Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1)

by Alex McKechnie

  Jura stared.

  ‘The tersh, I mean. He doesn’t even know you’re here. This isn’t part of some elaborate scheme.’

  He took a glass and downed half of the contents in a gulp. Gnesha’s nethers.

  ‘I had the privilege of reading your file before I landed.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You’ve done some sterling work in your time at the faculty, your wiremind detectors in particular.’

  ‘Many thanks.’

  ‘You would be an excellent addition to the syndicate hub, you know. We could certainly use your kind of ingenuity.’

  ‘You’re too kind, Your Eminence.’

  He took another sip of the mystery drink and wheezed. ‘What is this beverage, exactly?’

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d like it. Galdstian opal water. I brought several bottles of the stuff with me. Curious species, the Galdstians. They've modified themselves so heavily there's almost no humanity left.’

  The flavour had dimension somehow, gentle sweetness, and a sanguine sour after taste that lingered just long enough on the tongue.

  ‘I must say, I haven’t been very impressed with your planet’s liquor so far,’ said the syndicate woman.

  ‘No,’ Jura said. ‘I think most of it tastes like piss, myself.’ He gasped. ‘I…apologies. That was rather unlike me.’

  She smiled mischievously and took a healthy sip from her glass.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘The Galdstians have a special kind of biology. They can drink their opal water by the litre and it has only the lightest of effects on their mental condition. Humans, however, well, it’s quite a different story. Do you feel more honest, Professor?’

  He introspected for a moment. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You will. Opal water debilitates the brain in the usual style of alcohol, but it attacks the strabilum conglorium first, almost immediately after contact with the tongue. The strabilum conglorium. Do you know that part of the brain?’

  Jura shook his head.

  ‘The seat of deception. Everybody has one. I suspect yours is particularly enlarged. Even as we speak, it's being saturated in a deluge of sugar molecules, isolating it from the rest of your mind. Do you feel differently now, Professor? I could’ve just asked you to speak freely, but I know it wouldn’t have done much good, would it? This way is easier.’

  Again, he shook his head. I will give up liquor for good, he thought with weighty resolve.

  ‘I’m still fairly certain this is some dumb snare,’ he said and closed his eyes, ashamed. It had simply fallen out of his mouth; there had been no time to process it.

  ‘A snare? No, I don't play games like that,’ she said. ‘And you can tell that’s the truth, I’ve been drinking this stuff with you, after all.’

  ‘You said it only works on human biology, and there’s every reason to suspect that you’re anything but.’

  He cringed again, standing this time to leave. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I am truly, truly, sorry. I simply don’t seem to have control of my faculties.’

  ‘Sit down, Professor. We haven’t even started yet. Can you imagine what the leaders of Old Erde could have done with opal water in their arsenal? Bloody campaigns could have been avoided outright, nuclear payloads kept in their silos, left collecting dust for the duration of history. Deception is the pustulous head at tip of all conflict.’

  ‘Deception is the quality which gave us civilisation,’ said Jura, and meant it.

  What a relief this all is, somehow. He had no choice now, no choice to resist or subvert the truth. Well fine. If this is how I have to go out, if this is how it has to happen, I think I can bear that. It’s better than A.H., rotting quietly at the Bureau of Substatiation. Better than all those Ixenites. Better than that wiremind yesterday, taken apart in the dark bit by bit, bolt by bolt. Better than being a damned Old Erde weasel and dying an Old Erde weasel’s death.

  ‘What do you mean by that, Professor?’

  ‘Deception is the basic currency of every human transaction: love, politics, and trade. Advertising is a form of lying. Love requires heavy omission of the truth when the rot sets in later. And politics is deception at an artisanal level of mastery. We lie to protect those around us as much as we lie to exploit them. The truth is too bright to stare at directly. Even now, you’ve come here and lied unabashedly to the whole of Exurbia.’

  She forced her expression to one of mock-affront. ‘Lied?’

