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

by Alex McKechnie

  ‘Knowingly, yes,’ said the boy.

  He took in the Grand Hall then, the dangling purple banners, the gungovs stationary in the wings, the glass domed ceiling and the moons rising beyond it. ‘It is good to be inside the tower at last,’ the boy said. ‘I always imagined the place was ridiculous, I just didn’t realise to what an extent. You’ve really got a foothold, Stefan. You’ve really -’

  ‘You shall not,’ said Miss Butterworth, standing then, the two spyles streaking across the room to her side and extending their cutting-parts, ‘refer to the tersh by that name.’

  ‘Apologies, I assumed we were on informal terms. I see now that I was wrong.’

  Jura motioned to the syndicate woman and she sat back down reluctantly. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘what is your name, if I might ask?’

  ‘Mcalister. Store clerk extraordinaire.’

  ‘Store clerks don’t wear water coils, Mr. Mcalister.’

  ‘I sometimes moonlight as a high-ranking member of an order determined to end your tyrannical reign and create the first critical-stage wiremind. But mostly I stick to being a store clerk, you see.’

  ‘We had a gentleman here yesterday,’ said Miss Butterworth, ‘with a similar sense of humour. He’s having a wonderful time at the Bureau of Rehabilitation now, I believe. It would be no bother at all to extend the same offer to yourself.’

  The boy reached for a switch on his back and deactivated the water coils. Then he untethered them from his body and let them to the ground.

  ‘His name was Marxazy, and he was a friend. I don’t expect to see him again,’ said the boy.

  ‘Ah, and you have been captured on account of this Marxazy,’ said the tersh.

  The boy eyed one of the gungovs. ‘I have been captured because you’ve had your machinations, whatever they are, storming every hell-haunted house in Bucephalia for the last month. I was treated to a visit of theirs just after the moons had risen last night.’

  ‘We have found it an effective tactic for dealing with your kind,’ said Miss Butterworth.

  ‘Your idea, no doubt,’ said the boy. ‘Much like every other abomination recently, whispering in this soft-head’s ear, soothsaying. Is that the new law of the land, then? Round us all up?’

  ‘The Pergrin Decree isn’t a joke, Mr. Mcalister. It’s the core of the syndicate’s resilience. Without it, we’re all lost. I can see the Bureau of Rehabilitation would only be child’s play to you. With talents such as yours, I’m sure we can find a more appropriate placement. In my private chambers, perhaps. My spyles would be more than happy to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘Oh we would,’ one said, and corkscrewed up through the centre of the hall, splaying its cutting-parts.

  ‘Your wiremind device,’ the tersh cut in. ‘What could you possibly hope to achieve?’ And how close was it to criticality?

  ‘I have reason to believe that we have all been lied to for a very long time now,’ said the boy. ‘I have reason to believe that the syndicate hub is not the utopic union our visitor here claims it to be. I have reason to believe that the only thing that can possibly save us from you, her, all of us, is a spinning ball of t’assali that has finally woken up.’

  ‘What makes you think that’s even possible?’ Jura said. ‘Wireminds are a myth as old as Old Erde.’

  ‘Because it has happened before. And you know it,’ he said, staring then at Miss Butterworth. ‘You know damn well it’s impossible to stop the gestalt. Why have you come here?’

  ‘Bind him,’ said Miss Butterworth, stroking one of the spyles. ‘Then mute him, and take him to the education room where I will educate him.’

  ‘Why? What could you possibly stand to gain?’

  ‘That’s quite enough, young man,’ said Jura. ‘Miss Butterworth is a distinguished guest, and I am the head of Exurbic Governance. We shan’t be spoken to in this manner.’

  The spyles advanced across the hall, one bearing an adhesive gag.

  ‘Just think about it for a moment,’ the boy said. ‘She told us she came by boat but not a single astronomer detected weld ripples. She told us she came for a week’s inspection, and she has stayed for, what, five months now? She said she would honour our rituals, yet all she’s done is frame the old tersh and position you as a puppet instead. You can’t possibly -’

  The drone rolled the gag across his mouth, the other took his hands with a low-energy t’assali field. He stood motionless, not resisting.

