The ghostly child stares at him for a long time. Plotkin senses, in this small, sickly body, hovering between existence and nothingness, an unexpressed scream of terror, but also a sort of unknowable joy, as frightening in its own way as the muted cry.
He understands that in his way, the Machine-Child is telling him that he, too, is ready now.
Ready.
Not for baptism, but for birth.
And so Plotkin enters into death—or, more exactly, at that instant he becomes alive, and thus mortal. And thus immortal.
It surprises him as he leaves the black box, and he stops for an instant in front of the shabby crosses hastily mounted by Clovis Drummond, who, in his complete ignorance of the reasons behind the child’s request, mucked about like a boy with his first dildo.
This time, he falls to his knees.
He falls. As if stricken.
Catalysis. Acceleration so phenomenal that it seems to stretch into eternity. Everything is suspended; everything becomes real. No more Plotkin the Scribe in Capsule 108 and Plotkin the Killer in the world in action. Now there is something else. Something else entirely.
The Machine-Child? he wonders. Is the Machine-Child in me now?
The question hangs unanswered. He stands up, seeing only the gray wall and the face of the aluminum Christ tacked up on the false world concealing the real one. He finds himself in the service stairway, then in the dome’s entry-exit hatch, on his way to being completely reunified. There should, he thinks, be a third term for doubles become one.
Then, paralyzed, he watches as the hatch door opens in front of him.
And he finds himself face-to-face with Clovis Drummond and Cheyenne Hawkwind.
> MACHINE-HEAD
Death must come in one blow to strike the configuration that has now been created. The world must be made to understand, this world over which death reigns without ever quite being able to extinguish it completely. It is time, now, to see the dark shadow of the grim reaper coming. It is time for Plotkin to sacrifice what has been saved of him. It is time for him to become what he is.
And this must happen even though, once more, Plotkin is only one. Because in him, bit by bit, another is coming to life.
Plotkin the Killer, Plotkin the professional assassin of the Red Star Order, Plotkin the Man from the Camp, Plotkin the fictional man made flesh, the man of the Word secretly hidden in the isolation cell, faces Clovis Drummond, and he already knows what is about to happen.
He knows it completely, because it is now being directly written in him.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?” screams the fat pig in his disgusting suit, lips bluish with dope, as he comes up the stairs, furious, glassy eyes shooting darts of ice.
Just behind him, Plotkin sees Cheyenne Hawkwind open his black eyes wide in unfeigned shock and then shrug his shoulders and, with a slight gesture of his big hands, send him a message: I didn’t know you were here, and I can’t do anything to stop him.
“No matter,” Plotkin says in reply to the American Indian killer’s silent words.
“WHAT?” shouts Clovis Drummond, thinking the answer was directed at him. “YOU LITTLE PRICK! I’LL TEACH YOU TO TRESPASS IN A RED ZONE! WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING UP THERE, YOU DAMNED BASTARD?”
Plotkin looks at him with a strange feeling, almost sadness. A sort of melancholy. Pity, one might even say. Yes, he tells himself, that’s what it is. Pity.
He pities this poor human, this last of men, for devolving virtually onto all fours. He pities his flabby flesh and his baleful eyes, his face swollen from metadrugs and irregular sleep, from sadosexual neurogames and orgasmatron systems. He pities the face eaten up from the inside by death, the fat, sausagelike fingers coated with flab, playing with the string of the old leather pouch that is no doubt crammed with sexual gadgets adapted for the “body” of the Machine-Child, his living inflatable doll. He pities this poor fucker, this snitch, this pedophile. He pities his ugliness, his monstrosity, his morbid perversity. He pities poor Clovis Drummond.
Poor Clovis Drummond, who he is about to kill.
With one of the simplest yet most complex portable weapons any Order killer carries. His hands.
There are a thousand ways to kill someone with just your hands. They have been learned for centuries in all the martial arts on the planet, a nearly inexhaustible source of knowledge that orders of killers have systematically used, gathering endless resources in the huge library-bunkers in their command centers.
