Shamanspace

by Steve Aylett

  Another forgotten firmament rolled into view, dark pulses teeming with stings of light, waves of a billion perishing cells. Gigantic flavour tides in high definition, space overdoing it and washed by fizzing toxicity.

  The sawtooth strobing of sideviewed dimensional edits ended in the seething, chaotic mass of quantum foam. Hypergrey depths rumbling with the accumulating density of what was ahead. It was letting me approach. It hadn’t flattened the steps yet. Bringing its own poison to its lips.

  But when the thing drew near, it precipitated from all directions in a vastness of intricate, nonrepeating evil. A slow spectacle of dark vanes and complex underside, a titanic black insect floundered on its back at the centre of an infinite nerve net, fiddling a million legs amid the ferocious stench of vomit and scorching wires.

  Its mouth rimmed with lashes like an eye, biting in space at an end, it was eternally frantic in its convulsions, evils tangling and stretching about its mindless ratchetting. Shackled by its own influence. Seeping cold corrosion in a night of oceanic tragedy. No cure ever, a constantly breaking heart.

  And before this thing I felt the blossoming of total exposure. All resolve atomised by horror. One particle of poison in a sea of poison. No guts in a zero. No hero.

  On the cross, my eyes turned gold.

  SIG

  Daylight air gnawed off the curtains. Each molten tear frazzled down Alix’s face like a fuse. ‘Truth crosses the blood/brain barrier intact, boy.’

  The boy leaned forward. ‘But you are sort of a hero. You found the heart despite everything, everyone. They all talk about you back there, the ashers.’

  Alix rasped, old and faded as a photograph. ‘You don’t get it. Quinas’s escape, the abduction, the final act in the basement, it was stage-managed. The whole deal had been to send me off with passion. My friends. To save me from being a mere dry ironaut, easily turned. Quinas knew he’d get it in the neck—he welcomed it as a burnout. But he had more mischief in him at the end than alot of us start out with. He parlayed the coalition. I thought I’d seen everything. I was surprised, just as you’d be.’

  ‘They talk about the forgiveness of god—I could never forgive it before, maybe now.’

  ‘You’ve missed the point—Lockhart urged me not to feel pity because Quinas had got a sense of what the enemy was, during his failed try. It’s the reason I failed too. Remember the cause of it all, and what is the enemy. There’s a furrow through fortune—it’s not irrigated with mercy. You know the one thing I can say that’ll help you live a life? We’re shit, but we’re better than It.’

  ‘And part of it?’

  ‘The better part maybe—by a small margin. Now get out of here. You’re too young.’

  The boy stood as tiny pin-minutes sprang over silence. The room was aching. The living legend had gone dismal in the skull, lording it over dead flowers and dead books. Inside the ink, night alone was prophecied like black confetti.

  Alix’s metallic eyes seemed to move. ‘Someone else is here. I can hear her smile.’

  Melody was in the doorway. ‘I’m not smiling.’

  He didn’t turn. ‘Nor am I. Heaven sickness. Too many exits drown the soul. I’ve talked to your rookie—honour’s satisfied.’

  ‘Thank you, Alix.’

  ‘I really got a big rep out there? I remember me—stars in my pocket. Young rebel gun. Remember? I can see you and me in the street, believing it. I don’t even scare myself now. I’m dust.’

  ‘You’re a star.’

  ‘I know it’s you brings the flowers.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Melody and the boy left him in the small room, victory ghosts in his hung head.

  They reached the street through a fence, stepping over broken tarmac pieces with the scent of oil.

  ‘That was intense, Miss Melody. I didn’t know he’d be like that.’

  She stepped in front of the streets, stood watching rain on asphalt, tears hidden in the downpour. ‘Let him alone. Let him figure in a cloud, not in history.’

  ‘So why bring me here? I’ve read the books. What do I do now?’

  She looked back at him. ‘You could wait for a surprise, that the fruit won’t always correspond with its seed. That’s evolution, after all.’

  ‘You think I’ll back down because of this? You think I’m a re-run head just because I’m not so bright?’

  She didn’t answer. Maybe he’d think she hadn’t heard him above the rain.

  ‘Wait a minute—this is a setup, right? Like what you did to him. And he’s in on it, yeah? I knew he couldn’t be a burnout. You want me to fight forward, push against you. I’ll do that. I’ll go for the big trip. The enemy’s up on blocks? So bring it on. I’m ready. ’

  She watched the rain sussurating in the street, clouds fighting over the sky, and the bandaged windows of the edgeman’s house behind them, in which there was no living human energy whatever.

  ‘He was right,’ she said. ‘You’re young.’

  She saw Alix and herself in the streets he had described, the psycho heroes, coats full of death-welcome and belief. Nothing can be reclaimed.

  She began striding back across town, the boy hurrying after her. And turning corners only they could see, they lost themselves between the rainfall.

