Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  As in a dream, Carmel followed the tentacle-fetishist. His mind was open to her, and she could not help herself, she stalked him through the thronged streets, until he had slipped into a quiet quay-side alley and she pounced.

  She fed quickly, without control. The tentacle-junkie was one in real life, too. His body had been modified some years back. Now he flopped in his custom pod somewhere in the asteroid belt, his real body as helpless as his digital one as she fed on him, his memories, his access codes, his gamesworld conquests. He was an admiral in one of the minor guilds, she discovered. He commanded a ship and was known as the Butcher of Soledad-5, having given the order, in an early campaign, to use a doomsday device in that GoA solar system, annihilating every indigenous NPC and player within a light year of Soledad-5’s star.

  He was married, had three children, his wife was a miner with her own ship, his eldest daughter had just married, his middle son wanted to follow him in a career in the GoA, the youngest was proving difficult, rebellious, all this and more she was sucking out of his mind, his node, in a hungry frenzy, all the while knowing it was wrong, she would be caught, the Others were everywhere, the Sys-Gods were watching . . . she tore herself away from him. He lay there, curled up on himself, his mind flooded with dopamine, and she did something she never knew she could, she reached down with her node and pushed, and his mind disappeared, his virtual body was gone, erased—she had sent him back into the physicality.

  And now, post-feed, her mind had cleared and she knew she had to get out, too, but somehow she could not do to herself what she had done to her victim, the way out was closed to her, she had to seek an exit, a gamesworld gateway, desperately she tried to Abort! Abort! But nothing happened, then the sky darkened above her, a beam of light came down from the sky and touched her, engulfed her, and Carmel closed her eyes, defeated, a choir of angels sang and she was lifted up, like a doll, rising into the light, rising up to heaven.

  “Motl?”

  “Isobel. What are you doing?”

  She was sobbing. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s so dark. I’m cold, Motl. I’m so cold.”

  “Where are you? What is this place?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I went through a thing. A thing like a thing.” Even the words were being lost, leeched out of her.

  “Ur-space,” Motl said, and cursed. “You passed through a singularity-mine.”

  “A what?”

  “Hostile code bombs,” he said. “We used them in the war . . . one of the wars. Or all of them. I can’t remember.”

  “There were wars in the GoA?” she said.

  “The wars were fought on both levels of existence,” he said. Not wishing to remember.

  “Hold me,” Isobel said. “I’m cold.”

  “I’ll get you out. What about your crew?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see them.”

  “They might be all right, still.” But he didn’t sound convinced, which made her heart catch inside her (and somewhere she was flatlining in a pod that smelled of unwashed human bodies).

  “How did you get here, Motl? Motl, I’m sorry.”

  “It was my fault,” he said. “I promised you I was finished with that stuff. The drugs. But Boris asked me.”

  “You should have told him no.”

  “I owed him, Isobel.”

  “Why?”

  “Wait. Listen.”

  “What is it?”

  “A siren song. A god, growing. With life comes death. We can follow the call.”

  “How?”

  “Hold me. Hold me tight.”

  She held him. She held him tight. That representation of him, in this ur-space. It still smelled like him. Oil and metal and sweat. They began to stumble away in the dark and, after a moment, she thought she, too, could hear it, almost feel the pull of the god.

  “It wasn’t my fault. Please. You have to believe me!”

  The voice was as pure as an angel’s, emanating from the god straight into her node, her mind. Little strigoi, the voice said, you shouldn’t be here.

  “I was ubicked.”

  Even to her, her voice sounded weak, insincere. She was floating in a vast space, bodyless, and the god, this Other, this digital intelligence as strange and unknowable as a true alien, was studying her, reading through her as through a text, effortlessly.

  Humans fear your kind, the Sys-God said.

  She did not reply. Acknowledging the truth in the Other’s words. A meme of fear regarding strigoi, a self-perpetuating cross-cultural myth permeating the human worlds, drawing on ancient images, half-remembered mythagos. Sometimes she thought the same designers of the strigoi had also created the meme—or perhaps it was created in response, a protective measure—

  You speculate. The voice sounded amused, if such emotion could be ascribed to an Other. They did not experience human emotions, which were tied into having a body, hormones, physical responses evolved over millennia. Others had evolved separately, outside the physicality, in the virtuality of the Breeding Grounds. But you don’t know.

  “I never wanted—”

  No, the voice agreed. And yet you went where you are forbid den. You damaged a player. You have transgressed against the GoA.

  “Please. Please. . . .”

  Human . . . the voice hesitated. Little lost strigoi, it said. Do you wish to feed?

  “Always. Always! You do not know, cannot know, cannot understand,” Carmel said. Screamed at the heart of that empty place, that palace of the virtual. “The hunger.”

  We will fix the player you have eaten, the Sys-God said. We will replace his memories, rebuild the parts of his mind you have taken. Such incursions have happened before. We do not always . . . advertise. Humans depend on the virtual, and we, in turn . . .

  “Yes?” she strove for escape, but there was nothing around her, not even air.

  We depend on them, the Sys-God said; almost, it seemed to her, sadly. And again, Do you wish to feed?

