Errata
Page 7
And low, but resounding in collision, in collusion, in collapse over the city streets, aringing out across the grand unified Illusion Fields, across the hollowed Havens of Hinter’s ice & sand, out over oceanic aeons of sunken cities long dissolved in the oblivion of Evenfall, & even in the dead soul deeps beyond reality’s horizon, the spaceless gulf of time itself enchimes, the darkward & abysm of time cracracks, all with a boom of a big band big bang last trump big crunch, an almighty—
DOOM.
A History of Thought
The craftsmith sits at his desk in the Museum-Mausoleum of the Homo Primate, playing with a spearthrower. A polished carven intricated relic of the Bone Age denizens of the Hinter, it’s a quantum leap from the rough flakes & chips of stone that went before, a leap in the dustcrawlers’ wits & wisdom. Perhaps a breakdown of the barriers between the modules of the protean mind, he thinks, social, natural & technical intelligences rewired to allow a cross-stream knowledge to take shape in complex artefacts of new materials, of components. A link with the origins of language, he muses, those first acts of definition, acts of making finite, binding meaning into forms that lace together, lock together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—a sense of sense proscribed & prescribed into sentences, articulated into spatial metaphors, meanings as things that can be grasped.
•
In his schematics of the mind he pictures language as another tool, forged in a lightning flash, a sigil at the very core of this webwork of intelligences. A graving of the Cant’s mechanics, of the signifiers & syntax that command reality. Only for some the graving was imperfect, incomplete, their pitifully fractured languages a dog’s yowl of dumb pride, hunger & fear. The spirals, notches & curved swastikas carved in the spearthrower won’t code it to throw true, don’t inscribe will in the world. They’re mere scratches on its surface. Still…
There is no date to these tools—numberings of years have little meaning here—but skulls of dustcrawlers from the same strata show an evolutionary growth-spurt. And it’s this elsewhen far out into the Hinter where the first unkin, so the theory goes, stood up from mob humanity, stepped out into the Vellum.
•
Rolled up on the shelves in the wooden cabinet behind him, scores of old charts diagram discarded metaphors of millennia of human understanding—engrammatic programming, behaviourist conditioning, Fraudian complexes, zodiacal starsigns, oriental skandas, the four humours, & so on. A tabula rasa hangs in a frame beside the cabinet, an image of an ideal mind of sorts, a blank slate, all the prejudices, tolerances, conscience, ignorance & such inscribed not by nature’s pragmatic hand but by the rule & writ of culture.
It would be so much easier if that one were true.
•
He lays out his own working schematics of the human mind in front of him, placing paperweights—a black stone, a dustcrawler’s skull, a gypsum figurine, a clay tablet—on the corners of the chart to keep it from recurling. Graved in the Cant, it reconstructs his vision as he studies it, rises out of the plane, a complex hologram sketching a series of concentric spheres & flow-charted frameworks, tracing a history of thought from bestial beginnings thru to modern man.
All of those other charts are obsolete now. Now the angel has a new map of the mind with which to try & trace the root of consciousness, of free will, of the soul. This is his job. With the humans rising up in riot all thru the city, seeking to overthrow the very unkin lords who sang their world into solidity, the craftsmith has the charge of finding that elusive spark of spirit… to snuff it out before it is too late.
He rubs his eyes with thumb & forefinger, pinches the bridge of his nose. Outside the Museum-Mausoleum of the Homo Primate, a way away but audible, the bell of the Watch Tower chimes a distant—
DOOM.
A Glitter of Sprinkling Tinkles
The watchman feels the gantry shoogle under him, screws loosened by the resonance of the bell, as he shifts forward trying to reach the hammer’s hinge. If he can jam his spanner in the right place maybe he can stop it all from going to rack & ruin. He doesn’t hear the cracks creak, deafened by the bell, but looking down he sees abstructions shearing with the twist of steel. A lurch of gantry drops him to his knees & he sees sand trickle down around him, clocks with a glance that it’s coming from the archways of pillars & stone dome that cap the tower. Wrack & ruin, wreck & rain. The whole metalogic forgery of the Watch Tower, grand antique keep of time, is about to come crumbling crashing down, if he can’t stop it.
