The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  Masters hadn’t dared to breach the room. He had stood with his ear to the door and heard what passed between Salt and Astrid until its intimacy embarrassed him. He had turned to look through the window, hoping that the fruit of Salt’s transcomputation would drop into the world below. And that was what he saw now. The mad blinking of the Shield had stopped. A small rectangle opened in that hemisphere, and the skyfaust began to descend towards it.

  Salt had stopped. It had been brief, his transcomputation—less than a minute—but, naturally, he had no sense of that. He reoriented himself. Seeing Astrid, he remembered her, then himself. Attuned to the skyfaust’s descent, they turned to the window together. That was how things ought to have begun—a man and women, newly created in and of each other, looking at the resplendent world. But the beautiful passivity of watching, the loss of self in the view, had been lasted no more than a day. It had been all coveting and selfishness and pursuit after that, each character with its own afflictions.

  Astrid had seen cityscapes of the ancient world in the Laurasian factbooks, so the towering spires and marvels of Seaboard were not alien to her. She knew that this was how the ancient world looked—steel and plastic, surface and shine, hives upon hives of silver and gold. But the knowledge hadn’t prepared her for the experience. Other Redcolds might have felt this descent to be ill-starred, the destination hell, but Astrid saw the same aspiration in these buildings as she saw in herself. The ancients, no less than her, wanted the heaven of fearless autonomy.

  After a moment, Salt turned from the familiar sight of Seaboard to the unfamiliar sight of Astrid. To see her in wonder was wondrous. He wanted to frame and suspend the moment before she became aware of him, the moment in which he could spy the twinkling of her soul, and she obliged him by continuing to gaze. She inspired him to burn back to Seaboard in examination of what could have entranced her, but he could never see his habitation with her novel and unclouded eyes.

  A great deal of stolen energy left Salt, and he fainted. Astrid caught Salt by instinct, her hands darting out on an errand of preservation that kept that kept his invaluable cranium from cracking against a bench’s edge. She installed him on the bench, amazed at how light he was—as if his bones had been hollow, as if all his weight had gone into his soul. What a very strange mixture of strength and weakness he was! She propped him up and, uninformed in the art of reviving fainted folks, struggled to discern the next step. Water, presumably? Before action could be taken or inaction deepened, Marlo appeared. She was bluer and more solid, and her appearance coincided with a slight shift in Salt’s position. He was, Astrid observed, floating slightly above the bench.

  “Thank you,” Marlo beamed at Astrid. “I’ve been successfully reinstalled. I’ll care for Jed now, if that’s all right.”

  “Is he damaged?”

  “Not at all. It’s part of his healing. You’ll be on the ground in four minutes. I have special recovery booths prepared for you and the children.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ll understand soon. I promise.”

  There was a diffident knocking at the door, which, quaintly, had a handle. Astrid issued an absent-minded grunt of assent, which Masters took as his signal to enter. Marlo, presumably sensing that she was no longer visibly needed in this assembly of humans, blinked out.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  Seaboard, so long a ghost city, was now in a hell of a populated state. Marlo, having come back online after Salt’s successful interventions, devoted a considerable portion of her bandwidth to succoring the woken dreamers. To do so, she had first physically reconsolidated them in the House of Dreams—because, in her absence, several of them had ambled and shambled into other portions of the city, leaving hope and corpses behind. She had used tubes and antigravity to call back the sheep to their grassland; then she had sprayed everyone with a soporific mist.

  Now, contrary to expectations, most of the dreamers had not gone mad. Confused, yes; they were confused and discommoded and flustered, but they had been so when they were awake. They were asleep again, but not dreaming—not as they had been. They were sleeping as comfortably as Salt, on cushions of airy support put there by Marlo. Imagine the scene! The House of Dreams, a city-sized building, its roofs lost in the empyrean and its depths in the recesses of the Earth itself, no longer characterized by the kind sanity of its vaults. Humans once filed more neatly than any books or thoughts were now piled like so much firewood. The frailty of the human form out of its sustaining fluid meant that a strict pile was impossible; they would merely squish each other, these exiles from Eden, if placed in any vulgarly proximal way. Marlo kept a modest distance between each one: The very bottom human in each column floated a foot clear of the floor, and then a foot would intervene between that one and the next, and so on. It was all very orderly, this stockpile of humanity.

