Chapter 27
For a few minutes they sat in silence, trying to imagine the sort of person capable of conceiving the Empress' plan, but failing.
"Fifty one minutes," Ruari gently prompted.
"She must be insane," said Gmoulaye. "If she hoped to make a human director of Muezzinland, she failed. Muezzinland is a thing of machines."
"The Empress sees little difference between human beings and machines," said Ruari. "Think of her relationship with I-C-U Tompieme, the most sophisticated android of the age. Think of the complete disrespect she offered us three. She sees technology merely as an aspect of human life. Genetics is a tool. Nothing is sacred."
Nshalla said, "If we make her here, she'll kill us. She's a monster."
"Nonetheless, you must make the attempt. Muezzinland
knows
the Empress, perhaps already thinks Mnada and the Empress are one. I don't know."
Then Mnada said, "She hoped to create a director complex enough for Muezzinland, a conscious director able to understand the foibles and desires of others. A mere transputer, even the most powerful in the world—even I-C-U Tompieme—would not do. That's why I exist. That's the only reason."
Nshalla heard the depth of bitterness in Mnada's voice; she said nothing, knowing that the wrong remark now could ruin everything.
Nobody spoke.
Mnada got on her knees and began to squeeze the earth, which in response moved like an amoeba, sending out pseudopodia, forming holes and bulges, acknowledging, Nshalla knew, miniscule changes in the aether caused by Mnada's emotional state. The earth here was like biomagnetic plastic.
Here she was not making transputers, though. This would be an act of sculpting, physical with gel, abstract with spirit.
"I've always wanted to sculpt," said Mnada.
After a brief wait to collect her thoughts, Mnada sat cross legged on the ground and laid her hands upon the mass she had called up. It responded by shivering then becoming quiet, and Mnada smiled as if she had tamed an animal.
Under Mnada's palms the gel convulsed, becoming tall and thin, ripples quivering out in all directions like waves through fat. By stroking and squeezing she thinned the lower end so that it was just fifteen centimetres or so across. Standing, she pulled the top end up, then squeezed a constriction, thus forming a rudimentary head. The resulting shape was her height, blobby about the middle but approximating human form. Tears began to trickle down Mnada's cheeks, and her hands and fingers shook as emotion welled up. Her breathing became quick and shallow, almost laboured. Nshalla stood by her sister and assisted with the sculpture.
Now they sculpted individual parts of the body with fascinated attention. Mnada started at the feet, lengthening them, creating toes with four indentations made by a thumbnail, then scoring a deep line half way up the figure, while Nshalla concentrated on the thighs and knees.
Tears fell off the sculpture like raindrops off a new leaf.
Mnada now made further indentations to the sides of the upper half, scoring them deep and strong with her thumbnail, pausing to draw breath, for the effort was draining her, then carrying on. With quick motions Nshalla pulled out two arms. Pressing the ends of these extrusions between her flattened palms she created hands, then by a further process of scoring and pulling four fingers and a thumb on each. A small ocean of electromagnetic waves, uncountable in number, entered and altered the creation, softening the earth to what looked like brown flesh. These wavefronts oscillated between Mnada and her mother.
Mnada stood up shakily and focussed her attention on the head. She pushed and manipulated the lower part to make a chin and a jaw, then pinched out a nose. Eyes she created by indentation, then ears by the same process. Using her nails to impress and carve, and her fingers to smooth and cajole, she completed the face. Mnada's tears increased to a flood, and she had to rest, crouched upon the floor.
Realising that her sister was unable to stand up unaided, Nshalla bent down and, hands under armpits, dragged her to her feet. Weeping, Mnada made adjustments to the face, until it became an analogue of her own. Nshalla understood that her participation here was essential, since part of Mnada's identity was forged from the relationship between them. That relationship, spread over time, was here symbolised by her physical support.
They had finished. Nshalla pulled Mnada way from the sculpture and said, "It wasn't so bad. Look, she's human. She's our size. Our weight. She can't hurt us."
Mnada made no reply.
A shout from Ruari alerted Nshalla to danger. "Behind you!"
Nshalla span around to see what initially appeared to be a crow speeding towards them. Gmoulaye first recognised the thing. "It is Buadza! Buadza is upon us."
