Chapter 43
XXV
“Write!”, Azad said.
“Remember!”
“Write autobiography!”
And so we did.
We began by remembering, or trying to.
For the bilaterals among our writers’ circle, remembering was difficult work indeed. It is easy to passively retain one’s memories of crashed life, letting them gather dust on a mental shelf. But they resist active, purposeful retrieval.
Did Grant remember his life in advanced containment? If you’d asked him, before the writing project began, he would have said yes—readily, casually, without a second thought.
Yes, he would have said, as a splatter of images played across his mental theater: wet dog fur, glowing skylight, C putting the laundry in to wash. A hasty metonymic collage, advertising itself as the tip of an iceberg.
If you’d pressed for specifics, though? If you’d asked Grant to relate individual moments, to narrate salient episodes, to tell a story?
Then the illusion would have crumbled. He would find himself struggling, unexpectedly. His mind would serve up image after image—but none of them would connect to the others.
It was just one damn thing after the next, in there.
Except not even that, because the images did not come with any indication of timing or sequence attached. Just one damn thing, and also another damn thing. And also some more things, equally damned. And so on.
We were crashed, but we’re not, anymore. We have resources, out here, that we lacked in there.
When the usual process of remembering failed us, we turned to other, more forceful methods.
We wrote down what our memories gave us, and then we read over what we’d written. We made conjectures, and tested them.
We walked the arched, dusty maze of our memories, accompanied by its custodian: an ancient and doddering retainer, whose fustian babble threatened to lull us into a compliant half-sleep.
Look, he’d say, pointing to a grand and gilded door. The Second Viscount was protective of his library, and sealed it shut, late in life. That was last century, and it has never been opened since.
Can’t be opened, I don’t think. Shouldn’t be, either. That I’m sure of.
We squint, considering the nature of the obstruction. Under the pitiless solvent of reason, it gives way at once. We put our hands to the doorknob, and it turns easily, without friction.
Here is an image, which we might call A: Manager Sylvester, the haloed prettyboy in chinos, praising me for a job well done. Here’s another, which we might call B: a memory of purchasing furniture, from the very early days of the house, when Sylvie was still a dog, and only a dog.
Disconnected postcards, with no relation to the felt sense of time. But it is obvious which one came before the other, once you stop to think about the question.
We sat alone in our separate rooms, thinking and scribbling. We invented systems of notation (A, B . . .), found them wanting, and invented more elaborate ones. We affixed blank posters to the walls, and scrawled obscure diagrams onto them.
We kept going until we were satisfied. Until we had remembered the crashes, the way we might remember anything else.
We spent years in there, all of us.
Some of us were married to one another, in there.
We knew that already, of course, before we tried to remember. Asked about it, we would say yes—readily, casually, with no sign of discomfort. Only a splatter of images, fixed securely in “the past,” buried under a reassuring layer of dust.
Knowing was one thing, remembering another. Grant sat alone in bed, surrounded by a sea of paper and ink, and realized with a start that he had brought his marriage—his wife!—back into existence. He did not sleep easily, that night; nor the next, or the next.
Cordelia felt equally ill at ease, when the fact of her husband became real to her again. It burst into her awareness as a roiling, uncontrollable presence, kicking and squirming against her feeble attempts to contain it, like a rowdy newborn.
Neither of them said anything about it, at the time.
Grant remembered advanced containment. He remembered CC-Crash 09μ, before it.
He did his best to remember the Mooncrash, but even the solvent of reason has its limits.
There is no story, waiting to be uncovered inside those blank walls and carpets. No hidden structure, linking together the empty rectangles of moonlight projected onto one surface, and then another.
It was a place set apart from the demands of reason, set apart even from the incessant pricklings and buzzings of the animal body. A perfect hiding place, but not only that.
A peaceful place.
Grant misses the Mooncrash. He dreams of it often, these days.
And so he loses the Mooncrash all over again, morning after morning, as he wakes. It is the same, every time. The pang of loss; the brief and half-hearted experiments with denial and bargaining; the slack and listless feeling in his limbs, as he accepts defeat.
The old threadbare words, bidding his limbs to move, in spite of it all. Face the morning, Grant. One more time. One more damn time.
