Chapter 12
XII
Here is the room, here is its bookshelf. Here, all around, is the tower, Michael’s—
No, start again.
Here is a room. Here is its bookshelf. Here, all around, is a tower. It is Gabriel’s tower, perhaps, which lies all the way across the mountains, and which she cannot thus see from her own window. What a queer treat, what an unaccustomed and indeed discomfiting extravagance, to be in Gabriel’s tower! It is the extravagance peculiar to dreams, she knows.
To dream, Marriott avers, is to swim in the poison pools poured by chaos with the aim of our deception, in the silts of which pools grows a twined grass called the vines of chaos, planted there to ensnare and bind for ever the unwary and untutored, yet none the less as weak in essence, in virtue of its con-fusion, as it is made strong in semblance by the glamour of its fusion and multitude.
And Ratleak, for his part, sends the dreamer on their way with a fortifying admixture of caution and assurance: in these necessary descents to the underworld the traveler is offered the bewitched bread of that no-man’s country, sweetest fruit without humblest seed, journey’s end without journey’s toil, and is by this cursed table blessed, inasmuch as he may refuse to sup there, and wake in renewed confidence of his direction.
There is nothing to fear, these authors would assure her, in the full madness of this dream. Yet she hides in the smaller madnesses of more modest dreams, double falsehoods which could almost be truths.
She could really be in Gabriel’s tower, perhaps. She, Twenty-Six, had never crossed through the front door, had never felt the grass on her feet—but Eighty-Three had touched the mailbox, been given leave to open it with her own hands and even to run those lucky hands over the parcels inside. And she had read of more than this, much more, for among the suspect tales related by Twenty-Nine was a special day when Michael, setting out on an errand to the Horology Tower, took her hand and brought her there by his side.
Admittedly, even that most feverish of Twenty-Nine’s missives—with its rhapsodic visions of metal walls patterned like fine lacework which stretched skyward so far as to strain the limits of vision, of varicolored globes which shuddered and spoke as if alive—even it had claimed no more than a leisurely half-hour’s stroll down the footpath, to the closest of all the towers. The nearest inhabited tower is Gabriel’s, and it is said to be a full day and night away, more for anyone unaccustomed to the rigors of the mountain slopes. And yet, with Michael as given to spells of whim and indulgence as he had been in her last two Notebooks, is it really so far-fetched that she, Twenty-Six—although a middling Anne of no especial distinction—might find herself, yes, in Gabriel’s tower, among the books and belongings of some unknown counterpart?
This could be half believed, and she clings to it, half believing. Is this what Marriott had meant by the vines of chaos? This perverse impulse to dwell in an invented space positioned with devious care at the very edge of error, to weigh with feigned care a proposed assault on the most well-fortified region of the game board when her adversary had left glaring holes elsewhere?
Or had Marriott meant something else entirely? Marriott the surveyor of hamlets and castles, recorder of grandmothers’ tales, tallier of deaths and debts, relentless partisan of virtue and order in an age—some age, somewhere—when men cast these aside as mere insubstantial wisps, trusting instead in steel and gold and blood? She had read his Encyclopedia straight through ten times or more, but how many of the words had she really understood? She, who had never touched bullion, who had never had a grandmother?
No, start again, again—
The bread is bewitched, transparently so. Some dreams do tempt, but not this one. Anne shakes her head, runs her hands through her hair, opens her eyes and takes in anew the purported facts of the case. She is sitting on a bed, and before her is a bookshelf, and to its side is another, and then another. There are three times as many books here as she has ever seen in her life. Some of the spines flaunt colors she would have presumed were unachievable in pigment, the sole property of the sky in its jealous majesty.
She turns her head to the right. There is a window, looking out across a small outdoor space onto a flat wall studded with identical windows. What a strange tower, that wraps around itself like a snake—
This is not a tower at all. This is a school. Anne has read of schools, in that dullest of all story books, Ellen Montgomery’s School Days. But whereas little Ellen read grammar and maths, the pupils here are taught magic, though whether this means the gentle wonders shown to Young Goodman by the winsome Maid of the Meadow in every young Anne’s favorite story book, or the grisly sacrifices of frog or vermin which in Marriott’s age could secure a king’s nephew the throne, or some third thing, Anne does not know.
