Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  The roof of the passageway began to collapse. I was running, now, veering from one side to another to prevent being hit by debris. I burst into open air, my chest aching, and flung myself into the flyer. As I rose up, three destroyer bots honed into the very spot I had vacated. I had no time to activate the flyer’s defenses. A great fireball blossomed below me. I felt its heat as I piloted the rocking craft upward through the tumultuous air. Up, in the cool heights, I saw that there was blood flowing down my right arm. My shoulder hurt. I looked down and saw the myriad fires blooming, forming and dissolving shapes that my imagination brought to life. Monsters. And lastly, a woman, arms outstretched, burning.

  * * *

  In the Ramayan, Ram braves all to recover his consort Sita from the demon Ravan. But near the end of the story he loses her through his own foolishness. He turns her away, exiles her as he himself was once exiled, and buries himself in the task of ruling his kingdom.

  All that: the war, the heroes killed—for nothing!

  One of the most moving scenes in the epic is at the end of the story, when Ram goes down on his knees before Sita in the forest, begging her forgiveness and asking her to come back to him. She accepts his apology but she does not belong to him; she never has. She calls to her mother, the Earth; a great fissure opens in the ground and Sita goes home.

  In the One Thousand Commentaries, there are different views on the significance of Sita. Some interpret her as signifying that which is lost to us. For a long time I had thought of Sita as my world, my childhood. I had seen myself as Ram, raising an army to win back—not those irredeemable things, but a chance for survival. Abandoned by my fellow investigators, hunting for Hirasor alone, I had, after a while, given up on analogies. Certainly I had never thought of Dhanu as Sita.

  Dhanu was what I had to sacrifice to reach Hirasor, to rescue Sita. Dhanu had never belonged to me, anyway, I told myself. She could have come up out of the City at any time; it was her obsession with the made-beings that led to her death. Sometimes I was angry with her, at other times, I wept, thinking of the fall of her hair in the moonlight. At odd moments during my renewed pursuit of Hirasor, she would come unbidden into my mind, and I would wonder what her last moments had been like. Had she seen the Universe through the eyes of the dying City? Had she had her epiphany?

  But I had little time for regret. My life narrowed down to one thing: find Hirasor. I set various agents sifting through mountains of possible leads; I re-established contact with criminal informers, coaxed or threatened information from scores of witnesses. At night I lay sleepless in my lonely bed, thinking of what I would do when I found Hirasor. My mind ran through scenario after scenario. I had to first put him in a hundred kinds of agony. Then I would say the name of the mother-machine and lock him in Shunyath for ever.

  His silence lasted over two years. Then, at last, one of my agents picked up his trail. This time, curiously, it was not marked with blood. No small, artistically arranged orgy of violence betrayed his presence. All I had was proof from a transit shuttle record that he had been headed for the planet Griddha-kuta two months ago.

  I went to Griddha-kuta. Apparently he had headed straight for the Buddhist monastery of Leh, without any attempt at covering his tracks. I went to the monastery, suspecting a trap. There, to my angry surprise, I found him gone.

  An elderly monk told me that yes, Hirasor had been here. What had he done during his stay? Apparently nothing but walk around in the hill gardens and read in the library. Where was he now?

  “He said to tell you that he had gone to Oblivion,” the monk said, watching me. “But why don’t you stay here awhile, before you go? There is no hurry. Hirasor is not running any more. Why don’t you walk the gardens and ease your burdens a little?”

  They let me search the grounds and the building, but there was no sign of Hirasor. I wondered if he had really gone to Oblivion, a planet about which I knew little, except that it was as close to hell as you could get among the inhabited worlds. It made no sense that he would go to such an uncomfortable place.

  While I was wondering what to do, I walked briefly in the gardens with the monk, Chituri. I told him a little about myself and my quest; in return he confided to me that he had been a world-shell citizen, too, before the fall. His world-shell had been Gilgamesh.

