The Return of the Arinn

by Frank P. Ryan

  ‘What is that thing – the metal monster that’s holding him?’

  ‘Daemon bots have a fondness for metals. They cannot resist clothing their naked spirits.’

  ‘That giant thing, it’s hideous – terrifying. Please make it release him.’

  ‘It is no gaoler, but a saviour. Would you have me return Gully to the danger he was rescued from?’

  Penny’s vision was transported to a blazing ruin, what might have once been a farm, built around an ancient building with leaded glass and mullioned windows. The buildings and compounds around them blazed and were littered with dead. She averted her eyes from this vision.

  ‘He tried to find me?’

  ‘He ran, but there was nowhere for him to run to. His injuries are not life-threatening. He is safe now, under the protection of my servant.’

  He showed her other visions: streets, towns, cities, worlds – everything was burning, burning, burning . . .

  ‘Why are you doing these terrible things?’

  ‘I am at war with your world.’

  Penny was struggling through a confusion of emotions, horror, anguish, resentment, rage . . . She wanted to scream at him, but a tiny chip of ice in her heart warned her that it would achieve nothing. And then a fear began to grow in her, an inkling perhaps of a deeper understanding.

  ‘You said that the Rose is some kind of machine?’

  ‘Your world of science discovered nuclear power. You affected to own it, to control it. Yet is not the natural world already replete with such power?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The star that greens your planet.’

  ‘You’re talking about the sun? The Rose . . . it’s linked to the sun?’

  ‘What more natural and befitting than to construct a machine designed to feed off your source of life?’

  Penny saw her horrified face reflected in those emotionless all black eyes.

  *

 

  Penny wasn’t listening. All she could think about was the fact that Jeremiah intended to destroy the Earth. That was the purpose of the Black Rose. The Black Rose was feeding off the sun, drawing energy from it to do something monumental, something terrible. She must discover a way of confounding Jeremiah’s plans.

  Penny wished she had Gully here to talk to about it. However stubborn, and pragmatic, he had always been sensible. What would Gully say about what was happening? He would have reduced it to something ordinary. He would have called upon her common sense.

  Stop, look, listen!

  But it wasn’t possible to fall back on what had been safe and simple in the past. Nothing was safe or simple anymore.

  The Black Rose was at the heart of all that was happening. That terrible sight must be visible from anywhere still standing in London. It was probably visible for many miles outside London. It was metamorphosing from moment to moment. It infused the air about it with strange charges, colours, thunderous crackling sounds, to remind you that it was forever active, forever forming and reforming within itself, as if . . . as if it were strangely, terrifyingly alive. The utter alienness of it filled Penny’s heart with dread.

  ‘Oh, Gully!’

  He was the only one, other than her parents, who had ever cared for her. He was the only one who had made it obvious that he loved her. She knew she had hurt him because she couldn’t bear to be touched. What she had done to him was wrong. She so wished she hadn’t run from him. She wished she could turn back time back and do things differently. She wished she could have spoken to Gully about what she had been thinking and feeling, and maybe then he would have talked her out of that final exploration of the City Below.

  The City Below . . .

  The City Below was dangerous. It was worse than dangerous. It was . . . monstrous. And Jeremiah was at the heart of it. He was inhuman. But did that mean that he was also wicked? He saw such moralising as meaningless. He had told her that morality was just a human invention. There was no morality in nature. Was he right? What was he really up to? Why had he come to London? Why did London have to be at the heart of it all?

  Question after question queued for answers in her mind.

  Still, Penny felt that she was making progress little by little in her examination of what was going on.

  She had a flashback to something Jeremiah had told her, right at the very beginning, when they had talked about his impending war with Earth. She recalled his reply when she had asked him why he was here in London:

 

  War!

  She focused her still slightly hazy, dreamy mind on that word. War was another relevant word – an altogether relevant fact.

 

  An ancient war in another world . . .?

  It made no sense to Penny, this talk of a war in another world. Why was she important to his extending this war to Earth?

  I must not dwell on imponderables. I must focus on facts.

  She would have eaten and performed bodily functions over the days, and possibly weeks, of her time here, otherwise she would be dead. Yet, she had no memory of doing so. That meant Jeremiah had to be controlling her even when she was unaware of it.

  He’s controlling me. He’s controlling every single aspect of my existence. He knows when I breathe, when I blink. He listens in to my heartbeat, my every thought, my every feeling. Even now, he knows how much I resent his controlling me. He will prevent any move I make to resist him.

  But was that true? Was Jeremiah able to listen in to her every thought?

  She had remembered something that now seemed important: Jeremiah’s words. he’d said.

