I didn’t have time to press Hadley Ben Michaels on the matter of my father, however, because Shanumi Six came through the entrance, her face smoldering with anger. I saw her through the colored lens floating in the air until she edged her way along the side, the jeweled rings on her hand sparking in the strange light.
She wasn’t changed in the least from what I remembered, a powerful woman who had to stoop to fit under the side of the tent. She was wearing a light blue uniform I didn’t recognize. On the shirt pocket was a badge I had seen years before in Morocco: the logo of the Board of Protection. My heart beat fast to see her raised from the dead.
“You are here much too early, Enver Eleven.” She checked her watch and moved towards me. “You shouldn’t be here until the morning of the day after tomorrow.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t keep to the terms of your itinerary.”
“That’s no matter, Eleven. I am capable of making a correction. That is what we’ve been doing all along. Making a historical correction. Redemption through correction.”
I moved towards the consultant, assuming she would protect me. But she didn’t move.
I said, “You’re going to have energy, aren’t you, from the supernova? You’re going to have enough energy to do whatever you like. To bend time. Create space. Bring a new species into being. What is it, your dream? What is the curse you want to bring down on our heads?”
Shanumi didn’t say anything. She came around the arch and tried to put her arm around my neck to paralyze me. I ducked out of the way, barely escaping from her grip, and thought in the very same instant that there was no point struggling against her or the Board of Protection. Their plan had been in place for centuries. On the Day of the Dead enough energy would arrive on the surface of the planet to transform the ephemeral histories of mankind.
Were they even wrong to make of history what they wanted? But to think on these lines was to go beyond the Constitution and also, as João Twenty had reminded me, beyond the human heart. It was to encounter the infinite in the shape of the multiverse.
I turned to Shanumi so that we were face-to-face, startling her, and then slipped past. The consultant began to hum with red-and-blue thought. Her head spun around and she brought out a cleaning cart from the side of the room to interpose between my Six and myself.
“Don’t try anything, Shanumi. HB Michaels is under my authority. She is acting in obedience to my prime number. Your number has been withdrawn from service.”
“I see that. Although she worked for me for many years. Everybody knows that a machine is a fair-weather friend.”
Nevertheless, Shanumi stopped where she was. Fanatical as the members of the Board were reputed to be, she knew that only a madwoman would fight with a consultant.
“It’s your father’s fault we’re here, Enver.”
“I don’t understand how he knew about your plot. He is an ordinary man.”
“He knew nothing. But he gave his machines free will, which meant that they could reach their own conclusions separate from the consultants. They were the ones who betrayed the rest of us, who believed we were betraying the values of the Agency. Ordinary vacuum cleaners and domestic machines, assigned to an old-age home, daring to disagree with the greatest calculating intelligences of their time. But why do I need to convince you? You are destined to take your part in the redemption from suffering.”
From one of her jeweled rings, Shanumi brought up a hologram, a black-and-white sphere in which I could see myself or someone who looked like me in front of a console, a row of clocks on the wall behind my back. I wasn’t sure what she intended to make me believe.
“You see it with your own eyes and you can also see that it has not been altered. Nothing must change from the recording. It is vital that every detail is arranged so that it will come out right in the past. You need to put yourself under my supervision. Your life has all been leading up to this point. Who knows why it was you, but the consultants have known. Or suspected as much, since you were thirteen. Everything has been arranged for your own good, even the removal of your sister.”
I shifted so that the arch stood between us. I put my sister out of my mind, sensing she had only been introduced as a distraction.
“A true image can lie. What reason do I have to trust you?”
“You would never have survived in these tunnels, Eleven, if I hadn’t put it about that you were the prophet the underground has been expecting. You would have been killed and eaten. I saved your skin. Do you think you would have come back from Morocco in one piece if it hadn’t been for my intervention?”
I edged away from her as she moved closer. Caught sight of the room in the window pane. There was only one person in the reflection.
“Have you looked in the mirror recently, Shanumi Six?”
“I’m not a vain woman.”
“I mean, have you considered that you and your entire cohort of renegade machines are suffering from reflection sickness? Look in the window. There’s nothing there.”
At the same time I heard, or thought I heard, Shanumi under her breath reciting the digits of another prime number to HB Michaels, and to my horror I saw the cleaning cart reverse and come towards me. I gathered my strength and pulled the head of Hadley Ben Michaels from her moorings. Her eyes spun wildly as I threw her at Shanumi Six. Before anyone could do anything worse, I jumped part of the way through the arch.
On the other end, I collided hard with the ground, getting the breath knocked out of me. There were already hands holding on to both my feet. I pulled, not knowing whether I was resisting the strength of one man or a robot, and to my relief my boots slipped off and left me to collapse in a heap under a vast daybreak.
The sky was almost orange when I arrived on the day of the supernova. The atmosphere had grown to be thin, thanks to the invisible bombardment of the preceding hours, but as yet there was no physical indication of the devastation to come. The arch closed to the size of a pinhole and then evaporated completely. There wouldn’t be enough energy to send anybody after me.
