The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  She remembered the existence of the three worlds. She had been born on one, then she had seen the one below, and now she was above. The clouds seemed to wink and turn prettily, aware of the scrutiny of an innocent, and she smiled at them. Balder joined her shortly, looking over her little shoulder at the clouds and the passage of the sky. He looked, too, but not for his mother. He had no thought or feeling other than entrancement that they could go so fast, so high, in one of these ancient machines. He had seen so many of them littering the migratory landscape, and he had shuddered at the evil they represented, but he was happy to be in one. Nothing that took humans into the sky, into the sun, could be evil. He tried to squint through the clouds to see what there might be of land or habitation, but the skyfaust was at too great a height of abstraction. He kissed his sister’s silky hair, and she squeezed his callused hand as the world unfolded somewhere beneath them.

  The world winked at their passing. Six miles below, a knot of trees shook in the wind, alarmed by the gray wetness of the day. The rocks shrugged little secrets to themselves. Rivers gushed their brief existence into the works of greater waters. The silver miracle of the skyfaust was no greater than them.

  And Seaboard approached. Marlo, now in status range, appeared at Salt’s side. He was busying himself with the skyfaust’s controls, whose mechanical logic would always remain beyond him, in order not to look back at Astrid. Astrid was busying herself with the sleep of the children, who were accommodated very nicely in vertical pods, in order not to look ahead at Salt. It was the impossibility of love that kept Salt from looking at Astrid and the pique of comradeship that kept Astrid from looking at Salt. There he was, the spirit of knowledge—but small and vulgar, helpless, needy and reedy and unmasculine. She was maddened by the claim in his smile; by the knowledge of the obligation of the greater to its counterpart, the lesser; by the fear of acquiring another dependent in a world that had granted her no peers. She, who didn’t want a man’s love, had even less use for one’s admiration. She felt relief at Riku’s death, for, despite his strength, he had been a dependent and a subordinate, neither mate nor father. Salt proposed to enter this void, and Astrid feared that his immeasurable openness would overpower her.

  “Jed,” began Marlo, and the tone alone was enough to alert Salt to some important change in the atmosphere.

  “Non-Henry?”

  “He’s stable. I’m recharging him. My blending’s successful.”

  “But?”

  “The House of Dreams shut down.”

  Salt’s bowels churned. He had not considered this possibility, and Marlo had not discussed it with him on the journey. Neither computation nor transcomputation were prepared to entertain a catastrophe on this scale. Both had waited and forgotten in their own ways.

  “It was PROBIT,” Marlo continued. “This was his revenge, you see. Taking paradise away.”

  Salt nodded. It was a good revenge. Better than murder. The dreamers could not be returned to the dreaming state, and they were now unfit for waking life.

  “Casualties?”

  Marlo told him the percentage. It was low. Sixteen individuals per thousand.

  “I fear it’s pandemonium. I’m attending to them as best I can, but…”

  “What’s happened?” Masters asked. He’d been on the other side of the cockpit, sharing a meal with Astrid and the Redcold children.

  Salt didn’t have the heart to say anything. He left the copilot’s seat and went to the window, letting Marlo disclose the fall of paradise. It was dawn somewhere, and the scarlet promise of the sun included Seaboard on the horizon. Salt’s throat hurt. He was dizzy. PROBIT had foreseen and planned this moment, had traded his life for sweet knowledge of it. Distantly, abstractly, Salt marveled at the vastness of the enemy computron’s victory, whose true dimensions would soon be measured firsthand.

  In the skyfaust, Balder had fallen asleep. In his dream, he was in the desert, and his parents were fighting, and he walked away from them into a golden infinity. His steps were silent at first, then echoed in his ears, and the sound gave birth to trees that erupted from the sand. Only after the advent of the trees did Balder realize how sad the desert had been.

  The trees weren’t alone. They were accompanied by patches of water seeping into being from nowhere. Nya was by Balder’s side now, and she smiled at the trees and the water. Balder was glad to see her. Her face was open to the wind, and her teeth were shining in the sunlight. Balder looked back at the stone on which his parents had been fighting. They were aghast. They had preferred the dry world, the dead world. They were watching an Earth more helpful and hopeful and agile than themselves, an Earth whose renewal was a terrible rebuke to their barrenness.