  Was it possible that she might discover something of Jeremiah’s purpose through contact with the Akkharu? But how could she possibly communicate with the slug beasts? Up to now her only avenue of communication with them was through the mind-to-mind transmission of the metamorphosing images that Jeremiah had explained as blueprints.

  Penny tried to clarify her thoughts. Then she thought, determinedly, clearly: I would communicate with the Akkharu . . .

  She was standing within a very confusing landscape, half nightmare, half fairytale. Strange creatures peered out at her from behind an explosion of even stranger vegetation. The Akkharu were close. In her mind she saw the black discordant shapes that were their system of communication constantly changing against the ash white background.

  Then, abruptly, she felt more at ease with the dark mystery of it. She began to interpret the message in their changing beauty.

  The message was brilliantly colourful, like a proliferation of opulent flowers – but these were not flowers. There were no definable leaves, no petals. These were structures in a landscape, buildings that followed organic shapes. She watched the blueprints blend and change, and blend and change again. She knew now that she was within the common mind of the Akkharu, the creative womb where the ideas were thought up, toyed with, reshaped and altered until found to be satisfactory. And that made her wonder if she might be able to talk to the swarm.

  Let me see the Akkharu.

  In the blink of an eye, she was among the huge slug-beings, watching how their bodies moved through undulations within their amorphous forms. She looked more closely at their sideways mounted mouths, which were assembling crystals into fibrils that resembled silky blue-black wires. How could such lowly-looking creatures create such architectural wonders?

  To communicate she would need to convert her spoken words to three-dimensional mathematical shapes in her mind. She would have to imagine the shapes even as she spoke the words aloud:
>
  ‘Are you aware of me? Do you know who I am?’

 

  The response had been immediate and intelligent. Penny was so astonished she had to stop to think. ‘I presume that you really are the Akkharu?’

 

  ‘Chardizz?’

 

  Penny hesitated again: ‘What are you weaving the chardizz into?’

  No reply.

  She thought about the silence. Were the Akkharu forbidden to answer that question? If so, who had so forbidden them? It could only be Jeremiah. She rephrased her question: ‘What is it you aspire to?’

  Still no reply.

  Perhaps in the silence there was useful information? Perhaps she was not failing to make contact, but asking the wrong questions. She rephrased her question: ‘Do you dream?’

 

  Communication, again! Had she sensed a frisson of excitement in the otherwise placid beast?

  ‘What do you dream of?’

 

  The reply shocked her; it wasn’t what she had anticipated. On the one hand it was vague and abstract, but on the other hand it was tantalisingly interesting.

  She wasn’t sure what that answer really meant. Eternity. From what little she knew of it, eternity was a central aspiration of many of the major religions. Up to this moment, all she had ever seen of the Akkharu suggested that a common mind followed higher instructions like a machine; but a machine could never have formed that reply. It made Penny wonder if there was something else going on in their minds. Could it be that they concealed individual consciousness, higher intelligence, even, by hiding behind their swarm identity? People in factories did something similar. Penny knew this because she recalled a television programme – one of the very few Father had encouraged her to watch – that showed how workers on an assembly line communicated among themselves as they worked – nodding their heads, fashioning unspoken words on their lips, reading other’s lips.

  Was this instructive?

  Looking at it from this angle, the jarring, mind-arresting images – the three dimensional, metamorphosing blueprints – might mean something quite different to what she had imagined. Not the wonderful language of mathematics that Jeremiah had beguiled her with, but overwhelming orders from their Master; brute instruction of such compulsion that they overwhelmed any individual consciousness?

  The more Penny thought about it, the more she came to question her previous assumptions about the Akkharu. Their slug shapes, devoid of eyes, and their rudimentary bodies, might have deceived her into thinking they weren’t intelligent. What if the Akkharu were more complex and sensitive than she had assumed? What if they didn’t need eyes, or ears, or the manipulative limbs of humans?

  It startled her.

  In the few books and films that she had seen, highly intelligent beings, whether godly or aliens from outer space, had been depicted as humans, often with film-star handsomeness. Artists from classical times had also painted or sculpted beautiful people to denote civilisation and intelligence. But what if that was a quintessentially human construct? What if the Akkharu were highly intelligent, however alien that intelligence might be?

  To create the wonders they did using the crystals they called chardizz, they must be attuned to their environment through some alternative sensory organs. They must be capable not only of perceiving the world around them, but of being inspired by it. How do the Akkharu sense the world around them? Then she thought: bats and cats! Bats could detect the landscape about them even in the dark through their sonar. And cats could feel the proximity of their prey through their whiskers.

  Penny examined the slug beast nearest to her more acutely. Its skin, which she had taken to be smooth, was not actually smooth at all. It was covered with scaly ridges. And wherever there was a scale, a tiny hair-like thing poked out. She was just beginning to appreciate how much further that realisation might take her. And what of emotions – was she assuming the Akkharu had a concept of human emotions, felt human emotions, when they might not?

