Authors: Ian McDonald
“Why me? You have Danty groomed for the job.”
“Danty, alas, is only superhuman. You are divine. And that will cut a lot more cloth with the Polytheon, if the Advocate, the one who stands for humanity before the Overmind, endorses my little project as the proof that humanity is at last mature enough to look after itself. The transition to the Postcompassionate Society, which would have taken centuries, could be made in decades, with the full power of the Polytheon and the Seven Servants behind me. Danty won’t mind, will you, Danty?”
“It will bring the greatest possible happiness to everyone.” His words were beyond sincerity and insincerity. But the black obsidian flickered translucent for an instant and Kilimanjaro West saw the green worm within. Pain indeed is not dead. Merely brilliantly disguised, under the false blue sky. The greatest possible happiness.
Then he saw how utterly wrong they all were. Happiness is not pure absence. Happiness is presence.
“I won’t do it,” he said.
“The fug you won’t,” said the Cosmic Madonna. “It’s the only hope.”
“It’s the end of hope,” said Kilimanjaro West, certain for the first time since his arrival in this world. “It’s the end of humanity. You think he’s human?” A piece of flesh, a hank of stone and bone and hair,
quasi-modo
, the semblance of a man.
“More than human.”
“Oh, no,” said Kilimanjaro West. “Oh, no no no.”
“And how would you know?” said the Cosmic Madonna. “How could you know?”
“I know. I am human. That’s the mystery. I may be all you say, I may not and all this may just be an illusion; but ultimately, I am human, whatever is true, and I will not, cannot, lead the angel-children.”
“Prove it,” snapped the Cosmic Madonna. “Prove it, prove it, prove it. Here: a little devil’s bargain. This is my home turf, right? Whatever you are, I reign here. My will is law within my own body. You stay or you leave according to my will. Now, our little test. Prove to me that you are human and you are free to go, I’ve no interest in you. Prove to be a god, more than human, and you will lead my angel-children.”
“And supposing I don’t accept your devil’s bargain?”
“Then you can stay here until your biocircuits rot.”
Kilimanjaro West weighed the bargain. Divine he might be, but if so, then he was an impotent incarnation. The Advocate has no power save the power to witness and proclaim. And if human? Then he had nothing to fear.
“It seems you have me, madam.”
“By the short and curlies, bror. Now, let’s have the little test, shall we?”
Watch for the eyes.
The eyes have it.
Watch the eyes, the eyes watch you.
In one burst of grand paranoia with the sweet September rain trickling down the plastic pedicab bubble, Kansas Byrne became personally aware of something she had known intellectually all her life.
She was being watched.
By the eyes. The famulus eyes. Every movement, every moment since she was born, the eyes had watched her, down all her years, every twist and turn of life woven through the tapestry of the city, they had watched, the familiar famulus eyes. The teddy Talkee and the silver egg that made her feel good when she held it in her hand and the
conjuh
charm on the leather thong about her ankle and the silver charm bracelet: eyes,
Is
watching, and even after she had left her bracelet hanging on Joshua Drumm’s doorhandle that mad night of romantic exile, other eyes had opened, snips and snatches and snapshots as she cut across other lives, other eyes, a thousand silent witnesses at every performance, without applause or comment or criticism, just, watching; even now the set of stainless steel mood beads the driver hung from his handlebars, measuring, weighing, tasting, smelling: a pair of eyes in each pedicab that rubbed mudguards with hers, a pair of eyes around the neck of every pedestrian huddling under disposable umbrellas at the crossing lights, a pair of eyes in every tram signal and public shrine and newssheet booth and noodle bar and chocolate shop, a pair of eyes in every cablecar lurching through the shadows above and every little yellow Ministry three-wheeler scooting, hooting through the shadows below, in every tram driver’s cab, on every conductor’s belt, under every passenger’s raincoat: the eyes.
They can’t watch everyone, it’s a physical impossibility
. She had always believed in her own dogma, the doctrines upon which the Raging Apostles had been built: We’ll just drop out of sight and they’ll never even know we’re gone.