The Gan deity of wind and storm. Yet here Buadza had the face of the Empress.
So this was the agency sensed by Ruari. He lay wailing on the ground, melting like butter, as the storm god approached and began to circle their camp, raining laughter upon them with all the power of a sea squall. The storm, then, was the metaphor of the Empress picked up by Mnada after she entered Muezzinland; unforgiving, violent, careless, immune to the ministrations of individuals, and heedless of the consequences of any of her actions. A storm in human form.
The Buadza-Empress entity descended and landed on the head of the sculpture, whereupon it also melted, pouring itself over the sculpture like candle wax, hardening, growing dark. The sculpture doubled in height. Tripled. The mouth of the new Empress was fanged, slavering, and her fingernails were claws. Her sweating skin shone with incoherent fury and her eyes were bloodshot. The stench of corruption fell down from her. And here, Nshalla recognised aspects of the shapeshifter.
The sisters shrank back from what they had created. Nshalla had thought their effort complete, but now everything she had hidden from herself was apparent. Her mother was truly a beast, a terror, impossible to control, impossible to kill. She towered above them both, and they were bereft of all their godly skills.
Nshalla had only the vaguest idea of what she actually faced. Some external virus hierarchy must have slipped in with Ruari, but whatever that was, the earthy stuff of which Muezzinland was made had been transformed into something brutal, and something brutal was surely going to kill her. She had no idea what to do.
Mnada took the lead. She challenged her mother in a wavering voice, craning her head back as if she was looking up at a tree. The Empress knelt down and put her face directly before Mnada's, to say, "You are going to fight
me?
"
"Yes," Mnada replied.
The Empress slashed at Mnada with her claws, and blood flew through the air, splattering on the ground. Mnada made a vain attempt to reach her mother's eyes, as if to scratch them out, but the Empress simply pushed her to the ground, then knelt over her and struck her in the belly. Mnada groaned and curled up. Then the Empress flicked her nails against one another—a motion like the whetting a knife—and slashed again, so that dark blood spilled out over Mnada's skin.
"You can torture me," Mnada gasped, "but you'll never overcome me. I'm a real person. I'm human."
"Oh, are you?"
Again the Empress slashed, and the effect was like the work of the leopard Muso Koroni, for Mnada was reduced to a bloody form writhing on the ground, half defiant, half conscious.
The Empress looked over at Nshalla. "Do you want some too?"
Desperation, not courage, made Nshalla run over and launch her puny body into the monster that knelt on the earth. "Get away from her!" she yelled. "Get away from my sister, she's not yours!"
"She
is,
" returned the Empress, taking Nshalla in both hands and standing up.
Nshalla was raised ten metres, then dropped. She felt her right arm break. Pain blurred her sensorium. Then the Empress knelt down and fell upon her with her claws, slashing at her exposed flesh, so that all Nshalla felt was a sea of pain. She tried to grab the Empress' neck so that she could bite and gouge at her weak points, her eyes, but it was hopeless.
The damage ceased. Nshalla lay exhausted and semi-conscious, with Mnada just nearby.
Gmoulaye made one attempt at attack, but the Empress simply threw her like a doll over the trees.
And the Empress towered over them as they lay prone.
"You are both fools. Nothing can overcome me in my own land. Did you think that mere physical strength would be enough? No. I possess a hundred times the power of you both, and I have hardly dipped into my reserves. There is nothing you can do. Now I will lead Mnada to the edge, and out, and Muezzinland will be safe. You have failed. Both of you."
Nshalla could think only of one thing. The bond with her sister. Her left hand crept and crawled over the blood soaked earth until it met Mnada's. She gripped tight. She remembered all the effort she had spent in the search for Mnada, the attempts to help and protect her sister, and somehow that gave her strength. She realised then what her last defence would be. The Empress was alone, isolated, adrift from humanity in her own private world. Nshalla and Mnada had each other. It had always been that way. Throughout childhood they had looked after one another, helped one another, loved one another, against the force of their mother's personality and all her devious plans. So it would be now.
The pain departed. Nshalla felt no strength; but the agony was gone. Warmth seemed to enter her body through her throbbing left hand.