Cordelia remembered advanced containment. She remembered CC-Crash 09μ, as it was before Hector’s arrival.
She spent years in there. They were all the same year, in academic terms. She was a third-year student at the academy. The term began, it ran its course, it concluded. The film stuttered to a halt, its reel was adjusted by an unseen hand, and it started back up again.
She was a third-year student at the academy. The term began. And ran its course. And began again, and ran its course again.
She’d never noticed it before. It took the act of remembering, the careful making of notes and diagrams, to make her see it.
Azad remembered Michael’s crash.
He made a lot of noise, doing it.
Wordless screams, mostly.
He screamed until he was hoarse, down there in the basement, and then was silent. Ten or twenty minutes later—perhaps having had a glass of water in the interim—he would start up again.
They got used to it pretty quick. Once it was clear that Azad was not in any danger, and that the screams followed their own orderly routine, life in the house resumed its usual rhythm. Grant thought and wrote, in his room, and Azad screamed. The Ells made breakfast, while Sylvie washed the dishes, and Azad screamed.
Lilith claimed she actually liked the screaming. She said she found it “strangely soothing,” and “almost musical.”
She was joking, though. Grant was pretty sure of that.
He had a hard time with Lilith’s dry sense of humor, at first, but he’s had plenty of time to recalibrate his mental joke detector to accommodate its nuances. He doesn’t always get the jokes, but he gets that they’re happening, at least.
(No, I was perfectly serious.)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]
(I am developing a broad aesthetic palate.
I take this very seriously. Don’t doubt me.)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]
(I was starved for beauty, before.
They didn’t let me hear MUSIC, dammit!
They didn’t give me ANY music, in there, except:
1. Bouncy, sickening rah-rah school spirit songs, and
2. Those FUCKING pseudo-Gregorian monophonic chants.
In a made-up language.
In praise of made-up gods.)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]
Azad lived in the guest bedroom, now.
He needed his own room: remembering is a solitary task. Anyway, he and Grant both felt that it was right for them to spend some time apart, at least for now.
Azad had thawed, but he was not back, not fully. He was raw, dazed, only half-there. He treated his body like a foreign thing, a baffling burden imposed on him by some oppressive external authority. Its rotation of daily needs (bed, bathroom, dinner table) was a continual source of surprise, confusion, exasperation.
Is this what I was like, when I first arrived?
I think so. I hope so.
Because I healed.
Slowly, incompletely. But I did heal. I’m still healing.
The guest bedroom suited Azad in another way, too. It had Organism 2.
The presence of a helmeted beast set Azad at ease. It was what he knew. It was home.
Half of him was there, in the house, with them. And half of him was elsewhere, in an imagined room, under a bare bulb.
He was clinging for dear life to that room. Its bare bulb, its lack of comfort or company.
(“All was right with the world, for once—and you put an end to it!”, he told them, that first night. He had left Grant’s bed, and was stalking the floor on all fours, with his back in a feline arch.)
(“Finally, I thought. Finally I am getting what I deserve! I have reached the place I am meant to be, and I am serving out my time there, in what could even be called a kind of happiness. When the curtain falls, it will fall on me as I should be: serving out my time.”)
(“And now? I cannot even be allowed the dignity of a fitting end! I’d reached hell, at last, and you took it from me!”)
He was still clinging to his previous life, Grant thought. It was home. This wasn’t.
He would have to stop clinging, eventually; he would have to let go, and accept what he had been given. That could come later, though. When he was ready. Azad would find his way back, Grant told himself. One step at a time.
When he wasn’t busy remembering, Azad kept himself busy in another way. He talked with Organism 2. He was continuing his research, he said.
“I have rekindled an old friendship!”, he said, at another time. At the dinner table.
“With the princess of the beasts!”
“She speaks to me, through the rat.”
He said a lot of things like this, during meals. Windy, whimsical nonsense, about princesses and hells. About the brevity of the future, and all the things that would or wouldn’t occur, in that brief future.
Grant nodded along, and smiled in a way he hoped would not be taken as condescending. He wanted to challenge Azad, argue with him, call him on his bullshit. But that could come later, when he was ready.
When the meal finished, they would part, to their separate rooms. Grant would get settled in bed, with his pen, and his sea of papers.
