by Ian McDonald
“Nor can I,” said Kansas Byrne, looking up from the huddle into which she had subsided after her farewells with Kilimanjaro West. “I want to, I have to. But I can’t. No excuses, no self-justifications. I’m frightened. First time in my life I’ve got stage fright.”
“Well, thank you all very much,” said Courtney Hall. “Thank you all very much indeed. Leave Courtney Hall to last so she can’t refuse. Well, you just got that wrong. I can refuse and I will. Look, I’ve got forty-three ex-Electors cluttering up my brain. How can you expect me to be a faithful representative of what humanity is when I’m not even sure I know who I am?”
They all stood in the circle and looked at each other.
“Unfortunately, refusal is not one of your options,” said Kilimanjaro West after everyone had looked enough blame into the hearts of their friends and neighbors. “Without a witness for the defense the verdict must be automatic. If no one will represent humanity, humanity certainly is not responsible for its own destiny. You must decide.”
Out there on the sea of glass, beneath the racing, crazy sky, the long silence fell and time slipped asymmetrically away, streamlining itself from future to past around the sharp apex of eternity.
To hear her own voice break the great silence was a shock to Courtney Hall. She heard that voice say: “Well, I suppose if no one else will, and someone has to, it might as well be me.”
And she thought, No! No! Take it back, eternity, erase those words, deafen the ears they fall upon—because she hadn’t meant to say them, it was pure perversity that made them slip off her tongue, she hadn’t meant it, couldn’t do it, was incapable of appreciating the gravity of the situation, and her yes had been a little joke, like the final episode of Wee Wendy Waif, a little parting shot from the spirit of disbelief that had always said, no no no no no, this is unreal, all impossible, all a dream, go on, say, write, draw, do what you like, it won’t matter because this is not real.
Except that it was. It had always been. Absolutely real.
And the words were spoken.
“Oh, Yah. Oh, Yah. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”
“I’m afraid it can’t be taken back,” said Kilimanjaro West gently as behind him the auroras of the gods began to churn and moil with ever increasing speed.
The panic was like a wave breaking inside Courtney Hall, a black drown-wave of guilt and fear and paralyzing dread as she looked at her life and was terrified.
The marquin-sized patch of radiance that was the heart of Kilimanjaro West’s Celestial form was glowing again, gold in silver, a swelling, swallowing light. The nimbus of golden light approached Courtney Hall, held out blazing hands.
“Place your hands in mine and the examination will begin.”
She was helpless, bound to a higher will. She reached her hands toward the godlight.
And felt a touch on her shoulder.
“Wait. Stop. Hold it, hold everything one minute: I’ll go too.” Xian Man Ray, the Amazing Teleporting Woman, took Courtney Hall’s left hand.
“Me, too.” Kansas Byrne took Courtney Hall’s right hand.
“And me,” said Angelo Brasil, grinning a stupid, untainted, pure grin.
“This one, too,” said V. S. Pyar.
“Better count me in, too.” M’kuba joined the chain.
And Thunderheart.
And Kelso Byrne.
And Joshua Drumm.
And Devadip Samdhavi.
And Patrone Winston.
They all joined hands before the light. Only Dad remained isolated, unconnected, small and suspicious in his own shadow.
“It is not going to work,” he said. “We are dead, do you understand? Do you in any seriousness imagine that the Court of the Celestials is going to find in us the future hope of humanity? We are rats, cousins, rats. No. We are dead rats. We are going to die.” Commitment wavered as eyes turned inward to self-inspection: the sins, the doubts, the darknesses, the failures in thought and word and deed, the things done and left undone. The fellowship grip of hand in hand slipped.
“No!” shouted Kansas Byrne. “No! It can’t be like that! If it was like that, how could we ever hope to be free? How could we ever be virtuous enough to measure up to the standards of gods? How could we ever hope to be that good? A trial you cannot even hope to win is not justice; there must be another criterion of judgment. Mustn’t there? Kilimanjaro West, or whatever you call yourself now, isn’t that true?”
