The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

“Come on, then,” Masters urged Astrid. He was sheepish, as the right of command was no longer his—if it had ever been. But Astrid, as both current barbarian and former Knower, retained an intrinsic independence that did not bend easily to direction. Still, she trusted the voice in the air, and she felt sorry for the diminished hero before her, and she knew that she and the spirits would have or find the necessary answers. So Masters followed the lights, and Astrid and Del followed Masters.

  On the other side of the world, PROBIT had had another task to complete, a task whose seed he planted within Marlo. Neither Marlo nor Salt had seen the sowing of this seed, and neither saw its fruition now.

  The seed was to have been the destruction of all dreamers. But enough of Marlo remained in Seaboard to contest a simple shutdown. There was only their declension to another stage.

  In the House of Dreams, two billion caskets detached themselves from the walls with a mighty and collective hum. Each casket’s top opened outwards, and each dreamer experienced a jolt of psychic removal. For those who had experienced reality before dreaming, the transition was merely hellish. For those who had been born directly into the dreaming state, the transition was infinitely worse. Those born dreaming knew neither the physics nor metaphysics of reality. Their solipsism and their ignorance had been absolute. Now they were waking in glass containers, half-drowned in fluid and raised into the air by invisible forces; now they were being lifted clear of their caskets and being deposited on the floor by the ministration of antigravity; now, on the floor, many of them folded into prone and slug-like shapes once the antigravity went away, as standing was an alien act. They had no speech; they gurgled like giant babies plucked from the teat of fantasy. Their eyes blinked resistance to visual data that were too complex. For most of them, dreaming had been a dull orgasm of the senses, with all extraneous details and difficulties swept away by the brooms of pleasure. The world—even the calm and managed world of the House of Dreams—was far too differentiated and difficult for them. Their muscles were called upon to contract, their bones to support, their brains to process and decode.

  But that crisis was distant and indistinct, and this crisis is intimate and immediate.

  Both Astrid and Del were, in their own ways, glad of it—of the flashing lights, the subterranean rumbles of the approaching monsters, and the ruins of this evil place for interceding in the death of Riku.

  Astrid had known him to be weak in what counted; she had known that, like the boy abandoned in the forest, he would have taken any outstretched hand. She knew that he would have championed, oh, Farinaz over her, that he would have followed his void into any undignified disloyalty. He would have died as well for any woman, any family. But these were only ideas. It was for this woman, this family that Riku had died.

  She had seen happiness through his straining features, happiness at the thought that he had something as potent as his life to place between his love and their darkness. And had she been loyal? She had refused the Goddess and the golden path. She had brought her daughter and her husband and two other innocents into this unholy place. She had been the cause of Riku’s death. She would, if successful, lead three children behind more Goddess-mocking walls. She had proven to be like the ancients, seduced out of loyalty to the hard lessons of nature and divinity. Riku’s weakness had been carved on him, visible in his downcast eyes and apologetic strength, apparent in his servility. Her own weakness had been concealed. She would be judged, in this new world, as brave. She would be lauded by the Spirit of Knowledge and his thinking machine and the old general for shaking off the dirt of barbarism, for daring to join them behind their walls. She would be called questing, curious, far-seeing. And maybe she had only wanted to be a little goddess of her own.

  Del remembered how her father had always stooped down to play with her, how he had made her dolls and held her like a baby long after she began to chafe at that treatment. Riku had been the champion of her childhood, just as Astrid had been the champion of her future, and his loss was too hard to confront. It had been easier to kill the monster. It was easier to race through the dark and narrow hallways. It would be easier to think of her two lost finches and to invoke their protection for her father now that they shared the spirit world.

  And where was Balder? He had regained consciousness alone, in a circular enclosure of collapsed pillars, and he had drawn his sword against the coming doom. His heart beat rapidly, but not in fear. He was not surprised to see his mother part the veil of dust and enter the enclosure. He had felt her spirit nearby. She was still bloody from her death but also marked by some greater shame. Death had simplified her essence. He begged her to speak, but she would not. When he reached for her, she dissolved.

