One-eye fell at Kim’s side, vomiting, his hands clutching at his ruined manhood. Kim jerked his hand away, leaving the flint embedded where it was, then looked about anxiously.
Baxi was watching him, smiling ferociously.
Kim looked back, appalled, hearing the wretch heaving up each painful breath. Then, as he watched, Baxi came close, the knife in his hand, and pushed its point deep into the base of One-eye’s neck.
One-eye spasmed then lay still.
‘Da,’ said the chief and turned away. Good. Kim watched him strut, triumphant, self-satisfied, then throw back his head and whoop.
A web…A web of sticky darkness. Kim felt a warmth, a kind of numbness, spread outward from the core of him, a hand of eight fingers closing on him slowly like a cage, drawing him down beneath the surface of the dark. Darkness congealed above him like a lid, tar in his open mouth. And then he fainted.
They had never heard him say a word. Baxi thought him dumb or just simple, and others took their lead from that. They called him ‘Lagasek’, or Starer, for his habit of looking so intently at an object. That, too, they saw as a sign of his simplicity.
For an age, it seemed, he had been as if asleep among them. Their hideous shapes and forms had become as familiar as the darkness. He had watched them without understanding, seeing their scars and deformities as natural things, not departures from some given norm. But now he was awake. He stared at them through newly opened eyes, a bright thread of thought connecting what he saw to the sharp-lit centre of awareness at the back of his skull.
He looked about the flickering fire at their missing hands and eyes, their weeping sores and infected scabs; saw them cough and wheeze for breath, aged well beyond their years, and wondered what he was doing there among them.
Sitting there in the dust, the thick and greasy soup warm in his belly, he felt like weeping. As he looked about the small circle of men and boys he saw, for the first time, their gauntness, their strange furtiveness. They twitched and scratched. They stretched and stood to urinate, their eyes never still, never settling for long, like the blind white flies that were everywhere in the Clay.
Yes, he understood it now. It had begun there with that glimpse of otherness – that vision of glass and silver, of kings and brightness. He felt like speaking out – telling them what he had seen at the Gate, what he had done to scare off the intruders – but habit stilled his tongue. He looked down at his tiny, narrow hands, his long thin arms. There were no scars but there were sores at the elbows and the bone could be seen clear beneath the flesh.
He looked away, shuddering, his face filled with pain and a strange, hitherto untasted shame, then looked back again. They were talking among themselves now, their crude, half-savage speech suddenly foreign to his ear. It made him feel uneasy, as if he had knowledge of something better, some long-buried memory of things before the tribe. Across from him Tek and Rotfoot exchanged half-hearted blows in savage-gentle play, their broken faces filled with light and shadows. He lifted his head, sniffing at them in instinct, then settled, realizing what he was doing, filled with a sudden, intense sense of self-disgust.
For a moment he closed his eyes, feeling the warmth on his face and arms and chest. That too was strange. It was rare to have a fire. Rare to sit as they sat now, the circle of the dark behind, the circle of the light in front. But this was a special time.
Baxi sat in his place, on a huge, rounded stone above the others. A stack of wood – itself a kind of treasure – lay at his side. From time to time he would reach down and throw a piece upon the blaze, growling with pleasure.
They had found the sacks of firewood in a store room in the conquered settlement; three of them, hidden beneath a pile of other things scavenged from the dump. Baxi had brought them back and built the fire himself with a care that made Kim think he had seen it done before. Then he had gone down to his cellar, returning moments later with the fire-stick.
Kim had watched them all gasp and fall back as the flame leapt from his hand and spread amongst the gathered wood, muttering darkly between themselves, their eyes filled with fear and fascination. But Kim had known. He had crouched there, still and silent, watching as the fire kindled, like some strange, living creature jumping from one dark surface to another, consuming all it touched. Like the unspoken thoughts in his head, he realized. Yet this had a voice, a crackling, popping, sputtering voice, its breath strangely thick and dark, curled like a beard, yet evanescent-vanishing into the dark above the blaze.
