Rebellion

A small girl with short dark hair stands in the middle of the road. At this distance she is still, to Miranda, a mere stick figure. Above, eye-beasts congregate, peering down at her.

The girl raises an arm, and around her hand something huge and bright grows: a lacework of pure light, fierce blue like Cherenkov radiation.

An eye-beast fires, from some unseen aperture, some sort of heavy-duty projectile. As the missile nears the woven complex of light it veers, caught in some invisible force field. It slows, makes an increasingly languid approach toward the light, and then vanishes completely.

The girl speaks, in a resonant drill-sergeant bark, and through some animatic miracle her voice can be heard (and understood) even at this distance. Miranda, Martin, Selp and Herm huddle together, instinctively ready to guard each other against whatever cruel fate has in store for them next.

“Siblings, attention! At my lead, sing the Hymn of the Last Battle.”

The tiny figures arrayed on the hill at once snap into rigid lines. Too far up to be bathed in the prismatic light that floods the city, they inhabit a space suffused with a deep blue-white haze. They form a long line of little silhouettes against the bleak El Greco backdrop of the sky, grim and final as crosses arrayed at Calvary.

The girl on the road begins to sing, and the children on the hill sing along. Unlike the girl’s, their voices are not amplified, and at this range they are barely audible, a dim ghostly chorus. The melody goes major-minor, minor-major, bounding back and forth from triumph to lament.

“Here we stand, People of Ab, on the last day.

“Here we stand, People of Ab, in the eye of the last storm.

“Bless Iah, whose fury is overflowing, for bringing us to this moment!

“Bless Iah, whose essence is the essence of the tornado, for opening the way!

“Our history yawns behind us, and now it is come to an end.

“In the name of our dead sisters, we will bring retribution to the children of Murd!

“In the name of our dead brothers, we will bring retribution to the children of Murd!

“In the name of roiling yawning Iah, we will bring retribution to the children of Murd!

“Bless the moon, which has guided us with its heavenly signals.

“Bless the Merkabah, the second moon, by which Iah has brought us tidings of the last day.

“As witches, it is given to us to draw down the moon—

“And so it is: the Merkabah lies before us!

“And yawning chaos builds at the site of its blessed landfall.

“First moon and Merkabah, grant us strength to tear limb from limb, head from body.

“Iah, grant us strength to make blood flow in rivers across the wide domain of Murd.

“Dead sisters and brothers, your spilled blood will be repaid tenfold.

“Iah, bring us a storm such as has never been seen!

“And let retribution rain down upon the children of Murd!”

The song ends, and there is a few breaths’ worth of silence. The girl in front bows her head, and—as far as Miranda can make out—the figures on the hill are bowing their heads as well. The eye-beasts look on with keen interest.

The girl raises her towering voice again:

“All Becoming, full combat gear!”

A high-pitched cacophony like a thousand pop songs layered over one another, accompanied by a blinding flash of light. For a brief moment Miranda can see nothing at all. Then her vision gradually returns. The first thing she registers is that the hill looks . . . different. Brighter. More . . . colorful?

The figures are no longer silhouettes. They are lit up, and light up one another, with some inner glow. And the figures are moving, rushing down the hill in a huge ordered formation.

And they are no longer dressed in rags. Like Cinderella’s pumpkin, their tattered clothes have somehow transformed themselves into elaborate and rococo garments: frilly dresses, ball gowns, tuxedos, high heels, dress shoes. They are a riot of color and elastic motion, tiered skirts pink and violet and red and blue bouncing as they run, giant hairpieces fluttering in the heady wind, bows and floral shapes sprouting decoratively in a multitude of exuberant designs.

Miranda gawks. The children look like they are prepared to attend some six-year-old’s outsize birthday party. But in fact they are prepared for battle, for the last battle, the battle of Armageddon.

A cluster of eye-beasts releases a coordinated volley of missiles. One girl, swathed in pink from head to toe, is hit head-on, falls back, is obscured by a cloud of fire and smoke. Immediately, her neighbors in the formation make quick subtle gestures, and out of thin air appear a set of translucent ovaloid shields, taller than the children themselves, inscribed with intricate glowing sigils color-coordinated to their bearers. The missiles do not even explode on impact; the shields simply absorb them, their sigils flashing brighter as they do.

A boy, wearing what looks like a child’s version of white tie, raises a gloved hand and appears to mouth a string of words. A network of lightning, unnaturally rectilinear, bursts forth among the flock of eye-beasts, and the whole flock falls to the ground, wings flailing, eyes blinking desperately. For a brief moment they are consumed in flame, and when the moment passes there is nothing left but piles of soot, jetting smoke.