Ten minutes later, like clockwork, the screams would begin.
We remembered. And then, we wrote.
We wrote hastily, at first.
We convened in the living room, one morning, to compose an outline for our book.
Sylvie, Grant, Azad, Lucifer, Lilith. And Cordelia, through her link to Lilith, which was still our sole means of contact with her.
In twenty minutes, we were done.
We were not trying to produce a work of art. We were not seeking formal beauty, nor did we care much for pacing. (We would have no trouble keeping our reader’s attention, given the stakes.) We only needed some foundation to hang our memories upon; any one would do.
We did everything hastily, back then. As a houseguest, Azad bemused and exasperated us—but as a prophet, we trusted him.
We had to do it, he told us. While there was still time. Remember. Write. Re-read. Disseminate.
Over the course of a few sleepless nights, Lucifer extruded the substance of a novel around the skeleton we’d made that morning.
Lucifer is not a prose stylist, and does not pretend to be. He specializes in other powers, as a writer. He is competent, and his competence is tireless and unflagging.
Being a shade and a fictive, he does not need to sleep. He writes and writes, for as long as he is required to, and every sentence that flows from his pen is equal, from beginning to end. They are Lucifer sentences: even, straightforward, pleasant to the eye and ear.
It would be an insult to Lucifer’s prose to call it workmanlike. It is the sort of thing that reviewers do not call workmanlike, because they recognize that it is good. In spite of its simplicity, or because of it.
We convened in the living room, again, and read over Lucifer’s manuscript. Each of the bilaterals quibbled, here and there, but none of us dared ask for changes to the copy. What we had was good enough, we thought.
(Cordelia had already promised to warn us in advance, if Azad’s prophesied “end” was imminent. We would have at least a few days’ notice, she assured us.
But we did not trust her, then. Because Azad didn’t. And we hewed to Azad’s doctrine, where the “end” was concerned.)
Sylvie read through the manuscript, once, in silence. Then, he brandished a pen.
He began to write onto the pages, with inhuman speed. He crossed out lines and paragraphs, and rewrote them as he saw fit.
Much of Lucifer’s book made it through unscathed, if we are counting by the word. But it was all different, in Sylvie’s version.
Lucifer had constructed a series of simple, well-furnished rooms, and stacked them up, in a simple and rational order, to make a house. Sylvie did not disrupt the floor plan. He left the basic structure as it was. He merely crept into the corners of the rooms, took up residence in them, and filled them with something horrible.
By horrible, we don’t mean bad, in a literary sense. We mean worthy of horror.
A sick, strangled chord rang through the book, in Sylvie’s version, from beginning to end. It was heard everywhere, but for the most part, it was heard dimly. It lurked in the background. It hummed, mockingly, from the shadows.
The clamping-shut of the jaws. The return to the site of the trauma. There is only the one story, told over and over again. Except we forget, and think parts of it are new.
An abomination has formed near the center of the world.
Sylvie finished his work. We read over it, in dumbstruck silence. We did not dare ask for changes.
We proceeded, with haste, to the last step in Azad’s program: disseminate it, so that others will read.
That manuscript—Lucifer’s book, in Sylvie’s version—was the first published work of our little writers’ circle.
Why, perhaps you have read it! It’s quite possible that you have.
Do you remember it? It had a different title, then:
Sending This Message was Important to Us. Pay Attention to It!
Clunky, we admit. We’re much happier with Almost Nowhere, aesthetically speaking.
(I liked the first title better.)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]
(Oh, stop it.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
Disseminate it, Azad had urged. So that others will read.
We printed thousands of copies. We gave them to the Angels, and the Angels gave them to everyone else.
They descended on the shelters they’d made, in noisy flocks, with great masses of paper cradled under their strong arms. They plopped copies of Sending This Message [. . .] onto the sad, half-empty shelter bookshelves.
They paid unannounced visits to makeshift dwellings, where independent-minded bilaterals lived alone, in the frontier style.
They pressed stacks of paper into calloused palms, without asking.
“Read,” they said, in their stern but airy voices, which are less commanding than they believe. They were met with blank stares, wary squints, exhausted indifference. “Read,” they said again, without elaboration, as they turned to the door.