•
He looks out between two pillars at the city & the coast that curls around it, that it sprawls along in not-quite-possible topographies & geographies, the Illusion Fields, & the Hinter far out in the distance. He looks in the other direction at the centre of the city with its glass tower, & the Irim Quarter beyond, & finally the docks with their bridgewalls, stone threads of order at the very edge of everything. He looks at the silversea of heavens & ocean out past that, the swirl of an ever-turning spiral of a never-breaking wave, a great swirl of blueblack & silverwhite, of what might be water or air or light or mass or something else entirely, extending & intending, falling inwards to the Deep Within or rising outwards to the Great Beyond, but reaching, reaching. If the city sits at the end of time, that vortex is what comes after.
•
The tower shakes. He clutches the grating of the gantry as he edges further forward. It can’t happen. It won’t happen. The city is built on rock, as sure & steadfast as a sleeper’s flesh in the flood of night. Don’t the stories say that the glass tower itself was built around the great mast of the ship that brought them here, over a world of wild & rolling ocean to the rock of their landing? Don’t they say that when the waters drew back, & the black earth rose under them, & the stars wheeled into place around the crescent sun & moon, & greengolden grain swayed in the fields, don’t they say that the ship, left high & dry on the rock, was built around & swallowed up in their new settled eternity, its mast the very axis mundi of the city & the order that it symbolises? Don’t they say that? The shadows of the bitmites might shape dreams around us in the aether, yes, but under the covers is a body, still & solid in its slumber, the great captain god himself, anchored by chains. It can’t happen.
As if to answer him, a chain comes rattling down from above, unloosed & tumbling free, smashing thru the wormy floor of the Bell Chamber. Thru the hole he sees the chain swing, hit the microcosm of the glass tower, scattering it to a glitter of sprinkling tinkles.
•
He imagines all over the city kin & unkin falling from their beds as time & space unfurl between the rending vortex of sea & sky. He imagines waters arising in blueblack waves to meet the heavens opened above, crashing over docks & airshipyards, crashing down on neighbourhoods of tenements & temples, city centres of skyscrapers, shantytowns of shacks out on the very edges of the city. He pictures waves crashing down in silver spray foam of moonlight, starfall glittering torrential rain on streets that sweep out to wide roads into the wilderness.
We flutter, alight on the gantry in front of him, try to comfort him.
— There is no beginning and no end, we say, no first or last events to bound this cosmos, only thresholds of reality, singularities, where the sheer immensity of minutiae tear the truth apart. And here, listen, hear the sound of the clash of symbols, the chaocophony, the end of something and the start of anything:
DOOM.
All His Forgotten Wars
In a room carved out of candlelight on wood, the soldier kneels before the dreamwhore, holds his dogtags like a rosary & bows his head as if to pray. Then, as he looks at her again, his eyes close slow as if to say, Forgive me. Let me have a summer, just, he thinks, one summer of peace, & when you must, come gather me in your arms to dance—she touches his shoulder—to sing of roses in a ring, he thinks, and death.
— Stay, she says.
Death, he muses, is a warm flower held out towards you in the hand of someone you
love.
He stands & pulls his longcoat on, checks in the pocket for the little leatherbound copy of the reacher’s book, the Book of All Hours. A book of prophecies & portents, madness & mathematics, it’s his only connection to the man who freed him, his only real connection to this last war, this last battle that, like all such battles, can only fail even in victory.
He shakes his head. It’s time to go.