It was the same for Mnada. They had spoken no word, but Nshalla knew this was the ultimate defence. The Empress' most appalling attack could not overcome twenty six years of sisterly bonds.
And this the Empress knew.
Screaming with rage she slashed her claws across them as they lay panting on the ground, and yet she missed. An invisible defence was protecting them. Enraged she tried to pick them up, but she could not grip them.
Nshalla knew she had won. Mnada was hers.
As if in reply the Empress shrank, until her teeth were gone, her claws were gone, and the filthy expression she wore returned to the simple, wounded fury of a small girl. She stood only a few metres above them.
Nshalla felt strong enough to stand up. Mnada followed. Hand in hand, they challenged their mother.
"Strength and power aren't the only forces," Nshalla said. "What we had as we grew up endures now, and will endure forever. It's something you can never have."
The Empress looked in panic at them both.
Nshalla saw defeat in her face. "You can never break us apart," she said.
An evil leer replaced the look of defeat. "Oh, can't I?" said the Empress.
Nshalla and Mnada both shook their heads.
The Empress grinned. "There is one thing that even your sickly love can't endure, and that is the truth. My last weapon is my greatest. I know what Mnada is."
"I don't care what Mnada is," said Nshalla. "She's my sister, and I love her."
"Love is just sentimental attachment," the Empress replied. "Truth is the most powerful data of all."
"We have truth," said Mnada. "We have each other."
The Empress looked at Nshalla and said, "Do you truly know what your sister is, Nshalla? No. But I do, and now I'm going to tell you."
Nshalla confidently said, "Tell me, then. I won't care."
"When your sister was born I replaced most of her forebrain with auxiliary biomagnetic lobes. Inside her head it's all a mass of genetic machinery. As she grew up in the artificial aether of her playroom, the lobes merged with her lower brain organs to create a new kind of consciousness, a simulation of the human mind. She's inhuman, Nshalla! She's one step on from I-C-U Tompieme in flesh and clothes. Your sister is a device, a
thing,
and not human at all."
Nshalla turned to stare at Mnada. Mnada looked back. Inside Nshalla some of the old revulsion stirred, and then suddenly she saw before her a plastic shell, an android with the face of the Empress. She jumped back, letting go of Mnada's hands.
Revulsion took her. She felt sick. She took more steps backward.
The Empress grew in stature, until, in moments, she was again a monster, all her powers and fury intact, with claws and teeth and the evil eye.
It was over. Nshalla could not fight what she now knew. Her childhood seemed a vile children's tale, something remote from her, nothing to do with her at all.
Mnada stood alone in Muezzinland waiting for the final attack. Seeing her there, Nshalla felt one last surge of incoherent pity, raw and terrible and full of the years of not knowing, before she buried her sympathies deep in her subconscious mind and stood dumb, like a prisoner condemned to death.
Mnada was alone. The Empress knelt down to take for the last time what was hers.
Mnada glanced across at Nshalla and said, "Goodbye, dear sister."
She screwed up her eyes, crouched down, and then her head exploded.
The landscape around Nshalla wrinkled, warped, then fell away from the real world in which it existed, collapsing in seconds to become a hard disk of plastic that span, then settled, like a coin tossed into the air landing on a pavement slab.
~
The Fes Hospital Technologique smelled of alcohol swabs and antiseptic chemicals. At the end of a hundred metre corridor Nshalla and Gmoulaye sat in silence, listening to the clatter of automatic trolleys, the hiss of nursing machines, to the burbling chatter of innumerable medical transputers. It was evening, and a crimson sky was visible through a single, high window. Patiently, they waited, their scarred and aching hands in their laps, half asleep, not knowing what to think or do.
The evening passed. Just before midnight a white coated woman stepped through a nearby door, then approached to speak with them.
"What's happening?" asked Nshalla.
"Your sister has suffered a stroke—an apoplectic fit. Do you know what that means?"
Nshalla and Gmoulaye both shook their heads.
"It means," the doctor continued, "that a bloodclot entered her brain and she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. We can't tell how serious it is at the moment because it's been difficult to analyse her brain. The auxiliary lobes there seem to be hypertrophied, and that's causing us problems. But don't worry. Although she's critical, she's stable."