  “Yes! Damn it, yes . . . always.”

  Then feed, the voice said, and something vast and inhuman, a body like a whale’s, pressed against her, near suffocating her, and she held close to it, its rubbery body, its smell of brine and seaweed, the skin rough to the touch, her nose pressed against this huge belly, her mouth watering, her canines slipping out, sinking into the rubbery flesh of it, feeding, feeding on this enormity, this alien entity, too vast and powerful to comprehend, the feed overwhelming her, suffocating her, and in her mind that voice, chuckling as it faded, saying, Why do humans always make the comparison to whales?

  It wasn’t clear, later, who started the fire. It began as a lick of flame, a flash of colour. The police-bots beeped alarmingly. The dancing Na Nachs, perhaps intoxicated by the fire, danced harder, and sweat streamed down their bearded cheeks and trailed into their white shirts, soaking them.

  The god burned.

  Eliezer, the artist, seemed as captivated by the fire as the spectators were. How often does one birth, only to kill, a god? That oldest of human institutions, the Sacrifice.

  His lips still moved but his song was eaten by the roar of the fire.

  The god burned.

  Those watching on their nodal feeds could see the same thing happening in the Conversation: the way that complex Other shape began to fragment, like a network being slowly taken apart, each major node unlinking, the one shape becoming many smaller networks disconnected from each other. The way memory, in a human, slowly degrades, perhaps. Or maybe it was just a change, like ice becoming water. Either way it burned, fragmented, and as it did it cried, a voiceless sound, a string of zeroes that made people wince and pull away.

  “Carmel!” Boris said.

  Miriam followed him. She cared for the girl, whatever folly Boris, well-meaning though he was, had perpetrated. Someone had to keep an eye on him.

  But at the entrance to the bookshop her brother, Achimwene, stood. Boris halted. “You,” Achimwene said. His voice shook with anger. Poor A
chi, Miriam thought.

  “I told you to leave her alone.”

  “I’m just—” she could see Boris, too, was suddenly angry. It was an unexpected sight. Even as a boy, he so seldom showed emotion, especially violent ones. “I’m just trying to help.”

  “We don’t need your help, Boris! Go back! Go back to Mars or wherever you came from. You can’t just come back from the Up and Out and expect everyone to defer to you, like you’re some kind of, some kind of—”

  But Boris, wordless, pushed past him. Achimwene stood there, helpless. “Miriam . . .” he said.

  She didn’t know what to say. Achimwene turned and went inside, and she followed him.

  Books lined the shelves. Paper books, with that distinct, odd smell about them. Shelves upon shelves, books upon mouldering books. Where did her brother find all these? There was something unhealthy about his obsession. Something unclean. It was a sad reflection on his existence, she thought, that the arrival of a vampire in his life was the best thing to have happened to him.

  At least it got his mind away from books.

  “Achi?”

  “Carmel!”

  Miriam followed him up the narrow stairs. Carmel was lying—reclining?—on the narrow bed. The window was open and a smell of burning came from outside. Boris was hovering.

  “I was asleep,” Carmel said. “But I’m awake now.”

  “He shot you full of drugs,” Achimwene said, pointing accusingly at Boris. “I was away, in Tel Aviv, I was buying books, I didn’t know.”

  “I asked him to, Achi.”

  Miriam glanced at her brother. He stood close to Carmel, who sat up, yawning. Her white shift clung to her thin body. Achimwene’s hands were pressed together. Almost as if he were praying.

  “Why?” Achimwene said.

  “Because I want to get better, Achi!” She raised her head. Her eyes were large, anguished. “I don’t want to be what I am.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to . . . Because . . . Achi . . .”

  “To be with me?”

  “Men,” she said, but she smiled. “It’s always about you, isn’t it.”

  “Carmel,” Boris said. “What happened?”

  “I went away,” she said. “And then I came back.”

  “Carmel . . .”

  “That’s enough,” Achimwene said. “Get out, Boris.”

  “Listen, now—”

  “Boris,” Miriam said. Men were like boys. You had to speak to them slowly. “Come along.” She put her hand on his arm. After a moment, he subsided. She noticed his aug turned a deeper shade when he was angry like this. He let her lead him away. Behind, she could hear her brother and Carmel, speaking, but the voices were too low to make sense of the words.

  Once they were outside, Miriam took a deep breath. The air was filled with smoke. She had the sense of something approaching, or coming to an end. “I want you to leave her alone,” she said to Boris.

  He opened his mouth, looked like he wanted to speak, then closed it, his shoulders drooping slightly. “All right,” he said.

  She took his hand as they walked away. He wasn’t a bad man, she thought. He was just a man.

  “Motl?”

  Isobel was in the dark and it was suffocating her. Then she pushed and something gave and suddenly light, and air, poured in and she realised she was inside a pod.

  She was back in Universe-One.

  She pulled out the plugs from her flesh. Pulled herself out of the pod, hands shaking. She noticed signs of burning on her skin. Almost collapsed on the floor as she came out but strong, metal hands caught her and held her steady. “Motl?”

  “I had to see you,” he said. “To explain . . .”

  “Were you in there?” she said. “In the GoA?”

