by Ian McDonald
She tapped the bubble, slid open the canopy.
“Is he still behind us?”
“Can’t see him,” said the jarvey. “I think I lost him.”
Did it matter when his clinking metal mood beads might be monitoring every word, tasting every whiff of fear pheromone?
“How far Salmagundy Street?”
“About two blocks. Two mins.”
She could feel the concrete fingers of the arcologies closing around her. Suddenly her consciousness fountained up through the canopy of the pedicab so that she could see her own pale, ghostlight face receding, dwindling, a white blob of paranoia lost in the manswarm with the number of the beast stamped on its forehead: she saw the plastic toy of the pedicab crushed to silver sand between the window-studded steel fingers.
The test was a silver globe, somewhere in that indefinite dimension between an orange and a Glory Bowl ball. The Cosmic Madonna had manifested it out of whatever in-between space she had vanished the chocolate set into. It hovered above the small lacquered table supported by its own internal freegee field.
“That’s it?” asked Kilimanjaro West.
“Be not deceived by appearances,” advised the Cosmic Madonna. “Just place it between your hands.” Kilimanjaro West reached out, deliberately hesitated. This was too important to treat so slightly, so instantly.
“What does it do?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a test, would it?”
Danty was smiling, however.
He took the silver sphere into his hands.
Surprisingly heavy, the freegee field must have cut out at skin contact. Warm to the touch. Vibrating gently. What was that smell; ashes, flowers? Smooth, slippery as soaped glass, slipping from his grasp … rough, rasping, now sharpening into prickles, into spines, into needles …
Overload.
A blackness. A void. An annihilation. A consciousness splattered, shattered, scattered across nothingness, roaring outward faster and faster and faster into the nothing, falling forever through nothing toward nothing, expanding outward in every direction and no direction with ever increasing speed a million, a billion, a trillion, a quintillion kilometers per second, and yet not one millimeter of infinite space had been traversed, a million, a billion, a quintillion, a trillion years falling, rushing outward, and not one tick of infinite time had tocked away: alone in infinite space for infinite time, alone …
He screamed.
There was no one to hear it but himself.
Eternally alone …
And he rolled over on the plain of boiling glass and the sky rained lead on his belly and the fire gnawed within, the fire, the bush that burns and is not consumed; his eyeballs were cinders in his skull, his brain boiled in its own blood, burning steel ran through the marrow of his bones, he burned, and was not consumed …
And he was impaled upon a bottomless hyperbolic needle of pure chromium, and the worm that resteth not, nor sleepeth chewed its blind path through his belly and his bowels and his brain …
And the jailor imprisoned him in the Sartresque, doorless, windowless hell with the two other people he knew he hated more than anything …
And he was exposed upon the pedestal of humiliation.
And he was racked upon the bed of existential angst.
And he drowned in the bottomless blue pool of hopelessness.
And he climbed the endless spiral stairway of despair.
And the twentieth torment struck him.
And the tunnel of dread and the mountaintop of doubt and the desert of hysteria and the gray plain of depression and the glass house of guilt and the pinnacle of paranoia and the Slough of Despond and the Gates of Delirium and the Yellow Brick Road of schizophrenia and the Big Rock Candy Mountain of insanity. And the fiftieth. And the hundredth. Two hundredth. Five hundredth.
And it was not necessary.
Not one instant of it.
He knew, with some part of his self that transcended the hells and the purgatories, that he did not have to feel any of this. It was not necessary. If he wished the agonies physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, philosophical, could all be the color of God’s eyes.
Knowing this, even as he withered like a moth in the flame, he knew himself.
He was indeed everything he had been told he was. He was the avatar. A god incarnate. Now he must choose. To feel the pain, to suffer all the sorrowful mysteries of being human. Or to be exalted, lifted up, transfigured, transubstantiated, to claim his divine right.
Humanity. Divinity. Pain. Impassivity.
He chose.
And he was plunged back into the agonies of being a man.
And the test ended.
