“Watch closely, and make sure you remember it.”
José felt a shock in his new eyes, and information began to pour in from them again.
A whale was swimming languorously through a fireworks display in the sky.
That was José’s first impression of what he saw.
It was night.
Night somewhere else.
The constellations were different. Which Realm it was, José did not know.
The eyes implanted in José were floating in midair, surprisingly high up.
Below him countless points of light spread out in a dazzling, galaxy-like spiral. It was a vast city.
He couldn’t get a sense of the distance, but it was dozens of times larger at least than the Realm of Summer, with thousands of times more people.
José had not even realized that there could be a Realm like this. He found the idea overwhelming. The system resources that would be needed were unimaginable.
As he watched, tiny flying machines rose from the town, whizzing past José’s “eyes” at incredible speeds and continuing upward into the night. José’s “eyes” followed them up.
And saw what lay beyond them.
Far above his head, silhouetted against the moon, was a whale swimming in the night sky.
It was like an airship, but much larger. Its exact size was hard to grasp, but it had to be at least a kilometer long. From below, José could see only the whale’s belly, which shone silver in the light from the town below. He could not say whether it was the silver of a fish, or of metal or some other material.
There was no way it could be a whale, of course. José wasn’t even sure whether it was alive or not. But it certainly looked and moved like a whale. It was graceful and gigantic, and somehow gave the impression of wisdom. Its body undulated as it swam through the night sky. Thinking of it as a whale was probably the most correct approach. He sensed intent along those lines. It was intended to look like a whale, or perhaps to be like a whale. That was why it looked the way it did. But what was it really? José wished he could get a closer look.
The flying machines from the city maintained their ascent toward the whale. They were shaped like spinning tops, revolving rapidly while an engine quietly droned within, and the color of burnished copper pots. Their top sections were fixed, and José could see people (whether guests or AIs was not clear) leaning out of open hatches on some, wearing classic flying caps and red or white scarves that streamed in the wind.
There was a low boom, and a small explosion of flame appeared on one side of the whale’s abdomen. It was small by comparison with the whale, but much larger than any of the flying machines. More booms followed and explosions appeared across the whale’s surface. From the flames that blossomed in the sky away from the whale as well, José deduced that it was under attack by the flying machines. The vivid colors of the flames were dreamily beautiful: red, green, marine blue. This was clearly a fierce battle, but José felt a sense of separation from it; it looked like a fantasy, slightly out of alignment with reality. Like something out of a storybook.
As José watched, an airship emerged from the moonlight-pearly clouds. The airship looked to be from the same technological background as the tops, only bigger. It was not a zeppelin filled with gas, but a literal airship, complete with keel. It was fat and rounded, and, naturally, coppery in color. Comblike structures extended from its gunwales, making it look like a flying galley. Looking closely, José saw that the combs’ teeth were spinning at high speed. Was there a Realm with the technology to create lift with rotation like that?
The battle between the whale and the galley was about to go on. José wished he could go higher, but his viewpoint remained fixed. Presumably this was more like a recording than a view on live events.
The flying machines fired on the whale with a sound like swarming bees, releasing flaming projectiles from their spinning sections. These burst when they were close to the whale, releasing gouts of flame. What kind of mechanism could fire these from a rotating surface? José found himself fascinated by the somewhat irrational, arbitrary scene playing out before him.
The whale increased the intensity of its undulation to give its body a strong flick.
And what happened next? Like seeds blown off a dandelion, a cloud of minuscule (human-sized?), light objects were shaken from the surface of the whale. They looked like snowflakes. Each had the same complete control of its movement as the Spiders that had rained down on the Realm of Summer that morning. And, as José watched, the snowflakes opened hostilities with the army of flying machines.
The result, however, did not even deserve the term “hostilities.” The flying machines were annihilated in moments. Any top that came into contact with a snowflake either broke apart in midair or stopped spinning immediately. The depowered flying machines continued to rise at first, but gradually broke formation and, like pebbles thrown into the air, lost their upward impetus and began to fall. The men in flying caps did not even scream on the way down—were they already dead? Flames burst from some of the tops. Exploding ammunition, José surmised.
Other snowflakes attached themselves to the galley. It fell completely to pieces, collapsing like a toy castle built of blocks. Flames erupted from within its hull, tearing it apart from bow to stern. Before long the disintegrating airship was on fire as well. Even the blocks that had escaped the inferno burst into flames themselves as they fell.
Reduced to an uncountable cloud of fragments, the galley brushed past José’s viewpoint as it fell.
José heard singing.
A distant song.
It was coming from the snowflakes as they drifted lightly through the air.
The song was clear and somewhat off-key, sounding like boy scouts around the campfire. José could grasp neither melody nor harmony. In fact, he was not sure whether, ultimately, it was truly a “song,” but he could tell that the snowflakes shared some kind of tone with which they were attempting to harmonize.
