The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  “I’ve never exposed you to something I knew you couldn’t manage,” Astrid said to her daughter. “I don’t know what’s in there.”

  “You do know. Whatever’s next after the Storm. Another way of life.”

  By this time, Riku had joined his wife and daughter before the open door.

  “You let me climb a mountain with less at stake,” Del insisted.

  “Del, I knew you could climb the mountain.”

  “But you don’t think I can walk through a door? If it’s something you can’t survive, what do you think happens? Do you think life continues out here without you?”

  “It does.”

  “You’re going through that door because survival isn’t enough—isn’t thriving, isn’t growth. Leave us without you, and we’d only be surviving.”

  “No, your father—”

  “I love my father, but he isn’t you. Now: There’s only one question. Do you want me to survive without you—however long that lasts—or do we thrive together until we die, whenever that is?”

  “We thrive together,” Astrid relented.

  There was a slight rustling from the yurt, and Astrid looked up to see Nya and Balder looking at her. They were to thrive together, apparently—but not before breakfast, as the practical Riku reminded them.

  Constitutionally, the Redcolds were always in a rush. The Goddess didn’t disclose a place of safety. She disclosed a journey of safety, and the journeys were long. She might, of course, have had the Redcolds oscillate between a small number of sites. Indeed, even nomads had been less nomadic than expected, their nomadism often confined to the transition between summer’s feeding grounds and winter’s retreats. To undergo journeys of safety was to be uncommitted to any place. In short, there could be no home except in perpetual travel, and this ingrained lesson benefited the five Redcolds gathered at the door. The association between travel and safety was, especially with a Knower or former Knower still at their head, stronger than the taboos against the ancient world, taboos that had grown less relevant with age. Possession of the factbooks, for example, or other stray nuggets of Sinwoyese technology was no crime, because there was no urgency to remain distant from the ancients. The ancients had swallowed themselves, and there could be no danger of becoming them, so all they elicited from the Redcolds was a mild and impersonal revulsion.

  But the most important factor in the coming journey was Astrid’s self-belief. She was coming to believe that her choice of the wrong journey did not disqualify her as Knower. Her error had been conservatism, and the Goddess had punished this error, and she must not make it again. She must embrace the journey into this building and whatever it contained, and this embrace brought a silent assurance to her that radiated through to her four followers.

  Breakfast was modest, consisting of milk and cured ox-meat, and taken largely in silence. No one tasted it. Balder quietly explained to Nya that they would be going into the hill, whose open door drew the little girl’s wonder. Riku muttered to Astrid that he was thinking of taking both his axe and his sword, and she told him he should equip himself as he saw fit. Astrid replied that she, Del, and Balder would take swords, although it was unlikely either that anything lived in the building or that whatever had survived such long entombment could be slain by them anyway. This was a good argument, but Riku would not be parted from his axe. His sword was a companion of necessity, a sort of twin, but the axe had come to him by choice. The axe was a friend, and Riku would not part from it, and Astrid smiled at his pouting insistence.

  It was time. Riku had said his tearful farewells to the oxen, who had been his responsibility. They regarded him with a certain sadness that was unusual for them, for, outside the mating-sickness, they were not emotional beings. Riku had, like Astrid, formed the impression that either they would not return or that they would enter a spirit world into which the oxen, faithful though they were, could not follow. In either case, he would not bind the oxen here. He would let them wander where they may, and he would pray that the Storm with stay remote from them. Riku gripped his axe more tightly to console himself.

  Astrid situated herself at the head of the little party and walked towards the open door. Her steps, which began rapidly enough on the grass, slowed as she approached the bunker or the building or whatever the ancients called it. Some leisurely stench had been building up inside. Disdaining to come out when the door was first opened, it came now, polluting the Redcolds’ sensitive nostrils and pouring its acridity into the clean air.

