The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  I, Mhari Murphy, am loyal to the government of the United Kingdom. However, I’m not a blinkered fanatic or an idiot. A government is a vast, intricate machine whose components are people and which is controlled by code—legal code. Most employees spend a fair amount of their time pursuing their own personal agendas, and although “do the job, collect the paycheck” is usually high on their list, it’s seldom the only item. There is endless scope for backbiting, rivalry, and internecine feuding and plotting. Perhaps it’s my HR background speaking, but sometimes it seems to me that that’s all that ever happens. My job was just to repair or replace the damaged components of the human machine when the gears started to grind. Now, at a slightly higher level, it’s my job to help debug the programs—the legal code—that keep my chunk of the machinery running smoothly. Which would be a fuck of a lot easier without rivals trying to break things, wouldn’t it?

  Now, any government with a unitary executive—such as the New Management—is susceptible to courtiers who use their privilege of access to the royal ear to settle scores with rivals. The PM is of course fully aware of this at all times. But it may serve His purposes to let others—those who haven’t quite realized how far beyond the merely human He is—believe that He isn’t, and to permit them to think they can manipulate Him for personal advantage. Sociopaths battling for territory are more highly motivated to excellence if they are terrified of being taken down by their rivals, just as ordinary people are motivated by hope of a reward if their work exceeds the requirements of duty.

  In short, although we all serve the same Dread Majesty, we don’t automatically march in lockstep. Which is partly why I’m recording this: by way of insurance, and to ensure that I don’t go to hell without an honor guard.

  Last Wednesday evening, I entertained Dr. Armstrong with dinner in the Lords’ Dining Room, and afterwards we had a little chat inside the big containment ward in Persephone’s attic.

  “Obviously I can’t tell you anything that will compromise you,” he said, with one of those amiable smiles of his that admit to no discomfort at being trapped in a pocket universe four meters in diameter with a hungry vampire, “but you should be aware that it’s fractal contingency plans all the way down.”

  “That’s nice to know.” I smiled back at him.

  “The trouble is, the oppo also have contingency plans. And informers.” His smile faded. “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”

  I shook my head. “Which opposition are we talking about here? The Nazgûl, or the Cult?” We both understood this to be the Cult of the Black Pharaoh, the Prime Minister’s brownshirts: fanatical loyalists from back before his rise to power. Some of them have made good in the New Management—Iris was a High Priestess of the Cult and went to prison for it, prior to her rehabilitation and promotion to Chief of Staff—but others remain problematic. They’ve taken the ascendency of the Mandate as their own imprimatur to steal anything that isn’t nailed down and cut the throat of anyone who gets in the way—on an energized sacrificial grid, of course, so the necromantic mojo flows up to Himself. (They think this will buy His indulgence. They might even be right.)

  “Both, but the American OPA comes first. Make no mistake, the Nazgûl are our biggest threat right now. They’ve had years to turn the continental internet backhaul into conductors for a gigantic geas, and they’ve used it to impose amnesia on their own population’s symbolic occult focus. The presidency was originally modeled on the eighteenth-century British king-emperor’s powers, which can in turn be traced back to the Roman imperial cult—the genius of the emperor, in the original meaning of the word ‘genius,’ referred to his power as a begetter and supervisory spirit, a godlike being. So we’re talking about someone who is revered as an emperor by over three hundred million people…” He trailed off, lost in thought.

  “It’s not news to me that the President of the United States is important.” I nudged him. “But why make everybody forget him?”

  “Because it creates a god-sized occult power vacuum. They’re building a machine to awaken—to call—his replacement, and it’s a lot easier to install a new deity if the old one has gone missing.”

  “This is that Sleeper business again, isn’t it? Schiller’s patron?”