  There is no doubt that there was some magic about the place, because I stayed longer than I intended. The gardens in the terraced hills were tranquil, verdant, misty with waterfalls. Amid groves of moss-laden stone trees, pale clusters of flowers hung in the sweet air. Memories of Ramasthal, which had faded with time, returned to me vividly. Meanwhile Chituri tried to persuade me to stay, to give up my quest for justice. As we walked, he would tell me stories from the Indic tradition, even resorting to his knowledge of the Ramayan.

  “Don’t you see,” he would tell me, “it is only when Ram forgets the god in him, forgets he is an avatar of Vishnu, that he acts foolishly? What is evil but ignorance of our true nature?”

  “You are forgetting that Ravan is the villain of the story, not Ram,” I would say coldly. “If you want to talk about evil, talk about him.”

  “But, Paren,” he said, using the name I had given him, “don’t your commentaries say that the entire epic is more than a literal telling of an old heroic tale—that the great battle is really the battle within . . .”

  He had a peculiar way of sidling up to me, of speaking as though imparting a great confidence, and yet his manner was ingratiating, tentative. He hardly spoke above a whisper. I guessed he had suffered much before his arrival here, but I took a dislike to him after a while.

  For me this period was, like the time I had met Dhanu, only an interstice, a time to catch my breath before resuming my quest. I was not interested in academic discourses on morality. Chituri did not understand that. He had seen Hirasor walk these very gardens—Hirasor, who had brought down his world as well as mine—and he had done nothing.

  I finished my researches on the planet Oblivion, and made arrangements to go there. It was a difficult place to get to, since there was only one settlement, if one could call it that, and only a small scientific research craft visited at rather long intervals. The day I left, Chituri again tried to persuade me to give up my pursuit of Hirasor. He did this in his usual oblique way of telling me a story.

  This time it was an ancient Buddhist tale about a murderer called Ungli-maal. Ungli-maal had been a bandit in the time of the Buddha, a man so depraved that he wore the fingers of his victims as a garland around his neck. The Buddha was the only man he waylaid who was unafraid of death, who faced him empty-handed, with compassion. Eventually Ungli-maal—despite all he had been—became a Buddhist monk and a great teacher.

  “If you are trying to persuade me that Hirasor has become a saint,” I said between clenched teeth, “you must think me naïve indeed. He is still the man who butchered millions, destroyed countless worlds. He will not escape justice.”

  “That was not the point of my story,” Chituri said, rather sadly. I was glad not to see his face again.

  * * *

  Oblivion, they say, is another word for hell. A bleak world, barely habitable, it was once known as Dilaasha, and was considered a reasonable candidate for terraforming. Those hopes have long since vanished. The “habitable” zones are deserts, subject to violent dust-storms, and all indigenous life is primitive—bacterial, algal, and inimical to coexisting with humans.

  But all this does not explain why the planet Oblivion is hell. Oblivion earns its name because those who stay there long enough slowly lose their minds.

  It begins with forgetting and slips of tongue, peculiar speech disorders, waking terrors, and finally, silence. The rescue teams who first observed the early explorers (consisting of both human and nakalchi) could only speculate as to why the subjects walked around without apparent purpose, neglecting the basic needs of their bodies, muttering in unknown languages, reacting to things that nobody else could see. The second stage was one
of great distress—the subjects howled or whimpered and ran about the compound as though to escape a terrible, invisible enemy. They could still, at times, respond to their names; they would look up when called, frowning, as though trying to remember who they had been. Sometimes they would weep in the arms of the staff; a terrible, heart-rending weeping it was. The final stage was silence and withdrawal. In this last stage the sufferers seemed to have completely lost any knowledge of who they were—they did not respond to their names or to instructions; they wandered around with dead eyes, tracing out complicated patterns with their feet.

  Only three victims had been taken off-planet. When removed in the second stage they would resist with maniacal strength—both such subjects had met violent death at their own hand. The third had been in the final stage and had simply faded away after removal, although he had been in fine shape physically. However an autopsy had revealed a bizarre restructuring of his brain that no scientist had yet explained.

