Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  Therein, of course, lay a political and theological complication, as well as a purely physics-based one.

  THE FACE OF THE DEEP

  (A BRIEF INTERLUDE)

  The Void, the universe that was the seat of the Pinian Brotherhood’s authority, was divided into two halves just as the Brotherhood itself was. The upper infinity belonged to the Pinians – to God and the three Disciples. The lower infinity belonged to the Darkings – to the Adversary, and the Adversary’s three Disciples.

  The upper half of the Void was a cold stellar vacuum in which untold trillions of galaxies wheeled and raced. The great disc known as Cursèd’s Playground was just the closest of them, and had been drawn somewhat into the region of variable physics that marked the lower boundary of the Void’s stellar volume. It spun its way past at the stately pace of the stars, acting in accordance with the rules imposed upon it at the birth of the cosmos it called home.

  The lower half of the Void – a separate universe in terms of physical laws, although it was really part of the Void Dimension in the same way that land and sea were part of the same world – was known as Castle space. It was also technically a null-gravity vault, but it had a thin, chilly atmosphere of sorts and a different set of starting conditions that prevented the formation of stars. Instead, great spherical agglomerations of grey stone abounded, some larger than the galactic superclusters of the cosmos above. They didn’t exert gravity in the same way as stellar bodies, and didn’t fuse into stars or collapse into black holes, although they did collect the air of Castle space around themselves into breathable atmospheres.

  Out of these masses of stone, the Darkings and their worshippers had constructed Castle Void, an unnatural32 monstrosity that seemed to fill the universe from wall to wall, its roof stretching like a grey desert across the expanse of the central boundary-plane, its warren of chambers and basements extending untold fathoms into the frigid darkness below.

  The boundary-plane, where stellar vacuum met Castle space, had once been called The Face of the Deep. It was there, on the roiling interface of physical laws and the tense border between Pinian and Darking, that God had built Heaven, Earth, Hell and Cursèd. The flatworlds benefited from the gravitational pull of Castle Void as well as the modest gravity that came from their own masses, but they were technically in the Pinian half of the Void. They were held aloft in their pockets of atmosphere33 by what was generally agreed to be the reinforcing pillar of the Eden Road, although a baffling loophole of Dimensional physics could not be ruled out as a factor – while things on their upper surfaces were drawn downwards.

  Nearby, easily accessible to Heaven and the worlds below, and occasionally hotly contested by the Darkings of Castle Void, there was a Portal to The Centre that was another reason the Four Realms had been placed where they were. The Portal was still accessible on Moskin’s side of the veil, hanging in space beside the great dish of Heaven and providing all-important traffic to and from Capital Mind. That the Portal had not vanished in the exile was one of the plotted points showing the approximate extent of the veil.

  Whether a Portal even could be folded into a separate layer of reality was a question beyond the reach of most conventional science, and yet it was endlessly debated – despite the fact that once you got to the ‘Infinites can do anything’ argument it all got rather pointless. Still, there were laws. Portals could be corrupted, after all – even sealed. But the Portal had not been veiled, so it wasn’t really important.

  It was all immensely complicated and Moskin was forced to concede that the crazy set of physical laws seemed to work even though he couldn’t understand them. He’d lived in Fade for a century, after all, without spontaneously un-being.

  The question of the post-vanishing debris just exemplified the convoluted nature of the Pinian realms. Early explorers into the gulf had dredged up some scraps, and crews like the BaLoi’s – with whom Moskin had taken a tour into the gulf once – claimed to have found some too, floating here and there in pockets of null-gravity or eddies of conflicting gravity, but the majority had simply fallen. And when it had crashed onto the Rooftop, or into the stump of the Eden Road at The Godfang’s Landing, the Darkings had claimed it as their own under the aeons-old and tome-length series of treaties between the two halves of the Brotherhood.