  ‘That’s a very healthy imagination you apparently have,’ said Miss Butterworth. ‘Why, if I had fancies like yours, I’m sure I could write new myths to endure for millennia. It’s a shame you’ve applied your talents to Ixenite matters instead. I’ll be up to join you shortly, Mr. Mcalister. Then we’ll get a little better acquainted.’

  She motioned to the drones and they dragged the boy and his water coils from the hall. Jura shifted uneasily in the tershal chair. ‘What will you do to him?’ he said.

  ‘Whatever need be done.’

  ‘I don’t know if we should be torturing the population, even if they are Ixenites…’

  ‘What would you suggest, Your Eminence? Perhaps we should dispatch them all to the almond spas instead and pay for their rest and recuperation with credit from the Governance treasury?’

  ‘There is a line,’ he said quietly, ‘between total mercy and total tyranny.’

  ‘In a universe without the Pergrin Decree that might be so. Let’s imagine we detain Mr. Mcalister for a short time, perhaps have him flogged a little. Then we let him loose on an unsuspecting Bucephalia once again. He will tell his Ixenite friends back in their warrens and hovels that the price for trying to build a wiremind is little more than a smack on the wrist. They will overrun even the gungovs in almost no time at all. Can I assume you understand?’

  Jura nodded. Gnesha, his clothes were heavy, the absurd purple robe, filled with weights in the hem so as to stop it from swaying when he walked, the tershal cane to carry, the tershal cummerbund about his waist. What a relief it will be to take this nonsense off tonight, to lie in bed with the lights off and the curtains sealed.

  ‘What is it, Professor?’

  She would be there of course, just as she was there every night, sharing his bed, insisting that they - as she put it - twine. Afterwards, naked, she would say impossible things, things she had no way of knowing, breaking him apart, recounting childhood episodes he had been careful not to share with another living soul, save perhaps for Annie an age ago. And sometimes, if she fell asleep first - though he suspected she was only pretending - he would walk to the balcony and look out on Bucephalia below, look out on his continentmen and continentwomen and wonder how many stared back at his tower and wished they could trade places. I would take that trade in a second, Plovda’s fury, I would.

  ‘We will need him, this Mcalister character.’

  ‘Need him, Miss Butterworth?’

  ‘As the scorpion needs the toad,’ she said. ‘Do you know that story, Professor?’

  He wrung his hands beneath the tershal robes and tried to clear his mind. ‘I believe I do, yes.’ Perhaps it has all been clever guesswork. Perhaps she can’t see inside me at all and I’m just addled.

  ‘His design was one of the best I’ve seen, very few moving parts. We could certainly use him.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, is that not incredibly dangerous, letting a man like that inside the workshop?’

  ‘What is the moral of the scorpion and the toad, Professor?’ she said, reaching across to run a lazy finger down his neck.

  ‘Be careful whose help you accept,’ Jura said, his skin prickling. For your help has brought nothing but misery.

  ‘No. The moral is that each and every living thing has within it a nature, and will act in accordance, above all, with that nature. Men will lie and men will steal, but they will always revert back to their true leanings. Mr. Mcalister’s true leaning is the building of a god. It matters not to him whether that god is built in the slums
or the palace; he will do a fine job in the tershal workshop. Perhaps he’s an Ixenite, but it’s only a vice. He’s a gestalt fanatic first and foremost, a “Seer” as they say in their chapterhouses.’

  The gestalt, the gestalt, the gestalt. She would talk of it only in the moments when he was incapable of leaving, bound by duty or ritual, lying spent beneath bedsheets, or sitting fully robed in the tershal hall.

  ‘Is the gestalt…’ he said, ‘a syndicate branch of spirituality, or is it only native to the Exurbic Ixenites?’

  She turned to him, incredulous for a stretched second, then let out a manic laugh that seem to compound and compound on itself.

  ‘Did I say something naive?’

  ‘More,’ she said, ‘than you could ever possibly understand.’ Then, wiping a tear from her eye: ‘Do you know why they’re called Ixenites, Stefan?’

