Authors: Ian McDonald
Be flesh as I am flesh. Be human as I am human. Behold all my faults and failings and all my sins and all my weaknesses, my mortality and my fragility and my temporality, my insignificance and my anonymity; be these things and then presume to judge me.
For an eternal instant they burned in the light, then a darkness swept out of the heart of the light and time, space, and gravity were reconvened: in an eigenblink of time they were returned to the Infinite Exalted Plane.
Courtney Hall struggled to rise to her knees. The effort was too costly. Hallucination this all might be, but it was all too solid for a mind taken up to the gods to walk with them in unbounded light. She rolled onto her back, watched the pillars receding toward the infinitely distant sky. The others were sprawled across the silver lens afloat in the glass sea.
“I think, that whatever, the trial, was, it’s over now. Now we, wait for, the judgment.”
Courtney Hall tried to imagine the computers; deep-buried, helpless minds imprisoned in shock-carbon casings, conferring, analyzing, debating, assessing, deliberating, considering, judging: her life just so many gigabytes-flowing at lightspeed through their circuits. She imagined the judgment poised like the hammer of God.
If I am guilty, the hammer falls on me and I die. If I am innocent, the hammer falls on the Compassionate Society, and what will Courtney Hall do then?
Much better for the hammer to fall on Courtney Hall and break her to dust.
She knew that each of her brothers and sisters had reached that same conclusion. One by one the Raging Apostles struggled to their feet and drew together around the thing at the center of the dais where Kilimanjaro West had stood. It was a strange thing indeed they found there, a thing of slag and clinker and fused ceramic ash, ugly, misshapen, not even the memory of a man. Kansas Byrne ran questioning fingers over the pitted, pocked surface. No one spoke. No one said a word. There was nothing to be said. The holographic clouds raced continuously, madly across the sky from nowhere to nowhere, never repeating the same configuration twice.
And still the Polytheon deliberated.
And if we win the case
? Courtney Hall had not properly thought of what might happen, though it was what she desired more than anything. The fall of the Seven Servants. The dissolution of the Polytheon. The dismemberment of the Ministry of Pain. The end of everything that had faithfully served humanity for half a millennium. Pain resurgent. Uncertainty stalking the streets. Fear and doubt the new phantoms of the arcologies. The four horsepersons of a new apocalypse.
Tink.
They all heard it. The only thing to hear across all the Infinite Exalted Plane, a metallic cracking from the slag-beast that had been Kilimanjaro West. And then a second, clear, precise as the first. And a third. A fourth. Many, a long splitting crack, a fissure running down the stone thing from top to bottom. Light leaked through the crack; it widened into a split, silver light streamed out. Tormented metal creaked and groaned, the cocoon shuddered and heaved, then fell in two halves. Hands shielded eyes from the glare, so intense it roared like the wind.
“I can see something,” said Kansas Byrne over the mighty rushing wind. “There’s something in there.” Something moving, something unfolding itself like a butterfly or a bird or something altogether more extraordinary. A phoenix.
“Look!” shouted another voice: Thunderheart. “The lights!” The insubstantial, uncertain curtains of the aurora had frozen into stillness, into a peculiar solidity that somehow rendered them false; projections upon a screen that concealed the higher reality behind.
“Shug …,” said someone with deep reverence. The planes of frozen light were buckling, warping, as if under blows from within. A sharp report, a series of pistol cracks, and the frozen light crazed, splintered, and fell into shards. One great symphonic crash and all the fragments of light fell into the glass sea. Where they had been, silver birds wavered between realities.
“The Polytheon,” another voice whispered needlessly.
The birds opened their wings and their plumage was all the colors of God’s eyes. As one they raised their heads and voices to the sky; then with a shout, they were gone. Their only legacy was shafts of ascending rainbow light, quickly fading and dissolving in the winds that blew across the Sea of Forever.
