At that moment—though any simultaneity between the Aevum and earthly time is a perception of the mind—at the instant when the Grand Junction cops finally break into the Hotel Laika’s dome, in the early morning of October 5, under the Deadlink interchange, it is midnight. The eternal midnight of the Third Time.
The vast cruciform shadow of the unfinished highway unfurls as if it has been nailed to the sky, where the stars have never been brighter. This is what Plotkin wrote in the Created World, thinks Lady van Harpel. This is what the Man from the Camp was protecting, why he sacrificed himself.
There are two women here, and two men, and one angel.
And what caused the old lady to think what she just thought is the angel that is before her, before them; it is this creature of bodily light, this combustion of a body in the invisible, this spirit of dancing sunlight.
It is Vivian McNellis.
Her body is surrounded by a globe of light, light so pure, so white-hot that it could blind you, though it has the opposite effect of making you open your eyes even wider.
The halo of light is resplendent in the darkness, a quicksilver nova sparkling in the depths of the shadows, in the middle of nowhere, in the very heart of the devolution, and inside it, what was the body of Vivian McNellis has become a slender field of luminous vibrations that physics, concreteness, supermateriality leave in no doubt.
Above the globe of light, they can all discern a strange form rising, like a double plume of fire that seems simultaneously to ascend toward the sky and descend from it. It appears to be a ladder of pure radiation, a double helix that twists in space-time just above the glorified body of what was once, perhaps, a terrestrial creature.
Jacob’s ladder, they think, almost at the same instant.
The divine Antenna, by which the body of Light will be transmitted back to its sender and its only true recipient.
Everything began a few hours earlier, when the android girl had a dream and came to wake up Lady van Harpel in her camp bed at the other end of the mobile home.
“Something is happening,” the android said.
“What do you mean?”
“I can already feel something changing in me. It is physical, not symbolic—”
“You want to talk about your baptism at two o’clock in the morning, Sydia?” asked Lady van Harpel, a bit coldly.
“I need to tell you what’s happening; it is very important!” the former orbital prostitute replied, edgily.
Sydia Nova was no longer feeling those moments of quantum correlation with the other android, the one she had become vaguely acquainted with during her stay at the Hotel Laika. Because they shared the same space-time, because they came from the same manufacturer and belonged to the same biotechnological generation, she and he were bizarrely connected.
“It’s a low-intensity connection,” she explained, “but around once a day we share a single piece of information with each other. For example, I will suddenly know that he took a night train in Thailand or a taxi in Mexico, or that he ate lamb curry in the south of India, or that he slept in a big hotel in Sydney. It’s always stochastic, very factual, very brief.”
“And?” Lady van Harpel asked.
“It hasn’t happened for more than a week. It’s over. The quantum correlation initiated by our meeting in the hotel has been annihilated. In both senses. I’m sure of it.”
“Well, that’s excellent news, Sydia. I think we can both go back to bed now.”
“No,” said the android girl. “This is only the beginning. For two days I’ve been having very violent dreams, where Plotkin and Vivian McNellis appear to me. This night it was different. It was stronger.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She’s waiting for us,” said the android girl simply. “Under the interchange. And she put the same dream message in the heads of two men living in HMV, one of whom is Father Newman, who baptized me.”
“What are you talking about?” Lady van Harpel had gotten suddenly to her feet. Her old cellular telephone beeped. It was Father Newman. He was on the way from HMV.
With another man. A man who had just arrived in the area, and who had had the same dream.
They are reunited now, under the Deadlink interchange. In human time, it is the early morning of October 5, but that means nothing here. We are in the discontinuous time of angelogenesis, circumspect time, the time that synthetically disconnects all others.
The man who has just arrived, the stranger—Lady van Harpel has met him several times during the last few weeks, during visits to HMV. He is a friend of Father Newman’s; he is Eastern European, a Catholic, and a writer. When he introduced himself to her, he explained succinctly that he used many pseudonyms, some of which he cited without evoking any memories whatsoever in Lady van Harpel’s head. Later, when she told Sydia Nova about the meeting, the android’s face went pale, her eyes glazed with a translucent film. “Jeffrey Alhambra Carpenter? Strange. That was one of the identity boxes the Machine-Child used. He read books published under that pseudonym.”
Now they are there, all four of them, under the main keystone of the abandoned interchange, facing the angel Vivian McNellis has become. Lady van Harpel knows that the man, knowing nothing of the strange link between his existence and that of a being he never knew, is yet well aware that he is present at an extraordinary event, The Event. He too had the dream, the dream that was quite simply the retrotranstemporal copy of what is happening here, now, under the interchange that stretches its huge black piles toward the golden sand of the Milky Way.
Lady van Harpel realizes at that moment that it is precisely because she is clairvoyant, a true medium, that she did not receive Vivian McNellis’s dream message as the three others did. There must always be a blind spot in one’s vision, a bit of shadow in the light. Her gifts of precognition probably prevented the retrotranscription of the event in her own brain.
Her role is different. She must observe now, during the time she has left to live here. She must observe and ensure that everything happens smoothly.