  Stolen property, according to the Pinians. Confiscated projectiles, according to the Darkings. And the Void had come close to going to war over – with due respect for the magnitude of the vanishing – a shower of garbage. In the end, the debris was forgotten, and conflict was averted by dint of those same treaties that had led the Darkings to appropriate the stuff in the first place. And the incident had itself become a footnote in the greater history, nay, mythology, of the animosity between Pinian and Darking.

  And so the centuries had crawled on by.

  THE INTERPLAY

  “So,” Bayn said, “any other questions?”

  “Plenty,” Moskin replied, “but they’re all along the lines of ‘tell me everything’. Maybe it would be best if you started at the start.”

  “I’m not sure you’re adequately equipped to take this story from the start,” Bayn said in amusement. “No offence intended. But I will do what I can.”

  “Are you concerned about what the Angel said?” Moskin asked. “About a military intervention from Heaven?”

  “Oh, military sanctions from the Corps of the Magi, and decommissioning of the Destarion?” Bayn replied carelessly. “No. Every now and then they have elections up there, and a new Archangelic court tries to act tough, but nothing really happens because I work for a higher authority.”

  Moskin started forward along the corridor, since there didn’t seem to be much alternative. Trailing his fingers along one wall, he followed the apparently seamless and unbranching passageway through a slow right-hand curve that seemed to tighten slightly as he progressed. It was all on one level, but may have been sloping ever so slightly downwards. It was difficult to establish without instruments.

  “How long am I going to be here?” he asked.

  “As long as you wish,” Bayn told him. “I rather imagined this as being a long-term commitment, but obviously it depends on a lot of factors. You’ll find I am quite capable of sustaining you in comfort.”

  “Despite the fact that you don’t do Áea-folk?” Moskin felt safe enough to add dryly, and was rewarded by a rich chuckle – or, like the earlier awkward titter, a sound that communicated ‘chuckle’ but was not in fact a chuckle of any kind.

  “Precisely.”

  “I have food supplies – dry rations – to last me a couple of months, and a generator that should be able to make water from the atmosphere,” Moskin said, “which is presumably renewable or otherwise cycled…?”

  “Oh yes, you don’t need to worry about that,” Bayn said. “I have bioorganic systems to generate breathable air, and I have already adjusted my gastroclave to your needs. I think we can do a bit better than your dry rations. Feel free to use them, however, until such time as you trust me. I will not be offended.”

  “Looking ahead, if our work is still ongoing when my rations run out,” Moskin said, although he was curious as to what exactly a ‘gastroclave’ was, “I will need to either trust you, or ask you to take me back to Fade for provisions.”

  “Yes,” Bayn said, sounding unconcerned. “I suppose that will be a situation we will face when the time comes. The sooner we get started, perhaps, the better?”

  “Agreed,” Moskin said eagerly, quickening his pace. The tunnel curved more sharply. “I assume I’m headed in the right direction, since no other directions seem available?”

  “I will provide you a route to the observation deck,” Bayn said. Even as she spoke, another milky opening gaped practically under Moskin’s trailing hand, and he detoured into it unhesitatingly. This passageway also curved, and angled quite noticeably upwards as well.

  “Observation deck?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Bayn said, and now she defi
nitely sounded smug. “You’ve come all this way, after all – it would be rude of me to deny you a glimpse of the vanished worlds any longer, wouldn’t it?”

  After this tantalising comment, of course, Moskin could barely contain his questions. He followed the tunnel up and around until the eerily dimensionless white interior opened out into a chamber, in the centre of which the floor was raised into a knee-high circular platform several metres across.

