by Greg Egan
Martin grunted at the bird and flicked his head. It rose from the platform, and when its tether snapped tight the pavilion’s motion suddenly became smoother. Martin peered over the edge. Before, they’d been scraping the grass, brushing against every second tussock; now they were clear of the vegetation, half a metre or so above the ground and still rising.
‘Again!’ Shahin urged them. Martin hurried to unhood the next bird. ‘One. Two. Three!’
They quickly brought the last of the eagles into play. By the time Martin had a chance to look around again they were higher than the treetops - which was lucky, because they were drifting straight towards the cypress grove.
‘The Lord of the Earth becomes Lord of the Sky!’ Kavus proclaimed modestly. ‘Ten thousand generations will not see the equal of this feat!’
‘Lord of the Earth . . . Lord of the Sky,’ his adviser mumbled. The poor man did not look well.
The pavilion passed over the grove, safely clear of the highest branches. Martin took a step towards Javeed, then he felt the platform tilting and retreated. Though Javeed was lighter than his two fellow bird-wranglers, Kavus and his adviser must have been far enough from the centre to help maintain the balance. But the luck - or contrivance - that had granted them a level ascent meant that any change now was risky. If they moved at all, it would have to be coordinated very carefully.
‘Try looking through the floor,’ Martin called to Javeed. Javeed glanced down, then squatted and peered through the latticework. Martin had his icon adopt the same posture, discordantly aware for a moment that his real back and knees remained unbent. He could see straight down into the treetops, and as they drifted along he spotted a small, unguarded bird’s nest with three speckled eggs, built on a forked, swaying branch. He felt a sting of resentment; however well-researched the details, there was something demeaning about seeing the natural world through so many layers of mediation - rubbing his face in his rapidly dwindling prospects of ever encountering such a thing in the wild for himself. Would he ever go hot-air ballooning with Javeed in the real world? It wasn’t beyond hope. Maybe after his transplant, if everything went well.
For now, though, this was what he had to make do with. Better to savour the details than resent them: for his own sake, for Javeed’s, for the Proxy’s.
Javeed called out to him excitedly, ‘Baba? Did you see the eggs?’
‘Yeah!’
The eagles carried them higher, and the wind - or some persistent difference in strength between the birds - drove them further across the land. The king’s estate gave way to ploughed fields, then pristine woodlands. Martin wasn’t sure exactly where in Iran they were supposed to be; Kavus was a figure out of myth, not history, and if the Shahnameh had ever named his seat of power it had slipped from Martin’s memory. It wasn’t important. Wherever they were, Javeed was ecstatic, gazing down at the landscape from the edge of their glorious, impossible contraption.
‘Baba! See the river!’
‘Yeah, it’s beautiful.’ Sunlight glistened across the silver thread. ‘Hey, see the dark spot near the bend in the river? Now it’s crossing the water—’
‘I can see it.’
‘That’s our shadow.’
Javeed looked up at him to see if he was teasing, then looked down again. ‘Ohhh!’
When they rose into a thick bank of clouds and the air turned to fog around them, everyone started laughing with delight, even Kavus and his motion-sick courtier. When they emerged, the land beneath them was hidden. They drifted through a surreal world where massive shapes that, in the distance, seemed as solid as carved white rock melted into swirling tendrils as soon as they drew near. Martin barely spoke now; he needed only to exchange a glance or a smile with Javeed to make the connection, to convey everything.
See that cloud that looks like a dog’s head?
Yes! And Baba, see the one behind it, like a nose with snot coming out one side?
They continued to ascend, and the world of giant sculptures flattened out into a blanket of torn grey fleece. Through every tear was a glimpse of the desert far below.
Then in the distance, rock punctured the blanket. The peak of a mountain broke through the clouds.
‘Mount Damavand,’ Shahin declared.
‘Mount Damavand,’ Kavus echoed, ‘where noble Feraydun imprisoned the Serpent King Zahhak, pinning him with iron stakes to the walls of the darkest cave. But as we rise above Damavand, so I rise above even Feraydun’s glory.’
‘Lord of the World, there have been none to equal you,’ the adviser declared, without much conviction.
The pavilion was starting to list. Shahin addressed the adviser discreetly. ‘The birds are tiring. It’s time to return.’
The adviser spoke with Kavus. Kavus shook his head angrily. ‘I am lord of every animal and bird; these eagles will do as I bid. I have come this far, and now the angels await me.’ He raised his face to the sky and spread his arms triumphantly. ‘See!’
Martin followed his gaze. There was high cloud above them, with the sun behind it; dazzling beads of light shone through the cloud where it thinned.
Shahin lowered his face in deference, then spoke to his apprentices. ‘We need to keep the birds striving, we need to urge them on. When you see one flagging, go to it, encourage it, assure it that it will receive its reward when the trip is done.’ Martin wondered how he could have missed the whole ‘useful phrases in the language of eagles’ seminar.