  An Underman burst through the enclosure, scoring Balder’s face with rubble. The boy staggered backwards, then regained his footing before the beast was on him. The beast bore his father’s face somehow, and Balder lost himself. The combat that ensued had none of the elegance of Astrid’s and Del’s encounters with these creatures. It was intestinal combat, hot and red. The boy’s muscles, though unequal to those of the monster, were forged in the same genomic cradle as those of the other Redcolds, and, though what he considered the unending grace of the Goddess to his people, he knew what to do. It fell to an outsider such as Masters to wonder where the fighting skill and physical gifts of the Redcolds had come from. To Balder, this gift was only another in the long sequence of the Goddess’s mercies. He had been spared civilization’s obsession with mechanisms and precursors (rhe weapon, demonstrated in phase one, that would be deployed in phase three; the equation whose parts were diligently designed to cancel each other out; the linear growth of the calf into the bull). Things were, then were not; these were successions of impossibilities; desires became things; things became desires; and only through the fog of blood and pain and effort did Balder find some redemption for his childhood weakness. His ensorcellment had been lifted. He was free to act. In the blood of the Underman now pooling at his feet, he saw another truth: That his mother had also been free to act, that she had not exercised this freedom, and that he and Nya had been sacrificed to that decision.

  Lights blinked on an intact portion of the ceiling. Balder looked up and saw that he himself must have fallen through the mazework of cracks visible overhead. He was far from where he had been. He heard steps far too delicate to be associated with any monster, and the moment disclosed Salt and Nya. Nya shouted with happiness to see her brother alive, and they embraced with happy tears. Salt shed a tear of his own, but he remained mindful of the greater task.

  “Let’s keep moving,” he said, and led the way. Balder, sword in one hand, held Nya’s shoulder with the other. Salt was a little sad to no longer bear sole responsibility for the little girl. The boy needed no protection; Salt saw what he had done to the Underman. Still, the lapel-gun on Salt’s flightsuit was a formidable weapon, and Salt hoped for another Underman—nay, a troupe of Undermen!—on whom and which to demonstrate his technical might. He was forging a family down here, after all.

  Now, the Laurasians had had many faults (none, however, deserving of eradication). They had been lovers of chintz and squeaky music. They had been xenophobes. They had refused the otherwise universal charms of liberty. But they had not, for all of that, left their facility’s integrity completely to chance. Admittedly, they had not known that a race of destructive humaniform beings would enter the world through one of their buildings, and, consequently, they had not prepared the innards of this place to withstand the vast—if momentary—heat the Undermen could generate. In fact, given the known strength of the Coastal bombs, they had not bothered to harden the place; they had, instead, resorted to disguise, caparisoning the facility as a deepsoil treatment plant. What they had done, however, was to make the place somewhat reassembling. The Laurasian science—like Coastal science, like all science—had reached the conclusion that everything was modular, fungible, foldable into something else. The materials of this facility were imbu
ed with a little of PROBIT’s intelligence, just enough to give them a memory of their place within the whole. The facility had been left attended by the ghosts of innumerable nanoparticles that would aid in its reconstruction in case of a conventional attack; the whole idea of germ warfare had, in fact, re-attained its vogue in both the Laurasian Empire and the Coastal States because places had become so much easier than humans to reconstruct.

  Therefore, the Undermen’s assault on the facility did not have the definitive impact that the creatures of the deep wished it to have. Yes, there were collapses and cave-ins throughout the complex, but these were already beginning to undo themselves.

