by Ian McDonald
“You old bastard.”
He smiled. “Aren’t I just a bitch?”
“You’ll never get it out. It’s defended. Look what happened last time. Your prime combat team picked up and slung into West One.”
“I will admit we were a little taken by surprise that time. Things will be different when my warriors of the wasteland make their second attempt. My dear, you don’t even have to go in person; I can quite understand your reluctance. All that is required is a data transfer from the personas to Angelo’s lynk. Simple. Painless. And in return, our full cooperation in returning the personas to their rightful owner. Well, that, as they say, is the deal. I’ll bid you a goodnight and leave you to sleep on it. Breakfast, tomorrow? Perhaps? No hurry. Take all the time you need. Callisto won’t mind another few days in white sleep.”
“Bastard,” Courtney Hall whispered at the closing door. It was quite some time before she was confident enough to order the room lights off.
And finally …
Courtney Hall and Kilimanjaro West. The cartoonist and the deity sharing postbreakfast figs around a deconsecrated altar in a side chapel, intimate and conversational behind masking reredos of climbing plants and flowering angel-trumpet vines. With a lot of incredulity.
“You’re what?”
A piece of fig seemed to have lodged in her throat. Either a fig or her heart.
“The Advocate.”
“I always thought that was, well, you know, made up, a kind of childhood superstition.”
“It’s not.”
“So you say.”
“Your scepticism is understandable.”
“You will excuse it. I don’t know … logically, I suppose it would be more sensible for me to act as if you are a god, but, well …”
“You can see me in all my glory on one of Dad’s full-scanning tomoscopes, if you want.”
“I don’t think I really want to. So, well, I believe that you are who you say you are; next, why have you told me?”
“Because together we may be the triggers which kick over the Compassionate Society.”
“You’re not the first one to have said that.”
“I know. Listen, believe me, there is nothing that I, that the Polytheon that I represent, want to see more than humanity’s taking charge of its own history again. You only have to look back into your memories to see that nothing significant has been achieved in four hundred and fifty years. And that is because the Polytheon were taught that history is a painful process, the anvil of evolution. Your command to us when you gave us control of yourselves was to find a solution to the problem of pain. That solution included the abolition of history. We had to put a stop to the exponential upcurve of technological achievement that was the primary root of the Break. ‘Technoshock’ was the word four and a half centuries ago. The rate of change was too fast. So, now there is no more change, there is no more technoshock. The Compassionate Society has not achieved in almost five hundred years what the pre-Break world achieved in five. Not even fifty. Five years. So, we have given you your stable society. That is what you like to think of it as, isn’t it? Stability. But we know different, we know that it is stagnation. And ultimately, decay. Without progress there is no growth, without growth there is no life, and the Compassionate Society is not growing. It is dying. It has become an agent of entropy. Dying, decaying, it is no longer on the side of evolution and the counter-entropic drive. Yu may stand for another half a millennium, another five millennia, another fifty, but in the end it will mean the extinction of the human race. As surely as if they all became the Cosmic Madonna’s angel-children playing under the sun.” He stopped. She was staring at his chest. “Excuse me, is there something interesting about my chest?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s glowing.”
He looked down at his chest, and as he saw it, a tiny patch about the size of a marquin card glowing silver through his clothing, the fire and the light blazed up and consumed him. Courtney Hall saw his head thud onto the pure, blessed marble, and the patch of glowing silver sent tendrils of light crackling across his body. Silver lightning crawled along his ribs, over his vertebrae, burned along his spine into his skull; silver light crept along his arms, into his hands, his fingers, as he lay immobilized slumped across the marble altar, and Courtney Hall cried, “What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?” as the silver tendrils leaked out of Kilimanjaro West to infect the sacred stone, to crawl across the table toward her. She jumped up from her chair, stepped back, but the silver lightning had run through the altar block into the floor to spread a filigree of luminescence through the floor tiles.
