Authors: Ian McDonald
On the Jamboree line eastbound platform he found a municipal shrine. It was a sign of how deeply he had been absorbed into the life of the city that he no longer found these episodic erections of wood and plastic and concrete remarkable, even noteworthy. This particular shrine was just another imaginative mélange of shells and canopies and halos and minor deities scrambling for attention, dedicated in this instance to a Cosmic Madonna suckling twins at a pair of outsize alabaster breasts.
Recalling other twins. Other breasts.
Kansas Byrne. The Raging Apostles. BeeJee &ersenn in her glass menagerie. Even the room with the cold and the universe inside it. Why was it that every experience was taken away from him? Why were things lost as soon as they were found?
He did not want it to be that way. It did not have to be that way. Recalling his glimpses of citizens invoking their deities, he bowed to the shrine, clapped his hands—three sharp, precise explosions—and asked, “Where is Kansas Byrne?”
The Cosmic Madonna smiled banally while her entropic twins, Order and Chaos, fought for the teat.
“Where is she? I want to find her.”
Whispers of wind scampering down the platform stirred prayer tickets into a syllable:
Why
?
“Because I … because she … because.”
A blast of sound. A wave of hot electric air. The marble chamber boomed like a gong as the Templeoaks—St. Mauritzburg Limited pounded through. Disoriented, Kilimanjaro West was taken up in a vision.
Not the vision he had asked for.
A nameless vision, a remembering.
An itch in the bones. An echo in the skull:
light
. Endless, boundless light, a domain of shifting planes and volumes of many-colored light. Here each color is a consciousness, a character, a memory, a
voice
, and as the beams of many-colored light meld and mingle with each other to form new shades, new voices, new songs, new characteristics and consciousnesses are born to breed new memories: he is a creature of light, ever moving, ever changing: no, more than that, he is the uncreated, he
is
light.
He remembers: darkness. Unseeing, a void of beholding, not blindness, rather an absence of anything to see. But there is sensation, of stone for bone and steel for sinews, of power blazing along channels of ancient energy fueled by fires deep within, the ceaseless surge of a billion corpuscles through the arteryways of his body, and the sound, the roar of the blood in his ears. Somewhere a heart is beating, somewhere lungs fill and empty carrying the breath of life to the billion bustling corpuscles, and from the gut depths come ruminant belchings and bubblings of healthy digestion. He is huge, he contains multitudes, billiontudes, it is as if (
yes,
now he understands, though the mechanics of that understanding is incomprehensible to him) he is the city; its streets, buildings, manufactories, arcologies, parks, playgrounds, power plants, agrariums, are his physical body. Now he understands the darkness, the blindness. The city is all, where might there be a beyond from which to observe everything?
Remembering.
And the laughter of children. … Loud. Close.
Unambiguous. A physical presence. He turned … Hands. A forest of hands. Soft, open, reaching, more and more and more and more
hands
, pouring out of the walls, the floors, the ceiling, cracks in the world spewing hands, hands with eyes between the outspread fingers, all around him, enfolding him in a web of interlaced fingers, touching, brushing hands, face, hair, and with each touch the hands drew something out of him, some power, and they grew stronger on that power and he grew weaker so that he could not resist them, and the web of fingers propelled him along the deserted platform toward the mouth, a brass mouth, no (reason and rhyme and all his painfully learned associations slipping away like fish into the sea), an elevator, an ornate brass-and-crystal cage padded with buttoned satins, and he offered no resistance as the doors, teeth, mouth closed on him, and with a whine of cables and counterweights, the brass elevator descended. … It passed through unsuspected depths of the
pneumatique municipal
: laagers of powered-down trains, giant compressors, track maintenance robots black-and-gold like busy bees, electrical generators; then down into an even more unsuspected landscape, a place of wheels and industry, of massive, grinding machines, of titanic domes wrapped in steel pipes illuminated by forks of artificial lightning ten kilometers long that danced between spherical electrodes like minor moons. Nothing remotely human-scaled: brass valves the size of houses vented geysers of steam, hoppers that could easily have held a tenement block each moved steadily along a conveyor line toward some unimaginable end-point. The brass elevator inched across a twenty-level rendition of the Universal Power and Light sun-gold asterisk never intended to be viewed with human eyes. This was a place for machines, a Valhalla of the gods of Industry. The hundred-meter sunburst was the secret name the machines spoke to themselves alone.