  “There,” Nya said, pointing to a space between the trees, and Balder saw them emerge—two and three at a time, their brown bulk superimposed on the sand. He saw them not as gods or monsters, but as part of some ordinary germination. Balder looked away from the Undermen—there were already hundreds of them—and at his parents, who had already been devoured, whose had left their blood-flecked bones as offerings to the sun and sand. His soul panicked, but not at that sight. At the knowledge that all of them were accidental to the Earth. The Undermen were in and of the world. They—humans, Redcolds—were not.

  Balder’s dream was punctured by the descent of the skyfaust. He looked down through the window at the approaching sight of Seaboard. The spires of the city were too numerous for his eyes, which were used to the undifferentiated expanse of nature—broken by sole monuments, like mountains, that overwhelmed the soul rather than the eye. There was too much detail below him now, too many individuated things. He didn’t know where to look or what to think. And, as the perfection of his vision returned from the vaults of sleep, he saw something like a misty bubble appear and disappear around the city, distorting its colors.

  The skyfaust came to cover a mile above Seaboard. Masters was at the window too, looking down at the derangement of the Shield. Salt and Marlo conferred separately as Masters turned from the window to watch them.

  “—two stochastic processes,” Salt was saying, and his speech as immediately repugnant to Masters. There was life and doom below them and infinity above; and these two would always, in their joint eternity, babble of stochastics. Oh, Masters understood the necessity of it; at such mechanical moments, the soul and heart were banned from the workings of the world.

  “—the risk,” Marlo was responding, and then Salt turned his crooked smile on Masters.

  “Ah, but he knows,” Salt said. “One must roll the dice, no, general?”

  “Yes, I suppose one must.”

  “In that very spirit did Hannibal cross the Alps and take his scalps!”

  “Are you proposing a passage through the Shield?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Shield that’s flickering below us now?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Shield that would probably dissolve us immediately if we cross it?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re responsible for all of these lives, Salt. We can’t be cavalier.”

  “Do you know what’s happened down there?”

  “A malfunction on the grand scale. Brought about by PROBIT, no doubt, before his termination.”

  “The House of Dreams is awake. Humanity is awake. Two billion people, down there, awake. You led the way. Only they’re not like you; their brains were switched off before they went in. They’re mad, all of them, in various ways. They’ll die without Marlo and myself. We have to take the hazard.”

  “But you said it yourself—there’s no pattern, right? Isn’t that what stochastic means?”

  “Indeed. There’s no pattern discoverable by Marlo or myself. Or by my present self. I will, in another moment, transcompute. Do you know why I haven’t already?”

  “No.”

  “She’s stopping me.”

  “Marlo? Why—”

  “Not Marlo. The other one. The other woman.”

 
; “Astrid? What does she have to do with—”

  “I’m self-conscious. In this state, I can’t do anything.”

  “But you did earlier.”

  “She’s been growing on me. Is she looking at me now?”

  “No, she’s not looking at you. For Jesu-Krishna’s sake! Go to the secondary hold. She can’t see you there.”

  “But I’d still be thinking of her.”

  Masters thought of reminding Salt what was at stake, but that seemed a bafflingly logical approach to this confusing man. He had to feel what Salt felt; he had to approach him through the proper currents. Masters looked briefly at Marlo, who was smiling sweetly at him—as if she knew and approved of his plan and was letting him take precedence.

  “Well, I say…”

  “Yes?”

  “Lean into it.”

  “Lean into what?”

  “Her.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She’s the goddess in the data, right? The face in the equations, the fire in the void? Then let her be your muse.”

  “Yes, but which one? Ourania, do you think?”

  “I think not. Polymnia, rather.”

  “H’m. Yes, by Jesu-Krishna!”

  “Give me a moment, then, will you?”

  “Go on.”

  And Masters sidled from Salt to Astrid, who had been watching and listening to the exchange between the two men.

