by Ian McDonald
As the raft approached the foot of the Wall the river swelled outward into a great wash from which the summits of sunken towers reached like the hands of drowning men, reaching for light. The image was so adamant, so apposite and uncanny that Courtney Hall screamed aloud when she saw the actual hand of the drowning man reaching for the light. The hand of some pre-Break Titan, some race of Behemoths created by those prehistoric people for purposes and plans unknown; and drowned, feet mired in the mud, as the floodwaters rose. A hand, grasping a torch. A beacon.
Only a statue.
But kilometers later, across the waters at the foot of the Wall, the image still made her shudder.
The weather was no exception to the Wall’s domination. The winds and currents that had pushed the raft forward failed. All hands were set to paddling the remaining few kilometers. Courtney Hall bent to the oar and did not dare look up. To look up the face of a wall so high it seemed to be toppling over was instant vertigo. And Wall met water in a sheer, unbroken line. No opening. No grids, no vents, no tunnels, no spillways, no flumes, plumes, spumes. No way through.
No Beyond.
But the King of Nebraska’s spirit remained unvanquished by the Wall’s impenetrability.
“If we cannot go through, then we shall go over,” he declared.
“‘Over,’ he says.” Angelo Brasil wiped his blisters on his cycling shorts.
High above, the vertical farms cascaded green and gold down the higher slopes of the Wall.
“There must be paths, stairs, between the communities.”
“But do they reach sea level, Your Majesty?” sneered Angelo Brasil.
“Only one way to find out.” The King smiled. He pointed with his cane along the gently curving horizon of wall and water.
“Well, you can just do it without me, sweetie!” snapped Angelo Brasil. “I’m sick of this. Sick sick sick.” With a toss of dreadlocks he stormed off to the stern to sit looking back at the drowned city and the wastelands beyond. Xian Man Ray sighed loud exasperation, impatience, sororal duty, and she went to offer comfort, sympathy, and to cajole and coax. Endless and enduring as the Wall, the Tinka Tae porters and engineers laid their small weights to the paddles, and under Jinkajou’s barked instructions, the raft crept along the base of the Wall.
It was well after dark—twenty-two o’clock sky time (the discrepancy between it and Victorialand time, coupled with the fact that all food except for tofu steak and some gamy rat had been devoured that dinner, may have accounted for some of unraveled feelings)—before apologies were mumbled, forgivenesses offered and received. Which was just as well. Ten minutes later Trashcan the cyber-cat let out a yowl that set the raft rocking like a zook in a Jazz Hot club and stood stone still, fur bristling, pointing with her furry nose at the ladder cut into the obsidian face of the Wall.
In the Editing Suite
SNIPPING, SNIPPING, SNIPPING: TODAY Mr. Slike the Scissorman is on the Ps. Busy scissors snipping, snipping; out they come, the hurtful Ps, excised, edited, deleted, floating down to litter the Scissor-room floor: panic and papacy and paranoia, piles and pernicious and political, plutocrat and prostitute and Presbyterian; priests face to face with oppressors, nihilists with martinets, lepers with killers, Jansenists with interrogators, heros with grumblers, field marshals with enslaved, dissidents with communists, bastards with aristocrats: a rustling, chattering cocktail party of incompatibles facedown in the final democracy of the Scissor-room floor. Knee-deep in paper, Mr. Slike the Scissorman snips snips snips with manic glee, out out out with the old hurtful words, the cruel words, the divisive words. In his Scissor-room on the fifty-fifth floor, language is being shaped by the snipping scissors of the scissorman like a silhouette snipped by some street artist. By the time he reaches zeal, zouave, and Zymotic disease there will be no more words left for people’s tongues to hurt each other with. There will be only kind, gentle, painfree words. The streets of Great Yu will resound with blessings, and language, like sweet perfume, shall, redeemed, fill the air. Often Mr. Slike the Scissorman pauses in his snip-snip-snipping to look forward to that day. Then, suitably reinspired, he returns to his holy task. Today the Ps, tomorrow the Qs—good-bye queens, queers, and querulousness—how Mr. Slike the Scissorman loves his job! But then, he cannot very well do anything but, can he?
