by Brett
Davidson
Part 4
It was not difficult to take the fae-folk to the
city. They seemed used to weaving their way from shadow to
shadow,
and when they were in the open, they were no stranger than any of the
masquers now abroad on the starport plain. Entering the city was
even easier, to her surprise. The man spoke in whispers to one of
the Monstruwacans and without a word of reply, they were immediately
admitted to the most secure deck of the stacks car. The ease with
which this was accomplished surprised Io. She tugged at Medeis’
sleeve and gave him a querulous look. “He knows the Master Word,
the distillation in thought of true human identity,” he explained in an
almost silent whisper. “It is only an hypothesis to us,
extrapolated from the traces of Set Speech in records that we salvaged
from the Castle - and yet he speaks in his mind with a fluency
impossible to imitate.”
“Who is he?” Io asked, equally hushed.
“An Adeptus Exemptus at least, perhaps of the third
order and a
Magister or even higher. That is all I can guess, but I can sense
that he carries the thoughts of someone who saw all our secrets as his
own ancient history.”
“Then he is from the future?”
“Somehow-”
“Yes, that is true,” the Puppet Master interrupted,
somehow overhearing
them. He found a chair and sat stiffly, favouring a leg.
“The Monstruwacans of this age have a method of divination that is as
useless as any other except when the courses of causality converge on a
single imminent catastrophe. These events are in different times,
and the relationship that they have is rather like that of an echo - it
cannot be separated from the original sound. However, in this
case both are echoes; we are components of your vision, or you are
components of ours - or the distinction is irrelevant.”
Unable to make sense of this, she decided to assume that
he had
described something simple and plain: he was here, things had been
happening because of something and now something else would
happen. The why and the how did not matter, only the what.
“And what is to happen now?”
“Soon.”
“What will happen?”
“The balance will tip one way, and I will be and have
been able to help
you, or it will tip another way and I will never be and never have been
able to help you.”
She laughed nervously. “But you’re here…”
He shook his head. “It’s impossible to explain in
your
tongue. We have a Set Speech, but… all I can say is that I am,
but it could be that I might not had been.” He spread his hands
in a gesture that suggested a shrug. “Imagine that I could
disappear, and with me, your memory of me. Of course, in such an
event, your own destruction would be imminent.”
Incomprehensible whys and hows again. If she had
his ‘Set
Speech’, could he explain rather than describe? In any case, his
last sentence was very easy to understand…
The man gave a slight, wry smile. “However, you
have escaped your
fate once before, Io. There is hope.”
Nobody gave any sign that they understood what he had
said.
Pressed to elucidate, he smirked and demanded to see the sarcophagus
containing the body of Io’s mother.
Medeis seemed surprised for a moment, and opened his
mouth in readiness
to deny that there was any such thing, but then he shrugged.
“Very well then.”
As soon as he was taken to the infirmary chamber and
before anyone
could stop him, the Puppet Master unlatched the cover of the
sarcophagus, flung the wings of its cover-shield open and turned to
face Io. “Do you know the history of this person?” he
asked. “Have they told you?”
The body that lay espaliered between the spread wings
was as uncanny as
an effigy. It was true, accurate and radiant in its beauty, but
somehow unreal and needing sustenance simply to be. There were
mechanical fingers as slender and delicate as cricket’s antennae that
were laid upon her vellum skin, glittering wires as fine as her own
hair that trailed from her temples and tiny lights as bright and
unchanging as jewels. These did not obscure the fact that the
body in the sarcophagus was the exact image of the young woman
breathing before them, and that her lips smiled as if she had performed
a clever trick.
Io stammered out an explanation as it had been taught to
her by her
guardians. “My mother, they say, bore me in a dream. She’s
still asleep. She’d been sleeping since they salvaged her from
the Castle a pentascore orbits ago. They brought her back, tried
to wake her, only made her warm… and they say I grew in her then,
though my ember was sparked ages before. I was born, and she is
still asleep. I’ve grown, and never spoken to her, seen her eyes
open, heard her voice… why won’t she…?” Her face was red.