  “You understand, don’t you?” Masters implored.

  “Not at all.”

  “We have to get down there. That’s the city. It’s behind a Shield, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Shield isn’t working. It’s turning on and off. We have to be able to go through it, then Salt has to fix it, and Marlo has to reinstall herself. Or all will die.”

  “But why were you speaking of me?”

  “Because you’re the key. He’s in love with you. You’re distracting him. You called him the Spirit of Knowledge, right? Ordinarily, he’s alone, and he goes into—into a trance.”

  “All Knowers do.”

  “He can’t do it now, and we need him to.”

  “How do I stop distracting him?”

  “Be with him. Let him see you. Inspire him. I’ll leave.”

  Astrid had seldom been asked to be passive, for anyone attempting a request of that sort would have rapidly learned that her preference was activity. Nor had this preference come from her later status as the Knower. She had had it since childhood. She had, in all collective childhood games and projects, been the organizer, the director, the decider—not because of the bossiness that alights on certain boys and girls by accidents of character and destiny, but because she had always been still enough to feel the currents. Perhaps it was this trait that had suited her to be the Knower. She was not, in that fine old Coastal phrase, jazzed to be asked to stand there and inspire any man or spirit. Astrid was many people—mover, doer, warrior, queen. She was never statuary.

  But she also trusted Masters and understood Salt. Salt had lived in this gigantic place alone, or with the ghosts of his past selves, and he had not been centered by tradition or parenthood, and the Goddess had come to him in a very strange form, and she knew herself to be a filament of blood in the clear water of his mind. She must, in this moment, be passive and anticipate that the Goddess would send more of these moments to humble her.

  The skyfaust, like any metaphysical puzzle, had paradoxical spaces—it was capacious in a manner that seemed mechanically impossible from any outside vantage. It was a womb in the sky, a riddle and a shelter, and one of its spaces now held Salt and Astrid. The skyfaust remained hovering above Seaboard. History had resumed down there but remained in suspense, as the engine of its continuation was a funny little man who was distracted by a beautiful and imperious woman.

  Salt was standing before a column of holographic numbers, and Astrid stood some feet across from him—close enough for him to see incarnadine streams in her scleras and the mounting pique in her face. She had come before him, it seemed, as a map of perfection, the legend of a country to which he could never travel.

  “Where does your knowledge come from?” Astrid asked, and what he had considered her anger dissolved into a mist of curiosity. “Mine came from the Goddess. Yours must also favor you.”

  “She does,” Salt nodded. “But I also made her, you see. Because I needed a mother and a mind. I was lonely. I made her, then she made me, and we live in this intertwined way. I was born with with my knowledge. It’s an accident. It doesn’t come from anywhere, and it isn’t anything, and I’m no one when I exercise it. What happened to you and yours?”

  “A woman of the Redcolds dreams. The dream’s a prophecy. A sign of the Goddess’s favor. There’s no reason in the choice, no similarity between the chosen. I don’t know why Her favor fell on me, but I know why it was withdrawn.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I dreamed—not Her dream. I dreamed for myself and my daughter and my people. I dreamed of the past. The past you built, the past down there. Some of it survives. We saw old craft, buildings, even—even factbooks. Small machines full of knowledge. We learned from them. Del and I, we saw the wonder in your world. A world the Redcolds hate, when they think of it at all. Why shouldn’t they? You broke nature, killed everything. But…you made that too,” Astrid smiled, looking down at Seaboard from the rear hold’s window. “You even built a Goddess of your own. I wanted safety, Salt. Others marveled at the Goddess, bowed in gratefulness that She would send us Knowers and map our way between the storms. I marveled too. But I didn’t want to depend on Her favor. She withdraws it from each Knower. Why wouldn’t she withdraw it from the Redcolds? I wanted freedom and responsibility. I wanted a chance to remake the world, to fix what you ancients broke. But that was pride. That was why I earned my punishment. Freedom isn’t control. Thinking that was your mistake. Survival is humble, whether it’s behind your shield or in the teeth of the Storm. Now, tell me: What can I do for you? Do you want to hold my hand?”

