“Yes, Doctor.”
“I have endured much trouble to acquire you. Now that I have you I hope my trouble is at an end.”
“I would not want to cause the doctor any hardship.” I had seen him use that ebon cane. It was not something I wished to see again.
The Doctor gave a curt nod and said, “Then follow me, a step behind and to the right. If you think to leave me, ever, remember that token identifies you as my property.” He looked me up and down.
I nodded. He turned and marched down the cobbled path before us. Of course I followed, but not without a final glance at the portal from which we had emerged.
The door was set in the ivy-choked base of a monumental statue crowded on three sides by an overgrown garden. The cobbled path from the door was only saved from strangling hedges by wrought-iron fences near-invisible for greenery. It wasn’t until I had gone a dozen paces down the cobbled path, and toward the city’s vista, that I could see the structure in whole.
It was an ancient marble cenotaph, set in the rear of an old cemetery. Though the statue faced away from me, I couldn’t help but note its resemblance to Doctor Bel.
Part V
The central island of Thalassus divided itself to three parts, just as many philosophies divide man into threes.
The largest part was the center of the government, the civic buildings that huddled to the sides of the Monad like suckling young to their mother. The Protectory was buried underneath the mass of the government there.
Next largest was the Theopolis, the spiritual center of the city-state. A thousand recognized churches radiated from the obelisk known as the Arm of God. Within its hagiocracy, hives of theologists struggled to unify diverse faiths, from that of the Hylotheists, who worship all material life, to that of the Necrolaters, who pray only to the dead.
The smallest part was the Academy, whose buildings radiated from its own crumbling library. Unlike the Theopolis, the Academy of Thalassus had been giving ground for centuries. Doctor Bel was a member of the Academy, though his exact relationship to it was never clear to me.
The place he took me was deep under the Academy. We reached it by traveling through the Library, an edifice as ancient—if not as imposing—as the Monad itself. The Library was a massive iron dome supported by marble columns five paces in diameter. The walls between the columns were made from slabs of every description, granite, marble, lapis, onyx, quartz, fossilized wood. What connected every panel was the fact that each piece was inscribed in an ancient language, hieroglyphs and dead scripts past translating. A few may not have been carved on Gaea. From the wooded plaza surrounding it, it seemed that the Library blotted out half the sky.
Doctor Bel led me down into the Library, down into levels that reached as deep as the Protectory. The stacks were mazelike and endless, their contents unmoved for centuries. Books hid behind glass hazed by dust, and the only light came from a lantern Doctor Bel had taken from the upper levels.
Deep under the Library, we came to a massive room with an arched ceiling and marble walls. Great shelves reached above us, heavy carved wood inlaid with dark onyx that formed faint geometric patterns that could have been a language themselves. These shelves held more than books, scrolls and the engraved plaques that spoke to the Academy’s machines. Other objects sat covered by dusty glass jars or in dull metallic reliquaries.
One arcane object that still remains fresh in my memory was a metallic skull. Human in outline, it was formed of gray steel, etched with rectilinear grooves that sank deep beneath its surface. The teeth were white enamel, grayed only by a thin layer of dust. As Doctor Bel passed it, I caught sight of a complex nest of clockwork, wires and hoses behind the eye-sockets.
Then his lamp had passed, casting the interior of the skull back into darkness.
I cannot account for why such an effigy would fill me with such dread. All I can say is that when I saw it, I remained frozen in place for so long that Doctor Bel came back and grabbed my arm to hurry me along.
Within the museum of unused objects, Doctor Bel had made his home. It amounted to a Spartan apartment in the midst of the stacks, framed by a series of long tables crowded with piles of papers cast around with no discernable pattern.
“You shall touch nothing,” he told me. He pointed to a cot that was set off from everything else by a single cloth screen. “You shall sleep there. On the bed are clothes appropriate for a student, something to replace those putrescent rags you’re wearing.”