She choked back a sob. “She has no pneuma and yet her body is not
dead, they say. It’s not just the machines.”
Sensing her distress, the Companion was at Io’s side
while the Puppet
Master was making urgent gestures at the attending physicians.
They fled, and returned with trolleys of equipment - and a duplicate of
the sarcophagus. She barely noticed, or noticed instead a rising
dread. She gripped the sides of the sarcophagus to stand straight
and staring directly into the foreshortened face of her undead
‘mother’, she began to hyperventilate, trying to stave off what was
already inevitable. “They keep me, they taught me things,” she
gasped. “Everything anyone should know… other things like
exercises and skills too, of course, otherwise they would not be a
secret order.” This last she tried to make a joke. She must
continue talking, she commanded herself. My will is like iron; I
must obey. “If they could draw her pneuma back…” The words meant
nothing; they were mere noises uttered by someone else. “Brought
back, from where it is… brought, brought, still in battle between the
stars perhaps, if that’s my visions explain so bright…” It was no
use. There was the sweet smell, the crinkling of the air.
All of this had happened before, over and over again… “My life!”
“Forgive me,” the man said, pointing his wand at
her. “I cannot
stop this, but I can make it gentler.”
Suddenly she fell as if he was a literal Puppet Master
and he had cut
her strings. Numbly, she was aware of being lifted and laid in a
padded cradle, the second sarcophagus. For a dreadful moment, she
thought that her life was ended for ever and she would be condemned
like her mother to sleep forever. She tried to protest, but only
thick slurs passed her dull tongue. She forgot who she was.
***********************************************
The Lighter-capsule was
gently brought back into the
harbour- hall of
the Castle. It arrived with a scrape like a knife being
sharpened, and it was not a smooth sound. He guessed then that
the victory was not so clean. He rushed to the chamber and saw
that his intuition was correct: the capsule had suffered severe
damage. It did not come apart as it should: at the first touch,
some of its plating crumbled, another part peeled like the rind of a
fruit, another piece shattered. Its surface was charred in some
parts, but glass-like in others. The capsule inside was jammed,
half-released. Through the gap between the tripartite jaws of the
greater capsule and its cargo, buzzing motes of light drifted as the
protective energies misfired. It was as if it too was caught in a
dream of matter, slipping across interpretations and not knowing in the
end whether it should be glass, ash or leather. He tried not to
imagine what horror he would found where the Lighter was embedded.
Layer by layer, the capsule
was stripped, and,
reassuringly, the
matter-warping effects of the attack were progressively less
severe. Finally the sarcophagus itself was revealed,
substantially intact. The telltales were all dark, saving the one
indicator on the edge of violet. This was an ambiguous sign at
least. Perhaps a contact sensor set from the medical bays would
reveal what was inside? He ordered the effectors to convey the
set to him.
Standing back, the
purple-clad stranger watched, not
interfering,
inscrutable. The Sideromancer forced himself to take heart from
his stability. Surely he expected a proper functioning of the
mechanisms of care that he was now applying. Surely he must.
The sensor set assured him
that the sarcophagus held
something in a
state that was not directly dangerous to the Castle and the last lock
was accordingly released.
Heedless of danger, the
Sideromancer rushed to see with
his own eyes.
The lottery of selection had
performed the most perfect
irony. It
was her, of course. She seemed well, but she went out seeming
well, and so had come back only seeming.
He fell to his knees, too
afraid to know if she was safe
or
corrupted. It was left to the stranger to make the assessment: he
brought a wand forth from his sleeve, other devices from elsewhere
about his clothes. He made passes, consulted his device and gave
a grunt of affirmation. It was not a sound of happiness, only of
an expectation met.
The Sideromancer let the
machines take her away and
begin their own
diagnosis. He found himself, horai later, holding in his hand a
chart produced by the iatrikotechnoi, looking through the great central
lens of the observatory on the black vista outside. The stranger
was with him; he did not known when he had entered the chamber.
