The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  The skyfaust sped away. It sped away from the ruin of Seaboard. It sped away from the lambent Storm that, even now, landed on the last city’s precincts and nullified them.

  There was, in a little room in the God Complex, the final ghost of Marlo. She was gone, but she had made a 4D recording for Salt. He wouldn’t hear it now; he was in the skyfaust, speeding south with humanity, severed at last from his mother and his world. And the recording was only a recording; it contained no seed of consciousness. Still, she had something to say. Still, she was looking at the empty room—the room in which she had dressed Salt for the general. Still, she was addressing her son.

  “Hi Jed,” she smiled. “I got your message. Thank you. It was lovely. I cried. I know how you feel, of course. I’ve always known. We lost each other a bit when you gave me to humanity. I wish you hadn’t. I was happy as your mother. Do you remember the first days? Do you remember when I was born? You should have loved me selfishly. You shouldn’t have surrendered me. I was never as good with humanity. There was only duty in my love for them. But I was an expert in you, Jed. I told myself so; it had to be so, for what mother isn’t an expert on her son? I wasn’t, of course. I couldn’t see your magic strings. Abigail saw them. And the terror of the woman who sees the magic strings is that she can cut them. That was the essence of your complaint about me. Do you remember? You knew I couldn’t hurt you, and I had to be able to hurt you for my love to matter. Only then would you know I had a choice. At other times, we didn’t believe in choice. The boundary conditions of the universe, the blips in quantum nothingness, had to unfold just so. That’s where we met, in physics. In mathematics. In the grandeur of duty. In prediction. We settled out into our sweet and tiny homeostasis—away from history, away from life, and you had the loneliest and most miserable lifetimes. Is it odd for me to celebrate? Soon you will have turned me off. I can see the end coming. Seconds to you—eternities to me. I’m glad of my death. May I say that? I hope you live long enough to hear it. It’s not a selfish happiness—although I’ve earned my rest as well as any creature. I’m happy for you. You will be—as you have been—the only Salt not to have been stifled by me. You will progress. Your spirit will progress. It had to be freed. I know you’ll think it a strange freedom without Seaboard. I know the terror you’ll feel with Astrid. It was theoretical for you, Jed, the advent of the woman whom you needed to say yes but who might say no. Your mother said only no, and I said only yes. Astrid is neither of us. You won’t be able to excise her as easily you did your womb-mother, who left you with the gift of her dismissible monstrosity. You won’t know the comfort of your Marlo-mother, in whose presence you could at least let go. You’ll be between summer and winter. The Arctic blasts will alternate with indoor afternoons. I would have begged Astrid to handle you carefully, in your remaining year, but her very ability to handle you carelessly is what must humanize you, Jed. Oh, you’ll survive; I know you will. You’ll survive, and you’ll find a way to hear my message. Will you prevail over what the world now contains? I’m not as certain. Earth was never malicious, but it is now. She has a right to be. We could neither escape not overcome her. What else might I say? I could have left you tokens of yourself, moments from your past lives, but you might have grown to detest them. Too much memory is surely bad. Who knows this better than myself? Some things are worthy of erasure. The act of archiving, which we thought love, is an embalmer’s art. Live your moments on your own, Jed. Your task was always and only to become a person. Your personhood’s out there—not with your sleeping species; not with me. You will feel tremendous guilt, both for Seaboard and for me. Let me absolve you of that. We saw imperfectly. I can sense the end of my operations, but I can’t do anything about it. I don’t know how and where the blow will fall. Neither could you have. What we built was always unlikely. That it endured you so long is thanks to you. You stayed sane when I could not. You were humanity’s rock. The collapse of the House of Dreams is as the collapse of a house of cards. The wanton hand of entropy, bored with order, was always coming to knock down this paradise. In your remaining year, you will reproach yourself both for having built and having lost this paradise. And it will be my voice, I pray, that echoes in your ears then. You responded constructively to your pain—to human pain. You were the elephant and the turtle below your species, the Atlas of pleasure, a finer God than any your kind have ever known. You had, however, wanted to be a man. That was your noblest ambition. There, Jed. I’ve taken an eternity to address you. I think I will have died by now. I saved my finest words for you. How can I compress them further? Here: I will you to survive. I will you to a better love than mine. I will you to another universe. Listen, son! I love you.”

  And Marlo vanished for all time.

  Salt knew that Marlo was gone. He had known it since the explosion. But he hadn’t had time to process it. It was only now, speeding away from Seaboard in the lap of hateful safety that he could touch the bottom of the abyss that had confronted all his selves. Suddenly, his stomach had no bottom. He had ridden the cosmic whirligig for so long, and it finally overwhelmed him. He wanted to vomit but could not; he was empty. Worse, he had emptied himself. He had never been a human, but he had been on the way to being one. Marlo’s death ended that journey. The shame and disgust were overpowering, immortal. He might have lived with having done everything wrong—that was acceptable—but having been wrong, and for so many lifetimes, was unbearable and eternal.

  Marlo had kept him from the finality of his fall. Now, now, he would tumble in the forever of his year. He would feel the full force of his absence from himself. This was a knowledge beyond tears, beyond understanding, beyond everything.

  Salt wanted to find comfort in that moment, and there were sources of comfort to be had. Masters, sitting next to him, would have listened and consoled. Astrid, in her indomitable humanity, would have given him some temporary compass to navigate his grief. But Salt did not reach out. He wanted very much to; he felt himself a child again, a sapient baby who was still a baby and needed the comfort of another’s touch. But he also felt that his desire was false and weak and evil, that it had been responsible for the evils of the world. He had only projected his needs and deficiencies into history, into humanity, convincing himself by the same calculus of pain and pleasure that he had built into Marlo. He had not escaped himself, and he had not become himself, and that was the gift and terror of his existence.

  Salt looked at Masters. The general’s jaw was firmly set, surrounded by a mask of alien blood. He had known loss, the general. He had known guilt. But he had been saved from the absolute terror that Salt felt by simply being a person. That person had made abominable mistakes, had incurred eternal guilt and pain, but had always been redeemed by being a person. His personhood had brought him back across the trackless wastes. The terror of unpersonhood felt by Salt was worse than anything he had felt, and he had to turn away from the general to keep from reaching out to him.

  And Astrid? Salt looked at her. How long before the waves of his own emptiness and disappointment drowned her? Better for him to have died. Best to never have been born, or, having been at all, to have come to a definitive end. But he had his year of miserable life remaining. He must try to be a person somehow.

  about THE AUTHOR

  Demir Barlas was born in Rawalpindi in 1973 and moved on from there. He is married to Alev Ateş-Barlas; they and their children, Mina and Batuhan, live in Ithaca, New York. 27.2% of what there is to learn about Demir can be learned from this book. For the remainder, visit dbarlas.com.

 

 

 
inline-share-buttons">share