This is—the illusions pile upon themselves—a school from a story book, a story book which has been made real, in some place called a crash, to which she has travelled a distance beyond conception. Across the space between the stars and further, across an intermediary nowhere of pure sky. Taken away from her tower by a person who was not Anne or Michael, who spoke to her and touched her and (no no make it stop)
No, start again. Don’t lose yourself, don’t let the room spin like that, bear up though your stomach swims horribly, step by step now, every thing of worth in our grand civilization has been made piece-by-piece, start again—
Against the will of Michael, against reason. She, Twenty-Six, a middling Anne at best, listless 9th Notebook Twenty-Six whose busiest hours are spent proving her own decline, penciling in the losing side of games against her own self, Twenty-Six who justifies her decline to herself with the argument that were she to go too bad, were she to truly fail rather than merely fading away, she would become a cautionary tale among all her sisters, like the other failed Annes, and she would then have heard them tell the story of her own future failure—
—Twenty-Six, out of all her sisters, blessed or cursed or blessed-and-cursed with a singular destiny?
Not dear brilliant Twenty-Seven (no no do not think of her—)?
Not One, who had watched Michael build the tower, had picked out the purple blinds herself?
Not Forty-One, the favorite, who had won Michael’s favor with her displays of some special talent too close to the heart of Michael’s mysterious goals to be spoken of freely in any letter, who grew more and more distant in her later notebooks as her path took her ever deeper into something the rest were not allowed to know (unless, perhaps, by some surfeit of good behavior and hard work they might happen upon whatever secret made Forty-One into Forty-One)?
Not Ninety-Nine, the Bard, who invented wild and daring stories which drew more heavily from her dreams and nightmares than from any book on the shelf, who sent chapters as letters to the sisters she knew best, distributing them across the days and weeks and months so as to deliberately drive the recipients into a frenzy as they awaited the resolution of a thrilling predicament or the final efflorescence of a long-hinted romance, who made her audience so thoroughly lose interest in Michael’s drills and in the usual fodder of the bookshelf that Michael soon declared a hard rule, with retroactive jurisdiction backward and forward across all known time, against the transmission of fictive matter through the notebook system?
Not sweet One Hundred and Six, who during her 3rd Notebook had dropped the Travels of Young Goodman into the fireplace by mistake, whose pleas for a replacement had not moved Michael, and who was thus the reason her predecessors had copied that book out onto papers cached beneath a loose floorboard, conspiring to each contribute one hundred-and-fifth of the book in a gesture of unanimous affection unbroken across centuries, One Hundred and Six whose letter of gratitude had been the purest expression of joy ever to cross the pages of her, Twenty-Six’s, unworthy notebooks?
Not even horrible, evil, despicable Thirty-Eight, who among her other misdeeds had torn up all the pages under that floorboard that had been compiled there by her time, but whose blind bile had been no match for the subtle wit of her brightest sisters, for she passed away at the old age of 71st Notebook with not an inkling that the game books around her formed a second cache, that Young Goodman was safely preserved in a secret code which threaded its way through the innumerable private game systems which each Anne played against herself and herself alone?
Not even mad Twenty-Nine?
Not even poor Eighty-Seven, wretched Eighty-Seven, the saddest of all Annes by universal agreement (but nothing can be done, we tried, Eighty-Seven of whom we have agreed not to speak, since nothing can be done—)?
—not any of them? In their place Twenty-Six, a mere face in the crowd, whose later Notebooks must have been utterly unremarkable, since she cannot remember any sister ever alluding to them—
No! Start again!
The room is spinning, but her hands are still before her.
These are my hands, Anne’s hands, Twenty-Six’s hands. And as long as one familiar thing remains, the path can still be found again, if one does not lose heart.