“Help me.” Kilimanjaro West was a burning shimmer of silver. His mouth was filled with a luminous glow. “Help me?”
“What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?” repeated Courtney Hall.
“It’s. Beginning.” Kilimanjaro West was a human nova, too bright to behold. “The. Judgment. I. Hadn’t. Expected. It. So. Soon. Help. Me.” He raised a hand of light. Aghast, powerless to do otherwise, Courtney Hall took it in her hand of flesh. She gave a little cry as the silver threads raced up her fingers, her arm, her shoulder, her upper torso … But there was no pain. Only a sense of communion with the colossal.
“I. Am. Infecting. This … place. With my … Inorganic systems. The Celestials have. Thrown it into. Massive overstimulation. And growth. Everyone … here … is a part of the judgment. It seems. I had not expected. This so soon. I’m not. Ready.”
Courtney Hall barely heard, less understood, caught up as she was in the sudden awareness that there was a second alternative reality superimposed upon the organic greens and Gothic grays of St. Damien’s: an improbable horizonless silver sea stretching from infinity to infinity with at its paradoxical center, a raised silver dais surrounded by pure Doric columns, reaching out of the sea, reaching to the third vertical axis infinity, beyond which (impossibly) the sky began, a sky of steel-colored clouds racing out of nowhere into nowhere. All somehow embedded within the chlorophyll and the granite.
Joshua Drumm came stumbling through the screen of vines, silver-veined hands pressed to his temples. His eyes were both ecstatic and horrified.
Words flew like luminous moths from Kilimanjaro West’s mouth.
“The Infinite Exalted Plane. Virtual domain of the Polytheon. Consensus hallucination. Induced by computers interfacing direct with nervous systems. Helps to close eyes until acclimitization of visual and audial centers is complete.”
Courtney Hall blinked away the superimposition of universe interior with universe exterior, closed her eyes and saw planes of many-colored light moving in the spaces between the columns, prismatic, restless, singing and belling like wind chimes. She smelled steel, tasted air, heard fire, saw time, opened her eyes, and was there. And they were with her, all the others, the Raging Apostles, a spectrum of emotion from fearful confusion to resolute doubt to sharply critical; Xian Man Ray surprised to find herself dressed in zebra-striped sleek silver, Angelo Brasil trying to shake a persistent itch out of his lynkbrain, Dad, irritable and a little frightened still in his lumpish isolation suit. And at the center of the arena, Kilimanjaro West, humanity discarded, deity assumed, a heroic figure in pure silver.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on here?” asked Joshua Drumm.
The planes of light shimmered and momentarily opaqued.
“I’ll tell you,” said Dad. “I’ll tell you precisely what is going on. What your friend Kilimanjaro West never thought to tell you and what really is quite inexcusable of him, is that he is not Kilimanjaro West Raging Apostle and Man of Mystery, he is Kilimanjaro West avatar of Yah and Advocate of Humanity, and what this is, this group hallucination, is the final judgment. And like it or not, we are all in it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Kilimanjaro West Advocate of Humanity avatar of Yah. “I truly am sorry. I had hoped I would not have to involve you in this, but it is out of my hands. The Overconsciousness has d
ecided. Please try to forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” Joshua Drumm was incredulous. “If what you say is true—”
“Of course it’s true, how else do you explain this?” growled Angelo Brasil.
“—then this is no hardship, this is the highest of privileges, to participate in the trial of humanity itself, the ultimate courtroom drama!”
