Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  The wizard drew up a chair and sat down, cackling with glee. He loved this program! It was even better than the one with the tall dark-haired warrior woman and her blond friend… .

  Alex Irvine is the author of A Scattering of Jades, (Tor Books, 2002) and the forthcoming One King, One Soldier (Del Rey, 2004). His short story collection Unintended Consequences is due from Subterranean Press this year. He has also published short fiction in (among other places) F&SF, Asimov’s, Sci Fiction, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and was coeditor of The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives. He lives in Portland, Maine. His Web site is http://alexirvine.net.

  REFORMATION

  Alex Irvine

  ALIF LAM MIM

  Enter.

  ALIF LAM MIM SAD

  Marwan does one last dry run before putting his life on the line. He slips through the outer layers of Southern Baptist Convention security, in and out like a needle through a balloon, and then the Assemblies of God. He does not bother with the Lutherans or Presbyterians or Methodists; they have no security worth noting, not really. The Methodists even permit their congregants to own personal computers. The great temple in Jerusalem is more difficult, especially since the virus terrorism of 2013, and the thickets of security protecting the magnificent Mosque of the Prophet in Medina are a still sterner test of his abilities. Marwan does not dare approach the Vatican, not yet. He will get only one opportunity there, and he will have to make that one count.

  Ghosting in and out, he monitors his pursuit. A few strays from the Assemblies of God, a few more from Jerusalem and Mecca. All easily dusted off. The kind of thing he’s been doing since he was eleven.

  He sits in his apartment off Ford Road in Dearborn, Michigan, with the shades drawn. It is five in the morning. Time to pray. Marwan removes his sneakers and his Detroit Red Wings baseball cap. He knows he should wash, but he does not. He unrolls his prayer rug in the living room and kneels on it, facing the balcony. As he bows to touch his forehead to the rug, the first rays of the sun find their way through the drapes and strike the top of his head.

  ALIF LAM RA

  Marwan never prays to be saved, or to be martyred. He never prays for the souls of his mother and father, dead in an auto accident the previous spring. He never prays for the money to go to university; he can read, and his mother taught him how to learn. He prays only that he is doing the right thing, and asks God to tell him if he is not. So far he has not heard from God, and he carries with him a bone-deep certainty that he has understood the signs of the times and that he has chosen the only course of action possible.

  He speaks of this with no one. Not the rental office on the first floor of his building, where he drops off the check on the first of every month. Not the restaurant where he buses tables and washes dishes to afford his three rooms. Not the four hundred or so other worshipers at the Beit Jalal mosque in Dearborn Heights.

  And especially not those faceless searchers he encounters on-line, his fellow travelers. He is more careful with them than with any church or synagogue or mosque.

  Not for long, though. Fairly soon all his cards will be on the table.

  The sun is fully up, and the day promises to be hot. Marwan opens the drapes and steps out onto his nineteenth-floor balcony. A couple of miles from his building, Dearborn gives way to Detroit: a lesson in the infliction of the sins of the father onto the sons. The assembly line took its first steps in Dearborn and sowed the seeds of its own destruction in Detroit. As Marwan gazes off to the east, the sun shines down on 900,000 Detroiters in a city built for two million. From where he stands, Marwan can see trees growing through the roof of an abandoned factory that once produced ball bearings.

  He cannot help it; this is what he sees when he thinks of the Neo-platonists—Augustine, al-Farabi, and all the rest—and their City of God. Henry Ford had been Detroit’s tin god, and the results spread ruined and empty as far as Marwan can see. Down near the river, heavy traffic congeals around office towers, buses idle in front of casinos, new stadia shine brightly in the June morning. But between Foxtown and Telegraph Road, the city is as empty as if a great plague had passed.

  Will I change any of that? Marwan asks himself. And has no answer.