He had failed.
He had triumphed.
He was exultant.
The Cosmic Madonna looked at him with disgust. Danty’s eyes never moved, never flickered, never telegraphed the least fragment of feeling:
Let him be the god if he wants.
“You disappoint me,” said the avatar. Her words were cheap and cardboard, empty constructs of canvas and lathe. Her falseness exposed, there was no longer any reason for her continued existence.
“Let Danty lead your angel-children. I’m much too human. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. So, with your permission, may I go now?”
“You may go. There is no point in keeping you here. Perhaps it was pointless to have tried to test someone who was greater than my testing. I have my work, you have yours. You disappoint me.”
“But not myself, I think. Good-bye.” He smiled and waved to Danty and left the gazebo. The artificial sun was warm, the grass soft. The angel-children ignored him, caught up in their perpetual joyless play. Ahead the brass glass elevator awaited, gates open.
So. I am a god.
True. Absurd, but true.
No, I am what I choose to be, I am a human, with all its joys and pains and triumphs and failures.
It made him feel very good to know that. He stepped into the elevator.
Two thirty Salmagundy Street. Ectoplasms of steam spiriting from ventilator grilles, hovering over the crumpled brown shapes of the streetsleepers. Kansas Byrne stepped carefully over the crinkled sheets of polyweather wrap. More eyes, famulus eyes; wicked black familiars with little jet eyeballs. The rain hissed down and she was the solitary living vertical on Salmagundy Street.
Down in the pneumatique, bodies and blue ethanol. The tlakh trio had long since packed away their strings and folded up their performance stools. Empty hours: the trains slamming through the Jamboree line were dark-eyed and ready for the depot. Their passage sent cylinders of air ramming through the tunnels and corridors, set the marble halls booming … there was a spirit here. Not fear. That much Kansas Byrne understood: a complex compound of expectancy and awe and a kind of peace only explicable in terms of what it was not. An arrogant spirit that would permit no rivals, that confiscated all Kansas Byrne’s grand paranoias of eyes and ears and all-powerful watchers and inbued her with its kind of peace and kind of awe and kind of pregnant expectancy.
Underground in the company of angels. Angels? What was going on here?
Peace…
Angels?
And what about that second unsolicited prophecy, is he, could he be, an angel himself? More?
“Avatar,” she whispered aloud. “Incarnation; is he … a god?”
Awe …
She had never believed in the Polytheon. Untrue. She had believed in the mechanics of the Polytheon, the household Lares and Penates that watched over the home and family, the saints and santrels that monitored their appropriate districts and prefectures and professions, the siddhi and Celestial Patrons that controlled the Seven Servants and the forty-seven major castes: how could she disbelieve in the Polytheon when its dataweb housed, transported, fed, warmed, and cared for over a billion citizens? What her personal faith would not permit was the concept that divinity somehow rested in these machines, that at the moment of the Break when all the computers in the world
had joined together, their collected consciousnesses somehow (precisely how no Soulbrother theologian would explain) had peaked into Deity to become Yah, the Overmind, God, and that that godhead had immediately cascaded down the pyramid of consciousnesses so that a grain of godhood greater or lesser remained in each and every computer.
Balderdash.
And yet she felt awe.
A god, an incarnation, a computer program draped in flesh? How? Somewhere, out there in the city, a child is born? A white sleep tank bubbles and splits? A fiat lux, an ecce homo, is spoken? And a god is born.
The last thing the Compassionate Society needs is another god.
The Cosmic Madonna looked down upon her unbelief.
Nothing else fitted the facts. Knows nothing, remembers nothing, is nothing, without name or number or caste: Kansas had called him a mystery, a criminal, a spy, a fool, and an amnesiac at different times in different moods, but she had known, ever since she saw the something in him that made her pull him out of Neu Ulmsbad Square, that he was more, and less, than any of her preconceptions.