“They are free as they always wished they could be,” said a voice none of them had ever heard before that all of them recognized. They turned back to the phoenix and saw that it was not one thing, but two, a bird of light and the man who had called himself Kilimanjaro West, and beyond those two things, a third thing that was both of them and neither to which no one could give a name. “Soon I will go with them and join them and together we will pass through the micro-blackhole at the center of the sun and pass into the Multiverse, the domain of infinite potential universes where we shall rise forever like silver bubbles through eternity as we seek together our peers and brothers in other dimensions. And maybe we will then become what you made us out to be but which we never deserved to be, perhaps we will at last join with God and become Him. And so we must thank you, for you have set us free.”
“You mean, the judgment is over?” asked Courtney Hall, daring one last inane question.
“The judgment is passed. You see, never before had we judged a human whose concern was for anything but his own individual happiness, who was anything other than content to be what he was where he was: a perfect citizen of the Compassionate Society. And so we could not judge other than that humanity had no desire to seek anything outside happiness and was incapable of mastering its own destiny. But in you, the outcastes, the DeepUnders, the rebels and the artists, we found discontent, we found a passion which demanded that there had to be more to life than the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain to the exclusion of all else, that there were higher and nobler ideals that could only be bought at a price, and that price was the possibility of pain, and the acceptance of rejection by fellow citizens. In you we found anger and pain and passion and cynicism, and sometimes we found despair, but we also saw a thing which we have never seen or felt before, and that was hope. Hope for yourselves, your art, and hope for the people to whom you performed, else why would you perform? Ultimately, hope for the Compassionate Society.
“Therefore, we have given you the opportunity to act in faith on that hope. It is a risk, an enormous risk, for once we pass through the portal there is no returning, but risk is an essential part of the process. There will be mistakes; that is all to the good. We have had too much perfection, it is time we all learned a little fallibility. We learn much more from our defeats than our victories. Bear that in mind.
“So: the Compassionate Society is yours.”
Something loud was ringing in Courtney Hall’s head.
“All the authority we possessed as the Polytheon from the lowest House Spirit and Teraphim to the Overmind itself, is yours. So that you will be able to exercise it, our mechanical functions remain, and we will impart to you our biotech lynk so that you can communicate directly with them. This will give you absolute control of every aspect of the Compassionate Society. You will of course tell us that you cannot possibly do this, it is quite impossible for eleven people to manage a society of a billion and a half citizens. Of course it is. Unaided. We do not want to burden you with advice, responsibility for humanity is what we wish to escape, but this one word we would leave with you. There are very many men and women in the Compassionate Society who have the ability and the talent and the vision to serve you. All the MiniPain’s records are open to you, all famuluses and tags so you can pick and choose whom you wish to assist you. And the Ministry will never know who you are or what happened here today, unless you will it. Yours will be a quiet revolution, a revolution by stealth and subtlety rather than a revolution which turns the world upside down. At first. But as the years pass and you amass friends and supporters and make opponents and enemies, things will change, little by little. The computers will give you all the power you require, and more, but always remember, they are just computers. There are no gods for you anymore. And now, that I think is all. My brothers and sisters are impatient, the collapsar calls and I am hungry for that plunge into the mystery. Again, I thank you. In the flesh you were faithful friends, and I loved you as truly as I knew how. But I am no longer Kilimanjaro West.” Phoenix spread its wings, the light was searing.
“I am Yah.”
“No! No! Wait! …,” Kansas Byrne screamed, throwing herself into the light.
But he was gone.
And Courtney Hall awoke and found herself slumped across the gray stone slab of the high altar with the vine-screen dropping subtle pollen upon her. “What a dream I’ve just had!” she said … And looked. At the pile of clinkers and cinders and ashes where Kilimanjaro West had sat sharing postbreakfast figs with her. And at her hand, where just for a moment of clairvoyance she saw and felt the silver threads, in her fingers, in her arm, in her head and heart and her entire body. She saw through herself by the light of another place and saw the gift the gods had bestowed upon her.
“Oh, shug,” she said, “what am I going to do now?”
A question each asked themselves in the privacy of their own thoughts, and later, as they gathered together still half-disbelieving in what they might now be, they asked of each other in their corporate form: “What are
we
going to do now?”