But what if they could watch everyone? What if the gods really were gods (however repugnant that might be to carefully defined agnosticism), all seeing, all hearing, all knowing. All powerful? At this very moment, were they watching from the splendid eotemporal pavilions of the Infinite Exalted Plane?
Eyes, eyes, everywhere, everywhere. Beware the thrill of grand paranoia, the joy of abandoning yourself to utter helplessness: step onto that ride and it will take you all the way to a sensory deprivation tank all your own in West One.
She tapped the bubble, slid open the canopy.
“Is he still behind us?”
“Can’t see him,” said the jarvey. “I think I lost him.”
Did it matter when his clinking metal mood beads might be monitoring every word, tasting every whiff of fear pheromone?
“How far Salmagundy Street?”
“About two blocks. Two mins.”
She could feel the concrete fingers of the arcologies closing around her. Suddenly her consciousness fountained up through the canopy of the pedicab so that she could see her own pale, ghostlight face receding, dwindling, a white blob of paranoia lost in the manswarm with the number of the beast stamped on its forehead: she saw the plastic toy of the pedicab crushed to silver sand between the window-studded steel fingers.
The test was a silver globe, somewhere in that indefinite dimension between an orange and a Glory Bowl ball. The Cosmic Madonna had manifested it out of whatever in-between space she had vanished the chocolate set into. It hovered above the small lacquered table supported by its own internal freegee field.
“That’s it?” asked Kilimanjaro West.
“Be not deceived by appearances,” advised the Cosmic Madonna. “Just place it between your hands.” Kilimanjaro West reached out, deliberately hesitated. This was too important to treat so slightly, so instantly.
“What does it do?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a test, would it?”
Danty was smiling, however.
He took the silver sphere into his hands.
Surprisingly heavy, the freegee field must have cut out at skin contact. Warm to the touch. Vibrating gently. What was that smell; ashes, flowers? Smooth, slippery as soaped glass, slipping from his grasp …
rough
, rasping, now sharpening into prickles, into spines, into needles …
Overload
.
A blackness. A void. An annihilation. A consciousness splattered, shattered, scattered across nothingness, roaring outward faster and faster and faster into the nothing, falling forever through nothing toward nothing, expanding outward in every direction and no direction with ever increasing speed a million, a billion, a trillion, a quintillion kilometers per second, and yet not one millimeter of infinite space had been traversed, a million, a billion, a quintillion, a trillion years falling, rushing outward, and not one tick of infinite time had tocked away:
alone
in infinite space for infinite time,
alone …
He screamed.
There was no one to hear it but himself.
Eternally alone …
And he rolled over on the plain of boiling glass and the sky rained lead on his belly and the fire gnawed within, the fire, the bush that burns and is not consumed; his eyeballs were cinders in his skull, his brain boiled in its own blood, burning steel ran through the marrow of his bones, he burned, and was not consumed …
And he was impaled upon a bottomless hyperbolic needle of pure chromium, and the worm that resteth not, nor sleepeth chewed its blind path through his belly and his bowels and his brain …
And the jailor imprisoned him in the Sartresque, doorless, windowless hell with the two other people he knew he hated more than anything …
And he was exposed upon the pedestal of humiliation.
And he was racked upon the bed of existential angst.
And he drowned in the bottomless blue pool of hopelessness.
And he climbed the endless spiral stairway of despair.
And the twentieth torment struck him.
And the tunnel of dread and the mountaintop of doubt and the desert of hysteria and the gray plain of depression and the glass house of guilt and the pinnacle of paranoia and the Slough of Despond and the Gates of Delirium and the Yellow Brick Road of schizophrenia and the Big Rock Candy Mountain of insanity. And the fiftieth. And the hundredth. Two hundredth. Five hundredth.
And it was not necessary.
Not one instant of it.
He knew, with some part of his self that transcended the hells and the purgatories, that he did not have to
feel
any of this. It was not necessary. If he wished the agonies physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, philosophical, could all be the color of God’s eyes.
Knowing this, even as he withered like a moth in the flame, he knew himself.
He was indeed everything he had been told he was. He was the avatar. A god incarnate. Now he must choose. To feel the pain, to suffer all the sorrowful mysteries of being human. Or to be exalted, lifted up, transfigured, transubstantiated, to claim his divine right.