Kilimanjaro West
CHILDREN’S CALLS IN MARBLE halls …
Hide’n’seek laughter scurrying down ringing corridors; evocations of rustling silks and candelabras, hurrying down ringing corridors: the laughter of children. Heard, just for a moment, only a moment, then the corridors swell with the rush and boom of pneumatique trains and the flap of feet. Distant clanging, a bass hum that shakes the kilometers of brown marble corridors, a gust of warm electric air that sets the chandeliers clinking and tinkling. Then, once again, the laughter of children, singing down the corridors, filling the airshafts and ventilation ducts, eventually wafted with the warm, electric air out onto a wet and weary Salmagundy Street where the slubberdegullions gathered for warmth and companionship, all folded up in their brown polyweather wrappers like old, well-picked scabs.
He first heard it there, by the Salmagundy Street ventilator, and it was a quandary to him, for it filled an empty, lost place inside him, yet it made that empty, lost place more void, more remote. It called, seemingly to him alone, and because he believed that he alone was graced to hear it, he followed, out of the rain and the night, under the brass sign that read PNEUMATIQUE MUNICIPAL, down ringing brown marble corridors beneath ceilings crusty with cherubs and the frozen rainstorms of chandeliers, over bridges of alabaster filigree, across cavernous domed concourses and echo-haunted platforms; he followed, it led, always just around a corner, just down a flight of steps, just across the tracks.
Others shared this station with him: near the entrance to the Dalcassian Gate downline, a trio of tlakhs in masks and streetgowns, crouched over their instruments, intent upon their thin, ascetic music. Time and again his path sent him across theirs, but he was reluctant to disturb their devotions. Where the lacquered ventilation grilles exhaled warm air, congregations of slubberdegullions, a caste of registered mendicants psychologically unsuited for any active part in the Compassionate Society, had unrolled their wrappers to steal a little cozy. Glittering cabochon famulus eyes watched the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West as he stepped between shrouded bodies drunk comatose on industrial ethanol, sacramental intoxicant and libation to whatever Celestial patronized the slubberdegullions. Famulus eyes watched, famulus bodies pulsed as they drew their wards’ blood through their own web of veins and arteries and purged it of poisons. The Binge Eternal; with no fear of hangover or alcoholic poisoning or DTs or cirrhosis. The marble galleries of Salmagundy Street station reeked of blue ethanol and old urine.
And always just around the corner, just down the staircase, just across the induction tracks: children’s calls in marble halls. Enough of children’s calls in marble halls; let us speak of luck. These things are connected, if you know where to look. Luck, you see, had pushed Kilimanjaro West off the guttering of that shop in Ranves, and as he fell five stories, luck had darted ahead to arrange for a cycle-drayload of semisolid biobase support plasm to be underneath at that precise moment when his body and planetary curvature would have intersected. Luck had also arranged for that consignment of gel to pass through the Love Police cordon (“PainCriminal at large, yezz, cizzen, dangerous PainCriminal,” which made the wingers gasp, and then gasp again, all the louder when they learned that this-danjeruzz PaneCrimmal was an artist, an actor, a Raging Apostle, Yah sakes!) without so much as a sleepstick prodded into the rapidly solidifying gel. Luck had prompted Kilimanjaro West to struggle free before his body heat set the stuff rigid, and luck it was steered his trail of slime through street after street through boro and prefecture until it brought late night and cold misery together in the warmth of the Salmagundy Street pneumatique ventilation grille. Where, treacherous as any late-night lover, luck had tu
rned her back on him and stalked away under the neons and sprays of steam from the tenement heating ducts. For he had been seduced by the laughter of children. Forsaken by luck, the object of his fascination always remained just around the corner, just down those steps, just across those tracks.
The thin, acid harmonies of the tlakh trio grew now louder, now softer. At the foot of a cascade of marble steps he found a slubberdegullion woman piled like dung. She had not yet drunk herself into oblivion: a rancid bottle of blue ethanol invited Kilimanjaro West to communion.
Children’s calls in marble halls …
“What are they, why are they laughing?”