For a brief moment it seemed he understood; held in his head a key to the pattern of all things. Then it too was gone, drawn up into the darkness overhead.
He felt misplaced. Torn from the light and cast down into darkness. But if misplaced, what then? How could he change things?
Run away, a small voice inside him called out. Run far away. To a place where the darkness ends.
He looked out beyond the fire, blinded by its brilliance, seeing nothing but the after-image of the flames. The darkness was unending and eternal. There was nothing but the darkness…
No, he reminded himself. Not true. There is a place of brightness. Up there. A wartha.
Among the gods.
Not only that, but there was a way. A single door into the brightness. A one-way door that often led to death, or so the men said. A door that only the youngest and the bravest took.
Kim looked down at his hands again. He was young, but was he brave enough? Was he prepared to risk everything on a single gamble?
He thought of the escapade with the mirror and the fire-stick and his spirits rose. Then the image of himself, scared and cowering on the rocks, came back to him. His stomach knotted. He wanted it. Wanted the brightness like he wanted life itself. But he was afraid. Dreadfully, awfully, numbingly afraid. He felt he could not do it – would die before he took the first step.
Better to stay here a thousand years…
A cold shiver passed through him, ice beneath the firelight on his face and chest and limbs. No, not that. Death was preferable to that.
He looked up. On the far side of the fire, beyond Rotfoot, stood Baxi, watching him. For a moment their eyes met and locked and some kind of raw understanding passed between them. And, in the moment before he looked away, Kim saw a crude kind of affection there in the older man’s eyes: a strange, almost wistful tenderness that he found unsettling.
Far away, said the voice inside. To a place where the darkness ends.
Kim rose and turned to face the darkness. The heat lay on his naked back, like the promise of comfort, but now his face was cold and the tension in him was worse than it had ever been. For a moment longer he hesitated, need and fear at war within him. Then, with a violent shudder, he nodded to himself and jerked away from the fire, his decision made. He would go. Now. Before the darkness took him back.
The sign was ancient. Time had turned the whiteness of its paint a mottled grey, had faded the dark, heavy lettering. Where the bolts held it to the wall a red-gold rust had formed two weeping eyes.
Kim looked up at it, struggling to understand. Like so much else it was a mystery; a symbol of all the things denied him. He studied the strange yet familiar shapes of the letters, wondering what they meant, filling the gap, the darkness of incomprehension, with his own meanings. The first letter was easy. It was an arrow, facing to the left. There was a gap and then the second, its double curves facing away from the arrow like a straight-backed woman’s breasts. The third was a ring. The fourth a drawn bow. The fifth? Two steep hills, perhaps, linked by a valley. The sixth again was easy. It was an upright column, like the column beyond the wall. The seventh? He felt the seventh was like the fifth, yet its difference – its lack of an upright strut – was significant. A gate, maybe. Or two interlocking flints – perhaps the sign for war. Then, after another gap, came the last of them; an eye with a dark, curled eyebrow overhead, linked at the eye’s left corner.
But what did it mean in total? What message had it once conveyed?
/> He looked about him, then ducked beneath the rotten lintel, pushing through the gap in the wall. There, like some vast subterranean serpent breaching the far wall of the ruined building, stood the column, its silvered surface gleaming in the half-light.
Kim stumbled forward and stood before it, his eyes drawn upward to where it met the ceiling of the Clay far overhead. There were many such pillars spread regularly throughout the Clay, but this one, Kim knew, was different from the others. It was a gate. An entrance into the Above.
Long ago they had chased a boy from another tribe across the nearby hills and trapped him here, between the walls of this old, ruined building. Faced with certain death, the boy had turned, gone to the pillar and pressed his hands against it.
Miraculously, the pillar had opened. A narrow aperture had formed in its perfect roundness, a dim, fierce light burning out from the space within. Fearfully, with a backward glance at them, the boy had gone inside. At once the opening had closed, throwing the space between the walls into an intense and sudden darkness.
