The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  The guilt was stronger now that Astrid and Del were gone. Hadn’t he introduced some subtle poison into their atmospheres, some psychic turbulence that might blow them off the cliff? They had to stay alive, not only because he loved them but also because his need for redemption was so strong. He had been delighted to see Astrid racing into the forest after Topaz, because he had known that the two brothers would follow, presenting a real threat to her. His debt to Astrid for his soul seemed a little less unpayable after he’d saved her life, but the trade was still uneven. Flesh would always be inferior to spirit.

  Like any good debtor, Riku grew humbler and more compliant over time. He listened more closely to Astrid than he ever had—listened with the ear of the spirit, not of obligation. He could do that much. Left with Nya and Balder, he could at least return to the solid thoughts and obligatory tasks of fatherhood. He could keep vigil in the hope that his wakefulness would banish their nightmares.

  Riku’s own sleep was delayed by strange scratching sounds around the yurt, as if the corpse of Topaz had limped back for vengeance. Riku opened the flap more than once. He wasn’t afraid of anything other than himself. He would have fought night or the Storm or Erlik Khan, let alone a reanimated Topaz. He was afraid only that his own disloyalty would take a physical form beyond his own, a form in which he would lose even the dream of redemption.

  He was watching Astrid and Del now, and the wonder of their descent was a merciful distraction from himself. Climbing was something for womenfolk and therefore all the more mysterious to a man—especially a man like Riku, whose bulk was barely maneuverable across flat land. He watched open-mouthed as they came down the cliff in a reversal of their upward path, their bodies remembering the sequences of ledges, holds, and protrusions without the prompting or the certitude of the eye. Oh, women were miraculous! Itugen had created the universe.

  She had been first. There had been no darkness and no light. There had been only the strands and spaces of Her hair, of Her: Itugen, the Goddess, mother of all, the void and its antithesis. She had been alone for a long time and no time, She was no longer sufficient for Herself, and She made the sky as consort. The sky, Tengri, grasped at the universe and fought his maker, and he was overthrown. He has hurled into the darkness, there to be reborn as Erlik Khan, as Itugen peopled the cosmos with more tractable spirits and, eventually, humanity. Erlik Khan, that had once been Tengri, was the sky no more. He had been neither strong nor imaginative enough to check the true work of creation. He had, however, whispered mistruths into men. He had convinced man, misbegotten and secondary man, of his pride and primacy. Man had turned on woman—firstborn and holy woman, woman the creator. Man had succeeded for a time. There had been an age of vulgar strength: First of the body, then of the brain. The age of soul, the age of Itugen, was briefly usurped by the male age, the age that had come to its crisis and climax with the ancients. The male age had undone the human and the natural world. Itugen was angered. As Tengri had once angered Her, so now did man. She let the ancient world consume itself, because humanity had to be remade. Hence the Redcolds. Hence the nomads of the steppes, bound closer to Her by the golden path. These, Her children, were no longer trustworthy. There had to be a Knower among them. These, Her children, would live in the unending knowledge of human failure. They would be chaste and chastened. They would walk the purifying path, the golden path, under Her gaze and with Her approval, conveyed through the Knower. The Redcold men might chafe under this arrangement, but they were now subordinate. The Redcold men might chafe, but the Redcold women never had. Not until Astrid.

  None of the other Redcolds had come to watch Astrid and Del descend the cliff. Miracles were not miraculous to them, but the stuff of life itself. They were blessed by a Goddess and a Knower, and perhaps Riku was the only one to whom the wonder was inexhaustible. He watched in joyful gratitude.

  Astrid, having returned, hugged him powerfully, and Riku’s eyes went wide at the intensity of the embrace. He couldn’t know that the source of this heat was Astrid’s determination to continue on the right and traditional path of safety, a path on which he was certainly a pillar. Turning her back on the building and its promises bound her more closely to him.

  Riku squeezed Astrid gently and smiled. Presently, Del was in the embrace as well. Riku briefly forgot his guilt.

