by Demir Barlas
Having lost consciousness many times, Masters neither surrendered to, not panicked at, the gathering darkness. He gritted his teeth and recited some lines from Cicero until the darkness passed. When it did, Astrid’s eyes were open. Her free left hand grabbed the cable, and Masters let her right wrist do the same. They climbed, as Del above them climbed, back to the weaker light.
There was no further adventure on that road. Masters, Astrid, and Del followed the lights through the broken but self-repairing facility until they found themselves at the control room that Salt, Nya, and Balder had entered earlier. Marlo opened the control room’s door, and the Redcolds were very happy to find each other alive; they embraced and exchanged endearments—quietly, though, in the knowledge that Salt was engaged in the momentous task that would free them from this place. By now, they needn’t have bothered. Salt was so lost in transcomputation that an army of monkeys would have failed to register on him; death itself would have to wait for that mighty mental wheel to stop turning.
Astrid and Del didn’t know what Salt was doing, but they were numerate, and they had spent time reading the Laurasian factbooks, and they know what computrons were. Balder and Nya stood outside even this modest circle of knowledge, but the silent urgency of the radiance around Salt—the radiance of arrays and columns, tables and vectors, orbits and dimensions—was enough. A great work was here undertaken. To Nya, the numbers seemed like butterflies from the spirit world, and she accepted their presence with the lucidity of childhood. To Balder, the numbers seemed like the hieroglyphics he had seen imprinted on the side of a fallen Laurasian craft, storm-spared and forgotten in the path of one of the Redcold migrations.
Masters alone had seen Salt in his transcomputational state, but the last of these states had been sterile. Salt was fallible. Through the rational sound of self-healing emitted by the facility,
Masters could hear a substratum of clicks and rumbles that told him of the Undermen. It would be a race now—a race between the awakened avengers of nature and the taiji of transcomputation. In this moment, Masters stood apart from his own life. He had lost it before; he would lose it again. The ghost of Lily, though—she was there, in Seaboard, in Marlo, and Salt held the key to her. She was somewhere in these very numbers.
Salt began to hum merrily. The sound seemed extraneous to him; Masters first ascribed it to the machinery of the control room, this diminutive and undignified squeaking. Then he remembered the sound from Seaboard—not from the second and failed repair of Marlo’s drift, but from the first and triumphal tweaking. It was, then, a propitious sound. Perhaps it was the voice of transcomputation—not the silver trumpet of success, not the resounding drum of conquest, but this little humming.
And Salt was happy. The happiness was neither hedonic nor eudaimonic. You couldn’t see it in his face. There was no telltale bulge in his jumpsuit. Marlo, with all her senses and sensors, couldn’t have located this happiness, because it was an essence. Salt had ceased to be; there was only function and alignment, this collapse of dichotomies and ultimates; there was only the doing, and the doing was the stuff of this universe and the next, and the doing would always be greater than the undoing. The undoing and its void were transient and unstable, would always give way to the doing, and the doing was happiness. Everything was form and content and control; everything was striving and failing; and Salt was deep in the heart of everything; and this was his happiness and his success, this was his transcomputation, this was his knowing.
The control room blossomed under the tread of enlightenment. The walls, so long unfriendly, glowed and echoed Salt’s hum back to him. The facility recognized its new master and purred.
It would be wrong to say that Salt was aware of Astrid. Awareness would have required observation, and observation sentience, and sentience the sense of self that was annihilated in these moments of transcomputation. No, he wasn’t aware of her. Awareness was biological and crude. Awareness was a pin through a butterfly. They were, however, together in the place that neither of them was. Transcomputation, like the Knowledge that Astrid had possessed, was a positive absence, and they were together in that absence, and, without being at all, they were aware of each other. Salt—he was returning to himself now—sensed a perfume in existence, a river the desert, and it was her.