  Dr. Armstrong sighed, so deeply that it almost came out as a groan. “I wish it were! There are many sleeping gods. The one the Nazgûl are trying to immanentize is … well, it’s another class-six entity, like the PM. Or rather, like the puppeteer pulling the strings behind the PM’s face—the one who hasn’t fully arrived yet, but is busy building His nest and incubating His eggs. It’s. Whatever—gender is meaningless in this case. We probably can’t stop the Nazgûl from carrying out Project Godwaker, but we can make it a lot harder for them to do it if we break this geas, and it’ll be vastly easier to crack the geas if we have the willing cooperation of the actual President.”

  “This Project Godwaker,” I said carefully. “Am I permitted to ask how we know about it?”

  “Ah-hmm, yes, a good point. Yes, you can ask.” Which I took to mean that I shouldn’t.

  “All right, then let me see if I’ve got this straight. The mission to Colorado Springs is some kind of diversion or a side-quest, because we already know, by means I have no need to know of, that the Nazgûl don’t yet have their very own elder god. And therefore the PM’s little joke about kidnapping the President of the United States, is, is…”

  “Not a joke at all.” His fey smile slipped out.

  “But that’s—isn’t kidnapping a foreign head of state an act of war?”

  “Correct! Which is why you’re not going to kidnap the President. You’re going to convince him that it is in the best interests of his nation to cooperate with you to lift the geas, and offer him all necessary assistance, including political asylum if he wants it. But if anything goes wrong—”

  “The PM’s hands are clean,” I said, slotting it all into place. “Huh. But. Hmm. What about the Vice-President? I know they have a continuity of government arrangement in case the President is compromised or resigns—”

  “Or if he dies, yes. But they can’t remove a living President from office without impeachment by Congress, or proceeding in accordance with the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which requires their cabinet and VP to take action, at which point they revert to the existing rules of succession. None of which can happen unless they drop the amnesia field.”

  “Neat,” I said, admiring. This is a problem I know. It’s like that embarrassing situation where you find a VP in Finance with their fingers in the candy jar up to the elbow, to the tune of a couple billion in unwise leveraged options, but you can’t prosecute them or fire them without admitting that your assets are down to pocket lint and pencil shavings, thereby triggering a run on your bank. Perversely, the worst kind of misconduct is the hardest for an organization to admit to.

  “So…” I say, “if the POTUS is willing to cooperate, we can use him to crack the geas and drastically weaken the OPA, thereby advancing our own interests, plus the US government owes us one—insofar as they ever admit to owing anybody anything, at any rate. And if he won’t cooperate, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If the OPA find out we’re paddling in their pool our excuse is to point at Colorado and shriek. Right?”

  “Right.” Dr. Armstrong nodded.

  “But.” I frowned. “This whole plan relies on them not having the President on lockdown. What about the Vice-President?”

  “They’ve got her already,” Dr. Armstrong said grimly. “It looks very much as if they only missed the top dog by accident.”

  “Ah.” I’ve suddenly got a sinking feeling. “And if they find him working with us—”

  “—If the President dies, the constitutional succession rules take over, and the Nazgûl are back in control of the situation.” The SA pinned me with a flat stare, like a bug on a display tray. “Which is why, once you make contact with the President, you need to extract him by the fastest possible means. If you don’t the
y’ll kill him—and blame you.”

  FIVE

  ON DEATH GROUND

  The landscape around Colorado Springs looks alien and other-worldly to British eyes. Mountains soar preposterously high into the blue yonder, wearing a shawl of snow most of the year round. The altitude of the gentle, sloping plateau that defines a local ground level is higher than the highest peak in the British Isles. Suburbs exist in name only. Back home they’d qualify as rough countryside, with houses spaced so far apart that you can’t see one from its neighbor, towns that are barely a short run of “historic” shops and buildings, and “Founded in 1906” written on sign boards without apparent conscious irony.

  Pete and Brains approach their destination close to lunchtime on the second day, having broken the journey overnight in a motel in North Platte. That morning they drove a little over a hundred miles along US 85. Five miles short of the US Air Force Academy, they reach the turn-off leading to the compound of Golden Promise Ministries, near Palmer Lake.

