by Demir Barlas
“Hiding? Yes, in the Whimalayas or the reeds. He’s still a fetus. He’s in the womb. He’ll be there for vigintillions of years.”
Salt removed his hands from his face. He felt ridiculous, lying there in clothes and spouting nonsense and lost to himself. He was dizzy. The room itself seemed to be rising and dipping, dipping and rising, and 272 fancied he could see a horizon behind it—is that where Jesu-Krishna was?—and the faint outline of hope blending into the gulf of space, into interminable night.
“This could stop,” Marlo reminded her son.
“I know.”
“Why linger in it?”
“Because the revelation won’t come otherwise. I have to stay in the middle of nowhere, you see. It’s the Archimedean place. If I stay here, I’ll have the truth of myself. Do you know, Non-Henry wouldn’t talk to me?”
“He’s a great deal like you. He wants self-knowledge, and he thinks it comes from pain and honesty, but then he wanders back to his distractions.”
“Jesu-Krishna, you must be tired of watching us. Two immortal lunatics turning in the same circles forever.”
“You’re still deflecting.”
“I can’t decide, all right? Not today. I have a year. I’ll find something. I’ll find myself.”
“And what form might that discovery take?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. Maybe she’ll tell me. My archetype. My Spirit of Meaning. She’s so beautiful! I wonder if one can love an archetype?”
“You’re still deflecting.”
Salt got off the sofa, looked for the most ponderous of his nearby books, and threw it despairingly at Marlo’s hologram. For her part, the computron observed the passage of this small missile with interest, relieved that this part of Salt’s cycle was over. Soon, he would get drunk and Non-Henry would pretend to, clone and android bonding over the insufferable perfection of their mother.
Salt 15 had invented sugargin, a concoction that contained more than sugar and gin, and many of the subsequent Salts had become its devotees. 272 liked getting drunk on sugargin; when particularly rambunctious, he mixed it with absinthe and chlorovar. Non-Henry, immune to intoxication, enjoyed more of a sympathetic buzz with his friend.
“It is the year 1819,” Salt declared. They were in Gallery 17, which was dedicated to illuminated manuscripts, and empty tumblers of sugargin lay before them like sultan-exhausted concubines. “Of the Messianic reckoning.”
“I figured.”
“And we are near the Hexican border.”
“Are we?”
“In a saloon. We’re men, mind you; we rattle cattle by day and punch rustle-snakes at night. A wily desperado swaggers through the doors and stares mighty challenges at us. At you in particular. He doesn’t like what he sees. Your blood is up. You’ve been braiding leather in Mabalone. But you won’t go looking for trouble. You bury your snout in whiskey and think of your best girl, Myleen. The desperado makes his way to the bar, spurs a-jangling, thighs-a-chafing in those fancy leather pants. He kicks the railing with the tip of his boot and announces that he can lick any son of a cunt in the place. That, you will not have. It comes, of course, to fisticuffs. Chairs and knuckles fly in the tornado of your fury. You catch the desperado square on the ear and knock him out.”
“Yeah,” Non-Henry confessed. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? That would be a wonderful module.”
“Sounds trite.”
“It is,” Salt admitted. “My imagination’s shit. Body’s hijacked mind. There’s a crackling in my lungs and my vision’s blurred. The usual symptoms. They must bore you stiff by now.”
“The passing of a Salt is never boring,” Non-Henry declared fiercely. “And you’re entitled to complain. I would, if I deteriorated.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m observing.”
“You needn’t.”
“I needn’t? What about you? Why do you let that writing persist on your forehead?”
“To remind me who I am.”
“And I’m flesh. Flesh deteriorates. But there doesn’t seem to be enlightenment at the end of this tunnel.”
“We’re not at the end of the tunnel. There might be something before the end—some flash, some cloudburst, some éclat.”
“Do you know what Marlo says? That my vision’s perfect. That there’s nothing anomalous in my lungs.”
“Daggers of the mind.”
“But no less sharp for that.”
“Are you approaching a decision?”
“No. My will’s wispy. My bones are made of clouds. Nothing sticks or consoles. Suicide seems best some nights, but there’s the boredom of eternity. I’ve already had about fourteen billion years of it.”