  Astrid stopped on the threshold. Here was the transition. There was still time to refuse and return abjectly to the Redcolds. Knowers who had lost their kut were not killed; she and her family would merely be reabsorbed into the tribe, which might already have a new Knower. To enter this building was to enter damnation in search of a little light, to hope for the sight of Itugen in the domains of Erlik Khan, to cast her lot with the ancients—or, if nothing so vile, to assume that she was free of their taints and temptations. So she hesitated, but only briefly. She was Astrid Redcold, and she took more pride in that name and the spirit that went with it now that the Goddess had deserted her. She and hers would follow this path to the end, and they were fortified with heart and soul if not with holy favor or ancient knowledge.

  Astrid stepped across the threshold, and the four Redcolds of her household followed her.

  She had entered a hallway that grew wider as it went and whose walls were yellow. The hallway was lit—though not by any source that Astrid detected—and, during its initial length, without features. No doors, windows, or other interruptions marked the changelessly oppressive walls. The hallway went straight for perhaps a hundred of her steps or eighty of Riku’s, then joined a large room, substantial in radius, into which other hallways flowed.

  The large room was not featureless. At its center stood a statue of the Heavenly Emperor of Laurasia, last of his lineage.

  The statue had been convincingly carved and cast. The Emperor was obviously a late rendition. In earlier ages, he would have been depicted as emotionless and inevitable. This statue, however, was of a sad monarch, his emotion conveying the travails of the age. Although still on his throne, the Emperor was aware of the rot and rodents at his feet, of the doom of all dynasties. More to the point, the Emperor was worried by the Coastal Republics, which had survived his initial attempt to destroy them. The Emperor, though austere, held his shoulders a little stiffly, as if expecting the wounded eagle to descend on him and seize his crown.

  This, then, was the statue that the five Redcolds saw. They had not seen any statues before. This one was melancholy and magnificent. Astrid felt it lessen her dislike of the ancients. Surely any people who had produced such art added something to the world, if not the universe. The ancients had taken a misstep, perhaps, as she had. Perhaps even the rebellion of Tengri had begun as a mild drift from the golden path, a drift that Itugen had wrongly assumed he would correct. She thought of herself, too, and her negligence of management, of the death of Farinaz and of the lateness of her talk with Riku. Being careful and competent, she expected the same of others and of the world. Being strong and sane, she failed to exercise her power on the weak and mad. The statue seemed to her to mask some similar struggle of the ancients, one in which the forces of weakness and madness had one. She had assumed the ancients to be one mass, but they would have had their own Knowers and oxen, their Rikus and Xanthippes, their many types and kinds. They had not been completely free to choose. The strong and sane among them must have been blind and betrayed. Other storms had obscured the paths before them. There could be, she decided, no mountain between the ancients and themselves. The statue, through unknown means, had connected her to the past of her species in a manner that melted what remained of her moral simplicity. All this from a statue!

  The Emperor gazed out into the room with his unseeing marble eyes. What did he represented? He had been an organizer, a wielder of humans, an agent of order. You could see it in the weariness of his
blank gaze. There had been too many humans. They needed the yoke that he and his dynasty would place on them. The humans were oxen, and, for their good, they must be wrestled to the ground and led to grass, protected from the winter’s chill, and introduced to mates. He had been necessary, just as Tengri had been necessary. The women had thought too well of the species. The women had been like Astrid and Itugen. The women inhabited a universe of love and strength, not the universe that was. How to run a human world of weakness? How else other than through him? Humanity had come begging for his yoke. He had been their golden path.

  Del looked at the Emperor’s even shoulders, where, for some reason, she expected her captive birds to land. There was magic in this room, and the Emperor was the center of that magic, and all Del wanted from that magic were her birds. Good and evil were irrelevant to Del, as they had been to older barbarians than the Redcolds, because the force of need recognized no division in the spirit world. If only the statue of this evil king could peer into the spirit lands and call her birds for her! But no, he was unmoving. The magic in this room was only the smoke of extinguished fires.

