Under Heaven's Bridge

by Ian Watson

  “We’re l-leaving your wor-world,” Keiko stammered. “I’ve come for Dr Norn; he’s required to return with us.”

  She could not tell if any of the aliens looming above her now, appraising her with their death-eyes, happened to be the one she had taught—but she doubted that her former student had abandoned Andrik to greet their floater and feared that to these Kyber representatives her words were an incomprehensible mishmash. Last time out? Well, maybe that had been a dream.

  One of them confirmed the reality of both that other occasion and this: “Lady Keiko, I am to take you through the labyrinth. These others, your colleagues, madmen,” gesturing at the canopy and its occupants, “have no invitation. The human supplicant currently at the heart of our rite, by right of invitation, has asked that we bar them from seeking him out.”

  “But … but I?” she managed.

  “He had hoped you were aboard,” said the Kyber. “He has told us that your insanity is not so virulent as theirs, those others.”

  “My insanity?”

  “‘Persistent mental disorder or derangement’,” the Kyber crooned, its voice a mellow piping. “A disruption of process, a failure of control, a crapping-out of steersmanship.”

  “Andrik Norn said I was insane?”

  The other three aliens, aloft on their stilts, regarded her with eyes whose front-facing pupils had begun to dilate and glow. One Kyber made a cluck-clucking sound, whereupon they all retreated to take up separate posts around the ticking wasp-shape of the floater.

  “Come, Lady Keiko,” urged her guide.

  SIXTEEN

  She followed. This time there were no ghostly blue markings on the walls of the labyrinth; their way was a way of stones, billowing ice mists, darkness. So certain of her docility, or so indifferent to her safety, seemed the creature leading her that it picked its path over the snow-sprinkled flagstones without ever turning its head to note how well or ill she was keeping up.

  Keiko, scrupulous to a fault, did not permit herself to lag. By trotting a little, skipping a little, she managed to negotiate every turn—every unexpected doorway inward—without losing sight of the Kyber’s bobbing halo-crest.

  Suddenly the corridor opened upon the atrium at whose heart stood Andrik and the only other animate member of the alien family. Keiko hesitated, uncertain what to expect of the man who had broken with her, and with all his fellows on the Platform, without ever really renouncing his native allegiances. Indeed, he had come out here on the pretext of discovering from the Kybers a means whereby humanity could slip its biological and philosophical fetters and attain the sort of perfect awareness available to the Kybers in death-sleep. How that grandiose goal contrasted with the bleak and dismaying reality of these surroundings!

  His parka hood thrown back and his coat unzipped to his breast bone, Andrik turned to face her with glittering eyes.

  “Kei!” he said, rushing forward to embrace her. For a moment his cheek was hot against hers; then he drew back and peered at her with what seemed grateful wonder, unmindful of the cold, the fiery skies, the tomblike resonances of the Kyber pit. “You’ve come,” he murmured. “They allowed you to come.”

  “Because they want you to come back,” Keiko replied. “Captain Hsi and Sixkiller are waiting—” She tried to indicate the ridge, but Andrik clapped his hands to her arms and pulled her with him toward the waiting Kyber. Their boots crunched across a glaze of snow reflecting the incessant auroral streaming overhead.

  “This is Alice,” Andrik said, nodding at the creature. “I call it Alice. I call the one behind you Alice, too. In fact, I call them all Alice—but this Alice is the one who skipped from its side of the looking glass to ours long enough to learn our lingo.”

  “Yes, I knew—”

  “Keiko Takahashi, Alice. Alice, Keiko.” He spoke deferentially to the alien: “You also knew, of course. These are just formalities, a bit of small talk before her initiation.”

  “What initiation, Andrik?” She wanted to rezip his parka to his Adam’s apple and pull its hood back over his head where it belonged—annoying maternal stirrings that did not altogether obscure the uneasiness welling in her. What initiation?

  “Like Alice, they grow and shrink and grow again at will. But that’s only out here, up here, where we can see them.” Andrik shook his raw, mittenless hands at shoulder height, indicating the Kyber world chillily ablaze about them. “But down the rabbit hole of consciousness, down there, deep inside, where it’s hell for us to follow—and heaven, too—they’re not very much like that little-girl-tourist Alice at all: they’re more like Mad Hatters, March Hares, and Cheshire Cats—native to the place. Permanent residents. To tell the truth, I don’t really know what we ought to call them when they’re down there. It’s we who are the Alices when we try to follow, we who are susceptible to—”

  His gabbiness, his excitement, panicked her. “Andrik!” she cried, clutching at his sleeve and turning him. “Andrik, you’re babbling!”