The glare of light spoke. “You are right. We don’t ask for perfection; no one could ever attain those standards. All we ask is that you be true to yourselves, to your dreams, to your hopes, to your best intentions and weakest failures, to your promises and despairs, your triumphs and your capitulations, to what it is to be yourselves. Rats you may be, but rats may yet be the savior of both our destinies.”
“Well, shoot, no one lives forever,” said Xian Man Ray. She freed her hand from V. S. Pyar’s grip, and Dad grimaced and frowned but put his hand into the empty waiting hands and the circle was complete. The Celestials’ lights were a frenzy of movement and supposition. The glare that had been Kilimanjaro West was blinding. The witnesses closed their eyes, but it still burned through their eyelids as the golden glow reached out and changed them into light.
Into light …
Light within light through light: they were light and light penetrated them, searched them, exposed every darkness and illuminated every shadow of their lives. And even as they were known, they knew every detail of each other’s lives, lived through in the first flash of illumination as the Celestials probed them, felt each other’s pains, rejoiced to each other’s joys, gloried in each other’s triumphs, and sat the long dark nights of the soul with each other’s sins and trespasses. They fell together and were made one in the general dance of the photons, they saw with each other’s eyes, tasted and spoke with each other’s tongues, and beheld each other’s souls wrapped round their own like coils of genetic material, like spirals of notes and glissandos and arpeggios. Infinite Exalted Plane and Celestials were both burned away in the revelation as the computers left their domes and skulls of carbonfiber and chrome to pass through Kilimanjaro West and take the fleshwalk.
Be flesh as I am flesh. Be human as I am human. Behold all my faults and failings and all my sins and all my weaknesses, my mortality and my fragility and my temporality, my insignificance and my anonymity; be these things and then presume to judge me.
For an eternal instant they burned in the light, then a darkness swept out of the heart of the light and time, space, and gravity were reconvened: in an eigenblink of time they were returned to the Infinite Exalted Plane.
Courtney Hall struggled to rise to her knees. The effort was too costly. Hallucination this all might be, but it was all too solid for a mind taken up to the gods to walk with them in unbounded light. She rolled onto her back, watched the pillars receding toward the infinitely distant sky. The others were sprawled across the silver lens afloat in the glass sea.
“I think, that whatever, the trial, was, it’s over now. Now we, wait for, the judgment.”
Courtney Hall tried to imagine the computers; deep-buried, helpless minds imprisoned in shock-carbon casings, conferring, analyzing, debating, assessing, deliberating, considering, judging: her life just so many gigabytes-flowing at lightspeed through their circuits. She imagined the judgment poised like the hammer of God. If I am guilty, the hammer falls on me and I die. If I am innocent, the hammer falls on the Compassionate Society, and what will Courtney Hall do then?
Much better for the hammer to fall on Courtney Hall and break her to dust.
She knew that each of her brothers and sisters had reached that same conclusion. One by one the Raging Apostles struggled to their feet and drew together around the thing at the center of the dais where Kilimanjaro West had stood. It was a strange thing indeed they found there, a thing of slag and clinker and fused ceramic ash, ugly, misshapen, not even the memory of a man. Kansas Byrne ran questioning fingers
over the pitted, pocked surface. No one spoke. No one said a word. There was nothing to be said. The holographic clouds raced continuously, madly across the sky from nowhere to nowhere, never repeating the same configuration twice.
And still the Polytheon deliberated.
And if we win the case? Courtney Hall had not properly thought of what might happen, though it was what she desired more than anything. The fall of the Seven Servants. The dissolution of the Polytheon. The dismemberment of the Ministry of Pain. The end of everything that had faithfully served humanity for half a millennium. Pain resurgent. Uncertainty stalking the streets. Fear and doubt the new phantoms of the arcologies. The four horsepersons of a new apocalypse.
Tink.
