Ra

by Sam Hughes

  Tanako nods in agreement. "Go on."

  "I have many questions. To begin with, I want to know what was supposed to happen. You dived into the memory of a huge magical event, but then disrupted that event by being there."

  "I don't think I did," Tanako says. "I think Watson wanted to destroy the artifact, and that's what he did. Remember, it took about a megaton of magic to do."

  "You're suggesting that he pulled that thing up from the bottom of the ocean because he didn't think it was safe where it was? It was made of solid gold, Kazuya, it had to be worth something. Who knows what kind of hoard it was part of? You know what, this is ridiculous. I'm assuming that there was a real event at all, which you can't prove, and that this listening station thing is real for any level of 'real', and that pre-magic history isn't what any of us think—"

  "It only takes a few grams," Tanako explains, and holds his right hand out.

  The gauntlet instantiates, unrolling in an eyeblink from the speck of gold held between his thumb and forefinger.

  Laura comes within a hair's breadth of reflexively blowing Tanako's head off. She stumbles back into the far corner of the room, aiming her entire self-defence array back at Tanako. She manages to bite down on her tongue before the triggering syllable leaps out of her mouth.

  The gauntlet is too beautiful for this world. Its tendrils wave like flower petals, like slow-moving licks of flame. Laura can barely look away from it. Tanako sits easily - his feet up, the water glass empty on the table beside him.

  "What is that? What is it? Tell me!"

  Tanako smiles benevolently. "It has no name. In fact, I think naming it would remove a great deal of its power. It's a labour-saving device; it saves mages from having to comprehend infinity. It allows magic to do magic. It allows spells to cast spells which cast spells.

  "I used this on Krallafjöll, when I was Benj Clarke."

  Laura's arm wobbles fractionally. "Recursion."

  "More like... recursion's ugly big brother."

  "...You cast a spell without full comprehension. I remember now. You cast a spell without having to keep the whole thing in your head at once. You found a machine— which— Oh my God. You found the Holy Grail. You're Prometheus, you stole a miracle from a dream. Twice!"

  "No. You did."

  Tanako flexes his arm and fingers. He has absolute freedom of movement. The gauntlet might as well be made of mist and spider silk. Its gold flows and curls around Tanako, like deep, turbulent magic.

  Laura says, "We could build anything."

  "You see why someone would want to destroy it," Tanako concludes.

  "It works. It really works." Laura slumps back against the wall and shuts down her defensive spells. She shakes her head, still not able to look away. "This changes everything. It changes everything."

  "You must have more questions," Tanako says, after it becomes clear that Laura has forgotten how to speak.

  "I do," says Laura, "I do. I'll get to them. Just give me a minute. For this moment, this is all I want."

  There Is No Cabal

  Laura is stumbling drunkenly across a world that's like the sterilised mirror underside of reality, the blue and black and silver-grey upside-down place seen in rain puddles. It's a place where nothing that happens is good; where some nightmare was uncorked and spread through the air, worming its way into people's tongues and eyeballs and alveoli, seeping into the surfaces until there was nothing but nightmare to see or eat or drink. The air is as cold as bone and seems to breeze through her instead of around her. The air has an unsettling texture, as if there are occasional invisible strands of cobweb stirred into it. There's an irritating electronic buzzing, like some combination of metal cutting devices operating intermittently half a street away. It hurts to think.

  Laura blitters across the glass landscape. Nobody can remember the start of a dream. She is trudging through a black glass mountain valley with jagged glass boulders and glass shards crackling underfoot like frost. She wonders if there's a special word for a glass glacier.

  The sky overhead features the familiar pale triple-pointed galaxy, the forked Milky Way, but today it disconcerts Laura for reasons that she cannot pull together in her head. It is simultaneously reassuring and alarming. Laura is asleep and not reasoning at maximum capacity. All she knows is that she wants to find shelter.

