Vellum (15 page)

And giving a message to her servant. If I'm not out in three days, go get help.

If you're going to Hell, it's a good idea to have a backup plan.

The Answerers

The Comfort Inn, Marion.

Like a message in a bottle, a last entry in a lost explorer's journal or a monologue to camera recorded in a basement as the bombs fall outside, the cipher lady will be Phreedom's last note to the real world, and her fingers weave it with care, dancing in her simware glove even as she watches the sprite take shape in virtual vision. VR spirit of female shape, an off-the-shelf AI straight out of the grainy stores of discount data, uploaded with her voice profile, layered-over with a surface scan of her physique, mapped from the naked image in the mirror—naked but for the glove linked to the datastick that's linked, in turn, to her lenses. In the glove her fingers dance, and in the lenses, a mirage projected in the view in front of her, the vision dances. Wireframe and skintone, it rotates, articulates, built in layers outward and inward, multifacets of false flesh in full-scale replica of herself. Lady Cypher, she calls it, this electronic golem, virtual homunculus. Any sufficiently advanced form of technology, she thinks wryly, is indistinguishable from magic. It's an old saying that she heard somewhere.

She bypasses the built-in character engine. This isn't just some lame, cheap answerer, all smiles and simplicity and
Phreedom isn't available right now, can I take a message?
Fuck that shit. It won't have real autonomy, but the stolen PR module that she splices in is top grade, the sort of thing the CEO of a big bad corporation has to field those awkward questions about poisoned rivers and disease clusters. There's a lot you can do with AI these days if you've got the money…or if you've spent ten years watching your hacker jacker crackerjack mother mutilating business webworlds for the long-lost cause. Phreedom could probably build a sprite that, if it ran for president, would lose because it seemed too human.

But this doesn't have to do anything so complex. All it has to do is weep for her because she can't do that for herself.

Phreedom links through to the webworld for the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City. She checks that her access hack still works for the temple sim and readies the upload wizard. A tour menu scrolls across her lenses: the Pyramid of Cheops; Teotihuacan; the Parthenon; the Ziggurat of Enlil. VR tourism's a big industry these days; it's a lot cheaper than the real thing and you can visit places that haven't existed for millennia.

The sprite is re-rendering, its face contorting now in maniac gibberish, squeaking and babbling like a cretin child in fast-forward, as it runs through the linguistic algorithms in generation after generation of phonemes gradually evolving into sounds of speech, morphemes that build into words, words that patch together into grammar as the Chomsky node kicks in. It's still senseless even as it ripples from glossolalia into language, speaking in random couplings in various tongues, cobbled nonsenses that serve only as practice.
De lieuw zit in de bus. Où est le loup-garou?
But to get to artificial intelligence, as they say, you have to go through artificial idiocy.

“Qué pasa?”
the sprite says. “I am here.
Perdón; no entiendo.”

Man, this stuff installs fast, Phreedom thinks. She dips back into the sim, flicking the install interface into silent mode with a click of her fingers, calling up the design library add-on that she stripped off some bootleg CAD software—the sort of archive of geometry and mathematical modeling tools you'd plug into your answerer if you were an architect's firm whose PA needed to communicate tech-specs to clients and contractors with both accuracy and speed. Except that, along with all the domes and volutes and elliptical floor plans, this library has a very special little shape she programmed in herself.

The avatar's face is gurning through basic emotions now, as the affective response module generates its repertoire of joy, disgust, anger, surprise, fear and sorrow. She looks at the black sigil floating in the air in front of her. It's not completely accurate as a replica of her mark, but it's close enough to carve a little piece of her soul into the sprite's semblance of self. They used to do this to statues in the old days, she understands, back in the days before the unkin all got together in their little Covenant and put an end to idols, before they burned the teraphim in the temples. They'd make a creature of clay to stand in their temples, put a little rough copy of their graving into it, make it speak for them. Answerers.

She loads her mark into the sprite's deep memory and, for a second, it stops its mugging and mute mutters, winces, blinks and looks at her almost with sentience. God in the machine, she thinks.

Any sufficiently advanced form of magic is indistinguishable from technology.

THE TEMPLE OF LORD ILIL

When, after three days and three nights, Inanna still had not returned, the Lady Shubur then began to sound a lamentation for her in the ruins, pound the drum for her in the assemblies where the unkin gather and around the houses of the gods. She tore at her eyes, her mouth, her thighs. She wore the beggar's single robe of soiled sackcloth then as, all alone, she set out for the temple of Lord Ilil in Nippur. She entered the holy shrine and she cried out to Lord Ilil.

Pound the drum.
Phreedom feels the story etching itself into her life, her own life being buried in the ink.
Around the houses of the gods.
Fierce pride and furious grief. Lost innocence.
She tore at her eyes, her mouth, her thighs.
Memories, realities, cut over each other in new connections, like one of those dreams where a different you lives in a different time or place, has a whole different history, but still has also this vague sense of what you were when you were once awake, what you might be again…a dream of another life where you're not sure which life is real and which is dream. She's no longer sure how long she's been here. An hour? A day? A week?

So this is what it's like to die, she thinks. The road of no return. But there's still a little part of her left, a little piece of Phreedom.

Another memory: She's pulling the glove out of her jacket pocket, pulling it on and plugging it into the datastick. Earphones, booster sockets, logos scrolling across her lenses—she's wired in…

“Enlil,” the tour guide sprite says, “
en
meaning
lord, lil
meaning…well, it's usually translated as
winds
or
sky,
but one old theory by the esteemed professor Samuel Hobbsbaum suggests that it may be related to the Hittite
ilil,
literally
god of gods.
It's from the same Semitic root that gives us the Hebrew
Elohim
and the Arabic
Allah,
so Lord God of Gods does seem a rather apt translation.”