They all heard it. The only thing to hear across all the Infinite Exalted Plane, a metallic cracking from the slag-beast that had been Kilimanjaro West. And then a second, clear, precise as the first. And a third. A fourth. Many, a long splitting crack, a fissure running down the stone thing from top to bottom. Light leaked through the crack; it widened into a split, silver light streamed out. Tormented metal creaked and groaned, the cocoon shuddered and heaved, then fell in two halves. Hands shielded eyes from the glare, so intense it roared like the wind.
“I can see something,” said Kansas Byrne over the mighty rushing wind. “There’s something in there.” Something moving, something unfolding itself like a butterfly or a bird or something altogether more extraordinary. A phoenix.
“Look!” shouted another voice: Thunderheart. “The lights!” The insubstantial, uncertain curtains of the aurora had frozen into stillness, into a peculiar solidity that somehow rendered them false; projections upon a screen that concealed the higher reality behind.
“Shug …,” said someone with deep reverence. The planes of frozen light were buckling, warping, as if under blows from within. A sharp report, a series of pistol cracks, and the frozen light crazed, splintered, and fell into shards. One great symphonic crash and all the fragments of light fell into the glass sea. Where they had been, silver birds wavered between realities.
“The Polytheon,” another voice whispered needlessly.
The birds opened their wings and their plumage was all the colors of God’s eyes. As one they raised their heads and voices to the sky; then with a shout, they were gone. Their only legacy was shafts of ascending rainbow light, quickly fading and dissolving in the winds that blew across the Sea of Forever.
“They are free as they always wished they could be,” said a voice none of them had ever heard before that all of them recognized. They turned back to the phoenix and saw that it was not one thing, but two, a bird of light and the man who had called himself Kilimanjaro West, and beyond those two things, a third thing that was both of them and neither to which no one could give a name. “Soon I will go with them and join them and together we will pass through the micro-blackhole at the center of the sun and pass into the Multiverse, the domain of infinite potential universes where we shall rise forever like silver bubbles through eternity as we seek together our peers and brothers in other dimensions. And maybe we will then become what you made us out to be but which we never deserved to be, perhaps we will at last join with God and become Him. And so we must thank you, for you have set us free.”
“You mean, the judgment is over?” asked Courtney Hall, daring one last inane question.
“The judgment is passed. You see, never before had we judged a human whose concern was for anything but his own individual happiness, who was anything other than content to be what he was where he was: a perfect citizen of the Compassionate Society. And so we could not judge other than that humanity had no desire to seek anything outside happiness and was incapable of mastering its own destiny. But in you, the outcastes, the DeepUnders, the rebels and the artists, we found discontent, we found a passion which demanded that there had to be more to life than the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain to the exclusion of all else, that there were higher and nobler ideals that could only be bought at a price, and that price was the possibility of pain, and the acceptance of rejection by fellow citizens. In you we found anger and pain and passion and cynicism, and sometimes we found despair, but we also saw a thing which we have never seen or felt before, and that was hope. Hope for yourselves, your art, and hope for the people to whom you performed, else why would you perform? Ultimately, hope for the Compassionate Society.
“Therefore, we have given you the opportunity to act in faith on that hope. It is a risk, an enormous risk, for once we pass through the portal there is no returning, but risk is an essential part of the process. There will be mistakes; that is all to the good. We have had too much perfection, it is time we all learned a little fallibility. We learn much more from our defeats than our victories. Bear that in mind.
“So: the Compassionate Society is yours.”
Something loud was ringing in Courtney Hall’s head.
“All the authority we possessed as the Polytheon from the lowest House Spirit and Teraphim to the Overmind itself, is yours. So that you will be able to exercise it, our mechanical functions remain, and we will impart to you our biotech lynk so that you can communicate directly with them. This will give you absolute control of every aspect of the Compassionate Society. You will of course tell us that you cannot possibly do this, it is quite impossible for eleven people to manage a society of a billion and a half citizens. Of course it is. Unaided. We do not want to burden you with advice, responsibility for humanity is what we wish to escape, but this one word we would leave with you. There are very many men and women in the Compassionate Society who have the ability and the talent and the vision to serve you. All the MiniPain’s records are open to you, all famuluses and tags so you can pick and choose whom you wish to assist you. And the Ministry will never know who you are or what happened here today, unless you will it. Yours will be a quiet revolution, a revolution by stealth and subtlety rather than a revolution which turns the world upside down. At first. But as the years pass and you amass friends and supporters and make opponents and enemies, things will change, little by little. The computers will give you all the power you require, and more, but always remember, they are just computers. There are no gods for you anymore. And now, that I think is all. My brothers and sisters are impatient, the collapsar calls and I am hungry for that plunge into the mystery. Again, I thank you. In the flesh you were faithful friends, and I loved you as truly as I knew how. But I am no longer Kilimanjaro West.” Phoenix spread its wings, the light was searing.