  “I followed you,” he said, simply. “I’d follow you everywhere.”

  “I flatlined,” she said. He laughed.

  “No one really flatlines,” he said. “Only in cheap Martian Hardboiled stories.”

  “I know what happened, Motl!”

  “I know,” he said. “I just—”

  “That was awesome!” she said. “Flatlined! In a singularity! I won’t have to buy drinks for months!”

  “You could have died!”

  “But I didn’t, did I.” She grinned and held on to him. “Come on, Motl.”

  “Isobel?”

  She reached out and kissed him. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  The god artist sat with his friend, the alte-zachen man Ibrahim, under the canopy of a sheesha pipe shop. They drank dark, bitter coffee and drew, each in turn, on a tall, clear glass pipe that stood patiently between them. A sliver of coal burned above the cake of cherry-flavoured tobacco. As the sun set, the moon rose over Central Station, over the old streets and the space port, and the drifting lanterns filled the air, bobbing gently this way and that.

  The remnants of the god still burned, gently, but the fire was going out. Ibrahim took a drag on the pipe and passed the mouthpiece to his friend.

  “Well,” Eliezer said.

  “Did you accomplish what you wished for?”

  “Do any of us?” the god artist said. He smiled around the mouthpiece, and smoke came out of his nostrils in twin jets of white plumes.

  Beyond, at the circle of the burned god, two children played. And those who watched them in both the real and the virtual saw that they existed, evenly, in the one and in the other. Ibrahim watched them, and saw them reach out with hands as perfect as those of angels; and pluck away small, spinning bits of code which, if watered and fed, might one day grow to be entities all of their own.

  “Gods are born, and die,” the old artist said; but he said it sadly, and from a great weight of time; for they were all his children. And so he took a perfunctory puff on the pipe and passed the mouthpiece back to his friend. In his many years, he had learned the ways of that country.

  They sat in companionable silence and watched the children play.

  TEN: The Oracle

  Gods are born, and die, the old artist said; but he had not always been old.

  There had always been those who bridge one world and the other. Those who meddle in the affairs of the world.

  Once, the world was young.

  There had always been an Oracle in Central Station.

  She was born Ruth Cohen, on the outskirts of old Central Station, near the border with Jewish Tel Aviv. She grew up on Levinsky, by the spice market, with the deep reds of paprika and the bright yellow of turmeric and the startling purple of sumac colouring the days. She had never met her famous progenitor, St. Cohen of the Others.

  She was an ordinary enough child. She went through a religious phase and attended a girl’s yeshiva for a time in her teenage years. She had woken one night, late. Thunder streaked the sky. She blinked, trying to recall a dream she’d just had. She had been walking through the streets of Central Station and a storm raged where the station should have been, a whirlwind that stood still even as it moved. Ruth walked towards it, drawn to it. The air was hot and humid. The storm, silent, bore within itself people frozen like mannequins, and bottles, and a minibus with the wheels still turning and with frozen faces inside, glued to the windows. Ruth felt something within the storm. An intelligence, a knowing something, not human but not hostile, either. Something other. She approached it. She was barefoot, and the asphalt was warm against the soles of her feet.

  And the storm opened its mouth and spoke to her.

  She lay in bed trying to recall the dream. Thunder woke her. What had the storm said?

  There had been a message there, something important. Something deep and ancient: if only she could recall. . . .

  She lay there for a long time before she fell back to sleep.

  The yeshiva had not been a huge success. Ruth wanted answers, needed to understand the voice of the storm. The rabbis seemed unwilling or unable to offer that and so, for a time, Ruth tried drugs, and sex, and being young. She travelled to Thailand
, and Laos, and there she studied the Way of Ogko, which is no Way at all, and talked to monks and bar owners and full-immersion denizens. There, in the city of Nong Khai on the banks of the Mekong River, she conched for the first time, transitioning from her own reality to the one of the Guilds of Ashkelon universe, fully immersed, deep in the substrata of the Conversation. That first time felt strange: the shell of the conch, the plastic hot, the smell of unwashed bodies who had been enmeshed inside it for too long. Then the immersion rig closing, the light gone, a cave as silent as a tomb. She was trapped, blind, helpless.

  Then she transitioned.

  One moment she was blind and deaf. The next she was standing in the bright sunlight of Sisavang-3, in the lunar colony of the Guild of Cham.

  Ruth joined the guild as a low-ranking member, spending all her remaining baht on hours of immersion. She joined the crew of a starship, the Fermi Paradox, and travelled the nearby sector of game-space, her skin all the while becoming brittle and pale from the long immersion in the coffin-like pod.

  But still she did not find whatever it was she was looking for. Only once, briefly, she had come close. She had found a holy object, a gamesworld talisman of great power. It was on a deserted moon in Omega Quadrant. She had come onto the surface of the moon alone. The talisman was found in a cave. The atmosphere was breathable. She did not have a helmet on. She knelt by the object and touched it and a bright flame burst into life, and then she was in an Elsewhere.

  A voice that was like the voice of the whirlwind in her dream spoke to her. It spoke directly into her mind, into her wired node, it enveloped her in warmth and love: it knew her.