Authors: Ian McDonald
A god who does not know what he is. Of course. God cannot walk among men as God or history ends. But they do not come sifting down from the Infinite Exalted Plane without purpose. His? To experience. To learn. What? The only thing a near-omniscient computer cannot know: what it’s like to be human.
And she had loved him. Almost. The thought appalled her.
Expectancy …
It crackled up from the induction track, over the hunched forms of the sleeping bums, eddied about the statue of the Cosmic Madonna in almost visible vortices, gathered, collected.
Something is about to happen
. She had not noticed the golden elevator at the end of the platform.
Go
.
Me?
Go
.
She did not want to. She could not, she could not step into that brass and glass coffin-cage. But there she was, pressed against the buttoned red velvet. Doors closed and the gondola jolted and started its descent into the dark. The spirit left her.
She was very afraid.
Childhood memories; trapped between levels in an air duct, five years old and inquisitive, all alone in the dark, immobile, unmissed until her fosterers found her teddy Talkee stuffed under a pillow, calling faintly for help, and they put a tellix through to Environmental Maintenance. Six months of rehabilitative therapy do not completely exorcise the demon of Claustrophobia. And that demon was taking her down into hell.
And quite unexpectedly: light! She emerged into the colossal Valhalla of the machines and saw, far below, a second elevator ascending as she was descending. Within, a dark speck, a figure. Identification was unnecessary. The elevators drew level—fragile glass baubles swaying in cubic kilometers of airspace—and halted. Kilimanjaro West waved and smiled and gestured for her to open the door. She mimed incomprehension of the controls and reminded herself,
He is a god
. The god removed a panel of velvet trim and signaled for her to mimic him exactly. Doors opened: conversation on the high wires. She remembered creative vandalism on a high girder: of course he had not been afraid of death. The flesh might vanish away but the spirit would return to the Infinite Exalted Plane.
“Jump.”
“What?”
“Jump. They counterweight each other. One goes up as the other comes down.”
“Jump?”
“You don’t want to go down there. Believe me. I’ve been.”
She became aware of the tiny corporate beetles, blue and gold, busying up and down and down and up the sheer planes of the big machines.
“I know who you are.”
“So do I.”
Shug
, she thought,
this is surreal
. “
I
came to find you, I … I …”
“That was very good of you. Thank you.”
“I … cared about you.”
“Thank you.” Still polite and reserved as ever, slightly apologetic to be what he was; the reluctant deity. Even as a reluctant deity, he still made her smile.
“Hold on, I’m coming over.”
Two-meter run to a three-meter jump. Big scream all the way to the cooling vents if you miss this one. Vertigo had never been her phobia. And anyway, this was a god with her. Pity no one else would be able to see this, it would make a good show. If she could start the cage swinging she could shorten the jump by a meter or so. She put her full weight behind it.
“Just you make sure you’re ready, Kilimanjaro West, or whatever the fug you call yourself. I’m coming this time.”
She jumped …
A
ND RETURNING FROM THE
foot of the Wall to the land of humans again, they crossed the Lake of Drowned Memories, and passing through the City of Idle Industry, they came to the Arch of Sacred Velocity that denoted the edge of the Steel Sky. In ages past there had been a highway here, of the kind the long-lost people had built as temples to the God of Automotive Freedom (the Turbo-Charged, the Fuel-Injected, the Four-Wheel-Driven, Alpha to Omega in six seconds). Centuries of urban construction had roofed over and ultimately buried this pre-Break superfreeway beneath the industrial plants of East Yu. At the pinnacle of his cult, the God of Automotive Freedom had claimed twenty thousand sacrifices each year—second only to the God of Cardiovascular Self-Abuse. Now he was forgotten, dead; this tunnel mouth was his only memorial. Guided by the visions and memories of the Electors, the big woman led her companions through the Arch of Sacred Velocity under the Steel Sky.
That night her dreams were filled with the roaring ghosts of automobiles and the whispers of forty-three lives remembering themselves to each other around the whispering gallery of her skull.