  “Then perhaps you’re not listening,” said the Kyber to whom Andrik had led her; her former student, Alice.

  “We’re leaving Onogoro,” Keiko told the alien. “I’ve got to take him back to the floater. Our departure is only—”

  Alice knelt gracefully just to Keiko’s left. Then it extended toward her one of its mailed fists. Like a crane in shallow water, the other Kyber approached. It interposed itself between Andrik and Keiko on her right, but neither knelt nor offered her its hand. Andrik went penitentially to his knees. Behind him lay the Kybers bound back to back in their disquieting death-sleep pregnancy.

  “Take Alice’s hand,” he urged her.

  “Why?” She recoiled from the Kyber, from the quirky nuances of this ceremony. She did not want to put her knees to the cold, snow-layered rock, or to commit herself as deeply as had Andrik to an idealism that neither of them could confirm the truth of without alien assistance. He was insane, not she or Captain Hsi or the truculent Farrell Sixkiller, and now he was trying to exploit her for the purposes of that singleminded insanity.

  “To see what the Kybers see,” he said.

  “They’re going to die, Andrik. Their sun is going to blaze up, and they’re all going to die. Or they’ll die during transit—as Onogoro limps through this ungodly winter toward the hearth they hope to find in Laevo.”

  “It’s a most godly winter, Lady Keiko. That hearth is also a haven, processer of our dreams and seed.”

  This was from the standing Kyber, her guide, who peeled a strip of quasi-flesh from the drape of its right arm and offered it to her with easy dignity.

  “Eat thou this in remembrance of what thou hast never been,” it said in exact repeat of her former student’s command to Sixkiller, how many days ago …?

  “I’ve … I’ve tasted kyberflesh,” said Keiko, demurring.

  “You found it bitter?” her guide asked.

  “Very bitter. Unpalatable. I can’t.”

  “You didn’t give it a chance, Kei. I’ve eaten of it, too, several times—in order to get where they go naturally in death-sleep. The initial bitterness fades. Don’t spurn Alice’s invitation to … to heaven!”

  “But you’re different, Andrik, having eaten of it.”

  “Of course I’m different!” he declared impatiently. “What would be the point of eating kyberflesh merely for its savour? This isn’t cannibalism or predation, it’s holy communion!”

  “Eat thou this,” her guide warbled again.

  “No, I can’t”

  “For me, then,” pleaded Andrik. “I love you, Keiko, and not so very long ago you said that you loved me.”

  “For you?” Keiko stared bemusedly at Andrik, kneeling before her in the snow like the humbled Emperor Somebody in sackcloth at the gates of Rome. “By taking part in this freakish communion, you want me to prove my love for you?” Taunted by some archaic social parallel that would not come wholly clear, she smiled her disappointment and perplexity.

  “I want you to let me giv
e you this gift, Kei. It’s not a proof of love, it’s mutual expression of it.”

  She was moved by these words, by the way Andrik looked while saying them. She turned to her guide and hesitantly accepted the strip of flesh, wondering as she did so if she were simply succumbing to Andrik’s glibness. The flesh was greasy with the vinegary exudation long since familiar to her, even though the last piece of kyberflesh she had tasted had been as dry as impacted ashes.

  “Eat me,” said the alien, parodying the instruction labels in Wonderland. “Eat me, Lady Keiko.”

  Andrik’s face was beatific in the angry heaven-glow. Go on, it prompted her; taste of Alice that you may share with me an imitation of the state called kybertrance. His face—his eyes—persuaded her, and she fed herself the icy Onogorovan jerky in tiny twists that briefly gummed her crowns before melting on her palate and sliding down her throat. One Alice loomed while another Alice knelt, and Andrik was a fresh-faced boy between them.

