The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  It was a stream of interlaced blasphemies and threats that weakened and died.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Salt urged Nya. Salt was trying to radiate reassurance and hopefulness through his hands. He was trying to comfort Nya—Nya, whose wide eyes and gentle smile called him closer to his own humanity. Her shoulder was so soft! She must be protected. She must be walked back from whatever darkness had enveloped her. But, for now, she must accompany him to the control room so that he could undo PROBIT’s trap.

  Marlo’s lights led directly to a giant slab of plastic.

  “No access,” Marlo warned. “Can you lift the slab?”

  “I haven’t become any stronger since we parted.”

  Nya understood what was wanted, and she began to push at the corner of the slab. Salt joined her. The two strained heavily but achieved nothing.

  12 DEWCLAWS AND DEADFALLS

  Early humans, encountering lakes and canyons and hills, assumed sudden and intelligent action in their formation. Some god’s finger raked the soil to make the furrow of a lake. Some giant’s body ossified immediately into a mesa or a cliff. The gods and giants knew what they were doing and acted with thunderous intelligence. The real explanation, of course, was at once simple and horrifying. Rain and wind had acted on masses of cooled-gas space rock for millions of years. Time had come a-courting chance. There was intelligence in the chaos: A horrid intelligence born of cosmic patience and the malignance of directionless forces. Better to see a divine hand in the water or a titanic corpus on the land.

  The intelligence of the Undermen was a natural intelligence. They were the rain, irresistible and determinative because of its very brainlessness. They did not form or test propositions. They had limited powers of symbolic representation. They had not even bothered to trouble their weak and shiftless human cousins for hundreds of thousands of years. They had been dormant. They had known nothing of the evolving idiocies of their surface cousins, the humans—of the progress, as it was called, from the sharpened stick to the neutron bomb or from noble silence to the nightmare of poetry. Flight and submersion were unknown to them. They came from an unforgiving universe of heated rock, from the primality of a planet too hard for humans, and now the planet was returning to some prior configuration.

  Masters, though alive, passed through an interstitial state, through the reconfiguration of selves and planets. He was neither conscious nor unconscious. His experience consisted of dreams that conveyed and were spun from emotion rather than sense. He was distantly aware of some failure, and the awareness was too strong to let him lapse into the ease of death, and the awareness was too weak to keep him fully bound to life.

  Masters tried to inspect the failure, but it had no form and he had no senses. There was something he should have done. He should have died. He had had many chances to do so, so many noble chances. Death in war, like the soldiers and the machines that had crumbled under his command. Death in peace, which had claimed him forgivingly for so many centuries. Death in the protection of others, in the refusal to worsen the world. But he had only watched as others had taken his deaths. With that feeling came an image: The memory of Riku straining under the ceiling, unhelped by him, unhelped by the man of action who become hideously passive at the only times that action mattered. He had been active at the wrong times. He remembered. He opened his eyes to a strobing film of dust and the awareness that he was not only alive but unhurt.

  Riku had died happily. He had kept his little world from collapsing. Truthfully, he hadn’t wanted to leave the steppes. He had wanted the Knower to love him, yes. But he had also wanted to die in the defense of people better than him, and his wife and child were better than him. Under the weight of the ceiling, no profound thought was possible, but there had been enough space for sufficiently intense feelings, and Riku had had two of these: Love of Del and faith in Astrid. He believed in them. They would find the golden land and live forever.

  These were Riku’s final feelings, and they cleansed him. The weight of the ceiling, even when it overmastered him, was nothing. The cracking of his spine ended whatever pain he had, which had already dwindled in the presence of his love.

  When the dust cleared, Astrid saw that she and Del were unharmed and blocked off from the others by debris. And she saw all that was left of Riku—his blood-flecked hand, visible below the collapsed ceiling. Astrid ran to the slabs atop Riku and tried to move them. She could not. Del joined her, and, soon enough, the slab shifted to disclose Riku’s head and torso. He was dead.

  Astrid and Del cried. It was a brief surrender to the oblivion of despair, because survival wasn’t done with them.

  “Hello,” said a woman’s disembodied voice. “My name’s Marlo. I’m a computron. I have to warn you. You’re being approached by something I can only assume to be hostile. Are you armed?”

  Astrid and Del had their swords, of course. Marlo would have said something else, but, at this very moment, she detected Salt elsewhere in the facility, and she directed her attention to him. She had no multipresence in this place.

  When rubble moved in a distant corner and disclosed an Underman, Astrid and Del stood with drawn swords. For now, they only stared. They had no ideas on how to kill this brute, whose existence they seemed to take for granted—for they knew that spirits can take horrible forms.

  The Underman was approaching from his human targets. He had been damaged in the ascent, but not fatally. He limped towards Astrid and Del, fangs bared and dewclaws clicking on the floor.

  Astrid waited. She knew that charging the creature would be folly, but she had no definite plan of attack. She came forwards slowly after nodding a command to Del to remain in place.

