Authors: Ian McDonald
But there was another question, another responsibility.
“Wait.” The acolyte-mother (could it possibly be true?) was dancing toward her next hypodermic supplication. “I want to ask another question. Where is the man who calls himself Kilimanjaro West?”
Now that was a dangerous dangerous question. She hoped for both their fates that he was as invisible, imaginary, as he dis-appeared to be.
“Sorry,” said the acolyte. “One question is all you get. Number twenty. Number twenty?”
Deevah the Prophetess rumbled. A murmur went through the crowd. The acolyte froze, outraged, alarmed.
“Answer,” groaned Deevah, “answer answer answer …” Her tongue was possessed still by the Computer Standard Voice. “I will answer: paradox! How can this be? You will find him underground in the company of angels. At Salmagundy Street
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station, you will find him underground in the company of angels …”
Deevah the Prophetess stopped dead.
Every muscle locked into spastic rigidity. Her thinking head began to turn, wrenching round, round, a full 360 degrees. From the mouth of her speaking head came the voice of a child.
“Again, again, again he has come, the messenger, the avatar, the silent, secret one. The sent one: again he has come. Again he has left his holy place under the hand of Yah. Again he has left the rings of the santrels and teraphim to take human flesh and form and walk among us. The avatar has returned, the incarnate one, and we know it not.
“And pity, oh, pity, ah, the pity! For in leaving his high estate he has put off the memory of all former things so that even as we know him not, he knows not himself. For he has forgotten, he who cannot forget, he who shines with the power of Yah, forgotten everything so that he may be human among humans.
“Why have you come? Why have you left your home among the Celestials, the High and Shining Ones, to come among men once again? What is your mission? Your purpose? Reveal yourself, reveal yourself to us, holy servant, make known your purposes so that we may not, through sin, willfullness or ignorance, frustrate your work as we have so many times before. What are you? Who are you? Why are you? Do not judge us, we beg you. Have compassion. Have compassion. Do not destroy. Do not destroy.”
Deevah the Prophetess reared up on her four legs, raised her eight arms, and the divine electricity that had blazed along her synapses failed. She fell over backward and lay helpless as a beetle on its back while Brothers of the Carnal Plenum hurried to right her before she smothered under her own flesh. And the rain rained down and Kansas Byrne stared like an atheist with stigmata.
D
OWN ALONG THE MIDNIGHT
river time wore the shape of an ormolu pocket watch: a rococo confection of foliage and vine fruits and porcelain miniatures and dryads and plump virgins. Only here, in the jeweled hands, the lapis-lazuli moon-phases, the movement and bezels and twitching hairspring, did time have any meaning. Everywhere else, the great dark of the tunnel abolished time and temporality. By baroque dryad-time three days had passed since the raft had breasted the rushing plumes of water to ride the rapids through the closing sluice gates into the more profound dark of the tunnel.
Three days and still Courtney Hall would not be convinced that the tunnel was not closing in on her; the ceiling drawing closer, the walls nearer, the water faster, and that far away, or perhaps not so far away, perhaps only the next tick or tock of watch or heart away, the water would rise to fill the entire brick tube. Panic would paralyze her: inevitable as death, she knew she was being carried toward the drowning place.
“Are you sure you can’t see the ceiling?” she would ask. Her companions had stopped answering that question when Courtney Hall had stopped believing their replies. But darkness was a great breeder of questions. Questions filled up great swathes of ormolu tick-tock time so that for a while Courtney Hall could lose herself in the answers and forget that the walls were closing in. And that the mutant blind albino alligators were waiting for her every time she went to the bow to relieve herself. One question she wished she had never asked. Angelo Brasil had smiled wickedly as he had replied.
There was another question she wished had never been asked: the King of Nebraska’s call for his artist. She had known what he would ask her. But she went anyway. There was no other place to go on the raft. She went. And he asked. And she told him. And he was very quiet for several tickings of his rococo watch. Then he said, “What were you afraid of?” And she replied, “You.” “But how can you be afraid of me?” asked the King of Nebraska. “Because you are a king,” said the artist. “Thank you,” said the King, and he smiled weakly. “Would it make any difference if I told you I had always suspected?” “Some,” said the artist. “I was afraid you would hate me if I told you.” “I would have hated you more if you had not,” said the King. “But I didn’t have to tell you, you said you had always suspected,” said the artist. “That is not the issue,” said the King. “This is not the way for a king to die, felled by something invisible, intangible, immaterial. I suppose we all pay the price of our folly somehow, somewhen. All I want is to make it to the edge. After that, I don’t care.” He looked at his artist. “But you have disappointed me,” he said.
