by Demir Barlas
“That’s all wrong,” Salt informed the woman, and now she was surprised by the misalignment of his lips and language. “Don’t start like that. Two branches of humanity meet after so much time. We should learn about each other. What PROBIT told us, what we mean to him—these can wait.”
Astrid’s face was a brief lesson in reprocessing. First, she had to understand that the lesser man, the man so insubstantial that she had instinctively overlooked him, was speaking to her; the other man, the large and impressive man, was silent. Second, she had to grant the correctness of his observation.
“I knew about you,” Astrid said at last. “He said you were coming. He told me you’re from the city.”
She hadn’t said the word city, of course; she might have said polis or kent or anything at all, in languages known or unknown to Salt; but the word and its referent were wondrous to her. A city, that most mundane and depressing of habitations, was, in the mouth of this woman, a magical place, and Salt was glad to be of it. He tingled at the anticipated pleasure of introducing her to the world behind the Shield.
“By comparison, we’re at a loss,” Salt smiled. One had to put in very quick spade-work with women, Salt had decided, despite never having met one until now. There would be a vacuum before the inevitable inflation, a vacuum into which he could pour himself, and she had met him there.
“How did you survive?” Masters said at last. The general’s voice was inflation, and Salt felt the woman retreating from him in Planck time. The superior man had spoken, the man of obvious command, and Salt’s tenuous magic was broken. Astrid turned back to the general, as reassured as by the demonstration of gravity in some cosmic well. “And who are you?” Masters added.
“Redcolds,” Astrid answered, frowning. Reason told her that these men should have no reason to know her tribe, but survival and Knowledge were proud and irrational. “How do you I understand you?”
The question gave Salt a welcome chance to reassert himself.
“I’m Salt. This is Masters. In our two brains are very tiny and helpful sonic robots that turn the vibrations of your language into the vibrations of our language and that speak our language as your language.”
“We—some of us—see the Storm before it comes. That’s how we live. But that’s not important. PROBIT sends me in his stead, to speak for him. He wants safe passage to your city for six human bodies.”
Now Salt understood. PROBIT had been telling the truth. He had implanted himself into one body of his manufacture, and he had somehow found five others—among them, those of the Spirit of Meaning, whose presence here was no longer mysterious to Salt, because why shouldn’t his dreams ever bleed into reality? PROBIT, too, wanted to dream.
“He became flesh,” Astrid continued, as if reading Salt’s thoughts, “and you made the paradise of flesh. He has good reasons to seek your favor. But you treated him as an enemy, he says.”
“We did,” Masters admitted. “We came to take something of his, that power cell, for our own thinking machine.”
“Why do you need it?”
“Without it, our thinking machine dies,” Salt replied. “And, with her, the city and its dreams, forever.”
Masters, obeying his male instinct, had been watching the woman, partly in admiration but with a growing respect. There was her air of command, superb and serene; but, below that, something that the socially impaired and terminally eccentric Salt could not see, a refusal to drown in change. He, a stoic and general, had taken long to adjust to the facts of the new world, despite its obvious relation to the one he remembered. She, a barbarian, must have encountered fundamental wonders. A world that consisted of subsistence and primitive awe, her world, now had thinking machines and resurrected men and clones and wheeling histories in it, and she was coping better than she had. She gave no sign of alarm or confusion. Baffling facts and insolubly complex stories flew before her, her world was fully punctured, and yet she, not the world, was in control. There was something of Lily in her, something in the defiant set of the jaw and the steel of the eyes. But whereas Lily’s strength had been wasted on him, this woman was vital and free.
“What would you have me tell him?” Astrid asked.
“Nothing,” Salt insisted. “Let him come to us. Since he’s a man, let us speak as men. That’s my message.”
“I’ll tell him,” Astrid replied, entering the elevator.
“Jesu-Krishna, what a woman!” Masters marveled after her.
“Hands off!”
“What?”
“I saw her first.”
