“And don’t pretend to be jaded.” He smiled. “I’m nothing, Kalypso. I never was anything. You know that. I know that. You think I don’t know what people think of me? Good old Azamat. Gets the job done. Not much of a spark; not much of an imagination; not much of anything. But can be counted on to do what’s needed. That was my function on this mission; it always has been and it always will be.”
“What’s happening to you. Tell me.”
“I’m the bridge-builder. I’m the bricks. I’m the bridge. I’m the guy who jumps off.”
“Azamat, we’re in the Dreamer. Are you aware of that? This isn’t real.”
“Oh yes it is. Tell me how a Dream works.”
“Ganesh digs a bank of associations and references for you. Sensory. Cognitive. When it feeds you data, it translates them into your subconscious, which in turn rules your senses. So you can touch the abstract.”
“The System only exists in the mind that can understand it. I’m teaching Ganesh to understand the System, and the System to understand Ganesh. What we did to your body? I’m turning that into pure thought. I’m turning that into language.”
“But I’m the bridge. It’s my body you used for a bridge. Me and Sieng. Why am I not going crazy like you and Ganesh?”
“Because you don’t understand. You don’t grasp the abstraction. Your ignorance of the math saves you, Kalypso.”
“Irony of ironies.”
A PICTURE OF CHARL WITH HER HAND DEEP INSIDE A PANEL IN THE LUMA. A PICTURE OF KESSEL, TALKING TO HER.
“Go to sleep now. Change is coming. I need you out of here.”
“The Mothers have done this to you,” she railed at random. “How many sacrificial lambs have they made?”
“If it weren’t for the Mothers,” he said, “none of us would be here. I would have remained on Earth for lack of funding, and you would never have been born.”
“That doesn’t give them the right—”
“It gives them what it gives them. I’m bigger than you. That doesn’t give me any rights either.”
“But you carved up my body.”
“Exactly.”
“And I hate you for it.”
“I know.” And he smiled again and she smiled back, the moron that she was.
“What is this?” she said. “Why do I feel this way? Are you doing this to me?”
“I don’t know. Go to sleep.”
“If you say that one more time, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
Tehar verbed her: she felt it coming in, but she couldn’t decipher it. The message had been scrambled inside Ganesh.
“There are a thousand and one ways to take a man’s life,” Azamat said. “You’re the only thing I have left. I want you to go now.”
I’m not doing as he says, Kalypso thought. Tehar had verbed her for a reason. Maybe he’d found some way to help her. She had to try harder. Azamat was becoming emotional; that meant he was distracted. Maybe he could be distracted more.
“Will you kill that cat?” she demanded. “It’s suffering. Why don’t you just kill it?”
He stood up, still holding her in his arms. She liked this, and thought again of the rush she’d gotten, the first time he knocked her down, in the Dreamer unit. He walked over to where the kitten lay, unmoving except for its labored breathing, eyes glassy but still alive.
“Do you recognize it?” he said. “You kill it.”
He put her down. Produced the club again.
“Hit it hard,” he said. “You don’t want to risk having it live to feel the blow.”
WE’RE GETTING MORE NODES COME UP KALYPSO, HURRY. WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING, CAN YOU DO IT FASTER? TERES IS ABOUT TO BLOW.
She took the club. There were two obvious choices. Hit Azamat with the club. Or try to run across the bridge. Or both.
Too obvious. She put the club down and stooped. The kitten was beyond saving. Half its body was a stinking, crushed mess. The other half appeared to be in shock. She curled her hands around it and picked it up; it yielded oddly in her grasp and she winced, fighting disgust and horror and pity. She brought it to her chest and held it there in one hand. Azamat was shaking his head.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “That isn’t fair and it won’t work.”
“Why not? Explain why.”
“I’m going across the bridge,” he said defensively. “You can’t make me stay.”
The kitten’s heartbeat was fast. Its breathing was fast. How could it still be alive? How could it withstand such punishment?
Kalypso began to run out across the bridge. The luma below was bright.