  The initial bitterness of the kyberflesh gave way to a taste like mandarin oranges marinated in sweet French brandy. Soon, tipsy with strangeness, she was gripping the mailed fingers of Alice A and Alice B and sinking to her knees opposite the man whose love had led her to this pass. To the Kyber Pass …, she thought ridiculously. The Kybers’ heads moved from side to side in purposeful rhythm, as if trying to fix her stereoscopically with their meta-eyes. Then the nodding slowed, and their lights went out, like pinball games on which the plugs have been abruptly pulled.

  They were “dead”, deep in kybertrance, avatars of the divine couple of Japanese myth, Izanagi and Izanami. They were alien-gods cut adrift in a mythic realm dredged from Keiko’s own subconscious yet galvanized by lightning bolts of statement and demand from Somewhere Else. …

  SEVENTEEN

  Was the streaming chaos overhead really the sky or merely a series of phantom images projected on the screens of her inner vision? Why had she not frozen to death? Perhaps she had. Or perhaps there drifted through her blood a glycol antifreeze distilled from what she had already reluctantly eaten of the Kyber.

  This place that she, and they, inhabited was a place between Heaven and Hell, a limbo of uncertain possibilities. A noise like the lurching of bump’em cars punctuated the silence of which it was apparently woven: a humming silence connected to that ineffable Somewhere Else still just beyond her grasp.

  Nevertheless, energies and auras, the currency of death-in-life, flowed between her and the others in their little diamond of external touching; and she saw in death-sleep a flicker of lightning against the tarnished mother-of-pearl of her inward sky: **Do you feel pain, Lady Keiko?** This was from her former student, Alice A, no longer its family’s septa-prime. And, yes, almost coinciding with its question, she had experienced an ache or a hunger for which she could imagine no effective balm or nourishment.

  **That’s good,** hummed Alice A, even though she had framed no response either silently or aloud, for a little of that mysterious pain nagged her yet. **Pain is the First Mover, Lady Keiko, at whose touch we flee the stagnation of complacency and self-righteousness.**

  **And pleasure is the reward of escape,** sang Alice B in kybertrance. **Moving from pain to pleasure, we grow.**

  **If the pain is escapable,** Keiko cautioned the aliens in her own cold approximation of death-sleep, trying to locate Andrik in the grey recesses of its sky—whereupon her mind hung Dextro there, a lamp about to gutter. How escapable was the pain heralded by that image …?

  **Perhaps the greatest boon of intelligence is that it permits the vivid anticipation of otherwise abstract pain,** crooned Alice A. **Evil and entropy are avatars of pain, and therefore as necessary to an evolving datum state as the pleasure that rewards successful evolution.**

  None of this made sense to Keiko, not even in her quasi-kybertrance. She wanted out. She wanted to break her psychic bonds with Izanagi and Izanami—no, with Alice A and Alice B. She wanted to recall her mad lover to normal consciousness and return with him aboard the Heavenbridge to Earth. That escape would indeed be a pleasure, and she struggled against the lightning flashes pinioning her where she knelt. … It seemed the Rite of Conjoining was less a sharing of bodily warmth—a quality that the Kybers held in no particular esteem—than an activator of continent-wide data exchange. Regardless of her desires and doubts, she was interwired with her Alices and maybe even beyond them to other death-sleeping Onogorovans. Struggle was pointless.

  Where, then, was Andrik? Treading psychic water with the aliens’ indeterminate God-Behind-the-Galaxies …?

  **We are evolving in response to an anticipated pain,** vouchsafed one or both of the Kybers. **We are evolving at the behest of our own intelligence but in response to our intelligent perception of a control system greater than Kyber self-awareness. This control system is our God.**

  **Is it Andrik’s, too?**

  **Tied end to end, the neuronic axons of the human brain—if the cerebral makeup of your lover is typical of the species—would stretch one and a quarter million kilometres. That is the length of the unitary human mind, Lady Keiko; and as great as that may seem to you, as ‘rapidly’ as the synapses along that involute network do spark and fire, it may yet be insufficient to apprise itself of the God manifest within us as a programme for our own survival.**

  Now Keiko was lost not only in the fog of death-sleep but in the briary thickets of Kyber metaphysics. Her eyes were open—her physical eyes—but all she could see, now that her initial pain and fear had subsided, was a kind of photographic negative of the aurora-riven night. No way back, no way forward; no way out.