Turning away from the oppressive weight of industry, the man and his captors found space in the crowded gondola for mutual examination. Angels. Children. The laughter of … angel-children. Boys. Girls. Boy-girls, too young for gender differences to be important. Naked. Their hands hung by their sides, empty. Their eyes …
Eyes like stones. Painless, joyless, inhuman stones. Demon-eyes in angel-faces. One boy, taller, older, with greater muscular definition and a dark wedge of pubic hair, spoke.
“What is this gesture you are making with your hand?”
He had not even noticed he was doing it. “It is called the
nona dolorosa
, the hurt-me-not. It is a sign we make when we are afraid we will be hurt.”
“We are never afraid,” said the boy. “We never hurt.” No doubt was permitted. Certainty was written in his eyes. Kilimanjaro West found himself remembering the milky breasts of the Cosmic Madonna. He looked away from the stone-eyes through the glass floor of the gondola and saw another eye, a tiny black needle-eye incredibly far below. The time it took for that needle-eye to expand into a dark shaft was an indication of the dimensions of this machine temple. Dark clenched around the elevator like a fist. Just as Kilimanjaro West was quite certain the darkness was bottomless and the darkness of his own past, the brass gondola emerged into a subterraneanscape as alien to the Valhalla of the gods as that had been to the rain-swept streets of Yu.
The elevator sank into a gullet of translucent, throbbing flesh, a crumb lodged in the throat of God. Glimpsed through the vaguely translucent red membrane, arterial ducts pulsed with fluids, power crackled along neural networks half-mechanical, half-living. At the limit of vision, giant alveoli veined with capillaries and glowing with their own corrupt light swelled and contracted. And all things resounded to the beat of a great, unseen heart.
The leader of the angel-children again broke silence.
“Danty,” he said. “You may call me Danty. It is not my name, it is not who I am. It is what I am to you. I have no name. We have no use for names, but I am told you must call me Danty. This is the body of our God.” Murmurs. Shifts of body posture. “Our God, our mother, the Cosmic Madonna. It was she gave you to us. Though you have no famulus, as the rebels do not, her eyes are everywhere. She has been waiting for you. She is patient, but she cannot wait forever.”
“Why does she want me?”
“To test if you are the one.”
“Which one?”
“The one ordained to lead us into our inheritance.” The elevator throbbed to the heartbeat of a God.
“What is your inheritance?”
“The world. The future. We are the future of humanity.”
Through the floor Kilimanjaro West could see a sphincter dilating into a sphere of cold blue light.
“I do not understand.”
“We cannot feel pain. Physical, emotional, psychological. Heat cannot burn us, cold cannot freeze us. No physical thing can hurt us, no wound of the heart can cause us anguish. Colors. All we feel are colors. And the sound of God’s singing. And joy. Inexpressible joy. We are without fear or shame or guilt or conscience. We are the ultimate achievement of human evolution, the perfect citizens of the perfect, painless world to come.”
The elevator passed into the sphere of blue: a globe of biological support plasm, its precise boundaries difficult because of the light that seemed to come from everywhere. Floating in the gel, in anabiotic suspension, thousand upon thousands of human bodies. Tangles of tubes, coils of wire coiled from the bodies of the men and women, and Kilimanjaro West saw that some twitched and spasmed in their artificial sleep, and some seemed to cry out silently.
“SoulCriminals,” said Danty the guide. “In return for their rehabilitation into the Compassionate Society, some particular offenders are selected to donate eggs or sperm to our ovariums. There is no pain. Of course. Neither is there any choice. They sleep, and when they have paid their biological debt to society, they are returned once again to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Pain, and on awakening in their counseling units they will recall only that their sleep was filled with pleasing erotic dreams.
“How long do you keep them here?”
“The most productive has served us for fifty-three years. They do not grow old as we that are left here grow old. But even for her, it will only be as if a night’s sleep has passed.”
The descent continued.