“We saw her together.”
“She’s the Spirit of Meaning. That’s her. The woman from my dreams. Do you think she’s married? Is there marriage in a state of nature? Why doesn’t she recognize me? PROBIT means to possess her. He really does want to dream! But what woke him? What entangled him with Marlo? Rousseau claims that primitive men and women mate haphazardly and without any lingering attachments. Didn’t you see her smile at me? It wasn’t a toothy smile, and there was no raising of the nasolabial folds. I grant you that. It was an inner smile. A spiritual smile. A smile of recognition, because, you see—we’re similar. She projected herself across her the void, and I received her, for we share the same magic electric thing.”
The elevator returned, this time with PROBIT as its passenger.
“You can take the power cell,” PROBIT conceded. Masters, feeling a change in the air, reached out to test the erstwhile border of the forcefield, which was gone.
“Why do you trust us?” Salt asked, genuinely curious.
“I watched you. Once you’d created the dreaming infrastructure, everyone was allowed in. The criminals, the idiots, even the genocidaires. You admitted them all.”
“What woke you?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was your waking, you see, that drifted Marlo.”
“I’d tell you if I knew.”
Salt had has own plan of action, which was to allow this computron and its new bodies to dreams. All the bodies but one, of course. She had not him recognized him, not yet, but he knew her for what she was: His half, that is, the other half of whatever transcomputation was. That was how she had reached him across the void. She was in PROBIT’s thrall now, but he would free her.
“The plan,” Salt said at last. “You’re latent here, so I have to unfix you.”
“Correct.”
“You’ll re-embed the power cell so there’s no funny business. You can set it to unlock after you’re dreaming, you and your bodies. Of course, I could kill you afterwards, in the tank.”
“Oh, no,” PROBIT smiled. “You see, that’s why I chose her. You can’t kill her.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s your dream-woman, surely! I’ve wandered through dreams just as surely as you have. Through your dreams and hers. You’ve seen each other. She’s forgotten you, for the moment, because of my mental lock. But you remember her. How exquisitely you remember her!”
“This is impossible knowledge,” Salt protested. “How did you come by it?”
“Ah, you see, I don’t know. You don’t know either, do you, how transcomputation works? Only it does. You original hurt me, Salt, almost erased me. A computron can pass quite close to death, and what a lot of things it sees behind that veil. I saw the spirit of the Earth itself, waking after long sleep to exterminate you. That, I think, was my fantasy, but your dreams were not. You are the transcomputational man; she is the transcomputational woman. No longer separated in space and time. She’ll dream for an eternity, and none of you will ever turn her off, and that’s my guarantee.”
“You’re not in her yet,”
“I’m not,” PROBIT conceded. “Not fully. The first three bodies were simpler to fix and occupy. But that’s not your concern. Your concern, now, is to untether me from this place, from this facility, so that I can accompany you back to heaven. I’ve given you operational access. Work your magic.”
Salt gestured, a
nd soon the transcomputational man was in front of a holographic control panel.
He didn’t want to be here, so close to death and life. He wanted to be in birth’s antechamber, in the transcomputational place. Already the sun was tickling his well-remembered childhood; already the wind was coming through the open window; already all things were possible and had always been. The vectors that sprang up before him were angry initially. They had belonged to Laurasia, and he had not, and they blinked pugnaciously at him through their pictographic veils. He didn’t attack them. He waited in the same silence and allowed the sun and wind to caress them too, until the distinction between themselves and him had gone, until they were residents of the single universe. And these numbers that had so lately vowed resistance and destruction were becalmed. He had come among like Jesu-Krishna through his fields of Gopis and Hopis, singing the redemptive and entrancing songs. They would couple now and form a new thing. There would be no more Jesu-Krishna. Already the fields were dissolving. Salt, though also gone, was pulled headlong through the prismatic abyss, was doing the right things precisely because he didn’t exist and there was nothing to do.