  When Salt woke up, he was in the God Complex again—just stirring on a horsehair sofa. Non-Henry was smiling through a haze of cigar smoke and pouring out cocktails. Salt didn’t need to see Marlo to know that she was fine; a hum audible to no one but himself, a hum in the soul only, told him of her health. She hadn’t hoarded him; she had left him to wake to the sight of his best and only friend, to anticipate the well-loved activities of smoking and drinking.

  “You made it,” Salt croaked. His throat was dry, and he attempted to stand, but Non-Henry’s friendly hand restrained him to the comfort of the sofa. Before Salt knew what was what, Non-Henry had placed a lit cigar in his mouth and a cocktail in his feeble grasp.

  “Marlo says you’ve fallen in love.”

  “But—”

  “May I meet her?”

  “But how did you—”

  “I haven’t outlived the rest of my species for nothing,” Non-Henry explained, not without bravado. “I have my own hidden strengths. Where is she?”

  “Never mind her.

  “You’ve found a world of humans, it seems.”

  “And the House of Dreams?”

  “Well, right. It’s a pity. They all woke up. Marlo has them dozing now, but you’ll have to re-immerse them. After a suitable interval of rest or smoke. Or don’t. I’m not here representing Marlo.”

  “I know.”

  “Or even your species.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m here only as your friend.”

  “There is a world of humans. You’re right about that. I could bring them here. The Shield works. Everything words, except the House of Dreams. Humanity would recover, wouldn’t it? Grow. There would be audible things. Laughter, kisses, songs. People would touch other. Happiness and sadness and contemplation and misery. There would be suicides and babies. And, in my time—in my remaining time—I could set this society on its feet, couldn’t I? Or step aside, as I ought, and let Astrid direct it. Or let no one at all direct it.”

  “You know that’s impossible.”

  “Damn it, yes. I know. I want not to.”

  “They couldn’t direct themselves. Not as long as you and Marlo survive. And if the two of you go, there goes the Shield, and there go the humans. Survival’s precarious and contingent. You are the two pillars. All must stand, if it stands, on you.”

  “And that means we come back here. However we begin, whichever basic Eden we cultivate, wherever Pangloss wanders—”

  “It’s always back to the House of Dreams. But these new people might not want to go it. Perhaps there would be a parallel society. For a while. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “I wish none of it had been disrupted,” Salt said, dragging on his cigar. “I was happy.”

  “You didn’t seem happy.”

  “No, damn it. I wasn’t happy, and I’m not now.”

  There was nothing as vulgar as a knock in the God Complex or anywhere in Seaboard. There was no need for one. There were—oh, there had been!—two people only, and they were too attuned to each other to need any signs or supplications. But there were other
s now. The far portal opened, and a woman across the God Complex for the first time. Upon carpets from Bokhara, stepping carefully over discarded books; across small obstacles of technology, the pieces of perpetually unfinished machines; her eyes always on Salt. This was Astrid. She had come. She had entered his world. Marlo had shown her the way, of course, and opened all the portals in her path; there had been no need to ask him for permission, because Marlo knew what was in his heart. It took no computron for that.

  Non-Henry tactfully withdraw to an adjacent portal and left Salt alone. But with whom? His muse? The Goddess? A person? A woman? An instantiation of atoms?

  “Are you all right?” Salt asked.

  “No,” Astrid replied. “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Marlo showed me the way.”

  “Of course. She does everything.”

