Chapter 42
XXIV
“Grant!”
He doesn’t register this as his own name, the first time. It’s merely a loud and unwelcome noise.
“Grant! Grant, wake up!”
A loud and unremitting noise, aimed directly at his unwilling ears.
He wishes it would leave, but he knows it won’t.
It’s got his name. His name has been stolen, and mixed into the noise, sapping him of his power over himself.
He is in the noise, and his guardian spirit is in it too, together with him.
Grant’s very own personal angel, who breaks the dread arms of his foes in battle. Who gives victory to his invoker. Whose will is dreadful unto those who vex him.
Whose body is the body of a dog, that good, strong, beneficent creature.
(azad, wtf?
i’m waking up because sylvie’s yelling at me.
simple as that.)
[GRANT’s block letters.]
Grant’s own personal angel is in the noise, together with him.
Sylvie, who sits in silence, gazing with sharp looks. Whose eyes and ears are powerful. Who brings long joy, high and high-girded.
Sylvie, well-moving and moving afar, loud-snorting, possessing riches and a high renown.
(this scene is . . .
probably the most straightforward one in the whole book!
and you go making it all . . .
i don’t even know.
whatever the hell THIS is.
don’t make me regret letting you do first draft on this ch, dude.)
[GRANT’s block letters.]
“Grant! Listen to me!”
The noise is a man’s voice, bright and strong. And at the same time, it is also the barking of a dog—that good, strong, beneficent creature.
(The atavism of the drowsy mind.
At the threshold of sleep, we recover thought in its original shape.
Our heritage of a hundred millennia, which we’ve lately and unjustly forgotten.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(But IT has not forgotten US.
It comes to us, in the morning and in the night.
It comes to moderns, as it did to the ancients.
Find me a practical man, with no cobwebs in his soul—
And I’ll show you a man who pierces the veil, twice daily.
The nature of magic opens to him.
He sees its plain good sense.
Obvious once witnessed, and impervious to reasoned “refutation.”)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(Law of similarity, law of contagion.
The power that is in names.
The spirits that take interest in us.
Eudaimones and cacodaemones fight over us.
What we call the “vagaries” of fate, which we affect to find so mysterious—
Merely the wending contours of their battle lines.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(It’s precious to me, this minor quirk of our mental makeup.
This spell that comes over us when we’re near sleep.
It is another little jewel.
In the long chain of little jewels.
Which is always there, trailing behind us.
As we march to the future, to the next battle, to the horizon.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
Grant feels the bedsheets, damp and clammy around him. His throat is parched.
Someone is shaking him.
He opens his eyes.
(I hold precious everything that is “MINOR” about us.
The incidentals of bilateral life.
The things we find it easy to overlook.
Our loyal retinue of little jewels.
Which was lost. And will be lost again, forever.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(The things which any “sane,” “rational” chronicler would leave out.
Since we have so much MAJOR material to chronicle, after all.
Since our tale is full, to the point of bursting, with marvelous and grotesque incident.
Since we must commit to memory, before all else, the MAJOR things—
The causes of strife, and strife’s progress.
War secrets, and pearls of hidden knowledge.
Higher things, that put to shame my humble jewels, my obsolete daimones.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(But I am not a “sane,” “rational” writer, am I now?)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(You want another, simpler, better man, instead of me?
A good soldier, who will march to the final precipice with an unwavering gaze?
Who won’t get sentimental over old baubles and trinkets, as I do?)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(Tough luck, Grant.
He’s not here.
Only I am here.
There’s no one here to play Azad’s role, except the man himself.
You’re stuck with me, Grant.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(All will be lost, they tell me, except what we commit to the page.
Must I consent to the UTTER destruction of my chain of little jewels?
Those “minor” and “dispensable” things, close to the earth, which I hold dearest of all?
Must they ALL be given up?
Can I not be allowed to select a few favorites?
A few jewels to pluck and secret away, inside the greater mass which we will fling across the chasm?)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(sorry!!
jeez.)
[GRANT’s block letters.]
(actually, i take back that “jeez.”
and the sarcastic “!!” too.
i’m sorry, azad.
i do know how important this is to you.)
[GRANT’s block letters.]
Grant yawns.
There is no illumination in the room, except for the nightlight of Sylvie’s halo. He can see the shade’s eyes clearly, but everything else is a dark blur.
Sylvie beams at him.
“Grant!”
“You’re . . . full of energy,” Grant mutters.
It’s true.
There’s a brightness in Sylvie’s eyes, now, that Grant hasn’t seen in its full form for quite some time.
The shade’s comic mode. Sylvie the utopian optimist, toeing the near edge of mania in his eagerness to solve everything, at once.
The worldly geometer, freshly invigorated by the high mountain air of pure reason, now drawing up the perfect lines and arcs of a just social order with his compass and straightedge. And the visionary of a final renovation, in which the lion really will lie down with the lamb.
Sylvie the child, who sees everything appareled in celestial light. The sugar-high child, slayer of bedtimes.
“It’s like,” Grant says.
“It’s like three in the fucking morning.”
“It is two forty-seven AM,” Sylvie proclaims.
“It’s two forty-seven in the fucking morning.
“What’s going on, boy? What’s got you so excited?” Grant asks.
He’s been using his man-talks-to-dog voice with Sylvie more and more often. And entering more completely into the role-play, when he does it.
It felt weird, at first, talking to the “World Regent” this way. It felt like a joke, and a humiliating one at that. A facetious show of dominance, underscoring his abject submission.
Once, long ago, he had a simple friendship with a simple creature. He and Sylvie went for walks in nearby parks, in the early morning. He would nod to the other early-morning dog-walkers there, and they would nod back. His dog was not like the others, even then. But the kinship implied in that nod was not a lie.
All that has passed away. He knows he can’t have it back. It’s humiliating, having to pretend it’s still there.
Humiliating or not, though, the man-and-dog thing works. It gets Sylvie on his wavelength.
“What’s gotten into you, Sylvie?”
“How about you guess,” Sylvie says, with childish glee.
“Did we . . . did we, like . . . win?” Grant ventures.
“I mean, like, with advanced containment?
“Did Hector push the beasts out of advanced containment, the way he did with all those other crashes?
“He must have, right? Like, why wouldn’t he?”
Sylvie shakes his head no. The halo wobbles, in imitation of the gesture.
“Okay.
“But we did win, right?
“Some other way?
“You’re waking me up at three in the fucking morning because we won, right? And the Ells are safe, now?”
From the head and halo, another no.
“Shit.
“Fuck. You got my hopes up, there, for a sec. Bad dog.”
“I kid, I kid,” he hastens to add, watching the halo wince.
“You’re a good boy,” he reiterates, nervously.
The halo recedes from Sylvie’s head toward the back wall, as if in fear.
“You’re a very good dog.
“And a very clever one. Look at how you’ve got me stumped! Very clever.
“Like, I’m zero for two, here.
“I give up, man. I’m sorry. It’s three in the fucking morning. I’m gonna need some coffee, if you want me to be all smart and shit.
“Just come out with it, okay?”
Sylvie nods yes, and the halo nods with him.
“The reason I’m here, Grant, is that he’s free!”
“He’s . . . free?” Grant echoes without understanding.
“He’s free! He’s been thawed from his crash!
“He’s on his way here, as we speak!
“My Angels hold him safe in their arms. They are carrying him to us, over the Pacific, on their swift wings.”
He pauses and cocks his head to the side, to ingest telemetry.
“. . . they are carrying him to us,” he repeats, “over the Pacific. At Mach 4.1, currently.
“Current estimated time of arrival is 5:33 AM.”
“Hey. Sylvie?” Grant says.
“Sorry to be dense, again. But uh. Who the hell are you talking about?”
Sylvie’s eyes make a show of confusion.
“Azad,” he says plainly, as though this should have been obvious.
“Hey,” Grant says.
“Sylvie.”
Azad here? Physically? In the house?
Numerous images press themselves into Grant’s mind. They overlap, in palimpsest vision, into a single scene crowded impossibly with Azads.
Here’s Azad, bantering lightly with Lilith Vance. And there is he too, over there, delivering some incomprehensible disquisition on Sylvie’s relation to the Whole-Thing. Meanwhile, in another corner of the frame, a third Azad ruffles Grant’s hair.
He says something cruelly mocking about the wheelchair, this third Azad does. The Ells are silently but visibly aghast, not appreciating that casual raillery for what it is: a shared dialect, and a never-ending game.
A fourth Grant fails to control himself. He says the words The Deadly Embrace of Immortals, and blushes in shame.
His counterpart, the fourth Azad, gradually realizes that he is not speaking to his Grant, who does not exist anymore.