There are a thousand ways to kill a man with your hands. Among them are those that require just a small additional accessory—a razor, a needle, a cord, a chain, brass knuckles…
And there is a way that the Red Star Order particularly favors and uses brilliantly, thanks to its renegade biotechnicians.
It is the thousand-and-first way to kill with the hands.
The nail of Plotkin’s index finger, like the nails of all his ten fingers, was modified during the reconstruction of his body, during the first few days after his arrival at the hotel. In accordance with the genetic plan at the time he passed through the Control Arch at the Windsor astroport, it is now made of metamorphic carbo-metal with high-speed rememorization. All Plotkin has to do is mentally command the RUN BLADE program to initiate. It takes barely a thousandth of a second for the ensemble of nanocomponents built into his fingernail at the atomic level to register information. It takes barely one more thousandth of a second for the metamorphic program’s bootstrap to be triggered. Then two or three hundredths of a second more for the rest of the process to take place. All in all, an infinitesimal moment of time.
Barely visible, only just readable, nearly outside the limits of transcription.
Flash. His index finger has become a slashing weapon, very simple and very complex: an organic haft jointed at its three phalanxes and tipped with a carbon-carbon blade hybridized with a high-density crystalline structure and a polymetallic alloy mesh, around twenty centimeters long. It could slice a steel beam in half with ease.
The point of the fingernail is as sharp as a needle, its two cutting edges honed like razors.
A very simple, very complex weapon.
One that has just cleanly cut Mr. Clovis Drummond’s throat.
Later, but actually just afterward, Plotkin is under the shower in his capsule’s retractable bathroom. He far exceeds the standard allowance, emptying his bank account as he orders the tank to rain a continual stream of hot water down on his body. It seems like a strange, condensed duplication of the world’s voodoo economy: empty the bank account/empty the tank, money/water, water/blood, blood/money. IF YOU EXCEED 30 LITERS OF WATER, YOU WILL EXCEED THE STANDARD DAILY AMOUNT INCLUDED IN THE ROOM RATE, AND YOUR ACCOUNT WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE DEBITED. IF YOU EXCEED 50 LITERS OF WATER, YOU MUST PAY DOUBLE-PRICE. IF YOU EXCEED 100 LITERS, YOU MUST PAY TEN TIMES THE PRICE. AND IF YOU EXCEED 150 LITERS, EXPRESS AUTHORIZATION OF THE CONSORTIUM WILL BE REQUIRED. The water pummels his body, the body that is both physical and fictive, the body in which a third narrative, that of the finally reincorporated Machine-Child, is beginning.
Eighth Day.
The child of the Eighth Day.
Plotkin senses with his whole being that Vivian McNellis is retrowriting this experience in the Created World somewhere.
Somewhere.
Something.
Someone.
Images of Clovis Drummond’s murder float in his consciousness like sparkling clouds, full of a storm of blood.
The metamorphic blade sketches a majestic semicircle in the close confines of the stairway, and it is as if it opens the abyss of a world.
It slices the flesh like a high-intensity laser beam. The veins and arteries bisect cleanly—jugular, carotid, fat open under the icy slash of the hand-that-kills. The muscles retract at the blade’s passage through their fibers—the nerves, bones, spinal cord, vertebrae, cartilage—all give way in the same demonic fraction of a second.
Clovis Drummond’s head stays fixed on h
is shoulders for a moment, an indescribable grimace on the lips, wobbling slightly on the base of his neck where a red line appears, a very red line, a line that gushes first drops, then streams of blood down the man’s chest. Then, like a 110-floor tower falling after the core infrastructure has been destroyed, leaving it to the mercy of earthly gravity, Clovis Drummond falls apart. His head falls strangely, rolling away off to the side, while his stubby legs bend as if the kneecaps have turned to spheres of vaporous jelly. The arms make a few sporadic movements, like the wings of a sick bird trying feebly to fly. Finally the body falls backward, landing with a thump like a sack of rags against the stairway wall.
