Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “The sacred cross commands thee!” he shouts over her blasphemy, over the sound of her mother’s weeping and her father’s prayers, and—

  “Elial! Lord of Lords!”

  “The faith of the holy apostles Peter and Paul and of all other saints commands thee! The blood of the martyrs commands thee! The constancy of the confessors commands thee! The devout intercession of all saints commands thee!”

  “Fuck you!”

  “The virtue of the mysteries of the Christian faith commands thee!”

  And he holds the Bible over her like a brick about to shatter her skull, summoning all the strength of his belief, his faith a force inside him, deep as the centuries.

  “Elial!” she screams.

  And his hand shakes as he feels a force that’s deeper than the centuries stirring inside him.

  THE HOUSES OF THE GODS

  “Enlil Enlil Enlil Enlil…”

  The tour guide loops in the cubist wreckage of the sim like some old-school video-art installation; spaces fractured, curves become angles, the sim reconfigures around Lady Shubur, adapting to and adopting the form of the sound in physical resonances. Her lament is a solid thing in this world made of information, and it moves through it like an eel of light flicking through water, a sidewinder of fire over sand, throwing up ripples of burning, liquid dust. VR isn’t just wireframes and texture mappings; this world has particles, virtual models of pseudo-atomic structure and behavior. It’s a rougher grain than reality, but it’s still finer than the coarse surface of paper or the lumpen masses of clay and stone when all you’ve got to work them is your fingers, or a stone chisel, or a lump of wedge-shaped reed. If reality is information, the world that’s written on the Vellum, this is the best medium ever for the remodeling of it, for the invocations that are the basis of magic. And Phreedom’s sim, the cypher lady, Lady Shubur, is one complex motherfucker of a spell.

  So. Somewhere out of time and not quite in eternity, the onetime lord of all the unkin broods upon his throne, as still as stone, as silent as the broken statue in the glass case of the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities, one graven image that is now his only presence in the real world, in the finite forms of time and space. In reality, his temple has long been in ruins, broken up, the stones that built it either buried under millennia of dust or used in later buildings, Roman temples, Muslim mosques. It is only in the Vellum that he survives. The whole civilization that he built was completely forgotten until a mere century ago. All gods have their houses but all houses fall eventually and when they do the gods are left with only history as their home, living in the dreams of archaeologists, in the margins of a culture’s memory, in the Vellum. But now, as the invocation echoes in another sort of memory, Enlil remembers what it’s like to be revered, to be petitioned with prayer.

  He used to be the Father of the Gods. He used to be a king, back in the days before the city he had watched being built reached out its power wide enough around that it began to touch on areas ruled by others like him and he realized he was not alone. He was a king, back when a city meant a small town where the huts were actually permanent, when the unkin were still few enough that some could grow up in a world and rule an empire, die a couple of hundred years later, never knowing there were others like them. Even as the towns became cities, and the cities became nations, even when he discovered there were countless others, he soon realized he was still more powerful than them, king of kings. When his body eventually died, he already had the vessel prepared.

  He’d been using the Cant long enough to know how to put his graving on something, to put a little bit of himself into it, make it speak for him. As the artisans worked to his instructions they were, to all intents and purposes, only making a larger version of the clay figurines that all his lugals carried with them and that they called shabtis, answerers. But, hobbling around it on his crutch and muttering his chant, finding the resonant frequency of the stone and making it sing in the echo chamber of the temple, he’d known that he would be a king for some time yet. From shabti to teraphim he would go on to carve his soul in vessel after vessel, some stone, some clay, some flesh. There could be thousands of these vessels, these gravings, all working simultaneously, semiautonomous but still linked, still part of him. Temples and palaces with winged, heraldic, hybrid forms of karibu as their guardians, statues that looked fierce and sounded devastating when they spoke his words as his spirit moved within them. There was a reason people pictured cherubim with swords of fire coming from their mouths; the language was a fearsome thing to those who did not have it. And he was the most fluent in the tongue of all the unkin.

  O yes, he used to be a king. He used to be the Father of the Gods. Before Enki and his Covenant.

  “What does she think I can do?” he asks the creature flickering before him, the half-formed image of a maid as messenger, a little piece of Inanna—her sukkal—left behind to plead her case. As if a fallen and forgotten god could help her.