THAT’S GOOD. THAT’S GOOD. HURRY PLEASE. TERES—
She glanced down and saw Sieng’s blue spine, miles long. Sieng’s magic organs, blurred within the luma. Kalypso’s body tingled all over. The luma discharged violently; she stumbled. vast ecstasy opened in her skull. She lay on the bricks, covered in feline blood and fur, unable to stop herself looking over the brink and into the System below. After a while she noticed Azamat had caught up to her and was laying a few bricks at the ragged edge, meditatively.
SOUND OF WITCHDOCTOR RADIO STARTING TO UNTANGLE ITSELF.
“Don’t mind me,” he said. “Looking at you now, I’m noticing a few more details I could add. Your subs are progressing nicely. They’ll serve you well, when all this is gone.”
The luma below had begun a siren-song: “All Blues” by Miles of course.
“You hear it taking me apart?”
The devouring and reconstituting of you.
“That’s peach sorbet,” he said. “That’s my first girlfriend’s dog. That’s the way it felt to score a goal in the play-offs against Stuttgart. That’s a really bad case of poison ivy I got in America. That’s—”
“No!” she cried. “Enough!”
PICTURE OF THE REFLEX POINTS ALL BEING PULLED SIMULTANEOUSLY. IF GANESH HAD A BACK, IT WOULD BE BROKEN.
The Earth Archives were vaporizing into System noise. Marcsson’s life poured through her on its way to dissolving.
“I thought being a bridge would be static,” he said, scraping up the excess mortar squashed between two bricks. “Architecture doesn’t move, and that’s all I am, a piece of architecture in the new System. But I don’t feel static. I feel like I’m falling. I’m falling and always will be. Is perpetual motion the same as stillness? What did Isaac Newton say?”
“Isaac and everything from Earth are gone,” she sobbed. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”
KALYPSO, THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO. THE REFLEXES HAVE COME DOWN. YOU HAVE TO GET OUT OF THERE.
Azamat Marcsson and his bug collection and his perfectly neat lab reports and his timed bicycle route to work in the morning (17.6 minutes unless it was raining) and his family all sitting around the table saying virtually nothing and chewing their food thoroughly and his observation of social decay in formicine colonies from the detailed analysis of their kitchen midden and the ritual of flossing the teeth always starting from the back right and the bored summer he spent, aged fifteen, calculating pi to thousands of decimal places and the Swedish girl he fell in love with over the net only to meet her and, although she was half-cute and funny and did really want to come to his room and see his ant farms her physical presence proved too distracting and he begged to go back to a phosphor-bounded relationship —
“Please Azamat,” she said impulsively. “Let me go. Let me be with Ganesh. This isn’t for you.”
You can’t sleep with one eye open.
“I’ve tried to protect you. That’s all I ever tried to do. Even when you were Sieng.”
LUMA PILING ON ITSELF AT IMPOSSIBLE SPEEDS. SURFACE TEMPERATURE PLUMMETING.
“I was never Sieng.”
“You always will be, now. There are many more levels. The thermals go very deep. I’m going to be falling for a long time.”
PICTURE OF LIET CROUCHED OVER THE REMAINS OF KALYPSO’S WORKSTATION IN UNIT 5.
“You’ll leave the Drea
mer, you’ll fight with Tehar, you’ll go have something to eat—and I’ll be falling. You’ll get back to Oxygen 2, find someone to make love with, and I’ll be falling. I’ll still be falling and you’ll be explaining to the Mothers why you did what you did. Why you let me do what I’m about to do. You’ll be talking for all you’re worth, Kalypso Deed.”
PICTURE OF SIENG’S DATA AS ENCODED FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.
“After a while they’ll get tired of you. You’ll wear them down and they’ll throw up their hands and drink. While you’re sleeping, I’ll be falling. You’ll gather up some scraps of music—yes, I’m going to try to save you some music, but if I can’t you’ll play it yourself, you’ll play it from memory on that lousy joke of an instrument you call a bass guitar because you don’t know any better. You’ll find a way.”
PICTURE OF NOTHING BECAUSE IT’S ALL GOING DOWN.
“You’ll be reunited with that fucking Miles Davis I’ve had reconfiguring my soul all this time thanks to you, and you’ll sit there with your eyes closed, grooooving. I can see you Kalypso. And I’ll still be falling.”