  ‘Without a doubt. You refuse to let our engineers go near your craft, you’ve come alone, and you have neglected to tell us news of the syndicate, over and over. Either you’re here on behalf of a renegade faction, or the hub is getting ready to annex us and you’ve come to do the scout work. Whatever the intentions of your visit are, you’re a harbinger.’

  ‘I would tell you of the syndicate,’ she said, ‘if I could only find the words.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It is not something that lends itself easily to speech.’

  ‘I would think more of you for at least trying.’ Oh Plovda, let me go will you?

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘do you know those few seconds after waking? When life hasn’t found its context yet?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘That’s the hub in its entirety.’

  ‘Everybody…has amnesia at the syndicate hub?’

  ‘No. But let's say that it is not quite what you imagine.’

  ‘What do I imagine?’

  ‘A gleaming galactic civilisation. Trade routes. Gentility. Forums where the men wear togas and speak at length about the importance of courtesy and good manners.’

  ‘That's the last thing I had in mind.’

  ‘Were you always this pessimistic, Stefan?’ she said with a sudden playful alacrity.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘My wife did this to me, kiss by kiss.’ What are you saying, you mad radge?

  ‘What did your wife do to you?’

  ‘Gave too much of herself to me,’ he said and reeled at his own honesty.

  ‘You only want the unobtainable,’ said Miss Butterworth.

  ‘I would hesitate to comment on that.’

  ‘You only want the unobtainable, and when your wife became obtainable, when the veneer came down and she gave herself to you in full, you lost all interest. That night on the Nufeeja lake, the promises she made as you both fell asleep on the bank. If there was a point when it died for you, that was it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t -’

  ‘The moment when she became procurable. Not like the Up though. Not like the wiremind race. It’s the perfect game, isn’t it? You might never get hold of it, you might never live to see a real one reach criticality. It could stay forever and perfectly out of your reach. I can make that happen if you like, Stefan. If you want me to, I can keep it forever impossible.’

  He was speechless, sopping wet in his own sweat, his heart palpating. She was at his side then, whispering into his ear, the wet echoes of her mouth, the hot vapour of her breath. ‘Would you like that, Stefan?’

  He tried to stand and could not. He went to summon the energy to push her away, but that was just as impossible. He could smell her breath then, sweet. Turning his head, he took her in. Her face was radiant, glowing at the edges, her hair so bright it was almost blinding, her mouth tucked up in a confident half-smile.

  ‘What a busy thing you’ve been,’ she said. ‘Collecting scraps and discards for your projects, saying whatever the tersh wanted to hear. What an industrious scandalmonger.’

  ‘What are you?’ he managed to croak, stupefied with horror.

  ‘A guest,’ she said. ‘And you shouldn’t ask guests direct questions like that. Maybe you won’t like the answers.’

  ‘Are…are you really syndicate?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you really here because of a possible Pergrin crisis?’

  ‘In a sense.’

  But why? Gnesha, why?

  ‘Why indeed,’ she sai
d. ‘Do you know the Old Erde butterfly?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Well, they all begin as pathetic crawling insects, wingless. And they gorge themselves on leafs for a time until they’re full and then they crawl up into a chrysalis and dangle from a branch. Then the cocoon breaks and out comes this exquisite butterfly. But - curiously - if you break the chrysalis open when it’s only half done, do you know what you find inside?’

  He shook his head. Half a butterfly, he thought.

  ‘Not half a butterfly, no. Just slop. Gelatinous slop, full of amino acids. Isn’t that strange? The caterpillar disappears in the chrysalis and is completely broken down. And then it’s reborn, Stefan.’

  Out in the city, out beyond the great windows, the roof flares and spotlights were dancing like lazy diodes in the middle distance. All the light was streaking into itself now, blurring together in a hideous neon unison. An enormous purple butterfly descended suddenly over the Bureau of Substantiation, floating silently. The eyes seemed to look straight into Stefan.

  ‘Do you think a butterfly knows that it came from a caterpillar? That it dissolved into nebulous slop for a time? They’re myopic, for such beautiful creatures. They haven’t a clue what they are. But we understand. Don’t we, Professor?’