It was yet to be full dawn and the light was still increasing, sketching in the landscape with a pencil: a canopy of trees stretching beneath me almost to the horizon, the darkness of the night remaining beneath their heads, and a series of triangular mountains set in order of increasing size. In one corner of the sky was a patch of blue sparks, harbingers of the tide of relativistic particles bound in the direction of the planet.
I was not too distant from the top of another mountain, its crown a hundred yards from my position capped with snow, and could pick out the point perhaps ten miles from where the redemption machine had been assembled.
The day had already begun to burn on my skin while I sized up the redemption machine. Despite the early hour, the shadows of its enormous spike and the receiving bowl, in the style of the telescope at Jodrell Bank, lay long on the land.
I steeled myself for the last day of my travels. I had to make it to the device and shut it down on behalf of an Agency which might no longer exist. There was little time until the battery was charged by a sky smoking black and orange with the debris of charged particles, little time remaining before history was irrevocably purified. Purification was a mode of the infinite. There was only so much purification we could tolerate and continue to be human.
But I had started to scramble down the slope when I discovered a spectacle which struck me more than the face of Jupiter once had. In my direct path, in plain view, was a series of glowing tents, each marked with a red-and-white cross. There was a dozen or more, surrounded by a makeshift laser fence and a gate that opened as I approached.
There was no point trying to hide. Nor were the members of the expedition hiding from me. On the contrary, they came out to meet me, smoothing down their brown uniforms and buttoning decorations and insignia on their collars and breasts. They were wearing pith helmets. I couldn’t place
them in any particular period.
The men quickly set up a number of holographic recorders, their stacks of insect eyes glaring on our encounter, and indicated by means of hand signals that they wanted to administer a medical exam before any contact could be initiated.
I consented, not seeing any harm in it, and a silver-haired gentleman, leaning on a cane, took my vital signs with a pen-shaped scanner. He passed it over me like a wand, talking to himself under his breath, making sure to get readings of my arms and legs.
“Blood pressure, low. Heart rate, low. No sign of an imminent epileptic episode. You are in good shape, Enver Eleven. Excellent shape, considering what you’ve been through.”
“How do you know what I’ve been through?”
I saw that one of the recorders was focusing on me, a red light shining above its lens cluster. I half closed my eyes to avoid the glare. The gentleman adjusted his helmet, looked warily into the sky, and placed his scanner back in his belt.
“Have you considered that you might be a legend to us, to those who come after and whose task it is to administer the legacy?”
“I don’t know what I could have done to deserve it.”
“Consider for yourself, for I can’t say more, that we may know the ending of your story as well as the beginning, from the minute of your birth to the day of your death. Consider then, my friend—if I may address you as such on such short acquaintance—the following thought. To us, you are as much of a historical figure as it stands for you relative to any man, woman, or machine, belonging to the old world. Consider that we live and breathe in the shadow of your accomplishments. And not only yours, by any means. Not only yours, but yours as well.”
“I truly haven’t considered any of that.”
“I believe you have not. How could you, after all, since, despite the loose talk of prophecy, what comes after is hidden under a veil more profound than any other secret of the universe? That is all I can tell you, however, complying with predicate restrictions.”
I was so tired and thirsty I could have fainted on the spot. I stood there and expected something—I don’t know what—from the people around me. They, on the contrary, seemed to expect something from my side. One had drawn a sketch of my face on an easel. Others were looking at the likeness, nodding in approval.
Instead of summoning his machines to my aid, though, the gentleman continued to observe, looking down to take notes in an old-fashioned journal.
“You have nothing to add?”
The man pointed down the mountain in the direction of Muller’s machine, above which a rainstorm was spreading like an immeasurable vapor in the sky. The network of lightning sprouted above it, an electrical cage growing around the planet.
The man put a hand on his helmet, on which I noticed dull currents running through the threads, signs of artificial thought. I wondered if, like Manfred, he wasn’t a stranger creature than I comprehended.
“You know your ultimate destination, Enver Eleven. I am not revealing any further information, contrary to the will of the predicate, when I urge you to forsake our company and embrace your mission.”
“You won’t offer me a glass of water?”
“Not a drop of what we have at our disposal can be allowed to pass your lips. We are classical restrictionists. We do not believe in conveying any unneeded information from our own era into the past, no matter how grave the circumstances. Let alone matter. Thus, acting as a unified predicate, we have imposed an absolute barrier to any travelers from your time and succeeding times who attempt to enter our era.”
“You’ll let me die out there?”
“We believe in providence, the hand that guides the creation of the predicate through the centuries. At the same time, we believe very strongly in free will. Some would say it is a paradox. Others are of a different view. As a devout restrictionist, in any case, I have said too much already.”
I took a step back, swooning with anger. The people behind my interlocutor were as reasonable and impassive as he was.