“No, he is right, you should forgive him,” said Dad. “Because you should be afraid. Very afraid. Because we are all witnesses for the defense. And if we win, it’s the end of the Compassionate Society. Now that may not mean very much to us, poor outcastes and outlaws, but think of what will happen to that other billion and a half up there if we bring about the end of their world. And if we lose, if the Polytheon decides that we are not safe to be trusted with ourselves, you think they are going to let us go blithely back to wherever we came from to tell all and sundry ‘Oh, I’ve just seen the most amazing thing, the trial of humanity before the Celestials, and guess what, they think we still aren’t grown up enough to babysit ourselves!’ Oh, no. Oh, no no no. If we lose, the Polytheon will annihilate us. Not just physical death; they will go through the Ministry of Pain’s files and erase every reference that we might ever have lived. And when they’ve done that, they will take all our works and achievements and take them away from us and give them to someone else, and they will search out every person who even has a memory of us and take those memories away so that we will not just not exist, we will never ever have existed. Isn’t that right? You, Kilimanjaro West, isn’t that right?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Every word he has said is correct. There is nothing I can do about it. You see, the trial has already begun.”
Celestial
BABEL. BEDLAM. BACCHANALIA. BEERGARDEN. Boil. Bubble. Bestiary. Ball of Confusion. Balls of Fire (Goodness Gracious Great.) Belsen and Bebop. Bother. Boisterous. Bloody Shambolical. Barnstorming. Brainstorming.
Describe the general state of a period of time of approximate duration two minutes fifty-four seconds between Kilimanjaro West’s words “The trial has already begun” and the clap of silver hands.
And that’s just the Bs.
And at the clap of his silver hands, all the B-things that Mr. Slike the Scissorman would have snip-snipped onto the cutting-room floor ceased, and there was silence in the common consensus hallucination that was the Infinite Exalted Plane as a little bit of infinitude and a little touch of exaltedness and a large measure of awe passed into the spirits of the witnesses gathered upon the silver raft adrift in the glass sea. And as if they needed reminding where they stood, they saw shadows in the lights, shadows of faces and figures and iconic images that had haunted them all since their earliest mornings: twin-suckling, many-armed Cosmic Madonna; Mulu the RainWarden, archetypal green woman of the vines with leaves for hair; San Burisan the four-armed, he who dances one-footed upon the light. The gods themselves.
Courtney Hall reminded herself that these were only computer programs. Enormously powerful and sophisticated programs that had attained levels of intelligence and consciousness far beyond human abilities. Levels of intelligence that touched on omniscience … she had just rationalized herself all the way back into superstitious dread.
“What do we do now?” asked Devadip Samdhavi.
“Nothing at this stage. The Polytheon will first judge my ability and rightfulness as an Advocate. The degree to which I have been a human will determine the degree with which I can represent humanity. Some Advocates have failed at this stage. Look, they’ve started already.”
The mirror floor of the platform was swimming with reflections of Kilimanjaro West’s life as a man: fractional memories fragmented and fleeting, a film across the pure metal.
A naked man shivers by a condensation-fogged window, watching the tracks the little running driplets leave in the edge of the universe.
A whisper by spirit light in a butsudan with the rain pelting off the ribbed glass roof while a girl loves herself to death on the carpetgrass.
Out of the sky, chrome vultures with music in their beaks, birds of paradise, and a smile. A more-than-certain smile.
Chocolate for two and stiff catches on a mock-leather case. Take five. Take a bow. Take a ride.
Take a trip on the high steel, take a stately fall from a rusty gutter. Take a midnight pneumatique, take an elevator to hell. Cherubs and the agony in the agrarium.
A great glass lingam, massive architectural symbology filled with freegee sperm-flyers. And in the darkness of an intimate place, love amidst the loss and the lost.
The image froze. A hypersonic note sent everyone but Kilimanjaro West reaching for the illusory floor for real stability: a question.
“Yes,” he said to the lights. “And she me. I do believe that. No. It is more than a friction of flesh on flesh or the levels of chemicals in the brain. It is a spiritual entity. In love human beings are most like gods.”
The interrogative note ceased.
“No,” said Kilimanjaro West. “Not yet. It is not over yet. I have not ended it properly.”
Another querying harmonic, this one almost audible.