  APPENDIX 1: A Brief History of the Internecine

  “Any triumph is merely initial,” stated Isabelle Feedi, and so through its history the Internecine has hoped that its single success would take place in the very last instant of the universe.

  In the four thousand year old Yezidi belief system, there is no false introduction of another force that can exist against god—no satan. Slavers cross-fertilized Yezidism with toxic wicca during the Roman conquests, resulting in angry faces all round. Of the fifty or so gospels excised from the trad Bible, the most influential on the early Internecine were Thunder, Perfect Mind and the Complete Archontics, which now reside only in the Keep’s etheric library. Peter the Assassin’s insistence that authorities on Earth exist merely to confuse the aim of those who would “loose an arrow at the true sacred heart” was recorded in the true Archontics by the man himself: “Impertinence merely confirms authority’s greatest fear.” The Reality of the Rulers also touches upon this, using higher dimensional symbolism (in the dimensional one-jump manner of Flatland—the gods higher than god and shielded by god, as a symbol to portray the god higher than Earth authority and shielded by Earth authority). This truth was interesting enough for the priesthood of the time to frantically parse his statements into Christian quibbling (soft gnosticism)—recording him as Peter the Gnostic in the physical fragment which now poses as a piece of the Archontic Gospel (but which was written by St Epiphanius of Salamis, the same overweight gentleman who claimed there was a holy statuette gestating in his belly).

  The third early text was The Distractions (According to the Persian Prince) which related the travels of an invisible Prince who slips through the rooms and palaces of this world and those adjacent, “making of deception a continuous window”, to conclude that: “The world went from vast to artistic, a bad choice.” The text was used by Hasan Sabbah and the ‘hashishins’, an early manifestation of the assassinator Internecine, used to discipline its soldiers in the matter of focus, intent and the irrelevance of surviving the task. Their initiation ritual (trancing with hashish potion, after which the initiate would awake into a beautiful garden and a servicing by a dozen teenage girls) has continued to this day in the Cryers’ Climax and the occasional orgy at the Portugal house.

  One of the guises under which the so-called edgemen operated was that of the alchemical brotherhood, whose ‘transmutations’ often masked the construction of massive ‘sky guns’ whose medieval payloads of propellant explosives were ahead of their time. The age of sky guns gave way to more sensible initiatives. (For an idea of the levels of sophistication reached, see Basil Valentine’s ironically codified text The Triumphal Chariot, in which cypher generates the request “Just kill me” more often than
the number of words in the manuscript.) It is recorded in Disciples of the Discarded that Elizabethan alchemist Doctor John Dee witnessed the scarab star of god blooming with a creak from the surface of the wooden table at Clerkenwell—a vision immediately waylaid by the arrival of unwitting holy agent Edward Kelley, who wasted years of Dee’s time with useless signs and wonders. At the instant of death, Dee tried to remember the shape of god, while to onlookers it spread across his chest like a set of dark alien ribs and only black blood poured from the mystic’s mouth. Yet even upon recognition of the universal facts within such visions, we remain utterly powerless—the number of false walls for us to pierce are truly infinite.

  In the mid 17th century, the salvaged table itself was to be double-apported to its supposed former shape by our very own Sebastian Cockayne (entailing the destruction of parts of London) and the inaccurate depiction obtained was used for a symbolic target in an etheric misfire which resulted merely in Cockayne being reversed into himself in the most messy way. Similar ‘dartboard’ projects were carried out by the late hashishin splinter group known as the Unforgiving, a group more about cloak-and-dagger glamour than effectiveness. But it was from this group that Ralph/Chaim Foxcroft emerged, bringing to the Greek pre-Internecine the craft of the geomantic portal and the notion of projecting a missile into etheric sidespace (at a time when the mundane was still perceived as being separate from the all, and god a separate creature—the term Internecine was not yet used). These creations of Persian and Dialist architectonics can still be found embedded in several pieces of Internecine real estate. Finally the notion of a physical weapon was abandoned for good, but not before the geomantics were sealed against the espionage of the emerging Prevail.

  For some time the Internecine initiative was codexed through history by those known to us as the Whispers of the Road (such as Villon) and the later Strychnine Scholars (such as Voltaire, Trepannier and the over-casual Bierce), as well as by what some have called ‘Akashic resentment’, a wish for revenge passed down through generations at the atomic level. It was this consideration that led the late-Victorian fourth-dimensioner CH Hinton (who by the use of ‘casting out’ was teaching edgemen to see four-dimensionally with a visionary result similar to sonar) to consider that we are the self-destructive impulse of god. In presenting this and other information to the main council, he led Tagore Ros to reconfigure the assassin programme to that of pure etheric manoeuvres, with the conclusion that the assassination of god would lead to the certain obliteration of everything—a small price to pay. The first purely etheric hit attempt was performed in 1903 by Ros, who was an instant burnout. An amplifier accident in Siberia in 1908 set back the technical side for some time and lost a talented man in the Russian Persikov. The use of Sauniere etheric amplifiers finally put edgemen into what was termed the ‘body of god’, but none were ever so foolish as to claim to have reached the heart—though many returned as babbling madmen or the walking dead. The splinter group known as the Prevail—formed by those who considered that god was a thing separate from its works, and that the universe would persist after god’s assassination—began a series of spoiler skirmishes against the Internecine (or, as they began to call us, the ‘ashers’) which soon became a full cult war or, as the Invisible Prince might have put it, “an Almighty delaying tactic.” The Prevail have speculated: “The space where god was, it will perhaps seem bigger than it is—like the feel of a missing tooth.”

