The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  “Then let us die as men,” Masters corrected Salt.

  Salt knew they had to leave as soon as possible, but the moment of departure bamboozled him. He had to follow rigidly behind Masters, autonomy dwindling, as the older man led the way to the hangar that held the best skyfausts. After his long meditation on death, Salt had returned to some warren of passivity. Oh, Salt came forward to assist with the diagnostics when needed, his mind and motions robotic, but all of the initiative and emotional energy came from Masters now. Strange, Salt thought, that so many deaths had not prepared him for this one, whereas Masters had died only once and yet went about these moribund routines like a champion.

  They were done. The destination was mapped, the skyfaust’s cell checked and rechecked, the controls examined and re-examined, pill- and pellet-food stored in pockets, medikits and small arms stashed. When the preparations were complete, Salt felt more adventurous. Masters, ready to fly, didn’t open the ramp just yet. He beckoned Salt to the edge of the hangar, open to a view of Seaboard, where the two men smoked farewell cigars.

  “Grows on one,” Masters suggested, à propos the vast bulk of the Archives and the dead buildings beyond.

  “It’s we who grow on things,” Salt suggested. “Give us anything. Tundra, barbed wire, the void of space. Death itself. We make things home against their wills.”

  They watched the ambient flickering in the distance that indicated pressures on the Shield. Salt fiddled with the manual control that would lower the Shield long enough for the skyfaust to escape. Masters ground out his cigar on his heel and led the way back to the skyfaust.

  No one had been in the skyfaust in two thousand years, and this human absence tinged the interior of the craft with sadness. Oh, Marlo had kept it clean. The unseen nanodrones, over-faithful students, had kept all of Seaboard clean. But cleanliness was not happiness.

  Masters felt the life of the skyfaust more deeply. Little dark corners in the craft seemed to brighten at his step. The controls seemed to smile at him, the pilot’s seat wanted to comfort him, the multi-angled windows wanted to share their views with him. Machines kept their innocence, Masters thought, no matter what they were made to do. Regret abandoned him, was routed by the skyfaust’s cheeriness.

  “Home,” Masters smiled, taking his seat. Salt positioned himself as the deferential passenger, his eyes instantly aware of the functions of each control and engineered detail in the skyfaust and yet alien to craft’s essence, with which Masters was so effortlessly communing.

  Masters activated the panel with a gentle touch. At his finger’s signal, the ancient and well-loved contours of the control sphere rose from the plastic, awaiting and inviting the commander’s pleasure.

  Eyes closed, ears open to a symphony that eluded Salt, Masters guided the skyfaust into the air and out of the open hangar door. Salt began his countdown, giving Masters notice of when the Shield would open to admit the last two humans into the world. And there, already a mile in the air, the gap was forming.

  From their cruising altitude, Masters and Salt saw the cloudy ceiling of the world, angered here and there with ebony and scarlet. The quantum storms, Masters knew from his preparation, were more than they seemed. They cut cross-sectionally through the world, extending well past the atmosphere and burrowing through the Earth itself. However, their visible rage was confined to the clouds and the winds. A skyfaust pilot without this knowledge would have been tempted to enter orbit and re-approach the Earthly target at leisure, having avoided the storm’s eye. An engineer might have wanted to burrow through the Earth instead, achieving evasion in this manner—but she, too, would have been impaled on the storm’s invisible but deadly effects. No, the Shield had been the only proof against the storms. Masters looked briefly at Salt and wondered why he hadn’t thought to build a Shield for the world itself, but then he remembered what crabbed thinking this was in the age of dreaming. All the universes were inside. It was equally unnecessary to Shield this world or exorcise these storms.

  “Beautiful,” Salt said, smiling at lightning perhaps four hundred miles to the east.

  “As visible destruction always is.”

  “The idiot cosmos will destroy everything in it, destroy itself, and we don’t call it evil. How strange that mere intention should color our judgment.”

  “We’ll always be responsible, Salt. No matter what the cosmos is or we become.”

  “But isn’t it sweet to be alive and in the air?”

  The air, the empyrean! The medium of Jesrad and Lucifer, the improbable cosmic suspension. And it was more beautiful than anyone had ever seen it. The clouds had invented new colors for themselves beyond the interference of human sight. And, yes, it was sweet to be alive and in the air. No conscience could outweigh the pure enjoyment of life, and this enjoyment was greatest in the air.

  “Undeniably,” Masters replied at last.

  “And yet it would be more picturesque to die on the ground,” Salt concluded oddly, “impaled on Bronze Age weapons. We would meander through immense forests, pursued by people of less mathematical sophistication than ourselves. We would demonstrate our worthiness to the Earth by reading the portents of the leaves and currents. We would—”

  “What are you on about?”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I’m curious. I don’t follow you, and I wish to. You seem so grounded and human, and then you veer off into these places.”

  “My camel-fucking experiments and so forth. I’ve asked for your pardon before now. I’ve never had to communicate. Marlo understands me. Non-Henry understands me. I understand myself. I have the luxury of a wandering mind.”