The fourth Azad studies the body in the wheelchair below him, and sees it truly. A twitching invalid, with an incontinence problem, and only straw and fluff to fill his lolling head. An addict, in the severest stage of degeneration.
Only it’s not even that, in the chair. It’s not Grant with some new affliction, from which he might be saved. It’s not an addict, there, but an addiction. A single, hypertrophied circuit of the brain’s pleasure center, filling up the whole of the old Grant’s skull, puppeteering the old Grant’s corpse.
Somewhere else entirely, on a different panel of what is now a rapidly expanding polyptych, Azad and Grant are alone. They are alone in this very room, Grant’s bedroom.
The Grant in the bedroom tries not to say the words The Deadly Embrace of Immortals. And fails. And blushes in shame. And the look in this Azad’s eye, then, why it’s—
Grant forces all of this out of his mind. It’s frivolous. It’s irrelevant.
Because all of it is clearly, obviously not going to happen.
“Sylvie,” Grant says again.
“Good boy.
“I love you, Sylvie. Don’t think I don’t.
“But uh. I don’t get it.
“You’re bringing Azad . . . here?
“Azad? The guy you keep saying is the cause of all your problems?
“The guy who, and I quote, brought you ‘pain, and being-besides-oneself’? The guy who fucked with you so bad, you crashed the entire human race in response?”
“Azad,” Sylvie says, cheerfully.
“Sylvie. Dude.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your, uh. Your . . . emotional state. It’s been all over the place, lately.
“Which I get! We’re all going through a lot. And you’ve got the whole world on your shoulders.
“But look, Sylvie. We need you. The world needs you.
“We need you to be a rock under us, Sylvie. We need you to be . . . stable.
“And Azad, coming here? Be real with me, dude. That shit is going to fuck you up.”
The words are coming easy, Grant thinks.
Maybe it is only the mental image of Azad, rousing up a few flickers in a stray ember of the old Grant which the parasite in his mind has not yet fully snuffed out.
Or maybe he is healing. Coming back to himself, slowly but surely. Long-dormant synapses finding their footing again. Brain cells hitting the gym, getting back into practice. Mirzakhani’s little miracles, sprouting up at last, even in the barren ground of his own ruined soul.
“Sylvie?”
“Lucifer said much the same to me, Grant, on another occasion. He tried to argue me out of bringing you here.
“What does it profit a man to gain ‘emotional stability,’ and forfeit his soul? His master? His Grant?”
The halo quivers, in apparent pain, and Sylvie’s gaze grows plaintive.
Puppy-dog eyes, Grant thinks. Jesus Christ.
“Grant, have our minds failed to bridge? I find myself confused.
“I was so glad! I was so glad, thinking: my master wants to have Azad with him.
“Thinking: my master wants this more than anything.
“Was I wrong, Grant?
“I thought you would be so pleased!
“I had an . . . image, of a pleased Grant, in my mind. Its potency took me by surprise.
“Everything else receded. The starved, thaw-sick, invalid masses . . . the wrecking of my Angelprobes . . . the cavity in your chest, in place of a soul . . . these paled in significance, next to the image of the pleased Grant.
“I would make the image into reality, I thought. And the thought woke me from my nightmare.
“But it seems I was wrong.
“You are not pleased, after all, by what I have done.”
In that plaintive stare, Grant sees all the separate layers of Sylvie brought together. The many-colored rays, converging and resonating.
The innocent child, the adoring dog, the utopian Phalanx-planner with the winning smile. The all-too-human light coming in through the cracks in the alien Whole-Thing, trying its hand at the practice of merely human empathy. And encountering, for the first time, the pains inherent to that practice.
All these blend together, in a single and singularly adorable concoction.
You win, Grant thinks.
Bringing out the big guns, huh? The fucking puppy-dog eyes.
You know I can’t resist that shit.
“I’m pleased!” he says.
“No, you weren’t wrong! I’m totally pleased! Sorry if that didn’t come across, man.
“It’s just, you know. Three in the fucking morning, and all.
“And Hector Stein’s playing Renewal.
“And the Ells are going to die.
“But yeah. You’re right.
“You’re right, I’m pleased. ‘Pleased’ doesn’t begin to cover it. I don’t know of any word that does, really.
“He would, though. He’d know just the right word.
“That guy. Man.
“I really did think I was never gonna see that guy again.
“Thank you, Sylvie. You have made me a very happy man, right now.
“In spite of, you know. Everything.”
Pure rapture dances in the eyes, and in the halo.
“Current estimated time of arrival is 5:31 AM,” Sylvie says.
Sometime after midnight, Cordelia sits on a bed, looking at a box.
It’s well after midnight on the Rock. Most of the crew is asleep. The corridors are quiet, and have been for hours.
She’s about to do something naughty.
She waited until midnight, and then waited a good while more. Until the witching hour, she told herself.
She’s about to fuck some shit up.
There is no moment on the clock when the entire Rock sleeps. Each of the Squadrons keeps a night shift. It is necessary, in their line of work, to have eyes watching the world at every moment.
Even apart from the night shifts, the Rock has more than its share of insomniacs.
It has long been a custom among the crew to hold voluntary, workaholic sleep-deprivation in high esteem, as a mark of higher virtue and higher badassery.
It’s an unhealthy practice, of course. And a counter-productive one, in the end. And it doesn’t even come stamped with the Stein mark of approval.
Much the opposite, in fact. Stein has come around to a keen appreciation of its negative impact on throughput and morale. He denounces it on the regular, these days, in his morning addresses.
They still do it, though. Same as always.
Wander the corridors of the Rock at any given hour of the night, and you’ll find them.
Stoic, patient Armstrongs, refusing to sleep until some wayward piece of machinery gives up its secret, and relents. Cracked-out Blackhats, leaning more than ever into the Diet-Coke-and-Ritalin hardcore programmer schtick. Staring down the apocalypse, with bloodshot eyes that do not blink.
There’s the other sort of insomniac, too. The ones who don’t stay awake by choice. The melancholics, the neurotics, the ill-at-ease.
The crew does not like to talk about being ill-at-ease. We are soldiers, they think, in the End Times. Fighting the last war. If you want to weep and sulk, save it for later, after we have won.
You knew what you were signing up for, when you came here.
If you can’t hack it, just resign. You’ll have a home still, here, on the Rock. There is no shame in resigning.
Or rather, there is infinite shame in it. Of course there is.
But there is infinitely MORE shame in knowing that you will WILT under pressure, when shit gets tough—and keeping your Squadron badge, in spite of that knowledge.
Do your duty, or bail.
This has been the (mostly unspoken) creed, for most of the Rock’s lifetime, regarding maladies of the spirit.
Times have changed, though.
What does it mean to do your duty, when you know you are marked for death? When your work will come to naught, in any event?
You do not know the day, or the hour. Only that the curtain will come down, and soon.
Within the week, if not sooner. Within a few days—if not sooner.
They sit in their rooms, awake, ill at ease, thinking: this might be the last night. The end might come before dawn.
If I sleep now, that is the end of me.
When to mourn, if not now?
And they aren’t wrong.
There are three kinds of people, who keep odd hours on the Rock.
The overachievers, twitching at their work consoles; the wretched, making funeral preparations in their separate rooms; and another group, not yet named. The Wolves and Blackhats tasked with the commission of the world-sacrifice.
They rise in the middle of the night, in accordance with their secret timetables. They rise, and then they put everyone to sleep, forever. Themselves included.
Don’t call it death, says the unspoken credo of the crew, adapted for the End Times.
If this is death, why—then we die every night too, when we sleep!
“I pass the baton to another self, still recognizable as ME, though not continuous with me.”
“I bid the world goodbye. My thoughts grow confused, and then stop. My consciousness ends.”
“The other self, on the other side, picks up the baton and thanks me for my final service. She can remember being me, in a way, but only as an abstraction.”
“She ‘knows’ she was me, before she slept. She ‘remembers’ it. But there is no path connecting my own mind to hers. I ceased to be, and some time later, she came into existence.”
“If worries and doubts bedeviled me in my last evening, she sees these only from a distance. She sees them ‘with a fresh perspective,’ as the cliche would have it. She sees them ‘in the light of day.’ And under that light, they appear different, distant, abstract, bloodless.”
“Which is to say, she never HAD my worries and doubts to begin with. Only I did. And I have ceased to be.”
Does THAT scare you? But you do it all every night, already. When you fall asleep.
And I don’t hear you complaining, in that case.
It is no different, when we erase the whole world, and boot up a whole new one to take its place. It’s the very same thing, when you think about it.
We are fighting the last war. We are bringing the world its final renovation. Do your duty, or bail.