  And so, with Farinaz buried, the Redcold caravan continued. Its passage was slow. The oxen were no great speedsters, and the ground was uneven. The Storm-touched landscape recovered slowly. Grass reclaimed its lands from rock-filled divots and furrows left behind by meteorological violence. Uprooted trees waited patiently for their successors. Diverted rivers flowed in the hope of meeting their old currents. There were no ruts, for the Redcolds seldom returned to, or through, anywhere familiar. They relied on the sturdiness of their oxen and their wheels to get through the landscape, which, fortunately, had never opposed them with something impassable like a mountain range. The golden path had, on occasion, brought them close enough to the Storm, and past lore told of kutsuz Knowers under whom some Redcolds had actually been caught in the shadow of the Eternal Tempest.

  In Astrid’s tenure, the closest that the Redcolds had come to the Storm was on the occasion of their discovery of the downed Ark in which she and Del had found the factbooks. In retrospective Redcold morality, this incident constituted evidence of the evil of settlement. Many had not wanted to enter the Ark, and some had questioned the kut of the Knower in bringing them there. The subsequent arrival of the Storm had confirmed theories that the Goddess hated even the memory of civilization. For her part, Astrid had determined to be more circumspect in her own exploration. Anyway, she had the factbooks, and, in addition to Del, she had found a few people—Farinaz had been one—who had taken an interest in the world that had been. The retention of the factbooks was a tolerable eccentricity in a Knower whose kut had proven itself.

  But Astrid’s complacency and satisfaction at having returned to the golden path, the prescribed path, was not to last. The first signs of trouble came soon after resumption of the caravan. The air, clean and light, turned dark and heavy with the premonitions of the Storm. The world took on the unmistakable grayness of its coming death. The winds whispered of, then shrieked, the Storm’s proximity.

  Xanthippe had been throwing bones. It was a lesser form of divination for a woman who, for all her devotion to lore, had never been chosen as the Knower. She had been alone behind the reins of her oxen, her vast age having outlived and overthrown all other residents of her household. Only the bones were her family, but they seemed to shrink from her withered hand. She didn’t need the wind to tell her of the Storm. She had been close to the Storm before, in times of kutsuz Knowers. Xanthippe, for all her wisdom and experience, had never thought Astrid kutsuz. The winds now proved her wrong. Her own life was modest enough to offer, and Xanthippe did not grudge it. She grudged the loss of her moral judgment more than her life. If she had been wrong about Astrid, she had been wrong about everything, and her death would be angry and impermanent. She would cross the three worlds as a ghost.

  Ott, like many of the other Redcold men, had left the management of the oxen to their wives while they drank. Promises would be mulcted from them to desist. Conscience would prick at them. Their robust bodies would lose their too rapidly.

  But survival won in and against nature, not vis-à-vis an enemy, told heavily on them, and drink, more so than sex, was the inescapable distraction. His weakness won him a reprieve today. Unlike Xanthippe, he wasn’t sitting outside the cart, so he didn’t see the Storm, and he didn’t care to distinguish the mounting screams of the Redcolds from any other racket—some game of the children or adults, some gain, some loss.

  And what was the Storm? From a distance, it was conventional. Dark clouds it held, and pelting rain. Only its size violated the human concept of a storm. There were, from any vantage of proximity, two points of true interest about the Storm. First, it could appear from anywhere. True storms, Earth’
s storms, needed some buildup and coagulation. True storms accreted honestly, over time, as complements and counterparts to warmth and wind and water. The Storm, however, needed no processes or preliminaries. It came like death. It could disrupt the immediacy of summer. It could tear through winter. There was no safety from it, not even the imperfect safety of estimation. Second, once it hit, there was no sound or color. The Storm was composed of neither wind nor pressure. The Storm was malice only, scientific malice, silent malice. When the Storm was fifty feet from the ground, it would blind and deafen an immortal observer. It would only do its damage to the Earth under that veil. Perhaps, Astrid had thought, the Storm was cover to some madness that even the ancients wished to disguise. Their last weapon was so unholy that no conscience, not even ancient conscience, would allow it nude into the world. So they chose to robe their evil, their Storm, with the face of weather.