  The mountain ranges on each side elongate and coalesce until the valley has become a ravine. The ravine changes direction crazily, filling space, adding to its length, so that even flicking from location to location at a wish it takes Laura hours to make measurable progress. From above, it starts to look like a white noise waveform. It must be tens of thousands of miles long. Its walls become almost vertical and totally unscalable.

  The floor of the ravine sprouts tiny white daisy things, which look soft right up until Laura treads on one. They're extruded crystals, and they function like caltraps. From the ravine walls grow spider plants, whose leaves are long curved shards of broken wine bottle. Laura has to duck or turn sideways to edge past them without slashing herself open. It's at this point that she realises that the ravine is gradually narrowing, and then looks up to realise that it has begun to close up over her head. Her throat rasps. The electrobuzzing is becoming louder.

  Laura has been here for a long time and is gradually coming to realise it.

  *

  The ravine becomes a tunnel. What little starlight there was fizzles out, leaving Laura picking her way through an increasingly jagged blind nightmare. She illuminates her path by creating a picture of light in her head. The picture is red. Laura doesn't perceive that there are other colours she could choose. She creates red light. It is almost worse. Now she can see some of the surroundings, but the green leaves in particular are black and too indistinct to focus on. The passage flicks from uniform deep black to a puddle of dim red surrounded by deep shadows. And the light source, for dream logic reasons, comes into being in front of one of her eyes, a LED-pure light aimed into it like an optometrist's scope. It's not quite blinding, but painful, forming a dull point in Laura's retina. She sees blood vessel patterns overlaying her vision.

  It's miles further before the tunnel forks for the first time. Laura remembers her maze training - consisting entirely of her mother once telling her "always follow the left-hand side" - and goes left. The tunnel rises and falls and zags enough times for Laura to lose her bearings, before it forks again. Both forks are smaller than the parent tunnel. The plant life is petering out, but the walls are becoming blocky as they close in, as if made of thick slabs of sharp-edged glass, placed to catch her clothes. Laura goes left again.

  Much later, at a 60-degree right turn, Laura spots a crack in the left wall. The unacceptable lighting conditions mean that it would have been very easy to miss it in passing. The crack is just wide enough to slide through sideways without being cut in more than a few places - definitely both elbows, and maybe a rib or two. It's dark and, looking right into it, Laura can't tell how far it goes beyond an immediate right-angled turn.

  Follow the left-hand side. She must have walked past six of these side alleys without realising it.

  She is lost.

  The noise is driving her crazy. Considering retracing her steps, Laura turns suddenly, catching a shoulder on the wall and carving a wound all the way down to her elbow. She inhales to cry out but at that instant she sees, down the corridor, the thing which has been following her. The thing is three turns away, mostly obscured by outcroppings of rough glass, and it is wrong. It is a very young child's drawing of a man, with exaggerated features and nonsensical proportions, made flesh. It's the wrong shape, its face and teeth are wrong, its body is wrong. It's extremely dark and it's standing completely still, not looking in Laura's direction. It occupies the full width and height of the corridor. It is somehow larger than anything the corridor can strictly accommodate.

  Laura holds her breath. As the thing turns and begins to glide along the corridor in her direction, Laura kil
ls her light and tries to shuffle blindly into the side alley. It's difficult and fiddly and painful and she seems to get nowhere for a long time while the thing is moving closer. The thing is totally dark except for its illuminated eyeballs and if it makes any noise it cannot be heard over the machines. Laura forces her way around the corner and waits, eyes refusing to adjust, unable to hear anything but the mechanical grinding, and still dribbling blood from her hand, which is now soaked. Her heart might as well be buzzing.

  After minutes of waiting, and very slowly, the thing puts its head around the corner. Its head is a fat balloon, a big black elongated comma. It turns to look at her with its eyeballs. It opens its mouth of teeth and tells her, I CAN SEE YOU.

  It is at this point that Laura regains consciousness. Thought processes that were freewheeling wildly finally hit the road and find traction. Laura sees where she is and she sees what's happening. She realises that she is having an intensely unpleasant Tanako's World Episode. She realises, also, that she cannot wake up from it.