  When Astrid was close enough, she lunged to drive her sword through the creature’s stomach and into its back, but its spinal column was well-protected. Astrid’s sword had only broken an inch or so of the Underman’s skin, even though she’d put all her strength into the thrust. The Underman did not react. He seemed to be admiring his enemy or savoring his meal, or perhaps the ascent had damaged him more grievously than was now apparent.

  Astrid tried something else. Leaping several feet into the air, she cut through the creature’s neck, which was apparently unarmored by external bone. However, even the unarmored neck was too thick for the slash Astrid had aimed at it, and the Underman swiped at Astrid with more speed than was fair for such a large creature to possess. Astrid twisted sideways in the air to avoid the creature’s claws, but she still absorbed some of the blunt force of the blow. Before Astrid landed, Del, who would be no observant flower in these proceedings, had already drawn her sword and had lunged at the Underman’s thigh. The creature retracted its leg and directed an elephantine stomp at where Del would have been had she not been faster. The stomp was violent enough to crack both the floor and one of the Underman’s claws, and it also pitched the beast forwards. In its eagerness to kill, it had lost balance, and Astrid was faster in her second strike. She went for the eyes this time, which, though protected by ridged bones, were vulnerable in themselves to the point of a Redcold sword. Astrid’s resumed acrobatic attack, which brought her in reach of the Underman’s head, was matched by Del’s assiduity on the ground. Mother and daughter, who had never hunted anything before, worked fluidly to bring down the beast. Something else was working in them and through them. They had neither the right nor the habituation to be this coordinated.

  Masters turned the corner and saw this combat for himself. In the time before mental judgment, he had an impression of two atavisms, as if the women were as primal as the beast. He watched the Underman fall heavily to the floor, pierced and slashed and dead, and understood a great deal. These humans, the Redcolds, should not have survived. Their ancestors were to have been among those killed by the terrible weapon Salt 1 had devised and that he had delivered. They could only have survived had their genomes been modified in some manner that placed them beyond Salt’s weapon, and these modifications were responsible for what could only be
described as the posthuman physical skills here demonstrated by Astrid and her daughter.

  Masters allowed himself this much logic, then headed for the gory scene. There was nothing for him to do there. Masters felt undignified, a mastodon lumbering to join sylvan spirits.

  “The neck’s vulnerable,” Astrid informed Masters while wiping her sword on the snout of the Underman, returning some of the blood she had taken from him. “But only there.”

  “Very impressive. Have you seen these things before?”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “What’s that in your hand?”

  “Oh, this? This is a weapon. I had two. PROBIT disintegrated one. This other survived.”

  Del and Astrid looked closely at the orange blob-gun, mother and daughter frowning in simultaneous skepticism. Masters was looking else—at the half-obscured corpse of Riku. Astrid followed his gaze.

  “It’s the death he would have wanted,” she sighed, but not to Masters. Astrid and Del had retreated back into their world. Masters was merely observing.

  “Salt?” Masters asked, whether of the rubble or the women. Neither offered an answer. Surely the little man couldn’t have survived the big collapse. Masters was precluded from searching for his friend by the disturbance of another pile of rubble in another corner, from which, presently, issued another Underman. Astrid was ready to advance on it, but Masters turned to her and, with the potent but imperfect language of the eyes, requested her sword. Astrid saw in Masters the same crisis she had seen in Riku, the same urgency to demonstrate, through flesh, the vitality of a failing spirit. And she gave him her sword. Men would have to be allowed to spend themselves before the species could resume.

  Combat, like any art, contained its antithesis. The novice would, in Masters’ place, have accepted the crude biological recommendations of an elevated heartbeat and heightened arousal, ostensibly designed to increase the odds of survival. That was all wrong. Well, it was acceptable for animals. There was no particular art to gouging and biting, and bestial combat therefore benefited from the various lunacies of stimulation. That was not how Masters fought. Past arousal was relaxation, and past relaxation was unconsciousness. The author of the combat had to disappear for the art to reveal itself.

  Consequently, Masters’ steps and breathing were slow, and the sight of the approaching Underman was little more than a daydream. Masters had gripped the sword strongly at first; once he withdrew it, his muscles grew sedate. He was in the antechamber of combat; the next stage was unconsciousness.

  It was just as well that Masters was already in his fighting trance, for the sight of the advancing Underman was disconcerting. It was coming forward with damnably deliberate steps, as responsibly as a samurai or a gunslinger. The human aspect of these things, their undoubtable proximity to his own genome, had worried the earlier Masters, but that Masters was gone.

  The sword seemed to lead the way now, with Masters a mere appendage of the steel, an inertial phantom. The sword thought and acted for him. It alone knew what was wanted. It alone knew how Masters’ limited flesh could be arranged to the do the maximum damage to the mountain of muscle before him. Consciousness couldn’t be trusted with such an important and tricky task as the sword now faced.

  The Underman advancing on Masters was a paragon of his species, some troglodytic prodigy who had waited to fight the best of the humans in the most honorable of ways.

  The sword decided to come to a stop twenty paces in front of the Underman, and the Underman obligingly stopped at the same time. It would be wrong, of course, to say that Masters was fully gone, for he had reconstituted himself in the ether of memory and imagination. He was in many times, many places. He was eleven years old, in his first year at the Academy, being introduced to the discipline of the sword by his first instructor, who had the ridiculous name of Heppenstall.