  “We’re behind your walls now. The Storm can’t get in here. And I realize I’ve made a mistake.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “I can’t see the Storms any longer. I’d be choosing death for these children, as I chose death for my husband.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had a choice. I could have remained with the Redcolds. I followed another dream.”

  “And your husband chose to follow you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And PROBIT chose to try to kill us. It’s too much, isn’t it, to pick a tree out of this forest? I thought you’d have a better sense of that than me, being a child of nature.”

  “Speak plainly.”

  Salt was about to discuss the origin of the universe from the singularity, the essential interconnectedness of everything, but Astrid’s eyes checked in. Yes, he would have to speak plainly. He saw himself as ridiculous in moments of conscious wisdom, but he would have to overcome that now. This woman would accept no bromides.

  “There is blame,” Salt said at least. “There is responsibility. For everyone. Your choices, theirs. You can hate your own choices. They’re known to you. You live with them. I don’t know your husband. I don’t know your daughter or your people. I don’t know you. I’ve seen you, and you’ve seen me, and we’re the same kind of person—we’re the clay of the new world, maybe, or something’s mistakes—but we don’t know each other. Your husband knew you. He had his time to decide. You must have saved him in other ways. You were the face of life for him. If he hadn’t come with you, Astrid, he’d have gone with the Redcolds.”

  “And he’d have survived.”

  “Maybe there’s no new Knower.”

  “There’s always been.”

  “These people here were always dreaming. I was always able to fix Marlo. PROBIT was always inactive. But the world’s disrupted.”

  Salt stopped speaking. Astrid had fallen into silence. She had wandered to the edge of expression’s wood. Salt chose to join her there. There was no nervousness in him and no pique in her. Physical and civilizational opposites, they were still parts of an indivisible whole—the Knower and the Transcomputational Man. They had no need of words, and that was new for Salt. He had halted in silence with himself for many lifetimes, but that had been a vulgarly physical silence. This was a collaborative silence. He and this woman, his counterpart, were working together in the silence. They had no destination. They had merely returned to their natal space, to the space between words and worlds. They went on like this for some time, because it was equally healing for both of them. For Salt, it was liberating to be neither man nor person; he only desired Astrid to the extent that she was distinct from himself. Now that they were one atom of silence, he was free.

  Salt came out of the silence first. Self-awareness entered him slowly, like moonlight, and he was aware of her too, and he wanted to do something for her, to be someone for her, but he had forgotten who he was and what he could do. Before he could speak, she had turned and gone. There was another voice somewhere in the God Complex—Del’s voice. The mutual piping of mother and daughter faded, and he was alone.

  Astrid was redeemed by Del’s presence. Her daughter was, unusually, happy; she liked this novel, titanic place, taking to it with all the facility of a youth robbed by the storms.

  “I’ve been speaking to the blue woman. What’s her name? Yes, Marlo.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, everything. I asked her how she made our speech known to these other people. I promised to tell her more about the Redcolds so she can update these things called data banks. She promised to let me go anywhere. It’s all safe.”

  “Yes,” Astrid sighed. “It’s all safe.”

  “Doesn’t that make you happy? It’s what you wanted.”

  “It does. It does make me happy.”

  They couldn’t talk about Riku yet.

  Salt was no longer alone, because Non-Henry had returned to him.

  “Have you decided what to do?”

  “About humanity? No.”

  Masters had returned to his domus, where Lily was waiting for him. He was all the gladder to see her because of the very slight sneer on her lips, the sneer that made her herself through the perfection of Marlo’s simulation. He sat on the bed and told her about their adventures—about the facility and PROBIT and the Undermen, about the world and the Redcolds, about the woman and the children who had come in from the storms, and Lily warmed to his story. When he was done, he slept, and the hologram held him more gently than in life.