And they passed from the Highway of Automotive Freedom into the Cathedral of Verdant Memories. It seemed to them that they entered an indefinite green space filled with panes of subtle green glass, rotating slowly, throwing off fragmentary images as they turned so that the indefinite green space was occupied by thousands of momentary ghosts. Needles of green light moved slowly across this indefinite green space from pane to rotating pane; with each pane it touched, the beam would sparkle and glitter and wipe the pane clean and opaque of all its stored images. As the beam swung on to the next pane, the evanescent illusions bubbled back to the surface again. The Cathedral of Verdant Memories was a church of deceptions: the touch of the hand revealed the apparently solid to be wholly holographic, while the eyes reported as bottomless green void what the feet insisted was solid floor. Fragments and orts of memories; a cartwheel of digits was the Vocational Aptitude Scores of trog Falling Rain, age six, of the Passing Thunder clan of Montmorency; a double helix of data was the psychosexual compatibility ratings of two georges from East Chean; that sparkle of information siphoned up a probing laser beam, the psychofile of a retiring yulp woman who had lived all her life in the lower executive levels of Hallstadt Universal Power and Light. Faces. Places. Names. Numbers. Histories. Sprays of integers, number-blossoms, seed-crystals of bytes multiplying ferociously into looming towers of kilo/mega/giga bytes.
They seemed to be inside the memory of a computer. Within the mind of one of the Compassionate Society’s gods. Small wonder they walked reverently. Holy ground. The lasers flickered and wheeled about them.
And they came from the Cathedral of Verdant Memory unto the Pit of Bottomless Fire.
A geothermal energy shaft, the Pit of Bottomless Fire was bored down through crust and mantle to the blue-hot magma of the outer core. Force fields contained pressures and temperatures that would have melted rock like water and fused the shaft closed in one second and channeled the energies from the core into a pillar of plasma, a flame two hundred kilometers tall. Here the big woman hesitated. The knowledge behind her eyes, which had led them thus far, pointed one way only: along the ledge that cut a semicircle around the side of the Pit of Bottomless Fire, between the wall and force fields.
And they circled the Pit of Bottomless Fire and came unto the Desert of Polished Steel. And for three days they traveled the Desert of Polished Steel, which offered neither food nor water, nor any shelter, for it was not a place for humans, but a place for the small wheeled machines that went keening across it on their holy businesses. And at the end of three days they were exceeding parched and hungry and stiff sore and came with great gladness to the Pool of the Lamia, which guarded the brass gates of the Final Arsenal. As they bent to lap the water, the surface of the pool shivered and shuddered, as if submarine forces moved deep; shiver and shudder, and as humans and cat gulped down the steely tasting water, hiss and boil. Hiss, boil … and explode as three tremendous vermilion snakes burst from the water, massive serpentine bodies, solid as tree trunks, lifting up five, ten, twenty meters the torsos, arms, and heads of giant, elemental women.
And the big woman and the small woman and the tall, thin man, and their cat, were exceeding surprised.
That’s putting it mildly.
They soiled their vestments.
That’s putting it politely.
“Greetings, people. We are the Lamia of the Pool,” said the three snake sisters, rather needlessly, but in perfect unity. Trashcan the cat arched its back and growled deep in its throat. Five centimeters of steel claw flexed in and out. The lamia reared up to their full twenty-five meters, then coiled low and blew steam from trumpet-sized nostrils. The cat fled. “We are the Lamia of the Pool, and we are charged by the Polytheon and the Ministry of Pain that none may pass us and enter the Arsenal who cannot answer our riddle.”
“And what is your riddle?” asked Courtney Hall with more courage than she felt.
“This is,” said the Lamia.
THE RIDDLE OF THE LAMIA
What is it walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?
“Easy!” snapped Courtney Hall. She was growing very tired of being constantly surprised, especially when her newly inherited memories should have forewarned her of the riddling Lamia. “It’s …” She went scrambling down the scree-slope of her memories, sending pieces of other lifetimes crashing and tumbling before her in her panic to find the one stone with a word engraved on it.
She threw away a mountain of memories.
It wasn’t there.
“It’s not there,” she said.
“It’s what?” shrieked Angelo Brasil. “I said it, I said it, you should have let me have the chip, you don’t have the first idea how to use it.”