  Heppenstall had stood in front of twenty young men and explained why, at that late date (at that galvanic time of satellites and weather control, of wetware and nanoparticles), the sword was still necessary. He had spoken of the connection between men and their past, a connection whose maintenance was the only reason for living. He had spoken of the spiritual gravity of the sword, which would always return men (always men, that frightened, abeyant sub-species!) to their center. The boys had feigned attention—they were experts at that—but Heppenstall had known how to really capture their interest. He had brought out the dueling robot and stood against it for three minutes, his sword moving faster than the dreams of artificial intelligence and biological modification. When it was over, he had explained to the boys that his skill was the absence of skill, that the techniques of addition—of the machine, of genetic tinkering, of neurological augmentation—were just techniques, and that the real fire came from the philosophy of stillness. It was his job, Heppenstall concluded, to teach them the philosophy of stillness, which was the secret heart of warfare.

  Masters relaxed more deeply now. He was not quite out of his body, but he was getting there. There was a pleasant buzzing in his head. His spirit peaked out again, and he was amazed by how little it had to do with him. Then his spirit was gone as well.

  The Underman’s battle growl rattled Masters’ bones and sprayed him with spittle. The Underman charged before the growl had finished echoing, trying two feints before swiping his claws at Masters.

  Fast as the creature was, Masters had been faster. The creature’s claws sparked on the sword, but subsequently carved the air. After the parry, Masters looked for the counterstroke. He was perpendicular to the beast now, and he wanted an exposed hamstring, but the Underman had transformed his own missed stroke into a defensive crouch. Masters had no opening, so he took some steps backwards, moving in a semicircle.

  The Underman reared back on his hands and attacked foot-first. Dewclaws hissed in the air as he advanced. Masters stepped backwards, parrying the dewclaws as they came. Sword and claw sparked again, and speed contested speed.

  Masters broke off and flipped sideways. The Underman flung himself back to his feet and resumed the attack quickly, hoping to push the human into a mistake. Masters moved laterally now, standing in the eye of the Underman’s storm, turning from side to side with insectoid speed to parry each clawed attack. Masters wasn’t as fast as Astrid, but, lacking her genetic modifications, he was still fast enough to raise her eyebrows.

  The Underman brought his claws up into a more defensive posture, but otherwise took no action. He wanted to see what Masters would do. The human waited until he was within ten feet of the monster, then turned into something faster than flesh.

  The lunge was straight and blurred, a lightning strike that taxed Masters’s nervous system to the utmost. The sword pierced the Underman’s stomach. Masters felt the sword bend at the tip, lost his leverage at the point of attack, and pulled himself and the sword backwards

  And the counterstrike was already on the way. Masters pushed himself backwards, bringing the sword with him. He’d drawn blood.

  The Underman advanced more systematically, claws and dewclaws and fangs alternating and combining in an organic avalanche of attack. Masters was hard-pressed to parry as he retreated. With Masters nearly on the ground, the Underman directed a massive stomp at the man’s head. Masters avoided the squashing narrowly, rolled free, and scrambled backwards for distance.

  The Underman pressed inexorably. Masters’s sword-arm was beginning to go numb from absorbing the force of its blows. The creature was picking up speed with every engagement, and this time his claws achieved a sterner impact. A cross-rake from the right claw bypassed the sword and tore into the meat of Masters’s forearm. A quick sideways twist of the claw, and Masters’ forearm hung from the rest of him in tatters.

  It would have gone ill with Masters had Delilah not chosen this moment to come forwards and, with a leap fully equal to that made by her mother minutes earlier, bring herself into decapitating distance of the Underman.

  Masters was of two minds. He w
as grateful for the end of combat—not because he had wanted to live, but because he had not wanted to die in an undignified puddle of failure. The combat was to have unfolded nobly; he, the John Henry of the sword, was to have demonstrated his superiority to this unnatural prodigy, dying only after moral victory. Instead of which his lifetime of training and attainment had availed him nothing against the Underman. No, Masters’ selfishness extended to the need to die well, or, any rate, better than he had been on the verge of dying.

  Masters was therefore happy to have lived but understandably unhappy that the girl had been his savior. Whatever one thought up to excuse her skill—whatever experiments had infused her with such hardy and unconquerable genes—she had still outdone him handily. He wasn’t free of martial vanity, and he had wanted so much to believe in himself, but he never could.

  Del, following Astrid’s example, wiped her enemy’s blood from her sword, steadying the Underman’s body with her boot as she did so.

  “We have to find Salt,” Masters proposed.

  “I’ve found him,” came Marlo’s voice through the air. “The lights will lead you to him.”

  “What now?” Astrid asked.

  “We’ll get facility control,” Marlo promised. “And access to an exit.”

  Although Marlo had followed Salt into PROBIT’s trap, she had no one consciousness. Some of her had remained in Seaboard. But the trap was such that, through the open link between Seaboard and the Laurasian facility, it pulled more and more of Marlo into submission. Her clock was ticking.