“Like I said, it’s mobile. It’s a vehicle. And aside from all the stuff we’ve learned from its groovy computer, it’s become the most important tool in my own pet project, in another way. Again, though, with a lot of adaptation.”
“And that project is?”
“Come on.” Adamn led her directly onto the spacious elevator platform itself, and Vee followed him around to the back of the iron building.
Here, the corrosion was much worse, the mechanical body heavily patched and reinforced. But drawing Vee’s attention more were the various drilling apparatuses affixed to the back of the Black Cathedral. There was one very large boring auger, plus a variety of smaller drills on boom arms, looking like robotic insect limbs. Adamn pointed and said, “These nozzles here shoot a powerful acid that can actually melt the volcanic rock outside. Adding them has really advanced the project a lot. Though the back-splash from the acid does do a lot of damage to the building itself, as you can see, so we have to keep up with repairs.”
Vee had herself witnessed how the acid used by the drone Demons could dissolve the pumice-like stone that entombed the Construct. “Why are you melting that? What are you drilling for?”
Adamn appeared to take in a deep breath, and when he spoke it was as if to a soul newly delivered into Hades rather than one trapped there for two thousand years, because that was what she essentially was. “In the past, before the Big Bang, Demonic administrators scanned the mind of each and every Damned that came into Hades, and based on what they learned from them they sent them off to different parts of Hades—a lot of times by train systems—to keep them away from any family and friends, since being with them might lessen their misery. But the amount of new souls after the Big Bang was so great that they didn’t have time to take these kinds of measures. After the Big Bang, if people died in proximity to each other, chances were they would enter Hades through the same portals, and would skip the…whatever you’d call it…orientation period the Damned would go through in the past. When I came into Hades, there were people who came in with me from the same town I lived in. Because of this, I’m pretty confident that my mother and brother and sister, who also died in the Big Bang, can’t be all that far from the portal I came through, which was close by to Tartarus. My mother was staying with my brother and I’ll bet anything they remained together when they came through. Given the scale of Hades, in the past I might never find them in an eternity of searching, but I think they can’t be unreasonably far from the Construct.”
“You mean, out there fossilized in the rock, Adamn?” Vee said, not sarcastically but with sympathy for what she took to be a surprising amount of idealism—or naivete—after two millennia in Hell.
“Maybe, but as bad as the deluge was, it was still gradual, and I bet most of the Damned found at least some kind of shelter before they could be caught out in the open like that. Not that we haven’t dug out scattered individuals from the rock when we burrow along, like you say, but there are who knows how many cities out there—either constructed by the Damned or the Demons or both—and smaller settlements like villages, and individual houses and shelters, and caverns even. Maybe no other city was ever able to seal itself off into one big unit the way we did with the Construct, but you could have two people in a little Damned-built stone cottage here, ten people in a cave there, people hiding in apartments in a big city, cut off from the people in other buildings but still protected from the Pompeii treatment.”
“But without life support systems like ours, they might be starving for air…suffocating in agony for century after century on the floors of these apartments.”
Adamn didn’t look too pleased by this picture, when his own family factored into the discussion, but surely he had thought of it before himself.
“Maybe. Or maybe they went into a catatonic state—shut down, like you did. That’s the way most of the individual people we’ve dug out have been. But we’ve had contact with people in one city called Oblivion through their own version of the Mesh, and some spotty radio messages from a further city, too. There are people out there who are conscious…but conscious or unconscious, we can go to them. It will take time, but time is what we have, if nothing else. Time enough to dig out every last soul in Hades, if I have my way.”
“There will be billions…and billions. Too many to take back to the Construct.”
“We’ll make the Construct bigger. But we’ll free other cities from the rock. I’ll dig out all of Hades if I need to.”
“But it’s your mother and sister and brother you’re really thinking of.”
Adamn’s face was grimly resolved. “I won’t give up on them. I’ll get to them and bring them here if it takes forever. Like I say, the Black Cathedral was designed to give us suffering. I take great satisfaction in using it to relieve suffering. We’re taking back our damnation, Vee.”
“But how are you doing it? How does the Black Cathedral get outside to dig?”
“Like I said, trains used to link up the far corners of Hades, and a lot of these tracks were underground, like subways. That was how the Black Cathedral would travel from city to city. Not all that many decades ago one of our exploration teams found it below the Construct in a sub-basement garage. This vent shaft goes all the way down there, so we made our humongous elevator and rerouted the cathedral’s tracks so we could bring the thing up here to be repaired and retrofitted, and protected when not in use. But down there, we’ve excavated some of the old subway tunnels it would use. These were either purposely filled in by the Demons during the Great Conflict, to keep enemy forces from sneaking into Tartarus from below, or else they were caved in by the pressure of the lava and volcanic rock. But we’ve been digging them out more and more, laying down new tracks when we have to.” Adamn reached out a hand and pressed it to the metal of the Black Cathedral, as if fondly touching the hide of some loyal beast of burden. “We’re close to reaching the city Oblivion now, and who knows how many people there. New friends, and new enemies too I suspect, but that’s always the way. We’ve already liberated a few small towns entirely, every soul that was in them. Many of them were in comas like I describe, but some who hadn’t shut down had adapted to being without breath and coped with it pretty well—blocked out the sensation. We’re very resilient creatures, Vee. You ought to know that.”
