Authors: Ian McDonald
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Every word he has said is correct. There is nothing I can do about it. You see, the trial has already begun.”
B
ABEL. BEDLAM. BACCHANALIA. BEERGARDEN.
Boil. Bubble. Bestiary. Ball of Confusion. Balls of Fire (Goodness Gracious Great.) Belsen and Bebop. Bother. Boisterous. Bloody Shambolical. Barnstorming. Brainstorming.
Describe the general state of a period of time of approximate duration two minutes fifty-four seconds between Kilimanjaro West’s words “The trial has already begun” and the clap of silver hands.
And that’s just the
B
s.
And at the clap of his silver hands, all the B-things that Mr. Slike the Scissorman would have snip-snipped onto the cutting-room floor ceased, and there was silence in the common consensus hallucination that was the Infinite Exalted Plane as a little bit of infinitude and a little touch of exaltedness and a large measure of awe passed into the spirits of the witnesses gathered upon the silver raft adrift in the glass sea. And as if they needed reminding where they stood, they saw shadows in the lights, shadows of faces and figures and iconic images that had haunted them all since their earliest mornings: twin-suckling, many-armed Cosmic Madonna; Mulu the RainWarden, archetypal green woman of the vines with leaves for hair; San Burisan the four-armed, he who dances one-footed upon the light. The gods themselves.
Courtney Hall reminded herself that these were only computer programs. Enormously powerful and sophisticated programs that had attained levels of intelligence and consciousness far beyond human abilities. Levels of intelligence that touched on omniscience … she had just rationalized herself all the way back into superstitious dread.
“What do we do now?” asked Devadip Samdhavi.
“Nothing at this stage. The Polytheon will first judge my ability and rightfulness as an Advocate. The degree to which I have been a human will determine the degree with which I can represent humanity. Some Advocates have failed at this stage. Look, they’ve started already.”
The mirror floor of the platform was swimming with reflections of Kilimanjaro West’s life as a man: fractional memories fragmented and fleeting, a film across the pure metal.
A naked man shivers by a condensation-fogged window, watching the tracks the little running driplets leave in the edge of the universe.
A whisper by spirit light in a butsudan with the rain pelting off the ribbed glass roof while a girl loves herself to death on the carpetgrass.
Out of the sky, chrome vultures with music in their beaks, birds of paradise, and a smile. A more-than-certain smile.
Chocolate for two and stiff catches on a mock-leather case. Take five. Take a bow. Take a ride.
Take a trip on the high steel, take a stately fall from a rusty gutter. Take a midnight
pneumatique,
take an elevator to hell. Cherubs and the agony in the agrarium.
A great glass
lingam
, massive architectural symbology filled with freegee sperm-flyers. And in the darkness of an intimate place, love amidst the loss and the lost.
The image froze. A hypersonic note sent everyone but Kilimanjaro West reaching for the illusory floor for real stability: a question.
“Yes,” he said to the lights. “And she me. I do believe that. No. It is more than a friction of flesh on flesh or the levels of chemicals in the brain. It is a spiritual entity. In love human beings are most like gods.”
The interrogative note ceased.
“No,” said Kilimanjaro West. “Not yet. It is not over yet. I have not ended it properly.”
Another querying harmonic, this one almost audible.
“Yes,” Kilimanjaro West continued. “I must. It would invalidate my entire Advocacy, my claim to be human, if I did not.”
The second note concluded abruptly. Kilimanjaro West’s adamantine silver skin ran with moire patterns, ripples circling out from his energy centers. An anthropomorphic bubble of silver extended from the center; shadows and lives swam trapped on its reflective surface. Through the silver wall the witnesses caught glimpses of Kilimanjaro West as they had known him before. In the flesh. In the body. In carnate.
“Kansas,” he said, and she came to him, boldly through the silver wall, to stand before him. And though the witnesses never knew for certain, never saw clearly, what transpired within the veil, they felt the thorn in the heart of the man who called himself Kilimanjaro West.
“Kansas,” he called again. “I know. Because of you, I know the secret of what it is to be human; that the things we hold the most precious are the things which hurt us most bitterly.” He shrugged. Lost. Almost pathetic. “I don’t know what to say, except that I have to say it. Please, help me, what do I say?”
