‘How did you hear about these people?’ I say.
‘Look. I wasn’t completely honest. I am curious about all this but it’s not why I’m here. Two months ago my son went missing suspiciously. He’d been banging on about Ixdom-this and Ixdom-that for ages, so when he didn’t seem to be coming back and when no body had turned up, I thought this might be the answer. Can we keep that between ourselves?’
Joy. Guarded overwhelming joy.
‘I can keep a secret,’ I say. ‘Do you think he joined the church?’
‘Maybe. They’ve got a habit of indoctrinating eager twenty-somethings. It’s all over the net.’
Is it?
‘Callum wasn’t one for fancies, but there was something about this bunch that really did it for him. I thought I’d come and see what all the fuss was about, maybe eek out a hint or two about his whereabouts. You’re not a plant are you?’
She regards me through the cigarette smoke and half-light. What cerulean blue eyes she has.
‘Plant?’
‘Sure. Some of these screwball cults put normal-lookers in among the new initiates to keep tabs on everybody, make sure nobody’s in it for the wrong reasons.’
‘Like you,’ I say.
‘Sure. Like me.’
She looks me up and down covertly, examining for oddities. I was careful to dress with near on perfect dullness. She won’t find a thing out of place.
‘I don’t think plants smoke,’ I say.
‘That doesn’t mean a thing. You don’t smoke. Look at you, puffing it all into your cheeks.’
I nod and stub it out. No point being a masochist now the secret’s out. She’s smiling mischievously.
‘You’re just playing with me, aren’t you?’ I say.
‘Of course.'
She eyes my naked ring-finger. A subtle glance but detectable enough. I am long out of practice with this.
There must be a thread which links every action in a life, even if it’s impossible for us mortals to discern. For the last three weeks I have been trying to trace yours, that indestructible wool which stretches from wherever it is you are now, whichever room you’re sitting in, back to the moment you stormed into the world just a few moments ahead of your sister. Sometimes the thread winds over on itself, juts off in some unexpected direction. Taking a sudden interest in Phil Collins. That was out of the blue. Cultivating a smoking habit. Your religious phase. I could see the idea forming in you, crystalising in realtime. We sat huddled like Russians in a gulag at the front of the church, not a spare pew in the house.
Your mother and I were silent but you were crying something chronic, practically wailing. The priest was giving it the usual nonsense, and it wasn’t until the and who believes in me shall never die that you stopped crying all of a sudden and raised your head to listen. Shall never die. But Lucy was dead already, lying just a few feet away with her mouth pursed and her makeup made up. What force you threw yourself at Christ with after that. Buddhism, Jainism, Nihilism, every plate from the ideology buffet all went out the window in that moment, didn’t it? Jesus was your captain now and you fell into the bible and the psalms with the same ferocity you used to give to boys and MTV. I always wondered if you felt cleaved after that. Something had been taken from your mother and I, but a piece of your very own soul had been taken from you, split down the middle. Untwinned. You simply couldn’t accept the brutal truth. Terrible things happen sometimes and we have little else to do but come around to the idea, unbearable as it is.
I don’t want to take you apart psychologically, but you never quite relented on this religious nonsense. When Christ became too contradictory you found your other prophets, the Eastern mystics, Terence Mckenna, Alan Watts, Ramdas. They lost their appeal too, soon enough.
‘They have a special workshop on Tuesdays,’ Julia says. ‘For the initiates.’
‘You’re thinking of joining up?’
‘Of course. How else do you get inside this thing?’
I turn this over in my head. It’s clear enough that short of putting on the garb myself they’re not going to give anything away.
‘All right,’ I say.
You’d like this woman. She’s driven in that singular way. Fran-ishly. When she talks she keeps her eyes fixed on yours like they’ve been epoxied, doesn’t let up for anything. A sign of intelligence, I’ve always thought. We go back inside after a while. There are only a few non-initiates left, all swamped by the Ixers. Personal details time, all the freaks trying to aquire phone numbers of the uninitiated. They have a good go at mine and Julia’s. I give it to them for good measure. What’s the worst they can do?
The moon is hiding tonight, but least I know where she is and when she’ll be back.
I miss you always,
Yours,
Papa.
4.
Internment Transcription – Ersatz-Ningen Denizen – Blue Tier Present Subjects: The Interlokutor (Cadence Official), The Breacher (Cadence Official), Ersatz-Ningen Subject (Perpetrator)
The Interlokutor:
There have been revelations in Cadence Major.