By some unknown law of nature, or a known law of Salts, there was no such corollary for Astrid, no ripples in her cosmic plain. Salt was a spirit, and she had met hm before, and she had been in the trace state before. There was many spirits. Even the rocks and storms had spirits. The Knowledge that she once possessed had passed through many others and would circulate until the end of the world, if it should end. In consequence, Salt lacked the cataclysm of uniqueness that she held for him. And, more prosaically, there was nothing in him to move her, even had she not been consumed with her grief and shock and survival. Salt’s estimation of himself, vis-à-vis the female of his species, had been characteristically exact. But enough of this diurnal fact!
When Salt was done, the room was blue. Marlo, newly freed from the snares of PROBIT, hovered six inches from the floor, a little larger than life but much larger than death. Salt beamed to see his blue mother, and, though her vision was all-encompassing, she turned to favor him. Had the Redcolds not known what the Goddess looked like—black eyes, red hair, and unending hair—they would have thought this to be her.
The Undermen burst into the control room from two directions—the door and the floor. Marlo, who had been empowered for less than a second, had seen then coming; that second was an eternity to her. She had spent this small wondering whether to draw energy from the facility and stun these beings into death or unconsciousness, as there was plenty of ambient power for any such hostile purpose. But her remit was to love and serve humanity, and the Undermen were just human enough. She couldn’t kill them. She couldn’t hurt them. She could, however, create gravitational forcefields around the other humans, the little, late-comer humans, the Eloi in this world of Morlocks. Behind these shields, they were safe.
An Underman who galloped directly at Masters bounded off the general’s personal shield and into the wall, but this display did not dissuade the rest. They swarmed and clawed and bit, but the shields kept them at bay. Marlo waited for some additional seconds, hoping that these human beasts would be somehow chastened or satisfied by their display, but, on confirming that they would keep attacking—here was one whose tusk had broken against Del’s shield, exposing a red-rimmed jaw—she took other action. She lifted the gravitational bubbles that held Salt and Masters and the Redcolds and bored them upwards through the structure—upwards, upwards! Salt was the only one of the six humans thus transported who was used to this mode of transportation, and, while Marlo whizzed her charges through the self-assembling facility, he noticed that the Undermen were on every level, having come up from the great subterranean realms in greater and more anarchic numbers than he had initially though. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Salt wondered how many more—thousands, millions?—were waking up from their ancient sleep. But it was not with the impression of their numbers that he came away. Somewhere in the ascent, he saw that an Underman had been crushed by a falling pillar. It lay in a heap, and one of its arms was extended and twitching madly—an unnatural motion that the joint could never have made this side of life. The motion disturbed Salt deeply—the circularity of it, the expression of inexpressible pain in this ritual way, the knowledge that this mountain of malice and muscle was an organic and violable being like himself. He wanted the Underman not to suffer. He wanted no one ever to have suffered; he wanted himself, all those iterations ago, to have refrained from the ethnocide of the Laurasians. This sentiment was not novel. He had always been one of the gentlest Salts. But none of those Salts had come out into this world and seen that mangled creature and the twitching of its arms and smelled blood and death in such propinquity! Salt thought of the mammals lovingly cloned for his breeding experiments—which, when completed, saw the su
bjects given little paradises of their own (for instance, the camels had a little desert in which they wandered happily once Salt was done with them). He had not, it is true, gone to the Jainlike length of installing filters on his mouth to preserve the insects, and he was insensible to the suffering of microscopic animals, but surely the suffering of taxonomically related creatures is a hardship for any animal of sensitivity.
But the memory of the maimed Underman was contested by the speed at which Marlo moved them through the facility. They were already at the main door. They were already outside. It was afternoon, and there waited the skyfaust—earnestly, loyally, bedecked in sunshine. In the light and hope of this surface world, Salt though, the Undermen and all pain seemed unreal.
Masters led the way into the skyfaust. Salt tarried, Idit-like, to look back at the facility. He wasn’t stirred until he felt the pressure of a hand on his shoulder, pressure he thought to be that of Masters. But it wasn’t. It was Astrid. Having seen the children safely on to the craft, she had come for him.
