Authors: Ian McDonald
T
HE GODDESS RECEIVED THEM
in a small gazebo atop a grassy hillock. The children, the angel-children who had come flocking along behind them, had all fallen back as they approached the knoll, returning to their endless games and toys and playthings; alone, Kilimanjaro West and Danty his guide entered the gazebo.
“Chocolate?” asked the Cosmic Madonna.
Kilimanjaro West was not certain what constituted proper etiquette for a goddess with six breasts and four arms (one holding a chocolate pot, two holding cups and saucers, the remaining one held palm up, thumb to fingertip in an attitude of contemplation) who was floating in lotus position above a lacquered afternoon-table. “Danty won’t have any, will you, Danty?” The guide said nothing, but Kilimanjaro West caught both the goddess’s bantering tone and the matt sheen of resentment in eyes that should have been incapable of expressing such an emotion. “Me, I really just take it out of politeness, I’m only a construct after all. And you, Citizen West?”
“If you please, madam.”
“Ooh. Madam. Nice manners, he has, Danty.” The arms performed ritual gestures. “But please, not so formal, cizzen. After all, we are relatives, in a sense.” The moving arms did something rather complex that Citizen Kilimanjaro West could not quite follow. In the absence of seats he contented himself with the velvet-smooth turf.
“So sorry,” apologized the Cosmic Madonna. “Simple thoughtlessness. Danty always stands and I have this freegee generator up my ass. Hope it’s not too damp; there was rain programmed just before we put up this gazebo.”
His preciously acquired worldorder was spinning into chaos, instant by instant.
“You’re quite forgiven for finding this all a little surreal,” apologized the avatar. “There is a logical explanation for everything, I assure you. This place may seem like a wet dream by Hieronymus Bosch; it’s really just a decommissioned agrarium I’ve had some work done on.”
“Hieronymus Bosch?”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting that you only know what you’ve seen. Why you always have to be incarnated an absolute blank I don’t know. It could all be done so much more simply in our purely spiritual states. Mind you, if you were in your spiritual state, none of this would be occurring because you wouldn’t be any use to me.”
“I’m confused.”
“Right. Words of one syllable. Or less. I am the Cosmic Madonna. “Well … no, that complicates things. You are within my body; from here to the surface, all the machinery, all the biotech, all that, is me, my physical form. I’ve put on a bit of weight in four and a half centuries. Recently, in conjunction with my subordinate saintly and siddhic systems, as well as some of the administrative programs of the Ministry of Pain, I have been working on a project. That’s it by the door. Danty, hand out, please.” The Cosmic Madonna smiled and poured half a pot of hot chocolate over his arm.
It might have been rainwater for all the naked boy responded. The scalded arm blistered up and not even a pupil twitched.
“I presume he told you on the way down about himself and his little chums out there, but I thought a small demonstration would be a lot more effective. Tell me, Danty, what do you feel?”
“I see rainbows, I see peacocks, I see translucent golden butterflies, I see the colors of God’s eyes. I hear the blood-song, I hear the dance of the atoms, I hear the footsteps of Yah, I hear your every word like shapes in crystal.”
“Total nervous synasthesia. Took a lot of genetic reprogramming to reconfigure the CNS chemoreceptor/transmitter systems so that pain stimuli are redirected through the limbic gate into the visual, tactile, audial, and olfactory sensors. That was just beginners. Take a look at his arm.”
Those blisters, that scalded, seeping tissue: healing even as he watched. Blisters turned to clean scabs turned to scar tissue turned to soft, new, pink skin.
“Like I say, what’s the use of not feeling pain if pain can still cripple you for life? Accidents will always be with us, even in as closely regulated an environment as this. And not just physical pain: emotional, psychological, spiritual pains, all banished away. Good-bye Oedipus, Hamlet, Portnoy, and Freud.
Saluté
painless, conscienceless, guiltless humanity. Of course, the surface world’s not ready for them yet. Things have been greatly simplified since the Break, but they’ll have to be simplified much much further and brought under much tighter control before humanity can run naked under the sun forever. In the short term, my saints and I hope to introduce small communities of the new humanity onto the surface in two or three years. Which is where you come in, brother.”
“How?”
“I want you to be their messiah.”
Is he behind you?
Look, over your shoulder; glance, quick, just a glance; is he there, is he following you through the alleys, darting, starting this way, that way, between Three Jump Span’s ominous brownstones, through the puddles of yellow sodium light pierced through and through again by gray shafts of rain, is he following
? Glance.