  “You are the Lord Ilil…” the Lady Shubur says.

  But this onetime father of the gods, long-bearded ruler of the multitudes of heavens, has no foothold in a world now ruled by One True Gods. Like his temple, his own soul is broken up and buried, surviving only in the odd fragments of a patriarchal archetype, here and there, in this or that man’s deep unconscious soul, in the kind eye of a brujo or the stern voice of a priest. There’s a new Godfather with his own temple, his own story, and Ilil is just a footnote in his text, a brick used in the new lord’s house.

  “My daughter craved the Great Beyond,” he answers sullenly. “Inanna craved the Deep Within, and she who takes the me of the Kur cannot come back. From the Dark City there is no return.”

  He will not help.

  IN A DARK EYE

  The Lady Shubur went to the temple of Sin in Ur. Time flickers with the buzzing of the needle, and Phreedom flickers with it. In her mind’s eye she’s back fighting with her brother in the Winnebago as it pulls into the trailer park of Slab City, way out in the dead heat of the Mojave; as it swings wide past a junkyard slab where a shining Airstream rises on a tower of bricks behind this man holding a crazy staff, wound round with wires and topped with a TV aerial, like some modern mage; she’s staring out the window at him, silent, as Tom punches her in the arm. She’s tripping on peyote by a fireside with Tom and his new friend, this crazy, fucked-up latter-day shaman, Finnan, as he spins them wild tales of gods and angels, worlds beyond the world. She’s throwing stones at Finnan’s Airstream, cursing him, demanding to know where her brother’s gone. She’s looking at the weird mark on his hand and knowing it, understanding it. She’s cursing an angel that’s come for him, that he won’t fight because the war they want’s not his. She’s straddling Finnan, naked flesh against flesh, knowing him, knowing herself, awakening with him gone. She’s alone.

  She’s holding her brother on a hillside as he cries. She’s spitting in the face of the unkin with the long, thin fingers tightening round her throat. She’s sobbing in the shower as the water runs over her body, shouting at Finnan in the church because he has no answers for her, nothing, nothing, no denials, no assurances, no lies, and she just knows that it was him who told the angels where her brother was ’cause she can see it in the way he keeps his gaze down, guilty eyes in shadow. She’s gunning the bike along the freeway, faster, faster, slamming a door behind her, pulling a beaded curtain aside. She’s raising a veil from her face. She’s writhing under the exorcist’s grip. She’s biting down on the brujo’s hand between her teeth. She’s screaming as the judges of the underworld fall on her, their claws tearing at her flesh like a tattooist’s needle, stripping her of her skin, her name, her self.

  The Lady Shubur went to the temple of Sin in Ur, entered the holy shrine.

  A SPIDERWEB COLLAGE

  The Temple of Sin has no pop-academia sim to give it form, no virtual walls or floor or ceiling here, no flickering lamplight over rendered plaster, no texture and no color. But dimensionally, the space that ho
uses the ancient moon god is richer by far, an abstract space of entities and relationships defined in ones and zeros, a mosaic of bitmaps of scanned-in black-and-white or color photographs, hundred-walled warehouses of tables of texts and translations, keyed, indexed and cross-referenced. Sin lives in a network of article titles and authors’ names, of cataloged museum storerooms, descriptions of artifacts and expeditions saved in files, distributed between servers across the world. The house of Sin is a spiderweb collage of information.

  The Lady Shubur can’t stand before his face and speak to him, but she can summon him in complex queries, semiautonomous search agents that scatter across the web to bring back scrolling, flickering sets of records for her to process. She searches for him as a criminal psychologist seeks out the mind that’s hidden in a case file, in the forensic reports and witness statements, hidden somewhere in the scraps of facts, a me under the MO. And as she builds the profile, she continues with her mantra.

  “O father Lord Ilil. Bright silver aromatic cedar broken daughter cut of precious lapis, slaughtered holy heaven priestess, slaughtered in the Kur, stone for the stoneworker, wood for the woodworker, covered with dust of the Kur. O father Lord Ilil…”

  The sim takes shape around her.