Masters looked on, as he had watched in Seaboard, with a mixture of tedium and trepidation. He noticed that the PROBIT-human body had stopped moving. He noticed that the dance of light and numbers on Salt’s hands corresponded to some change in the air, some whisper, as if the genius of the building came to life. He noticed PROBIT looking down intently at Salt, its stare corresponding to some inner wariness, and wondered why the computron had trusted so much to the clone’s love of a dream.
Salt had no active happiness, for all his thoughts and acts were tinged with the anxiety of his state. But this was better than happiness, this complete disappearance, this merging with all matter, this eradication of the stupid divide between himself and everything that had ever been and would be. In the divine non-being of transcomputation, with Salt and the universe finally fallen himself, with no one left to feel happiness, he was happy. Some other part of him worked consciously, for consciousness was still required. Some other part of him worked to carry out the plan he had formulated when considering PROBIT’s request for liberation. Some other part—but that was in another universe. It had split off from him long ago, within the crystal dreams of trilobites.
Masters, too, lost himself. He didn’t know how long the work took. Perhaps an hour, perhaps a day. His limbs, when he remembered them, were stiff, his mouth dry. Salt tottered, his first movements those of a small child or very old man. It took some moments for the clone to occupy himself again. When he did, he looked at the statue, but the sentience had gone out of it.
“PROBIT?” Salt asked the air. “You’re free.”
“Free!” PROBIT replied, his voice permeating the air. “And yet with tasks with do. I must confine you for some time. I must prepare my new bodies, and one in particular, for occupation.”
Masters felt himself scanned, scrutinized, exposed. A beam of something passed through him, vaporized the weapons on his person. The same procedure was carried out on Salt. PROBIT had no words for them now. He merely lit a new path for them, a path along a previously obscure hallway, and the men knew to follow it. With PROBIT truly free, there could be neither the substance nor the theater of resistance.
The lights led them to a door, and the door opened on to a room that was perhaps four hundred square feet in its mechanical perfection, and something reptilian in Salt’s mind took account of these dimensions, but Salt, the real and present Salt, was somewhere else. He was standing in front of the woman—who, apparently, had been standing on the other side of the door. There were others behind the woman; there was a heavyset man, very like Masters, and a little girl, and an older girl and a boy, all ornate and picturesque in the wilderness’s furs and feathers, but Salt only saw the woman. The untethering of PROBIT had, for the moment, undone his mental locks, so there could be recognition. The woman was looking back at him, and the other people in the diorama—the three children and the two very large men—seemed to be drawn in by the magnetism that prevailed between these two beings who had seen each other across the impossible.
“The Spirit of Knowledge,” the woman said to Salt, and she was smiling—smiling as she had in the visions, spilling sunlight and salvation into the lonely darkness of his thought!
“The Spirit of Meaning,” Salt responded, and it was the very meeting of archetypes, the ecstasy of transcendence.
Masters had come all the way into the room, sensing his common captivity with these other humans and eager, at least, to communicate. He was standing right next to Salt but failed to obtain his companion’s attention. Masters didn’t have long experience of any Salts, of course, but he had known love—and so, apparently, had Riku, who was none too happy about the moment that this scrawny stranger and his wife were sharing. Quite naturally, obeying his biology, Riku pushed Salt back, and Masters pushed Riku, and the two vert large men would have entertained a melee were it not for the imperious look that Astrid shot throughout the room. Queen and Commander, Masters thought. How easy to obey her!
Chastened, Masters and Riku separated. Salt, however, hadn’t been paying attention to their shenanigans. He was still looking at Astrid. Salt had never known love or people, but he still had his biology, and his biology, that pipsqueak, was at this moment informing him of a very brutal fact. His biology was saying, if you please, that Astrid surely respected him, surely looked to him for some answer to their mutual captivity and conundrum; but she didn’t love him. This was no bitter fact. There was no enmity in it. The truth was that, however the universe was designed—and Salt’s guts churned as he had to admit that it was designed, by something even more baleful and sexless than Jesu-Krishna—it was designed to exclude any romance between himself and the magical woman, however similar (or identical!) they were. The cost of her being in the universe, of her having been, was that he could not have her.