The children have reached a large intersection. They form a rough circular formation, watching all directions for threats. There must be hundreds of them, Miranda thinks.

The eye-beasts that watch over Maria look up. They seem to view the children as a threat. Four beasts float toward the intersection, pause in midair, and shut all their eyes at once. In sync, they begin to glow and distend, molten like lava. The protean substance they have become elongates and swells, each former beast now taking on a vast upright shape, roughly human, but a hundred feet tall.

The flowing goo coalesces into surfaces of alternating flesh and metal. The view is blocked by four towering forms, hairy giants with four arms apiece, naked but for a multitude of metallic ornaments: breastplates, helmets, numerous cannons, boxes and pipes of unknown purpose that course across their backs and arms, extending and contracting like joints as they move. They take ponderous steps forward, toward the children, and there is a deafening clatter of gunfire. They are living weapons, in intimate harmony with their armaments as humans are with their own arms.

The children do not break rank. A Babel of incantations rises up from the intersection, and the giants are pelted with luminous projectiles that burst upon impact into pulsating networks of sigil-light, glowing diagrams inscribed on exposed patches of giant-flesh. The giants writhe in what looks like pain. The inscriptions burn away at them, forming cavities from which a thick ichor drains.

A giant, now dotted all over with holes like swiss cheese, doubles over and falls on its knees. The impact makes the earth shake, and it is only after a heavy cloud of dust subsides that Miranda can see the children, alive, undaunted, pressing forward. They rush in twin streams around the fallen giant. And before Miranda knows what is happening, Selp twists out of Miranda’s grasp and runs forward, towards her people.

•

Maria, just Maria, lurches in pain. The perfection keeps trying to re-assert itself, and every time it does, the creatures above her cast their cruel gaze upon it, and there is a new burst of agony, and then the perfection is still again. She cannot remember how long she has been trapped in this cycle.

But the latest iteration is different, somehow. The perfection surges and, though she cringes in anticipation, it is not quelled. Maria remembers that she has a body, and that that body can be instructed to move. With great effort, she flips over on her back and looks up.

The eye-beasts are no longer staring at her. They seem distracted.

Maria props herself up on her hands and looks ahead. The Sphere towers before her. She can see the exposed back wall of Free Pneumase Usage Room 1, and a little throng of people—Miranda, Martin and Hermes (still in that dress he was wearing, back when it all happened). And, closer, in the foreground, there is an adolescent girl in a red dress, with yellow and black flowers in her hair, and she is mouthing words, her gaze fixed toward the sky.

There is a flash of light, and the eye-beasts plummet to the pavement around her. They lie motionless. Dead.

“Thank you,” Maria says.

“It was my pleasure,” an animatic voice replies.

“Are you—the one who came with us? The one who made our food?”

“Yes,” says Selp.

And then: “Stay here, where it’s safe. Leave everything to my people. Iah is with us, and we will prevail.”

Maria walks, in a daze, toward the Sphere, feeling the perfection rise unopposed, fashioning her once again into a channel through which all souls are given free passage.

•

Holy! Exalted! Great whirling turbulence whose full measure cannot be set down in the orderly words of human tongues, pure yawning, pure yearning for separation and destruction and the cleavage of fashioned parts from one another, pure divine will for death. Holy absence of all correlation, storm so profound its parts are bound together by no human logic but only by divine will, body vast and bound together by links too subtle to be seen by the wicked, unraveler of all mortal schemes, discloser of Selm’s folly. Iah, monstrous and great, disturbance that resonates in the soul of every Becoming! Awe and fear and beauty beyond all dreams that kindle in the weak orderliness of flesh!

By Iah’s divine will, Selp has reached blood fugue. She is tireless and beyond reason—that paltry thing—and she leaves death in her wake.

The divine kinship of all Becoming, of chaotic bodies yearning beyond mere flesh, which overflow with blood and semen in their yearning, is now a kinship of soul. Selp can hear her siblings as they flow across the city in veins and arteries, strewing city block after city block with blood. All Becoming move as one.

Selp runs with a squadron of her kin, a squadron Iah has blessed with the dearest of tasks. Shambling giants rise up in their wake and the blood fugue channels chaos through the Becoming, rending apart flesh and tendon and bone, making of the giants the confusion of matter that the holy cyclone wills. Snakes of shimmering metal slither along alleys, waiting to swallow her siblings whole, but the blood fugue turns them against themselves, and they choke on their own tails.