  And he dreamed. In the dream, Astrid was laughing. It was the last thing Salt had expected, and Astrid was just as surprised, but some reservoir within her had broken. As did Salt’s impression of her. He’d been expecting steely, principled resistance from her; after all, she was Woman, intertwined with the mother lode and the telluric currents; she would speak for the sacred, and he for science, and then there would a glorious (hopefully sexual) synthesis between them resulting in cosmic edification. But she was laughing. Partly at him; partly at the unexpected energies he’d released in her. For science was no drab, drooping, masculine presence—it was marvelously androgynous, it was Jesu-Krishna, it was funny and liberating and sad. Still, the true source of Astrid’s laughter would remain mysterious (or perhaps it was chemical, for Salt felt the ground move). He felt a little as he’d done when, in the midst of some past lifetime’s spree, he’d imbibed a great deal of nitrous oxide and ether at the same time. Things were happening, but he was not at their center. The world itself rejected his certainty. There, he had fallen and found something to bleed on. There was a gash on his forehead and the blood was escaping so urgently that it made little splashing noises on the grass. Astrid, somehow, had kept her center. He could see her body twisting, correcting, reordering the world. She had a scepter in her hand and was turning in a semicircle. Turning, the supine Salt saw, to a danger emanating from the grass. An Underman had broken through, and he was tall enough to block the philosopher’s sun. Salt found that he could move again, and he looked in vain for a weapon, but what he saw instead was the creature.

  In his time, Salt had gawked at megafauna. His childhood compressed, he had entertained the once-universal fascination with dinosaurs for thirteen days of his own, during which he had consumed 4D recreations and ancient illustrations. This fascination had encompassed other large things. He had also stood before elephants of his own experimentation—and these elephants had been very much larger than this new being, this Underman, before him. The Underman, though, was human. But man was, in no Bauplan Salt was familiar with, meant to be nearly twelve tall, fanged, tusked, improbably muscular, and yet imbued with clear intelligence.

  The Underman had caught Salt’s eye. The abyss of the flesh was staring back at him with none of the rage, lust, or idiocy that Salt was used to seeing in the animal gaze. The Underman was, rather, looking at Salt very much like Salt looked on his own experiments when it was time to incinerate them. But even that wasn’t the element of horror. The element of horror was that the creature was right. It smelled of the dirt—not the clumsy, superfi
cial dirt of human familiarity, but the deeper, cleaner dirt closer to the fires of the Earth—and the dirt wanted Salt gone. It was the color of the grass, and the grass wanted Salt gone. It was the pinnacle of evolution, and humanity stood revealed before it as fraud and mistake.

  Horror was the uncanny and unheimlich, the thing that should not be. Humanity was horror. The Underman’s claws and fangs, below its exterminating gaze, communicated this fact to Salt. Humanity was the great exception, the void within the womb, the cancer in the gentle growth, and these creatures had come to rectify humanity. Salt could no more kill this being than he might kill a surgeon operating on true folly, on the rock too long embedded in the Earth’s innocent skull.

  But the Undermen were gone. Astrid was oblivious of Salt now. Del was resting in her lap, and she was stroking her daughter’s hair and kissing her forehead. Astrid’s maternal love radiated outwards; Salt felt its assurance, felt his own ego melting in the crucible of such pure commitment. For the first time since he had seen her, Salt wasn’t possessive of Astrid or jealous of her love. She had been here, she had existed, she had loved, and no universe’s collapse could erase that. In fact, Salt felt certain that she had existed before, in every universe, and that her presence before him now was a defiance of entropy itself, was the key fact to be transmitted from one reality to the next.

  Astrid looked up at Salt. She didn’t know he’d be there, of course, looking at her; she didn’t have the time to adjust her look, the soft and moonlit look that being with Del gave her, and Salt felt it encompass him too. He was admitted into the circle of perfect love. Astrid looked at Astrid and smiled, waiting, waiting for the look to give way to something else—to comradely consternation, perhaps—but Astrid didn’t change. She continued to look on him in the same way. She held his eye and his heart for a long moment, then, without perturbation, returned her glance and her attention to Del, who had gone to sleep.