I stared a moment at the bed behind the screen, a single thin mattress with a simple cloth blanket. It was the peak of opulence compared to the cell I had so recently left. Still, because of the odd defect of my deliberate memory, my old life as a courtesan was fresh in my mind and I was not as grateful as I should have been.
A gray uniform lay folded on the foot of the bed. The fibers shimmered slightly and felt soft to my hand. Looking at my hand, I saw the meaning of Doctor Bel’s use of the word “putrescent.” Filth crusted my skin forming a collage of black, brown and green.
“Doctor, is there a place I can wash?”
He stared at me long and stern, his hollowed face resembling a parchment cousin to the metal skull we had passed. I half-expected him to rebuke me for talking out of turn. Instead he gestured with his cane toward an elaborately decorated armoire set beyond the long tables. “You may use my cabinet.”
The device was unfamiliar, but I was unwilling to tempt Doctor Bel’s goodwill by asking further questions. I had learned long ago that men of authority are rarely willing to accommodate the idiosyncrasy of my memory. Easier for me to relearn some mistakenly discarded gram of knowledge than it was to admit my own defect to others.
The armoire was thick glass, embossed with basreliefs of extinct sea creatures. Behind the glass I saw water fill voids behind the transparent sculpture. When I touched it, the doors swung open, making me afraid that I would release a flood in Doctor Bel’s library.
There was no flood. The water I saw was between the glass and a flexible membrane that formed a man-sized cocoon within the cabinet. I hesitated a moment, and only stepped inside because I could feel Doctor Bel’s attention riveted on me.
I stepped into the folds of the membrane, and turned to face the doors as they closed on me. Once sealed inside I could only see a vague blur through the glass. The membrane rolled itself upward, like a stocking. The water spun in a vortex around my legs, spiraling up my body as the membrane rolled upwards.
The sensation was fascinating, the fluid tugged at my skin and clothes with a weight beyond its mass. Slick and heavy, it dragged across my body with increasing speed. It reached my face before I had time to truly fear what was happening.
But before unease became panic, a new membrane—or the same one, I could not tell—rolled up from the floor, pushing the vortex behind it. The doors opened before me and I stepped out.
“Next time,” Doctor Bel said, “You should remove your clothing.”
I looked down and saw that in addition to the filth that had encrusted my body, the doctor’s cabinet had removed the rags I had worn in the confine of the Protectory. I stood naked in front of Doctor Bel.
Oddly, I felt uneasy and vulnerable. It was uncanny, the desire I felt to cover myself, when I had the fresh memory of standing uncovered and unconcerned before a pederast more completely loathsome than Doctor Bel could hope to be. The only account I had for my unease was the fact that the doctor did not look upon my nakedness as a man should. He observed me much as I imagined he might regard some dusty relic.
I turned away from him, toward the armoire. I saw no sign of my old clothing floating in its aqueous embrace.
The last signs of my confinement had been washed away.
Part VI
“I am a historian,” Doctor Bel told me the next morning. “You will assist me with my studies.”
I nodded. I understood my position and how to acquiesce to the desires of men. The fact that Doctor Bel’s desires were not of the physical realm did not c
hange that, though I was concerned that the skills I had chosen to remember in my life were not ones appropriate to his particular interests. However, I was not prepared to question his choice of students.
I sat in the center of his museum of antique curiosities, wearing the strange gray coverall he had provided and an expression I hoped was appropriately studious.
“The theologists call this the twelfth age of man. Do you understand what that means?”
I shook my head. It was not a fact I had cared to remember.
“An age, a great turn in the cycle, represents how long it takes humanity to rise from barbarism, achieve civilization, and then return again to barbarism. How often this has happened on Gaea is unknown to anyone but the gods of the theologists.”
“How then do they know this is the twelfth age?”
“This is where theology differs from science, my student. It is so because the sacred writings say so. Questioning such revelations is a sin—as much a sin as questioning the Monad.”