  ‘I don’t, Your Auspiciousness.’

  ‘Before the word “wiremind” was coined, the people of Old Erde devised a system for categorising technology. They knew the future would be a million times more complex than the past and so the Ix metric was born. Stage I is the alteration of humans using medical implants. We’ve been doing it for centuries, have we not? The next is using mental implants, such as the one I now wear myself. Stage III is the point at which a society begins to use these devices recreationally, rather than just in a medical setting. By stage IV, we are beginning to see the beginning of wireminds. It is this point that the Pergrin Decree forbids us from ever reaching, for the certain knowledge of what will happen.’

  And yet, we’re building a wiremind right here in the tershal tower. What madness is this?

  ‘Stage V is the emergence of human-technological hybrids. The planet would long ago have been destroyed by the wiremind of course, but let’s allow the Ixenites their optimism. By stage VI they believe it will be possible to transfer human consciousness onto a machine platform, to live forever on a technological substratum. Madness, no? At stage VII, almost the entire planetary population will have migrated inside these virtual habitats, opting for immortality over biological death. By stage VIII, all the sentient software inside these habitats will have merged together into a single conscious unity. And it is that unity that they fervently refer to as stage IX, hence, Ixenites. They call it the birth of the godhead. Little do they know that particular godhead is always, without fail, furious when he’s woken from his slumber.’

  ‘But,’ said Jura, ‘nobody has tried to build these virtual habitats.’

  ‘No, of course not. The Ixenites are trying to skip the later stages using t’assali. That’s the beauty of the material. No other substance in the universe, not even silicon, can reach critical conscious states the way it can. And once it does, there’s a feedback effect, or they hope there will be anyway. The patterns of consciousness bleed back into reality itself, turning physical systems into miniature consciousness computers. In effect,’ she said, with a playful wink, ‘waking up the universe.’

  How do you know so much? Are you mechanical after all?

  ‘Of course, being a sack of meat like yourself, there’s only so much we can guess about the process. But that seems to be how it would unfold. I saw the beginnings on Spool, of course. That was enough.’

  ‘What…’ said Jura, his stomach vaulting at the thought, ‘did it look like?’

  She was silent. He went to repeat the question, but she pointed to the centre of the hall. There was only air and ornaments for a moment, then a giant marble-like sphere actuated, filling the hall itself, swallowing even the diligent gungovs: a planet, cloud patterns percolating in the upper atmosphere, the skies a fuchsia purple, the whole structure turning slowly on an invisible pivot.

  ‘All species,’ said Miss Butterworth, ‘are either insomniacal or comatose. Some can’t lose themselves to the dark, others can’t emerge from it.’

  There was a break in the clouds towards the top of the north pole, a pallid shimmer of green and red light.

  ‘Almost all species are insomniacal. Take the Old Erde shark, for example. A brute of a creature, evolutionarily stagnant, living at the peak of its development for millions of years. And with nowhere to go, with no monuments to build, no history to live through.’

  The shimmer began to plume and blossom in wild permutations, covering the whole of the continent from where it came in seconds, expanding out.

  ‘Others, very rare species, are comatose. They live for millions of years on the cusp of their improvement, never quite able to make the jump for one reason or another.’

  The ribbons engulfed the whole of the planet until there was only a curtain of variegated light. Then it vanished completely, the gungovs still standing where the planet had been, unmoved.

  ‘The question, beloved tersh, is which you think our species is. A sleeper, or an insomniac? A chrysalis or a worm?’

  ‘I don’t consider myself educated enough to comment.’

  Miss Butterworth laughed into her hands.

  ‘It’s all you ever think about, you lying brute. No matter.’ She gestured to one of the hall drones and it came at once with a glass of zadrika. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘for something testing. Will you promise me, Professor, that you won’t relent?’

  ‘Relent?’

  ‘To anything less than the promise you made some months ago when I arranged this position for you, to honour the traditions of Exurbia.’

  ‘I stand by that promise.’

  ‘Even under moments of stress?’ It has been nothing but. Furious butterflies began at once to swarm and dance in his stomach. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She nodded to the door drone.

