Authors: Ian McDonald
“What do you mean?”
“I had intended to remove your tag, as I have done for all your tatterdemalion allies, but I find that some other has beaten me to it.”
“Jonathon Ammonier.”
Pudgy fingers smote brow.
“Of course! He would have had to have known of their existence and have acted on that knowledge. Certainly, the Ministry of Pain would never have let him abscond from the Salamander Throne in possession of so vital a commodity as the stored personas of his predecessors. He was not one half the fool I took him for.”
“Indeed he was not,” said Courtney Hall evenly. Dad continued his musing aloud.
“And even more certainly, he could not have permitted himself to associate with a tagged citizen whose every move could be, and probably was, tracked by the Love Police. Tell me, how did he do it?”
“White sleep tank, if it’s any help.”
“Effective, I suppose, but I think you would have found my method less uncomfortable. Subdermal polarity invertor …” He flicked a small needle-nosed conical device out of his fat, creased palm. “One two three and out it comes in one nice piece. No blood, no pain, no fuss. You must be a light sleeper; you were the only one I awoke on my nocturnal errands. Guilty conscience?”
“Should I?”
“You tell me. What has your experience of the DeepUnder taught you?”
“Beware of dogs.”
He clapped his hands in sour delight.
“Very good. Oh, most droll. But please, you do me a disservice. I may be a rat, but I am a moral rat, by a rat’s lights. What else?”
“Oh, this and that. Ships, shoes, sealing wax, cabbages, and kings. This world that we live within. This Compassionate Society we are taught to believe is so strong that it will outlive the sun, but which rats and artists know is really a rather fragile and delicate ornament; one tap in the right place will shatter it into a hundred million tiny brilliant pieces. A society which will outlive the sun has no need of things like tags. Or West One.”
“Travel does indeed broaden the mind, Mizz Hall. But tell me, in the view of your enlightenment, who do you think will be this neo-barbarian who would storm the gates of the City Imperishable? Your Raging Apostles? They certainly look dangerous enough, and they certainly like to believe that they are dangerous, but really, there is nothing new about them, my dear. Since time immemorial there have been artists who deliberately placed themselves outside society; self-proclaimed flambeaux bearers lighting the path to the Beautiful Land of free expression and Free Love and free beer and wonderful art; but we both know, don’t we, that that is a load of … well, what I pump through my conservatories. The push cannot come from them. If it comes from anywhere, Mizz Hall, it could come from you.”
“Oh, come on. I’m just another flambeau bearer lighting the purple path, not even a very good one. My one attempt to turn the world upside down was stepped on quickly enough by the Love Police. I’m just a yulp who isn’t bad at art.”
“Almost true. A yulp who isn’t bad at art with the stored personas of the forty-three Electors of Yu in her head. Which rightly belong to Elector the Forty-fifth, Roberto Calzino, the living equipoise between God, State, and Industry, who is sitting on the Salamander Throne playing with himself without the slightest idea of how to do what he’s meant to be doing. That’s quite a hefty push, madam.”
“Let me tell you this. I take no pleasure in giving that rabble the hospitality of my head after what they tried to do to me in sensdep. I can’t allow myself to forget they’re there, not even for a second, or they’ll stage a
coup de tête
and throw me out of my own body.”
Now she knew where Angelo Brasil had learned that certain smile.
“But how would it be if I were to tell you that Dad can send them all home again?”
Temptation grew into desire, hovered on the lip of action; her tongue was shaping a yes, then she looked at this white gnome stroking his beard, with plans and ambitions no one could name sewn to the back of his button-moon eyes, and she could see how the pyramid of distrust went all the way down to infinity.
“No thank you. If I can find a way to return them to their rightful owner, I will. Until then, they’ll stay here for safekeeping.”
“You don’t trust me to give them to the proper recipient?”
“I trust you about as far as I could spit a rat.”
“That far. You’re probably quite right, my dear.” He laughed, and the laugh was very much nastier than any of Angelo Brasil’s repertoire of nasty laughs because all his nasty laughs had only been imitations of his father’s. “Oh, well. If you won’t give them to me, I’ll have to make a deal with you. There is no conceivable way that you can return the soulchip to Roberto Calzino without my help. You’re going to walk up to the Presidium and say, ‘Here you are, I believe this is yours, please accept with the compliments of Courtney Hall, PainCriminal, escapee from West One?’ Come now, madam, you do need me. You need my son Angelo. Without his lynkbrain, how are you even going to begin? So, in return for our assistance, you will furnish me with the exact location of The Unit.”