Clovis Drummond’s head has rolled down a dozen steps like a spongy balloon emitting red-violet spray before knocking into the bottom of the escape-hatch door, precisely between Cheyenne Hawkwind’s feet. The man automatically kicks away the head with its fixed rictus, its eyes hardly more dead now than when Drummond was alive—glassy, immobile, cold as those of a dead fish—toward the corner of the wall and the first tread of the staircase. The head seems to fix a blind eye on the surveillance camera. There are drops of blood everywhere in the access cage. On the steps, the walls, the doors. On Cheyenne Hawkwind’s shoes. And on Plotkin’s too.
Plotkin hears himself tell the American Indian killer: “There’s a responsibility you don’t have to worry about anymore. Consider your contract null and void.”
“Right, except that I’m your accomplice. I think you should reconsider about the contract.”
“Half, no more. Twenty thousand Pan-Am.”
“Half will be just fine.”
“Perfect,” Plotkin says. “The escape hatch and the dome are cut off from the hotel’s AI, thanks to the careful work of Mr. Drummond himself. We can work in peace.”
“What do you mean?”
“Clean. And put what’s left of Mr. Clovis Drummond somewhere.”
“Where?”
Later Plotkin will remember his own smile, the regal smile he offers Cheyenne Hawkwind now, a very gentle, radiant smile, like the sun, capable of consuming an entire world.
“Guess.”
Later, as the last legally permitted liters of water stream over his body, sending up a mist that dissipates in a cabin too small for such extravagant consumption—later, as he tries to wash his body clean of invisible blood—he thinks about the grotesque tomb provided for Clovis Drummond: the black box of the dome, just where the fat man had previously shut the Machine-Child away.
For even greater safety, with Cheyenne Hawkwind’s help Plotkin had stuffed the decapitated corpse of the Hotel Laika’s manager into the nanoprogrammable suit that had once been used to hold the ghostly creature from Deadlink born of Vivian McNellis’s narrative. He had used a few carbon-carbon staples he found in a box in a corner of the Box-House along with their magnetic projection gun to reattach the head to the body. Drummond the tinkerer, the attacher of crucifixes on demand, king of the aphroditech pump.
He had reprogrammed the iron lung to contain Clovis Drummond’s great recapitated bulk, setting it to maximum opacity. Then he had started the system back up.
The nanocomputers, the optic peripheral machines, the holoplasmic machines, all hummed back into life, hooked up to the dead body of Clovis Drummond, scanning the organism—already breaking down in the seething entropy of a cadaver—with the silent avidity of a fisherman for the entry-exit modules, the access portals to a mind that no longer existed. “Yes,” Plotkin had said. “There’s a treat for the Metastructure.”
He knows with absolute certainty that, with this action, he condemned the Metastructure to death. That he has just initiated a Larsen effect that will prove deadly to death itself. As for what else he has accomplished, he really has no idea.
Later still, as the night envelops the universe in a blue box and the cosmodrome lights form a cold, crystalline arc, something happens inside him.
Something violent. Something that he feels is his price to pay. He understands that he is going to die. That the share of sacrifice he has dared to accept will perfectly balance the killing of Clovis Drummond. He will die, that is certain, but will he die until he is dead? Or will he die into another life?
Then something, a voice that seems to come from a hole brighter than the sun and whose ardent Face resembles that of a man; a voice speaks—writes itself on his consciousness. It is like a laugh, silvery and soft. “We will find a way to preserve the part of you that is pure, the part you knew to foster within yourself.”
“Who are you?” he asks via his neural typewriter, the neuro–word processor that is now turning him into his own book. “My guardian angel?”
There is no formal response, no voice, but the silence that answers him shines with a light that fills him with joy.
Thus he senses the “presence” of other “beings.” Other angels.
The disappearance of the false Metatron, that simulacrum of a simulacrum, that fiction of a fiction, that termination of the agent of the World, has opened the door to another form of reality. There isn’t only the Celestial Scribe, the real one; there are a multitude of beings. They don’t all have the same power over you, but some of them seek to deprive you, while others try to ensure that this effort will fail.
The angels make war with one another over Man. And for each individual man, a specific combination of forces comes into play.