  “Now,” Bayn continued, “like I said, I was unable to get my metaphorical hands on much of the objects left behind by the vanishing – and, of course, none of the people. Still, with some luck and a pair of grav-floats, I was able to collect a lot of it together and keep it aloft. I spent an unfortunate length of time, I regret to say, trying to categorise and assemble it into some sort of coherent design, thinking it was meant to help.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Moskin said. He’d considered it too, when he’d first arrived in Fade.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Bayn agreed. “It was mostly just junk – especially after being tossed around in gravitational eddies for a few decades. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. The objects themselves? Some of them are as innocuous as household appliances or larger-scale power retrieval units, things as huge as Dueron industrial plating or as small as a puff of inert nano-mites. A lot of it seemed to be technological in nature or related to power-generation, or otherwise high-grade energised matter … but none of it was useful. I concluded that the most valuable things had long since been snapped up by the Darkings, but that it wasn’t worth starting that fight again. The debris was just that – debris.”

  “The most compelling theory I read,” Moskin said, circling the knee-high platform thoughtfully, “was that it wasn’t so much that items had been left here for us, as–”

  “–as items not taken in the vanishing,” Bayn said enthusiastically. “Yes, exactly. That was my conclusion as well.”

  Moskin nodded again. “I didn’t take it much further than that.”

  “No,” Bayn agreed. “But it was that idea – finally, after far too much time wasted playing with frozen junk – that led me to begin plotting the interplay.”

  “The interplay?” Moskin asked, because it seemed expected.

  The pallid, sourceless light smoothly drained from the room, leaving the central platform illuminated like a strange alien fungus. At the same time, flecks of light began to wink into being in the air above the platform. It was, he realised, a display system.

  “The interchange of energy between reality and unreality,” Bayn said. “You don’t need to be a soul doctor or an unphysicist to know that there are several mundane examples. The most common being the shift a spacecraft goes through when accelerating to relative speed, and the shift that a consciousness goes through when an organism goes from being alive to being dead.”

  “The former is a lot more accessible to scientific verification,” Moskin remarked.

  “Of course. But you’re aware of the latter,” Bayn said with slight impatience. “The spark of life woven into the chemical reactions that separate organic matter from inorganic. The various ways it can be affected. The sphere it originates from, and to which it returns.”

  “I’m as familiar as any layman,” Moskin said, then felt compelled to add, “I was intrigued by the Dagab incident.”

  “Ah,” Bayn said, pleased. “Yes, that was rather critical to my understanding of the so-called vanished worlds, as well,” lights were still appearing in the air, picking out a roughly spherical shell. “One of our Lost Disciples soul-journeyed out of the gulf by paths unknown, got as far as Zerf’s Dimension before being captured, and a spoiled soul was sent back in the Disciple’s place. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Moskin said, “the Disciple’s consciousness, or that particular incarnation of it, most likely remained in Farrendohr.”

  “Mm. Strange place. I’ve never visited,” Bayn said. “One of those places where the Infinites play Their games directly with the beasts of the land and the fish of the sea and the stones of the field,” she fell into a silence Moskin couldn’t help but identify as moody, as the lights continued to appear. They were, he noticed, appearing at steadily-increasing frequency.

  “But this interplay you have been tracking is … deaths?” Moskin gestured at the strange display.

  “In very simple terms, yes. I have been tracking the deaths of life-forms that are not only functionally invisible – they don’t even seem to exist in this sphere.”

  Moskin looked at the sparkling lights with a new appreciation, and a pang of concern. There were a lot of lights flushing across the display. “So,” he said, “when a soul retracts from reality into Limbo, you can … detect that?”

  “In a sense,” Bayn said clinically. “Of course, death on that conceptual level does not normally leave a signature one can pick up using ordinary sensors, or extraordinary ones for that matter. The world around us gives off too many signals. The physical ones, for example, like a dead body where there had previously been a living one. It is an overwhelming excess of data.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Moskin agreed.

  “In the emptiness left behind here, though, there is enough silence that one can pick up patterns, over time. And, over time, filter the different gradients of living things, until … well. As you can see. The deaths of native sentient creatures, as a graphical representative timeline and with a three-point margin of error on the Karpida relative intelligence scale…”

  The sphere of light seemed to have solidified, a seamless shimmering sculpture of death on a colossal scale. It was like a patchwork, a jigsaw, a set of interlocking shapes alternately illuminated and dark, higher concentrations and lower, in constant flux. If Bayn was to be believed, it was a chronological map of lives ending in some intangible plane.