  The imagination of the Redcolds stopped at the precincts of evil. The ancients and their weapons, the ancients and their destruction of the world; these were rebellions constructive in their evil, explicable rebellions, echoes of the rebellion of Tengri against Itugen. Evil had its grandeur. Imagine, now, evil committed from long boredom or from the desire to make all houses the same; evil whose purpose was to ensure that everyone wore identical costumes or that, somewhere, sex would be free; evil emanating from the desire to see how fast a computron could run; evil emergent from a poet’s fear of poetry. These were the evils of the ancients, and they were evils unknown to the Redcolds. They assumed some link between the maledom of the ancients and the malevolence of Tengri and were spared the moral horror that the ancients had seeded. Better, then, to die like this, at the hands of evil and expecting salvation from good. Better to have some system of belief, some scale of moral explanation, for the truth of other knowledge was barren.

  These were metaphysics, but physics was descending.

  The Redcolds were long in paying attention, for they had no reason to doubt the Knower and their safety. But the winds and the darkness compelled one Redcold after another to look up. Astrid brought her yurt to a stop, opened the flaps, and jumped down to the grass, scanning the heavens, and Riku was right behind her. She was gripped by the impossibility of what she saw—the Storm, the Storm approaching from the east! Movement and hope were equally impossible. There could only be surrender to the immeasurable malice of the Storm. It was justified, after all. Erlik Khan existed, just as Itugen did. The weapons of the men were as potent as the wisdom of the women and just as often destined to prevail.

  Riku grabbed Astrid’s shoulder. “We have to keep going!” he shouted above the wind.

  Riku was right. Damn the Goddess and the Storm; damn surrender; they must, with their last energies, flee from doom. But what was it to flee? The Storm’s immensity might be overcome, but its silence could not. The Storm had already hit the ground. It consumed more than half of the Redcolds in that first descent, consumed them blindly. Astrid herself was overcome and senseless. Riku’s strength failed. The children—Del, Nya, and Balder—were quietly harvested.

  And the Storm vanished. This time, it had ravaged more than the ground, which was humble enough to recover. The returning sun shone on the remains of Redcold children and the entrails of oxen, on scarlet streaks in the unoffended grass.

  5 our two to their thirteen

  And so, with old cognac and new friendships as welcome aids to sleep, Marcus Masters dreamed. Salt and Non-Henry had left him hours ago, and he was on the antique Roman bed, and Marlo was monitoring his passage into deeper and deeper chambers of reverie, in the inmost of which lay nightmares.

  One nightmare was a meeting. Masters had been summoned to a great depth, to the President’s bunker, to meet not merely the leader of the Coastal Republics but Salt.

  Salt’s very existence was a secret from all but three people; his presence before Masters made it four.

  “Who’s this?” Masters asked as soon the corundum seals enveloped the conference room. He fancied it was some illegitimate child of the President’s, brought here on a whim.

  “This is Salt. Jed Salt.”

  The President turned deferentially to Salt, but the boy of nine was in no hurry to introduce himself. He worked silently on a hologram model as Masters chafed. A blue woman, subsequently to be Marlo, phased through the hologram intermittently, as she was incomplete. Masters looked more closely at the boy. He looked merely wrong, but his wrongness inhered in nothing physical and couldn’t be pinpointed. If you measured him, he would prove to be significantly below the average in height and weight, but he would still be made of flesh and genes. If you spoke to him, he would respond to you in your language, its grammar knowable. Yet, if you were sensitive enough, you would know him immediately as what he was, which was an alien. Not an alien in the old and stupid sense, tentacled and misty. A human alien, who, in honestly, had been both promised and partially delivered. He—always male, for reasons known only to Itugen and Tengri—had been named godling and messiah, prophet and seed, science and salvation. His spume inflected history. What was wrong with him, Masters realized, was that he wasn’t meant to be here now. He was meant to have arrived earlier and elsewhere, earlier and elsewhere enough to have made a difference. Masters realized, then, that the boy wasn’t wrong; humanity was wrong, and the presence of the boy gestured to a fact too unpleasant for any human to accept. The boy wasn’t wrong, and Masters felt sorry for having misclassified him. But now the general’s attention turned to the President.