The Blackhat term is rebasing realworld: two words, with no space in the latter. The rest of the crew will use the Blackhat term if pressed, but otherwise they prefer to talk around the thing, in limp euphemisms.
“Using the crashes.” “Pulling a reset.”
Hector calls it Renewal, for some reason, and refuses to elaborate.
Cordelia knows more than most do. She knows Twenty-Seven. And she knows Twenty-Seven—in the Biblical sense, and in the other, deeper one.
These are not her last hours. The next planned “reset” is still a few days away, on Saturday.
And it will be the silent, routine kind, too. The kind that does not kill.
It will restrict itself, studiously, to what Hector calls the “convenient-world” tactic: a variant of the approach he used with CC-Crash 09μ, when he took Cordelia’s box and made the Academy his own again.
Rewrite the past, and you rewrite yourself. You’re a product of the past, same as all the rest. Disturb that root, and you vanish in a flurry of butterfly wings.
You can have anything you wish for, as long as you sacrifice your own self—the one who wishes—in exchange.
Suppose, though, that you want to bend the past to your advantage—without submitting to the passing of the baton, the fall of the curtain? (Or, to use the term now popular on the Rock: the “soft suicide”?)
There is a way.
Find the crash you have designed for use. Go into it, and become its rebase administrator. Stand at the highest summit, the “interactive rebase console,” and watch the alternate crash-histories, laid out for you, on their diverging train tracks.
The summit affords you a panoramic view of crash-time and crash-space. Watch closely.
Absorb all the particulars of crash history which you did not know, before this moment, and which you could not have known. Out-of-the-way trivia, irrelevant to your life, and to the life of everyone else who has woken from the crash.
Feel out the backstory. Find the bits of crash history and vicinity shadeform that no one has ever seen or touched, the ones that only exist for the sake of making the world feel real and lived-in.
Change these, and only these.
Empty storerooms, abandoned basements, the virgin summits of scenery-mountains forever in the background: find these, and fill them with jailbroken artifacts, and with loyal and helpful shade-soldiers.
Why, for all you knew—these things really were there, all along! In the original story!
Their presence makes no difference to your story. They could have been there, all along, even before you put them there.
And you would have been none the wiser, the whole time—through the whole of your story up to its last moment, in which you touched a box, became administrator, and witnessed their absence.
Let us say they were there, shall we?
Why not? It really could have been that way. Your story leaves the door open for it.
That is the magic of the thing, and the only reason it works. You pass on the baton, and find yourself picking it up, in the very next moment, without even the familiar caesura of sleep in between.
Nothing is lost, except that very last moment: the box, the trains, the panorama. You will forget that, yes. But what does it matter?
What will happen on Saturday has happened many times before. It will be more complex than what Hector did in CC-Crash 09μ, involving more than just crash-stuff, mere unseen basements and storerooms. Still, it has the same shape, and the same happy ending.
A selected group of crashed Wolves have left the designated crashes, already.
Upon exit, they fled in haste to the enclosed bunkers prepared for them, deliberately cut off from all the Rock’s monitoring and communication systems.
They have lived in strict quarantine, each confined in his own separate room. They have subsisted on frozen and tinned rations, placed in the bunkers beforehand. No one has seen them, or spoken to them. Their lives in the bunker could be one way, or another, and it would make no difference to the story outside.
They lived under strict quarantine earlier, too, inside the crash. It is not difficult for the Blackhats to peer into a crash and watch the people inside. But when it comes to the Wolves who have been designated for the sacrifice, even the nosy, information-hungry Blackhats avert their eyes.
No one knows what the Wolves do in there, before they leave.
Do they give themselves up to hedonism, to dissipation? Making themselves gluttons and satyr-kings, well-sated tyrants, ruling a sea of comely and meaningless shadeform—knowing that it will all pass away utterly, at the fall of the curtain, and that no one will ever know? So says a popular theory, on the Rock.
No one really knows, though. That’s the whole point.
Later, on Saturday, a priest of the sacrifice will enter the crash. They will come wielding a carefully-prepared ignorance. They will know nothing of the strange soldier who was once inside. He might have lived one way, while crashed, or another way; the agent does not know.
Now, he lives in a bunker. But he might live one way, or another, in the bunker. The agent does not know.
Suppose our strange soldier spent his crash-time—not in aimless revels—but in careful preparation? Suppose he got busy, learning whichever skills would be most useful to our agent now, in the next hour, the next day?
Suppose he was told, long in advance, of the present tactical situation? Suppose he went into his bunker with years of study under his belt, aimed entirely at the site and moment of his eventual deployment—here, now?
Suppose he brought maps with him into the bunkers, and timetables, and precise instructions?
Perhaps he knew, in advance, all that we have learned in our many prior acts of “soft suicide.” How the enemy bested us, the last time. Where they hid, to ambush us.
He might have been told all kinds of things! Say, the locations of the launch sites where the Angels keep their space vessels. And the way that those sites relied on security-by-obscurity, and had little security besides it. He might even have been given a plan for intrusion, stowing away, sabotage.
Suppose he had all that, with him, when he went into the bunker—?
Why not? It might have been true, all along.
That is the shape of the thing they will do on Saturday. An invisible bending of the unseen backstory.
For us, up here, nothing will change. A curtain will fall, and we won’t even notice.
As for the real fall of the real curtain—the one that scares us? The next true “reset,” that will leave us all different, afterwards?
These things cannot be planned. They happen when the situation demands it.
The situation can change quickly. But Twenty-Seven was unusually calm, when Cordelia last saw her. If the weather was about to turn toward oblivion, Twenty-Seven had no foreknowledge of it.
And Twenty-Seven would know, if anyone would.
“I will last the night,” Cordelia says, out loud.
She doesn’t know this. No one does. The situation can change quickly.
It’s helpful as a first premise, though, allowing her to go on with the rest of her work as though it might matter.
“I will last the night,” she says again.
“I will fuck shit up,” she says.
The words don’t sound right, coming from her mouth.
“I will fuck shit up. Just like Hector said he wanted, back then. When I first met him.”
She laughs, realizing what she’s saying. I will “fuck shit up”—just as I was commanded to do, by a revered authority figure!
It feels right, though, when she says it this way.
The Rock is full of natural rebels. Men and women oriented toward breaking, as a fundamental principle. They work for the final renovation as if by accident; they would be just as happy, in some other lives, if they were breaking empty bottles against their own skulls in the back alley of some nameless bar.
Heaven knows what Marika would be doing, if Stein had not grabbed hold of her cracked mind, and pointed it in a constructive direction.
Cordelia is not like them. She never has been. Her heart wants to obey, in the end.
If she sometimes turns against the worldly order, it is only as the willing lapdog of some other, higher, more worthy authority.
The Ells. Hector Stein. The special class, and its special girls, up there in space.
She only wants to join them, and be recognized by them.
The best teachers tell us to rebel, sometimes—don’t they? To fuck shit up.
That’s how we know they’re the best. They respect us. They want us to think for ourselves.
If our thoughts, after wandering here and there, bring us back again to those same teachers, and to their perfection—that is our choice and our right.
If this is my soul, Cordelia thinks, so be it.
Why not? We must be one way, or another. There must be something driving us, at the bottom, which we did not choose and cannot truthfully regret.
There are some advantages to living under Twenty-Seven’s death mark, in awareness of the onrushing curtain.
It brings a welcome clarity. When every hour is your last, shame loses its power over you. You see the systems of self-evasion which have been your constant companions through all of adulthood, and you lose your patience with them.
This is the last day. This is the last hour. I want to see myself, with no illusions, before it’s all gone.
“I am going to fuck shit up, like Hector wants,” Cordelia says.
“I’m going to do what he really wants,” she clarifies to herself.
“Even if he hasn’t told me to do it.
“He wants me to think for myself.
“Twenty-Seven does, too. I know her. She does.
“That’s why I’ve hidden myself from her, since I formulated this plan. That’s why I’ve made excuses, to avoid arbitrating with her.
“She wants me to act freely. She wants me to surprise her.”
Her girlfriend needs a surprise, that’s for sure.
Her girlfriend is Fate, and Fate’s imprint on the world. She is the heavy, ponderous perfection of the universe, and she’s getting mighty tired of all that weight.
“Twenty-Seven wants me to do this,” Cordelia says.
“I’m crazy. And she wants me to be.
“I’m a child. I’m an idiot. And she wants me to be.
“Everyone else has clockwork plans, with layers and layers. Me? I have a baseless, stupid little hope.
“That’s what Twenty-Seven needs. She needs things that can’t be explained. She needs magic—crazy, inexplicable magic.