Now, how does an Anne get her bearings? Why, just as Michael and Ratleak taught her. Step by step, with care and diligence, with curiosity tempered by reverence, and a firm belief in the wisdom of the best writers, whose books will reveal all to she who reads and re-reads every word with a clear mind and an open heart.
There are three times as many books here as she has ever seen in her life.
Was I preparing for this, all this time?
With a wondrous lightness in her limbs, with a strange pride sending its sparks across her whole body, with the perfect clear-headedness she used to feel on 6th Notebook mornings as she watched the dawn without and felt game boards evolve into new configurations within, she turns her attention once again to the large book which was singled out for her by the woman who brought her here. According to the frontispiece, it is
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
BY H. G. WELLS
Who is this chronicler Wells? Will he measure up to Marriott? Anne’s standards have been set by the very best of books, she has been told, but she will give the unknown Wells a fair chance.
At last, with both a facility and a hunger which none raised outside her tower can fully grasp, Anne reads.
The earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast though it seems to us, it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space. Space is, for the most part, emptiness. At great intervals there are in this emptiness flaring centres of heat and light, the “fixed stars.” They are all moving about in space, notwithstanding that they are called fixed stars, but for a long time men did not realize their motion. . . .
Head held high, composure forbiddingly aglow, Cordelia emerges from the unassuming side office where Hector Stein has taken up residence and into the Academy halls. She walks with speed but without haste, a be-laureled hero secure in victory, on her way to the champagne pleasures of some deserved Elysium.
She’s been around long enough to know that contact with Hector Stein tends to induce this state irrespective of circumstances. She had been thoroughly warned about what Marika—smarting as ever over the whole Jobs thing—calls Stein’s “reality distortion field.” But if this aura of conquest were ever justified, surely it is justified now, for her? For Wolf Squadron field agent Cordelia, Promethean thief of the very secret of time itself?
“If this is what I think it is,” Stein had said—in a tone that assured her it was, outright dared her to propose otherwise, which she had not done—“it will turn the tide of our struggle.” And then, after a pause, as if he were only just realizing the sheer gravity of her accomplishment: “if this is what I think it is, we will remember your mission today as the moment everything changed.”
She is the hero of the moment in the new Academy, Stein’s Academy. No one, not even the most committed apostle of the new Academy and its cult of dynamism, could possibly accuse her of fossil-hood. And so it is without shame that Cordelia, master of the new yet partisan of the old, makes her way toward the Headmaster’s Office, to see her two favorite fossils.
Even above the first floor, away from Main Hall, the Academy is aflutter with activity. Crowds part to let her pass. Few know, yet, of her recent deeds and their epochal promise, but her composure is out for all to see, and it inspires an apt deference, even from those who will only understand its aptness after the fact. Then, naturally, there are others who cannot just let Cordelia the Conquering pass by, as her mission is their business too, and they have been waiting with bated breath for news which only she can bring:
“Just briefly, can we talk about the transfer pipeline,” a Blackhat is saying, his face a brutalist assemblage of angles, his hair a spheroid halo of Chia Pet curls truncated by trilby. “Specifically I’d like a quick yes/no on transfer distort phenomenology both in the CMS intake and CMS outflow stages—”
“Went like a charm,” charmed Cordelia assures him, and walks on.
“I haven’t seen instrumentation metrics yet,” complains a squat Einstein in a paisley-patterned vest, her wig threatening to fall off as she peers up expectantly. “If there were operational failures in our cladding setup—”
“I got a clear signal from instantiation all the way to transfer,” Cordelia the Impeccable tells her. “Should get picked up in the daily load cycle,” she says, and walks on.
“The client must be in rapid thaw shock—where are we on survivability?” A kind question, from a Wolf with kind eyes.
“She’s a strong one,” says Cordelia the Savior. “I could have shaved half the time off the CMS stage if I’d known she’d warm up so fast. She’s shaken, but it’s all psych, just the stuff you’d expect. Her anomaly field’s already at ninety percent and in a, like, textbook controlled climb toward equilibrium. She’s fine, don’t you worry.” There is a softening in those kind eyes, and Cordelia knows she’s said just the right words. She walks on.
“Was he there?”