  “Yours?” Masters asked peevishly.

  “No, he’s—um—what is it? Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens. HS3, for short. He’s a new species, and there’s only one of him. Go on, Jed, say hello.”

  Masters was no scientist, but, again, he recognized misclassification. The boy wasn’t a new species. Only, having arrived in this age of labeled human insects, he must be transfixed with some taxonomic pin. No—he was human, completely and shamelessly human, and the rest of us had been, were, and would be, something lesser.

  “There isn’t a trigger,” Salt said, dismissing his hologram with outstretched fingers.

  Masters looked from Salt to the President. Perhaps the old man had lost his mind and planned some practical joke before the end.

  “What are you—”

  “There isn’t a trigger, because they’re already fired the weapon.”

  “I’m sorry he couldn’t brief you earlier,” the President explained. He, the President said, because he understood that the boy was now the state. The President’s only act of decency had been to accept this fact.

  “About what?”

  “The rest’s gone,” Salt shrugged.

  “The rest of what?”

  “Of us, outside Seaboard.”

  The President, withered at the best of times, retreated into some carapace of despair, leaving Salt and Masters to hash it out.

  “What’s he talking about?” demanded the general. “And, honestly, who are you?”

  “The President told you. I’m the saltational speciation of humanity. Transcomputational man, I’m thinking of calling myself. I do what men and computers can’t.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Which is to leap, General Masters, across the gulfs of ignorance; which is to swim in insight. But here’s what concerns us. The Laurasians fired their genome bomb six hours ago. It killed every human being in our hemisphere but for the good folk of Seaboard, who are so fortunately protected by my Shield.”

  Salt waved his hand again, and a very large three-dimensional image appeared in the middle of the conference room, extrapolated from satellites. Salt pinched his fingers to zoom and traverse the image, which was of the unhurried and promiscuously fallen dead of the nearby city of Ultrahaven.

  “Jesu-Krishna!”

  “I had time to project my Shield, but only just,” Salt explained. “You see, this old man, who isn’t worth the shadow of a tardigrade, decided to reject my allocation requests. I told him I could protect
us, but he preferred to listen to his military computron, Samson.”

  “I’m sorry,” pleaded the President.

  “Get out,” Salt insisted, and the President did. He shambled out of the room, a husk of something, as Masters watched in growing and unmanaged shock.

  “My—”

  “Your wife’s safe. Everyone here is. But we have a terrible thing to discuss. The Laurasians have been working on the next generation of their genome bomb. This one will penetrate my Shield. Not my fault, mind you. They started before I did.”

  “We’ll retarget the production facility,” Masters suggested, brightening. “Maybe you can augment our atomics, get us right past their matrix. You can do that.”

  “Won’t help.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ll use irrational stochastics to breach my Shield, using an oblique vector shift to deflect interdiction.”

  “Condescend to me, would you?”

  “Weapons, even biological ones, have hitherto been made in factories.”

  “And?”

  “A factory’s something to hit. It’s a target—no matter how hardened, how distant, it’s vulnerable. That’s why they’re not using factories. They’re using people.”

  “To incubate the genome bomb? Then we find the people, kill them.”

  “No, no, see, it’s not a single person or even a group of people. It’s everyone.”

  “What?”

  “Their computron, PROBIT, uploaded bomb snippets across the entire Laurasian population. I was able to hack that much out of him before he shut me out.”