  In 1942, Kosmon Lavant, on the rim of death, placed himself within a circle of twelve amplifiers and, witnessed by edgemen of all ranks, died, leaving his nerve rig to run for a full hour on automatic. Cleared of philosophical interpretation, the shell ran through a well-practiced etheric journey, according to all coordinates gathered thus far. The unfiltered vision accomplished is recorded in the locked section of the Keep files, but proof of the enemy’s existence had finally been obtained.

  In the second half of the last century, Internecine affairs have been complicated by intrigue—the matters of the Paris ’68 Decoy, the googolplex-agent Alfred M Hubbard, and the so-called Russian ‘scanner battles’. Yet there have been concerted pushes—that of Salii, a burnout, Quinas, a brilliant burnout, and the recent push by Alix, which has spawned the so-called ‘Cult of Alix’ about which we have such debate—another inventive distraction from our purpose (spawning the first open tell-all to be published by the straight press). The edgemen coalition broke down almost as soon as it began. A thousand times more powerful than ‘the man on the street’, we are universally ineffectual. Did we expect anything else? As Trepannier stated, “Emptiness tilted is yet emptiness.”

  APPENDIX 2: Internecine Bibliography

  ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind’—describes the All: ‘It is I who am the voice whose sounds are so numerous/And the discourse whose images are so numerous.’

  The Complete Archontics (Tales of the First Mystic Renegades)—the edgeman classic residing in complete form in the Keep—a series of interlocking parables leading to the conclusion that ‘It gets boring to be terminal for eternity. Invite the end with disregard.’

  The Reality of the Rulers—gnostic cypher laid to the phrase ‘Infinity is infinitely divisible.’

  ‘The Distractions (according to the Persian Prince)’—‘Invest a grapefruit with authority—what do you expect?’

  The Priceless Moat of Disinterest—early assassin manual which started the fad for embroidering into sword blades the phrase: ‘Actually the hapless celebrate.’

  Flightless Land Without Clouds, Charles d’Acqueville—a thaumaturgical fuel cell built from absorptive surfaces, this device worked on the false principle that an undefined sense of loss is better than nothing.

  The Triumphal Chariot, Basil Valentine—interesting mainly for the lengths to which edgemen have gone to codify their dissent.

  Disciples of the Discarded, which dwells upon the Q Gospel or ‘that which is forever and meticulously evaded’.

  The Ultimate Midnight, Robert Livingstone—an early deicide text detailing many (mainly symbolic) edge practices including a technique to float a razor on the sky.

  Sacrifice Excludes, Stoll Trepannier—this man of mischief spoke straightfaced about ‘the feeling of patriotic respect I feel when looking at heaps of dust.’

  ‘The Dictionary of Endless Independence’, Isabelle Feedi—shuffling her texts into other people’s books like a cardsharp, Feedi asks ‘How do you hurt poison?’ and replies, ‘By living oblivious.’

  The Scientific Romances by Charles Howard Hinton—Vol 1 includes ‘Casting Out the Self’ and ‘A Picture of Our Universe’; Vol 2 includes the reverse-coded allegory ‘An Unfinished Communication’.

  Pigs on the Stage, Harold J Shepstone—this title speaks for itself.

  Tenaglia, Ambrose Bierce—in the first book after his ‘disappearance’, Bierce begins by stating that ‘The grayness of a thousand miles begins with a single disappointment’, concluding finally that ‘A dissolving corpse is an honest finale.’

  Stations of Loss, Tagore Ros—‘Our children cut god, unawares in play. Noticing blood hours later, they wonder at the source.’ A great doomster, Ros loved ripping the piss. ‘When a culture which is flat out on the floor insists on looking down as though from a progressive height, its perceptions are reduced almost to zero. Have a nice day.’

  ‘Nursing, cursing, hearsing and a bill’, Ben Gallic—Gallic plays at mundanity, commending god on its achievements—‘Another dog invented, future made bright’—and arguments in favour—‘A manmade bird would look like a dusty grape in a dress.’ Good point.

  www.serifbooks.co.uk/SteveAylett

 

 

 
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