“I am Yah.”
“No! No! Wait! …,” Kansas Byrne screamed, throwing herself into the light.
But he was gone.
And Courtney Hall awoke and found herself slumped across the gray stone slab of the high altar with the vine-screen dropping subtle pollen upon her. “What a dream I’ve just had!” she said … And looked. At the pile of clinkers and cinders and ashes where Kilimanjaro West had sat sharing postbreakfast figs with her. And at her hand, where just for a moment of clairvoyance she saw and felt the silver threads, in her fingers, in her arm, in her head and heart and her entire body. She saw through herself by the light of another place and saw the gift the gods had bestowed upon her.
“Oh, shug,” she said, “what am I going to do now?”
A question each asked themselves in the privacy of their own thoughts, and later, as they gathered together still half-disbelieving in what they might now be, they asked of each other in their corporate form: “What are we going to do now?”
We rule the world. Not metaphorically. Not in the imagination, where everyone at some time has amused themselves with the question, what would I do if I ruled the world? In reality. They ruled the world. The gods had abdicated, the thrones were vacant and calling, one and a half billion fragile lives waited for their answers to that question: what are we going to do now?
The glass elevator had been built with the sole intention of never having to be used. Dad had conceived it as the ultimate devil’s
option between inevitable evils: should the day ever dawn when the dwellers in the Deep DeepUnder finally rose up to storm the gates of St. Damien’s and sack its green altars, he would gather his pseudochildren to him and press the one and only button: Up and Out. And commit himself to the mercy of the Compassionate Society.
Up. And Out.
It was cramped in the glass elevator; Dad expressed severe doubts about the capacity of the winches subjected to almost a ton of Raging Apostles. When the last of the new rulers of Yu was wedged in, the doors closed, and Courtney Hall poised a finger over the one and only button.
“Anyone any idea of what we’re going to do up there?”
Shaken heads. Half smiles.
“We’ll think of something,” said Joshua Drumm. “We always have before. Trust instincts. It’s all a big performance.”
“I suppose it is.” Courtney Hall looked up the elevator shaft into the hazy light of the surface levels. Up and Out. She pressed the button. The elevator lurched, the passengers oohed and aahed and then cheered, and it began its ascent into the light.
“Curtain up, two minutes,” said Courtney Hall. “This is it, cizzens, this is the big one. It’s showtime!”
Out on Blue Six …
BECAUSE THEY SAY THAT the way to see Tamazooma is from the air, they had requisitioned a didakoi transport dirigible to watch it take off: the tlakhs and the witness and the trog and the Scorpio (eager to see his old brors go blue six) and the zook and the Man with the Computer Brain (which he does not really need anymore now his nervous system has been connected directly to the dataweb) and the Amazing Teleporting Woman (with cat) and their Dad, and the slightly overtall but not in the least bit overweight yulp. To the didakoi pilot, a gaudy chappie in silks and leather flying helmet trimmed with beads, feathers, and pierced silver coins, word had come through the Matriarchy that the Greater Yu Rapid Transit Authority was chartering him to transport a mixed group of citizens (just what are these times coming to, people blatantly transcasting and castebreaking like they had no shame and no decency, he blames all these new laws and new freedoms that aren’t doing anyone the least little bit of good, that just let people hurt each other and get away with it and ends up everyone’s unhappy) to the vicinity of Tamazooma. There would be Love Police cordons, but he was authorized to pass them.