  ALIF LAM MIM RA

  Of all the numbers, the number nineteen is the most holy. The number of verses in the Qur’an is 6,346—a multiple of nineteen, whose digits add up to nineteen, as well. The number of suras in the Qur’an is 114, a multiple of nineteen. The basmala occurs 114 times in the Qur’an, and each basmala is nineteen letters. The first and last revelations consist of nineteen words. And so on. Nineteen, Marwan believes, is the number of God. This is certainly true in Detroit, where the number nineteen hangs in the rafters of Ilitch Arena, memorializing the great Steve Yzerman’s four Stanley Cup triumphs between 1997 and 2003. Marwan is a great fan of the Detroit Red Wings, and when he sees that number 19 hanging above the ice, a peace comes over him. Surely he has chosen the right place.

  He is back at his computer, preparing for the day. A distracted part of his mind wonders what Martin Luther thought of the number nineteen. Another distracted fragment wonders if he might better have pursued his goals in Denver, where Joe Sakic wore 19, or New York, where Mike Bossy wore 19, or …

  Names from my childhood, Marwan thinks. Names my father would mention when we were watching the Red Wings. “Poniatowski reminds me of Mike Bossy, you know, he wore nineteen, too. But Yzerman was the best of all of them.” And they have percolated into my mind, become my own comparisons and touchstones even as I put away childish things.

  In high school, Marwan read a play called Everyman. Summoned by death, Everyman fears that he cannot complete the voyage to Heaven alone. His friends Kindred, Cousin, Fellowship, and Goods cannot accompany him. In the end, only Good Deeds—previously neglected—steps forward and finishes the journey with Everyman. Along the way, Knowledge offers himself: “Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide.” The line has not left Marwan’s head since he read the play, now eighteen months ago.

  Marwan’s father and mother were still alive when he read the play, still there with him to be his guides. No state policeman had yet come to his door with rounded shoulders and shifting eyes. No doctors had yet touched him on the shoulder and left him alone in a cold white room with two sheeted bodies. And he had not yet suffered the comfort of hearing that all was well, that Imad and Ayat Aziz were gone to whence they’d come, absorbed back into the divine. Gone home.

  He had gone to school the next day because he didn’t know what else to do, and he stayed after Edsel Ford High School had emptied of everyone but custodians and off-season football players. Not knowing where else to go, he had wandered into the shop classroom, where old Mr. Krause was still tinkering.

  “Krause,” Marwan said.

  Krause was the only person in the world Marwan knew who seemed like he really knew what was going on. You were having trouble with an English paper, your car, your girlfriend, you went to Krause, and he made it all make sense. He was about five feet seven and weighed maybe three hundred pounds, wore his hair slicked back over his bald spot, and collected kids’ toys from the 1970s. A strange guy; the general consensus around Edsel Ford was that the cops would come looking for him one day.

  But on this day, it was important to Marwan only that Krause knew what was happening inside him.

  “Z,” said Krause. He had a nickname for everyone.

  “My parents were killed yesterday.”

  “I heard.” Krause looked closely at Marwan. “It hasn’t hit you yet, has it? You’re still—”

  “Are they gone, Krause?”

  A pause. “Depends on how you mean that, I guess, but I’d have to say yeah. They’re gone.”

  “Not in paradise, or heaven, or nirvana, or any of that shit.”

  “Z, are you a religious kid?”

  Marwan had to think carefully about this. “I think so.”

  “That’s the problem with this, isn’t it?
Someone told you something, and you don’t know what to do with it.”

  “One of the nurses,” Marwan said slowly. “She said my mom and dad were gone home. Taken back into the divine or whatever.”

  “Reabsorbed, huh? That’s what’s bugging you.”

  “If that’s what happens, then they’re dead in heaven, too, Krause. What’s the point?”

  Krause shifted his bulk in his chair and stroked his goatee. Marwan began to cry. The tears came slow and hard, and each breath tore itself loose of his diaphragm. Krause let him go for a while. Then he said, “Z.”

  Marwan wiped his eyes.