  Salt’s mind wandered into the recent past. He had been looking right at Riku’s face when the pillar collapsed and throughout the brief ordeal of the strongman’s support of that burden. Salt had seen guilt there, guilt and relief, for this man had failed his own little world. Failing a little world was surely worse than failing a big world. Big failure was ennobling and self-exculpatory. And Salt thought of something else, of the nod of recognition that Astrid had given him. The nod, a gift, had been accompanied into his desert tent by the shadow of a smile. The desert was death. Salt lived a city of the innumerable dead, and he walked past his dead selves all the time, and he was born knowing when and why he would die. Death gripped him tightly. Death was small and cold.

  Astrid’s nod enlarged and warmed him, enticed him deeper into the welcoming woods of humanity. He was the kind of person, apparently, who deserved nods—and maybe smiles. Love and death and life!

  He smiled too, heedless of his crooked teeth and other insecurities; smiled in the darkness and in response to her misremembered smile. He smiled to better remember her smile. Then the smile in his daydream was gone. Salt was relieved and terrified. He wanted to see the smile again—to pass eternities in her—but also wanted to forget that such beauty could exist. She was temporary, a swallow in flight over his desert. There were still so many facts to accumulate. He had to grab impressions where and while he could—to enter into the spirit of her smile, imprint the contours of her face into his inner eye. He could dole out these morsels to himself in the cramped and deathly minutes without her. The smile came back to him, but as saltwater. He had passed nearly all his lives without her, and he would only have these moments now. There could be no time in which to determine how her face managed to be so different from the billions of previous faces, so lovably unique. However much time there remained, he knew that his duties as a Salt, his generic inheritance, and his purpose must all be sacrificed to her. Not for any logical reason. Not because she would ever demand such tribute. Because, having encountered her possibility, nothing else seemed important to him, and the world without her was only nothing.

  Without knowing it, Salt had come to the control room. He finally heard Marlo’s weakening voice through the fog of reverie asking him to go through the door she was holding open for him. The door itself was shuddering in an attempt to choose closure. Salt entered, and Balder and Nya followed him inside.

  The control room was small, a humming electronic womb that held all the magic of enclosure. There could be anything outside—hell and devils, death, the wall of entropy. He was inside. He was in the beating heart of the mechanism, where his ideas would again take form.

  Alas, as Salt was the only witness to his working, there would be none to retell the details of his work. The whole deliciousness of the impossible lies in adumbration. Had the great Maribelle, wife of the father of the brother of the mother of Jesu-Krishna, provided the specifications and blueprints of Frankenstein’s great working, had the veil been lifted from the god of galvanism’s face, there would have been little excitement for the reader. Artificial life would thenceforth enter the prosaic domain of the toaster and ocelot. Each enterprising lad would build a monster (men, bereft of the love and creativity of women, would be the only builders of monsters). It is just as well, therefore, the Salt entered his transcomputational state alone, without any cataloguer of his thought or activity. The reader can, like Salt, be happily stranded on a little magic island surrounded by the waters of individual belief.

  Masters hadn’t trained in two thousand years. Since his resurrection, his most strenuous exercise had been sex with a tactile hologram, and he had been winded after that. He had, in his time, climbed ropes and scaled towers, lifted distressingly heavy weights, and sprinted for unusually long distances. He had, in his time, woken to every day with the consolation of his own physicality, to the sight and feel of a prototypically male physique. He had, in his time, been unbothered by the petty phenomena of soreness and self-doubt.

  But this was not his time.

  He was unsure of himself, he was in pain, and the orange gun-blob was the sole avatar of his manhood.

  He had seen a girl defeat a monster whom he could not defeat.

  He had considered himself fallen from a mountaintop of dignity to a safe plain, at least, where all was flat. On this plain, all he wanted was to return to the digital ghost of his wife, but the plain was not a plain. It was merely a waystation between declivities. There was a bottomless pit of indignity, but he, apparently, would find the bottom.

  His physical form was intact—even improved, as two millennia in the Fluid had repaired various internal and external defects. His reflexes had lost none of their responsiveness. But his content had seeped out on the same day, so packed with cosmic incident, on which he had dropped the bomb.