“Real magic.”
She has dimmed the overhead lights, and not just because it’s past one in the morning. She wants to evoke the atmosphere of the candle-lit Academy.
She wants to remember the wizard-world. How it was comfortable, beautiful, right. How she was special, and paid a cost for it, but only an ordinary sort of cost.
How she had her endless latitude to be naughty, and how the Ells were always there, to catch her at the bottom of the fall.
“I’m an idiot,” she says, proudly.
She cues up a track on the room’s sound system. A jaunty little instrumental piece, on dulcimer and pizzicato strings, from the soundtrack to Chester Chrestomath and the Door into Nothing.
Music for being naughty.
I hope no one can hear this from the hallway, she thinks.
It would have been smarter, probably, to keep the music off.
What can I say? I’m an idiot.
She looks at the box, one last time.
She brings a hand forward, and touches it.
Don’t get too excited, reader. Cordelia’s box is pretty toothless out here, in the real world.
There are hundreds like it on the Rock. They’re useful, sure, but only in ways that would bore you, if we were to explain them. Monitoring the CMS. Establishing link chains. That sort of thing.
They’re unremarkable. Just another Blackhat artifact—the commonest one, in fact.
Cordelia isn’t a Blackhat, though. She does not have the Squadron’s authorization.
And, when it comes down to it, she doesn’t really know what she’s doing.
She links to the CMS, and monitors it.
The Blackhats have come a long way, since the old, quaint, sun-speckled days when she worked beside them in CC-Crash 09μ. They’ve built new interfaces, more powerful ones, for watching the crash system and meddling in it.
Wow.
I REALLY don’t know what the hell I’m doing, do I?
She sees with all her senses. In prickles and waves, all over her body, she feels the shape of the crash system. She inhales, and the CMS logs flow into her nostrils. She smells ingress and egress.
The sensory onslaught is intensely uncomfortable.
This CMS interface is designed to maximize the rate of information transfer. The Blackhats have taken consciousness apart, placed the disassembled pieces on a table, and examined each one in turn, asking: “can this thing transmit bits? How many? How fast?” Wherever they found bandwidth, they put it to use.
There is a meaning behind the itch in her navel. There is a meaning behind the throbbing pain in her left foot.
A meaning, behind the irritating sense that there is a word on the tip of her tongue.
A meaning, too, behind the blasts of alternating hot and cold air. And the crawling feeling in her skin.
Behind the sudden pangs of lust, for people and things (things?!) she would not normally find attractive.
If she were a Blackhat, she’d know what it all meant.
She’s not a Blackhat, though. She’s an idiot, and now she is an intensely fucking uncomfortable idiot. With no idea what she’s doing.
At this level of awareness, there is no need for the old, crude sky-and-sunset construct.
She makes herself see the sky anyway. For sentimental reasons. It overlays the rest, and plays synesthetic games with it.
When she falls through the sky, it is only an echo of the falling mercury in a thousand thermometers. The peach-colored clouds are a veil placed over the peach-flavored crackle-and-pop of link static.
Eight crepuscular rays make the shape of a compass, artificially exact. She hears the word eight inside them, and her number-sense tingles.
A long-division problem crunches away in her mind’s eye, each of its terms coming pre-made with a complex of inexplicable associations. The number 6 feels like an old lover, one she’d prefer to forget.
5, for its part, just smells like bleach.
It is a delicious smell, and it fills her with an overpowering hunger. She will—she must—gobble up every 5 ever written on paper or parchment, at any point in past or present or future. She will eat every real 5, and every hypothetical one, and every one which is present only through implication. In this world, and every other.
Focus!
I need to concentrate—need to FIND IT—
Find advanced containment.
The repetitive dulcimer of the Chrestomath music is transmuted, here, into a sick clacking dislodgment in the sequential structure of thought.
FIND IT
The words are split apart by the clacking, and then reassembled, hideously, with the joints and seams in entirely wrong places.
Need to FOCUS
FIND ADVANCED CONTAINMENT
Clack clack clack, goes the dulcimer, rapid-fire—the words scream, “I’m still alive! Stop!”—but it’s no use, clack clack clack—
The knife comes down, nonetheless, and makes a clacking cut—and now the stitching needle comes out, with a clack—
She has found the worst thing imaginable. It is the sound made by the words “find advanced containment,” after they have gone under the dulcimer’s knife.
Cordelia has a new mission in life: that no one should have to hear this sound, ever. If she has children, later, she will shield them from this with her life.
With anyone else’s life, too, if it came to that. She’d kill someone in cold blood, she now knows, if they stood between her and this. The clacking wrongness in the words
Find
advanced
containment
The worst part is that she can’t get her mind to shut up. Every time she thinks the words, it happens all over again. It is the worst sound imaginable, and she could end it, but she
Find advanced containment.
Find advanced containment. FOCUS.
No one said it would be easy, to save everyone.
You’ve gotta be brave, to save everyone.
You’ve gotta be ready to go to dark places, under the earth.
And fight monsters, there.
You’ve gotta be brave, to save everyone.
And I am. I’m brave.
Don’t believe me? Don’t have to. HECTOR STEIN says so.
He does! Twenty-Five told me! “Hector Stein himself, who sometimes pines for your bravery . . .”
She forces herself to look the vortex head-on, and make what she can of it.
She’s a decorated hero of Wolf Squadron. She’s been through the CMS many, many times. It’s an old friend, in a way.
And her old friend must be here, underneath it all.
The primary job of this interface is to communicate the state of the crashes. And where are they? What is the word for “crash,” in the native language of this hell?
She surveys her body, and all at once, she understands that the crashes are there.
Laid out on her body, as in a medical diagram.
The first captivity spans her feet, legs, and hips.
The new crashes, of the third captivity, writhe and tingle across her torso and arms.
As for her head? She knows, in a flash, what is meant to go there. The second captivity, of course. Advanced containment.
The crash-sensations stop, abruptly, at her neck. Above, there is nothing remotely like them.
Only the texture of spent chewing gum, on her palate; a whiff of acetone; and hot folds of sweaty, leathery skin, filling up the space where her brain ought to be, burning with an unscratchable itch.
“Advanced containment came to an end,” her girlfriend had s̶a̶i̶d̶, as their minds touched.
“I was the one who ended it. You know that. You were there.”
“I killed your Ells. And destroyed my sister’s work.”
Grant takes another sip, and gags.
He should really wean himself off of coffee, one of these days. It’s not like he has much else to do.
There’s only one kind of coffee available in the house, and it’s shit. It’s worse than Grant would have thought coffee could be. It’s too bitter, yet lacking in flavor. The texture is thick and slimy, invariably; this is a constant, stubbornly maintained no matter how one varies the parameters of the grinding/pouring process.
It smells, to a first approximation, like rotting salmon. There are coffee-like notes in the odor, but they’re well hidden.
He could ask Sylvie to bring him some non-shitty coffee. There’s gotta be plenty around, just sitting there, in warehouses.
But Grant has made a choice. He’s drawn a whimsical, quasi-moral line in the sand, and he’s sticking to it.
His weird power over Sylvie—resulting from the whole dog thing, and maybe something else too—is a precious resource. He can’t spend it on trivialities. If he needs a mundane sort of assistance, he’ll ask the Ells.
And there’s a pride in it, too. He enjoys the discipline. He kind of likes the coffee, in a way. It’s something that resists. It dares him to back down. And so he has a chance to not back down. A chance to feel strong.
I am the man you see on the screen, I am that man you see with huge rock-solid pecs who protects government secrets, I am on guard against terrorists against China and Iran
He isn’t any of that, anymore. If he ever was. But he is a man who chokes down shit coffee, each morning, without a single wince or grimace.
Sylvie stands at the counter, heating up some tinned beans for breakfast.
They made the whole house out of shade-stuff, except for the larder in the basement. Its stocks are real, sourced from warehouses and supermarket shelves.
Shade-stuff only imitates the bulk properties of matter, not its chemical structure. You could eat it, if you wanted to, but it wouldn’t fill you.
(Same reason the shades have no body odor.
The ones in the real world, I mean.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(There was something strange, when I first kissed Twenty-Seven.
I couldn’t place it.
Something was wrong—it scared me!
I was so flustered by it, that when I finally realized the reason—
I just blurted it out, without thinking.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(“You don’t smell like anything!”)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(Not my smoothest moment.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
It’s still dark outside. It’ll be dark for a long while yet. It’s not even four in the morning.
The Ells are elsewhere. In their bedroom, probably. Trying to have a normal day, together, since it is the last one.
“Sylvie?
“Can I ask some questions?”
“Of course,” the shade says.
“So. We didn’t win.