“I’d say you’re pretty resilient. Two thousand years hasn’t broken you.” She said it with true admiration, and not a little bit of wonder.
“You’re a rebel without a pause.”
“I told you, I feel reincarnated. Reborn.”
“Me too, I guess, but I think what I really want is to feel redeemed.”
“Redeemed?” He was studying her face. “Let me help you. I can take you in here—” he nodded at the Black Cathedral “— and help you get back the memories you’ve lost.”
Vee looked up at the closest of the blood red stained glass windows, its panes held in a metal web of strange geometric patterns like formulae from a sorcerer’s grimoire. “That’s not what I want, Wizard of Oz. I don’t want to go back to Kansas.”
“Well this here ain’t no Emerald City, Dorothy.”
Vee’s mouth raised at one corner. “Ha. If I’m Dorothy, I guess my gun is Toto.” She stepped away from the Black Cathedral, and her expression became serious again. “No, I don’t want to remember, Adamn. I don’t want to dig up the past. That’s one thing I’ll kindly ask you to leave buried forever.”
38: THE SWIMMERS
She was floating in a sparkling, scarlet sea.
Far above her, as she swept her arms and pedaled her legs to keep from sinking below the surface, the night sky was sprinkled with winking red stars, some of them like shooting stars zipping this way or that. In one section of sky, the stars were so dense they formed a luminous curtain like a crimson aurora.
Vee looked down at the ocean she was buoyed in, its lava-like glow rippling over her naked chest and shoulders. She could not see far below the surface, but the water s
eemed a living thing made up of countless tiny red organisms. Rather than producing a feeling of wetness, they were a subtle electric fizzing sensation against the bare flesh of her avatar.
She was in Freetown’s library, surfing the Mesh. Well, almost surfing; in the distance she had seen a man riding a great wave of information on a board, and crying out, “Whoo-ee!” though the area she bobbed in was thankfully more tranquil. Rather than seeking out a particular book to read, however, she was trying to better acquaint herself with navigation through the Mesh, if she wanted to work closely with Adamn on his projects—particularly, join the crew of the drilling and rescue crew he supervised. For this was the vocation she had chosen to pursue as a citizen contributing to the good of Freetown.
Beyond the water’s horizon, a city of glittering red towers soared against the starfield, with what looked like huge red dirigibles and small darting red helicopters moving between those neon skyscrapers of information. Many of them were still just skeleton frameworks and scaffolding, but the citizens of Freetown—and the Enmeshed, and those of Naraka, and even of L.A. and other colonies she hadn’t encountered—made this world larger every day. She wanted to go ashore and explore.
But she also wanted to submerge and explore the ocean’s depths, to see what treasures lay at its bottom, to better observe what appeared vaguely like schools of fish swarming around her legs down there. All in good time. There was so much time, as Adamn said. She was a novice, still learning the basics of swimming.
She cupped some of the water in her hand, let it trickle between her fingers, and watching it closely this way realized the particles it consisted of were actually numbers; computer code, each unit in itself nearly microscopic.
A huge fish, maybe even a whale, was passing below her beyond the edge of gloom, and she couldn’t help but feel uneasy at its size. Yet the pale, ghostly leviathan—or was it a submarine, filled with more experienced explorers than herself?—soon passed from sight, maybe sounding deeper, and she relaxed, let the waves cradle her up and down in gentle swells.
Then, her right foot was seized at the ankle. She gasped. She hadn’t seen this fish rising. Was it a shark? It gave a great yank, and Vee almost went under, splashing her arms wildly, nearly in a panic not to be drowned. Her slapping hands sent up sprays of phosphorescent droplets, like water falling past a strobe light. Like beads of blood flying from an ocean of blood.
The creature that had hold of her leg gave another, stronger tug, and this time Vee’s head was pulled below the surface, her eyes wide with terror. She looked below to see what had hold of her, at the same time that she kicked at it with her free leg.
The thing that stared up at her had a familiar visage, its own eyes ballooned with hate. It was not a shark, despite its menacingly bared teeth, but a man. It was the unclothed, swimming avatar of Pastor Karl Phelps.
His gritted teeth parted, and a stream of glassy red bubbles carried distorted, burbling words to her ears.
“So here you are, you traitorous whore! I’ve found you! Here in Babylon with the rest of the sinners!”
Could he drown her? It felt that way. Maybe not snuff out her spirit, but perhaps disorient it, so that it became lost down here in the deep currents of the Mesh for the rest of eternity?
She kicked out at his face, but the medium she was submerged in diluted the strength of her attempts and he batted at her limbs with his free hand. As she looked down at him, clamping her mouth shut for fear of her lungs filing with tiny red numbers beyond counting, she saw a white shape streaking toward the both of them like a torpedo. Vee’s dread was doubled, as she feared this time it would be a shark, for it looked like something of that kind. But to her surprise, this white streak drove itself into her father’s side. A great column of bubbles was disgorged from his mouth at the impact, and he let go of Vee’s ankle. As Vee churned her arms to propel herself back to the surface, she watched the white form turning sharply to come back toward Phelps a second time.