  7 THE LUXURY OF A WANDERING MIND

  In all their lifetimes, the Salts had accumulated little interest in the physical facts of Seaboard. The mental marvels and torments of transcomputation locked them into a state of defiant interiority. Only now did 272, after his years of individual and collective life, look at the city itself in wonder and terror, amazed that Marlo had kept each structure so present and pristine that, without her, these spires and surfaces must surely go the way of Iram. And he had believed so fervently in immortality!

  “Where does this go?” Masters asked, gesturing to the tunnel that gaped before them, leading away from the surface. The tunnel had risen in response to Salt’s manual commands, rearing itself into existence in what had been a minor thoroughfare at the very edge of Seaboard. The thoroughfare was so perfectly preserved that one expected levikars to traverse it, but, of course, none were forthcoming. They had had to walk here, as the tubes were under Marlo’s control.

  “I’m no Virgil,” Salt managed, his gaze thwarted by the tunnel’s darkness. “I’ve only been here once, and never without Marlo. I don’t think I can go inside.”

  “You’re frightened? Surely there’s nothing to fear.”

  “She formed a bubble of light around me. It was never dark. It’s never been dark.”

  “Salt, we have to act. We have light. We don’t have time.”

  “None of us has ever failed. I’m the first one.”

  “You said Marlo’s gone into drift before.”

  “Yes, and been corrected!”

  “Do you need more time? Activate some other carbon consciousnesses, then, and—”

  “That was meant to be temporary. She can’t be moved from mind to mind. She’d degrade.”

  Masters, who had seen and experienced various phantoms of panic in his bygone life, merely touched Salt’s shoulder reassuringly and led the way into the tunnel with a light helmet.

  In the tunnel, the general applied two cures, leadership and conversation, to Salt’s panic.

  “What’s the mission, Salt?”

  “Manual access to a master cell.”

  “Whose designers couldn’t place it on the surface?”

  “None of this was meant to happen. My failure was inconceivable. None of me envisioned the master cell as anything but a relic.”

  “What does the master cell do?”

  “The same thing that any computronic core would do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Re-attune Marlo’s sixth-dimensional strings—returning her, in theory, to the last tuple accessible by transcomputation. If that works, I have some ideas on freezing the new versioning in place.”

  “Meaning it won’t happen again?”

  “Meaning it shouldn’t happen again.”

  “We should be grateful for this adventure.”

  “Why?

  “We thought history was over, right? Ours and humanity’s? And here she is again.”

  “You derive some pleasure from what’s happening?”

  “I do.”

  “I envy you. I don’t have pleasures.”

  “What do you have?”

  “If I fail to do something, I’m dissatisfied. If I achieve something, I’m not dissatisfied.”

  “Surely you were happy when you got those camels to fuck.”

  “I’ll admit to happiness, yes. Ten seconds of it, then.”

  “And when you drink?”

  “I drink solely from habit. Are you indicating that this particularly tingly anxiety is pleasure?”

  “You know more about it than I do. We evolved to survive, and now you’re surviving.”

  “What I’m doing is envisioning myself before a fireplace with a cigar, in the company of my two friends.”

  Ahead of Salt, in the semi-darkness of the descending tunnel, Masters smiled. How simple, how welcome, to be called a friend! He had not had friends. The other soldiers, then the officers, had existed in easy harmony with each other, bonded by their limits. Masters had been an exception, always too competent and thoughtful to be a friend.

  Salt was the most unlikely of friends, but his need was pure, and Masters responded to it. And Salt’s was not the only need. There was an oceanic confederation between the two men, a calm and terrible wisdom, an eternal binding that had embittered them at first, but that united them now in service to the species.

  “Am I your friend, then?”

  “You were my friend when I met you. How purposeful and admirable you were! I’d have wanted you as a father.”

  “Who was your father?”

  “A most ordinary man! And my mother a most ordinary woman. Raised to some crackpot exponent, ensouled by chaos, they begat…me.”

