his too, severed to his will. Are we really that different?
The new camp I select is much like our old one. The wall hums nearby. The hills rise. There is a clearing, and it is there I decide to build my final work. A symbol for the ages, and for any eyes looking out from Olan's Redoubt, wondering what kind of plot the madman is hatching.
I build Stonehenge.
It's a whim. I've always wanted to build it in one of my cairns, but never had the time.
My ocean dig into the body hills, extracting building materials as if it was Deepcraft, obscuring the tunnels that burrow down toward the bedrock below. Here a frozen gray arm unhooks from a waist, there a knee uncurls from a neck. These are pixels of stone, each a pointillist dab in the 3D portrait I'm building.
In the clearing I lay the foundations; twenty-four 'dolmen' posts, each four bodies wide, newly interwoven. I have my demons stack them ten bodies high, forming gray pillars like the stones erected thousands of years ago, atop which they construct 'lintels' of dead floaters slotted together like Lego.
I feel eyes on me. I grin for those watching from the Redoubt. At the same time, my army are deep into the hills now already, digging where they can't be seen. I send lepers jumping forward into the solid rock bodies, where they erupt like TNT blasts, making progress swift for the demons that follow. I lose lepers, but it's fast.
Shortly after they hit bedrock there's a surge on the line, and I turn to see Olan Harrison returned. He's standing inside the wall where I can't reach him, dressed in a clean shirt, looking at me with something like a smile.
"I thought we might talk," he says.
I walk over to him. This is good. Every second with his attention on me is a second my teams keep digging, looking for the base of the wall.
"So talk."
19. TALK
He studies me. We know each other now, so I know he's been plotting too. I felt the army leave the Redoubt hours ago, flinging themselves like lepers through the line, headed west.
What's west? Anna. Istanbul. All the shields she's been standing up feel like distant braziers on the long dark night of the line. There's going to be a battle, and I don't know who will win.
But I can't fight that war. I can't help Anna. I can only fight here, and now. I look into Olan Harrison's bright white eyes, and see that he knows this as surely as I do. The end is coming.
"It's a fine construction," he says, nodding toward my Stonehenge. "It won't help."
"They're not watching?" I counter. "Your severed slaves."
His smile widens. "They are. But they don't see if I don't want them to. You should know that. You've done as much to your own."
I smile back. He's talking about Feargal, of course. He sees the shame in me. "They still fought for me, at the end. Do you think your people will?"
"They will. They can't live without me, now, nor I without them. We are bound together."
I shake my head. He doesn't get it, and he never will. I've been in this exact spot before, facing these same choices. "Maybe they'd rather die."
He laughs a little at that. I can see it's a foreign concept.
"You speak of yourself, Last Mayor. Your willingness to die a martyr. Don't fear, you'll get your moment."
"Come out of your wall," I say, taking a step closer. "Put that to the test."
He looks at me.
I look at him.
"Tell me," he says, as if it's a little bit of trivia that's been bugging him, "why do your people follow you?"
It is an odd moment. I think of the old movie where Death plays chess with a man about to die, and they have a conversation about mundane things while souls are shuffled about the board. I can see that the notion of this final dialog appeals to Olan Harrison. He likes the drama.
"Go fish," I say.
He continues regardless. "You built symbols of another time for your people, and they loved you for it. Here you've built a symbol from the ancient past. It intrigues me. To what end?"
Of course he wouldn't understand. He's worse than a child in many ways, with all the parts of himself that might once have understood already lost or whittled away. There can be no negotiation with someone like that, no treaties, no way to co-exist.
I itch to kill him right now. Perhaps I could charge the wall and reach where he stands, but I'd be so weak I would scarcely land a blow. No. I have my plan; and reach casually down to where my army burrow through bedrock beneath my feet. Lepers explode the rock, so deep we don't even feel it. Demons hammer through the rubble with their huge fists. Soon they'll hit the wall, and perhaps they'll pass underneath. If Olan Harrison stays here long enough they'll come up behind him.
"Earlier you told me you were old," I say. "Older than me, older than my grandparents. But you're not that same man anymore. You're like a child now, after your year on the line, except you're broken, Olan. I can hear the voices in your head, grinding against each other like faulty gears. Nothing works the way it should, and it never will again. You'll never be happy. You'll never inspire your people
, or lead them to anything worth having. There can be no meaning in your world, only power, and discipline, and your boot on the face of humanity crushing down forever." I smile. "You should have stayed dead."
He looks at me. There's not much he can say to argue. Everything I just said is true.
"This is the moment," he says, "right now, which you'll regret forever. I welcome it. Hold up your mirror, Last Mayor. Show me what I am. I'll make sure you live with the consequences in eternity."
I laugh. "Maybe. Or maybe I'll send you back." I glance up at the sky. "Not your favorite place, right? They'll have a big party mulching you to compost. The prodigal son. They always say the warden has the worst time in jail."
There's the slightest flinch at that. He buries it deep, but I catch it. That's his fear. That's what drives him now. I drive it home.
"They'll have a field day with you up there. All your severed slaves will follow you, and I expect they'll enjoy the reversal. They'll round on you like harpies. There won't be a single scrap of Olan Harrison left on the line when they're done."
His eyes harden. Good. I'm getting to him.
"Down here it'll fall to me," I go on. "And how do you think I'll memorialize you, in my comics, in our history?" I let that hang. "There won't be a single word. Not one. I'll erase your name and everything you did from the record. No one will ever know all the shit you caused. They'll be born and live and die thinking that this zombie apocalypse was just an accident. Or maybe, and I'm just spitballing this now, I'll turn your name into mud. When people want to say 'shit' in the future, I'll get them to say 'Olan'. I'll put it into common usage, like 'I really need to take an Olan,' or 'You think your Olan don't stink?'"
I grin at him. His hardness is turning to diamonds. I'm getting him hot again. I shrug.
"You're empty, Olan. That's it. You're a vessel, and maybe you always were. It's not worth getting angry with you. Like a dog that takes an Olan in the house, you didn't know any better. But I'm here now. Olan-training is in season. I'll jab some good sense into you if it's the last thing I do." I poke toward his neck, where the black eye sank in. The wound is a sealed line now, not even any scabs. His new body heals fast.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 209