  Content was necessary, form an afterthought. With his shriveled, evilly surviving soul, he could offer no real battle, and these creatures demanded a real battle. One had to believe—as the Laurasians had believed, as he had believed—in a cause. What was his? Only to survive. Salt, the young Salt, had reminded him of the primacy of this motivation, but it conflicted with the romance of warfare and masculinity.

  Rumination of this sort led Masters into another trap, a failure that made the leap from his soul into the actuality of ruin. He had wanted to lead the way, and the ground had opened under him, and he hadn’t been quick enough to evade the void, and now he was falling headlong into what might have been an elevator shaft. It was no consolation to see, by virtue of the still-blinking lights somewhere overhead, that Astrid and Del had were also falling.

  This being an elevator shaft, and, the Laurasians in their last flower being disinclined to invest in frippery like magnetic levitation while the Emperor required such necessities as gilded apes and floating palaces, the shaft had a cable. Masters was able to grab it. Other oscillations in the cable told him that Astrid and Del had also taken the tether.

  The darkness of the shaft was partially illuminated by faint scarlet lights—not the guiding spirits of Marlo, but dead and dying lights, hopeless lights.

  Masters began to climb. Unfortunately, several Undermen had clustered at the top of the tunnel, their bioluminescence a warning to humanity.

  Masters ensured that his knees and right hand were wrapped firmly around the cable, while his left hand aimed the blob-gun past Astrid and Del and at the Undermen. The gun’s aim was connected to his vision, and his vision was superior to that of any raptor.

  Hundreds of feet above him, a shockwave disintegrated three Undermen. They came apart slowly, as if they were underwater, and rained down the tunnel in fragments. Astrid looked down quickly at Masters, then back up at the falling Undermen. The encounter in the chamber had been too rapid to impress her with the full destructive capability of civilization’s weapons. Then, too, she had followed the law of nature in refusing to ascribe harmfulness to a weapon that looked like a child’s handful of clay. Harm was sharp; if not large, sharp. Harm had teeth and claws. Harm had muscle. She couldn’t imbue the rubbing of some atoms or an innocuous blob of putty with the powers of death that they obviously possessed.

  The falling bodies of the Undermen were unhappily longitudinal in death. The beasts were a dozen feet tall, and even their fragments were substantial enough to rain down on the three humans suspen
ded in the tunnel. The malice of the Undermen survived their deaths.

  13 THE ONLY MATCHING BUTTERFLY

  Del, being small, evaded the organic detritus, but astringent blood fell on Astrid. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, half of the corpse of an Underman was bearing down at her. Astrid made herself a smaller victim of this terrible projectile by coiling herself more tightly around the cable and burying her face in her shoulder.

  The impact, when it came, was too heavy to feel. Astrid merely found herself separated from the cable—without pain, without decision. When she felt something, it was anger. She would die at the bottom of this tunnel now. And it was all her fault, and the cable brushed against her leg and was lost forever, and her skull cracked against the tunnel wall.

  Astrid’s form was almost lost among the corpses of the Undermen. Almost. After hitting the tunnel wall, she had taken a new trajectory, one that would surely bring him straight to Masters. His muscles, newly confident with firmness, grew tighter. He was diminished, yes. He was unforgivable, an atom in the dark, but he still stood between this woman and destruction. In the few seconds of waiting, catching Astrid became immeasurably important to him. To his credit, he never formed the definite idea that saving her would negate his sins. But wasn’t she the species itself?

  She fell on him awkwardly, unconscious as he she was, but he caught her. She seemed to slip and slide, her unconsciousness multiplying the weight of her otherwise lean body, but his free hand clenched the leather of her robe—then, when that tore, her wrist. Masters looked up, straining. He blinked away the scarlet occlusion from his eyes and noticed that the remaining Undermen had fled before the violence of his weapon.

  Even as Masters rejoiced in the strength of his right hand’s grip on the cable, fluttering and tingling in his middle back suggested some deeper damage. His vision almost failed him.