  The tunnel was descending sharply now. The light on Masters’ helmet was unequal to the angle of the hallway—and, though he knew that no danger lurked here, he slowed his passage. Salt was continuing to speak of the circumstances of his birth, but Masters was thinking of Lily. If this adventure were to fail, she would evaporate to him: To him, the thirstiest of men! Resentment briefly pecked at Masters. Two hundred and seventy-one Salts had kept Marlo functional, but this one had failed. What squatting, idiot god had arranged that?

  Salt and Masters fell into the silent rhythm of progress. The tunnel didn’t descend in a straight line, but over the course of several lulling curves. Masters, who had expected claustrophobia at the tunnel-mouth, felt sheltered instead. And the declension pleased him morally. The pretense of infinite ascent was never for him.

  “Why join the army?” Salt asked halfway down, a musing question that Masters struggled to differentiate from some inner voice until it was repeated.

  “To kill, I suppose.”

  “That’s disingenuous. I’m interested in the truth, unless our friendship’s too fragile to support it.”

  “I went into the army because I couldn’t be what I wanted to be.”

  “Which was what?”

  “A scholar. I wanted to be a scholar.”

  “Ah!”

  “A classicist.”

  “Ah!”

  “I loved my Latin and my Greek. Not merely as languages. As codes for living that had survived into benighted times.”

  “And what kept you from the pen?”

  “My instructors believed I wasn’t competent.”

  “Anan!”

  “Here I might flatter myself, but I think they resented the intrusion of love into their garden of duty.”

  “No, no, man. It’s simpler. They were duffers, and you weren’t.”

  “Well—”

  “Collingwood and Deane? Their work smells not of the lamp but of the lash. Of the counting of minutes before they could return to their cellphones and catamites.”

  Masters prided himself on pruning and delimiting surprise; he was no wasteful and promiscuous sower of amazement; and yet, at this utterance, he h
ad to turn on his heel and stare open shock into Salt’s face, which blinked uneasily in the light of Masters’ head-lamp.

  “Do you know everything?”

  “That’s Marlo’s job. I sample from the currents most agreeable to me.”

  “Have you snooped on me, Salt?”

  “I’ve read your biography. Many of me have. After your resurrection, I went through a two-day mania of consumption in which, I confess, I learned as much as possible about you.”

  “But have you snooped on me?”

  “What counts as snooping?”

  “Have you watched my wife and me?”

  “Marlo watches everything. You know that.”

  “I’m speaking not of your mother, but of you.”

  “Did I watch? Well, yes, I had to make sure you were settled.”

  “We were, I suppose, camels to you.”

  “Damn it, yes, I watched. I’ve never seen human love. I’ve known it in the Sensorium—”

  “I thought you didn’t enter the Sensorium.”

  “I lied.”

  “Love, if love’s to be, is not an invitation to soulless observation and experiment. It’s as private as anything can be, Salt.”

  “I was led to believe love was proclaimed from mountaintops. And that the act of love was, or could be, cheerfully, brazenly public or semi-public. How about those Romans of yours?”

  “I’m not an orgiast, and I bitterly resent—”

  “Jesu-Krishna, man, I won’t do it again. I promised Non-Henry—”

  “He watched too?”

  “He has a sense of decorum. He enjoined me not to watch, then, at some point, turned himself off.”

  “You curate and ward humanity. You’re entitled to their dream-fragments. But not to mine.”

  “This is all new to me, Masters. I didn’t even wear clothes, habitually, until a few days ago.”

  “I wasn’t good enough.”

  “For what?”

  “For the pen, as you call it. Collingwood and Deane were duffers, but that’s a secondary issue. I wasn’t good enough. I was a grinder, a plowman. I succeeded, if I did, because greater minds had chosen greater fields, and lesser minds were everywhere. Lily understood me just as I was. She triangulated me, Salt. It’s precisely the sacred that can’t be glimpsed and catalogued. There’s no data frame for it, there’s no possessing or cultivating it. Rather like your property of transcomputation. Would you want someone smirking and tumescing at your inmost self?”