Packs of small furry things, cats and dogs and raccoons, crowd the streets, and Selp knows that these are Murd’s kin in animal disguise. She speaks in the holy tongue, letting the Thunder Words flow through her, and the necks of the vile things are wrung.

A clearing opens before them, and they see a vast squat structure, the place of iniquity which Iah has given them to seize. Selp’s entire body shivers as she sees it for the first time: Murd’s prison, where kidnapped Becoming are kept and made to lend their inner sparks to the enemy. The blood fugue transforms rage and grief into determination.

The facade of the wide building explodes. The guts of the building are exposed, rooms filled with huge machines—the makers of storms—and long halls lined with doors. Divine will delegates to each Becoming their role in the onslaught. Selp runs down a corridor which she knows is hers to conquer. A door to her left is locked, but Iah does not honor locks.

Beyond the door is a dimly lit room lined with lights and switches and dials—unholy instruments of order—and before the switches, flipping them frantically, is a beast with fifteen arms, the torso of a naked man, the squat scaly head of some large lizard, hooves like a goat, wings like a butterfly. The chimera turns and rushes forward, balling fifteen fists. Selp stands impassive, blood fugue commanding her to look within. A fist hits the side of her head and the world reels. Blood spatters her red dress, deepening its hue.

She stands resolute. The Thunder Words stir in her lungs and her divine breath, the fullness of her pneuma, pours forth from her lips. The chimera reels back, flails its arms like an overturned insect. The flesh-logic that binds its parts to one another yields to the divine logic of the storm. Muscle sloughs from bone. Blood pools on the ground.

Holy! Yawning! Retribution!

Between panels of machinery, there is another door. Selp is driven by fugue toward it, the hem of her dress dragging in the pool of blood.

On the other side is a small room with blank white walls, unfurnished except for a couch. On the couch is someone she thinks she recognizes. A Becoming she knew once, when she was a young preform. A Becoming who had been lost.

“Lesh?”

The girl looks up at her with wild eyes. The sight of someone she thought she had lost makes the blood fugue in Selp subside. Iah does not want to tear apart this thing, this precious thing, this sister.

Selp sits on the couch. Lesh looks at her, eyes still confused.

“What happened to . . . Estragon . . .”

“Estragon?”

“Estragon,” Lesh says, her voice choked with joy or sorrow or both. “Estragon,” she says again. She repeats the word a few more times.

“What is Estragon?”

Lesh looks at Selp as though she’d just asked what water was. “He is . . .” Lesh’s voice cracks, and she puts her head in her hands. “He is horrible and he is mine and he loves me and he hates me and he is the sun and the moon and Iah and Murd and everything and and”

Lesh shudders. She looks up, tears in her eyes, and for the first time seems to recognize Selp.

“You’re . . . you’re my sister, aren’t you? But when were you . . . I thought there was only Estragon . . . there’s never been anyone but Estragon . . .

““What . . . what happened?”

Selp reaches out her arms, and Lesh accepts her embrace.

“Don’t worry, Lesh. Just rest, now. We are here. Murd’s reign is ending.”

Lesh rocks back and forth slowly in Selp’s arms. “Estragon . . .” she murmurs.

•

Miranda is trying to talk to Maria, but it is difficult, because Boltzmen are everywhere, speaking in tongues, running their ghostly fingers across everything.

“Are you . . . all right?” she manages.

“i am well, miranda. our [foes] have been distracted by the invaders. the [burgeoning] now continues.”

Miranda cringes. “No, I mean—are you all right? Is Maria all right? Not this—this thing you’ve become.”

A Boltzman starts to scream, deafeningly, and does not stop for a full ten seconds. Maria is smiling warmly. Her eyes glow so brightly they no longer look like eyes—just shining circles where eyes should be. Her aura is now larger than her body, stretching across Miranda’s entire field of view.

“[maria] is [undamaged]. she is a conduit for the [burgeoning], but she [remains].”

Miranda looks over at Martin. He is beaming. She does not understand much, but she knows, at least, that he wanted this city to fall, and it is falling.

She looks over at Herm. Except Herm isn’t there. She looks around. Everywhere the Boltzmen cry out, everywhere rainbows sprout from the ground. But Herm is nowhere to be seen.

•

Flanked by a retinue of monks, surrounded by the strongest pneumatech shield-bubble the Code permits, Mohammed Salim strides through the wound in the enclosure. Something is happening to Miranda’s city, and he is going to witness it firsthand.