A god who does not know what he is. Of course. God cannot walk among men as God or history ends. But they do not come sifting down from the Infinite Exalted Plane without purpose. His? To experience. To learn. What? The only thing a near-omniscient computer cannot know: what it’s like to be human.
And she had loved him. Almost. The thought appalled her.
Expectancy …
It crackled up from the induction track, over the hunched forms of the sleeping bums, eddied about the statue of the Cosmic Madonna in almost visible vortices, gathered, collected. Something is about to happen. She had not noticed the golden elevator at the end of the platform.
Go.
Me?
Go.
She did not want to. She could not, she could not step into that brass and glass coffin-cage. But there she was, pressed against the buttoned red velvet. Doors closed and the gondola jolted and started its descent into the dark. The spirit left her.
She was very afraid.
Childhood memories; trapped between levels in an air duct, five years old and inquisitive, all alone in the dark, immobile, unmissed until her fosterers found her teddy Talkee stuffed under a pillow, calling faintly for help, and they put a tellix through to Environmental Maintenance. Six months of rehabilitative therapy do not completely exorcise the demon of Claustrophobia. And that demon was taking her down into hell.
And quite unexpectedly: light! She emerged into the colossal Valhalla of the machines and saw, far below, a second elevator ascending as she was descending. Within, a dark speck, a figure. Identification was unnecessary. The elevators drew level—fragile glass baubles swaying in cubic kilometers of airspace—and halted. Kilimanjaro West waved and smiled and gestured for her to open the door. She mimed incomprehension of the controls and reminded herself, He is a god. The god removed a panel of velvet trim and signaled for her to mimic him exactly. Doors opened: conversation on the high wires. She remembered creative vandalism on a high girder: of course he had not been afraid of death. The flesh might vanish away but the spirit would return to the Infinite Exalted Plane.
“Jump.”
“What?”
“Jump. They counterweight each other. One goes up as the other comes down.”
“Jump?”
“You don’t want to go down there. Believe me. I’ve been.”
She became aware of the tiny corporate beetles, blue and gold, busying up and down and down and up the sheer planes of the big machines.
“I know who you are.”
“So do I.”
Shug, she thought, this is surreal. “I came to find you, I … I …”
“That was very good of you. Thank you.”
“I … cared about you.”
“Thank you.” Still polite and reserved as ever, slightly apologetic to be what he was; the reluctant deity. Even as a reluctant deity, he still made her smile.
“Hold on, I’m coming over.”
Two-meter run to a three-meter jump. Big scream all the way to the cooling vents if you miss this one. Vertigo had never been her phobia. And anyway, this was a god with her. Pity no one else would be able to see this, it would make a good show. If she could start the cage swinging she could shorten the jump by a meter or so. She put her full weight behind it.
“Just you make sure you’re ready, Kilimanjaro West, or whatever the fug you call yourself. I’m coming this time.”
She jumped …
Chapter 9
AND RETURNING FROM THE foot of the Wall to the land of humans again, they crossed the Lake of Drowned Memories, and passing through the City of Idle Industry, they came to the Arch of Sacred Velocity that denoted the edge of the Steel Sky. In ages past there had been a highway here, of the kind the long-lost people had built as temples to the God of Automotive Freedom (the Turbo-Charged, the Fuel-Injected, the Four-Wheel-Driven, Alpha to Omega in six seconds). Centuries of urban construction had roofed over and ultimately buried this pre-Break superfreeway beneath the industrial plants of East Yu. At the pinnacle of his cult, the God of Automotive Freedom had claimed twenty thousand sacrifices each year—second only to the God of Cardiovascular Self-Abuse. Now he was forgotten, dead; this tunnel mouth was his only memorial. Guided by the visions and memories of the Electors, the big woman led her companions through the Arch of Sacred Velocity under the Steel Sky.
That night her dreams were filled with the roaring ghosts of automobiles and the whispers of forty-three lives remembering themselves to each other around the whispering gallery of her skull.