“The beasts are still . . . fucking with the big advanced containment machine? That’s still happening?
“We’re still on that—what was it—that thirty-hour timer?”
“I do not place much stock in the thirty-hour timer,” Sylvie says.
“I wish I had never mentioned it to begin with.
“But yes, Grant. The beasts are dismantling the machine, piece by piece. It is a long process, since the device is so massive.
“They have already killed a number of the people I was trying to protect.
“In some cases, they have done this directly, by disconnecting or disrupting the enclosures in which these bilaterals slept.
“Others have died through failures in the power system, or in the systems that control temperature and airflow. Much of the mechanical apparatus of the machine, in terms of size and mass, exists to support these functions. Accordingly, most of the mechanical damage sustained thus far has been in these systems.
“The parts that generate and sustain the crash itself are comparably small. And buried deep, behind the rest.
“The beasts will reach these places, soon. But they have not reached them yet.”
“How about that wall? You said you were making, like. An insurmountable wall?”
“As I expected,” Sylvie says, “it was surmounted, in short order.
“Somehow. I don’t know.
“I do not understand the beasts,” he says ruefully.
Grant pours another blob of salmon-scented slime into his mouth.
The shock of impact is a welcome distraction. For a few seconds, he forgets all about beasts, and walls, and Hector Fucking Stein playing Renewal, and the smug fucking grin on Stein’s punchable, invincible face.
Then he remembers, all over again.
Renewal. Hector’s smug fucking grin. An abrupt break in the long stalemate. A thousand armed Wolves leaving their crashes, all at once.
A wheat field on the living room TV, its long golden lines marred by a spatter of brown specks.
Cut to another shot, from a lower-flying drone. Brown and red, against gold, in a repeating pattern that would be rather pretty, if it weren’t made of bloodied corpses.
Dogs, mostly.
All the wheat leaves stand at the same angle, and blur together, into a flat gold surface. But the illusion breaks, at the places where the bodies press it flat to the ground.
He remembers, and becomes hopelessly confused. All over again.
“Sylvie?”
“Yes, Grant?”
“Why hasn’t Hector stopped them?”
The shade is silent.
“Because, like.
“Hector said he could ‘handle the beasts,’ without your help, right?
“And he fucking handled them, like a lot of them, right there in that moment. I don’t think I hallucinated that part.
“He can do whatever the hell he wants, now, right? He’s shown his hand. Everyone can see he’s got some kinda crazy power, now, whether or not they know it’s Renewal shit.
“Not that it’s very hard to figure out. That it’s Renewal shit. Even I got that one.
“Point is, he can handle the beasts now.
“That’s how Renewal works. I don’t care if they’re a deep cosmic mystery, I don’t care if they can claw through impenetrable walls. Doesn’t matter. Just reload the save state, over and over, until you find a way.
“I don’t get it. Why is this even a thing, anymore? Why doesn’t Hector just go in there, and clear the beasts out of the big machine?
“Why hasn’t he already done it? It doesn’t make any sense!”
Sylvie sighs.
“I do not know what Hector thinks. He will not speak to me. I can only speculate.
“I would assume, Grant, that Hector thinks the beasts are wasting their time. And he is happy to let them.”
One of Sylvie’s clawed hands protrudes into the corner of Grant’s frame of vision, bearing a steaming bowl.
Breakfast is served. Grant stares down the pile of pinto beans, and steels himself. He hopes Sylvie at least remembered the salt, this time.
The shade returns to the counter, and begins washing dishes.
“Wait, Hector doesn’t care about advanced containment? About all those people?
“Figures. That guy. That fucken asshole.”
“No,” Sylvie says.
“Hector believes that it has ended, for good.
“At least, I assume he does. It is the natural thing to believe, in his position.
“It is not easy, from the outside, to see the flickers of life still present in the crash. I have obscured them from view, deliberately.
“I knew, from the moment I decided to keep the crash alive, that I must keep its life hidden. I did not know how I knew this. At the time, I did not know why it would be necessary.
“But I am coming to understand, now, I think.
“It is just as you said earlier, Grant. Hector’s leverage over the timeline increases in proportion to the age of the crashes he can bring under his spell.
“Michael’s crash still lives. It is the oldest. If Hector can access and rebase it, nothing else matters.
“But if he cannot? In that case, advanced containment would be his most powerful point of leverage—if he knew it was there, available for his use.”
“Okay,” Grant says.
“I get it, I think. You’re keeping it a secret from Hector. Because it’s an early save state.
“And you kept it a secret, the whole time . . . even before you knew Hector was save-scumming?”
Sylvie is silent for a time.
He sighs.
“I have . . . another means of knowledge.”
He is speaking in a different voice, now. Flat, distant, without life.
“I have told you, Grant. I have told you already. There is the other one, with my face.
“I have told you this, already. I do not like revisiting it.”
Grant winces.
“There is a terrible thing, lurking in my peripheral vision. Its name is ‘Sylvie.’
“To the extent that I am sane, now, it is because I cannot fully make out the shape of this thing, this ‘Sylvie.’ I see pieces of it, poking out from the shadows, but no more.
“The terrible thing watches me, from a few moves ahead. It watches me, from my future.
“In different moments, it beckons me forward, or bids me to stop. It has a schedule for me, and moves me in accordance.
“It knows what I will know. I know ‘Renewal,’ now—so, then, it always knew ‘Renewal.’ It shows me what it knows, in shadowed pieces, when it deems this necessary.
“And it knows the beasts. It understands them.
“This, I am coming to think, is the fundamental difference between me and the shadowed thing.
“It understands the beasts. I do not.
“But I must. And so I will, soon enough.
“That is when I will complete my conversion into ‘Sylvie.’ Into the terrible thing. That is where he began, and where I am to end.”
“Dude.”
As if in penance, Grant downs an especially large mouthful of coffee.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I brought it up.
“Like, I didn’t know I was bringing it up. But I should have guessed.”
“It’s all right,” Sylvie says, flatly.
“I love you, master,” he says, just as flatly.
“I love you too, man.
“Time for a change of topic, I think.
“Azad! Let’s talk about Azad.”
“Azad,” Sylvie says, sounding alive again.
“Let’s talk about Azad. First things first—how?
“You’re telling me he’s free, now. Not crashed anymore. How the hell did that happen?
“Weren’t the Wolves keeping him in, like, an extra-secure crash? Like they thought he was some kinda war asset?
“And I mean. If it really is him who’s teaching the beasts to talk—”
Grant catches himself, remembering Organism 2 in the basement. Sylvie’s hollow laugh. The halo clattering to the floor.
None of that, now. Think happy thoughts! Walks in the park, chew toys, good smells!
Stay with me, Sylvie.
“Anyway,” he says.
“Tell me how Azad got out of there.”
“I wish I could, Grant. I cannot. I do not understand.
“Early this morning, his crash simply . . . thawed. It thawed, and its Wolf guards vacated the area. That is all I know.
“Estimated time of arrival is 5:29 AM.”
(Dunno if there’s a place to fit this into the text, but.
I did see Twenty-Five that evening.
Briefly, in the hallway.
When I was doing the rounds, trying to find out who was still awake.
We didn’t talk.
She was crying.
Her face was beet red.
Her harlequin makeup was running.
Her back was hunched.
That’s all. I just saw her in the hall, briefly.
Wanted to note it down, just in case.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(She spent that night with Hector.
I didn’t talk to her until the next night.
When I did, well.
That was the first time I saw Twenty-Five without her mask.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(Not that it’s FAKE, I mean.
The persona, the myth, the pose.
It’s real, it’s who she is.
But I saw another thing, that second night, that she tries to hide behind it.
She cursed Eleven, and didn’t try to make her curses clever.
She cursed with a shaking voice, a beet-red face.
She made strange pleas to Twenty-Seven—
I almost want to call them prayers.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(She cursed herself, mainly.
For backing down.
For being, in the end, a FAILURE.
She lived for one thing, only, and she’d FAILED.
She kept saying that, over and over.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(She narrated the rebase of the Mooncrash, over and over.
It’s her founding myth. She craved its solace.
But it’s only a myth, to her, nothing more.
All rebases, except the “convenient-world” type, end up forgotten.
“The one truly good moment in my life,” she wailed.
“And I can’t even REMEMBER it!”)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(She scared me.
But she seemed comforted by my presence, in the end.
For a friendless shut-in, I’m surprisingly good at consoling people.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
(Turns out all that mediator training was good for something.
Even in the real world.
And I guess it helps, too, that I’M a failure.
And have been for so long.
I know the territory.)
[CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]
A plague of gnats comes to Cordelia.