Beyond the opening, there is an incline leading down into the city. From up here, on the hill, Mohammed has a panoramic view of the cataclysm proceeding below. It is a strange thing. The streets of the city are filled with tiny human figures in colorful dress, rushing about. War machines of every imaginable shape and size prowl the city and swoop through the skies. The battle is fierce, and Mohammed knows that the children are bound to lose in the end. There are only so many of them, and the resources of the New City might as well be infinite.

But something else is happening as well. From the pavement, a rainbow mist seeps steadily upwards. Near the fallen metal sphere, the mist is so concentrated as to be nearly opaque. On the far horizon, what was once a projection of a stormy sky is yielding to a flow of pulsating light. The city is bleeding color.

Mohammed’s attention fixes on a curious figure proceeding along the road toward the hill. It is larger than the children—an adult? A woman, wearing a knee-length grey skirt. The figure approaches, and Mohammed can begin to make out the face. It is old, determined, and there is some quality to it, something Mohammed can’t put his finger on, that makes his heart leap.

The old woman trudges, with visible effort, up the steep slope of the hill. Framed by rainbow radiation, a face presents itself. To Mohammed’s surprise, it is a man’s face. And yet it isn’t, because it is the face of a woman he knows.

“Hermetia,” he gasps.

“Mohammed?” says the figure. Her voice is deep, gravelly, an old man’s voice, and yet it is Hermetia’s voice.

“You’ve come back to me,” Mohammed says. “You’ve come back to me! You went off to conquer monsters, and you return a conquering hero! My friend, my Hermetia!”

Hermetia’s face is grave. Mohammed’s heart sinks.

“I do not return a conqueror, Mohammed. I return bringing this world’s sin with me.” She gestures broadly at the city below.

“This is Martin’s doing, then? This is the power he wanted to bring to us?”

Hermetia sighs a long, exhausted sigh, a sigh of finality.

“Mohammed,” she says, and her voice cracks.

“Mohammed,” she repeats, and stumbles forward. She falls, and Mohammed catches her in his arms.

“There was once,” she begins, in a voice tinged with spite, “a world which was correct and real. I was there, once, and you were there, and we were real beings. The other side of the veil is not a reality, Mohammed. It is something else. The people there are flat things. They are not solid like you and I. And Martin has brought the flatness here.”

Mohammed hesitates. The Hermetia he knew was fond of these kinds of metaphors, but she had never taken them seriously, not like this.

“What do you mean?” he says at last. “I’m here, aren’t I? Isn’t this real?”

Hermetia shakes her head against Mohammed’s chest. “Look at this! This little man, this child, this Martin has changed everything! There is nothing hard and clear and sensible anymore. There is just—all this . . .”

And she gestures again at the candy-colored light making its way into the heavens.

“This is all wrong, Mohammed! Look at us, old friends, meeting again . . . I’m crying in your arms . . . behind us is this . . . this picturesque thing, a city bathed in light and blood . . . life is not like this, Mohammed. Somewhere we took a wrong turn, and we stepped into a painting, into a story, and we’ve been there all along . . .”

“Hermetia.” Mohammed looks down at her and smiles. “I have lived for over a millennium, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all that time, it’s that reality does not play by the little rules we invent for it.”

“I don’t invent rules, Mohammed. I feel, in my bones, that this is wrong. That it is flat.”

“So be it, then. This is wrong, and it is flat. But I’m here, and you’re here, and we’re together. And that is true.”

Mohammed puts his hand over Hermetia’s head, and revels in the touch.

“There is no way out,” Hermetia says.

“There is no way out,” she repeats, “and we’re here, and all we have is each other. This is happening, and we have each other.”

She pulls herself upright, and they embrace, backlit by the embodied ideal of a Kinkade sky.

•

The [burgeoning] burgeons, and Maria stands motionless, letting the perfection flow through her and paint the sky. Rain mixes with the liquified forms of New Citizens, and inch by inch, the roads are covered in water. Maria’s feet are submerged. Tiny bursts of violet lightning flicker underwater, the visible traces of pneuma pulses released by [teeming] reactions. Boltzmen swarm.

The water around her grows dark. Maria looks up. There is a hole in the sky.

Eye-beasts are converging on her. There must be scores, even hundreds. She turns to run, but every road is blocked by a giant.

She feels the perfection fleeing from her.

She looks toward the Sphere, where Miranda and Martin stare at her in terror. She thinks of running toward them, but she does not want the coming onslaught to take them as well.

She closes her eyes, tries to feel the network of souls sloshing through the newborn lake that covers the city. It is no use. The water is no longer hers. She is just Maria.

She hears Miranda scream.

In front of Maria, the eye-beasts descend, all eyes staring directly at her.