“Yes,” Kilimanjaro West continued. “I must. It would invalidate my entire Advocacy, my claim to be human, if I did not.”
The second note concluded abruptly. Kilimanjaro West’s adamantine silver skin ran with moire patterns, ripples circling out from his energy centers. An anthropomorphic bubble of silver extended from the center; shadows and lives swam trapped on its reflective surface. Through the silver wall the witnesses caught glimpses of Kilimanjaro West as they had known him before. In the flesh. In the body. In carnate.
“Kansas,” he said, and she came to him, boldly through the silver wall, to stand before him. And though the witnesses never knew for certain, never saw clearly, what transpired within the veil, they felt the thorn in the heart of the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West.
“Kansas,” he called again. “I know. Because of you, I know the secret of what it is to be human; that the things we hold the most precious are the things which hurt us most bitterly.” He shrugged. Lost. Almost pathetic. “I don’t know what to say, except that I have to say it. Please, help me, what do I say?”
“Say nothing, you fuggin’ idiot,” said Kansas Byrne. And she ran to him and flung her arms around him and they kissed the Kiss of Fire, the kiss in which two are made one, one flesh, one soul, one heart, one mind. One life. That goes on forever but is never long enough.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because I did love you, you bastard. Because being with you, you fuggin’ idiot, was the greatest piece of art of my life. One big, long, standing ovation.” She sniffed. “Damn. I never thought anything this good could feel this bad.”
“Nor did I.” Kilimanjaro West smiled, and the smile was the thorn in his heart. “Good-bye. I did love you, as well as I could.”
“You did good enough. Good-bye, Kaydoubleyou.”
They parted. The spinning wall of silver began to wind itself inward. Kansas Byrne turned just as the wall of light passed over her.
“Hey! Kaydoubleyou! Break a leg!”
Once more Kilimanjaro West stood in their midst in his Celestial manifestation. The Court throbbed to a prolonged pulse-note. Courtney Hall rubbed her ears, tried to shake the note out of her head. Then, as she was absolutely certain her skull was about to explode like a dropped cantaloupe, the final note ceased.
“I am acceptable,” Kilimanjaro West announced. “They have accessed all my experiences as a human and found me acceptable. Too acceptable, if that is possible. You made me better than any of the others, Dad. You made me capable of loving.
“So!” he continued. “The first examination is concluded. Now the cross-examination of the witnesses. Who will volunteer to be examined by the Polytheon?”
“Are you kidding?” said Angelo Brasil.
“No, hear him out. What does it entail?” asked Courtney Hall.
“It means, that
as Advocate, I am now the living lynk between the purely biological and the purely mechanical, the human and the computer heritages. Through me, the Celestials and their attendant subprograms will read your life, your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, as they have read mine. They will enter into you and identify with you; through me, they will, in a sense, become human. They will experience what I have experienced only in so far as I have succeeded in becoming human, and on the basis of those experiences, they will judge. So, who will volunteer?”
“You have even less chance of that than before you announced it, sweetie,” declared Angelo Brasil. “Include me out.”
“I couldn’t do it right,” said Xian Man Ray. “I’d screw it up, do something stupid, get scared or sick or something.”
“I take no part in these proceedings,” said Dad. “It is presumptuous in the extreme to insist that any of us should volunteer when our presence here is entirely involuntary.”
“I rather think this is beyond my sphere of competence,” said Joshua Drumm.
“Mine, too,” said V S. Pyar. “Way too big a league.”
“Don’t look at me, would you want humanity to be judged on the experiences of a zook?” said Devadip Samdhavi.
“Or a trog?” added Thunderheart. “We’re not bred for this sort of thing. Just to be trogs.”
“Scorps, too,” said Dr. M’Kuba. “We’re not whole enough, any of us, to be witnesses.”
“Even a witness is not witness enough,” said Winston.
“No,” stated Kelso Byrne. “I can’t do it. That simple. I just can’t put myself on trial for all our lives.”