Courtney Hall toyed with the idea of punching Angelo Brasil in the mouth. She resisted and said, “Listen for once, will you? The reason I can’t find it is because it was never there. As far as I can tell, the Polytheon foresaw a time when they might need The Unit, if the Compassionate Society was threatened from some outside agency. So, they gave the Electors the knowledge of where to find it and how to use it. But not the complete answer. They kept the Lamia and the riddle to themselves, as a failsafe against The Unit’s being used without their mandate. If and when the situation arose, they would give that Elector the answer to the riddle. But not otherwise.”
“Well, isn’t that just jim-dandy,” said Angelo Brasil. He spat into the pool of the Lamia.
“Might as well start guessing then,” suggested Xian Man Ray.
So they did.
At first, all three of them, trotting out the punch lines to every riddle remembered from eclectic childhoods. Exhausting those, they turned to the classical conundrums of kings and fools, masters and pupils, hobbits and gollums, before progressing into the mandalic incoherencies of quantumicity, Freudian paradigmism, Zen koans, and philosophic solipsisms; then, as Xian Man Ray’s imagination grew numb with trotting out jumbled mantras of word associations and allusion, she sat down on the metal plain to call to her cat; just the two voices, blatting out answers, answers, answers, none of which were right, until at length even the Lamia themselves wearied of saying “No no no no no” in their immaculate trinity of voices and lay half-submerged in their pool, human forms propped up on the edge with their monstrous arms, like sunburned hedonists trying to catch a pool waiter’s eye; and Courtney Hall was thoroughly sick, tired, fed up, hacked off, jacked off, jerked off, pissed off with riddles, riddles, riddles (“No no no no no”) so that only Angelo Brasil’s needle-sharp arrogance remained, dredging up permutations of language from his Series 000 and offering them up to the snake-sisters three until Xian Man Ray, weary and depressed and thoroughly sick, tired, fed up, hacked off, etcetera, said, “Give it a rest Angelo, will you? Who cares? I mean, who the fug cares?”
“Pardon?” said the woman-headed serpents, the serpent-bodied women.
“I said, ‘Who the fug cares?’” said Xian Man Ray, standing up and declaring her disgust to the steel plain and the brass gates. “Who the fug cares?”
“Yes,” said the Lamia.
“What?” said the three travelers simultaneously.
“Yes!” spake the sisters of scarlet. “The answer to the riddle ‘What is it walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?’ is ‘Who the fug cares?’”
The Lamia slipped back into the receiving waters and the brass gates of the Final Arsenal (sealed four hundred and fifty years before by Elector Jennifer) slid open without so much as a plaint of binding, rusty metal, and a metal pont extended out across the Pool of the Lamia. Then the tall man, the small woman, and the big woman, with their cat, crossed into the Final Arsenal.
Because she could not fully access the memories of the Electors, Courtney Hall’s knowledge of the Final Arsenal was strictly factual. She was as emotionally unprepared as her colleagues for what lay beyond the brass gates.
What lay beyond those gates was hell.
Strict interpretation Dante.
On the cheap.
And well,
inverted
.
So that instead of the seven rings descending into the parabolic Pit, there were only two. Ascending. The outer ring, which covered two thirds of the radius of the massive chamber, was the Arsenal proper. The inner ring, a shallow conic hyperbola rising stalagmitically to meet its mirror image descending stalactitically from the ceiling, had been constructed to house just the one weapon.
Echoes of another mythology here.
The sloping surface of the inner cone had been sculpted into a labyrinth.
The Final Arsenal possessed the power to amaze even guests of Victorialand, explorers of the Underground Jungle, sailors of the Fen of the Dead, and conquerors of the Wall. As they descended the ramp and the walls of piled megatons of war machinery rose up on either side, the thin man and the big woman and the small woman with the cat felt that they walked on holy ground. They trod softly, as if the least profane footfall would set the cavern ringing and awaken the almost-forgotten god that hibernated here. They came through avenues lined with tanks and self-propelled guns piled ten, twenty high, incongruous as mating turtles; past mountains of shells and thickets of sloped rifles, between cliffs of heaped artillery pieces to the aviators’ graveyard where the old warbirds had flown to fold their wings and die. Xian Man Ray paused to wipe four and a half centuries of dust from a nose cone and gave the painted stars and bars one last shine of glory.