  Pete is driving again as Brains fidgets with his thaumospectral analyzer. The road is steep, winding, and alarmingly narrow. “Wish I’d brought my bike,” Pete observes, as he brakes hard to keep the Escalade from lurching drunkenly as it corners.

  “You and me both.” Brains frowns. “There’s no contamination here, all my readings are showing is thaumic background.” He taps the project box that holds the guts of his instrument. “Nobody’s summoned anything here in, well, ages.”

  Pete drives on slowly. After a few miles they come to an abandoned gatehouse. Driving past the raised barrier they eventually come to a compound like the residential quarters of an army base. Rows of houses, barracks, chapel, warehouses, a building cryptically identified on their map as “spinal injuries/forced maternity ward.” The windows are dark, and there are no parked vehicles. Drifts of last year’s dirty snow obstruct the side-streets. “This place is abandoned,” says Brains.

  “And that’s a very good thing.” Pete pulls up outside the building that is flagged as a chapel. “Coming?”

  “Aw, must I?” Brains releases his seat belt and clambers down from the SUV, analyzer in hand.

  Ten minutes of walking around in the cold convinces both of them that the compound is abandoned. The analyzer stubbornly insists there’s no active thaum flux present, just a higher-than-background level of decay events: magical fallout from previous years. Up close, there are signs of neglect: peeling paint, broken window panes, seedling trees pushing through cracks in the sidewalk. “Abandoned in place,” Pete affirms. “One last thing.”

  Pete walks over to the medical building and tries the front door. The handles are chained together and held by a padlock, now rusting. He bends his head and stands in silence for a minute, then walks back over to the Escalade. Once in the driver’s seat he sits motionless, lost in thought.

  “What?” Brains asks eventually.

  “’Seph told me about that place. Asked me to take a look. I’d say it’s abandoned. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Pete shakes his head. “Don’t ask.” He starts the engine and begins to turn the big SUV around. As they head towards the exit checkpoint he relents. “I like to think that there’s lots of good stuff in the Bible. Advice and ideas that can help us lead a better life. But it’s a mixed bag. Parts of it don’t fit, other parts seem to be borrowed from other religions, or written in the third century. Then there’s the bad stuff. Cults who add their own apocrypha and outright fakes to scripture. You’ve got to exercise careful judgement, lest you follow a road signposted for heaven and wind up in hell.” He shakes his head. “Schiller’s people took that turn: they enthusiastically embraced evil in the name of love. But you know what they say about the wages of sin.”

  And that’s all he’ll say until they’re in Colorado Springs.

  “Next stop, the Universal Life Church,” Brains reads from his phone’s memo pad. “Where’s that?”

  “Put it in the satnav,” Pete says tiredly. “Let’s get this over with.”

  They drive along ruler-straight highways that crawl across a sloping plain, passing vast shed-like buildings spaced infinitely far apart, past fences and ornamental walls and the occasional strip mall. Eventually they come to a wall punctuated by driveways that lead to a demolition site. A chain-link fence bars access, and a forbidding sign looms above it: CONSTRUCTION SITE. Brains checks his instrument. “Too hot to mess around with, but it’s all decay products. Nothing active here,” he announces. “Let’s go.”

  A guard in a rent-a-cop uniform is slouching towards them as Pete backs and turns the Escalade. He buzzes his window down: “Wrong turn!” he shouts. The guard shrugs and waves them off towards the main street.

  They’re taking a lunch break in a diner beneath the oppressive sky, when Brains’s phone emits an urgent turkey-gobbling sound, pauses for dramatic effect, and repeats the squawk. “That’s odd,” he says, frowning.

  “What is it?”

  “Message from the DC office.”

  “What—”

  “Give me a minute to decrypt.” Brains’s temper is short and Pete’s usual good humor is strained, so they sit in moody silence while Brains unpicks the meaning of the message. “Right,” he says to himself, then a moment later, “Right” again.

  Pete bites his lip.