They bite, and there is a meaning in the bites. They swarm near her ears, buzzing, and it is the loudest noise she has heard in her life. And there is a meaning in this.
She’s not a Blackhat. She isn’t meant to be here at all. She’s an idiot, and all meaning is lost on her.
FOCUS.
I thought this might work. I thought it had a chance.
WHY?
Bleach fills her nostrils. The number 5 is pressing itself onto her lips.
It pries them open, and forces itself down her throat.
Her dream has come true. She has eaten 5. It’s in her belly, now.
Her stomach distends and contorts. It ceases to be convex, taking on a pentacular shape, with pointy edges that skewer adjacent organs.
The number 5 grows inside her as a parasite.
All her blood transmutes, at once, into air. A ritual chant stirs the air, propagating along the hollowed-out tubes of her veins and arteries: the names of the Platonic solids, enumerated five times a second. She gets goosebumps, and their tiny raised hairs swivel this way and that, to trace out geometrical figures.
FOCUS
I came here to look for advanced containment.
WHY?
Because there were smaller crashes, inside it, like nested dolls.
Because there was a smaller crash, once, where Twenty-Seven’s favorite sister lived.
And wrote down her life’s work, for safekeeping.
And I thought, maybe
She is a pencil sketch of the numeral 5. Her eyes are compound eyes, with five parts. From ten different angles, she watches herself fall.
A tiny blue 5, plummeting through pumpkin-colored clouds, toward night.
I thought
I thought maybe there was something alive in there, still
WHY?
Unseen Whos, living on the speck
A fetal alien, unseen, inside the Celestial Orb
And no one knew, except me!
Because no one CARED, except me!
Because no one else had HOPE! No one else had—a pure heart, a child’s heart!
Real magic responds to purity of heart, and accepts no substitutes.
You must become as little children, or the door won’t open for you—no matter how CLEVER you are—
No one else was willing to say: I DO believe in fairies! I DO!
The maw of the night opens to swallow her.
That was—that was really WHY—that was the ONLY reason—
The quality of her penmanship undergoes a curious regression. Her lower part, the half-circular arc, slumps and crumples. The line at her top tilts, and is no longer horizontal.
She becomes three crude lines, barely even joined.
They put their faith in me.
Hector.
Lilith and Lucifer, before him.
And others, before them.
They CHOSE me. Singled me out
And this is how I repay them
By hiding in children’s stories. In comforting dreams, of mancers and Whos
Fleeing to their story-logic, so readily understood
Fleeing, from the REAL WORLD, which is all made of cathodes and anodes
Not the pleasing arcanity of the words, “cathode,” “anode.”
But the REAL things—whatever THEY are!
The belly of the night digests her.
Somewhere else, very far away, Cordelia sits on a bed, and cries.
Once upon a time, I was CHOSEN.
I was chosen, and I acted on whims, and poked around in what was not my business.
And it was
It was . . . all right?
It was permitted?
Because they were always there.
To catch me, at the bottom of my fall.
Someone, someone—catch me, please! I’m falling!
Lilith, I’m falling! Can you hear me? It’s Cordelia, it’s your chosen girl!
I’m alive here, on this speck! And I’m
Falling
《 ID polling is active. 》
Cordelia opens her eyes. All five of them.
If you’re out there, somewhere
If I have to believe in you, first? Then—
I DO believe!
I do believe in you, Lilith!
I do!
Five compound eyes scan the night sky, in search of a fairy Godmother.
《 ID polling is active. Polling for predefined ID [SHADE][CC09μ]__LILITH. 》
《 Poll is reporting. Matches so far: 0. 》
《 Poll is ongoing. 》
Azad is lying on Grant’s bed, supine. His eyes face the ceiling. His arms are flat at his side, with palms upturned.
They put him here, when he arrived. It was obvious, from the look of him, that he needed a bed to lie on.
He looked sick. That was Grant’s first thought, when he saw him come in.
He drooped in the arms of Sylvie’s Angel, like a swooned damsel. Every part of him completely slack, lifeless—except the eyes, which stared and darted with more than the usual agitation.
Was I like that, Grant wondered, when I first got here? Or is this something worse?
Grant’s second thought was, he’s even thinner than I remember. Or maybe he was always this thin, and I’ve forgotten.
His third: I’m afraid.
He’s been craving this, ever since he woke up in this house for the first time. He’s always wanted to see Azad again. It was one of the first things he made clear to Sylvie.
But the man he sees on the bed, now, does not quite line up with the man in his mind, who he craved.
Sick, Grant keeps thinking, as he considers the body on his bed.
Not just “sick,” like, with the flu, or something. Sick in some elemental way. Full of poison.
Not a diseased body, but a disease embodied.
It does, in fact, occur to Grant that he has started to think of himself in much the same way. He considers this, and finds it does not make him feel any less estranged from the body on the bed.
The body is sick. And not only that. There is a heaviness in the frozen mask of the face, a grim and otherworldly gravity. The gaunt cheeks made Grant think of fasting, rather than starvation: a man ritually prepared, for a grave and final duty.
The man on Grant’s bed looks serious, above all. Deeply and deadly serious.
Grant thinks of Sylvie’s words: You spoke and it was pain, only pain. Because of your friend, Azad.
Maybe he was always sick. Maybe this thing, on my bed, is what Azad is. This thing, that Sylvie saw, and everyone else saw—everyone but me.
Maybe the rest was just the Mooncrash, and my own imagination. Just the crash jerking me off. Scanning my id, inventing a playmate for me—out of the raw material of a very sick man, who I never really knew.
The four established tenants of the house stand around the bed, watching the body.
They’ve been here for twenty minutes.
Grant’s not sure what they’re waiting for. He feels, as usual, like he’s the only one in the room who hasn’t read the script.
Sylvie and the Ells have experience dealing with newly thawed bilaterals. They’d nursed him back to health, when he was in that state. He assumes they know what they’re doing.
No one speaks. Grant doesn’t dare ask why. Maybe that’s part of the script. Maybe talking to Azad would hurt him, at this stage of his transition into reality.
Azad’s eyes are very wide. They flit back and forth rapidly, and sometimes narrow, only to widen again a moment later. Whatever it is he sees on the ceiling—or in it, or behind it—must be pretty damn interesting.
When Grant looks, he just sees the same old ceiling.
“Oh, enough of this!” Azad cries, suddenly.
Grant jumps in his seat.
Lucifer edges back from the side of the bed.
“This is a punishment, I take it.
“For what? I can all too easily guess, I think.
“I’ve dallied too long, for your taste, in the single-minded study of nostalgium and related mnemopoietic matters.
“I am losing myself in a scholar’s maze, you’ll say.
“You’ll remind me of my purpose. My ‘only remaining purpose,’ you’ll put it—as you invariably do, in kindness to the epodes: a mnemopoietic bargain, three words for the price of one.
“You’ll remind me that I ought to be dead, morally and prudentially speaking. You’ll remind me, O maiden in polluted shape, why you have arrested me at the near side of Činwad-puhl for a duration far outstripping the conventional long weekend.
“You’ll remind me that I am alive, or ‘alive,’ not for the dry delights of the stemmatic method;
“Nor to reflect carefully on the varieties of science-fictional experience, on the hairbreadth line between the uncanny and the Weird;
“Nor to apply the same reflections to the construction of neologisms, weighing one against another without end, discarding each one in turn, as familiarity dulls the effect which is its ‘only remaining purpose’;
“—but to win a war.
“Pity. Just when I was beginning to have some fun, for once!
“Ah, I see now!—for we can’t be having that, can we? The gears of your torture device want for grease, and a hitch somewhere in the machinery has set the motor running in reverse.
“Well, if it’s punishment itself you find lacking . . . I remain, as ever, your obedient servant. I only ask one thing: that you leave off these limp, lilting games, these diversions on the way to the main event, and get down to business.
“Show yourself to me. If my efforts fail to please you, in the least respect, then come and reprimand me. There is only one remedy for schoolboy errors. Recall it to mind, and then to hand, and bring it to my flesh.
“Or—if you play with my senses, not to teach some obscure lesson, but as a deferred and devolved form of a simpler, more brutal kind of play—need I remind you that I am here, helpless, at your mercy, already?
“Come to me. Have your way with me, if that’s what it is you wish. Or string me up on the rack, if you wish that instead.
“No, no. You don’t wish for either one of those, alone, do you?—but for both of them, at once. I know how your wants are structured, my Cadmean vixen; that knowledge is one of the few things you can never take from me.
“Well, here I am! In your clutches, pinned to the ground at the near end of the bridge, with my face grinding into the dirt, so that I cannot look up and see the arches of the cosmic crossroads.