Salt’s last memory of a woman’s touch was actually Salt 1’s memory of Abigail’s Snowstorm’s kiss. That kiss, had noted, had had a peach-and-apple taste to the first of the Salts, and he had remembered the wonderfully reassuring pressure applied by Abigail’s teeth and tongue. That pressure had, more than anything he had known or experienced, told him that the world was, and would be, all right. But the pressure and Abigail had gone. The world had been untethered again, and he and it had floated back into the void.
Until now. Astrid was robust and forthright, and she intended to alert this man to the necessity of boarding the craft. Without him, presumably, there could no safe voyage or landing, no resumption of life behind the protective walls of the city whose chief and champion he was. Therefore, she gripped his shoulder strongly. It seemed the best way of alerting him to his present responsibility. There was nothing latent in her touch, but Salt did not experience it, or her, innocuously. Now that they had come through the facility, now that Seaboard and everything awaited, he remembered the full import of having seen her, the face in the data, the ghost and guardian of his soul, the great Marlo-substitute come at last, the end of transcomputation and the beginning of life, and he turned to smile at her.
Astrid had never seen a smile like that before. To begin with, the Redcolds were a ruthlessly perfected people, and there were no crooked teeth among them. Salt, spirit or not, must always be a little ridiculous to her by virtue of physical distance; but that was only the first layer of surprise. The true novelty was in his supplication. He might be a spirit or a god—but he was a supplicant. Too much had happened in the past hours for Astrid to dwell on any such fact, but now it was staring at her through him. This man loved her. His love had floated across a larger world than any she had known. It had alighted on her, the only matching butterfly in an expanse of nothing.
There was nothing for her to do, of course. In the best of times and circumstances, she could not have loved him. Admiration, yes, and wonder; and thankfulness and comradeship; and the intimacy of a friendship that only Knowers could know. Those things, but not this. She withdrew her hand suddenly and gaped at his smile, which stubbornly refused to fade. Rather, it intensified. He looked brazenly into her eyes, as if he expected and wanted to drown there, until, chastened, she grabbed him and pushed him into the skyfaust. She could no longer dismiss the depths of stupidity that lay in this man.
Salt was alarmed to feel the strength in Astrid applied to the task of manhandling him, and his smile vanished back into the void as he entered the familiar cockpit. Now for home!
Now for his mother and his friend and the remainder of his life and the caretaking of humanity. He had seen Astrid, yes, with impossible vision, but not the vision of love. This topic came up quickly because, soon after the skyfaust rose, Marlo appeared next to Salt, and he had to speak next to her.
“She has it too.”
“Has what?”
“Transcomputation. We’ve seen each other. I while working; she while in a trance. She thinks I’m a spirit. She’s quite unspoiled. A child of nature, an open-air philosophe. She’s beautiful.”
“Jed, you’re in shock.”
“I know, but that doesn’t change…doesn’t change…you’re not conscious in Seaboard, are you?”
“I’m a local instance. I’m cut off from Seaboard.”
“Non-Henry!”
“I’ll ping him as soon as I’m in status range.”
Salt no longer felt the burden of responsibility. Having ventured into the astonishing waters of love, he was glad to venture back into the warmth of well-known duties and considerations, of rhythms and routines. He did not, however, want to wait for Marlo to be in status range of Non-Henry to occupy himself. He opened a diagnostic hologram and began to evaluate Marlo; she became translucent in response. Salt carried out this work from the co-pilot’s seat; Masters, who was at the controls, had set the skyfaust on its homeward course and was therefore at liberty to get up from his seat and look to the passengers.
Masters began to speak, but Astrid’s frown told him that his tongue was once more gibberish to her. Salt, without diverting perceptibly from his diagnostics, touched a virtual dial that sent a hum through the cabin, equipping it with translation. Masters’ stream of nonsense became sensible again.