  ‘Annie Jura,’ it said, ‘of the Bureau of Celestials.’

  The main doors swung aside. Annie was propped up against a gungov, her hair greasy and wild, her face sunken. Jura stood to his feet involuntarily, his mouth opening and closing.

  ‘Treason,’ said Miss Butterworth, taking Jura’s hand and pulling him back down into the tershal chair, ‘is punishable by death, is it not?’

  ‘Treason?’ said Jura, his breath short. Am I a pet? And is this entire world, and its entire populace, just some jangling ball to be dangled under my nose?

  The gungov pulled Annie forward into the centre of the room and then retreated to the peripheries with the others. She fell to her knees, matted hair covering her face like a veil of seaweed. ‘Oh Stefan,’ she said in a mouse’s voice.

  ‘You will call the tersh,’ said Miss Butterworth, ‘by his correct address.’

  ‘What’s happened to her?’ said the professor, noticing then the welts on his ex-wife’s arms.

  ‘Mrs. Jura made the decision to pass her satellite access string onto unauthorised parties.’

  His senses receded into a single point; his hearing muted, his field of vision the size of a bullet hole.

  ‘A diligent member of the Bureau of Celestials informed me of the theft when he found that the strings were being used for improper purposes.’

  Jura could make out something of a manic smile through Annie’s blonde tangles. He lowered his voice to a whisper: ‘But she gave them to me, and I gave them to you.’

  ‘Your point being what, exactly?’

  ‘You wanted the codes and I asked Annie to aquire them from the Bureau.’

  ‘To steal them, you mean.’

  ‘You demanded them.’

  ‘I asked that they might be ascertained. The Governance bureaus are an extension of the syndicate itself. Theft from them is theft from the hub. This could hardly go unpunished.’ And then to Annie: ‘What have you to say for yourself?’

  She was gaunter than he’d ever seen her, skin like perished parchment. How long has she already been kept in the cells?

  ‘Nothing comes to mind,’ Annie said.

  ‘Annie…’ Jura said.

  ‘You admit the crime then, Mrs. Jura?’ said the syndicate woman.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you are willing to face the appropriate puni
shment for such a crime against Governance?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘It’s settled then.’

  An escort gungov approached to remove her.

  ‘Wait,’ said Jura. ‘This is preposterous. She was only doing as I asked, and I was doing as you asked. You have the strings now. That would’ve been impossible without Annie’s help.’

  ‘You’re correct, Grand Tersh, but you forget that this is a precedent. Old Erde’s empires were often founded on slavery and persecution. When their empires matured, did they still tolerate said slavery and persecution? Means and ends, ends and means.’

  ‘Whatever you do with those strings,’ he said, ‘will be thanks to Annie. You wouldn’t have them otherwise.’

  ‘You’re correct. And those robes about your body, the chair on which you sit, the chamber you will retire to this evening, it came as a result of the former tersh trying to kill me. Had he not made such a terrible calculation, he would still be in power today, rather than rotting in the Low Cells. Does that make the attempted murder of syndicate officials virtuous then, just because it brought you to power?’

  ‘It’s hardly a fair analogy.’

  ‘But it is,’ said Annie, her voice rasping and low. ‘It’s fair in every sense.’

  ‘Then the matter’s concluded. Remove her.’

  The gungov’s eyes surged with orange for a moment then returned to the standard dim glow. It began to drag her from the hall.

  Could I kill the witch? If I told the machines to rip her limb from limb, would they obey me, even if she’s syndicate? They’d just turn and laugh at me, laugh in mechanical squeaks, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. He felt himself a young man then, some two decades previous. Wind was dabbing at the curtains. Annie was still asleep. He had brushed aside the hair from her face and she had opened her eyes for a moment, just a moment, and he had known then, known in the sense that he knew his own name, known in the sense that he knew the positions of the stars, that nothing could really harm him now. They had found a small corner of their own, and it would be enough for the duration of the lives. Time is a rot and it eats through even the sturdiest walls, even certainty, even empires. Even you and I, Annie.