Out of the sea of sex-dreamers into the womb of the Cosmic Madonna: a tall cylinder of hexagons within hexagons, a hexagonal chamber lined with thousands of individual ovariums. Cocooned within, fetuses watched the elevator descend with their little frog-eyes.
“Our brothers and sisters,” pronounced Danty. “The donated eggs and sperm are genetically screened and then biotechnologically engineered to produce individuals with neural systems incapable of registering pain. It is a marvel of genetic neuro-engineering: pathways are redesigned, new connections made so that we recognize that damage is done without the physical sensation of
pain
. Only light and sound and joy.”
Without shame. Without pride.
From the womb of the new society into the bowels of the old. Gehenna. The place of eternal dissolution. Bubbled up in synthflesh capsules, citizens of the Compassionate Society, all classes, all castes. All conscious. Some, presumably the most recently incarcerated, beat, tore, threw themselves at the transparent wall of their cells. The resilient synthetic flesh absorbed their blows as utterly as the biobase support gel within stifled their voices. The more established inmates (how long? hours? days? months?
years
?
)
floated resigned to their captivity, hovering on the borderlands between consciousness and dream-time. Pale tendrils extruded from dark irises in the membrane walls caressed their naked skulls. Descending, ever descending, the elevator entered the demesne of the long-term inmates. Frail, pale, vaguely luminous mummies, their eyes stared into the darkness and their skulls were open for the questing tendrils to touch and feel and heal their brains.
Who were these damned? What was their crime? What was their punishment?
“PainCriminals.” Danty the eternal guide. “Incorrigibles. Grave offenders against the Compassionate Society. But do not imagine that they are being punished, please. The Compassionate Society is, above all else, humane.”
Floating bodies. Naked brains. Row upon row upon row. Rank upon rank upon rank.
“Then what?”
“Rehabilitated. An experiment, in cooperation with the Ministry of Pain. Our mother is impatient. She cannot wait forever for her children to inherit the earth. Though our numbers grow daily, we are still a mere handful in the face of the millions who inhabit Yu. And we are young, only a handful of us have reached breeding age, as I have. Thus the experiments: to ascertain whether it is possible to adapt normal citizens to be as we are: incapable of feeling, of conceiving, pain.”
So many. Rank upon rank upon rank. Row upon row upon row.
“Some respond more readily than others: it takes only a few days for their neural pathways to be reconfigured and the new behavior patterns enforced. Others, those with stronger wills, less socially compliant egos, it takes time. Weeks. It some recalcitrant cases, it may take years.” A shrug.
This is the future and I still do not fully understand the past it is to replace
.
“So much better than the old system and the stigmata of a rehab famulus clasped to the neck monitoring and adjusting neural chemical levels.”
So, they had a concept of a
better
. And therefore, a
worse
. So there may be no guilt and no conscience, but there was discrimination. A sense of
quality
. And how was this worse
worse
? Were the lights less dazzlesome brilliant? Did the music of the gods play out of tune? He began to suspect that pain was not abolished. Merely brilliantly disguised. He began to suspect that pain could not be abolished. By man or god. Or machine.
The elevator came out of the hadean red into pure light. Dazzled, disoriented, Kilimanjaro West was descending like a psalm upon a land of blue skies and green meadows singing with flowers.
In this land were trees and fountains. In this land were grave, stately birds three times the height of a man. In this land were friendly, bumbling, gleeful little animals. In this land were giant apples half as tall again as the trees that grew them, giant peaches, giant pears, giant strawberries and pomegranates. In this land were butterflies the size of small clouds. In this land were shaggy unicorns. And in this land, everywhere, were children, naked children, angel-children, walking, running, playing, laughing, sleeping in the tall grass, eating the giant apples, peaches, pears, strawberries, pomegranates, riding the shaggy unicorns.
A heartbeat. Distant. Distinct. Systole, diastole, systole, diastole. This was the center of the circle. Kilimanjaro West was being lowered into the inner ring, the navel of the body of the machine that called itself the Cosmic Madonna.
The elevator approached the meadows singing with flowers. The elevator touched the tips of the grass, the petals of the wildflowers. The elevator touched the ground. The elevator stopped.