  Is that worse or better?

  "Get it together, Ferno," says the man behind her. Laura whips her head around, but does so too quickly and catches it on more glass. She flinches and ducks to clutch the new wound. This provides enough room for the other dreamer to raise a conventional sidearm and fire four conventional bullets over Laura's head and into the thing's face.

  The thing tells them HAHEHAHEHEHEHE. It relaxes, rather than collapsing or dying in any convincing way. It is as if its internal supports have suddenly been withdrawn. It falls to the ground in a manner which strongly suggests that it could very easily be reactivated. Its eyes darken, but remain wide open.

  Laura's heart rate levels off. She takes stock.

  Not much of the man can be seen, because of the cramped environment. He is taller than Laura. He's covered head to toe in a light armour shell and carrying nothing but the gun, which he immediately dismisses. The shell is grey, and thin enough not to make navigating the tunnels impractical but evidently hard enough to withstand contact with the glass without sustaining much more than white scratches. No face is visible.

  It's a really good choice of equipment. Laura immediately clothes herself in the same.

  "You've gone off mission. Follow me," the man says. He starts moving down the alley. Laura follows him, gingerly at first and then with more confidence once she establishes that sharp glass protrusions can't penetrate the armour.

  "Who are you?"

  "Who do you think?" Kazuya Tanako turns his helmet transparent. He turns around so Laura can get a good look. "Ta-dah."

  "Oh. We're back in T-world, why?"

  "'Show, don't tell'," says Tanako. "The things I need to say to you could fill a book, but you'd have no choice but to take the whole thing as fiction. It's how you think. I needed to bring you in here to put your face in front of some evidence. You've found your way into something much bigger than you thought."

  "This place is full of evil," Laura says. "Demons, and this noise we're having to shout over. Why wasn't this here before? You said you crossed a light-year of glass unharmed. T-world should fight you. But monsters were conspicuously absent from your story."

  Tanako reaches what seems to be a dead end. He feels the tall, narrow pane of glass for a second, then summons his sidearm again and shoots through it. He steps out onto thin air, and helps Laura out too. It is a bottomless ravine with an invisibly thin glass layer supporting them. The near side of the ravine is a sheer wall of fractured glass, with the cracks from Tanako's bullet spreading across it. The far side is buttressed stone, mile-thick castle wall. Both walls go up too far for anything like a sky to be available overhead. Below them is an unholy red light and the noise of combine harvesters coming up to speed. Standing over the gap is painful, like hard radiation.

  "You've got a problem with your short-term memory," Kazuya Tanako tells Laura, "so I guess we'll have to go through this whole thing again, Socratic style. Where are we?"

  Laura thinks the wall ahead of them is the exterior of a deep layer of her memory palace, but that isn't the question. Tanako strides across clear glass air gap like it's just a basic pavement, unslinging a heavyweight Akira-style laser from hammerspace. He inscribes a luminous pink blob on the wall, then tears the shape out of the wall like paper, letting it whip away into the wind. A dark gap is left. Laura follows him forward, mildly concerned that Tanako broke into her palace with such ease. As they step through, the electromechanical noises tune out, muffled. It's like weight lifting off her thoughts.

  Behind the paper-thin/mile-thick wall is her recurring dream-snapshot: Rachel Ferno, Atlantis, ET and full crew complement, all at the instant immediately before their simultaneous destruction.

  Click.

  Kazuya Tanako prompts her, "It's about two weeks since you woke me. The second time, I mean."

  "We're in memory," Laura announces.

  "We're in your memory palace right now," Tanako agrees.

  "No."

  "No?" Tanako already knows the answer, but is guiding Laura towards it.

  "It's a system," Laura says. "You spoke about finding a listening post. An omega-oracle, a systematic recording of all mana expenditure across all of history. That's where we are, that's what this place is. It's that system's memory.