•
This is the story that he told her as they lay together:
His first memory of the city is of having just arrived (though he does not remember the arrival), standing in the Strazza du Kentaurii, thinking that all his forgotten wars were over now he’d found his Haven. His second memory is of kneeling before an unkin duke at the Centurian Gates, proud in the wings & armour of a guardian (back when humans could still earn admittance to the lower host). His third memory is of being sent out to watch the rabble-rousers in the markets of diplomacy & enformation. His fourth is of studying the paxhawkers buying truths & selling lies on the corners, at the crossroads, at the junctures where the culture of one quarter meets another, powertraders touting beliefs & ideals in the inns & taverns, coming to understand how this common currency of consensus illusion is the nearest thing humanity has to the Cant. His fifth is of a master merchant drunk & bitter: we do not even know we’re slaves & beggars, pets & property, he said. His sixth is of halting in a moment of doubt as he was about to turn his ruptor on a rebel crowd, then spitting the word that strafed them all to dust. His seventh memory is of a blind man, a reacher he’d been sent to shadow, telling an uneasy crowd that in this city words are weapons, words are power, words command reality, & those who hold their reins enforce the silences of thought that wall their towers. When the angels came that day to raze the rebels with their swords of fire, he turned his own disruptor on his masters.
This is the story he told the dreamwhore of how he came to fight the good fight, stand against the raging light.
•
— You have a name then? she’d said.
He’d nodded. Shaken his head. Shrugged. A half-name in the Cant, in the language of the angels & the bitmites, graved into his forehead as he knelt at the Centurian Gates, enough to bind him but not to unleash him, enough to let him speak the Cant but not to hear it.
— Enough to track you? she’d said, closing the shutters of the windows.
— Just enough that I can’t run forever. That’s why I want you to whore me a dream where I’m another. A sandminer or a soulfisher for a night… or a dreamwhore if you want. Whore me a dream that I’m you, eh?
She’d come back to sit on the edge of the bed beside him, slide his longcoat from his shoulders.
— I’ll give you a dream that’ll stay with you for days, she’d said. I’m the best unguilded that there is, and I’ve no love for the angels.
•
— We’re all miscast or outcast to our station, says the dreamwhore now.
She runs a finger down the soldier’s scar, the rivulet of soft pink skin that ripples from grey hair to beard, the jagged flourish at his missing eye, like a weirdly inkless graving. With this & his longcoat & ruptor, she thinks, they should hardly need his half-a-name to track him, but then she hardly noticed him herself in the shadowy booth of the inn, until he called her over. Might have been sitting there for hours. She wonders if you can speak silence in the Cant, go from place to place & leave no trace by living in words & ways unspoken & unspeakable. In a dreamwhore’s boudoir at midnight or a tavern booth where he whispers nothing, simply drinks the beers & the beauties, seeming an old regular if anyone thinks to look. In his silence, in those spaces between words, would there be a form of freedom?
— We might keep each other well, she says. And it’s wild out there. Sandminers rioting. There’s talk of the host riding out in wild hunt, seeking revenge for their precious prince, poor little golden boy.
— Exactly, he says. It’s time.
She doesn’t know what he means, but as he opens the door, as if on cue, the bell of the Watch Tower sounds its deep & ponderous—
DOOM.
The Breaking of Days
The watchman scrambles along the gantry as a cog ten times the size of a cartwheel whirls from its place & rolls, smashing thru ladders & metal stairs & down into the jumbled wreckage of the tower’s now teetering internal intricacies. He falls & rolls, flings himself towards the wall, across the hole crashed even wider by the cog. A great crack sunders the stone dome above, & he clutches a pillar; under its arch he should be safe, no?
He looks down onto the flagstoned plazza of the Watch Tower, the museums & mausoleums that side it, raises his gaze over the city to what should be fields of farms beyond, the firmament, & sees reality’s horizon as an edge of ragged rock, the city ripped free & sliding into sky or sea.
•
Silver & gold as surf & sand, a liquid light swirls in waves aglitter with the scattered grains of spacetime; it roars into the gulf made by the city’s sheering from the fields, a foam of time churned into bubbles by the vast virtual energies of the infinitesimal. A momentary glimpse: a single sliver of causeway stretches out across the rift, a road still reaching to the fields beyond; then that too falls, the bridge buckling & disappearing down.