What she must do, for once, is not really see. She must simply watch.
Watch and listen.
And, if possible, hear.
“I am the fourth human face of Metatron, the Celestial Scribe. I am what has come to close the last moments of humanity, and to usher in what will succeed it. In this I am an inverted version of the Fourth Knight, but if I have come, it is because he is there. The Technical World, in a few months, will have gone. No need of a terminating Flood to condemn this humanity; it is destroying itself without any outside help. Even its most powerful technological tools have become accelerators of the entropy the whole system is experiencing. The World cannot, for all that, return to any ‘initial’ or ‘previous’ state; it combines, in its breaking down, all the phases that preceded it. The overall ‘body’ of the Metastructure is disintegrating as it copies its metabolism onto the bodybranes of the Machine-Child. It is the most perfect trap that technology could have created for itself. As you see, the disappearance of the Metastructure potentially opens a space of freedom, unless man chooses the path of false liberty, the path of anal regression, the path of crime, genocide, and tyranny; and if it thus unknowingly invokes the coming of another terminating machine, a planetary social-control structure even more terrible than what the UHU has tried to be for the past twenty years.
“My body is consuming what remains of it in you. You will know everything about me; you will know my life, everything I have done, everything I tried to do, everything I wasn’t able to accomplish. And thus you will know Plotkin, the Man from the Camp, the man invented in an isolation cell. You will know his ‘life,’ his various reconstructions. You will know the moment when he became real and alive, the moment when he chose to have a soul, the moment when he chose sacrifice so he would be able to exist. And you will thus be capable of keeping his memory alive. One of you is a writer; you know, now, that your gifts have been given to you by the Great Narrator s
o that you can, one day, pass it all along through writing.
“I am a continuity that causes rupture. I am certainly not the feminine form of Christ, who is himself a rupture that causes continuity, and those who dare to speak such rubbish should be considered anathema. I am probably analogous to Saint John the Baptist, even though I myself would fall at his feet if I had the honor to be in his presence. I explained it to Plotkin one day, my purely fictional lover, the man I could not but love when I invented him in my cell, the man who had time to love me only in a dream. I have come to close the Trinitarian square, the metaform of the tetragram that structures everything in the Created World. But I am above all else this moment that appears in the silence of God; my light is apophatic. I am not the Creator, but the translator—that which translates. I am the tree of Creation, because I am the tree of Life and Death. Remember the Writings that teach that ‘the Cross bears Fruit.’ I am the moment when the invisible becomes visible, the moment when humanity will reveal itself to itself. Understand well, that this is the meaning of the word apocalypse.
“No new religion, no sect, no schismatic branch can prevail over my passage. I am that which announces what has already been announced; I am what causes that which must happen to happen. I am what will put an end to the possible, to make of it an Act. I am that which says, predicts, pre-knows the unknowable transfiguration that will be imposed on what remains of the human beings on this planet: I put an end to the possible, but it is in order to better concentrate its fire in the beauty of the Created World. I am what will permit man to, perhaps, have a future. I am thus the pursuit of the divine program of infinite creation. I am what will divide humanity, but I am also the rest of this terrible operation—neither divider nor divided. I will resist any attempt at corruption. I will escape their box-selling labels, but because I have come, you must not let Technology destroy itself in destroying the World it will have swallowed with it. I call you to a new science, a science after science. I speak to you here and now of the Counter-World you must create.
“Unlike John the Baptist, if I speak to you of Christ, it is to warn you of the presence, already proven, of his antithesis.
“Now, without even the slightest hint of a Leviathan to dominate its instincts, crush its pretensions, maintain a semblance of order, mankind will deliver itself with terrible speed up to the abominations we now know it is capable of. Humanity will self-destruct, and you must escape from this destiny programmed by the machine but fully happening only now that it is disappearing itself.
“Though the light contained in my DNA is freeing itself and illuminating my body, my brain, each of my cells, the Light of the Created World, or rather the Light of the Creation of the World, is incorporating itself in my DNA. It is because everything given to each of us is given back to all of us, and everything given to anyone is made free itself, because the Divine Act is above all else the bringing forth of His Good to shine on His creations, and that of His creations on Him, even inside that which, in the creation, is the spark of the Act in question.
“We are worlds in ourselves, though often we lose sight of the fact that we are worlds within a Megaworld, and so we let ourselves become machines in a demiurgic Megamachine that has replaced the Created World.
“Yes, the Metastructure is dying, and thanks to this victory over death come alive I can incorporate the world without risk, and ‘die’ in my turn, but what will succeed this Global Machine, you may be assured, what will succeed it will be incomparably worse, because everything that remains of the World will have been destroyed, and Man will have no choice but to submit himself to its will in order to survive. The UHU itself was really only a prototype, a temporary stage, as the United Nations was before it. It served as a test for the next platform for general enslavement. This is already preparing itself in this world newly delivered from the chaos of the Grand Jihad; it will have learned the great lesson from the previous Metastructure: to succeed as a Megamachine, it must become a World; to enslave bodies, men must become products; to govern their consciousnesses, it must make them into thought beings, not thinking ones.