  "This scene is formally allocated. And so are the other things I can't forget, like the eruption at Krallafjöll. And so is the incident where Alexander Watson destroyed Recursion's Big Brother or whatever you want to call it—"

  "I don't want to call it anything," Tanako says hurriedly. "It stays anonymous."

  "These are the events in history when huge amounts of mana were spent," Laura summarises. "These are stored here, separated by bare recording medium."

  "Correct," says Tanako. "In Sanskrit these would be called the akashic records. Now, answer your own question. Why the demons now, but not then?"

  Laura stares up, once again, at her mother and the orbiter. What she is really looking at is: a plan, at the instant of its fruition.

  "Mum knew," Laura says. "She knew these records existed. All she had to do was get close enough to Atlantis, and spend a lifetime of magic doing it, and the whole thing would... go on record. Nobody is dead, as long as we remember them with sufficient fidelity to effect a full reconstruction."

  "Answer your question," Tanako repeats. "Why demons now? And not then?"

  "How much matter did you bring back for the anonymous recursion artifact to instantiate in full? A milligram? From a spell I wrote and cast in bed? If that's all it takes to trick the universe, I can bring a person back. I can almost taste it."

  "I think you're falling asleep again, Ferno—"

  "Scooby-Doo."

  "What?"

  "Your answer is Scooby-Doo. Someone built this."

  They are being watched. Something is looking in at them from the ravine outside, a tumorous monkey-giant with infinitely long legs and misplaced shoulders. It is about a hundred metres tall. Only one eye and one nostril are visible through the hole. It smells like fried detergent. It grins like an exterminator, pokes two long hoselike fingers into the room, and sprays Tanako and Laura with a carpet of brown spiders.

  Tanako brushes madly at his arms and head, even though his suit keeps him sealed off. He envisions insecticide, then thinks again and envisions arachnicide, if such a thing is real. It is now: his suit becomes slick with bug killer, as if he is showering in the stuff. Layers of spider shrivel up and slough off him. He wades towards Laura.

  Laura has summoned a two-metre bo/engineering staff, probably intending to take on the Kong monster outside, but she can't even move it through the knee-height flood of spiders. She throws flame at them, but this is less effective. The brown fuzzy animals heat up like copper, turning red-hot while they start to chew through Laura's helmet. Laura can barely stand. "I want to wake up," she says, "or I want to go to sleep. Either is good!"

  Above and behind them, the Atlantis tableau clicks forward one frame
. Atlantis is rolling hard left, yawing right. Soichi Noguchi is still fighting its movement. Rachel Ferno is tossed into the orbiter's wake, no longer visible.

  "We're doing something difficult but completely possible," Tanako tells her, still wading in her direction. He plays his laser over the face of the Kong monster, with no obvious effect. "You've got enough of the metaphor down to handle this, Ferno. I believe in you."

  "Fuck the metaphor!"

  "We're being pointed at," says Tanako. "This is the real event memory, the listening post just stores references. Follow the link back!"

  "Back where?"

  Click. Smoke. Fuel trail. The tiniest fragment of flame emerging from the ET shell.

  "Back there!"

  For the second time, Atlantis explodes.

  *

  The listening post:

  "—inking."

  "What?" Laura stumbles like she just stepped out of a roller coaster.

  "I said, good thinking," Tanako says. "You used the environment. See down below?"

  Laura almost falls onto the railing. Mapped out below is the Florida coast, picked out with lat/long lines, range boundaries and trajectory markers. One arc is Atlantis. Another, rising to meet it, is Rachel Ferno's. The map is suffused with Kanditz oracle colours. It is as familiar to Laura as her own face.

  "We followed the shortcut," Laura says.

  "Approximately, yes."

  Laura is transfixed. She reaches out for the map, but her hand just obscures the view and messes with her depth perception, like a hologram.

  She says, "Did you know there's a man whose job is to blow up the Space Shuttle?"