Yes.
Those are his Cuban heels clattering on the wooden planks of the covered humpback bridges. Still there, still following.
Lose him
.
Dump him, ditch him, fade him, jump him: in the fungus-forest of umbrellas rolling-bowling along Nevin Prospekt: is he still behind you?
Glance.
He is still behind you, the polite, helpful Marcus Garveyite, smiling politely, helpfully, apologizing as he elbows his way between the waltzing umbrellas.
LOSE HIM!
He is a Love Police agent. Lose him, or they will be waiting for you in the shadow of the great Keep of the Scorpios, the Great Glass Tower, the Capitol of the TAOS Consortium, out there among the abandoned vat farms and filtration tanks the pantycars will be cutting through the flaring tailgasses. Lose him, before you reach the entrance to Salmagundy Street
pneumatique …
if they are not there already.
The white panic kicked beneath Kansas Byrne’s breasts.
Lose him
! Amongst the buyers and bargain hunters and collectors, cognoscenti, and connoisseurs browsing among the waxpaper barrows of East Nevin Midnight Antique Market: between the glints of old holy medals and brass stopcocks and wrought-iron weather vanes, between the trunks of glass decanters and polished rosewood commodes and the certified Official antique famuluses: bemaze, bemuse, bewilder, and bedazzle the b’stard, you’re a Raging Apostle outlaw artist, you can lose him, Kansas Byrne, no worries, no hurry, no flurry, no scurry, it’s just another piece of art, another unique performance to an audience of one who, if the piece goes well, won’t even be there at curtain down, no applause please, no curtain call, no encores.
Is he still behind you
? Glance.
Fug.
Who is this guy? No Marcus Garveyite, but a Soulbrother for certain. The Love Police must be recruiting outside their own caste. No one but a Soulbrother would pursue with such faithfulness and determination. As if you are a verse of scripture or a tenet of dogma or the track of an icon’s tears.
Lose him. If the barrowboys and the anachronists hunting snippets of their little corner of personal history won’t absorb him, hit him with the manswarm. Drag him into the soulstream with you and see where the current casts you up.
The rain slashed down across the end of Nevin Prospekt, strict neon diagonals, hot and acid in the brilliant floodlights that lit up the pedicab rank. In their cycling shorts and thongs the athleto drivers gaggled and gassed and enjoyed the rain on their bodies.
Glance.
Apologizing her way around a Brace of bewimpled medievalists (some chance you had of finding anything
authentique
,
mesdames
), she ducked into an open pedicab bubble ahead of an outraged neo-colonial (three plastic carrier sacks’ worth of repro-Spode for his little bijou mansionette in Charlesburg) and shouted, “Salmagundy Street
pneumatique
, cizzen.”
“Salmagundy Street
pneumatique
. Sure.” Ring of bell. Shouts,
nona dolorosas
, as the driver screwed his vehicle out of the wedge of parked pedicabs. As he snapped down the
FOR HIRE
flag Kansas Byrne glanced in his rearview mirror.
Glance.
What is he doing? Flashing a card to the bemazed, bemused, bewildered, bedazzled bargain hunters. Stepping into a red-and-black pedicab decorated with stickers of Glory Bowl heros from the past ten years; pointing directions for the woman driver to follow, already pulling away from the rank …
“Driver.”
“Yo, cizzen?”
“I’m being followed. Fifty marqs in your cardreader to lose him.”
“Keep your fifty, lady. I’ve always wanted to hear someone say that.”
“I’m not a messiah,” said Kilimanjaro West.
“Oh, but you are,” said the Cosmic Madonna.
“I am not. I am … I am …”
“You are like me. I said it before, I was half-joking then, a bitter truth can be sweetened by a little drop of half-humor. You are an avatar, a construct, a biological incarnation of a computer intelligence. Only in your case, you are more fully incarnated than I; this flesh thing I grew just to act as my mouthpiece, an extension of my true body without any will or direction of its own. But you are different, you have emptied yourself fully into the biological. You have will and direction outside your true body, whatever or wherever that may be. Tell me, what is your earliest memory?”
“Cold.” He saw it again, the room, the rain tracing down the glass, mirroring the beads of condensation, tearing rips in the edge of the universe: the cold. “The room.”
“And before this room, the cold, anything?”
“No. Yes! Voices.”
“And what did the voices say?”