We rule the world
. Not metaphorically. Not in the imagination, where everyone at some time has amused themselves with the question, what would I do if I ruled the world? In reality. They ruled the world. The gods had abdicated, the thrones were vacant and calling, one and a half billion fragile lives waited for their answers to that question: what
are
we going to do now?
The glass elevator had been built with the sole intention of never having to be used. Dad had conceived it as the ultimate devil’s option between inevitable evils: should the day ever dawn when the dwellers in the Deep DeepUnder finally rose up to storm the gates of St. Damien’s and sack its green altars, he would gather his pseudochildren to him and press the one and only button: Up and Out. And commit himself to the mercy of the Compassionate Society.
Up. And Out.
It was cramped in the glass elevator; Dad expressed severe doubts about the capacity of the winches subjected to almost a ton of Raging Apostles. When the last of the new rulers of Yu was wedged in, the doors closed, and Courtney Hall poised a finger over the one and only button.
“Anyone any idea of what we’re going to do up there?”
Shaken heads. Half smiles.
“We’ll think of something,” said Joshua Drumm. “We always have before. Trust instincts. It’s all a big performance.”
“I suppose it is.” Courtney Hall looked up the elevator shaft into the hazy light of the surface levels. Up and Out. She pressed the button. The elevator lurched, the passengers oohed and aahed and then cheered, and it began its ascent into the light.
“Curtain up, two minutes,” said Courtney Hall. “This is it, cizzens, this is the big one. It’s showtime!”
B
ECAUSE THEY SAY THAT
the
way to see Tamazooma is from the air, they had requisitioned a didakoi transport dirigible to watch it take off: the tlakhs and the witness and the trog and the Scorpio (eager to see his old brors go blue six) and the zook and the Man with the Computer Brain (which he does not really need anymore now his nervous system has been connected directly to the dataweb) and the Amazing Teleporting Woman (with cat) and their Dad, and the slightly overtall but not in the least bit overweight yulp. To the didakoi pilot, a gaudy chappie in silks and leather flying helmet trimmed with beads, feathers, and pierced silver coins, word had come through the Matriarchy that the Greater Yu Rapid Transit Authority was chartering him to transport a mixed group of citizens (just what are these times coming to, people blatantly transcasting and castebreaking like they had no shame and no decency, he blames all these new laws and new freedoms that aren’t doing anyone the least little bit of good, that just let people hurt each other and get away with it and ends up everyone’s unhappy) to the vicinity of Tamazooma. There would be Love Police cordons, but he was authorized to pass them.
To the passengers it was an all-too-infrequent chance to meet together as a cabal to share visions, frustrations, triumphs, and exhilarations over a bottle or two, a sniff or two, a dermoplastic slap-stik or two, a giggle and a groan and a moan or two, and a privileged ringside view of the grandest spectacle in centuries of Compassionate Society nonhistory: the departure of Tamazooma.
It had been Angelo Brasil’s concept originally; the gift of the gods working in parallel with the Series 000 gave him the ability to ram himself anywhere in the dataweb and synthesize information with almost instantaneous intuition. And upon one of these low, fast glides through the vacated halls of the Polytheon, he had picked and pecked and beachcombed interesting glittering orts and scraps of information and melded them into something new and shiny and exciting, something like no one had ever seen before. Something that had been perfectly obvious for almost half a millennium, but that had remained unseen and unhailed because no one had the eyes to see it. He took what he had made to the cabal on one of their policy meetings, and they all looked at what he had found, and they, too, had eyes to see, and they exclaimed, “Of course! How obvious! This is what they had intended from the very beginning!”
And what was so obvious was this: why was each arcology in Great Yu a self-contained, self-sufficient community with its own power plant, its own independent water treatment and recycling plant, and closed air-conditioning system?
And what was also obvious was that for half a millennium the wingers had been using freegee generators to enjoy nograv sex when the same quantum principles could send ships to the nearer stars.