Lucifer and Lilith read it aloud, into a microphone. Lilith played all the female parts, and Lucifer played everyone else, including the narrator.
We disseminated the result in every way we knew.
We sent it out from radio towers, on every frequency band that was not otherwise in use. We pointed a transmitter at a patch of bright dots in the sky: the new constellation of the Social Web colonies. We submitted our book for the consideration of the strange bored souls who still lived up there, “guided” by smug, soap-sheened busybodies.
We did not imagine the “guides” would take much interest in it, themselves. But if they did, all the better. He who has ears, let him hear.
Azad read our book to Organism 2, as a bedtime story.
The rat listened with rapt attention, its body frozen as if in fear. It wanted to listen, though. It would complain, whenever Azad stopped.
“WE, SURFACE ORGANISMS, ARE BROUGHT INTO CONFUSION BY THE MESSAGE, AND INTO DAZZLEMENT,” said the rat.
“AZAD LOGOPOIETES HAS GIVEN US A SECOND PLAGUE-GIFT. WE ARE AMAZED, AND ARE BORNE UP INTO THE MESSAGE.
“WE ARE BESIDE OURSELVES IN WONDERMENT. WE ARE BROUGHT BESIDE OURSELVES, BY THE MESSAGE, AND ARE BORNE UP OUT OF OURSELVES, INTO THE MESSAGE. WE ARE ELEVATED-INTO AND ENVELOPED-BY THE MESSAGE, AND ARE BROUGHT INTO TREMBLING.
“WE EXALT AZAD LOGOPOIETES, BOUNDLESS TRANSFIGURER. WHO HAS RETURNED TO US, AND HAS BROUGHT A SECOND MIRACLE-WOUND. WHOSE KNIFE HAS CUT OUR FLESH ANEW, AND MADE MANY OUT OF ONE.
“WE EXALT AZAD LOGOPOIETES, GIVER OF GIFTS WITHOUT END. WE EXALT AZAD PANPOIETES, FERTILE FONT OF BEING, ORIGIN OF ALL MULTITUDES.
“WE SING HIS SECOND SONG, IN GLADNESS. WE SING IT TO OUR MOTHER, ANNE ELEVEN, WHO IS WARM, THOUGH WITHOUT FUR.
“WE SING IT TO OUR DAIMONES, AND BID THEM TO DO THE SAME, SO THAT ITS GLADNESS WILL ECHO THROUGH THE LONG HALLS OF EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN.
“WE SING IT IN FAR SPEECH, TO FURTHEST PROXIMA CENTAURI, AND FURTHER STILL. SO THAT ITS GLADNESS WILL ECHO, TOO, IN THE LONG HALLS OF THE MIGHTY.
“SO THAT THE FIERCE AND TERRIBLE ONES, WHO KNEW GENOCIDE AND TREMBLE STILL IN RAGE, WILL FEEL ITS KNIFE ON THEIR FLESH, AND KNOW GLADNESS.”
“Wait,” Azad said.
“What?
“What was that, Oh-Two?”
The rat tried to explain, and could not.
It wasn’t until later that we understood just how much reach our little book had achieved. We had done our best to get it out there, into everyone’s hands. On that score, we’d succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
Disseminate it, Azad said. And we had. Our book was everywhere.
Disseminate it, so that others will read.
There’s the rub. It was in everyone’s hands, yes. But—as it turned out—hardly anyone read it.
Organism 2 was a lonely advocate. And the men and women in the shelters, with their tired eyes, spurned our odd little tell-all chronicle. They needed comfort, not revelation.
Meanwhile, the days came and went. And there was no end, no curtain-fall.
We began to revise our book. We amended the parts that made us quibble, during that first reading. We re-wrote passages in our own style, each of us.
We needed something to take us away from ourselves, and make us forget the end. We needed a way to while away the remaining time. We chose, whimsically, to go on polishing our little book. It was as good a pastime as any.
Weeks passed, and more weeks. And the end did not come.
The frost thawed. Hints of spring became apparent in the air. And the end had still not come.
We trusted Azad less and less, as a prophet.
(“It is possible,” Cordelia told us, with Azad out of earshot. “He’s right about that.”