  So now all that is left of the original settlement on Oblivion is a study center where the remaining subjects are incarcerated. Regulations decree that nobody can stay on Oblivion for more than a hundred and ten local days. It’s after that that most people seem to start losing their minds, although in some rare cases twenty days is enough.

  There are theories—volatile compounds containing nano-organisms that are slowly released by the soil, pervading everything, that act like psychotropic drugs, low frequency sound waves that boom through the barren hills, disturbing the inner functioning of the body, peculiar surges in radioactive emissions in the environs—but none of these are adequate explanations. Oblivion remains a mystery.

  So I came, at last, to Oblivion, to the final confrontation. It was a fitting place for a last stand. The dome-town was mostly uninhabited, the empty buildings testament to the defeated hopes of the original settlers. The insane were housed in a primitive building built around a dusty compound. The skeleton crew that had managed the place for the last shift was irritable and moody, waiting to be taken off-planet in a week, and the few scientists looked depressed and preoccupied. Nobody seemed interested in talking with me, despite the fact that I was apparently a representative of a rich philanthropist considering a major donation. Everyone seemed curiously lacking in vitality or enthusiasm, as though under the influence of some drug. Within a few hours of my stay there, I, too, felt a distinct mental lethargy, punctuated by spikes of nervousness and paranoia. The medic who examined me, a thin, dark, spidery man, was pessimistic.

  “You’re one of those who will succumb fast,” he said, not without some relish. “This is a terrible place, affects some people much more quickly than others. Get out while you can, or you’ll be joining them!”

  He waved his long fingers toward the observation window behind him. There was something ghoulish about the way he stood watching the crazies, describing for me in painful detail every stage of the terrible sickness. The afflicted—men, women, most of them half naked, wandered aimlessly around the yard, muttering and drawing patterns in the dust with their feet. Some wailed incessantly, beating their chests, while others tore at their clothes. Still others sat very quietly on the ground, looking straight ahead of them with blank eyes. I felt as though their pain and confusion was somehow connected to me, that theirs was a sorrow that was drawing me in slowly. The dust patterns on the ground (the subject of much debate among the scientists) seemed almost to make sense, as though they were the script of a language I had known and forgotten. I shivered and looked away. The medic was right. I couldn’t stay here long.

  But when I looked back into the compound, there was Hirasor.

  He came into the yard through a door in the wall. A tall man, he now walked with a slight shuffle. He sat down on an unoccupied bench and watched the sufferers. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but the gait, and the arrogant set of the shoulders, was unmistakable. My heart started hammering.

  “That’s the other visitor,” the medic said, noting the slight start I gave. “Claims to be interested in our subjects, but he seems to have problems of his own.”

  He didn’t explain. Hirasor sat for a while, then moved his hands upward in a gesture that I didn’t recognize, and returned through the door, which shut behind him.

  I went into my narrow cell of a room to make my plans.

  It was hard to think clearly. Blood, revenge, murder—the sufferings of those who had lost to Hirasor—my own long years of trailing him, giving up love and life for this one obsession—these thoughts reverberated in my mind. When I closed my eyes I saw Hirasor’s face, or the Harvester’s toothed mouth. When I opened them, I saw the stark, claustrophobic room, and the view from the skylight of a yellow dust-plume over the dome. The air smelled faintly of dust and burning. I knew then that Hirasor had chosen wisely. I didn’t know to what extent he, as a nakalchi (and a hardened one at that) would be affected by the place, but he had gambled on it being a disadvantage for me.

  The next day there was a message from him, an audio. Giving me the location of his rooms, and telling me that he would let me know when I should come, when Suvarna was not around.

  Bring your weapons, he said.

  * * *

  This is the last memory fragment, the one most fresh in my mind.

  I had been waiting for days. Hirasor and I would make an appointment, then he would abruptly cancel it because Suvarna had returned unexpectedly to their quarters. He did not want her to be in the way. I could sense that, like me, he wanted our final confrontation to be between us alone. At times I suspected that he was playing with me, that I should be more circumspect, perhaps induce someone to spy on him—but this was not the time to play detective. It was fitting that at the end there should be no tricks and subterfuges, only him and me, face to face at last.