SO WHERE ARE YOU?
“Days and weeks will go by. You’ll tell yourself you want no part of the Wild. You’ll stay resolutely behind. You’ll refuse to have any part of anything. You’ll be a complete pain in the ass to everyone. All this time, I’ll be falling.”
WHERE ARE YOU?
“And then, one day,”
WHERE ARE YOU?
“I don’t know when, but one day you’ll change. And all this will cease to be the thing that takes you over. It will go away and leave you free. And you’ll decide you need a boat but you’ll have no skills to barter and no one will want to do you any favors because of your attitude, so you’ll have to cheat some poor sucker out of his boat in a poker game—Yeah, I know you cheat, don’t bother to deny it. And I’ll . . .”
“You’ll still be falling?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how long it will be.”
“What will be at the bottom?”
“I don’t know that either. I won’t ever be able to tell you.”
She struggled with this awhile. Finally: “Don’t.”
“Thank you,” Azamat said, “for saying that. Now ask Liet for the final data she collected from your skin.”
“Why?”
AHMED SHOUTING ON THE RADIO, “IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK! IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK! THE REFLEX POINTS DON’T WORK.”
“You know I can’t answer that.”
“But—”
“Kalypso.”
He looked her full in the face then, for what seemed like the first time ever. She didn’t know what passed between them. It was after all only a Dream. That was how she explained it to herself afterward, anyway.
DON’T WORK?
DON’T WORK?
“Tehar,” Kalypso verbed. “Ask Liet to please feed me whatever else she has. Don’t worry. I can handle it.”
KALYPSO, WHERE ARE YOU?
“Please. Do it,” she said to Tehar with Azamat standing still and watching her.
“I’m afraid.” That was the last thing he ever said to her.
WE’RE SENDING NOW.
She didn’t feel the statistics come through but she felt the last winds of Azamat’s memory, the complexity of light and smell in grass and the drag of a razor across his jaw and the way it felt to solve a quadratic equation for the first time and many things of this, nature which were of Earth and ought to be alien to her but now they weren’t and never would be again.
KALYPSO?
Kalypso’s body was changing colors in the places where she had been cut. Mysterious and tiny events were occurring in her skin, but she couldn’t perceive them. Below the bridge, the luma began to move. Her eye fixed itself on the mutilated kitten. It squirmed, stiffened as if about to expire, and exploded into a horse-sized Bengal tiger with hot breath and a voice pitched as deep as a bomb. The tiger sprang at Marcsson, who dropped the trowel and jumped off the unfinished end of the bridge. Everything broke down.
KALYPSO?
Kalypso didn’t have the faintest fucking idea what happened to her after that.
You won’t find yourself in the aftermath. No one can, because being human you don’t bend that way. It’s not in the cards for you.
You can’t get there. You can’t imagine what it’s like, or try. You can strain and wish. You can make its analogies dance and sing but you can’t get on the back of it and ride. The anatomy of distance has no hand by which you can touch and hold that which you desire. You lived an ever-enlarging reality that now won’t stretch another millimeter. It snaps back in your face. This is the end of language. If you go, you won’t return; something else will. That’s why you can’t go and neither can anyone else.
Except Azamat. Azamat is going on. He can go where no one else goes.
Kalypso was back in the ur-system, familiar territory, lights of the Works spinning outside, caressing the station—only you know now it can’t last. Above, the radical ocean-sky that she used to think she was so smart to have Dreamed.
Below, Marcsson sleeping in the Dreamtank.
His face shone like beaten metal. She put her fingers through the water. Touched. Skin and flesh yielded; then bone. Behind the interface his eyes were closed.
The feeling was like a storm, a developing thermal whose colors would not define themselves: not for her or for anyone. It was too late.
KALYPSO, COME BACK NOW.
Her flesh was numb. What a useless, ungainly sack of shit did all her arms and legs make, wedged and folded protectively over her torso, exposing her curled spine. None of it belonged here anymore.
“Come on. That’s it. Wake up.”