  The butterfly began to move towards them, coming across the city lights, cutting straight through the transport pods and police capriglobes.

  ‘We understand the process entire. It’s what we do. The gestalt. Everything has been an attempt to understand the gestalt, to understand the True Process. It started with man’s realisation of his own mortality. Life wasn’t an infinite dream. Instead it was, as the Old Erde poet said, bookended by eternity. And then we understood the gestalt of the stars, their strange geometries. And it is my job, Professor, to understand humanity’s gestalt.’

  There was no mistaking it, the butterfly was staring directly at him as it flew. He blinked frantically. The spectre persisted. Now the buildings were falling away into dark, replaced instead with stars and nebulas. The Bureau of Substantiation, the Civic Hall, the Stratigraphics Faculty, the Conglomeration of the Agglutinators, the Blueberry Projects, all of it diminishing into black; star fields taking their place.

  ‘Here we are at the true gestalt,' said Miss Butterworth. ‘I don’t show this to just anybody, you know.’

  They were suspended above a whirling galaxy then, all signs of Exurbia gone. The butterfly had followed them into the vision, apparently.

  ‘The gestalt…’ Jura said.

  ‘The gestalt,’ said the butterfly in a deafening bass warble, its mouth adorned with slick tangles of spit.

  ‘The gestalt,’ Miss Butterworth said. ‘We were caterpillars for the longest time. The real question, question with a capital Q, is whether man is ready for the chrysalis.’

  The butterfly was close then, still approaching.

  ‘We’re not a cul-de-sac,’ Jura managed. ‘We can’t be.’

  ‘It is your world that gets to decide,' she whispered, her mouth to his ear again.

  ‘Do you mean him?’ said a high-pitched voice from behind. One of Miss Butterworth’s spyles flew into view and scrutinised Jura with its stalk-lens.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Butterworth. ‘He seems as good as any other.’

  ‘But he’s scared. Look at him,’ said the second spyle coming into focus now, the voice a little higher in pitch than the first.

  ‘That isn’t for you to determine,’ said the butterfly, the voice so loud it was almost unbearable.

  ‘Who is the chrysalis?' said the first drone. ‘Who is the worm? Who gets eternity? Who gets the urn?’

  Then the two of them in unison: ‘Who is the chrysalis? Who is the worm? Who gets eternity? Who gets the urn?’

  Miss Butterworth put up a silencing hand and studied Jura’s face.

  ‘Well, Stefan? What do you say, eternity or the urn?’

  ‘Is this real,’ he whispered. ‘And if so, how much of it?’

  ‘You see,’ said the spyle. ‘He doesn’t even understand.’

  ‘Are they…wireminds?’ said Stefan.

  One of the drones giggled.

  ‘You’re going to do me a favour,’ said Miss Butterworth. ‘And in return, I’m going to give you what you’ve always wanted. I only ask that you be bold.’

  ‘“Be bold,”’ moaned Jura, ‘“and mighty forces will come to your aid.”’

  ‘Old Erde poetry. Goethe, yes? Mighty forces have come to your aid, Professor. There’s going to be a redistribution of power. You’re going to be bold. No more of this petty deferring of responsibility. No more subversion in secret. No more setting Mrs. Peaches’ garden shed alight and letting the neighbours blame it on the Blueberry Project arsonists.’

  How? How could you possibly know about that?

  ‘I know you, Jura. I know you well. And I know you’re capable of what I’m asking. There is one final thing I require.’

  ‘Our souls. All of our souls,’ he said.

  The spyles both giggled.

  ‘No, not that. The t’assali satellite access strings.’

  ‘The tersh wouldn’t give them to me in ten billion years.’

  ‘We don’t need the tersh. Only your wife. Pardon my misspeak, your ex-wife.’

  Annie, of course; her job at the Bureau of Celestials.

  ‘You’re meeting her soon anyway, aren’t you?’

  There was no further point responding.

  ‘Get me the strings. Get me the strings, and I’ll give you what you want.’