  “We’re to pick up a passenger,” Brains finally says. “Late addition, another team member. They flew into Albuquerque this morning, and they’re currently on a Bolt bus. We’re to stand by for further instructions about a local job. After which we’re to go to DC.”

  “What?” Pete’s patience finally boils over: “But that’s nearly two thousand miles!”

  “If there are three of us and we take turns driving we should be able to do it in a couple of days,” Brains says doubtfully. “Allow four hours a day for meals, showers, and toilet breaks? We could do it in two days, if we average fifty miles per hour.”

  “If they could fly into Albuquerque, why the devil can’t we fly out that way?” Pete stares at the wreckage of a burger and tater tots on the plate before him. “And what’s this about a local job? I give up. Anyway, aren’t you kind of assuming that they expect us to drive?”

  “Well, yes…?” Then Brains sits up, a dangerous glint in his eye. “What else could they have in mind?”

  “Don’t ask.” Pete shudders. “If there’s one thing the past year’s taught me, it’s that things can always get worse.”

  * * *

  The female alfär mage is having fun.

  At least, Yarisol thinks she’s having fun. It’s difficult to be certain of such things—she doesn’t have much experience to draw on. She should be having fun, if she were like everyone else, or at least she should be experiencing the absence of not-fun, because she’s not trapped in the camp any more. The camp was comfortably predictable, from the bad weather and the locked cell doors to the petty cruelty. (Cruelty from the warrior caste towards anyone whose face didn’t work properly, placid contempt from the other magi, sneers from the urük soldiers guarding the camp.) But she didn’t know differently before. Now she’s sharing her head with the distilled extract of Jonquil the party girl, and it’s all terribly confusing.

  Jonquil is the daughter of the High Priestess of the God-emperor who has lately usurped power over this urük kingdom. She aspires to high rank herself, riding the coat-tails of privilege. But her thought processes and memories feel oddly wrong to Yarisol.

  Jonquil obsesses over facial expressions and appearances, and recognizes nuances of emotional color in speech that completely elude Yarisol. Jonquil finds it easy to read minds and intent. It’s like the urük woman glides across a social ice rink where Yarisol finds only broken ground that crumbles beneath her feet.

  But Jonquil is also deeply, maddeningly stupid. She can no more grasp the essence of mana, formulate macros, or compose spell-sonnets than a brightly painted parrot could. At best all she’s good for is repeating cantrips, and pret
ending to understand the true knowledge that comes as easily as breathing to Yarisol.

  Jonquil likes clothes and men and is at home in urük society, but she’s essentially a people person. All she’s good at is manipulating victims. Yarisol, in contrast, finds humans—alfär and urük alike—enigmatic and baffling obstacles, although she can warp reality and melt flesh with a gesture. If she can turn Jonquil’s preposterous hypersocialization to her own ends, she’ll be unstoppable.

  But first she has to get past Jonquil’s mother, the High Priestess.

  Iris, Jonquil’s mother, has summoned her to a breakfast meeting in Downing Street. She is due to fly out of Heathrow only three hours later. These are places of some differing significance to Jonquil, and the clash of requirements throws Yarisol’s executive dysfunction into high relief: Wear formal robes for her presentation before the throne of the All-Highest, or dress for comfort on a long-haul flight? In the end she lets Jonquil bubble to the surface for long enough to settle on a trouser suit and comfortable flats, plus heavy sunscreen. She hands her carry-on luggage to the bemused police officers at the door. “I am on my way to the airport after this meeting?” she explains, forcing herself to meet the hulking urük guard’s gaze directly and phrase every statement as a question. “You can guard this for me?” She gives him a little push with her will, then enters the lair of the lich-king.

  The High Priestess is chatting in the break room with a handful of skinny, intense-looking youngsters whose minds feel juicy and weak. Jonquil is tempted to snack, but forces herself to wait. The urük mage’s people have provided her with a vial of fresh blood which she carries in her pocket. She intends to consume it at the last possible moment before she passes through airport security. After all, she has no idea when she’ll be able to get a meal in the Western Empire.