She had disappointed herself. No secrets on a Huckleberry Finn raft: everyone knew she was a coward now.
But the question was no longer a weight pushing, pressing on her chest, and she found a new kind of courage to ask the other question. The question that was not any old question, but The Question. It was a good Question. And, she hoped, not too obvious, for it contained within it intriguing subquestions: “How did you know who we were/where we were?” “How long have you been following us?” “Why ditto?” “How/why do you possess these extraordinary abilities?” “Are you friends, or subtle enemies?” “How/why can he/we/I trust you?”
It was such a good Question that Angelo Brasil and Xian Man Ray withdrew from the pool of firelight to whisper in the stern while Trashcan’s infrared eyes blinked watchfully at Courtney Hall. Behind the lean-to that sheltered the King of Nebraska, racoon voices muttered racoon mutterings. Firelight touched their hands and biochips.
“So, we’ll tell you,” said Xian Man Ray, settling herself across the niggardly fire from Courtney Hall. “No point in hiding anything from you.” The man who called himself Angelo Brasil squatted on his hams and ran his fingers through his dreadlocks.
“Sure, and don’t we all have to trust each other, my dear?” he said. He smiled a feral smile. Courtney Hall found it hard to trust someone who showed so many teeth.
“Jonathon Ammonier has something we want,” said Xian Man Ray.
“A piece of information,” continued her pseudosibling. “He has the location of a device we call The Unit, for want of a better name. It’s in the memories of one of his stored personas, and we need it.”
“Dad needs it.”
“All right so. Dad needs it. And he’s sent us, his most trusted agents, to get it.”
“For our sister.”
“Callisto, Callisto Pandel. You see, my dear, she has this problem Dad can’t cure.”
“Pernicious Energetic Bioplasty.”
“His name for it. Quite good, don’t you think? He knows what the condition is, but alas, even with four centuries of bioscience at his fingertips, he can’t fix the kink in the gene that’s causing it.”
“Pernicious Energetic Bioplasty?” asked Courtney Hall.
“A continuous ebbing away of life energy,” said Xian Man Ray. “She’s got all these enhanced combat systems, you see; one-shot implant lasers, jiggered-up reflexes, full-spectrum scanning ocular systems, power-enhanced endo-skeleton; kind of stuff Trashie here’s got.”
“My dear sib’s pet was Dad’s prototype. Trashie was meant to be Callisto’s pet, but then there was this problem …”
“Well, it all has to run off something.”
“What my dear sib means, my dear, is that it all runs off her.”
“Pernicious Energetic Bioplasty.”
“Or, if you prefer, Kiss of the Soul Vampire!” Angelo Brasil leered over the flames melodramatically. Courtney Hall was more confused than scared.
“She is not!” snapped Xian Man Ray. “How can you say that!” Angelo Brasil rocked back on his heels and looked up at the ceiling, which might or might not be growing closer with every passing fluid meter.
“Well, it’s true, sib. There was a shift in her chromosome patterns, you see. She replenishes her own energies by drawing life energy from other living things. Specifically, people. Kiss of the Soul Vampire, see? There was a wee tad of trouble; to support her energy habit she used to take herself off on these expeditions upstairs: catch zillies at late-night
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halts, prollet workers down in the subsystems. Drained them dry. Dry as an old bone. Most unfortunate. You’ll not have heard anything about it because the Ministry of Pain doesn’t want the people to get spooked. But she must have sucked out, oh, at least twenty citizens. Now, if you want my opinion, I say what’s a zillie here, a prollet there, a yulp somewhere else—present company excepted, my dear. The Compassionate Society can spare them. Well, our dear dad thought better; he pulled her and popped her into a white sleep tank while he works out what to do. Soul vampires: tricky enough. Soul vampires with enhanced cyber combat systems you do not want to meet, my dear. Anyway—”
“Anyway”—Xian Man Ray scooped up the cue like a pelota ball—“he needs some counterentropic power source which he can implant in Callisto to keep her stable. And there’s only one suitable counterentropic power source we know of.”