This from a muscle-bound Wolf she recognizes, a ghostly fixture of the halls who paces hither and thither to no apparent end, and always with the same haggard and lost expression.
Though they’ve exchanged maybe twenty words tops, in the months since the first wave of Stein’s Rock influx brought him to the Academy, Cordelia feels like she knows him. Every so often their eyes will meet as they pass by each other, and she, letting her composure fall away for a moment, will mirror on her own face the empty skepticism she sees in his. He, like her, is aware of a lack—not just the lack which unites the Cadets and Squadrons, the separation from kith and kin which unites all the displaced, but some unnamed further lack, unfilled by Stein in all his potency—and a moment’s glance is enough to bind them together in conspiracy, as comrades in the confederacy of the unimpressed.
He is, if memory serves, an escaped client from the very first crash, the so-called “Mooncrash,” from whose still-mysterious name the term for the general case had been extracted. The crash which had been sealed more crudely and tightly than all the others, and yet had undergone a safe thaw, regurgitating two live bilaterals: this one, and another still at large, last seen in the company of the shade Michael, a known shadeform of the administrator for Anne’s crash. Hence the question.
“I didn’t see him,” Cordelia the Disappointing says, and walks on.
There, now, what was that? It was something, was it not? A sort of flash or spark, at the corner of her vision . . .
Anne looks up, but there is nothing there except the bookshelf, the paneled wood wall behind it, and below, the red velvet bedspread on which she sits, surrounded by a half dozen books. Back, then, into the rapture of the maze.
For a time, Anne had been content to tag along passively at Wells’ side, attentive if unreflective, as the genial chronicler surveyed the Record of the Rocks and narrated the passage of the world from the Age of Reptiles to the Age of Mammals. But throughout this pacific period an itch scratched at the back of her mind, and soon it grew too strong to ignore. Then she knew something was wrong, and knew just what that something was.
Every author she had met heretofore formed a piece of a single tapestry. However else they might differ, they played on a shared game board, though each might at times use his own rules. An author might fashion a territory for himself and defend it ruthlessly against interlopers, as with Pigmaine, constructor of geometric paradises, whom Marriott accused of hiding from the world of man. But none was an island. Marriott shaking Pigmaine’s shoulders, urging the dreamer to set aside star charts and syllogisms; Ratleak tutting at Rolle over the latter’s laxness toward the morals of the young, and spirited Rolle rebuking Ratleak in turn;—all these were scenes embroidered on the same wide tapestry, on which the careful onlooker could discern Powlett returning to the same splendid pools where Rolle’s suntanned heroes had once encountered mermaids and resisted their wiles, and see Harding bemoan the decline of the same north-eastern city-state whose rise had been of such importance to Marriott.
Through the ordering of his drills, through the arrangement of the bookshelf, Michael had displayed this tapestry for her instruction and delight. But Wells had no place on the tapestry. He was not, Anne understood, an island. But the territories abutting his own, the stars he used to chart his course—these were nowhere in her prior learning. To follow a writer with utmost faith, reading each word, then the next, and circling back again to the first when the reservoir had been exhausted: this, she knew, was best. But she could not do this with Wells, now, except as a faithless game of pretend. Not in territory as new as this.
So she had let curiosity win out over diligent effort, just (she told herself) for a time, and had made her own whimsical course which passed through book after book. The contours of the new tapestry began to take tentative form in her mind, but every answer contained within it two questions or more. Her journey diverged and diverged, like Wells’ Differentiation of Species, with only the rare moment of convergence here or there to tame the growing multitude of trailheads, each as evidently crucial as another. What was meant by “the sixth century B.C.”? What significance attached to “the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Andes,” a tricolon used twice by Wells in close succession? “Canada” and “Colorado,” mellifluous names mentioned in passing—where were these, what were they?