It smiles with wise beneficence, the tour guide, acting for all the world like it's a learned expert opening a world of wonder to its uneducated customer, even though its singsong spiel is only a little more reactive than one of those old tape recordings fired off by a button on a display; it can answer questions, spin the ancient myths with all an actor's skills, react, respond…but it thinks nothing of the fact that its sole customer on this excursion is a flickering shade of a woman dressed in sackcloth, weeping openly even as he gestures at the altar, at the ornate lampstands, at the bearded statue in this lowlit mock-up of the inner chamber of the ancient temple of Enlil that once stood in Nippur and now stands, reconstructed, here in a simworld Sumer of VR.

“Like Zeus or Jupiter,” the tour guide says, “Enlil was seen as father of the gods, the king of heaven. But—and this really tells us something quite fascinating about Sumerian society—because, for the ancients, the politics of Heaven was just a reflection of the politics of Earth—well, unlike the Greek or Roman gods, Enlil's power was not quite absolute.”

The Lady Cypher wanders over to the statue, ignoring him completely, but he follows her, still wittering as if this was only another tourist, enraptured by his tales, stepping up toward the staring eyes and long curled beard of stone to take a closer look at this strange holy artifact of ancient times.

“I'm sure you know of all those stories about Zeus or Jupiter ravishing young maidens, siring demigods here, there and everywhere. There's never any questions. Nobody challenges the King of the Gods about his…lewd behavior. But it's interesting that in the one similar myth we have from Sumer, where Enlil comes across a young maiden bathing in a stream and…ravishes her…”

The Lady Cypher looks at him strangely, fiercely, for a second, as if some fleeting sentience under the surface of the sim finds something tasteless in his prurient euphemisms. He carries on regardless.

“Well, Enlil ends up called before the assembly of the gods, impeached, you might say, and exiled, cast down from his throne…to Hell, no less.”

“It really is amazing to think that a millennia before Athens, the Sumerians had democracy, not just in terms of the assemblies of elders in their city-states, but amongst the gods themselves. The king of the gods himself wasn't above the law. He could be impeached, tried for his crimes and punished. Of course in the myth he does eventually find a substitute to take his place in Hell but…”

The Lady Cypher, the Lady Shubur, isn't listening to him. Under the slick surface of her, neural agents dance down virtual paths that trace a pattern older than the stones this virtual space around her simulates.

“…should be all but obliterated in the end by monotheism is ironic, really. And yet, for all the iconoclasm of the Judeo-Christian tradition and of Islam, still…”

Inside her head, a three-day countdown of the thousandths of the seconds reaches zero, and a symbol, a sigil, a mark buried in her archives, is activated, a pop-up window into infinity.

“…look upon the face of Enlil, with his long curled beard, his fierce eyes, we can't help but be reminded of that God we know so…”

And the Lady Shubur starts to wail.

Lady Shubur's Lament

“O father Lord Ilil,” cried Lady Shubur, “do not leave your daughter to death and damnation. Will you let your shining silver lie buried forever in the dust? Will you see your precious lapis shattered into shards of stone for the stoneworker, your aromatic cedar cut up into wood for the woodworker? Do not let the queen of heaven, holy priestess of the earth, be slaughtered in the Kur.”

The words carve themselves in Phreedom's flesh and in her memory like a song uploaded to a datastick. Like cutting a disk, she thinks, burning a CD, ripping a file…carving a soul. She can feel her old self being overwritten, her memory being…deallocated, archived, reallocated. As a programmer, she understands what's happening to her, but it's still the strangest experience of her life.

But this is how Thomas got out of this world and into the Vellum. If she wants to follow him she has to die. She has to be written out of history and written into myth.

The needle bites deep into her skin and into the skin of the world. She flinches and a shock wave travels round the world.

Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

Papa Eli holds the girl down, forcing his hand between her teeth as she bucks and writhes under him, screaming, clawing at him and at herself with her fingernails, at her plain white linen dress and the skin beneath it, eyes rolled back into her head. The
abiku
that possesses her shrieks its fury as she whips her head to one side, freeing her mouth to call on spirits with names he does not know, not Chango or Ellegua, not Oggun or Yemaya—none of the orishas that the
brujos
have been calling on ever since their Yoruban ancestors were first brought here as slaves.

“Ilil,” she screams. “Sin! Enki!”

The other Santeros of the asiento stand behind him, drums abandoned, singing stopped, afraid of this girl taken as a horse by something far darker than any Santerian spirit, some creature of the other realms that knows only its own rage and sorrow.

“Ilil,” she screams at him, as if she's trying to call some loa out of him, as if her fury is that he will not answer. And Papa Eli feels some spirit moving through his fear, something in him that
is
trying to answer her, and he calls on every orisha he knows to fight it.

The Temple of Lord Ilil, Nippur.

The Lady Cypher drops to her knees before the statue, mouth open, wailing in a language that's not the gibberish of her infant idiocy, that's not the English or the Spanish, French or Dutch that it evolved into, that's not the C# or the Java or ObjArt or any of the construct codes she's written in, that's not the machine code built of binary bits that is the flesh and bones of her. It's clearer, more precise than mathematics, more poetic than the songs of humans. It's the language that the world is written in.

“Father Lord Ilil, your daughter! Will you see?”