Again, I was distressed at how casually he treated the authority of the Monad. However, I was able to conceal my discomfort as Doctor Bel expounded on the ages of man, such as were known by him.
Many times, humanity had destroyed its own civilization. Doctor Bel talked of many great disasters; wars, plagues, great shifts in the skin of Gaea itself, he even talked of the skies themselves giving way.
According to Doctor Bel, Gaea’s diadem, the great arch in the nighttime sky, was the remnant of a cosmic disaster that not only ended a human civilization, but came close to destroying Gaea itself.
Before the catastrophe, Gaea had a partner in her dance through the cosmos, an orb that circled her as she circled the sun. This was the greatest age of knowledge, when men had crafted machines indistinguishable from themselves. Machines that thought, that bled, that loved, that hated. Machines that could replace man in every aspect. Machines that were too perfect. The wars razed much of the surface of Gaea, and tore her partner apart in the sky.
From the memory of this came one of the universal commandments of the theologists: “Do not bring life to the unliving.” A command common to all faiths, all gods.
Doctor Bel mourned at the knowledge that was lost. Men had conquered disease, hunger, even death itself. An idyll for millennia. A realm of order and understanding. He talked of this age as if it were a lost loved one. I thought I understood him now. His crimes against the Monad were not impulses of anarchism. They were the acts of someone who lived more in a past age then the one he inhabited.
Surrounded by his artifacts, I thought he must feel as if he had lived through that past idyll, and longed to return.
“You know nothing of this past age, do you?” asked Doctor Bel.
The desire in Doctor Bel’s eyes, the only true emotion that breached his stoicism, would have been familiar to any courtesan. I was unsure if truth was the most appropriate response.
“Nothing beyond what you have just told me.”
He drew a sheaf of yellowed paper from his desk. On the pages, I could see the twisted sigils of the Monad’s engines, a record that only a mechanician or his engines could decipher. Doctor Bel scanned the page as if he could actually read the tiny holes.
“Do you know why you were confined?”
“I upset a bureaucrat.”
“The official record,” Doctor Bel looked down at the page in front of him. “ ‘The acquisition of knowledge forbidden by the state.’ ”
I furrowed my brow, quite unsure of what that meant.
“I found you because of your interest in relating tales of a prior age.”
Now, I understood. Somehow, Doctor Bel had found the transcription of the tale I had related to the pederast. My indiscretion continued to affect my fate. The doctor had uncovered my tale of the age when sodomites were put to death by stoning.
This made me uneasy, because I was unsure how Doctor Bel would react to me if he knew that that tale arose from the caprice of my self-fragmenting memory and not any particular interest in the past. Fortunately, I thought, he seemed unconcerned with how I came by the tale.
“After some years of research, I have determined that you are the only one who can assist me.”
I nodded, wondering to myself for the first time since my imprisonment, why I would have chosen to remember that particular tale. I looked up at Doctor Bel.
“May I ask you a question, Doctor?”
He nodded his assent.
“Why would my tale be knowledge forbidden by the state?”
“The past is dangerous,” he told me. “The Monad has decreed that there was no existence before the Monad itself existed. The only exception is the scriptures of the theologists, which are matters of faith. Should anyone else present as fact a history of events before the Monad, they are apostate and imprisoned. The only legal history is the history of the Monad.”
Again, I revised my opinion of Doctor Bel, he was an anarchist bent on an impossible revolt against law and the Monad.
Part VII
The next days, I chose to remember little; only simple facts that occupied little space in my crowded memory, just enough to convince Doctor Bel that I was actually listening to his forbidden tales of prior ages.
I now remember only one scene before the doctor’s expedition:
I was prostrate on a table in some deep part of the Library. Surrounding me was a mechanical cage that seemed to be some hellish cousin to the Doctor’s watery armoire. Water did not surround me, but the air between me and the cage was thick with potential. However, it was not the heavy air that prevented me from moving; it was a series of leather straps that held me motionless. Around me, the great metallic structure groaned and rotated like the engines of the Monad.