  A dead, airless hunk of stone and tranquil seas of dust silver as ash, tranquil as death, in an eternal fall through the black gulf of space, Sin’s solid sigil spins a dance around a world as gaudy as the moon is harsh. The earth wears robes of blue ocean and sky, embroidered with the browns and reds, yellows and greens of soil and foliage, plush mycelial threads, the furs of life; her draperies of continents glitter with the golden glints of sequin cities. The moon is naked in comparison, its only clothes the shadows that it casts upon itself.

  It dances to the Lady Cypher’s song.

  A spiderweb collage of: vacuum silence between the stars; static white noise hissing in a spaceman’s radio; white heat of the sun, sharp as the shadows on his suit, no air to soak it up; a rippling pathway on the sea at night, a bridge to the horizon for young lovers walking on a beach; tides of oceans and hormones; ice-gray eyes of wild coyotes howling in bestial rapture; flickers on the wings of moths that flutter through the air, charting their paths against the brilliant beacon. Women menstruate and men turn into wolves; blood flows for Sin. Moonlight, unstructured, Sin shines in the darkness.

  THE ILLUSION FIELDS

  Phreedom remembers stealing beer from her parents’ fridge, and she remembers stealing yagé from Finnan’s, leafing through his journals when he wasn’t there, looking for the answers that he wouldn’t give when asked. Who are you? What are you?

  “Who am I?” she mutters, but the only answer is the buzzing needle.

  She was born Phreedom Messenger, in the last years of the twentieth century AD, daughter of activists whose politics were born in the death of old ideals, somewhere between 9/11 and Guantanamo Bay. She grew up with genocide and jihad, with wearable computing and Internet access for all, and AI and VR, and men in clean suits pulling bodies out of subway cars, the whole CNN apocalypse. She played tagalong with her brother, Thomas, and his weird friend Finnan, listening as they talked crazy shit in the desert night under the moon, and, every so often, throwing something in that made them stop and look at her as if just realizing she was there.

  They’d get stoned, wasted, tripping out on yagé or peyote till the desert around them seemed a world of illusion.

  The Lady Cypher lays the imagery of Sin out like a Tarot deck in a reading, looking for the meaning to be found in juxtapositions and alignments. Where Enlil, god of sky and storm, of decrees uttered with the sharp clarity of lightning and the resounding force of thunder, is, by his nature, dispossessed, a wanderer in the Vellum, lost and moaning over greater days, Sin is at home here. Kings and tyrants come and go; no great surprise that Enlil should be obsolete in a world where law can be uttered in airstrikes not by a thunderbird but by a stealth bomber, black as a crow, imperial as an eagle. Sin, on the other hand, has always been a god of silences and shadows, negative spaces. If he was ever human as, being unkin, he must once have been, his history is long since dissolved in the dreamworld of illusions, elisions, elusions.

  The Lady Cypher, having all of Phreedom’s memories graved into her, remembers how Tom talked of the Illusion Fields, a sweeping expanse of eternity stretching out past reality, farther away than the horizon that you never reach no matter how far you walk, closer than the shadow under your feet.

  She remembers stealing the yagé, getting so fucked-up one night—after her brother left, it was—that Finnan had to body-slam her to the ground, out of the way of the thunderbolt that she’d called down. There was a storm raging, in the sky and in her heart.

  “What am I?” she’d asked him, grabbing his grubby T-shirt, shoving at him, pulling at him as he struggled to his feet against her, singing at the storm with a voice that made her eardrums bleed, in words she couldn’t hold inside her head. And it was only when the storm had stopped that he turned to her, and just looked at her as if it was the stupidest fucking question that he’d ever heard.

  It was a fluke, of course, the lightning, but after that he started to open up, a little at a time, to tell her about the Cant, reluctantly.

  “I want to know everything,” she’d said.

  “Curiosity killed the cat, you know,” Finnan had said.

  “Yeah, but it’s pig-ignorance that gets most of the other animals,” she’d said.

  Phreedom tries to hold on to the memory but it’s as liquid as the language that she heard that night.

  The Lady Cypher can’t tell from the fleeting fragmentary imagery surrounding her if there is really something underneath. The god of the moon is too elusive. She seems to glimpse a darting consciousness out of the corner of her eye, but it’s as quickly gone as it appears. The only message that he’ll give her is the echo that she hears.

  “My daughter craved the Great Beyond,” the voice of Enlil says. “Inanna craved the Deep Within, and she who takes the me of the Kur cannot come back. From the Dark City there is no return.”