They had camped there some while, waiting for the boy to come out, but he never had. And when one of the older boys grew brave enough to approach the pillar and press against it, they could all see that the space inside was empty.
It had eaten the boy.
For a time he had believed this version of events, and in truth part of him still believed it, making him cower there, terrified to enter. But the newly woken part of him reasoned otherwise. What if the boy had not been killed? What if he had been taken up into the Above?
They were huge assumptions. Hunches, not certainty. And the boy had gone inside only because he had had no option. But what of himself ? There were no knives awaiting him should he turn away. Only the darkness. Only the foetid Clay.
He grimaced and closed his eyes, tormented by indecision. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be wrong.
Is death any worse than this?
The thought came like a voice in his head, and with the voice came the realization that he was no longer a single creature. There were two of him, sharing a single skull, a single body. One dark, one light. One kept him here, the other craved escape. Here, at the gate to the Above, they would have to fight it out between them.
For a time the darkness had him and he stood there, thoughtless, his animal self shuddering uncontrollably, a gobbet of spittle dribbling down his chin. Then, with an abruptness that caught the animal unaware, Kim threw himself at the column and scratched at its surface, trying to find an opening.
He could hear himself gibbering with fear, and in another moment he would have backed away, defeated, but suddenly the aperture slid open with an outbreath of air and he tumbled in, onto the smooth, uncluttered floor, his hands going up to cover his eyes against the brilliance.
The brightness hurt him. It cut into his head like a flint. Then the door hissed shut behind him, trapping him. He whimpered in fear then lay there, shivering, his legs drawn up beneath him, waiting to die.
What happened next seemed worse than death. The light in the room pulsed gently and a deep voice boomed out, filling the narrow space.
‘Kewsel agas hanow, map!’ Speak your name, boy! ‘Agas hanow!’
Kim gagged, then shat himself. His muscles went into spasm. For a while he could do nothing to control them. Again he was an unthinking animal, there on the floor inside the alien column. A stinking piece of quivering meat and bone. Then the bright thing in him bobbed up again and floated on the surface of his awareness. His name? What was his name?
‘Laga…’ He could not say it. He’d had too little practice. In any case, it was wrong. Lagasek – Starer – was not his name; or, if his name, then his name only in the darkness. It was not the name his mother had given him. Not the name he wished to take with him into the light.
He tried again. ‘Kim,’ he said, the word strange, more awkward in his mouth than in his head. His voice barely sounded the K and the rest of it was inaudible.
‘Kewsel arta,’ said the voice. Speak again. It seemed warmer than before, more soothing.
‘Kim,’ he said more clearly, then lay there, perfectly still, wondering what would happen.
‘Da, Kim,’ said the voice. Good. ‘Praga bos why omma?’ Why be you here? ‘Praga prak why entradhe hemma pylla?’ Why did you enter this pillar? ‘Gul nebonen sewya why?’ Does someone pursue you?
‘Nyns,’ he answered. No.
‘Nyns,’ the voice repeated and then chuckled to itself. What it said next was difficult to follow. The words were alien to Kim, like the nonsense utterances of his nightmares. ‘We’ve a fluent one here.’ This last seemed not to be directed at Kim.
Kim sat up, looking around him. Then he stood and went to the curve of the wall across from where the opening had been. No, he hadn’t been mistaken: there was a shape in the wall’s otherwise unblemished face. A pattern of light, almost too faint to see. He stood beside it, trying to figure it out.
‘Ah,’ said the voice. ‘My gweles why cafos an matrix.’ I see you’ve found the… But the last word was new. It was like the other words – alien.
Kim twitched and turned about sharply. The creature with the voice was watching him, then. Was close by. He stared up into the dimly lit tunnel overhead and tried to make out something in the darkness, but it seemed empty.
‘Matrix?’ Kim asked, pronouncing the word carefully, as if feeling the shape of it in his mouth.