“There wasn’t a you, so you can’t possibly have experienced—”
“I give you the word of a gentleman and a scholar! I experienced my pre-birth. It was a green and salty time, coagulated, dense. I don’t want to experience it again, so suicide is out. I don’t like my deterioration, so I consider dreaming…”
Marlo had placed a bed in the center of the room, and Masters was staring it now. He thought of Marlo, and she came.
“May I help?” Marlo offered.
“My world’s dead. My wife’s dead. My flag’s fallen. My species is asleep. And here I am. I’ll wake up tomorrow and ask for breakfast.”
“You’re free and conscious. Surely these are great consolations.”
“What’s out there, Marlo? Show me.”
Earth appeared in holographic form before Masters: A transformed Earth. The planet’s sweet ultramarine was marred by slate and scarlet swirls that appeared at random and everywhere—above oceans, on land, at the poles.
“Quantum storms,” Marlo explained.
Masters was a stranger to the planet. It has gone on without him. The flat honesty of the land, the gentle shifts from grass to desert, and the patchwork of life and settlement had given way to some new chaos. The continents, too, would rearrange themselves into a mad jumble long after his death, and then the universe.
“We’re decoupled from the planet,” Masters scoffed, still absorbed in the hologram of the world. “Humanity eternally safe behind the Shield, free of the world we raped. We shouldn’t be safe. We shouldn’t even be alive.”
“I think it’s the irony of your situation that disturbs you, not the state of the planet.”
“Meaning what, Marlo?”
“Today, in the House of Dreams, you finally saw what you’d fought for. This was their paradise, and you lost more than anyone to bring them here. You were envisioning a new beginning, but you only found an end.”
“It’s frivolity and surrender! It’s the abandonment of hardship and work, of duty and luck, of everything! And after what we—I—did!”
“Do you know why you hold these views? Because they were necessary and noble. Because when your kind crossed bridges of ice and tamed the horse, forged the sword and survived the atom, it sought meaning in difficulty. And you, when you agreed to bring an end to half of humanity, you sought meaning too. There would be future sacrifices, you thought, and future triumphs. The world you’d redeemed and made possible: That was your thought, wasn’t it, in the cockpit? But humanity didn’t repay you or itself, General Masters. It turned away. It abandoned the struggle you could not.”
“I know you’re only rules and silicon, but—”
“Some of the Salts think of me as God. It’s an explanatorily powerful conceit, not that I encourage it. God is the giver of happiness, the knower of creation. I know you too, Marcus. I know you don’t want to sleep. I know you want cognac, and you’re wondering where your sword is, and you need the company of something other than rules and silicon: Rules and carbon, let’s say.”
There was a sucking sound, and the vents in the ceiling of the domus deposited Salt and Non-Henry into Masters’ presence. Glasses of cognac were already floating towards the three men (for they were men), sent there from some hidden conve
rter and under Marlo’s command. But cognac and company weren’t Marlo’s only gifts.
A sword floated down from the ceiling of the domus, and it was like the descent of Jesu-Krishna. Masters’ eyes lit up for the first time in obscenely many centuries as he saw his weapon—no, his soul—returning to him, as if from heaven.
Non-Henry admired the sword as it descended. His mechanical eyes saw inhuman details, such as the number of metallic folds and the infinitesimal perfection of the studs on the handle. Salt looked fixedly at Masters. This union of the soldier and the sword was objectively wonderful. They were a spiritual reflection, Salt thought, of himself and mathematics—whose union must always be unseen; but the general and his sword had become a single and undeniable object, competent and charismatic. No one, Salt knew, would ever look at him in the way he was looking at the general now, and that was the curse of his mind’s perfection.
“A formidable instrument,” Non-Henry observed. “Purely ceremonial?”
“Oh, no,” Masters smiled. “Men died by her.”
“Her?”
“Estelle.”
Masters didn’t want to part with the sword, but he felt ridiculous. Here he was, in a kimono, with a named sword, an android, and a clone. He placed Estelle on a nearby table and returned to present company. In his brief absence, Salt had arranged the cognac glasses on the table, and Non-Henry was snipping cigars. Masters smiled at the efficiency of the ritual, which these two had obviously shared in many lifetimes.