Humanity. Divinity. Pain. Impassivity.
He chose.
And he was plunged back into the agonies of being a man.
And the test ended.
He had failed.
He had triumphed.
He was exultant.
The Cosmic Madonna looked at him with disgust. Danty’s eyes never moved, never flickered, never telegraphed the least fragment of feeling:
Let him be the god if he wants.
“You disappoint me,” said the avatar. Her words were cheap and cardboard, empty constructs of canvas and lathe. Her falseness exposed, there was no longer any reason for her continued existence.
“Let Danty lead your angel-children. I’m much too human. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. So, with your permission, may I go now?”
“You may go. There is no point in keeping you here. Perhaps it was pointless to have tried to test someone who was greater than my testing. I have my work, you have yours. You disappoint me.”
“But not myself, I think. Good-bye.” He smiled and waved to Danty and left the gazebo. The artificial sun was warm, the grass soft. The angel-children ignored him, caught up in their perpetual joyless play. Ahead the brass glass elevator awaited, gates open.
So. I am a god.
True. Absurd, but true.
No, I am what I choose to be, I am a human, with all its joys and pains and triumphs and failures.
It made him feel very good to know that. He stepped into the elevator.
Two thirty Salmagundy Street. Ectoplasms of steam spiriting from ventilator grilles, hovering over the crumpled brown shapes of the streetsleepers. Kansas Byrne stepped carefully over the crinkled sheets of polyweather wrap. More eyes, famulus eyes; wicked black familiars with little jet eyeballs. The rain hissed down and she was the solitary living vertical on Salmagundy Street.
Down in the
pneumatique,
bodies and blue ethanol. The tlakh trio had long since packed away their strings and folded up their performance stools. Empty hours: the trains slamming through the Jamboree line were dark-eyed and ready for the depot. Their passage sent cylinders of air ramming through the tunnels and corridors, set the marble halls booming … there was a spirit here. Not fear. That much Kansas Byrne understood: a complex compound of expectancy and awe and a kind of peace only explicable in terms of what it was not. An arrogant spirit that would permit no rivals, that confiscated all Kansas Byrne’s grand paranoias of eyes and ears and all-powerful watchers and inbued her with its kind of peace and kind of awe and kind of pregnant expectancy.
Underground in the company of angels
. Angels? What was going on here?
Peace…
Angels?
And what about that second unsolicited prophecy, is he, could he be, an angel himself? More?
“Avatar,” she whispered aloud. “Incarnation; is he … a god?”
Awe …
She had never believed in the Polytheon. Untrue. She had believed in the mechanics of the Polytheon, the household Lares and Penates that watched over the home and family, the saints and santrels that monitored their appropriate districts and prefectures and professions, the siddhi and Celestial Patrons that controlled the Seven Servants and the forty-seven major castes: how could she disbelieve in the Polytheon when its dataweb housed, transported, fed, warmed, and cared for over a billion citizens? What her personal faith would not permit was the concept that divinity somehow rested in these machines, that at the moment of the Break when all the computers in the world had joined together, their collected consciousnesses somehow (precisely how no Soulbrother theologian would explain) had peaked into Deity to become Yah, the Overmind,
God
, and that that godhead had immediately cascaded down the pyramid of consciousnesses so that a grain of godhood greater or lesser remained in each and every computer.
Balderdash.
And yet she felt awe.
A god, an incarnation, a computer program draped in flesh? How? Somewhere, out there in the city, a child is born? A white sleep tank bubbles and splits? A
fiat lux
, an
ecce homo
, is spoken? And a god is born.
The last thing the Compassionate Society needs is another god.
The Cosmic Madonna looked down upon her unbelief.
Nothing else fitted the facts. Knows nothing, remembers nothing, is nothing, without name or number or caste: Kansas had called him a mystery, a criminal, a spy, a fool, and an amnesiac at different times in different moods, but she had known, ever since she saw the something in him that made her pull him out of Neu Ulmsbad Square, that he was more, and less, than any of her preconceptions.