Suddenly the platform tilted, with Martin’s side dropping half a metre. Everyone but Kavus had been holding onto something; the king staggered but caught himself. One of Martin’s birds had simply given up. He approached it and began repeating the grunting and nodding that had worked before; it cocked its head sceptically and stayed exactly where it was.
The platform tipped again, this time on Javeed’s side. Martin watched Javeed moving towards his own protesting eagle. ‘Keep holding the rods!’ Martin urged him; they were close enough together that Javeed could always grab the rod ahead of him before releasing his grip on the one behind.
‘Okay,’ Javeed replied, a little irritably, as if he already had enough to think about.
‘I’m serious,’ Martin insisted. The game couldn’t test their actual grip strength - nor would it take it upon itself to prise their fingers loose, whatever the notional forces on their bodies might be - but Martin suspected that it would distinguish very sharply between ‘Look, Ma, no hands!’ and more prudent strategies.
Javeed squatted in front of the bird and tried to get it flying again, but he had no more luck than Martin. Martin called to Shahin, ‘Can we give them some meat from the pail? Maybe that will restore their energy, enough to continue.’
Shahin looked dubious, but then he said, ‘Try it.’ The pail was beside him; he bent down and gave it a shove that sent it sliding towards Martin. Martin managed to intercept it before it went over the edge; he took out a strip of pink flesh and offered it to the troublesome bird.
The bird grabbed the meat and gulped it down. In an instant, Martin’s side of the platform dropped again; the bird’s two neighbours had seen it being fed and had decided to follow the same strategy.
‘No, no, no!’ Martin wailed. He tried desperately to get the first bird flying, but it ignored him completely.
The platform began lurching ever more erratically, as one eagle after another joined the strike. Javeed was laughing; he knew the end of this story and he didn’t seem to care if his own father hastened the disaster. Martin looked over at Shahin, but even the master was having no luck.
Kavus cried out angrily, ‘I am Lord of the World, Lord of the Sky, lord of every living creature! Only God himself is above me. I command you to carry me to the sphere of the angels!’
The pavilion dropped through the clouds. About twenty of the birds were still in action, which was enough to slow their descent, but not to halt it. The desert was getting close, very fast. At least they wouldn’t drown, like Icarus, but it wasn’t goin
g to be a soft landing.
Martin caught Javeed’s eye. ‘Hold on tight, pesaram.’
Javeed mimed straining against the two rods he was holding, to prove that his hands could not be dislodged. ‘Are you scared, Baba?’
‘No. Are you?’
Javeed looked down past the edge of the platform. ‘Zendegi won’t hurt us.’
An updraft caught the pavilion and set it tumbling. They were upside down, hundreds of metres above the desert, hanging by their wrists. Martin heard Javeed bellowing, but all he could see around him were wings and ropes; the birds had been panicked into flight, and as they tried to escape downwards they were only hastening the fall.
The roll continued, righting the platform. Martin’s skin was icy from shock; he looked around for Javeed.
Javeed had not let go. His hair and clothes were dishevelled, but he was wearing a wide-eyed roller-coaster grin. Martin emitted a brief, involuntary sob of pure relief.
None of the passengers had been dislodged, though they all looked several shades paler than before; even Kavus had had enough sense to grab hold of the royal tent, which now sported a magnificent tear along one side. The birds were bedraggled - some with feathers coming loose from their wings, some awkwardly tangled in their ropes - but about half of them were now straining upwards, offering some hope that their efforts would break the fall. Martin braced himself, tensing his muscles, sharing a smile of anticipation with Javeed.
The sound of the platform snapping apart and the thick cloud of dust rising up around them almost made up for the fact that the crash itself was imperceptible. Martin stepped off the platform, his hands trembling. He made his way through the white dust to Javeed, whose ghal’e would have shaken with a more convincing thud.
‘Are you okay?’
Javeed nodded; he was beaming, untroubled. He put his hand in Martin’s. ‘That’s the best thing we ever did!’
As the dust settled they saw Shahin tending to the birds. At first Martin thought he was merely untangling them from the rope, but then it became clear that he was releasing them from their harnesses completely.
When Kavus realised what was happening he was outraged. He screamed and gesticulated at the adviser, who approached Shahin and struck him across the face. Shahin froze and stared at the ground.
He said, ‘Lord of the World, forgive me, but we have no food for the birds.’ The strips of meat that had been spiked on the rods as lures were all gone. ‘They can’t carry us home on empty stomachs. The most we can hope for now is that they will hunt for themselves.’
Kavus composed himself. ‘Rostam will come to my aid,’ he declared. ‘Word will reach him in Zavolestan that his lord requires his assistance. He will bring food and wine, fifty slaves, fifty horses, and fifty golden cages for the royal hunting birds.’
Martin said, ‘And that will take . . . how long?’