“—do you understand?”
“Say it again.”
“Oh, good. We have pellets for food and drink. Here, in the pouch.”
Masters reached for the pouch, which was hanging on a nearby peg, and handed it to Astrid. She looked inside and withdrew the promised pellets—brown for food, yellow for water, as it turned out—for distribution to Del, Nya, and Balder. The children, more flexible than her in such matters, swallowed their pellets. Astrid offered Masters the pouch with what the general considered a charming grunt—a Neolithic grunt, he thought, that one mastodon-hunter might direct to another over a choice morsel and a nice fire—but he refused with a smile. Astrid took some pellets herself. She looked briefly at Salt: At his back, since he was still busy with the diagnostics and hadn’t bothered to play the host.
“I’m sorry about your mate,” Masters said, surprised to hear the word mate come out instead of husband. The Redcold language, whatever it was, must have lacked the marital niceties. “He saved us all.”
“He’d waited all his life,” Astrid smiled, looking to her left and through the skyfaust’s window at the passing wisps and ghosts of cloud.
“For what?”
“For exactly that. To be a hero. To revel in his strength, which had been a little wasted among us. To be what he considered a man.”
“Considered?”
“You need some feat, don’t you? An accomplishment, a monument. The days aren’t enough. The feelings aren’t enough.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“How? You’re just like Riku.”
“I am, yes. I seek accomplishments. I raised monuments. The days weren’t enough for me. But I still understand. May I ask: Do you believe in life after death?”
“The soul divides in three. One goes to the spirit world. If it’s very strong, it gets another body. Your friend—what was his name? Salt. He’s one of these.”
“One of what?”
“Flesh of another spirit. A stronger spirit.”
“That’s one part. The other two?”
“Another becomes an animal, and the third watches over a family. What do you believe?”
“I believe in a single life that ends at death.”
“Is that the belief of your people?”
“My people! I have no people. Where we’re going, everyone’s—I don’t know how to describe it—”
“Dreaming,” Salt said without turning his back. “They’re dreaming.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Salt replied, turning off the diagnostics and rotating in his chair to consider Astrid’s pretty face, “a different kind of life. Ha
ve you ever had a dream so pleasurable, so divine, that you didn’t want to wake up?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the state our people are in.”
“They’re all asleep? How can that be?”
“By means of a machine and an idea. The idea was mine—sort of. Marlo’s the machine. Wait ‘til you get to Seaboard. We’ll explain.”
Astrid looked briefly at Masters. Though children of different species, essentially, they had sufficiently much in common for Astrid to ask Masters, with a language of the eyes too subtle for any Salt to understand, if the Salt before her were crazy. Spirits could be crazy too; indeed, what spirit could retain its sanity in the worlds above and below this one? Masters, also fluent in the language of the eyes, conveyed a complex message to his interlocutor; his eyes said, in some many blinking words, that Salt was crazy.
Below and behind the skyfaust, in a world assumed to be left behind, the Undermen had come up to the surface in greater numbers—so great that the Undermen who harassed our human heroes so recently could be seen for what they were, the vanguard of an invasion force.
The facility that had once been home to PROBIT and his organic catspaws and handlers was overrun. No floor, no hallway, perhaps no room was free of Undermen. Their fellow in the advance wave had, after the re-assembly of the facility, opened up a single vein at its heart, a vein that led all the way into the monstrous depths from which the Undermen had come.
The place was like a hive now, latent with activity, and the Undermen’s industriousness denoted a greater intelligence than their initial attacks on the humans. History, it seemed, was about to resume after its long pause.
The skyfaust was streaking over Laurasia. There were no storms on the horizon, and the sky itself seemed to make a blue vow of safety to the brave silver bird. Nya was watching from the window. The child had never traveled faster than by oxcart, and now she was flying. She was, in fact, watching for spirits. She thought her mother might reappear here, above the clouds.