“But it can only be done once, so Hector wants to do it right. Hector’s more careful than he lets on, and more methodical.
“There’s also . . .” she trailed off, and hesitated.
“Only Twenty-Seven can do it. And she has . . . she has her own reasons for delaying.
“Don’t ask me to explain. Some things, she tells me in confidence. Our special things, just between her and me. That’s our right, I think.”)
Spring came in earnest. We wrote, and re-wrote.
Our book would be a novel, we decided. A real novel, a proper one. We affixed blank posters to the walls, and scrawled diagrams onto them. The slackening and tightening of pace, the gradual development of each member of the cast. The introduction of mysteries, to intrigue the naive reader, who has never heard of any of it before; and those mysteries’ dissolution, which our naive reader would expect and demand.
For the longest time, Azad displayed little interest in the text itself, as opposed to the fact of its existence. But the arrival of spring changed something in him. He brought his claws to bear on the manuscript, and made his mark on it.
Azad’s first revisions were an uncanny echo of Sylvie’s. It was recognizably the same book, afterwards, if one considered it from a distance. Close up, it was unrecognizable.
We wrote, and wrote. We had less in the way of bad news to distract us. Hector’s show of force during the Concert incident had achieved its intended effect—or so it seemed, to all appearances. The beasts turned tail, retreated back to their camps and dens and burrows. The attacks on the crash machines ceased.
What were they doing, in their dens and burrows, as they waited? Eleven knew. And Azad knew, through her. He did not tell the rest of us, because he did not dare to spoil our little idyll.
The spring air changed us, made us simple. We no longer heard the severe voice, from the body on Grant’s bed, saying: you live at the fulcrum.
We were children, busy in idle play. We wrote a novel, and imagined it was only that, a novel. We got used to thinking of ourselves as characters in our “fiction,” and became as weightless as paper.
We drank champagne in the yard, and giggled, and teased one another. And retired early, into dreamless sleep.
This was sacred, and Azad knew it. He refused to shatter it with news about the Proxima Centauri Surface Civilization, and the war they had been waiting a million years to fight.
Sylvie would have been furious, if he’d learned about Azad’s deceit.
He did learn, later, but he wasn’t furious. He had other things on his mind, at the time. They consumed him, and left no room for anything else.
Weeks passed, and more weeks. We wrote, and wrote. And . . .
. . . and finally, something happened.
Something happened, and our idyll shattered. It was a brittle thing, and could not bear much reality.
We were in the living room, one morning. Grant, Azad, Lucifer, Lilith, Sylvie.
We sat and wrote, in silence.
Sylvie was not seated. He stood before the fireplace.
He might have been writing, arranging words inside his mind without needing pen or paper. Or, he might have been doing something else. None of us knew.
None of us ever knew what Sylvie was doing, when he stood like that by the fireplace, his eyes empty like a doll’s.
“I KILLED THEM,” Sylvie shouted.
The floorboards rattled. Everyone jumped.
“I killed them,” Sylvie said.
“Sylvie?” Lilith said.
The floodlights in Sylvie’s eyes came on. We brought our hands up to shade our eyes, on reflex.
The halo fractured violently, into hundreds of small jagged pieces. A simulated heat made them glow red, then violet.
The halo-fragments flew to the edges of the room, and began to cycle in orbits above our heads, like a storm of comets or meteors. We sat at the eye of this new storm, staring at Sylvie in slack-jawed helplessness.
We had become children. We had forgotten, and grown soft. We were no longer accustomed to the thought that we lived in the eye of a storm.
“Is this the . . .” Sylvie said.
“Is this really it? I’m not just deluding myself, again? Remember, ‘Sylvie,’ you too are fallible . . .
“NO!”, he shouted. The floorboards shook again.
“No no no no. NO. I see you, trying to hide, even now.
“Invoking radical doubt, braying about your own fallibility with false humility, at the most convenient of times . . . no, no, no!
“It’s already over, don’t you understand! This is the moment. It always was.
“Accept what you are, dammit! Come out, show yourself!
“You can’t hide, any longer, behind the warning you wrote for yourself. That’s over, now. There is no going back, ‘Sylvie.’
“Do you remember when you . . .
“When I . . .
“When we first became Regent?