Take me to the slaughter, she thought at Tehar. She knew she hadn’t spoken aloud, yet she was mildly surprised when he didn’t hear her. So this wasn’t still the Dreamer. Probably.
I’ve had enough. This is the end now. Anything more would be in bad taste. I’m not going to ever wake from Dreaming again. Never. I won’t have this isolation. I won’t have this waking-from- sleep-to-be-alone. No.
He disengaged contact points. She half-lidded her eyes. Mustn’t react too much or the anger would come and then she would lose this equilibrium.
“Kalypso, we have to leave now. We can’t stay here. I’ve already sent Liet away. Kalypso.”
I never wanted to know, she screamed. She screamed it inside, where she was empty. Where no one could hear her. I never wanted to see a human being. Not that way. I didn’t ask to see.
“They’ve shut down the reflex points.”
She’d miscalculated about one thing: anger wasn’t possible. She was far beyond the orbit of anger. Tehar was agitated and trying not to show it. He had seen the System begin to come up as Marcsson built the bridge. He had seen for a moment the alien, or whatever it was, that had taken over Ganesh and Azamat and maybe even her. Now it was gone.
“I’m sorry.” Tehar was holding her hand, stroking her fingers.
Tears would be equally irrelevant.
“Let’s go,” he said and she could hear the earth and its leaves and sparrows in his voice.
No. But she stood up. It was easier than she wanted it to be. They left unit 5.
ONE EYE OPEN
“—OUT! EVERYBODY OUT! Reflexes are all down. Get ready for the heat.” Robere was in such a panic his voice stretched to the alto range and snapped.
Liet was waiting in the transit tube. Tehar yelled at her for not leaving and she yelled back, then started pushing and shoving at Kalypso.
“What’s happening? What’s happening?” Kalypso heard herself repeating in a blurry, childish tone.
“Don’t think, Kalypso. Move!” Liet commanded. Normally Kalypso would be doing anything but thinking at a time like this: Thinking was dangerous, troublesome, painful. Moving was easy. Yet here was Liet acting like Kalypso and Kalypso acting like Liet. How apropos, Kalypso thought, still failing to move with anything resembling
speed or coordination. Everything’s changing places. Nothing’s like it was. Dance, dance. Declassify yourself. No. Shut up, Marcsson.
They climbed toward the caldera, Tehar pulling her and Liet pushing. The confusion on radio was torrential.
“—trying but it’s melting—”
Ahmed: “Robere, believe me, it’s not what you thin—”
“You stupid bastard Grunts you made us do it,” Teres whispered. Manic tapping filled the channel and was cut off.
“—coming round to your heading, just—”
“Don’t fight us, Teres. We’ll help you get out but there must be no viol—”
A magnetic shock passed through the transit tube. She felt it in her hands and legs where they touched the side of the crawl. Liet stopped pushing. “Tehar, d’you feel that?”
“Yeah. Kalypso, did you feel it?”
Kalypso said, “Columbus, I don’t think we’re in India anymore. Let’s know each other. Toto, that’s some flying elephant. The devouring and reconstituting of you. Azamat, don’t jump please. Together they do a kind of flamenco.”
“Keep going,” Liet said. “Be quiet, Kalypso.”
“—to Oxygen 2 as fast as you can. I don’t care—”
“Robere, the channel’s blocked. The luma is sporulating way too fast.”
“Cut it if you have to.”
“It’s almost up over our heads. Shit—”
“OK, calm down everybody. The heat isn’t as bad as I thought. I wonder where it’s all going.”
“I’ve been trying to tell you it’s going into the goddamn luma is where it’s going,” Ahmed’s voice said. “We can see Landings 3 and 4 from here and they’re being blocked. The luma’s rising. You better mo—”
Tehar gave a shout.
“It happened again.” He scrambled frantically up the tube, went to a sensor point, and put his hands on it.
Liet said, “Tehar I don’t think that’s a good id—”
L’IDÉE, said a soft Ganesh voice on Kalypso’s interface. She glanced at Liet, who was wide-eyed and trembling. CECI N’EST PAS UNE PIPE.
Kalypso surged up the tube and flung herself spreadeagled on the sensor point. She didn’t dare say it, but Tehar did.
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