  I don’t want for anything, he thought. I don’t want a damn thing in the damn world, with the possible exception of getting you out of my mind. What do you want with them?

  ‘Something perfectly admirable. Do you know the Ayakashi?’

  Of course. And who could forget it, the streams showing video feeds every few weeks of those strange orange fingers tearing through some city or other.

  ‘What do you think it is? In your academic opinion?’ she asked.

  Malign inter-dimensional tomfoolery. Punishment from vengeful gods. I haven't the faintest idea.

  ‘I have. It’s a girl, black hair, pale little thing. And every night that she has a bad dream, those orange tendrils appear on the outskirts of a city or a village and rip it gutter from gutter. Get me the strings and I’ll bring her here, to Bucepalia. I’ll tame her. And I’ll give you a very special gift in return.’

  Amid the starfield ahead of them, something took shape: girders coming together, locomotive mechanical parts, pistons, casings, vent assemblies. My god. A rig. The casings locked together, the optic contacts and logic gates coupled. The structure was enormous.

  ‘Larger than the Stratigraphics Faculty,’ she said. ‘When it’s finished.’

  It hung in space for a moment. The rings began to gyrate, slowly at first, then looping back on each other, over and over, a light coming lit at the heart of the mechanism, an orb suspended at the centre, though not a t’assali orange. A shimming midnight blue. The ambrosia, he thought.

  ‘Correct, Professor. More stable than t’assali, more efficient, and a critical threshold of seven pergrins.'

  Aside from the improved design and the sheer size of the machine, there was a detail he didn’t recognise from the usual builds. A podium of some kind dangled from the belly of the mechanism, complete with a balcony.

  ‘That basket is your prize, Professor. If you are to be bold, those mighty forces will come to your aid when you step into that basket. Don’t you think the wiremind race is a strange one? Here you all are trying to build a god with no thought for yourselves. What about your volition? What about your will to power? I won’t give you a god, Stefan. I’ll make you one.’

  A projector, he thought. The damn thing’s a projector, an amplifier for consciousness. Why would you do this? Why would you do any of this?

  ‘The same reason you beaver away in secret. The same reason the Ixenites give their lives. For the gestalt, Professor,’
she said, leaning into him then, kissing his cheek, breathing hot air into his ear. ‘All of it for the gestalt.’

  17

  “We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday.”

  - F.T. Marinetti of Old Erde, exponent of futurism

  The Crone -

  The crone had been young once, a nomad in the epicforests. Her rabble had trekked from village to village bringing songs of Old Erde, shanties and the like, to curious ears, rarely staying more than a day in any one place. Sometimes they were chased to the village limits, but more often than not they were given food and bedding for the night on account of their novelty. Few knew much of Old Erde, and to have it sung to them, Macbeth, Beowulf, Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, was a welcome distraction from the banalities of life on the farms and in the t’assali pits.

  The crone had not taken a husband. She was far from ugly then, the opportunity simply hadn’t presented itself. It was no matter. The old myths and old songs kept her company enough; Theseus in his labyrinth, Steven Daedalus in his schoolroom. Occasionally a Governance patrol passed through a village and chased them out. She’d been arrested twice, but it hadn’t been of any consequence. Word was that the existence of Exurbia’s nomads had been put to the moralising imp, and he had deemed that they were well within their rights to continue their lifestyle as it stood.

  She had seen the Ayakashi twice before she met the girl. She had stood at the borders of Kadesh and watched the first ever attack, ripping through the town like a lace of angry sunlight. The Ayakashi had something to do with t’assali, that much was clear. Its orange gleam was unmistakable. But what was it doing outside of a generator, naked like that? It was the second attack that had stayed with her. Sometime around the Year of the Flippant Star, the rabble had made camp a few miles from New Coventry, and played ballads long into the night, the crone on the two-fiddle. They had heard it first; a screaming chorus beyond the epicforest. As they approached the city they discerned orange fingers peeking through the trees. The crone said a prayer to any god that might be listening: Alter this day in the most peaceful direction.