“You old bastard.”
He smiled. “Aren’t I just a bitch?”
“You’ll never get it out. It’s defended. Look what happened last time. Your prime combat team picked up and slung into West One.”
“I will admit we were a little taken by surprise that time. Things will be different when my warriors of the wasteland make their second attempt. My dear, you don’t even have to go in person; I can quite understand your reluctance. All that is required is a data transfer from the personas to Angelo’s lynk. Simple. Painless. And in return, our full cooperation in returning the personas to their rightful owner. Well, that, as they say, is the deal. I’ll bid you a goodnight and leave you to sleep on it. Breakfast, tomorrow? Perhaps? No hurry. Take all the time you need. Callisto won’t mind another few days in white sleep.”
“Bastard,” Courtney Hall whispered at the closing door. It was quite some time before she was confident enough to order the room lights off.
And finally …
Courtney Hall and Kilimanjaro West. The cartoonist and the deity sharing postbreakfast figs around a deconsecrated altar in a side chapel, intimate and conversational behind masking reredos of climbing plants and flowering angel-trumpet vines. With a lot of incredulity.
“You’re what?”
A piece of fig seemed to have lodged in her throat. Either a fig or her heart.
“The Advocate.”
“I always thought that was, well, you know, made up, a kind of childhood superstition.”
“It’s not.”
“So you say.”
“Your scepticism is understandable.”
“You will excuse it. I don’t know … logically, I suppose it would be more sensible for me to act as if you are a god, but, well …”
“You can see me in all my glory on one of Dad’s full-scanning tomoscopes, if you want.”
“I don’t think I really want to. So, well, I believe that you are who you say you are; next, why have you told me?”
“Because together we may be the triggers which kick over the Compassionate Society.”
“You’re not the first one to have said that.”
“I know. Listen, believe me, there is nothing that I, that the Polytheon that I represent, want to see more than humanity’s taking charge of its own history again. You only have to look back into your memories to see that nothing significant has been achieved in four hundred and fifty years. And that is because the Polytheon were taught that history is a painful process, the anvil of evolution. Your command to us when you gave us control of yourselves was to find a solution to the problem of pain. That solution included the abolition of history. We had to put a stop to the exponential upcurve of technological achievement that was the primary root of the Break. ‘Technoshock’ was the word four and a half centuries ago. The rate of change was too fast. So, now there is no more change, there is no more technoshock. The Compassionate Society has not achieved in almost five hundred years what the pre-Break world achieved in five. Not even fifty. Five years. So, we have given you your stable society. That is what you like to think of it as, isn’t it? Stability. But we know different, we know that it is stagnation. And ultimately, decay. Without progress there is no growth, without growth there is no life, and the Compassionate Society is not growing. It is dying. It has become an agent of entropy. Dying, decaying, it is no longer on the side of evolution and the counter-entropic drive. Yu may stand for another half a millennium, another five millennia, another fifty, but in the end it will mean the extinction of the human race. As surely as if they all became the Cosmic Madonna’s angel-children playing under the sun.” He stopped. She was staring at his chest. “Excuse me, is there something interesting about my chest?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s glowing.”
He looked down at his chest, and as he saw it, a tiny patch about the size of a marquin card glowing silver through his clothing, the fire and the light blazed up and consumed him. Courtney Hall saw his head thud onto the pure, blessed marble, and the patch of glowing silver sent tendrils of light crackling across his body. Silver lightning crawled along his ribs, over his vertebrae, burned along his spine into his skull; silver light crept along his arms, into his hands, his fingers, as he lay immobilized slumped across the marble altar, and Courtney Hall cried, “What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?” as the silver tendrils leaked out of Kilimanjaro West to infect the sacred stone, to crawl across the table toward her. She jumped up from her chair, stepped back, but the silver lightning had run through the altar block into the floor to spread a filigree of luminescence through the floor tiles.
“Help me.” Kilimanjaro West was a burning shimmer of silver. His mouth was filled with a luminous glow. “Help me?”
“What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?” repeated Courtney Hall.