There was about it all a peculiar familiarity, as though the new tapestry were just the old one done over again in some faddish style; along one wide panel Powlett could be spied tromping across “Europe” and “Croatia” in his quest for the antipodes, while a cramped corner showed Marriott laboring in his study, putting “the opening of the sixteenth century” in its place among his orderly annals, sometime after the Harrowing of Caeniel but before the Great Infestation. But Anne—less shrewd than so many of her sisters but shrewd still—knew this was but a tempting illusion. So she embraced the task of mapping the world anew, even as it drew her thoughts into disorder, knowing no better way.
It was a maze, she told herself, and this fancy stuck in her mind as others came and went. What she sought was the one and final way out, but like any well-constructed game, the maze would not let her leave before she had plumbed its depths, found temporary thrills in the pursuit of gleaming dead ends, uncovered at last the hidden logic which could dispel the false equality of a fork in the road, resolving left and right into right and wrong.
Back, then, into the maze, which had lately taken her across strange battlefields where strange creatures called Catholics and Protestants, cursed against nature with a dizzying infinitude of Notebooks, fought as no Annes had ever fought over the shamefully vague letters of their only sister, variously called “God” or “Christ” (among other names). Light of foot and gay of manner, she had crossed these fields and gone further, to a place the combatants held in unanimous disdain. Hoping to find this furthest country more habitable than the intermediary war camps, she has found at least an author whose concerns go beyond the grotesqueries of endless Notebooks and siblings who refuse to be clear. This must be, she imagines, this tapestry’s version of a sage on the order of Cardimille or Ratleak. He reads, she thinks with a shiver, like Ratleak transposed into an alien and ghastly key:
“HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of THEIR own—in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the ‘Thing-in-itself—THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!”—This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this “belief” of theirs, they exert themselves for their “knowledge,” for something that is in the end solemnly christened “the Truth.” The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, “DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM.”
There it is again, isn’t it? A shower of sparks, molten yellow, somewhere above her . . .
For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly
Sparks setting the page alight, sparks all around her, molten yellow fading into hot brilliant blue . . .
whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives
The room swims with quivering motes of light, like the Faerie Vale where Young Goodman set his innocent head to rest after his most trying day of toil.
What are “the Vedanta doctrine in Asia” and “Platonism in Europe”? Where, if not in this sumptuous treasury of books, might be found “Strabo’s Geography”? In which land do the “metaphysicians” live? Why is there not time to unravel each mystery as it arises? Why have a single sunset and sunrise, much less a Notebook or two, not been permitted to pass here before the right order of things is yet again interrupted by—
The air shivers, golden dew coalesces into solid form. Anne looks about her and sees a room no longer empty.
Here is the room, here is its bookshelf. Here, all around, is the tower, Michael’s tower. (hairs raised on her skin, hope beyond hope)
“Good evening, my Anne,” says Michael.
“We meet at last,” says the man beside Michael.
The slick raven hair, the guileful face with its boyish half-smile, bring to mind an illustration which accompanied Powlett’s hapless forays into the court intrigues of distant Aristomel.
“As you are, in these latter days, the bilateral’s last hope, so I was, in my time, its first. On that basis, if no other, you might perhaps derive some amusement from my acquaintance. My name is Azad.”
“. . . still not fully inventoried, even now, after I’ve been pressing the issue for months,” Lilith Vance is saying.
“And it’s not just unsecured crash introspection equipment,” Cordelia says, “although that would be bad enough! You’re saying we know there’s hot material, and fissile material, down there in the Catacombs, and no one’s doing anything about it?”
Lilith does that full-body sigh thing, the one that heaves its way across one shoulder and then the other, packing months’ worth of exasperation into a single efficient gesture. An eye-roll is involved.
“The Blackhats say it’s fine,” she says, and Lucifer adds what is either a correction or, more likely, a continuation: “the Blackhats say other things have to be prioritized right now.”
In unison, the three take a rueful sip of tea.
“So if someone were to go into the Catacombs, and, say, pick up a memory device without temperature controls, one of the ones that can read your heat signature and look up shit about your varsity cheerleading career or the maple trees you used to pass on the way to work, I mean those are there, right—”
“—there are probably between fifty and one hundred such devices in the Catacombs, along with an unknown number of similarly hot or fissile objects on the extended school grounds,” says a sullen but energetic Lucifer, caught somewhere between dad and dynamo. Sullen but energetic is how the Ells have been this evening, and how they’ve been around Cordelia in recent months.