There was laughter – soft, warm laughter – then the voice came back. ‘My bos ken tyller,’ it said, as if that explained everything. I be somewhere else. ‘Ha an tra a-dherak why bos un matrix.’ And that thing before you be a matrix. ‘Ef gul pycturs ha patron.’ He make pictures and patterns.
Kim struggled to understand, but could grasp nothing of what the voice was saying. Pictures? Patterns? How did it make these things?
‘Gasa-vydysquehs why.’ Let me show you.
The faint area glowed, then seemed to explode with colour.
Kim shrieked and leaped backward, scrambling away until his back was against the far curve of the wall.
‘Ef ny a-wra pystyk why. Golyas. Kensa un fas.’ He won’t harm you. Watch. First a face.
The screen formed a face. A typical face from the Clay, seen in partial darkness, its scars and deformities nothing unusual. Kim nodded, his eyes watching the matrix closely.
‘Nessa, un patron. Un semple patron. Tyby kettep myn bos un men.’ Next, a pattern. A simple pattern. Imagine each point be a stone. ‘My muvya an meyn formya un form. Un patron.’ I move the stones to form a shape. A pattern.
When the image on the screen reformed it showed three lines of three points. A square.
‘Den lufyow, le un bys,’ said Kim. Two hands, less a finger. It was the most he had said until then.
‘Ahah,’ said the voice, and this time Kim could hear a second voice speak softly in the background. ‘Numerate, this one. That’s rare.’ The hair on his neck stood up, hearing that foreign tongue again, and his lips peeled back, his dark self hostile to it, knowing it for the language of the light.
Unknown to him, however, he had taken his first step into the Above. And when the voice sounded again its tone was slightly different: less cosy, much more businesslike.
‘Dos ogas an matrix, Kim. Dos ogas ha my deryvas why fatel muvya an meyn a drodhe.’
Come near the matrix, Kim. Come near and I’ll tell you how to move the stones about.
Chapter 32
MACHINES OF FLESH
Klaus Ebert, Head of GenSyn, Chung Kuo’s second largest company, looked down at the corpse on the dissecting table and slowly shook his head.
‘No, Knut. I’ve never seen its like.’
He pointed out its internal structure: the lack of a spleen; the simplification of the respiratory system; the artificial latticework of the rib cage; the replacement of the stomach and intestinal system by a single sack, sealed off and unconnected to the anus. Most obvious of all was the flat, compact battery,
like a black lacquered hipflask, placed where the human liver should have been.
‘I’ll have my experts look at this, but it’s not GenSyn, that’s certain. It isn’t even organic. It’s just a machine; too simple to function longer than a few months. It can’t digest. It can’t even process blood. Whoever built it designed it for rapid redundancy.’
Ebert turned, facing the General, his face ashen.
‘Gods, Knut, but it’s so like me, isn’t it? Looking at it there, it feels like part of me has died.’
The General studied his old friend a moment, then looked back at the part-dissected corpse. It was a perfect copy. Too good in some respects. He had seen the films of it before his men had neutralized it – saw how cleverly it had mimicked Ebert’s voice and mannerisms. And if there had been something unnatural about it, something just a bit too animated about its speech, its gestures, that was only noticeable in retrospect. It had been good enough to fool Ebert’s personal staff. But the eyes… When the thing had been cornered in Ebert’s private suite, those eyes had burned, like the eyes of an addict.
‘Who could have built this, Klaus? Who has the know-how?’
Ebert laughed uncomfortably. ‘GenSyn. MedFac, maybe. No one else. At least, no one on-planet.’
The General looked up sharply. ‘You think it’s from outside, then? From one of the colonies?’
Ebert dragged his eyes away from the dead thing on the table, then turned his back on it. ‘I don’t know, Knut. Six months back I’d have said no, but I’ve seen a few strange things since then. Controls are less tight out there. The Edict has less force…’ He shook his head. ‘The Seven should do something, Knut. Now. Before it’s too late.’
‘I know,’ the General said simply. But he was thinking of DeVore. If what the kwai, Kao Chen, had said were true, it would explain much.
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