“Ainzhels,” mumbled the old woman, eyes focusing and defocusing as if searching for some microscopic universe close by. “Ainzhelsainjillsanizells. Doan messwiddem, doan go neerem. Ainzhels doan follow no rules, no, no no, no rools for dem …” She gave a great wail, as if some denizen of that neighboring universe (angel, demon, neither, both) had stepped through and sent her bottle of old blue smashing against the marble wall. “Angels!” Then she burped and the famulus clinging to her neck measured her blood alcohol levels and threw the neural switch that tripped her into unconsciousness.
On the Jamboree line eastbound platform he found a municipal shrine. It was a sign of how deeply he had been absorbed into the life of the city that he no longer found these episodic erections of wood and plastic and concrete remarkable, even noteworthy. This particular shrine was just another imaginative mélange of shells and canopies and halos and minor deities scrambling for attention, dedicated in this instance to a Cosmic Madonna suckling twins at a pair of outsize alabaster breasts.
Recalling other twins. Other breasts.
Kansas Byrne. The Raging Apostles. BeeJee &ersenn in her glass menagerie. Even the room with the cold and the universe inside it. Why was it that every experience was taken away from him? Why were things lost as soon as they were found?
He did not want it to be that way. It did not have to be that way. Recalling his glimpses of citizens invoking their deities, he bowed to the shrine, clapped his hands—three sharp, precise explosions—and asked, “Where is Kansas Byrne?”
The Cosmic Madonna smiled banally while her entropic twins, Order and Chaos, fought for the teat.
“Where is she? I want to find her.”
Whispers of wind scampering down the platform stirred prayer tickets into a syllable: Why?
“Because I … because she … because.”
A blast of sound. A wave of hot electric air. The marble chamber boomed like a gong as the Templeoaks—St. Mauritzburg Limited pounded through. Disoriented, Kilimanjaro West was taken up in a vision.
Not the vision he had asked for.
A nameless vision, a remembering.
An itch in the bones. An echo in the skull: light. Endless, boundless light, a domain of shifting planes and volumes of many-colored light. Here each color is a consciousness, a character, a memory, a voice, and as the beams of many-colored light meld and mingle with each other to form new shades, new voices, new songs, new characteristics and consciousnesses are born to breed new memories: he is a creature of light, ever moving, ever changing: no, more than that, he is the uncreated, he is light.
He remembers: darkness. Unseeing, a void of beholding, not blindness, rather an absence of anything to see. But there is sensation, of stone for bone and steel for sinews, of power blazing along channels of ancient energy fueled by fires deep within, the ceaseless surge of a billion corpuscles through the arteryways of his body, and the sound, the roar of the blood in his ears. Somewhere a heart is beating, somewhere lungs fill and empty carrying the breath of life to the billion bustling corpuscles, and from the gut depths come ruminant belchings and bubblings of healthy digestion. He is huge, he contains multitudes, billiontudes, it is as if (yes, now he understands, though the mechanics of that understanding is incomprehensible to him) he is the city; its streets, buildings, manufactories, arcologies, parks, playgrounds, power plants, agrariums, are his physical body. Now he understands the darkness, the blindness. The city is all, where might there be a beyond from which to observe everything?
Remembering.
And the laughter of children. … Loud. Close.
Unambiguous. A physical presence. He turned … Hands. A forest of hands. Soft, open, reaching, more and more and more and more hands, pouring out of the walls, the floors, the ceiling, cracks in the world spewing hands, hands with eyes between the outspread fingers, all around him, enfolding him in a web of interlaced fingers, touching, brushing hands, face, hair, and with each touch the hands drew something out of him, some power, and they grew stronger on that power and he grew weaker so that he could not resist them, and the web of fingers propelled him along the deserted platform toward the mouth, a brass mouth, no (reason and rhyme and all his painfully learned associations slipping away like fish into the sea), an elevator, an ornate brass-and-crystal cage padded with buttoned satins, and he offered no resistance as the doors, teeth, mouth closed on him, and with a whine of cables and counterweights, the brass elevator descended. … It passed through unsuspected depths of the pneumatique municipal: laagers of powered-down trains, giant compressors, track maintenance robots black-and-gold like busy bees, electrical generators; then down into an even more unsuspected landscape, a place of wheels and industry, of massive, grinding machines, of titanic domes wrapped in steel pipes illuminated by forks of artificial lightning ten kilometers long that danced between spherical electrodes like minor moons. Nothing remotely human-scaled: brass valves the size of houses vented geysers of steam, hoppers that could easily have held a tenement block each moved steadily along a conveyor line toward some unimaginable end-point. The brass elevator inched across a twenty-level rendition of the Universal Power and Light sun-gold asterisk never intended to be viewed with human eyes. This was a place for machines, a Valhalla of the gods of Industry. The hundred-meter sunburst was the secret name the machines spoke to themselves alone.