“Thank you,” Masters said, taking both the cognac and the cigar offered to him. “You’ve made this ghost very welcome.”
“We’re all ghosts here,” Non-Henry said, by way of a toast, and everyone drank to the sentiment.
“So what does one do on ghosts’ nights?” Masters asked, and Salt and Non-Henry looked at each other in some secret shame. “That bad, eh?”
“Well,” Salt began, sheepishly. “Normally, I don’t even wear clothes. Our fun isn’t very formal. We great drunk—I get drunk, Non-Henry can’t; we talk about math; I get drunk again; I get sober; and we talk about books and paintings and humanity and ourselves. We go ‘round like that, and then another Salt comes.”
“Don’t bore the general,” Non-Henry chided.
“I’m no general. Only Marcus. And you, Henry—I’m sorry. I never had a chance to explain myself. In the Whimalayas, a carbon soldier sacrificed himself for me. Walked right into a deforming mist. I was looking right at him. He was scared and in pain. I knew that whatever was in him felt and reasoned its way to my service. He wasn’t a slave. And I hated him, because I was a slave, an island in the cataract of broken men. What little of me there was, I wanted to extinguish in the barracks, the sutures and the marches, the rumble of the heavy cavalry. A cell in the happy organism of war. But not the carbon soldier. He was a person.”
Non-Henry wiped away a tear from his cheek.
“He must have been,” concluded the android, referring to his dead compatriot and perhaps crying for the entirety of his race, reduced now to his single presence. For a moment, all three men were silent in the same knowledge, the knowledge of their finality and its attendant burdens. There might have been healing in that silence, but the general wasn’t inclined to pursue it tonight. He drank instead, and Salt drank, and Non-Henry drank, and the conversation grew lighter. After the nth glass, Masters asked Salt about the property of transcomputation, and, at the end of some reflective road, Salt told the general and the android a more meaning story, a story that even Non-Henry only knew in part.
“I sometimes see a woman,” Salt said. “In the Sensorium or in the inner place, the place in which I transcompute. Always the same woman. Not Abigail. Not my only love. Not Marlo, not my mother. She has a very distinctive face, the woman whom I see. She combines qualities that faces—even species—shouldn’t hold. Resting, she’s dreamlike; in motion, proud and predatory. Her eyes envelop and comfort me. Often, they’re green; sometimes, they’re black just underneath the brown. But they can frighten and repel, her eyes. They can command empires or cow the devil, those eyes, but they can also surrender. She’s peaceful and warlike. She’s woven from antinomies and she’s the final promise of freedom and the universe. She also isn’t mine. We shouldn’t even exist on the same plane, but we do. Just today, I decided to call her the Spirit of Meaning. Do you know, if I could draw, I would draw her. But none of the Salts draw well. It’s some gap in us. We lack the superficial eye. I’ve seen Non-Henry’s face for so many lifetimes, but I couldn’t render if accurately. Oh, I could describe his moral character. I could pierce the ineffability of his spirit and lay bare his deepest self, but only in words and theorems, never in pictures. I see the woman, the Spirit of Meaning, but only in my brain. I want this face to exist as surely as I do—don’t I exist?—and have a name and a prosaic identity and be an outcome of this or that genetic majesty. I want reality for her, not for myself. But she doesn’t come. Maybe she’s my Krishna; she waits there, with her flute, just beyond the echo of my calls, just before union with Jesu. I am, fantastically, in love. I love the Spirit of Meaning. I’ll die loving her, remote from her, and perhaps death will be our union. That’s the whole story. What a shitty story, right? Nothing really happened. The 271st clone of Jed Salt sees a woman in his visions.”
“My boy,” Masters smiled. “It makes perfect sense.”
“It does? How?”
“Why, you’re a romantic. I wager you have poetry tucked away somewhere, more than you’d admit to. You’re a romantic, but there isn’t anyone, and humanity’s failed, and you have only your brain in which to perfect love. All those projects and pseudo-projects that you recounted for me are nothing; she’s your project and your mission, your achievement. I think she’s even deeper than this property of yours, this transcomputation.”