“And meanwhile,” Cordelia says, sullen and energetic and, well, by this point let’s say furious, “Hector’s off trading dirty jokes with Snoddery, completely fucking oblivious.”
“To be fair,” says Lilith (to be fair, to always be fair, godsbless the Ells!), “Hector is a busy man, and he of all people needs his moments of levity.” As punctuation and illustration, she takes another sip.
“I have heard,” says a sullen and contrary Lucifer Vance, figurehead headmaster seated before a formidable panoply of wise and meaningless books, “that Snoddery has recently discovered the connection between ass as in buttocks and ass as in donkey, mount of many a mancer and mantis, and has been mining this rich vein of humor to its fullest extent and beyond.”
A pause. A sip.
“But you were saying earlier,” ventures Cordelia, “that you’d found some interesting things lately in the Old Mantic corpus—”
An alarm. A blaring siren.
Red lights flash at a two-second cadence. Over the PA system, a recorded voice, recognizable as Tyler’s, highly strung and listless in Tyler’s inimitable cocktail:
Priority One security breach.
I repeat, Priority One security breach.
Unanticipated exploit. Attack surface should be considered undefined and unbounded until further notice.
Blackhat Squadron to evaluate and report. Wolf Squadron to secure known physical boundaries. Angel Squadron, proceed immediately to quarantine.
I repeat, Priority One security breach.
“You will take me back,” Anne says. Whether this is assertion, question or entreaty, she herself does not know.
“Humanoid shade Michael,” says Michael, “is configured to maintain minimal interface depth and will reject all inbound queries without established stability bounds.”
“It is not safe for him to speak freely,” Azad interprets, “and so I will speak for him, in accordance with a prior agreement between us. As a matter of general prudence, I would be the first to advise you against anyone who claims to speak for the voiceless, and doubly so when I am the claimant. I live by few rules but hold those few dear, and the first of them is to distrust everything that pours from my own fetid mouth. But you have my word, for all the nothing it is worth. Now, shall we get to it?”
“I will be taken back,” Anne says, “won’t I?”
“You may indeed return, but you will not be taken. To snatch and seize, to split wholes with the sword, to divide and be divided in the endless thankless agon: this has been the way among our kind, but among the anomalings there is another, a finer, a more beautiful way.”
“I have heard,” Anne says in a voice which only barely falters, “that the anomalings have taken captives, dividing sibling from sibling, friend from friend. Is it not true?”
“That,” says Azad, “is another sort of thing entirely.”
The halls are in chaos. With the Ells close behind her, Cordelia careers through a mess of colliding bodies. Every few seconds there is a flash of blinding red light.
Priority One security breach. Follow standard security measures until Blackhat analysis has been disseminated. Blackhat analysis is still in progress. Flash freeze has not been deemed advisable at this time. Prioritize your own safety above veil integrity.
A bubble of space forms in the crowd. Cordelia cannot see what it contains, but she hears a familiar voice, and understands immediately. Hector Stein is here.
“Where the fuck are my on-call Blackhats? I have not gotten a single notification from the whole fucking Squadron! Get off your asses and fucking report status, you cowardly sacks of shit!”
There is none of the usual hortatory joy in Hector’s voice, now, none of the twinkling pride in his creation. There is nothing there but rage.
She sees Lucifer lurch forward toward the bubble, grimacing like an angry dog.
Then Lilith’s strong solid elbow is wrapped tightly around his arm, pulling him back, and he relents. His face still smolders.
And then, in Cordelia’s mind, something clicks into place.
This, this, is the Hector that Lucifer knew.
She has known the Hector of Stein’s Rock, the pied piper, the movement builder, but only now does she recognize before her the other Hector, the headmaster of the Bad Old Days. The sable-clad dictator, screaming from the belfry. A man who could make, out of the supporting cast of a middle-grade fantasy serial, a private army of child soldiers.