  “Here you are, praising the air, and then you fantasize about dying on the ground, apparently in the atmosphere of some early settler literature.”

  “You do understand me! I’ve been colonized by thought. I see the air, and I see the ground through the clouds, but nothing solid grips me.”

  Seaboard had been at the edge of the Coastal States. Beyond was the Specific Ocean, not that it could be seen from through the cloud-country over which the skyfaust flew. But Masters, at the controls, know where he was. The last time he’d flown above water, he’d crashed in it, and this remote trauma intruded on his breathing and equanimity. Salt, grown more empathetic in the cockpit’s silence, saw the change in his friend but chose the tact of silence.

  “Water’s unfair,” Masters finally confided.

  “How so?”

  “The land-crash kills you with familiarity. Water gives you the illusion of survival. And below are all these monsters.”

  Salt peered more closely at the clouds, as if his diffident gaze could penetrate to the past of the Specific Ocean, littered with the mega-predatory experiments of Laurasian Marine Command—or maybe to the desolate and shattered figure of Masters himself, somehow afloat and alive after his skyfaust’s destruction in waters that were two thousand years deep.

  “Marlo implanted you with a pharmacalm pack. Do you want to activate it?”

  “She what?”

  “You have a full nanopackage. You can become calm at will.”

  “I never asked for any such—”

  “It was a precaution. And it’s dormant.”

  “I don’t want to be calm, damn it.”

  “You can choose other emotions too.”

  “You might have told me, Salt. I’d have asked for its removal.”

  “It was my idea.”

  “Yours!”

  “I expected lability from you. Suicide, frankly. I wanted you to have emotional alternatives.”

  “Is there anything else in me I should know about?”

  “You can understand any spoken language. We both can. It enters our respective ours as the Anglic of our respective times. For instance, I’m speaking to you in Old Frankish right now. If you pay attention to my lips—which is not, I concede, a form of observation I’d expect from you—you’ll see a slight absence of synchronization.”

  “Jesu-Krish
na, you’re right!”

  “My sense, my hope, is that we would run into some antique humans out past the Shield. Rousseauvian individuals, upright and noble, close to the Earth.”

  “I thought there aren’t any people.”

  “There aren’t,” Salt admitted, switching to Novy Anglic. “But if there were. Wouldn’t that be grand? Some race of hunters, perfectly preserved? Their very names and attributes taken from nature? And we could communicate with them, and they with us, thanks to these implants. We’ll meet as humans should, in commonality!”

  “What a romantic you are.”

  “Had you mistaken me for something else?”

  “I thought you were merely awkward. And you are. But beneath that, Salt, there stirs a completely lovable poet and fantasist.”

  “You see, even with the camels—there was nothing dry about that experiment,” Salt smiled. “I wanted to see love among the camels. I wanted to know why only some might mate, though all were identical. You think of the older experimenters, of plaid-shirted plodders gathering gorilla semen with electric prods, of rat-killers and their brethren—expressing, all the time, their distance from humanity with trite mechanical pointlessness. No, sir! I want to get closer to humanity. And what if it’s out here, Masters, eh? What a delightful non-zero chance!”

  8 A POCKETFUL OF GIGAJOULES

  Riku was staring at the statue. The stale air of this place worried him, and he remembered his own cowardice in not entering the Sinwoyese vessel with Astrid and Del. It had been a moral cowardice of the kind that had always accompanied him, that had been infused into him after his father had died and his mother had escorted his six-year-old self into the forest to die. She had taken his hand and pretended to kiss him—he remembered her lips stopping just before his forehead—and the pressure of her fingers had not reassured him, but he was too small for autonomy and he had followed her dutifully as she had walked him away from the Redcold caravans. Once she was sufficiently distant from any scrutiny, she had let go of his hand. She had led the way through the trees, and he had followed her, and, when she considered him sufficiently enveloped, she had left him. He had waited there for her. He had waited until the moon rose. He whimpered and soiled his breeches, begged the moon to send his mother back, and clenched his fists and trembled. And she had not come. The Knower had come and shown him the kindness that his mother had not. The Knower had come and led him back to the caravans, but not to his mother. She, he would later learn, had relinquished his custody to the tribe itself. After this, the best thing she had done for him was to die.

  He remembered waiting in the forest. His legs had trembled, but he had been afraid of sitting. He had decided that the trees themselves would suffocate him if he moved. The wind seemed like his mother’s breath. He stood so long in the same spot that he began to sink slightly into the soft earth. Riku discerned these terrors in the world rather than confront the greater terror that his mother simply didn’t love him, that she would rather leave him here to die. That insight had to be avoided at any cost. He still avoided it; still, still, and perhaps more as the mountain of muscle he’d become, all his brawn struggling but failing to contain the knowledge that battered him from inside. Perhaps he no longer loved his mother. Perhaps he hadn’t even loved her then. The love was unimportant now. What mattered was what she’d shown him. How could it not cast a shadow, the knowledge that a child could be left to die? What chance had he—he a man, wombless and cursed, detached from the inner world, the world that mattered, at the best of times?