  Moskin didn’t need to have ever been on one to recognise a ballworld when he saw it. Scad had a globe in her house, across the shell of which was worked a map of her ancestral home, Yatrodd 2,317 (Above).

  “It’s a planet,” he said.

  “Yes,” Bayn replied, still sounding happy. “And the shapes you see correspond to several of the populated landmasses of the flatworld of Earth. So we see population centres, native life-forms … and their rate of demise. Naturally for a toll like this to be sustainable – and it is constantly increasing – there must also be new life being born. I haven’t been able to isolate that signal yet, but for the purposes of illustration it’s not really necessary.”

  Moskin thought again of his sacrifice of Gyre, Grodnak and Hucklecomb. Of the bodies, separated out into components, points along a circle, unimaginable and interconnected and self-contained. Had the Infinites done the same thing with the Pinian realms?

  “Several of Earth’s landmasses,” he picked up. “But not all?”

  “Not all,” Bayn agreed. “There is no sign, for example, of Aganéa, Deschau, or Mador Laar. Nor is there any sign of any of the circle-nations of Hell, nor is there any sign of the Cursèdscape. Just this one world. I am still attempting to triangulate the positions of other planets so I can map things more satisfactorily. Of course, to triangulate, you generally need more than two points,” the Flesh-Eater gave her strange non-chuckle again. “It’s right there in the word, really.”

  “But you have two points?”

  “Yes,” Bayn replied. “Although the second point is … not exactly part of the interplay.”

  “The Destarion,” Moskin guessed. “She’s in there as well.”

  “Correct,” Bayn said approvingly. “In fact, it was the Destarion’s signature that gave me the first clue about what to look for. It was a fundamental change in assumptions, you see, between looking for three stationary hidden flatworlds and looking for three invisible planets in motion.”

  “I can appreciate that,” Moskin said.

  “For this part of the demonstration, I will have to change focus,” Bayn said. The shimmering blue-white deathplanet winked out, and just as quic
kly a new shape appeared.

  This one was less of an artwork, and more of a three-dimensional rendering, a schematic picked out in blue-white highlights. It was also instantly recognisable from a hundred horror-story representations. The long, thick, curved spike of the Godfang, the four tapering spires of her roots. Moskin stared at the legendary defence platform Bayn called home, feeling superstitious fascination crawling up the nape of his neck.

  “She’s … really in there?” he asked, his voice hushed for some reason. Wherever ‘there’ is. “You’re in contact?”

  “She’s in there,” Bayn said, “but we’re not in contact. Not in any conventional sense. What you’re seeing here is just a few impressions that I’ve amalgamated over the years to form a sort of composite image. Some of it is still guesswork. She is currently in a dormant state, due to … well, perhaps the best way to explain is to continue illustrating.”

  The sleek, deadly shape dwindled in size and began to move in a dizzying arc, which tightened to a circular motion as she shrank to a dot. At the same time, a faint webbing of lines extended out around her, forming another sphere, spinning with the Elevator stuck in its side. Soon the Destarion was too small to see and the sphere was moving in a circle as well as spinning. And then its circling began to outline a larger circle as the image shrank still further, until it too was almost lost, a spark of light no larger than the first of the death-motes from Bayn’s first demonstration.

  Circles within circles.

  “Guesswork, almost all of it,” Bayn said, “but I’ve been at it for a long time, and it’s a very educated guess. By my estimation, the Destarion is lodged in the surface or crust of a moon, which is in orbit around a planet, which is in orbit around a sun. That is to say, a different planet, not the one I just showed you – and not, as far as I can tell, a planet with inhabitants. The reason it took me so long to plot their relative locations is because…” the point of light winked out, “…they’re so far apart.”