Atia:
You’ve seen the foolhardy error of your ways and you’d like to release me.
The Breacher:
Please refrain from derisive ningen humour during the investigation.
The Interlokutor:
The mergerment recently consumed the entirety of Orange Tier.
Atia:
Saahl has told me of this already.
The Interlokutor:
In an effort to preserve Orange Tier’s legacy, the foremost archivist distributed the tier’s selfsense records to Cadence Major before it was subsumed.
Atia:
And you’ve no doubt been trawling through them.
The Interlokutor:
Indeed. Some startling facts have come to light.
Atia:
And I’m sure they’re accompanied by startling conclusions made by yourself?
The Interlokutor:
Partly.
Atia:
Well don’t keep me in suspense here. What are you talking about?
The Interlokutor:
We believe your infant responsible for the mergerment’s initiation.
Atia:
I see.
The Breacher:
She is mildly surprised, but not as much as would be expected.
The Interlokutor:
You were expecting something like this?
Atia:
Even if I was, how could I have had any part in it? I didn’t follow the infant to Blue and Indigo Tier. We had no contact after she left.
The Interlokutor:
Even so, there is a strong likelihood that you guided her thinking in some way, made the concept appealing to her.
Atia:
Have you been listening to a Gnesha-damned thing I’ve said? I'm as ningen as a denizen can be. I have taken a designation, a gender, a physical eksist mode. I don’t share my self sense directly with any other denizen. Occasionally I eat and drink and fornicate in the traditional ningen style. Why, if I’m that – to use your word, eccentric, would I dream of goading a child into creating the mergerment?
The Interlokutor:
We are unsure, hence the question.
Atia:
This is absurd.
The Breacher:
She is still not entirely being truthful.
Atia:
About what? You incompetency at even basic reasoning?
The Interlokutor:
We don’t doubt that you are surprised. The Breacher is only concerned that you are not as surprised as you perhaps should be.
Atia:
This is a total invasion of my selfsense autonomy, as I must have said a hundred times now.
The Interlokutor:
Did you suspect your infant might do something like this?
Atia:
No.
The Breacher:
Yet again you are lying.
>
Atia:
Gnesha’s teeth, perhaps, I don’t know. She was abnormal, a freak. Obsessed with novel modes of eksist. Everything I loved ningenity for, she hated. Language was inconceivable to her. She wanted direct selfsense fusion with every denizen she met. Physical form was inconceivable too. She wanted to be a pure concept or something equally as macabre. But yes. Fine. I suspected she might do something radical, go looking for new modes of eksist. But I never envisioned her starting a crisis, never envisioned her creating the mergerment.
The Interlokutor:
Nevertheless.
Atia:
Why do you suspect her of initiating it?
The Interlokutor:
The archives show that she had been obsessively researching the early Cadence pioneers. They too dreamed of direct selfsense fusion. She also began to correspond with a number of Cadence philosophers on the subject.
Atia:
Oh, philosophers. Why, that does sound threatening.
The Interlokutor:
Most Cadence renegades begin in the thought forums and end with the exactment of their schemes. We monitor the thought forums closely for that reason.
Atia:
Even if she did initiate the merge there’s no way she could have known it would spiral so violently out of control.
The Interlokutor:
Perhaps not. Nevertheless, she is almost certainly its mother. If this is so then the answer to its destruction may lie in uncovering certain personal weaknesses of hers.
Atia:
Why? If she has joined the mergerment, she will be long gone, fused with the other selfsenses. There must be well over a million now in there. That is how the mergerment works, isn’t it?
The Interlokutor:
Not necessarily. Distinctness may still be preserved. If we could antagonise it somehow with her fears or phobias, we may stand in a favourable stead. I will be frank. At present, we are totally powerless. We have tried setting up partitions all across the Cadence but the mergerment simply passes through them and continues its onslaught.
Atia:
I’m sure there are protocols for this. The original pioneer council will have left behind safeguards or something.
The Interlokutor:
The cadential founders set up the habitat so that no one individual could influence its structure. If the council still eksisted, yes, they could intervene. But they disbanded so as not to guide events in any way and to leave the Cadence to itself.
Atia:
We’re fucked by virtue of our autonomy. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?
The Interlokutor:
Crassly put, but yes. The mergerment recently consumed the partition artisan and all of his contained expertise. It now has the ability to eradicate any blockade whatsoever, including that between itself and Blue Tier.