“Despoil me, dammit! What are you waiting for? Why hide yourself behind these tedious illusions?
“I can endure anything, I think; I can certainly endure this sort of phantasmagoria, for as long as you wish to extend it; you shouldn’t think you’ve found a potent new means of torment, simply because I bitch and moan like this.
“My complaint is limited. I find it unaesthetic, that’s all. Your efforts are usually prettier than this, and better wrought.”
Azad seems to be done, finally.
Grant looks around the room, to verify that no one else saw that coming, either.
We have strayed from the script. The thought puts Grant at ease, a little, and gives him strength to ask what he thinks is the obvious question:
“Azad? Who are you, uh. Who are you talking to?”
The Dialogue of Azad the Apocalypt
Dramatis personae
Azad—a bilateral.
Grant—a bilateral.
Sylvester—an anomaling shade.
Lucifer—a fictive shade.
Lilith—a fictive shade.
Azad: You.
Grant: Me?
Grant: If you’re talking to me, then uh. You’re gonna have to be clearer.
Grant: I understood like 20 percent of that, max. 20 percent, if we’re being generous.
Azad: Grant? Grant! Oh, what fun. You’ve constructed a phantom figure of my old roommate! What role have you set out for him, I wonder?
Azad: Perhaps this is foreplay.
Grant: Azad.
Grant: I don’t know how to make you believe this, but I’m not a “phantom figure.” I’m not a dream.
Grant: I’m really here. You’re really here.
Grant: I don’t know what Hector’s guys were doing to you, in that crash. Sounds like they were doing some pretty crazy shit. But that’s over, now. You’re out. You’re thawed.
Azad: [. . .]
Grant: You’re in the real world.
Grant: In Minnesota.
Grant: In my house.
Grant: Well, my house, and these guys’. Sylvie, Lucifer, Lilith: meet Azad. Azad: meet Sylvie, Lucifer, Lilith.
[Azad’s head turns, with great effort. He sees Sylvie, and freezes.]
Azad: You.
Sylvie: Hello, Azad.
Sylvie: It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
[Grant winces, thinking: no way it is. Thinking, Sylvie, we need you. Stay with me, now. Please.]
Azad: You! It is you, isn’t it? I was told I would know you, by your claws. And so it is.
Azad: We have passed from the age of man. Four-thousand-odd years was a good run, I think, enough to ripen the crop without spoiling it. We wrote some nice ditties; we fought some picturesque wars; we would have carried on in the same vein, to long past the point of tedium, if we had not been interrupted by the dawn of the next age.
Azad: The bridle descended—on our heads, this time. The muzzle went over our jaws, to put a much-needed end to four millennia of yapping.
Azad: Two feet serve four, now. The canons of beauty are set aright at last, with the majesty of a furry coat at its summit. There is no longer any need to pander to the hairless apes in their perverse chauvinisms, pretending that it is finer to be plain and naked than to be coated in finery.
Azad: Why, even the apes prized one another’s hair! Even under the pressure of their own ideology, they could not stop the light of eternal beauty from peeking through the cracks. Long live the new age!
Lilith [sotto voce]: We should get ready to sedate him, if need be. I’m worried he might be in rapid thaw shock.
Lilith [sotto voce]: He does not seem entirely lucid.
Grant [sotto voce]: You don’t know him, Lilith.
Grant [sotto voce]: This is just . . . what he’s like.
Azad: Long live the new age, in which man takes up his proper place. We are less subtle than the four-foots, and fall to cruder traps.
Azad: Hear me, Cadmean fox: I understand perfectly well which of us is meant to wear the muzzle, if we are going by the law of nature, which is the only law that lasts. Were our places reversed, I have no doubt that you would wriggle out of this trap in short order.
Azad: Long live the New Age! But it won’t. It wasn’t meant to.
Azad: By the law of nature, the beasts ought to rule for four thousand years—and then more, in recognition of their native superiority.
Azad: But this is not written. It is not to be. There is no Age of Beasts listed in heaven’s index. The Age of Man is the last true age.
Azad: What comes after it, in heaven’s index? Only an eclogic dream, a sort of comic epilogue, in which all remaining tensions fade, and the players join the audience in merriment.
Azad: After that—? But there is no “after that.” We reach the cliff of the final page. The curtain falls, and will not rise again.
Azad: And that [he turns to Sylvie]—is why you were sent, Laeleps. The dog to end all dogs. The last beast, to scour away all the others.
Azad: But you can’t, can you?—not when the others are so finely furred, and so clever when they are trapped.
Sylvie: I’m sorry. I do not understand.
Azad: They called you Iskandar, for your fragrant breath, which has a double purpose. A sweet smell, to tempt us: you breathe on us, and we rouse from our penultimate dream. You wake us into history, one last time.
Azad: And a sweet smell, fit for embalming: you breathe on us again, and we end.
Sylvie: I do not understand.
Azad: I’m sorry. Your myth is . . . capacious. I have heard so much about you . . .
Sylvie: Heard? From whom?
Azad: Are you mocking me?
Azad: “From whom?” Who do you think? From some little, scurrying, four-footed thing, of course. I am a prisoner in a lightless cave, with no company but theirs.
Azad: I feel myself more housecat than man, at this point. I am starting to feel deficient, not having one of their metal cages around my skull.
Azad: I can no longer discern the line between my own buttocks, and the infinite cushion it rests on: everywhere-heaven, beneath.
Sylvie: You give the beasts speech. They talk. And it is me, that they talk about.
Azad: But of course! You’re the end.
Azad: Of course they talk of you! . . . you, Death wishspawn . . . you septichromatic Shining One . . . and too its Silent keeper . . .
Azad: You memento peccare, ancient monument to ancient hubris, radioluminescent with the warning-light, the death-light, the moon-flame . . . you ray through the rafters . . . the well-hidden sores on the body of innocence, and the older thing that leaks from them, purulent and malodorous, and displeasing to the eye . . .
[He convulses. Lilith puts her hand to his forehead.]
Grant: Azad. Look at me.
[He looks.]
Grant: Hey.
Grant: Remember me? I’m Grant.
Grant: From the facility, and the Mooncrash. Remember?
Grant: Don’t look at Sylvie. Look at me.
Azad: Grant? But you have shrunk. You used to be much taller, I think.
Grant: I’m sitting down, Azad. [He points to the wheelchair.]
Azad: Oh.
Grant: Remember when we used to talk, Azad? And you would go off on your tangents?
Grant: And I would say, make sense, Azad. Or else I’m going to beat sense into you.
Azad: You did say that, I think.
Azad: Grant did, I mean. You are a shade, in Twenty-Five’s crash. She’s made a shade that looks like my old roommate, as part of some tiresome mind game.
Azad: Show yourself, vixen. You are still hiding.
Azad: Do you think it is right, for you to hide? I had thought ‘hiding’ was an unpardonable sin, in the law of your sorority. I do have that right, don’t I?
Grant: I’m not a shade. I’m just a guy. I’m right here.
Azad: Grant did ‘beat sense into me,’ on occasion. I do remember that.
Azad: You like making me remember that, don’t you, Twenty-Five? I know how your wants are structured.
Azad: I suspect we are coming, now, to the point of this entire scene. I admit, it’s a novel device. I bow before your ingenuity, and rescind all my hastily-made complaints. I am, as ever, your obedient servant.
Grant: Let’s play a game, Azad.
Grant: Let’s play a game, where you pretend that you’re really here. And I’m really here, too. And I’m really Grant.
Azad: You propose a painful game, figment.
Azad: And that’s my favorite kind.
Azad: So. Let’s imagine, for the fun of it, that you are Grant.
Azad: Do you know, Grant, that you are about to end?
Grant: [. . .]
Azad: You don’t, do you?
Azad: That’s why this game is painful. It would be so much easier if you were an illusion, made to order, with an insect’s lifespan. A puppet, who will live for an hour, play out one side of a stock sadomasochistic fantasy, and then pass into oblivion.
Azad: But we are all like that, even the ‘real’ ones among us. We are all going to end.
Azad: That is what the cats tell me. In between tales of the first and last dog, who brought sin into the world at the beginning, and will rule the world at its close. Who met the Speaking Tree, which knew his future, and told him his death.
Azad: I am not a man, but a housecat. I am coming around to their morality.
Azad: If you knew what I do, Grant, you’d beg to be given up as a sacrifice. As I do.
Azad: There are others like us. Many, many others. Repeated indefinitely. A whole tower of life.
Azad: Life, everywhere. We can’t conceive of how much life there is, everywhere.
Azad: We look at our four-thousand-odd years, the empires we made, the multitudes we fed on grain, and we grow dizzy just trying to hold all the names in mind—much less their referents.