  “What the nurse gave you was emanationism. All worldly things come from the divine and disappear back into it when they die, and so on. Neoplatonism, the whole idea of forms and the material world being a debased reflection of what’s up there.” Krause pointed to the water-stained acoustic tiles over his desk. “You, you probably grew up thinking you were Muslim, even though any kid who really grows up in America can’t have a pure religion. It’s not that kind of a place. Here’s the test: If you’re a real Muslim, you have to believe that the Qur’an was dictated to Mohamed by God, and that even though it’s full of contradictions and long bits of just plain loopiness, it’s the infallible word of God. You believe that?”

  No, Marwan realized. I don’t. I never did, really.

  In that moment something fell into place within him, and he fell away from the comfortable osmotic religion that had been the background noise of his childhood and adolescence. Krause saw it happen.

  “Right,” he said. “That’s crazy. No rational person can believe that. Mohamed was a reformer, Z. He looked around him and saw all the craziness on the Arabian peninsula fourteen hundred years ago, the tribal wars and infighting, and then he saw how the Christians were going gangbusters up north and the Jews were holding on like they always had, and he had a divine vision that would make it all right. For my money, Mohamed was more like Martin Luther than like Abraham. Luther nailed his theses to the door because he wanted to get the church back to the source, the unmediated relationship with God. And that’s the argument of Islam, that the other People of the Book have gotten it all wrong, and that the Qur’an will come along and get back to God.” Krause shrugged. “You should go off and read the Sufis. You don’t believe the Qur’an is divine dictation, you’re a Sufi anyway. They’re all about looking behind the words, them and the Kabbalists and the rest.” He reached out a meaty hand and punched Marwan in the shoulder. “You’ve got a lot to think about. I’m sorry about your mom and dad, Z. Come back if you want to talk more.”

  “Yeah,” Marwan said.

  “Oh. You’re into math, right?”

  Marwan nodded.

  “Then you should check out the Brethren of Purity, Z. They’ll be right up your alley.”

  Marwan went straight from Krause’s classroom to his car, and then straight out I-94 to Ann Arbor. No way would the Dearborn library have what he was looking for. He needed a university library. He found the Ikhwan al-Safa, and the Sufis, and read until the library closed at midnight, and that night he went home and in the midst of his mourning thought, All over the world there are people like me, suffering because they are told what is not true. Somewhere my mother and father stand together with God, and are complete. But who has gone with them to be their guide?

  Mind wandering still, Marwan thinks that Martin Luther and Mohamed would have had much to talk about. A grin passes over Marwan’s face as he wonders if the Prophet ever dispelled the Devil with flatulence, as Martin Luther so famously did.

  Today is Marwan’s nineteenth birthday.

  ALIF LAM RA

  He has planned his action for early afternoon, when network traffic is at its most intense: East Coast American markets closing and people checking e-mail before leaving work, business use on the West Coast peaking, and markets in the Pacific Rim heating up along with the business of the day in Tokyo, Shanghai, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. It will be 1900 Greenwich Mean Time.

  He takes a disk from an envelope and watches the sunlight play across its shining surface. He has created this on a computer far from his home, at public terminals in Walled Lake and Eastpointe and Inkster and even Windsor, south across the river. All his reading, all his desire, all his sorrow and hope have gone into it. Somewhere in its rainbowed interior, the broken symmetry of the technical and the mystical is restored.

  The disk rests on the lip of a slot in Marwan’s terminal. The tip of his right index finger exerts gentle pressure on the rim of the disk. There is no way to be certain that what he is planning will work. It may be that when he inserts the disk, he will wreak changes greater than he imagines.

  What changes?

  God: stop me if I am doing wrong.

  He does not know which God he expects to hear his prayer. With a soft whir the disk disappears into the slot.

  KHAF HA’ YA ‘AIN SAD

  Marwan has named the font Brethren, after the Ikhwan al-Safa, the Brethren of Purity. The Brethren had flourished briefly in Basra nearly a thousand years ago and left behind only one work, a cryptic and self-contradictory collection of notes amassed over a period of years. Reading the Brethren the year before, with his parents still unburied and a great many of his tears still unshed, Marwan had thought, This is crap. Emanationist crap, to borrow Krause’s word. Why did he want me to read this?