Atia:
How much time is left?
The Interlokutor:
Unknown, hence why we are now turning this investigation temporarily away from Aiken’s writings and towards your infant.
Atia:
There really isn’t much I can help you with on that subject. She was as much as mystery to me as she is to you.
The Breacher:
This is unlikely.
Atia:
I don’t think you understand just how anomalous she was.
The Interlokutor:
Information has recently come to light regarding this matter. From Orange Tier’s archives we gained intimate knowledge of the infant’s birth. You told us that the artisan took selfsense material from yourself and one other, correct?
Atia:
I did.
The Interlokutor:
Are you aware from where the other material originated?
Atia:
I never asked.
The Interlokutor:
Tsliadin. We are sure of it.
Atia:
What?
The Interlokutor:
This is not speculative. We have the records to prove it.
Atia:
To begin with, where would the artisan get an image of Tsliadin’s selfsense?
The Interlokutor:
Despite Cadence decree they have been available on Yellow Tier for some time.
Atia:
And why would the artisan have any interest in doing something like that? To spite me?
The Interlokutor:
It is highly likely the artisan held allegiances with one of the many insidious Tsliadin resurrectionist groups and saw this as a rare opportunity to capitalise on an otherwise unsuspecting mother such as yourself.
Atia:
This is nonsense.
The Interlokutor:
I assure you it is anything but.
Atia:
The infant, my infant, is a half-incarnation of Tsliadin Tierkiller?
The Interlokutor:
That is the fact of the matter.
The Breacher:
She is genuinely surprised.
Atia:
Of course I’m surprised, you senseless idiot. This is madness. She was anomalous, not evil.
The Interlokutor:
There is a considerable swathe of evidence suggesting the same of Tsliadin.
Atia:
He was a monster.
The Interlokutor:
I’m surprised at your lack of historiks on the matter. He may have been anti-ningen but he certainly didn’t intend any harm against the Cadence. He was merely a passionate cohesionist. We managed to ascertain a few fragments of his selfsense from the moment of his execution. His thoughts were of the future of the Cadence and its preservation. Not the beast you were expecting?
Atia:
If he was anything short of pure evil, why obliterate an entire tier like that?
The Interlokutor:
An experiment gone awry. Tsliadin passionately believed that in forcing the tier’s selfsenses together, a kind of conscious unity would come about, much in the style of the mergerment now. Instead, the tier collapsed. He was not to know this and it was certainly not his intention to have that effect.
Atia:
He still sounds like a monster.
The Interlokutor:
Monster or not, your infant was partly driven by his intentions. His is, as the ningens would have had it, the father of your daughter.
Atia:
If I ever find the artisan I’ll terminate him where he stands.
The Interlokutor:
There are far more pressing issues facing us than revenge. Did you and your infant ever talk of cohesion and its consequences?
Atia:
Once. She was very excited about the idea. I think she believed it was a natural process.
The Interlokutor:
How so?
Atia:
A notion stolen from one of the philosophers in the thought forums. All life tends towards cohesion, apparently. The denizens of the Cadence will eventually cohere into a single super-organism of sorts. She believed it was inevitable.
The Interlokutor:
And you disagreed?
Atia:
I don’t know what I thought. I would just like her back.
Fran,
Strange developments. There are entire forums online for parents who have also lost their children under bizarre circumstances. Most are sad tales that, from the outside, are obvious enough. A young girl is last seen at two in the morning walking back from a nightclub. An inveterate drug user incurs debts with a notorious pusher and disappears overnight. I have written your story down a number of times. It doesn’t look so flagrantly tragic as theirs. There are even more obscure forums for parents who believe they have lost their children to the Church of Ix.
Angst got the better of me and I walked into the Herald offices yesterday. You always moaned about Dewey someone or other, so I asked for him at reception. The girl was young and inexperienced. I told her I was from the High Court and was visiting in regards to an ongoin
g legal dispute involving the newspaper and if she didn’t let me see Mr. Dewey immediately there would be dire consequences. She folded easily enough, walked me through the offices. I suppose this was your sanctum. One of those desks was yours and propped up your things day after day while you manically chewed a pen and made subtle threats down a telephone. The receptionist introduced me. Dewey was startled at first. Bushy professorial eyebrows, highly strung type. When he heard my name he cottoned on almost immediately.
But Thomas Aiken Is Dead - Part I Page 5