  **Unitary brain?** protested Andrik’s consciousness from the depths of the aliens’ all-encompassing trance. **What do you mean? Ours is a double brain—left hemisphere, right hemisphere, a membranous bridge between. That’s how we’re communicating now, isn’t it?**

  **Not entirely,** fluted Alice A, with irony.

  **In fact,** amended Andrik’s disembodied voice, **it’s really a triple brain! Cortex, limbic system, brainstem—higher thought, animal passion, automatic housekeeping.**

  **Our apologies, O complex being—but the tripartite human brain operates, we find, at a single speed.**

  Andrik acquiesced in this judgment, or else the psychic give-and-take of kybertrance dovetailed gradually into silence, like a radio station fading away into static as its listeners physically outrun it.

  Tilting her head back, Keiko stared with blind eyes at the heavens. Human beings had no lateral eye-bulbs, no bodily means of perceiving metaphysical reality, and this gauzy limbo between two realms began again to spook and weaken her.

  What were the aliens seeing? Archangels trumpeting resurrection? The light beyond the final curvature of space? The face of God? Projecting herself into a blind spot that was perhaps for the Kybers a lens on supranormal events, Keiko tried to break through to them. Her “voice” was mottled with psychic static:

  **Perhaps I see,** she told the silence. **Your brains must work at different speeds. A faster speed when you’re ‘living’, walking about as human beings walk, and a slower, more thoughtful speed when you’re interwired with one another in death-sleep.**

  **The other way round, Lady Keiko. The other way round. Consider.** (This was Alice A, her student, piping its message across the murmuring darkness in which she feared they had abandoned her.) **Kybernetically speaking, not to steer you wrong, a control system—axiomatically, I remind you—is always faster than the process which it controls. It packs more data. Data-packed, it embodies a vaster wisdom and a more protean, if ultimately immortal, spirit. The system governing a galaxy, Lady Kei, must have a wave-period far faster than that of any of the constituent or participatory elements of the galaxy under governance.**

  **I don’t—**

  **Neither did Andrik, but he is beginning to. Thus, being faster than, it is also invisible to, those constituent or participatory elements. If they could actually perceive it, it would not be the system of governance to which
I am alluding. Ipso facto.**

  **Since the system can’t be seen,** Keiko hazarded, **it therefore exists.**

  **Koan du jour!** exclaimed the Kyber. **It is all a question of tempo. Flesh-life unravels its organic processes too slowly to integrate meaningfully with its control.**

  **But how can you prate about tempo, you whose tempo is virtually nil more often than not? Even now we’re trapped in a little death, slaves of stasis. …**

  And yet she had a dim understanding that mailed fists gripped her hands, and that her fingers inside her frozen gloves were still capable of movement and sensation. In fact, her perception of an incomplete numbness was proof that she had not “died” as wholeheartedly as had the Kybers. She could still move and feel, even as if through several layers of surgical dressings or mummy-cloth. The stasis to which she had just claimed to be enslaved was in her case highly imperfect and therefore highly promising, a womb rather than a tomb. …

  **By and large, in the warmth of perihelion, Lady Keiko, we follow the path of flesh and think flesh-brain thoughts—**

  **But at aphelion, when your world is furthest from the sun, you commit yourselves more frequently to kybertrance, and to whatever that implies?**

  **True, O little teacher. We are quite flexible in our design. We have great localized control over our body temperatures. When you first arrived—I mean, of course, you and all your cohorts from the Heavenbridge—it was essential that we formulate a flesh-life response in order to acquire more data. One must dance a bit to keep the circulation going, and I was the principal dancer through whose pauses my peers and subscribers partook of the data I did dance for.**

  **In kybertrance you gave your people the gift of human language?**

  **Human language is merely one variety of data, Lady Keiko; I gave my people the gift of data. But we knew that this was an unusual year, made more unusual still by the ostensibly secular advent of humankind. We knew that this was the leap-year of our interstellar winter. We delayed as long as possible the universal hyber-preservation from which several of your party have lately sought to rouse us, only you and this persistent other succeeding—by virtue, I declare, of our approving that success. Eventually it seemed to all of us together that the Control System mediating our lives between illusion and meta-illusion desired our aid in conveying to you the Gospel According to Kybertrance.**