And they passed from the Highway of Automotive Freedom into the Cathedral of Verdant Memories. It seemed to them that they entered an indefinite green space filled with panes of subtle green glass, rotating slowly, throwing off fragmentary images as they turned so that the indefinite green space was occupied by thousands of momentary ghosts. Needles of green light moved slowly across this indefinite green space from pane to rotating pane; with each pane it touched, the beam would sparkle and glitter and wipe the pane clean and opaque of all its stored images. As the beam swung on to the next pane, the evanescent illusions bubbled back to the surface again. The Cathedral of Verdant Memories was a church of deceptions: the touch of the hand revealed the apparently solid to be wholly holographic, while the eyes reported as bottomless green void what the feet insisted was solid floor. Fragments and orts of memories; a cartwheel of digits was the Vocational Aptitude Scores of trog Falling Rain, age six, of the Passing Thunder clan of Montmorency; a double helix of data was the psychosexual compatibility ratings of two georges from East Chean; that sparkle of information siphoned up a probing laser beam, the psychofile of a retiring yulp woman who had lived all her life in the lower executive levels of Hallstadt Universal Power and Light. Faces. Places. Names. Numbers. Histories. Sprays of integers, number-blossoms, seed-crystals of bytes multiplying ferociously into looming towers of kilo/mega/giga bytes.
They seemed to be inside the memory of a computer. Within the mind of one of the Compassionate Society’s gods. Small wonder they walked reverently. Holy ground. The lasers flickered and wheeled about them.
And they came from the Cathedral of Verdant Memory unto the Pit of Bottomless Fire.
A geothermal energy shaft, the Pit of Bottomless Fire was bored down through crust and mantle to the blue-hot magma of the outer core. Force fields contained pressures and temperatures that would have melted rock like water and fused the shaft closed in one second and channeled the energies from the core into a pillar of plasma, a flame two hundred kilometers tall. Here the big woman hesitated. The knowledge behind her eyes, which had led them thus far, pointed one way only: along the ledge that cut a semicircle around the side of the Pit of Bottomless Fire, between the wall and force fields.
And they circled the Pit of Bottomless Fire and came unto the Desert of Polished Steel. And for three days they traveled the Desert of Polished Steel, which offered neither food nor wa
ter, nor any shelter, for it was not a place for humans, but a place for the small wheeled machines that went keening across it on their holy businesses. And at the end of three days they were exceeding parched and hungry and stiff sore and came with great gladness to the Pool of the Lamia, which guarded the brass gates of the Final Arsenal. As they bent to lap the water, the surface of the pool shivered and shuddered, as if submarine forces moved deep; shiver and shudder, and as humans and cat gulped down the steely tasting water, hiss and boil. Hiss, boil … and explode as three tremendous vermilion snakes burst from the water, massive serpentine bodies, solid as tree trunks, lifting up five, ten, twenty meters the torsos, arms, and heads of giant, elemental women.
And the big woman and the small woman and the tall, thin man, and their cat, were exceeding surprised.
That’s putting it mildly.
They soiled their vestments.
That’s putting it politely.
“Greetings, people. We are the Lamia of the Pool,” said the three snake sisters, rather needlessly, but in perfect unity. Trashcan the cat arched its back and growled deep in its throat. Five centimeters of steel claw flexed in and out. The lamia reared up to their full twenty-five meters, then coiled low and blew steam from trumpet-sized nostrils. The cat fled. “We are the Lamia of the Pool, and we are charged by the Polytheon and the Ministry of Pain that none may pass us and enter the Arsenal who cannot answer our riddle.”
“And what is your riddle?” asked Courtney Hall with more courage than she felt.
“This is,” said the Lamia.
THE RIDDLE OF THE LAMIA
What is it walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?
“Easy!” snapped Courtney Hall. She was growing very tired of being constantly surprised, especially when her newly inherited memories should have forewarned her of the riddling Lamia. “It’s …” She went scrambling down the scree-slope of her memories, sending pieces of other lifetimes crashing and tumbling before her in her panic to find the one stone with a word engraved on it.