“That I would forget everything.”
“They were right.”
“Yes. No! But I am not an avatar, a construct, I think I know what I am really.”
“Then what are you?”
“A criminal. Like the ones I saw you doing those things with. Perhaps I was one of them, I don’t know, how could I know? I was psychologically reengineered—I believe that is the expression—and returned to society, a new creation, a new life. Perhaps something went wrong, perhaps I should have been given a new personality in place of the old, criminal personality, a new set of memories grafted onto me. Certainly, I am not a god. Ridiculous!”
The Cosmic Madonna pursed lewd, fruity lips. Danty stood, an icon of impassivity, but Kilimanjaro West could hear him listening.
“Perhaps you should stand back and take a good look at yourself,” suggested the goddess. “Perspective helps.” A sharp, blinking-plinking sound; the gazebo’s arched windows blanked into gray holographic display screens. “Kilimanjaro West by Kilimanjaro West! Like the name.” He was surrounded by himselves. Flayed, peeled, martyred, vivisected, anatomized, sectioned, cored, and pithed. “Anticipating difficulties of this kind, I had a biopsy scanner built into the gazebo. Good, isn’t it?” His skeleton floated toward him, waved a hand. “Twelve point three three percent pseudoorganotrope tungsten/iridium osteo-fibers woven throughout the skeletal structure. Takes a lot to break your bones, cizzen.” He looked into his own skull’s eyesockets. “Cranial dome seeded with ceramoplast superconductor crystals: your skull is one big neural transmitter. But for the real kicker, nervous system!”
A blue-pale figure advanced from the gallery of the dismembered; white and sick as shoots under a stone, a shoot-man, a root-man, a cartoon drawn from tangles of roots and fibers; his own nervous system.
“Magnification twenty.”
Dominated by his own right hand. He flexed flesh and blood and the giant simulacra responded.
“Magnification fifty. Add false color enhancement.” He watched the tiny ellipses of light flowing along the twisted strands of nerve fiber. “Magnification five hundred.” He stood within a web of individual neurons with cascades of sparks shedding across the net of matted axons. He flexed flesh and blood again and was immersed in a constellation of lights. Waves of polarization and depolarization broke across him in hot neon pinks and blues. He saw something more. Coiled around each cell like a serpent in Eden, something black and sharp-edged, shining with its own light.
A bioprocessor.
“Believe me,” said the Cosmic Madonna, returning her windows to green grass, false blue skies, and little children, “you are no criminal. That level of technology is years beyond current general competence of the Compassionate Society. Only a very few of the Celestials, and their human agents, have access to that kind of biotech. You are no PainCriminal, Kilimanjaro West. You are a god. You are the Advocate, come again.”
He did not want to hear what this four-armed, six-breasted thing would say about him, but he could not elude the vision of his own nerves wrapped up in sheathes of biotech.
Or were they his own nerves? Holographic simulations, bioprocessors, biological constructs; everything he had been shown might have been a sophisticated illusion to lead him to believe that he was other than human.
But how could he know? To doubt was as dubious as to be certain.
“You are, I must confess, a little bit of a mystery to me. Oh, I know what you are, I can access the records of all your previous incarnations in the city, and I know why you are: to assess if humanity is mature enough to mind its own affairs and leave us to finally be free of our responsibilities to explore the Multiverse; but as to who you are, and where you come from, that frankly baffles me. I can’t find you in any of the current program files of the Polytheon; certainly, you are not a Celestial, at least none of them I personally know, and you certainly aren’t one of those dirty, fawning little teraphim and siddhi. So I am left with the uncomfortable conclusion that you are an interruption into our affairs of a higher order system, perhaps even a daughter program of the Yah overconsciousness itself.”
Still Danty’s eyes were a study in obsidian.
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“Of course you don’t. Just thinking out loud. All you as the Advocate need is to be human. But I’ve been interested in you from the time you joined up with that winger girl in Little Norway. It was me you felt, that presence in her
butsudan
; Janja is one of my semiautonomous daughter programs. From the first moment I saw you, I thought that together we might be able to give everyone what they wanted and put an end to this great and glorious circus that calls itself the Compassionate Society. Humanity can be free to do what it likes to who it likes as long as it likes and without fear of pain physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and we can all fug off into the Multiverse to party down with our peers. Nice. Simple. Elegant. Everyone’s happy.” Four sets of fingers snapped. “If you will agree to lead the angel-children.”