The tale of the Steinomachy was a lie, she had been told, and it was no doubt true that there had been no great mantic battle against the Shroud, indeed no Shroud in any sense literal enough to take arms against. But around that central current of story were dark eddies and side-streams, the stuff of overheard and third-hand anecdotes, of odd grim songs and taunts still seeing use on the schoolyard. All this she had put gladly aside when she learned of the big lie, and it now comes rushing back.
When Chester would bolt awake screaming at two in the morning, had that really been just part of the act? Could it ever have been?
“To live crashed is not to die, and it is not even to forget,” Azad says. He is sitting on the bed just beside her, and a curious thing is happening as she watches his eyes.
Anne has been close to several of her sisters, has wept for their misfortunes and cheered them in their triumphs—but only through the intermediary of the page. The only human form in her world, across nine Notebooks worth of life, has been a shade. To her, emotion is a private and internal matter, and nothing has prepared her for the full brunt of face-to-face empathy.
Shimmers of pain and pride flow across her, rising and subsiding in lockstep with the cadences of Azad’s voice and the minute motions of his face. Where are they coming from? Are they Azad’s feelings? But then how are they hers, too?
He has been telling her of his ancestors. Of their great civilization, and how it fell in the blink of an eye to an invading force, their King of Kings slain like a common animal. Of the invaders, adherents of an alien vision, who did not cast them out of their homeland but allowed them to stay—conditionally. Of the life they lived, then, at the mercy of their protectors. Of the path they still did not give up.
“It is a miracle that the path of my people still survives. A miracle, which is to say a rarity, a shining unbroken line visible against the dark background of a million dead and broken lines, so many that their remains grind together into a uniform dust. Do you understand, Anne? We are the creature which drives towards its own oblivion. We are binary opposition made flesh and spirit, and what is the binary opposition but a nullity with momentary pretensions?”
Anne cannot follow the words as she would those in a book, but there is something here which she follows, and raptly. There are no words for it, and it sets her body aglow.
“To meet on the field of battle is already to die, even for the victor, who has made himself into the very thing he is willing to kill. To take part in a system where one twin may crush his mirror image into dust, one must already agree that each twin is a valueless thing, which may be crushed into dust. Pair production, pair annihilation. Which is the one worthy of life, the left hand or the right? One hand crushes the other into the bloody dirt, drinks deeply in its triumph, and tomorrow there are no more hands, for we have proven their superfluity.
“My father read to me from the Shahnameh, a remembrance of a vanished world by a vanished man whose words remain. He read to me as his father had read to him, his father whose father had done the very same. How can this be, when every thing in our mirrored world yearns to find its brother and dance with him the death-dance? A unity, unpaired and unopposed, shining among the forgotten graves?
“There is a way that does not tend toward oblivion, Anne. To rise up in total war is already to die; to preserve, remember, survive, to conserve in their peerless splendor the things which are yours alone and thus cannot enter into enmity, is to form a path which will blaze its way into the heavens, and in its time converge with every other.
“This, Anne, is the way of arbitration.”
The man has been on the verge of tears through the whole of this monologue, and yet, without warning, he suddenly breaks down in a fit of giggles.
“You have me to blame for that word, by the way. Perhaps the worst of my many, many terrible decisions. ‘Arbitration’! Stupid, stupid, tin-eared Azad!”
A thicket of trilbies has sprouted up around Stein, and the hush of the frightened and expectant crowd is punctuated by bursts of placating technobabble.
“Confirming no interruption of service in the decoy handshake array, sir. We haven’t seen any increase in handshake attempts above background, sir.”
“Then what is the damn thing good for?”
“Well, sir, it’s really just a safeguard against a certain small category of . . .” The faltering voice is cut off by another.
“Confirming operational success of the nested crash stack, sir! Two entrants in the last hour, who made it three levels down and seventeen quintillion levels down, respectively, sir!”
“Are those the intruders? Then how did they make it in here?”
“Um, sir, I mean, sir, I wouldn’t really know about that, sir, I just keep the stack running, mostly, is all—”
“Confirming that I am totally shitfaced, sir!”