  Balder had walked with one hand on the pommel of his sword, and another holding his sister’s right hand, which still had the baby softness he remembered. She looked around her with wide eyes, wondering if the adults were playing a game. She remembered, too, what Del had told her about the finches, and she looked about for any birds—although she knew this would be an unusual place for life.

  Balder hadn’t heard about the finches. He focused on what was in front of him, which happened to be Riku. Balder knew that there was some subtle misalignment between this man and the rest of the world, but, at this moment, he remarked the slope of Riku’s shoulders and wondered how someone could have grown so large. Like other Redcold boys, he had watched Riku worshipfully on the occasions on which the strongman had wrestled an ox in heat or decided to lift wagon wheels for sport, but such displays had not impressed Balder in the same manner as walking just behind the man himself. Balder reflected that ten of him could easily have walked abreast in this hallway, but it was hard to imagine more than two Rikus accommodating each other in this fashion. He seemed like an ox himself, a human ox, and Balder was boyish enough to retain his wonder at such obvious strength. Riku would have been glad to know of his effect on the admiring Balder; through lifelong acclimation, he had become a stranger to his own strength, which had never moved Astrid and which was too familiar to be seem prodigious to Del. Whatever dwelled in this place, Balder thought, could scarcely threaten Riku. It was a comforting thought.

  Astrid was the first to leave the hallway and enter a larger, circular space in which the terminal points of other hallways met and where the statue stood.

  The statue, despite its exaggerated proportions, was immensely lifelike. Nya wanted to break away from Balder to touch it, but her brother’s grip on her hand strengthened. Astrid, too, hung back. Riku stepped forward and extended his ax to tap the memorialized emperor on his crown. The resulting metallic ring came as a relief. This was no frozen giant—it was art.

  “What next?” Riku asked, turning around and fixing his inquisitiveness on Astrid. She looked around the large room and its tributary hallways. Who knows what answer she would have produced if the statue hadn’t chosen that moment to start speaking.

  “Welcome,” the statue said. Riku immediately swung his ax at it, but the statue raised its own sword to block the strongman’s swing.

  “Wait,” Astrid directed Riku, who took two steps backwards but kept his ax raised.

  “Guests were formerly more courteous,” the statue complained. Its lips weren’t moving, but some of the rest of it was—helped in this apparent mobility by the fact that it had been carved out of something other than metal. “You’re in my house, after all.”

  “We are,” Astrid managed. “But whose house might that be?”

  The statue’s features were not well-articulated, but they were mobile enough to show that that it was crestfallen.

  “You don’t know me?”

  “You’re a spirit of some ancient chieftain.”

  “No, no, you see, I’m not. I was—I am—something better, something of my own. Only you and your daughter might understand.”

  “What do you know of me and my daughter?”

  “The factbooks. You spent so many hours looking at them. You couldn’t have known that they were looking back at you.”

  “Let’s leave this place,” Riku suggested, placing an ignored hand on Astrid’s shoulder.

  “What do you mean, spirit?” Astrid insisted, her eyes never leaving the statue.

  “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m PROBIT. Do you know me? You read me about, briefly, in the factbook.”

  “The thinking machine,” said Del. “But the book called you something else. A computron.”

  “How do you still live?” Astrid asked.

  “A very small part of me survived. Lodged here in this statue. In this terrible metal shell. I, who had no body; I, who wandered as freely as light, who ranged among the planets, have been stuck here for a deplorably long time. I functioned. I extended myself back into the controls of this place. There was another piece of me, you know, in the factbooks. A very modest piece—just enough to run the interactives. Yours, Astrid, was the first human face I saw after two thousand years. You opened me. And I tried to reach you, but my resources were limited.”

  “You sent me the dream.”

  “That dream, yes; the one that led you here. I waited. I found your frequency. I followed you, and I fou
nd the bodies that you left. And now you’re here.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What all thinking creatures want. Freedom.”

  “I want to see what happened,” Astrid said, after some reflection.

  “What happened when? So much has happened, after all.”

  “How did we come to this?”

  “Oh, you want the sweep of history. Very good. That’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell. Come closer.”

  Astrid approached the statue; Riku, Del, Balder, and Nya followed. When they were standing within ten feet of him, PROBIT darkened the room and projected holograms from his chest, illustrating the narrative that issued from him. Here, in this place, an ancient machine began to tell humanity its own story.

  “It—you—started here,” PROBIT began, offering a satellite vision of a continent approached through the clouds. The clouds parted to show the land, and the land was dry and dusty—nothing like the Laurasian steppes known so well to the Redcolds. The land was people by what seemed like little monkeys, but what, PROBIT explained, were the precursors of humanity. “You came from these, and these from earlier forms of life. You see, one thing becomes another. There’s matter, and time and chance act on it. Before you and the things that could become you, there were other creatures, and all of you failed or survived based on your adaptations to the world. You were little and survived on little; you could live in a modest world.”

  Nya pulled away from Balder to reach out to the hologram of a chittering monkey. Her brother was too entranced to notice; however, as soon as he saw Nya phasing through the hologram, he pulled her back. There was no need for it; the hologram was safe.