“It’s. Beginning.” Kilimanjaro West was a human nova, too bright to behold. “The. Judgment. I. Hadn’t. Expected. It. So. Soon. Help. Me.” He raised a hand of light. Aghast, powerless to do otherwise, Courtney Hall took it in her hand of flesh. She gave a little cry as the silver threads raced up her fingers, her arm, her shoulder, her upper torso … But there was no pain. Only a sense of communion with the colossal.
“I. Am. Infecting. This … place. With my … Inorganic systems. The Celestials have. Thrown it into. Massive overstimulation. And growth. Everyone … here … is a part of the judgment. It seems. I had not expected. This so soon. I’m not. Ready.”
Courtney Hall barely heard, less understood, caught up as she was in the sudden awareness that there was a second alternative reality superimposed upon the organic greens and Gothic grays of St. Damien’s: an improbable horizonless silver sea stretching from infinity to infinity with at its paradoxical center, a raised silver dais surrounded by pure Doric columns, reaching out of the sea, reaching to the third vertical axis infinity, beyond which (impossibly) the sky began, a sky of steel-colored clouds racing out of nowhere into nowhere. All somehow embedded within the chlorophyll and the granite.
Joshua Drumm came stumbling through the screen of vines, silver-veined hands pressed to his temples. His eyes were both ecstatic and horrified.
Words flew like luminous moths from Kilimanjaro West’s mouth.
“The Infinite Exalted Plane. Virtual domain of the Polytheon. Consensus hallucination. Induced by computers interfacing direct with nervous systems. Helps to close eyes until acclimitization of visual and audial centers is complete.”
Courtney Hall blinked away the superimposition of universe interior with universe exterior, closed her eyes and saw planes of many-colored light moving in the spaces between the columns, prismatic, restless, singing and belling like wind chimes. She smelled steel, tasted air, heard fire, saw time, opened her eyes, and was there. And they were with her, all the others, the Raging Apostles, a spectrum of emotion from fearful confusion to resolute doubt to sharply critical; Xian Man Ray surprised to find herself dressed in zebra-striped sleek silver, Angelo Brasil trying to shake a persistent itch out of his lynkbrain, Dad, irritable and a little frightened still in his lumpish isolation suit. And at the center of the arena, Kilimanjaro West, humanity discarded, deity assumed, a heroic figure in pure silver.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on here?” asked Joshua Drumm.
The planes of light shimmered and momentarily opaqued.
“I’ll tell you,” said Dad. “I’ll tell you precisely what is going on. What your friend Kilimanjaro West never thought to tell you and what really is quite inexcusable of him, is that he is not Kilimanjaro West Raging Apostle and Man of Mystery, he is Kilimanjaro West avatar of Yah and Advocate of Humanity, and what this is, this group hallucination, is the final judgment. And like it or not, we are all in it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Kilimanjaro West Advocate of Humanity avatar of Yah. “I truly am sorry. I had hoped I would not have to involve you in this, but it is out of my hands. The Overconsciousness has decided. Please try to forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” Joshua Drumm was incredulous. “If what you say is true—”
“Of course it’s true, how else do you explain this?” growled Angelo Brasil.
“—then this is no hardship, this is the highest of privileges, to participate in the trial of humanity itself, the ultimate courtroom drama!”
“No, he is right, you should forgive him,” said Dad. “Because you should be afraid. Very afraid. Because we are all witnesses for the defense. And if we win, it’s the end of the Compassionate Society. Now that may not mean very much to us, poor outcastes and outlaws, but think of what will happen to that other billion and a half up there if we bring about the end of their world. And if we lose, if the Polytheon decides that we are not safe to be trusted with ourselves, you think they are going to let us go blithely back to wherever we came from to tell all and sundry ‘Oh, I’ve just seen the most amazing thing, the trial of humanity before the Celestials, and guess what, they think we still aren’t grown up enough to babysit ourselves!’ Oh, no. Oh, no no no. If we lose, the Polytheon will annihilate us. Not just physical death; they will go through the Ministry of Pain’s files and erase every reference that we might ever have lived. And when they’ve done that, they will take all our works and achievements and take them away from us and give them to someone else, and they will search out every person who even has a memory of us and take those memories away so that we will not just not exist, we will never ever have existed. Isn’t that right? You, Kilimanjaro West, isn’t that right?”