The city is adrift upon its rock, a myriad of singularities spiralling around it, sucked down with it as it sinks into its own event horizon, into the black hole at the end of night where logic dies & leaves only the absence of all absolutes.
•
The watchman looks out at the shifting sandscape of shards of light like stars & planets, galaxies & universes. He’d thought the Vellum solid, certain, can’t quite grasp that he has only ever known the cool hard shell around a core event, with all these streets & furrows only gravings, scratches on that surface. A mycelia of crimson threads glow below the glitter as cracks of volcanism on an ocean floor, a web, a tapestry, of superstrings & twistors. Out of the city’s silversea sparkling surround of swirl now, plumes of molten truth arise in reality’s eruption, stream thru these fissures from the source of time, the breaking of days. They rise straight from the core of this cosmos, tear the mantle in vast continental rifts that spew debris of folds & forces, wash of waves & dust of particles.
•
The tower rumbles. The dome splits, raining stone that batters thru the floor of the Bell Chamber, pounds thru the Mechanism, punches thru the floor below as well, & down. Thru the broken brass & black below he sees the pendulum snap, the whip-end of it lash the walls as it falls, opening up yet more cracks. Near whimpering, he clings to his pillar, his tiny perch in the surviving skeleton of substructure, built to sustain the bell’s weight but strained nigh its breaking point. He hears the clatter & crash of stairs, ladders & escalators all collapsing, knows there’s no way down but with the remnants of the tower, in a crumple of stone & steel.
Above, the hammer swings wild & arrhythmic as a drunk berserker while, below, the fragments of the Houri’s Eye spin free now, whirl in a microcosm of the city’s maelstrom—
DOOM.
The Lawscribe
The lawscribe shuts the door of his office behind him, leans back against the glass-panelled wood. Bookshelves around the walls, a desk, two books upon it, one a small leatherbound volume of aphorisms, most of them entirely contradictory, the other the Law, a large tome, consistency its very raison d’etre. Two rubberstamps. Notepad & desk-tidy. Two vacuum tubes above the desk, one with a basket hung below.
With a huss & a phut, a steel canister pops from the in-tube, drops into the basket. Curious, he thinks. All work should have been suspended for the duration of the old lightprince’s wake, the new lightprince’s ascension and the wild hunt. Doubtless the discovery of some junior sophist cleric, he thinks, too keen for his own good. He unscrews the lid of the canister, takes out a roll of paper scroll, spreads it flat upon his desk & takes his glasses from his breast pocket—his eyesight’s worse
& worse these days. He sits down to read the new rule.
•
After a while of thought, he opens the Law & places it in front of him. He flicks slowly thru the pages, stopping twice to read the rule again before continuing, until he’s satisfied that, in respect of all already written in the Law, this proposition is entirely wrong. The Law must be consistent.
Only then does he pick up his pen & turn the Law to its last page, which is, as always, blank. He meticulously copies the rule onto this page, word by word, letter by letter, without error or omission, then lays down his pen &, with one of the stamps, he marks both copies of the rule as FALSE. He curls up the paper, replaces it in its steel canister & puts the canister into the out-tube. With a hoosh & a phunk, it disappears. He feels a quiet sense of satisfaction. One step closer to the Law’s completion.
The blotter on the desk is covered with scribbled notes, ramifications & implications, the workings of more complex rules than this. One of these is a gleaning from the other book, the book of aphorisms.
There is only one rule, it reads, and it defines the Law in its entirety.
•
The lawscribe takes his glasses off, rubs at his eyes. The book of aphorisms is an irksome thing, almost entirely metaphoric, proverb & parable as much as aphorism really, seditious spoutings of some imaginary mountain prophet of floods & dead gods. Thus spoke Ziusudra, it begins. It’s revered by the human mob, this so-called Book of All Hours, reviled by the unkin host, a most pernicious piece of anarchist propaganda. But the Law must integrate all possible propositions, whether gleaned from the order of wheeling worlds in the heavens or from the disorder of whirling words in human heads. And he does think he’s, at last, managed to glean some sense from this mess of a text.