Stein whirls around to face Marika, who’s stumbling toward him, brandishing a mostly empty bottle of malt liquor. She’s walking arm in arm with Tyler, but it’s clearly less a romance thing than a balance thing, and even then she’s having a hard time staying vertical.
“I need you alert and of sound mind, Marika.”
Cordelia isn’t sure what to call the emotion in Stein’s voice, here, though it’s chilling, whatever it is. Not even angry, really, and yet so so awfully cold . . .
“Aw, you’re no fun, Hec-hec.”
“Tyler,” says Hector, “report status.” The voice cold and clipped, mechanical, heartless.
“Exploit still unknown. Intruder’s location still unknown. Intrusion first discovered through the link chain stowaway system, so we know there’s one or more shades involved.”
“Let me get this straight,” says Stein. “We don’t know where they are. We could have easily not even noticed them. And we have no clue how they got in. Remind me again, Tyler, why I keep you around?”
Marika answers for him. “Do you ever, like, think about things before you say them? Hmm oh I wonder, gee, why does His Majesty Hector Stein let druggie lowlifes like yours truly set foot in his big fancy school? I’m sure you could handle security just fine without us, right? You got all the way to level three in the Blackhat training module before dropping out, right?”
“I need you alert and of sound mind, Marika. You too, Tyler. From here on out, no Blackhat will rest, not for one minute, until we understand this incident and have fully secured veil integrity. Period. Do I need to repeat myself?”
Trilbies bob and disperse. Blue constellations flicker into and out of existence, as the Blackhats take the ritual puffs which mark the beginning or end of a block of focused labor.
“Perfectly clear, Hector.” Marika finishes off her forty in one hearty swig. “Veil integrity. Great. You know that’s just a phrase I made up, right? Like as if it’s a wall or something where you could just look for holes. It’s not a wall and there are no holes, so we’re done, right? Time to celebrate, am I right? There’s more where this came from,” she says, waving the forty suggestively.
“I need you alert and of sound mind, Marika.”
Marika and Tyler exchange glances. There is a flurry of hushed conversation.
“No I mean it’s back in my room—”
“Aw no girl I got you covered—”
Cordelia averts her gaze. She has seen this before, and knows she prefers not to watch, even though it can make no difference.
What was the last time Marika slept? What will be the next time she sleeps? Can you even die of sleep deprivation in a crash? If you don’t, then what happens?
“Aww, shit, is that Chester over there? Chester! C’mon!” Marika’s voice.
And Tyler’s: “We’re gonna do blow with Chester fucking Chrestomath? Far out!”
“There are two paths before me, only two,” Anne says.
“There are two paths,” says Azad. “There is the path through long captivity into eventual arbitration and thereby to the possibility of something better, kinder, at least more interesting, than this predictable grinding against one another which ends in oblivion. And there is the path which the bilateral calls its own.”
“If I choose arbitration, I must leave.”
“That is right.”
“I was brought here by a bilateral called Cordelia. I do not know whether she has a mirror twin, or tends intrinsically toward oblivion, but she was kind and patient with me in my distress and confusion, and I would like to thank her before I leave.”
“Registering corruption in upstream link integrity,” Michael says. “Humanoid Shade Michael will be locked until restored link integrity can be confirmed.” He freezes stiffly in place.
“There is no time, Anne,” says Azad. “This Cordelia may be kind and patient, but I can assure you, if you follow her on her path, it will lead you into division and strife. Cordelia will become your enemy, all will become your enemy. There is nothing here but the grave.”
“Then,” says Anne, “I will go on the path of arbitration.”
There is a knock on the door. It is not a friendly knock.
“Take my hand,” says Azad.
She does. At once the luminous motes are all around them, and they flock to nestle against their skin and clothes, like a thousand small rodents returning to a single vast mother. Sparks kindle everywhere in Anne’s field of vision. The light is all around her, brighter, brighter still, yet somehow never blinding.
The light is everywhere, and she can see nothing but pure featureless white. Her world has become a blank page, to be filled—for the second time in a mere day—with something utterly new.