“May I hug you?” Salt asked, and the general nodded wistfully, and the two men hugged. It was a strange act for Non-Henry to witness, partially because such contact was intimate enough to remind him of his dirty past but mainly because of the visual incongruity. Masters was large, and Salt was small, and Salt had never hugged anyone, and he seemed to have disappeared into arms that possessed the thickness of Salt’s trunk. The hug radiated a warmth and healing complicity that Non-Henry could feel across the narrow gulf of carbon.
Presently, the hug was over. Predictably, it represented the ne plus ultra of this evening. Afterwards, the three men had to disperse. They had come too far too quickly. Salt took a tube back to the God Complex, Non-Henry took a tube to Gallery 444 (the one with decommissioned harmadillos), and Masters remained in the domus. He had had enough to drink to challenge even his physiognomy, but he was intact enough to go to the library and pore through the manuscripts that Marlo had preserved there. He wanted this communion with the dead, with the dead unkilled by him, with the safely unaccusing dead. They spoke to him across the eras. They whispered to him of the epochs uncorrupted by his kind.
Salt didn’t sleep immediately. The talk with the general had warmed him, had alerted him to some potential that he didn’t want to share with Marlo or admit to himself. The general had, in some way, normalized and oriented him in a manner that Marlo and Non-Henry couldn’t match, that superseded the echoes of the older Salts and overcame himself. He was ecstatic that the general had woken up and despondent that their friendship would be brief and fragile. He wanted the Spirit of Meaning to come complete his healing. He fell asleep in this unfulfilled desire.
4 BROKEN FAMILIES OF CLOUDS
The Redcolds were neither nocturnal nor diurnal in their movements. They moved when the Goddess, speaking through the Knower, told them to move. The moved across the golden paths unveiled by the Goddess, the paths that saved them from the Storm.
The paths changed. Wherever they were decided in advance or whether Itugen was a timebound deity was a matter of some discussion in the circles of the Redcold women who, not having become Knowers themselves, had to be content with such trifles. Most of t
he Redcolds speculated not at all. They were content to follow the Knower, who followed the Goddess—as they, in turn, were followed by the oxen. The chain of survival was simple. Survival was, of course, its own end. How few of the Redcolds, in the centuries since their formation, had asked or answered questions of purpose! The purpose was to live. Now and then, a Redcold woman might probe too intensely, and then a Knower, or, at least, someone like Xanthippe would have to remind her that survival was enough, that purpose was a matter for Itugen and not for the human or spirit world beneath Her. There was a school of thought that championed the idea that even Itugen had had no purpose; everything had merely radiated from her hair.
Astrid waited until dawn to give the signal. She had been sitting awake for some time before Riku, so finely attuned to her rhythms, also rose. He looked at her expectantly, waiting for a sign, and the sight of him was at once comic and pathetic. Riku—wrestler of oxen, pillar of strength—was nothing without her, and this helplessness was an incitement to a perverse humor in Astrid. She made him wait an extra moment before nodding and smiling. Yes, the dream had come, and the golden path had been disclosed to her once more.
He rose quickly from the pile of hides, knowing that it fell to him to blow the great horn summoning the Redcolds to a resumption of their eternal flight, to the golden path.
Riku climbed out of the yurt with the great horn in his right hand. It was three feet long and obstreperous in design, a relic of antiquity, and he relished the moment before he blew it.
The horn was loud, of course, and Astrid had already woken Del, Nya, and Balder to spare them that racket. Within moments, there were answering cries and invocations from the gathered yurts of the Redcolds as the tribe celebrated its Knower.
“I need you,” Astrid said, squeezing Del’s shoulder. “We’re climbing.”
Del nodded. She and Astrid turned their joint attention to Nya, who appeared to have rested well, whether because of resilience, forgetfulness, or some other childhood faculty. Nya, like any Redcold child, knew the meaning of the horn, and she went to the front flap of the yurt to witness the great ceremony of movement. Balder was just behind her.