  14 wessex

  Salt’s smile lacked its usual innocence, was now a vapid screen; behind it flowed thoughts and connections. He thought of a beloved Wessex woman, beloved in his reading, who had once suffered a young man to hold her hand as payment for assistance in a romantic war. The man had been happy to hold her hand. It had given him quite the satisfaction he wanted, although the woman was as remote from him as a mannequin. Now Salt was in the position of this man. He might issue a mechanical request to Astrid, might shape the feminine extent of nature into his very wish, but the ineffable fire would always be missing. The magic of Abigail Snowstorm’s kiss, all those lifetimes ago, came from its plain voluntariness, from the winged liberty with which kisses traversed the oceans between people. Salt was perhaps the first of his kind to feel his way to the unspoken emotional truth that had informed his predecessors—the necessary and intractable loneliness of the transcomputational state. The same cosmic idiocy that had produced the gift of transcomputation from nothing but uncouth atoms had counterbalanced it with the curse of eternal separation from humanity. Astrid was, for Salt, the face of humanity, her beauty a mask for the ascent of his species and the end of entropy, and there was no universe in which he could close the distance between himself and her.

  It wouldn’t be her hand. It would be a hand, a stale and mechanical catalogue of molecules attached and attributed to her. Her thusness, her suchness, would be remote from it and from him. Salt found some strength in this melancholy realization. He didn’t answer Astrid’s question. He turned back to the holographic numbers that had been waiting for him. Oh, they knew he was a faithless lover. They knew he’d wandered from them and would wander again. They knew of his shameful trysts with innumerate things, his quests for other souls, and they forgave him, and there was no indignity in their forgiveness. Perhaps they had betrayed him too. They had strayed into the hands and heads of so many lonely people before him, so many proto- and pseudo-Salts in the prehi
story of math. But here they were, together and reconciled.

  It began as a twitch of his right hand. The twitch became a definite movement, and the movement did something to the numbers. Astrid didn’t look at them yet—she was still looking at Salt’s face. She was glad to see that there was no sadness there, but Salt himself was also missing. The spirit of knowledge, when he had come to her in the trance, had been full of mischievous content, but the man before her now was a human void. He had gone right out of himself, as the Knowers also did. It was alarming to see a man in this sacred state. Alarming and a little vexing, because such a blatant transfer of attention would vex anyone.

  Astrid remained where she was, but her eyes no longer saw Salt. She had gone back to the facility, to the room that had fallen on them until Riku intervened. She saw Riku’s face, scarlet with effort’s nerves and sinews. She had, until this moment, banished him; there had been no time—no stillness—to grieve his passing. She had not thought of him on the skyfaust until speaking to Masters, and she had wanted to forget. He had died for her, for her folly. If she had remained as Knower, if she had dismissed her temptation, he would have lived. She was discontent with that life, with constant migration and the reliance on uncertain divinity for bare survival, but he had been happy. The theft of his happiness was worse than the theft of his life. She could have made him happy. She could have loved. Had she chosen not so? Had it been stubbornness, spite, rebellion? But she’d been that way as long as she could remember. She was a certain, iron, way; none, not even the Goddess, could bend her, and she had been proud of it, but she felt a new panic at herself in the glow of Salt’s numbers, a pounding of the head, the shadow of Riku’s sadness across the sky, across the world. All easeful certainties were gone.

  And Salt? He was back in the peace of nonexistence; back, absolutely, in the eternities before and after his births, succored by the void in which he was all things. There was no loneliness here. There was the taste of a Tuesday morning so many years before the birth of Jesu-Krishna, in which there had been such a thing as television. There was the shape of a cloud that had closed above a red balloon somewhere in Wessex. There was the outline of a happy peninsular marriage and the renewal of childhood promises. There was everything. He was too close for any operations of the senses; he could simply be. He was as surely disconnected as all the dreamers had been; but, whereas their disconnection was necessary to experience particular forms of pleasure, his disconnection was the precursor to the universal all.