Azad: Too much? But it is only one homely neighborhood, in a city which we cannot see, in a nation made of cities. The nation is part of a greater mass, too, and that greater mass is part of another; the scope of our words fails, but the series goes on.
Azad: There are others like us, everywhere. Except in one respect. We happen to live on the fulcrum, around which all the rest pivots.
Azad: We live in the Almost-Nowhere. It’s an ordinary neighborhood, like all the others. People live there—we do—but people live everywhere, only we do not see them.
Azad: It’s an ordinary neighborhood, except for the fact that the tower of life hangs from its ceiling.
Azad: Do you know, Grant, that the tower of life is marked for demolition? Everyone is going to die.
Azad: Almost-everyone, I should say.
Azad: If there’s a way to save it, it can only be through some application of force at the site of the fulcrum.
Azad: Do you see the housecat ethic, Grant? It has become second nature to me.
Azad: If we could do something to save the tower—? Something, anything—no matter how painful, or ignominious—?
Azad: It would be our duty, I think. No matter what it was, it would be our duty.
[He laughs.]
Azad: Oh, listen to me, nattering on. As though any of this matters!
Azad: We cannot do anything to save the tower. It is written thus, in heaven’s index.
Azad: Oh, why do I talk? What’s the use? Grant, we are about to end! These words will pass away, and no one will remember them.
Lucifer: You keep saying, we are going to end.
Lucifer: I want to know what you mean by that, Azad.
[My death is overdetermined, he thinks. If not one way, then another. The different deaths are crowding at my door, now, vying to be the one who gets to deal the blow.]
Azad: Kosmopoiesis.
Azad: That’s a word I made up, nothing more. A half-hearted gloss, slapped onto the substrate of a variety of inarticulate animal barks.
Azad: ALL, HOME, GONE, they said. And other things of that nature. I can’t pretend that I understood, any more than anyone would.
Azad: But once they had the word, they ran off with it, on their own. And seemed to mean something by it.
Azad: Some sort of . . . instantaneous irruption, affecting everything at once.
Azad: A rewriting of history, by a singular author. There’s a fulcrum involved—a different one—and someone gets hold of it, and it’s like the book of history itself is there, in that fulcrum, and they can write onto it . . .
Grant: Rebasing the real world.
Azad: What was that?
Grant: Long story. I’ll tell you later.
Grant: Point is, I know what you’re talking about. It’s not, like, some deep mystery, that only cats can know.
Grant: It’s just this weird hack, built in to the way that crashes work.
Grant: Hector’s known about it this whole time, I think.
Azad: Yes, Hector! Hector Kosmopoietes!
Azad: It’s him, who will end us. The dog was only a harbinger, a trumpet-blower. Hector is the one who closes the last page, and brings down the curtain. So it is written.
Azad: He has the power, already. It is only an accident of circumstance that we are still here, nattering. We will be here until Hector takes hold of his fulcrum, and then we will end.
Azad: He will do it whenever he likes. He will do it at whatever time pleases him. And then, we will end.
Lucifer: And there is nothing to be done. We wait, and then we die.
Azad: No! God, no!
Azad: What am I doing? Stupid, stupid Azad! Here I am, at a fulcrum of my own, and I fail to move it!
Azad: There is something we can do.
Azad: It’s the only thing the animals talk about, anymore, when I’m with them. They know the end is coming, and they plead with me.
Azad: I have taken my sweet time coming to it. Forgive me, please. I am sick with thawing. And I have spent the last few months attempting to talk to cats.
Lucifer, breathlessly: . . . yes?
Azad: We can remember!
Lucifer: . . . Remember.
Azad: We can write!
Lucifer: . . . write?
Sylvie: Write.
Sylvie: I do like to write, I am finding.
Sylvie: Lucifer has been teaching me.
Sylvie: I am already so far gone, by my old standards: why not go all the way? Become a spinner of sign-trains, with no object but play.
Lucifer: Yes, yes, Sylvie. It’s been fun. Now Azad, you were saying . . . ?
Azad: We can write autobiography!
[Lucifer waits a moment, expecting more.]
Lucifer: Autobiography.
Azad: Yes!
Azad: Mnemopoiesis. I gave them that word, and they ran away with it.
Azad: Something about the act of writing down what you remember. Reading it over again, after. And disseminating it, so others will read.
Azad: There’s some power in that, somehow. I cannot claim to understand.
Azad: But I believe. I have to. I don’t have anything else.
Azad: The cats and rodents plead with me in my cave, in every waking moment.
Azad: We will the Almost-Nowhere towards mnemopoiesis. We exhort you. You motes of dust swelled with omnipotence, we exhort you. Gather will, aim wish-thought. Create nostalgium. Speak, in your final breaths, the words of the Ferdowsi-Power.
Azad: We have to do it, while we still have time! Get me paper, and a pen!
Azad: Come now, everyone, all of you. All of you—the dog included. Put your memories in order, starting from the beginning. Get pen and paper. Write.
[Lucifer leaves the room.]
《 ID polling is active. Polling for predefined ID [SHADE][CC09μ]__LILITH. 》
《 Poll is reporting. Matches so far: 1. 》
《 Poll is ongoing. 》
Lilith: Something is . . .
Lilith: Something is happening to me.
《 Begin handshake. 》
Sylvie: Oh god. Oh, god.
Sylvie: Can the crash be failing, already? So soon?
《 Wait for handshake. 》
Sylvie: No.
Sylvie: Client vital signs are unchanged. They’re alive. Advanced containment is alive.
Sylvie: You’re alive, Lilith.
Lilith: Yes, Sylvie. I know.
Lilith: I . . .
Lilith: Excuse me, for a minute.
Lilith: I have to take a call.
Sylvie: What?
Azad: Tell them to write! Whoever they are, tell them to write!
《 Handshake accepted. 》
(Lilith: Cordelia?)
(Lilith: Cordelia? Is that you?)
(Cordelia: Mrs. Vance?)
(Cordelia: You’re—you’re ALIVE!)
(Lilith: I . . . yes. I’m alive.)
(Lilith: For now, anyway.)
(Cordelia: It WORKED! I can’t . . . I can’t believe . . . )
(Cordelia: I’m really talking to Lilith Vance.)
(Cordelia: I thought I would never hear your voice, again.)
(Lilith: My voice comes cheap. There were thousands of me, once. In all the different crashes. I must be fairly easy to conjure on demand, one imagines.)
(Cordelia: No, that’s not what I mean. You’re HER. You’re MY Lilith Vance.)
(Cordelia: We drank tea in the Headmaster’s Office. Not me, and some other Lilith Vance. Me and you.)
(Cordelia: Do you remember?)
(Cordelia: You ARE my Mrs. Vance—aren’t you? Tell me.)
(Lilith: Yes, Cordelia.)
(Lilith: I remember you very well.)
(Cordelia: Oh—oh, I DO believe in fairies—!)
(Lilith: Come again?)
(Cordelia: Never mind! I have to ask you something. I’ll be quick, I don’t know how long the link will hold.)
(Cordelia: Lilith, I know that advanced containment thawed, and ended. And so did all the subcrashes inside it.)
(Cordelia: But . . . Mrs. Vance . . . do you think there’s any chance that some of it’s still left? A few of those subcrashes, maybe? In some form?)
(Cordelia: Laugh if you want. I know it’s stupid. I know it’s only the sort of thing that happens in stories, with happy endings.)
[Lilith laughs.]
(Lilith: Cordelia, I don’t think I’m meant to tell you this.)
(Lilith: But I will. I have a habit of spilling my secrets, around you.)
(Lilith: There’s more than just a chance.)
(Lilith: The crash did not die, fully. There are people in there, still alive. Thousands of them.)
(Lilith: And I’m in there, too. And my husband.)
(Lilith: That’s how we’re alive. We’re still in there, even now.)
(Cordelia: Oh my god.)
(Cordelia: So the attack on the machine . . . they’re not just chipping away at useless metal, they’re . . . )
(Lilith: They are trying to kill me. Yes.)
(Cordelia: Oh my god.)
(Cordelia: I have to let Twenty-Seven know.)
(Cordelia: I have to let everyone know! I have to wake the whole Rock up, right now! There’s still time, we have the crashes!)
(Lilith: Wait.)
(Lilith: You are going to take what I have just told you—and relay it to Hector Stein?)
(Lilith: I am leaking information to the enemy. I did it because I like you, Cordelia. Don’t make me regret it.)
(Cordelia: I’m sorry, Mrs. Vance.)
(Cordelia: But you’ve done what you’ve done. You can’t take it back.)
(Cordelia: And now, I’m going to save your life.)