  He will not help.

  The Gods of Old

  “Once upon a time,” Finnan had told her, “there were gods all over the place. I mean, if you want to know how many gods there were, you only have to look at Ireland; a tiny little island and it’s still full to the brim with spirits. Jesus, but half the fookin saints used to be the heathen gods of old, and all those fairies, every one of them, what are they but gods who lost their glory and went skipping off into the gloaming with only their glamour left, when Christianity came and put them out of their homes? That was the choice, ye see, when the angels came. Sign up or ship out. So some of them join up, becoming yer Saint Bridget’s or whatever, and some of them take to the hills. Jesus, but can ye imagine it? Going from king of all the Tuatha-de-Danaan—of Cuchullain of the red hair, of Lud the silver-handed, Bran the thrice-blessed, the Dagda, with golden cauldrons and chariots and war-hounds bigger than men—to this foolish little lord of the Sidhe, hiding in burrows under the earth, and finally to the fookin fairy-folk of Victorian fancies. Fookin leprechauns and pots of gold. Celtic Twilight, my arse.”

  “Once upon a time,” Finnan had told her, “there weren’t any gods at all. Just human beings that lived and died and dreamed up foolish little fireside tales to make them all feel a little warmer in the cold night. They looked out to the sunset and they thought to themselves, why that’s so beautiful there must be something out there. They buried their dead in the ground and couldn’t bear to think of them just rotting, so they told themselves there was a land under the earth where all the dead live on like us. Or maybe it was in the far north, or at the source of some great river, in the mountains, in the sky, wherever. But for all the adventurers and explorers that went wandering over the face of the earth, did any of them ever find anything but people, painted up and draped in skins and dancing like loonies to the moon, but people nonetheless? Did that stop them, though? No.
Why, they says, if there’s no Heaven then we’ll fookin build one. If there’s no gods out there, we’ll raise ourselves up by our bootstraps, grab a star out of the sky and wear it as a fookin crown and we’ll be gods our fookin selves. So they built themselves a language for a ladder and clambered up over their own words till they did it. Only they took so many stars out of the sky, ye see, they left it full of holes, too weak to hold itself up, and so eventually, one day, the sky came crashing down on them so hard and heavy that it drove them right down into the earth, so deep that the only thing left of them sticking out was those crowns on their heads. Sure, there’s those who somehow manage to stick their necks up out of the shite and look up into the ruins of Babel, read a few words written on the rubble, but at the end of the day, that’s what we were and this is what we are now, up to our necks in history, in humanity, and with no more choice about it than the poor dead bastards buried in the earth by all our ancestors.”

  “Once upon a time,” Finnan had told her, “the gods got fed up with this not existing malarkey that they’d had to put up with for the last forever, because if you don’t exist, well, there’s no pressing need to get out of bed of a morning; it’s not like ye’ve got any work to go to, eh, and obviously that kind of unemployment lends itself to low self-esteem, if not downright depression. So they all came together one day and decided amongst themselves that they wanted to have a go at this existing thing. They’d been watching humans at it for a good few millennia, from the inside of their heads, living in the human imagination as they did, and the humans seemed to be having all sorts of strange experiences—living, dying, fucking, grieving, hunting, drinking—hell, even suffering is at least an experience, and to a god that only gets the secondhand scraps of dreams and delusions, well, it’s better than nothing. Of course, most people have such poor imaginations that the gods had no idea what they were in for. They thought it would be all epic battles and noble struggles, valiant causes, good against evil. Ye have to pity them, sure, because they weren’t at all prepared for life as it is, poor sods. What the fuck is this, they says to themselves, when they finally find a way to push themselves out from the back of our heads and into the noggin as a whole, when they pick themselves up off the floor and dust off their stolen bodies and look around at the world. What the fuck is this? Where’s the grand quests and eternal mysteries? Where’s the foreshadowings and symmetries, the plots, the themes? Where’s the meaning? O, in time some of them would come to love it, sure, this mad world of ours; but some of them, well, they just keep trying to make it fit their notion of what a world should be like. They’re insane, of course, and sooner or later one of them will come along and try and rope you into some mad empire-building scheme of theirs. And, of course, if you’re not with them you’re against them, far as they’re concerned. Take my advice and steer well clear of them.”