“Say nothing, you fuggin’ idiot,” said Kansas Byrne. And she ran to him and flung her arms around him and they kissed the Kiss of Fire, the kiss in which two are made one, one flesh, one soul, one heart, one mind. One life. That goes on forever but is never long enough.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because I did love you, you bastard. Because being with you, you fuggin’ idiot, was the greatest piece of art of my life. One big, long, standing ovation.” She sniffed. “Damn. I never thought anything this good could feel this bad.”
“Nor did I.” Kilimanjaro West smiled, and the smile was the thorn in his heart. “Good-bye. I did love you, as well as I could.”
“You did good enough. Good-bye, Kaydoubleyou.”
They parted. The spinning wall of silver began to wind itself inward. Kansas Byrne turned just as the wall of light passed over her.
“Hey! Kaydoubleyou! Break a leg!”
Once more Kilimanjaro West stood in their midst in his Celestial manifestation. The Court throbbed to a prolonged pulse-note. Courtney Hall rubbed her ears, tried to shake the note out of her head. Then, as she was absolutely certain her skull was about to explode like a dropped cantaloupe, the final note ceased.
“I am acceptable,” Kilimanjaro West announced. “They have accessed all my experiences as a human and found me acceptable. Too acceptable, if that is possible. You made me better than any of the others, Dad. You made me capable of loving.
“So!” he continued. “The first examination is concluded. Now the cross-examination of the witnesses. Who will volunteer to be examined by the Polytheon?”
“Are you kidding?” said Angelo Brasil.
“No, hear him out. What does it entail?” asked Courtney Hall.
“It means, that as Advocate, I am now the living lynk between the purely biological and the purely mechanical, the human and the computer heritages. Through me, the Celestials and their attendant subprograms will read your life, your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, as they have read mine. They will enter into you and identify with you; through me, they will, in a sense, become human. They will experience what I have experienced only in so far as I have succeeded in becoming human, and on the basis of those experiences, they will judge. So, who will volunteer?”
“You have even less chance of that than before you announced it, sweetie,” declared Angelo Brasil. “Include me out.”
“I couldn’t do it right,” said Xian Man Ray. “I’d screw it up, do something stupid, get scared or sick or something.”
“I take no part in these proceedings,” said Dad. “It is presumptuous in the extreme to insist that any of us should volunteer when our presence here is entirely involuntary.”
“I rather think this is beyond my sphere of competence,” said Joshua Drumm.
“Mine, too,” said V S. Pyar. “Way too big a league.”
“Don’t look at me, would you want humanity to be judged on the experiences of a zook?” said Devadip Samdhavi.
“Or a trog?” added Thunderheart. “We’re not bred for this sort of thing. Just to be trogs.”
“Scorps, too,” said Dr. M’Kuba. “We’re not whole enough, any of us, to be witnesses.”
“Even a witness is not witness enough,” said Winston.
“No,” stated Kelso Byrne. “I can’t do it. That simple. I just can’t put myself on trial for all our lives.”
“Nor can I,” said Kansas Byrne, looking up from the huddle into which she had subsided after her farewells with Kilimanjaro West. “I want to, I have to. But I can’t. No excuses, no self-justifications. I’m frightened. First time in my life I’ve got stage fright.”
“Well, thank you all very much,” said Courtney Hall. “Thank you all very much indeed. Leave Courtney Hall to last so she can’t refuse. Well, you just got that wrong. I can refuse and I will. Look, I’ve got forty-three ex-Electors cluttering up my brain. How can you expect me to be a faithful representative of what humanity is when I’m not even sure I know who I am?”
They all stood in the circle and looked at each other.
“Unfortunately, refusal is not one of your options,” said Kilimanjaro West after everyone had looked enough blame into the hearts of their friends and neighbors. “Without a witness for the defense the verdict must be automatic. If no one will represent humanity, humanity certainly is not responsible for its own destiny. You must decide.”
Out there on the sea of glass, beneath the racing, crazy sky, the long silence fell and time slipped asymmetrically away, streamlining itself from future to past around the sharp apex of eternity.
To hear her own voice break the great silence was a shock to Courtney Hall. She heard that voice say: “Well, I suppose if no one else will, and someone has to, it might as well be me.”