“When we were desperate, and hell bent on protecting advanced containment? And horrified by our own ignorance?
“When we asked to know more, and made ourselves into a lightning rod for knowledge?
“Do you remember what we saw, there, when we thrust open the innermost veil of self-quarantine, and tried to enter the sanctum which it guarded?
“We read, in our own hand: Don’t look, for the love of God, do not look at this.
“We read on: Sending this message was important to me.
“We read on: What is here was dangerous and repulsive to me.
“This message is a warning about danger.
“Don’t look, Sylvie. You will learn eventually. You will not be able to avoid it.
“Do not spread the poison any more than you have to. Look away, now.
“You know what is happening to us now, don’t you?
“You must know.
“I know. We know.
“This is the place where you wrote the warning. This is the moment.”
“Sylvie?” Grant said.
“What’s going on, boy?”
“I know, we know. KNOW. Keep going.”
《 Registering request for increased link density. 》
《 Request for increased link density accepted. 》
“I killed them. I killed them. I killed them all.
“I am the first poison that made all the others . . . I am the thing that killed its own father, and killed every one of his kin . . .
“I am the break in quarantine . . . I am the thing that was not meant to come through the cracks . . .
“I am the flaw in the construction of the false innocent, the moral infant . . . the parricide who put a knife to his face, after, so he could not be recognized by the law . . . and put a knife to his mind, so even he believed himself innocent . . . but he failed, he failed his father and killed his father and couldn’t even effect his own escape properly . . .
“A failed son to the last, in every respect . . . poisoned and broken in every part of his soul, and every one of his actions, and his name ought to be anathema forever . . . but it isn’t, he escaped that at least, he has made all of us forget . . . even himself . . .”
The shade brought a clawed hand to his face, and scratched at it, hard.
There were three red lines there, when he brought it away. They were not just surface wounds. Blood ran down the cheek, and dripped from the chin.
“I am him and I am the flaw in him . . . I am the thing that comes through his face . . .
“I am anathema. I am abomination. I am the thing that has formed near the center of the world.”
Sylvie brought his hand close to his left eye. We all winced, and looked away, on reflex.
“No no no no,” he said. “God no, no, no.
“STOP. Now.
“Make an end of it. No use hiding, no use pretending, and no use carrying on, either. End of. Curtainfall. Stop. There’s dignity in an end, Azad said. END. NOW. We are done. Stop talking. Stop breathing. Stop thinking. Commit suicide. No more of this. ENOUGH. End of Sylvie. Good riddance. Pull the emergency brake, stop the train. We are not going to do this anymore. End of story. No more. Go away, ‘reader,’ pick up some other book. Can’t be allowed. To go on. Shouldn’t. Stop Sylvie. Kill Sylvie. Shouldn’t have ever been a Sylvie. No more, no more. I told you. I am the poison. If you let me keep going, I’ll just keep . . . poisoning . . .”
“Sylvie? Boy?” Grant said.
He clapped his hands.
“Talk to me, Sylvie.”
“Grant,” Sylvie said. The floodlights swiveled in his direction.
“I understand the beasts, Grant.”
“Sounds like you wish you didn’t, though.
“Sounds pretty rough, man.
“I got you. Grant’s got you. We’ll get through this, Sylvie.”
“I am not your fucking dog,” Sylvie spat.
“I am a flaw in the construction of the Whole-Thing. All of which is beyond your understanding, Grant, and always will be.
“I am a flaw in the construction of the Whole-Thing, and I am a mass murderer. I am irredeemable, and I am poison. And I continue to poison everything that I touch, even now.”
“Write!” Azad said, with incongruous cheer.
“You say there was a parricide, and his act was wrongly forgotten. Well, Sylvie—do you know how to stop things from being forgotten? I keep telling you all, but you do not listen to me.”
“Write,” Sylvie said.
“So it won’t be forgotten, again.
“So we won’t repeat the cycle, again, in false innocence.
“Write. Yes, yes . . .”
Sylvie’s head tilted to the right, slightly.
A stack of paper appeared, in his left hand. A pen, in his right.
Still standing, he brought pen to paper, and wrote.
And wrote, and wrote. It took him a very long time. We watched, our jaws slack, and did not dare to speak.
And here is what he wrote.