The man continued after a minute: “We are here to watch and to bear testimony. You can be sure that whatever actions you take today, whatever words you may utter, whatever thoughts pass through your head will be faithfully reproduced for a thousand and more generations of sentience.”
I threw my hands in the air and turned my back on the arch restrictionist. At the time, I was irritated more than anything to discover that delusions of my grandeur had spread beyond the confines of the underground. Everybody on the Day of the Dead was in search of a prophet, as if they came so cheaply.
Nevertheless, as I scrambled down the mountain, avoiding a ravine on my left populated with icy boulders, I felt an increase of confidence. I knew I was going towards some moment of fate which attracted the admiration of skinners and restrictionists alike. And so I was determined to make a success of my assignment despite the fact that by the end of the day, men and women, boys and girls, in their thousands of millions, would be dead or dying shortly from radiation sickness, the incalculable harvest of the Day of the Dead.
Somewhere above me was a tide of subatomic particles whose supercharged crest had passed through the Kuiper Belt and was on its way to the center of the Solar System. Yet there was also peace and a different promise in the dim heavens—the promise of celestial stability. Venus and Mars were in their positions. The moon was visible, a sign perfectly clear and luminous as if I were examining it in a mirror. Its craters and moon mountains shone in the light of a pure white star.
This contentment lasted exactly as long as it took me to turn around and realize that I would have company on my journey. Following at a respectful distance, their hovercarts rolling alongside them down the slope, trying not to set off an avalanche, were the men and machines of the restrictionist expedition. The lenses of their recording equipment flashed in my eyes whenever I looked back. They moved when I moved, stopped moving when I stopped, as if we were playing a game of Simple Simon on the morning of the apocalypse.
I drank at a stream on the way down, cupping my hands in the rushing water which became sheets of glassy ice on the sides, slaking my thirst while the restrictionists, five hundred yards in the rear, used the time to calibrate their recording devices and set up a floating telescope which in a matter of seconds ascended high into the atmosphere.
I went on through a field littered with boulders, along the side of the stream, and the restrictionists pressed on behind me. There was nothing I could do to discourage them from dogging my steps. Nor was there anything which might be done to surprise them, given their perfect knowledge of what had been and what was likely to come, what was allowed and what was forbidden under their doctrine.
The mountain sloped into the trees. Under the canopy it was mysteriously quiet, the mushroom smells of the Earth and still water in every direction, and the trunks of the trees like black banners closing around me forward and back.
There was no direct path through the forest which was dappled in the morning light, a shifting fabric of light and shade in every direction. I tried to keep my bearings straight as I picked my way through the trees and over old trunks fallen in my path. The logs were covered in vines, the wood enlivened here and there by blankets of bright green algae. Small birds crossed swiftly from branch to branch, whistling to themselves. I thought of how, in centuries to come, they would have to be restocked and repopulated by generations of naturalists, heroes who would breed birds gene by gene in their artificial aviaries until they got every feather to match.
The boundary of the forest was not far, and marked one side of a region of intensive cultivation, tilled by fleets of automatic sowers and harvesters. I went through a cow gate, detaching the magnetic lock on one side, and found that I could see the sky again. Drones flew overhead, pollen streaming out of their bellies as they went over the fields. Others skimmed across the meadows, their tiny whirring sounds as pleasant
as the bees which hadn’t made it as far as the apocalypse. Canals for the machines.
Fields of windmills rotating on the ridge, and then a fleet of miniature robots no larger than cats. They were plastered with solar cells and marched through the long grass and the open ground, harvesting fruit, scything weeds, and, in one case, collecting flowers that they carefully returned in vases borne on their backs. Carts trundled along the lanes with their cargoes of hay and berries, flash-freezing them as they proceeded. I could hear the splash of the river in the distance.
When I came to a bridge, there was a queue of swans, their feathers gleaming, swimming in the opposite direction on the circling water, gleaming in the daylight. I watched them for a minute, unable to drag myself away, although the restrictionists had established themselves nervously in an adjoining field. I had been to the past, travelled in cities ruled by the specters of men, and yet the past had never ripened so perfectly until this very day.
For it was the world before the fall, the day of the fall, Day of the Dead, and it was more beautiful than I could have imagined on the eve of the harvest. Billions of years of development to make such a harvest. In a matter of hours, these fields and bordering woods would be pulverized and scorched, turned into a glowing pyre. The dust from these fields and forests would envelop the planet for decades, hiding the stars from view, turning the days into a long radioactive autumn.
I went over the bridge, refusing to see how closely the restrictionists were following, then through an automatic farm. A weathervane stood on top of an unused but spotless wooden church. The productive buildings were grouped around a dam, solar tiles glinting on their roofs.
In one of the buildings I saw a line of small machines on a blue tarpaulin, uneasily circling around one another for position. They were waiting to be repaired by a six-handed robot, almost nine feet tall. He had a powerful look, pistons showing in his chest.
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