  Then a diamond, the kind of signal idea that redeems hours and days spent bleary-eyed in the stacks of the university library. The Brethren had believed that the study of Number—of astronomy, geometry, algebra, and music—would bring the student to the mind of God. The simplicity of this idea took Marwan like a lover, and he clung to it as he read Pythagoras and even when he read the attack of the great al-Ghazali, who excoriated what he saw as the Brethren’s watery ecumenical mysticism, claiming they denied the omnipotence of God.

  But the Brethren had seen no conflict between philosophical and religious truth: Mathematics, number, was the way to the mind of God.

  Computation on the fingers, making the body into a number, approaches divinity. (And did not the Brethren and al-Farabi and even al-Ghazali—and the Christian Gnostics—agree that when a man knows himself he begins to know God?) Computation in the gold and silicon universe of the microchip is as near to God as man has yet approached.

  That will change, Marwan says to himself. He almost speaks aloud, and a chill runs up the back of his neck. There is no reason to believe that speaking now would influence anything, but he has not uttered a word aloud since calling in sick at the restaurant the previous Saturday. Four days.

  In addition to mathematics, Marwan’s real interest since middle school has been programming. He went through a phase of hacking, just like most kids he knew, and then when they all drifted away he kept investigating. The Virt seduced him, and never mind what the faithful said. Out there in the Virt was a new kind of world waiting to be born. It lay like the Golem, awaiting the Word.

  Now Marwan thinks he has found the words.

  He started designing the Brethren font shortly after another conversation with Krause. “You know,” said the shop teacher, “the real miracle of the Qur’an is supposed to be its language. Arabic is the only language, God’s language. What language do you think God speaks?” That night, Marwan had started looking into fonts. How they worked, what made each letter mean what it meant. Then he started working.

  After six months, he thought he was on to something. After a year, he was poised between exaltation and panic. This morning, with the disk in the slot and the low hum of the processor drinking it all in, he is somehow distant.

  He looks at it as it unspools onto his monitor. Each letter living, breathing. Not just programmable—intelligent. Able to interact with the letters next to it. And each letter charged with its history in the Qur’an and the sound and meaning of its cognates in the Torah, Aramaic and Greek and Hebrew all standing behind the beautiful calligraphy of the Brethren characters.
/>   Hypersignification.

  Brethren is the first language to speak to the totality of the Virt. (And there’s that image again, the one Marwan cannot quite force himself not to think of; for if man is in the image of God, is not God an image of man? A line from Ibn al-Arabi’s poetry floats through Marwan’s mind: “He praises me and I praise Him, He worships me and I worship Him.”) Marwan is not a linguist; he is almost a mathematician; he is a programmer of notable dexterity; he is a believer of terrible intensity. There is no violence in him save when he considers repression. He watches the Brethren font with an excitement like heat in the pit of his stomach. Before his eyes, Arabic and English characters are transformed. The letters that replace them gather expectantly on his desktop. Each, he realizes, is a language unto itself, or perhaps a virus. All fonts are codes, but the Brethren is alive. Each letter of it is alive. Marwan’s fingers hesitate above his keyboard; every stroke now will be a conversation, an argument, a prayer.

  In the beginning was the Word, John had said. And the Kabbalists broke it down further, reasoning that before there could be a Word, there must have been letters. And Mohamed himself, in his recitation of the Qur’an, had placed letters at the beginning of certain suras. In those letters, Marwan thought a week or so after the last conversation with Krause, is the answer to a question we have not yet learned how to ask. He used them as the basis for the Brethren font.

  The other worshipers at the Beit Jalal mosque in Dearborn Heights do not know that Marwan owns a networked personal computer. They do not know that he has sold his parents’ house to finance a firehose connection and processors that would be the envy of many university physics departments … and the small jack drilled into the mastoid bone behind his right ear. If they knew about these things, Marwan would certainly not be welcome at prayers anymore. It is entirely possible that other young men, so like himself in so many ways, would force their way into his apartment and destroy his terminals. A weight of history and tradition lies behind this.