  There was no doubt that he was wearing me down, however. I lay restlessly in my room, plagued by headaches and nightmares. I started at every sound, and the dust devils visible from my window became fiery-eyed monsters.

  Thus Hirasor and I waited, like illicit lovers, for the final assignation.

  Then his summons came.

  I will remember that last journey to the end of my days:

  My armor-plated body, all weapons systems readied; the dull, booming pain in my head keeping time with my footsteps. The walk through the complex, through which the other inhabitants seem to float like ghosts. Everything tinged faintly with red, as though the world itself is rusting. The stairs, dusted with Oblivion’s fine grit. The door, a white rectangle, that scans me with a round eye and opens in silence.

  Inside is a sparsely furnished receiving room. On a low divan sits a woman. Her hair cascades over her shoulders in black waves; her legs are crossed, her long, tapering, steel-tipped fingers folded over one knee. Her eyes are a metallic dark gray, multi-faceted like the eyes of moths; a quick blink in the direction of the door behind me, and it shuts.

  “Greetings, Suvarna,” I say, as calmly as I can, after the first heart-stopping moment. “Where’s Hirasor?”

  “Out,” she says. “I intercepted some of his messages to you. It was I who sent you the last one.”

  I am standing before her, outwardly calm, inwardly berating myself for my foolishness. Her nakalchi eyes track every move I might make, every muscle-twitch.

  “My business is with Hirasor,” I say. I am determined that at the end of it all, she will not stand between Hirasor and I.

  But she will be hard to kill.

  “I don’t think you understand,” she says, rising. She’s an impressive woman, tall, all teeth and muscle, but also beautiful.

  “This may be a game for you and him,” she says, “but my job is to keep him alive. If it hadn’t been for you, he wouldn’t have taken to planet-hopping. He wouldn’t have found this accursed place. It’s time we stopped playing, Vikram, or whatever you are calling yourself now.”

  I can sense her coming alive, the way a killer weapon comes alive when it finds its target. Through the fog in
my brain it occurs to me that Suvarna might be Hirasor’s sibling, birthed by the same mother-machine.

  I say the Word.

  “What?” she says. She laughs. “Are you trying to distract me with nonsense?”

  So it means nothing to her. She raises a finger-tip.

  The next moment my alarm system begins to scream coordinates and trajectories; I leap aside just as a spot on the wall behind me blackens with heat.

  I remember that she likes to play.

  “If only you’d left us alone,” she says, watching me. “Hirasor is old and sated now, Vikram. All he wants—I want—is to be left in peace.”

  “Don’t give me this old man nonsense,” I say breathlessly. “I know Hirasor is a nakalchi. He could live for hundreds of years.”

  She stares at me, the perfect mouth hanging slack with surprise. I tongue a mouth-dart, but she recovers quickly, catching it in mid-air with a burst of flame. It falls smoking to the floor.

  “How did you find out?”

  Before I can answer, a door opens behind her. I see real terror on her face, then, as Hirasor walks into the room.

  Except for the slight shuffle, he still walks tall, like Ravan-Ten-Heads.

  “Get out!” she tells him, covering the ground between them in long strides, watching me all the time. “I’ll deal with him!”

  He gives her a glance of pure hatred.

  “Let me fight my battles, will you?” A look passes between them, and I see in that instant that what they had once shared has turned bitter; that they are locked in their relationship out of habit and necessity rather than passion, hating each other and yet unable to let go.

  I study him as they glare at each other (one of her eyes is still tracking me). Now that I see him at close range, I am shocked by his appearance. How he has fallen! All that is left of his affectations is the silk tunic with the embroidered collar. His hair is ragged and unkempt, and his face, lean and aristocratic as a prize hound’s, is covered with scars. His burning dark eyes look out as though from a cage. I remember those eyes; I remember him peering down at me from the Harvester’s face. Silently I mouth the Word, waiting until he will be in my power.