He asks for a miracle. Words, impressions, even voices are no longer enough. “What do you want,” they ask in unison. “What do you want of us? Do you want to see images?”
He senses all the menace contained in this interrogative injunction. He understands that the face of the angel can be glimpsed through the filter of machine-disconnections of the Imaginary, especially those of the neurogenerative writing with an unknown, mutant, constantly mutating form of which Vivian Velvet McNellis contaminated her brain. But to be confronted with “the image of a Universe whose face is that of a man,” as Chesterton said, “is to fall with one’s face pressed against the earth.”
> SPUTNIK CENTENNIAL
It is the morning of October 4.
October 4, the day of the Sputnik Centennial. The day on which, according to the initial plans of his own consciousness, he was to Kill the Mayor of This City.
It is October 4, and he should have been ready for that first mission.
Not only is he not ready, it is as if he never would be, as if he never could have been. He is in the double Capsule 081, Capsule A, with Jordan McNellis. The light-body of his sister floats behind the cellulose partition, illuminating the two rooms with no need for additional artificial light. Dawn is breaking. Pressing his nose against the eastern-facing window, he can see the final preparations at the cosmodrome for the nocturnal launch of J.T. Lagrange’s rocket, the high point of the spectacle.
Grand Junction has transformed itself during these early hours into a vast Starnival—festive, parodic, terminal. There are parade floats with effigies of great space equipment, lunar and Martian robots, replicas of the Apollo, Mercury, Gemini, Skylab, Soyuz, Vostok, Voskhod, and Salyut capsules, and of course Sputnik itself, in a leitmotif repeated thousands of times in every conceivable form. The jubilant crowd resembles one of the old Star Trek fan conventions, where “Trekkies” adopted the costumes, masks, attitudes, and language of the characters from the 1960s televised series. Here there are astronauts, extraterrestrials, mutants, superheroes and heroines, and creatures of every imaginable and imagined species. Institutional and festival science fiction, for a fiction of science that is firing its last rounds, Plotkin thinks.
“We can’t leave with my sister in this condition,” Jordan McNellis says.
“No, of course not,” Plotkin replies.
“We can watch the blastoff and the fireworks on television,” says the young man, apologizing for the failure.
“No matter, really. This anniversary is a masquerade; it’s just a blastoff like any other. Have you registered the claim with the local UHU office?�
�
“Yes. The launch on a Delta rocket is confirmed for October 22. Less than three weeks from now.” The youth casts a sad glance toward the suite’s other cabin. Obviously, it will be too late.
Plotkin stares at him, saying nothing.
The young man seems almost too naïve. Doesn’t he understand that his sister never really belonged to this world, that she was returning to her own? Wasn’t it Denys the Areopagite who described divine unity as a processive movement of the Good toward the Good via its own Creation?
In a few weeks, Jordan June McNellis will fly away from Grand Junction to return to the Ring.
But in a few hours, his sister will rejoin the Celestial Scribe. She will be well out of this damned Earth, and its orbital survival arches too.
He is a human being now, a living being like the others. He bears the Machine-Child within him, but it is like a transcription. The operation is probably on its way to success in the Created World; it will be the last legacy of Vivian McNellis, the last legacy of the agent of Metatron to these last humans. He asks Jordan for permission to visit his sister in the other capsule.
“She told me to warn you—this is the final phase before her incorporation into the cosmos, the final phase before the Glorious Body. Her…her death is imminent now.”
“You know there is no such thing as death.”
Jordan does not reply. He leans on the small lever that causes the separating partition to slide aside on its rails. The light strikes Plotkin’s irises like the red light of the laser at the Windsor astroport a million years ago, but it is a globe of pure gold, and inside this sphere of solar light that seems both to come from the sun and to return to it, the body of Vivian McNellis seems as if it is subject to strange and continual transformations, like another state of being.
Optical effects?
She is close and far away at the same time; she seems larger but also much smaller; and—most of all—it is impossible to tell exactly where she is.
Cosmos Incorporated Page 38