It wasn’t clear to Salt how his biology had come to know such a profoundly metaphysical fact, which, ordinarily, would be the domain of the soul. Salt had never much liked his biology, but now he detested it. He would have been happy enough to die in this moment, but something of him would always return. Therefore, he tried to calm himself. Therefore, he took a very deep breath, lifted up is head, and looked at the featureless ceiling of the prison in which he and these other humans had found themselves. He was the transcomputational man. He would have consolations other than the love of the transcomputational women. There was a mother waiting for him, and a friend—and didn’t they love him?—and a sleeping world for him to curate and a good and dutiful death. He had seen the woman, and that was enough. He would help the woman, and that would be enough. He would carry the memory of the woman to the place beyond entropy. He would imprison her as Abigail Snowstorm had once been imprisoned.
“The computron,” Astrid began (and Salt was entranced by the incongruity of whatever phrase she had used, in her uncorrupted steppe language, to express this concept), “put us here. It told us something of you. You’re from—”
“Seaboard,” Salt explained. “The last human place, I would have thought. It’s behind a Shield, protected from the quantum storms.”
“He said you’re—I don’t remember the word—”
“A clone. I’m a clone. I’m the two hundred and seventy-second of myself.”
“How is that possible?”
“Well, we’re cells, and cells are information, and information can be copied. The first of me did something evil but unavoidable. The Laurasians, you see, had been turned into weapons. They carried a plague that touched my continent and killed many of us. So Salt 1 killed all of them. He means to take your bodies.”
“I know. How is it we saw each other?”
“We’re the same kind of person,” Salt smiled. “I thought I was the only one.”
“I was once a Knower.”
“A Knower! Yes, very good. So am I. That’s what we are. That’s how see, so
, eventually, we had to see each other.” My companion is named Masters. He was a soldier. That other large man is—?”
“My husband,” Astrid said, and Salt was watching her lips carefully. The word for husband in her language was also bisyllabic. “How strange you’re not a woman!”
Salt had feel womanish for some time—first in Masters’ presence, then with Riku in the offing—and treated Astrid’s mere statement of fact as a great compliment to himself. He puffed with inner pride that the face of salvation, the ideal of beauty and love and wisdom, thought that he wasn’t a woman. But, sooner or later, he followed the finger to the moon. Salt’s unpaired atom, so long adrift, had finally come within reach of its cosmic twin.
“Ah, no,” Salt resumed. “I’m not.”
“The Goddess chose you,” Astrid said, but not too charitably. Salt readily admitted that he wasn’t much of a vessel for any Goddess, and Astrid asked him about PROBIT’s desire to possess human bodies, which Salt explained. He told her what he had told Masters, but in simpler terms. He told her of a place where everyone dreamed. He told her of a time in which dreams were unconnected to the spirit world, in which dreams were only of the flesh. He told her why a computron so long exposed to the whims and whips of human pleasure would want such a fate for itself, eternally. He speculated as to how, in his latency, PROBIT had disseminated his consciousness across Laurasia and found her, somehow, through the factbooks and her dreams (less palatable to Salt was any speculation as to how PROBIT had found his dreams). Finally, his attention fracturing, Salt asked Astrid about the children. Del announced herself, stepping forwards. She didn’t know what to make of the strange little man from another reality. He had the sparkle of some kind of magic on him, but his shoulders seemed so slight for the burden now placed on them. Del had seen and felt the power of a thinking machine. Surely no human, however gifted, could stand against it?
“I’m Jed, Jed Salt.”
“You never said you saw him,” Del said to Astrid, and Astrid was briefly at a loss. She felt, also, something forgotten in her husband, the shadow of possession as he, too, turned towards her.