Turning away from the oppressive weight of industry, the man and his captors found space in the crowded gondola for mutual examination. Angels. Children. The laughter of … angel-children. Boys. Girls. Boy-girls, too young for gender differences to be important. Naked. Their hands hung by their sides, empty. Their eyes …
Eyes like stones. Painless, joyless, inhuman stones. Demon-eyes in angel-faces. One boy, taller, older, with greater muscular definition and a dark wedge of pubic hair, spoke.
“What is this gesture you are making with your hand?”
He had not even noticed he was doing it. “It is called the nona dolorosa, the hurt-me-not. It is a sign we make when we are afraid we will be hurt.”
“We are never afraid,” said the boy. “We never hurt.” No doubt was permitted. Certainty was written in his eyes. Kilimanjaro West found himself remembering the milky breasts of the Cosmic Madonna. He looked away from the stone-eyes through the glass floor of the gondola and saw another eye, a tiny black needle-eye incredibly far below. The time it took for that needle-eye to expand into a dark shaft was an indication of the dimensions of this machine temple. Dark clenched around the elevator like a fist. Just as Kilimanjaro West was quite certain the darkness was bottomless and the darkness of his own past, the brass gondola emerged into a subterraneanscape as alien to the Valhalla of the gods as that had been to the rain-swept streets of Yu.
The elevator sank into a gullet of translucent, throbbing flesh, a crumb lodged in the throat of God. Glimpsed through the vaguely translucent red membrane, arterial ducts pulsed with fluids, power crackled along neural networks half-mechanical, half-living. At the limit of vision, giant alveoli veined with capillaries and glowing with their own corrupt light swelled and contracted. And all things resounded to the beat of a great, unseen heart.
The leader of the angel-children again broke silence.
“Danty,” he said. “You may call me Danty. It is not my name, it is not who I am. It is what I am to you. I have no name. We have
no use for names, but I am told you must call me Danty. This is the body of our God.” Murmurs. Shifts of body posture. “Our God, our mother, the Cosmic Madonna. It was she gave you to us. Though you have no famulus, as the rebels do not, her eyes are everywhere. She has been waiting for you. She is patient, but she cannot wait forever.”
“Why does she want me?”
“To test if you are the one.”
“Which one?”
“The one ordained to lead us into our inheritance.” The elevator throbbed to the heartbeat of a God.
“What is your inheritance?”
“The world. The future. We are the future of humanity.”
Through the floor Kilimanjaro West could see a sphincter dilating into a sphere of cold blue light.
“I do not understand.”
“We cannot feel pain. Physical, emotional, psychological. Heat cannot burn us, cold cannot freeze us. No physical thing can hurt us, no wound of the heart can cause us anguish. Colors. All we feel are colors. And the sound of God’s singing. And joy. Inexpressible joy. We are without fear or shame or guilt or conscience. We are the ultimate achievement of human evolution, the perfect citizens of the perfect, painless world to come.”
The elevator passed into the sphere of blue: a globe of biological support plasm, its precise boundaries difficult because of the light that seemed to come from everywhere. Floating in the gel, in anabiotic suspension, thousand upon thousands of human bodies. Tangles of tubes, coils of wire coiled from the bodies of the men and women, and Kilimanjaro West saw that some twitched and spasmed in their artificial sleep, and some seemed to cry out silently.