Beyond the grinding and banging of the machinery orbiting my body, I faintly heard Doctor Bel’s voice.
“Yes, you shall be perfect.”
Doctor Bel began the expedition with the simple declaration, “We shall go now.”
He took a lantern and led me into a series of narrow hallways gray from disuse. We walked through a maze of corridors until we came to a large circular iron door. Two small bags rested on the floor. Doctor Bel hung his lantern up on a rusty hook on the wall.
Doctor Bel picked the bags up and handed one to me. “From this point forward, you shall follow exactly in my steps.”
I nodded, shouldering my bag as he had his own.
From his bag he withdrew a functional lucernal pipe. It was the first antique relic I had seen him carry whose value I understood. The pipe was a solid cylinder of eternal cold metallic light that washed the lantern into insignificance. The pipe’s radiance was inherent in the matter of the pipe itself, and it could retain its character through any gross deformation. I had seen such lucernal metal drawn into wires as thin as a thread to be woven into the ancient ceremonial robes of the politarchs of the Monad, and pounded thinner than paper to illuminate the manuscripts of the theologists. The art of making such things was long lost, and the short heavy pipe that the doctor carried—which contained more of the lucernal metal than I ever remember seeing in one object—would command a price beyond counting.
Doctor Bel found a lever, and the iron door rolled aside on gears I could not see. The stale air was blown aside by a cold damp gust that carried the sound of rushing water as well as the fetid smell of an abattoir.
Beyond the iron door, the lucernal pipe revealed a narrow stone pathway. Doctor Bel stepped out on the path without hesitation. I followed, taking heed of his admonition to follow in his steps.
We walked, quite literally, into the bowels of Thalassus.
The path led to a great stone aqueduct that seemed to bear the great part of Thalassus’ waste. The effluent raced by us as a black, raging torrent. Even in a space that could comfortably fit the Arm of God, the confinement made the torrent feel as if it could swamp us at any minute, despite the fact the path was three times the height of a man above the boiling surface.
&n
bsp; Doctor Bel followed the path, in the direction of the flowing sewer. We walked near an hour in silence before I raised a question, barely audible next to the raging torrent.
“Where are we going, Doctor?”
“The past.” He shouted back, his breath fogging the chill air. He gestured toward the vaults above us using his lucernal pipe, causing daemonic shadows to dance on the walls around us. “Perhaps you recognize your prior residence? Not from this angle, I suppose.”
I had been led even deeper than the lowest levels of the Protectory.
He smiled, and I did not like it.
Within another few minutes, we reached the chthonian heart of Thalassus itself, beneath the Protectory, beneath the Monad, beneath all of Gaea herself.
Around us, the roaring of the waters had increased to an impossible volume. Doctor Bel’s lucernal pipe showed only a gray mist that hung over the torrent, and I could perceive only a couple of paces distance trough the choking fog.
Then, abruptly, we stepped out of the fog. We emerged into a vast space, possibly as wide as the Monad itself, and descending into the depths of Gaea. The sewer we had followed now became a great waterfall, spilling down into the endless shaft before us. Waters echoed endlessly around us.
Our walkway ended on a stone platform hugging the side of the great shaft. The stones were slick with moisture, and no railing stood between us and the abyssal depths.
Shadows danced and twisted around us as Doctor Bel walked along the inner wall to a narrow stairway that descended from the platform along the inner wall of the great shaft. I followed, carefully placing my feet where Doctor Bel’s had first trod. As we slowly spiraled down the shaft, the torrent retreated behind us.
He spoke when the echoes of the water had receded.
“Man once could draw power and life from the heart of Gaea herself, before she grew cold.”
“How far?” The sense of apocalyptic depth I felt from the darkness next to us made me forget to address Doctor Bel properly.
Man Vs Machine Page 28