Kavus blinked at him in disbelief, too startled even to be angry. For his Master of Birds to address him directly was already a staggering impertinence, but for this worthless apprentice to speak his mind loudly and freely - to question his lord’s understanding of their fate - was like something from a dream.
Martin turned to Javeed. ‘I know you’d like to meet Rostam, but I think he’s a couple of days away at least.’
Javeed looked out across the desert; there was not so much as a wisp of dust on the horizon. ‘We’ll see him next time.’ He gave the thumbs-down, and everything vanished.
Martin lay in the scanner, waiting for the motor to bring him out.
24
Nasim had begun making a habit of spending half an hour with her colleagues in the programmers’ room every morning. Falaki’s investigation had left everyone feeling like suspects, and she didn’t know a better way to raise morale than sitting down with people, asking them to talk about their work, and making it clear that she appreciated their efforts. No one could yet rule out the possibility that the breach had originated in this room, and she would have been negligent to pretend otherwise, but that did not mean the whole place had to descend into paranoia and resentment.
Milad had been showing her a new interface for developers to tap into the social instincts of a set of composite, male, multilingual side-loads - there were so many different types of module now that Nasim had given up inventing nicknames for all of them - when every monitor in the room sounded an alarm and opened a window into the same environment. Every complaint coming in from the arcades now triggered this response; Nasim had decided it was better to be safe than tardy. Most of the alarms were trivial matters that were only passed on when the arcade staff were inexperienced: personal disputes between customers, or basic misconceptions about the way the system was supposed to work. And even the majority of genuine programming glitches had nothing to do with Zendegi and simply needed to be forwarded to the appropriate game developer.
This complaint was not trivial, though, and it could not be palmed off on someone else. In the ballroom of the starship Harmony - home of a popular science-fictional soap opera of the same name - handsome, epauletted, anthropomorphic aliens were turning into excrement. And they were not merely melting into pools of suggestive goo that might have raised a snicker but could have been something else entirely; they were morphing into stick figures built of soft brown cylinders flecked with undigested roughage.
‘Arif!’ Nasim shouted, ‘launch the Faribas!’ Some of the post-colonic gingerbread men were running around the ballroom, trying to embrace people. The thumbs-down escape had been disabled; why every customer didn’t just whip off their goggles, Nasim couldn’t guess - unless it was pure shock - but stampeding partygoers had formed a crush at the exit and the first dreadful hug was clearly only seconds away. Nasim averted her eyes; she was already having trouble keeping her breakfast down.
‘Arif?’ She walked over to his cubicle.
‘They’re not working!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Faribas! I’m showing them the environment, but the modules are just . . . frozen - unresponsive.’
Nasim said, ‘Grossed out?’
‘What?’
She risked a brief peek at the ballroom, then looked away again; brown smears on tablecloths and ballgowns lingered on some fold of her visual cortex that was going to need scrubbing out with disinfectant. ‘How many people could sit staring at that,’ she said, ‘and calmly point out all the anomalies?’ The Fariba modules had included all the basic human visual responses; they would hardly have needed specialised training to acquire this one. Every donor to the HCP would have averted their gaze - and if their eyes had been pinned open and forcibly locked on the nauseating scene, they would have done their best to blank it out, to stare right through it. The Faribas had no power to turn their eyes away, but they could still mentally disengage and refuse to sift through this sewer.
Arif pondered the unexpected obstacle. ‘Maybe I can route all the objects into separate environments and show each of them to a separate instance of the Faribas. Then we can eliminate anything that grosses them out - without them having to spend time telling us exactly where it is in the original scene.’
‘How long will that take?’ Nasim glanced at another part of his screen; six thousand complaints had now been registered. Hundreds of games were affected, including Virtual Azimi.
‘Five minutes. Maybe ten.’
‘Go!’
Arif started typing. Nasim watched him, agonised for thirty seconds, then went to Bahador. ‘Shut us down.’
‘Are you sure?’ He looked at the Harmony window through a gap in his fingers. ‘Oh my God. Now it’s kissing—’
Nasim reached over his shoulder and tapped the icon to start the shutdown. The touch-screen needed both of their thumb-prints; all the confirmatory steps were taking forever. When the ballroom scene finally blanked out, Nasim slumped against a partition.
She closed her eyes and tried to think calmly about the situation. Within half an hour they could restart from back-ups, and Arif’s improved filter would be ready if
they needed it. One Fariba per object would cost a lot to run, though. In any case, they’d be refunding all their customers for the outage, and most of those who’d witnessed anything like the Harmony attack would never be coming back.
Nasim composed herself and walked to the front of the room, where she could see all the programmers at once. Arif was still typing, his eyes locked to his screen, but everyone else looked dazed. This was the first time in a decade that Zendegi had been shut down completely.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there was no choice this time; we had to retreat. But this isn’t over. Cyber-Jahan tried to muscle in on us; Shahidi’s tried boycotts and intimidation. But we’re not going to be cowed by anyone—’
Her notepad buzzed.