Absurdly, for a moment Vee thought it was Adamn’s dog, the white Akita that had lunged at her father in the virtual shopping plaza. But no, its shark-like form belied that. And now, as the creature drove its long snout into the small of Phelps’ back, Vee realized what it actually was she was seeing. An albino dolphin, with eyes that were not only pink but a vivid red.
Jay, she thought. Wherever he had been stored away or taken for study, he had been connected to the Mesh.
Vee didn’t linger to witness the avatar’s further attacks on her father’s avatar. Taking advantage of Jay’s intervention, Vee swam upward to the surface, and not only to the surface of the ocean, but broke free of the Mesh itself—and found herself in her library chair, lustily gasping for air.
39: THE RESTLESS
“You don’t have to do this,” Michael Palladino told her, as he handed Vee her pocketbook from Hell. She peeked inside, saw her sheathed knife, her M9 Beretta and spare magazines, and the single remaining M67 grenade.
“I don’t want to lead my father here and make trouble for you people,”
she said, hooking the skin pouch’s strap across her chest.
“From what we glean from the Mesh, he’s taken a seat beside Pastor Johnston but hasn’t replaced him. I don’t think he’s going to lead a whole army up here to wage holy war against us, just so he can get to you.
Whatever his own agenda is, Rebecca, the Construct isn’t like it was back in the Great Conflict.” Next he handed her Jay, and Vee resisted grinning at the gun as its single eye rolled to gaze up at her face. “The war settled what? We just ended up with new combinations of enemies and comrades, like after any war. It wasn’t really this big ultimate finale, this war to end all wars, to end everything bad and begin everything good. So—except for some hardcore fanatics like the Mujahideen—for all this time since, most people have been weary of war. Even L.A. for the most part, I’d say.
We’ve all had enough war, a long time ago. The Great Conflict shell-shocked most of us into accepting its spoils. We had to concentrate on other things, like making this city a unit and keeping it hospitable. Sure, there’ll always be little skirmishes, but nobody really has the ambition to march into a full scale battle again. And win what? A couple more floors of this place? What’s there to win when Heaven and Earth might no longer exist, for all we know? What’s there to win when we’re all already dead?”
“Your point being?” Vee said, after having extracted Jay’s last remaining magazine to check its bone bullets and then clicking it back into place.
“My point is, even if your father can manage to rally a small group of his most loyal followers to come up here to find you, he doesn’t stand a chance of attacking our city. We can handle him. You don’t have to run away like this.”
Vee smiled at the security chief. “Are you sure you’re not trying to discourage me because you suspect I’m going to rendezvous with him, now that my spy mission here is complete?”
Michael didn’t look amused by this accusation. “I’m showing you real concern here. If you don’t want my concern, so be it.”
“I’m sorry. Forget I said that. Anyway, Mr. Palladino, it isn’t just that I’m afraid to lead my father to Freetown.” She glanced over at Adamn, who also stood in the room she’d been given to stay in, as she continued.
“I haven’t seen all of the Construct yet. I haven’t been to the top. There’s so much here that I still haven’t explored.”
“You think you’re going to find better than Freetown?” Michael asked with surly defensiveness.
“Probably not, but I didn’t say I was looking for better. I’m pretty sure I’d like to come back here later, if you’ll have me. Once I’ve…I don’t know…satisfied my wanderlust, my need to see and learn more. This restlessness or whatever it is I feel. Look, forgive me for saying this, but you guys in your little colonies all seem a little too settled in to me. I mean, I know you’re afraid to venture out and end up tangling with other clans, but I think most of it has to
do with you being too comfortable, settling for too little. I guess because I still feel like a newcomer, I’ve got a different mindset from most of you—except for a minority, it seems, like Adamn here. I still think we should try to find out what more there might be beyond these walls. If the Creator is gone and the old order of things has fallen, maybe we might even be able to escape.”
“Escape what?” Michael asked.
“Hell.”
He snorted. “Escape to where?”
“Heaven…Earth…if they exist.”
“Even if they do, you think it’s just a matter of walking there?”
“I don’t know what to think. I won’t know how much to expect until I know more. But you see what I mean? No disrespect to you or the rest of Freetown, Mr. Palladino, but it’s like you don’t even want to wonder.”
“I think what’s really making you itchy is that you’re still confused about yourself,” Michael told her. “Are you running toward self-discovery, Rebecca, or running from yourself?”
As if to derail the tension before a real argument could develop, Adamn cut in, “Well, as for seeing the top floors of the Construct, you can forget that idea. Believe it or not, we have actually done some exploring in our time, and we know that the top thirty or so floors of the Construct are mostly collapsed—crushed under the weight of all the solidified lava resting on the roof, we figure.”
“Totally flattened?”
“Well, no…I mean, you can still work your way through a lot of the rubble, maybe, but at the risk of getting crushed yourself and maybe trapped for a real long time. I don’t know that there’s a lot to gain from it, except for being able to say you saw it.”
The Fall of Hades Page 19