  But what, she now wondered, if the Akkharu did feel emotions?

  What if they felt emotion as intensely as humans did? What if they resented Jeremiah’s arrogant manipulation of their species, which, now that she considered it, amounted to a kind of enslavement, all the while being unable to express their frustration and rage?

  Perhaps she was wrong? Perhaps the Akkharu did feel despair and anger, but had learned to hide their thoughts and feelings in the same way a human would at work? What if the Akkharu hid their real selves by keeping a system of communication at a private, altogether more intimate, level? The more she considered it, the more she became convinced that it was true. Tentatively, with delicacy and a lightness of mind-to-mind touch, she probed this extraordinary idea.

 

  The response appeared to be silence, but it was a silence like static in your ears wearing ear phones when a radio transmission had been switched off.

  A secret place based on . . . static . . .? Silence? It seemed improbable, but Jeremiah was so incredibly clever at reading minds. Could it be that they kept their feelings below the radar by communicating with one another in a way that Jeremiah did not recognise?

  Oh . . . oh, my!

  Oh, if only it were possible to escape Jeremiah’s control.

  Penny thought again about those factory workers and their lip-read conversations. They performed quite complex, but repetitive tasks for the factory owner – for their controller – but at the same time they had this secret system of communication that they kept below the radar. They conversed among themselves by lip-reading. They read one another’s facial expression. Humans were very good at reading one another’s facial expression.

  An idea crept into her mind, one that would be most unwelcome to Jeremiah if he knew of its presence. A dangerous idea.

  What if I too can find a secret means of communication, a code that is below Jeremiah’s radar? Could this be the first step in opposing what he is planning to do to Earth?

  As if he had read her rebellious thoughts, Jeremiah manifested beside her. With a flick of a finger he opened up a vision of a world, and threat, altogether more tangible. Penny found herself hovering in space, in a place where darkness stretched in every direction.

  Is he punishing me with a vision of eternity?

  But then, with another flick of his finger, green lines, curves and parabolas appeared to fill the emptiness about her. Penny thought: he didn’t read my wondering about a place to hide. He didn’t read my wondering about a secret means of expression. She tucked this realisation away: it was her secret.

  ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘It is known as Dromenon.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘Do not be frightened.’ With another flick of his finger, pinpoints of green appeared, then began to spread, moving like cosmic nibs across the three dimensional darkness, etching as they moved.

  Penny gasped: ‘Oh!’

  She recognised the familiar outline of St Paul’s Cathedral, but now it was etched into the emptiness by the glowing green blueprint.

  ‘Dromenon and reality co-exist. You might sketch your new city here – much as you captured the old on the ceiling of your hiding place. Such is the wonder of Dromenon, your creativity that might be translated into physical realisation in the new city.’

  ‘The new city?’

  ‘Your city, Penny – the new London.’

  In spite of her fears of mere moments ago, Penny felt excited by the prospect. ‘But how do I do it?’

  ‘I will call upon another power to enable you. But first I need to free you from all constraints.’

  ‘I—’

  He dematerialised. She felt him invade her mind. He said: st show you how to think through to the minds of the Akkharu. Let me guide you so that they become your pencils and brushes.>

  *

  Penny gave in to him and he became one with her, reaching deeper and deeper into her thoughts, her spirit, igniting a frenzy of creativity that burned like a furnace. With effortless ease her mind entered communication with the common mind of the Akkharu. In that communion Penny found that she was looking at the world as the Akkharu did; through a vision that was, as she had correctly figured, exquisitely sensitive to every nuance. But now she could also control that mind: she could recall with precision the cityscape of London; the monuments she had drawn again and again and the desolate spaces that now surrounded them. She could direct the Akkharu to follow her blueprints to make it whole again, to revive her beloved city, while at the same time blend old and new into a masterwork of creativity.

  A pinpoint of glowing green grew and spread, creating curls and arches, helices and arabesques. Walls appeared, constructed of a three-dimensional lattice of overlapping circles; buildings of spectacularly organic shape, making use of space and the most fluid of lines allowed by the magical crystals. Buildings, devoid of flat planes, straight lines and the unpleasant sharpness of angles appeared to defy gravity, more still had transparent walls, or captured light in all of its prismatic colours. On and on the creativity stretched, so Penny became lost in the wonder of it, while all around her the new city of air streams and currents of visual movement flowed around, in and through her.

  When, at last, it was finished, she felt exhaustion overwhelm her, body and spirit. She desperately needed to rest . . . to sleep. But within her mind he – Jeremiah – resisted it.

 

  ‘What more can I do?’

 

  ‘I cannot do that.’

 

  ‘A communion with what?’