When all the flying machines were gone, the snowflakes split up and arranged themselves like skydivers in horizontal rings. Then they slowly began to descend toward José. As the rings approached he was finally able to make out the individual snowflakes. They looked like mannequins of glass, but they were not human, or even humanoid, in form. In this respect they were like the Spiders, which did not after all take the form of spiders.
They looked like sculptures put together by an alien who had stumbled upon a cache of abandoned mannequins but had never seen a human being before.
There were some who had nothing but fluttering golden hair atop a smooth posterior and thighs. There were headless torsos with dozens of arms that moved like graceful wings sprouting from them. Some of the mannequins wore heads with ice-blue eyes as if on necklaces. All had the same glassy texture. Most of them appeared to have been coated in heavy frost or stuffed with glass fiber. There was a chilling sense of coldness about them. If he were to touch one, José thought, with no evidence, his fingers would surely freeze and break off in an instant.
Singing their “song,” staying in their rings, the snowflakes descended.
José turned his gaze to the city below.
The metropolis spread like scattered jewels, tongues of flame rising here and there. These were fires started by crashed flying machines. Larger explosions eventually began to bloom, one after another, as the wreck of the galley hit the ground. José could not see it from his vantage point, but AIs were fleeing from those flames in their hundreds of thousands. (Like us this morning.)
Suddenly several blocks were swallowed up by a single gigantic explosion. The galley’s engine room, perhaps.
And all the while the mannequins descended in their rings, glowing a faint blue. Perhaps because they were accelerating as they fell, from José’s perspective the glowing rings seemed to close up into themselves until they were indistinguishable fr
om the city lights below.
A change occurred. A black circle centered on one block of the city started to spread. It grew horizontally, remaining at street level. Its circumference glowed, but inside it was perfectly black. The city was disappearing, starting from the places the mannequins had fallen. The edges of the circles transformed everything they swept across, leaving nothing whatsoever inside as they grew. Were these circles the same as the holes the Spiders made? Or something entirely different? José felt a shiver run down his spine. He had preferred the explosions.
The glowing rings eventually overlapped, forming a single gigantic circle.
The city had been completely swallowed up.
And then, all at once, José felt a presence, overwhelming and very near.
The whale had descended to his level. It was well over five kilometers long. José felt himself go weak.
As he watched, the whale kept swimming forward.
This time what José felt was astonishment.
On the whale’s back was a sprawling mining town.
Cut-down mountains. Vast open pits. Conveyor belts carrying unearthed rocks and ore. Rails. Clusters of buildings. Houses with lights in their windows.
And …
A gigantic pond, gazing at José.
No, that was no pond.
It was an eye.
One that looked exactly like a human’s.
Eyelids, eyelashes.
Moist iris.
Without warning, the image feed to José’s eyes was cut.
Instead, the ocean terrace came into view, the boy Langoni peering into his face.
The recording must have ended there.
José studied Langoni’s face, and was surprised to find that the boy looked rather sickly.
“Did that happen in some other Realm?” asked José.
The boy pulled his chin in slightly. A nod, presumably.
“What was that thing?” asked José.
“An Angel,” said Langoni. His voice was low, weak, and dry.
Where space and time extended to infinity, Old René the shipwright was laughing with a sound like dry leaves. He had managed to stop himself right at the brink of madness.
The chewing, crunching noises behind him were steadily growing louder. He could not summon the nerve to turn back toward it, but he had a fair idea of what was happening. The Spider had revived and was eating his companion. Soon that hunger would swallow him up too, he supposed. If so, he wished it would hurry up. Better to disappear quickly, in the space of a thought.
Suddenly, for some curious reason, René recalled Julie Printemps’s smile. The memory was from a time when he had been unable to work after severely straining his shoulder. Endless rain had left him nothing to do for several weeks but sit gloomily in his chair and work on model ships. When was it Julie had arrived with her “Hi!”—about three o’clock? Despite the foul weather, it felt as if the sun itself had come to the door of his dingy home. He’d been surprised when she said “Look!” and showed him the piercing in her tongue, but when the deed was done, he seemed to recall, it had been as if a great burden had been lifted from him. There had been no guilt. Partly because of the morals of this Realm, and partly, he supposed, because that was what Julie was there for …
René’s thinking soon returned, however, to the matter of the Spider.
If he was simply going to be devoured by the hunger, it should be over in an instant. But it felt like that noise had been coming from behind for forever. What on earth was taking the Spider so long? What was it doing?
“Arts and crafts.”
René stiffened. Had he just heard that? Had someone said “Arts and crafts”? Who? He knew the voice. René was far beyond laughing now. Something unimaginable was going on behind him. Arts and crafts? What was being made, and by whom? Whose voice was that?