And she thought, No! No! Take it back, eternity, erase those words, deafen the ears they fall upon—because she hadn’t meant to say them, it was pure perversity that made them slip off her tongue, she hadn’t meant it, couldn’t do it, was incapable of appreciating the gravity of the situation, and her yes had been a little joke, like the final episode of Wee Wendy Waif, a little parting shot from the spirit of disbelief that had always said, no no no no no, this is unreal, all impossible, all a dream, go on, say, write, draw, do what you like, it won’t matter because this is not real.
Except that it was. It had always been. Absolutely real.
And the words were spoken.
“Oh, Yah. Oh, Yah. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”
“I’m afraid it can’t be taken back,” said Kilimanjaro West gently as behind him the auroras of the gods began to churn and moil with ever increasing speed.
The panic was like a wave breaking inside Courtney Hall, a black drown-wave of guilt and fear and paralyzing dread as she looked at her life and was terrified.
The marquin-sized patch of radiance that was the heart of Kilimanjaro West’s Celestial form was glowing again, gold in silver, a swelling, swallowing light. The nimbus of golden light approached Courtney Hall, held out blazing hands.
“Place your hands in mine and the examination will begin.”
She was helpless, bound to a higher will. She reached her hands toward the godlight.
And felt a touch on her shoulder.
“Wait. Stop. Hold it, hold everything one minute: I’ll go too.” Xian Man Ray, the Amazing Teleporting Woman, took Courtney Hall’s left hand.
“Me, too.” Kansas Byrne took Courtney Hall’s right hand.
“And me,” said Angelo Brasil, grinning a stupid, untainted, pure grin.
“This one, too,” said V. S. Pyar.
“Better count me in, too.” M’kuba joined the chain.
And Thunderheart.
And Kelso Byrne.
And Joshua Drumm.
And Devadip Samdhavi.
And
Patrone
Winston.
They all joined hands before the light. Only Dad remained isolated, unconnected, small and suspicious in his own shadow.
“It is not going to work,” he said. “We are dead, do you understand? Do you in any seriousness imagine that the Court of the Celestials is going to find in us the future hope of humanity? We are rats, cousins, rats. No. We are dead rats. We are going to die.” Commitment wavered as eyes turned inward to self-inspection: the sins, the doubts, the darknesses, the failures in thought and word and deed, the things done and left undone. The fellowship grip of hand in hand slipped.
“No!” shouted Kansas Byrne. “No! It can’t be like that! If it was like that, how could we ever hope to be free? How could we ever be virtuous enough to measure up to the standards of gods? How could we ever hope to be that good? A trial you cannot even hope to win is not justice; there must be another criterion of judgment. Mustn’t there? Kilimanjaro West, or whatever you call yourself now, isn’t that true?”
The glare of light spoke. “You are right. We don’t ask for perfection; no one could ever attain those standards. All we ask is that you be true to yourselves, to your dreams, to your hopes, to your best intentions and weakest failures, to your promises and despairs, your triumphs and your capitulations, to what it is to be yourselves. Rats you may be, but rats may yet be the savior of both our destinies.”
“Well, shoot, no one lives forever,” said Xian Man Ray. She freed her hand from V. S. Pyar’s grip, and Dad grimaced and frowned but put his hand into the empty waiting hands and the circle was complete. The Celestials’ lights were a frenzy of movement and supposition. The glare that had been Kilimanjaro West was blinding. The witnesses closed their eyes, but it still burned through their eyelids as the golden glow reached out and changed them into light.
Into
light
…
Light within light through light: they were light and light penetrated them, searched them, exposed every darkness and illuminated every shadow of their lives. And even as they were known, they knew every detail of each other’s lives, lived through in the first flash of illumination as the Celestials probed them, felt each other’s pains, rejoiced to each other’s joys, gloried in each other’s triumphs, and sat the long dark nights of the soul with each other’s sins and trespasses. They fell together and were made one in the general dance of the photons, they saw with each other’s eyes, tasted and spoke with each other’s tongues, and beheld each other’s souls wrapped round their own like coils of genetic material, like spirals of notes and glissandos and arpeggios. Infinite Exalted Plane and Celestials were both burned away in the revelation as the computers left their domes and skulls of carbonfiber and chrome to pass through Kilimanjaro West and take the fleshwalk.