“And that’s The Unit.”
“The Unit?” Courtney Hall’s confusions were multiplying with Malthusian vigor.
“It dates from the time of the Break.” Angelo Brasil continued without even a dropped syllable. “Back then when the old society was going to pot, the ancestors of those dear chappies back there”—he thumbed toward the dark-filled, flooding cavern—“threw everything they had into the construction of the ultimate weapon. Now, don’t ask me why they felt the need for an ultimate weapon, but they did. Threw so much into its R and D it would have bankrupted civilization if civilization hadn’t been past caring by that stage anyway. But what they got for their money was The Unit. To this day we don’t really know what it does, or how it does it, because it was never tested, but the general theory is that it’s—”
“An activator of entrophy. As bro said, no one ever saw it working, but according to Dad’s theories, it winds entropy forward—”
“And it winds entropy backward again.”
“It’s about this long”—Xian Man Ray’s fingers stood about half a meter apart—“looks like a cross between a ceramic flute and a short sword. To use it, you pull it apart. There’s something inside, exactly what we don’t know. But the general effect is—”
“It kills people. Like most weapons.”
“Ages them a thousand years in two seconds.”
“And then, unlike most weapons—”
“It brings them back to life again.”
“Runs entropy backward when the entropic accelerator is on reverse setting, when you push the thing together again.”
“So it’s a weapon that kills people, temporarily.”
“And we need it.”
“And His Majesty Jonathon Ammonier, Forty-fourth Elector of Yu, King of Nebraska, Victorialand, Racoons, what the hell, has the precise location buried in the persona of one of his predecessors.”
“The one who put the thing there in the first place.”
“So why can’t Angelo just lynk in and get it out?”
“Excellent question, Mizz Hall. Because the cunning bastards who devised the persona storage system wove it so tight that not even I can get into it. If I pry so much as one strand loose from the security web, the whole thing unravels and comes apart. Wipes itself clean, my dear. And His Majesty, Bless ’Im, with it. Don’t think I haven’t tried, lovie. No, if we want the location of The Unit, he either gives it to us or we wait until he dies and passes the biochip containing the information to someone who will.”
Courtney Hall’s immediate question answered itself so perfectly that it never left the machinations of the imagination.
“Precisely, my dear,” said Angelo Brasil. “To the End of the World, if that’s what it’ll take. We were afraid, my sib and I, that you were going to be something of a useless encumbrance to our little operation when we first encountered you with that pack of ludicrous animals back there. However, you may well turn out to be of some use after all.” He smiled his Gasoline Alley grin.
Courtney Hall felt the tunnel creeping down on her from above again.
“Ignore my bro,” said Xian Man Ray. “He likes to look pretty damn sharp and shiny, but underneath he’s more scared of you than you are of him. We’re glad to have your assistance now. So far, we could have made it alone, but from now on, and with the King in his condition, we need you. He doesn’t trust us. You’re the only one he trusts.”
“I disappointed him. Badly.”
“He knows you won’t disappoint him again, so he trusts you.”
“You’re using me.”
“Exactly.” Angelo Brasil’s teeth menaced her. He cleaned them every night with peeled twigs and they shone tiger-tiger bright. “It’s all a question of which side uses you, the angels or the dogs.”
“We’re on the side of the angels.”
“Everybody else …”
“Isn’t. You saw what it’s like back there. That’s par for the course DeepUnder. Every bit of social excrement, every possible dark deviation and incorrigible antisocial trait ends up down here. It’s a steam-release valve for the Compassionate Society, and the Compassionate Society knows it. That’s why they don’t police down here. Out of sight, out of mind. Flush it all away and you won’t smell it anymore. You can forget all about the Rising Sun of Social Compassion down here. Angels. Or dogs.”
The fire had collapsed into embers on the slate hearth. There being nothing more to be gainfully said and overmuch to be comprehended, Courtney Hall pulled her blankets around her and rolled over with her back to the dying fire. She dreamed dreadful dreams of bricks and drowning, and plummeting in a blazing hogshead over that kilometer-high waterfull of human turds.