As René stared at the distant exit from the bathroom, one of the Spider’s legs entered his field of vision, closing around him from behind. It was sturdy and bristly, with black and yellow stripes. René was frozen. The tip of the Spider’s leg split open to reveal an array of slim manipulators with various attachments. It looked like something you might see at a dentist’s office in hell. A nozzle at the end of one manipulator sprayed him with Spider-web. Web with poor insulation. Drenched in the stuff, his chest’s identity boundary became unstable. His surface turned translucent, revealing his weakly pulsing innards. He was going to be vivisected, René thought. Nothing to be done about it. He’d had a good run—a thousand years of shipbuilding. If this was how it ended, there was nothing to be done about it. He tried to make himself believe this.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” the voice from before said. “This isn’t a dissection.”
Probe needles and tubes went into his head, too many to count. The voice began to sound inside his skull.
“It’s arts and crafts, Grandpa René. This is my summer homework.”
Then the voice laughed. He felt the programs that constituted his self coming apart in time with the laugh’s spasmic rhythm. His left eyeball revolved in its socket like a light bulb being unscrewed, then popped out. His tongue lolled and retracted like a clockwork mainspring in a cartoon. If this was a joke, it was in truly grotesque taste.
Finally René realized.
The voice. The voice laughing behind his back.
It was Felix the tailor.
Joël, who had charge of the Mineral Springs Hotel’s kitchen, put the well-used frying pan on the hob, then heated the oil until thin smoke began to rise from it. He never used tallow. Vegetable oil infused with herbs and garlic was more his style.
A selection of vegetables and an almost impudently large hunk of beef sat in an enamel tray on the counter, marinating in wine. He gripped the beef with stainless-steel tongs and wiped off the wine, revealing its lustrous, smoothly full surface. Best to cook this as a simple steak, Joël thought. Then he could cut it up so that everyone at the entrance got at least a little piping-hot meat.
In the Realm of Summer, Joël the chef also played the role of exhaustive culinary database.
He was, in fact, the symbol of all cooking in the Realm of Summer. Anyone preparing food in the Realm accessed his database, whether they knew it or not. This obviated the need for all the AIs to bear their own individual knowledge of cooking. The system’s resources were limited, and a design which lightened the burden of AI activity by eliminating trivial knowledge made sense.
Of course, not everyone could cook as well as Joël could. That skill was accessible to him alone.
Still holding the steak in the tongs, Joël transferred it to the frying pan.
There was a fierce hiss. Fine droplets of oil flew into the air, stinging painfully as they landed on Joël’s arm. The sheer vividness of the sensation made Joël wary. He might have been the first to notice the change in their senses—he was a cook, after all, and it made sense for him to notice such things. But of course he did not realize what was behind the change.
Needs a little more time, Joël thought, looking into the frying pan. Once he had cooked one side of the steak to a suitably crispy finish, the top of the steak slick with fat, he flipped it over. The meat looked delicious. It was wonderful (if only natural, if you thought about it) the way beef smelled of milk. Oil and fat, cooking and blood, and then the smell of milk. For the diner, these smells confirmed the richness of their own existence, but for meat it was the smell of death. The smell of a part that had once been alive being completely destroyed.
Such thoughts were unusual for Joël, but he found himself pursuing them anyway. Here he was, doing what was necessary to completely obliterate the last faint traces of life in the meat. He would then divide that death up and serve it to the others.
The steak was looking good now. Humming a tune, Joël flipped it over again with the tongs.
Reveali
ng the charred face of Felix.
It was torn into the cooked surface of the steak, split here and there so that the color of raw meat showed through.
As Joël stared, the face smiled.
“Hey there, Joël,” it said.
Joël was completely without the ability to respond to a situation like this. The cook could only cock his head and look into the frying pan.
“I should have known it’d be hot in here,” Felix continued, still smiling. “It really is. I thought I was going to die.”
Under the counter, the oven door opened from the inside. A Spider exactly the size and shape of a human hand crawled out of the oven and began to climb Joël’s back.
“Cooking’s a wicked trade, isn’t it, Joël? Choking the breath out of things, then gussying them up to serve to others.”
The Spider-hand seized the back of Joël’s head. Joël felt a powerful shove from behind. The frying pan drew near.
“Now it’s your turn.”
Joël’s intelligence no longer operated normally, but he felt his bodily senses dizzily reversed and twisted.
Now, in the frying pan, Joël’s face was being pushed down, cooking in the sizzling, fragrant oil in infinitely extended space. Unbelievable agony ensued. What was pushing Joël’s face down was Joël’s—his own—arm. The arm was attached to his own body as well, but from the neck up, that body was taken over by Felix’s face, done to a delicious-looking golden brown and still steaming. Joël realized that at some point his own face and sensations had been mapped onto the steak. He was sealed up inside the cut of beef.
Enjoying the fragrant smell of Joël that filled the kitchen, Felix took up the tune his victim been humming. He had all the time in the world.
“This isn’t normal,” Julie said bluntly. “If we don’t do something soon, it’ll be big trouble.”
The three sisters looked at her sadly. Julie’s own eyes were fixed on Yve in what could more accurately be called a glare. Yve’s eyes were cast down, perhaps because she did not want to meet anybody else’s.
The women had emerged from the Chandelier temporarily to resume their positions around the casino table.
The Thousand Year Beach Page 18