“They must reach the absolute limits of self-loathing.
“Thus the success of the Machine resides in its dissolution, but its dissolution is the beginning of its success.
“I am not the Fire cast down on Earth Jesus spoke to his apostles about. I am, rather, the Light that is withdrawing from the World in order to better fight against its darkening. I am the Fire cast into the sky, in the guise of a final incantation.
“I am the ultimate living being, sent among living beings.
“I am the final sign.
“The final sign before the Word.”
> BLACK BOX BABY
It is Sydia Nova, the android girl, who discovers it.
To be exact, it is better to say that it is Balthazar, the cyborg dog, who discovers the box.
The black box.
Closed.
He finds the strange, small monolith just under the Deadlink interchange. A human odor led him to it from fairly close by. The great mass of refugees from southern Quebec is moving east; there are more than a hundred thousand people now. It is said that they will try to force their way across the Vermont border. He is patrolling the area, scattered with isolated groups of faithless, lawless men who might break through the rear guards of the human colony. Lady van Harpel has been living permanently armed for weeks.
And now there is this odd little box under the Deadlink interchange.
Balthazar returns to Lady van Harpel’s mobile home and finds the android girl alone there. The old clairvoyant left for HMV this morning. He tells Sydia Nova of his discovery, and leads her to the abandoned interchange.
The sky is distilled into a monochrome blue that seems reflected in the milky silver of the low cumulus clouds, rising like giant pipe organs toward the zenith. The whiteness of the high-altitude clouds vibrates with this iridescence from the higher layers of the atmosphere; they throw their value into oxygenless space in ribbons that sparkle on the puffy edges of the jet streams.
Sydia Nova walks toward Deadlink, thinking that the beauty of this world lasts for only brief instants, during which it is as utterly complete as an absolute presence.
In the meantime, the box has opened. Inside there is a very simple lining of white silk, shining in the morning sun, covering the whole interior.
And in the middle of it is a baby.
A human baby.
Fists clenched. Asleep.
Later, when Lady van Harpel has joined them near the black box, Sydia Nova says: “We don’t know where he came from.”
“The child has no name,” the dog adds.
“We’ll give him one,” Lady van Harpel replies, lighting her pipe.
“But what?” the android girl demands. “We don’t even know where he—”
“Oh, yes we do,” interrupts Lady van Harpel. “We know it very well, you and I both. He is the Act made flesh. He is the product of the Creation of Vivian McNellis, of her union with Plotkin, her creation. He is a real human baby. I don’t know how they managed to do it, in a dimension we will never experience, but you can be sure of it.”
“But…that makes him the hybrid product of an angel and a human, like the terrible devouring giants from the time before the Flood, the ones written about in Genesis and the Book of Enoch—”
“No.” Lady van Harpel cuts her off coldly. “It’s exactly the opposite. Don’t forget what is said in the antique Scriptures—‘The angels fell to Earth and decided to mate with human women.’ This is an inverted and intensified version of that process. Plotkin was a man, but not really. Really, he was more than a man. And Vivian McNellis was an angel that went back up from Earth.”
The titanic nimbus clouds in the sky seem to have come just to support her imagery. There is, at this moment, another perfect balance between the Created World and their interior world. In the vault of the present that whirls in a spiral as static as it is fast, some
thing is emerging, something incredibly luminous and nearly silent, an immeasurably thin voice, a crystalline voice murmuring that all is splendid. And at that instant, that most precious second, a storm will probably break over the Adirondacks and the furnace of the Appalachians, there to the east, in the pure cobalt blue tension.
“We need to baptize this child as soon as possible,” remarks the android girl.
“Of course,” Lady van Harpel replies almost dryly. “But in the meantime we need to get him out of this box, get him back to the mobile home, and take care of him.”
“And find him a name,” adds Balthazar.
They call him Gabriel Link de Nova. It is Lady van Harpel who comes up with the name, but Sydia Nova who will be his adoptive mother.
The father?
“Ah yes, the father,” says Lady van Harpel. “His father will be here soon. Someone, a man, will come. Maybe he is already here.”
The old woman is thinking of someone. The signs are accumulating. “You found this child. It wasn’t by chance that I wasn’t there at the time, but on the road, coming back as fast as I could from HMV. I had just had a vision of it. And I found you there, where the vision told me you would be. You will be his mother. I will help you. I will be like an aunt, because you are like my sister. You are my sister. But you, clearly, will be his mother.”
The storm breaking over the Appalachians has extended its whirling arms toward this part of the Independent Territory. It has begun to rain. It will rain, without stopping, for weeks.
Later, a renegade biologist from Neon Park will be able to pinpoint the child’s age as exactly eight days at the moment the android girl discovered him.
Lady van Harpel says: “He is the child of the Eighth Day. The anticreature is contaminating and killing the monopsychic Metastructure, and Vivian McNellis has left us this baby, whom we must protect from the UHU, from the Jihad, from mankind, and from the Enemy of Man.”
Cosmos Incorporated Page 41