“They have as good as murdered her,” he said, not caring if the man
heard his intimate thoughts or not. “Darkness is become the sky,
darkness will become the earth, darkness is already shrouded about her.”
The stranger took a step
forward and joined him at the
lens.
“Tell me what you read,” he said.
The Sideromancer tried to
explain as best he
could. The Castle’s
long-seeing instruments had suggested and the peculiar phase-changes in
the shell of the Lighter-capsule had reinforced the suspicion that the
Eaters were not mere opportunists, but intimately tied with more
fundamental changes afoot in the Cosmos.
“Ah, yes.” The
stranger nodded to himself.
“The
Ulterior. This is the age in which they and their work become
known.”
“The Ulterior, yes, of
course…” he repeated. The
Sideromancer
knew that the ‘stranger’ was merely a splinter of his own
consciousness. Unable to deal directly with his guilt and despair
and his loneliness, he had created this imaginary figure with which to
discuss his fears. By reducing them to mere conversation, he
could pretend that they were no more than abstractions - and
abstractions originating in the mind of this other. Even though
he knew this, it was nonetheless a comfort that he could so contrive to
look at his predicament from an external perspective.
The stranger gave a
quizzical look, but that was
necessary to maintain
the pretence and the Sideromancer smiled approvingly, nodding to prompt
him further. He could almost anticipate his next words, or at
least, when he heard them, they fell neatly into mental niches
unconsciously prepared for them.
“The Eaters are not only
prepared for the universe, they
have had
longer to live in it. Some of them have reached the very apex of
possibility, they have risen… Imagine a great chain linking the highest
and the lowest. This chain spans everything from one extreme to
the other - time, space, consciousness. The human clade has
climbed up from the very lowest and has been much transformed from mere
slime and dust; once we became aware of the existence of this chain, we
imagined beings still higher than ourselves, and logically, we thought
that they would be things called ‘gods’, entities like ourselves, but
greater in every magnitude… and that was our mistake.”
Despite himself, the
Sideromancer found himself
engaged. “If
there are no gods, then there are other things, higher states of being
that we could aspire to. Why was that a mistake?” he asked.
“Yes”, the man
answered. “When the lineage of a
clade climbs the
chain to the very highest link, awareness and will and power grow until
they become less like the attributes of an entity and more like a force
of nature itself. There was life of a sort that existed in
darkness long before the suns were lit and those dark beings climbed
the chain long before life even began on earth. The Eaters you
see are not merely predators upon a field; their field is an order of
being in itself, insofar as that description had any meaning. We
call them the Ulterior and as you could not imagine them, we cannot
understand them, let alone defeat them. They emerged in darkness,
rose up and became the darkness and the darkness will continue to rise
until it is the universe itself. Already they are
indistinguishable from natural laws: the suns are dying and the planets
slowing in their turning by means that seem utterly natural… because
nature itself is perverted by those things.”
“Ah, all of nature.
Naturally.” He nodded,
quite certain
now that this plan of astral evolution was no more than a grimly
comforting fantasy, scaled in such a way as to distract him from his
own little grief. “I have seen this, and now, my dear, my beloved
is infected, and so I believe… ah yes, an elaborate fantasy of a
prophecy fulfilled, a magician come to tell me what somewhere in my
mind I have already decided to believe-”
The man struck him, sending
him sprawling to the
deck. He stared
up at his assailant, aghast, and then he tried to laugh, but the
white-haired man would have none of it. He stood over him with
his legs planted widely and glared. “Do not hide from me,
astrogator!” he shouted. “You do not know how acute this tragedy
is to me. You will listen!” He raised his fist again and
the Sideromancer cringed. “Ah, so you acknowledge that I am
real?” he sneered.
“I acknowledge that pain is
real,” he snapped in turn.
“In the oldest and most
secure libraries of my Reboubt I
have read your
logs and your deductions, astrogator. I am here to ensure that
you will write them. Listen to me and record.”
“And who are you to demand?”
“I am the child of your
children, astrogator.”
The man’s stare penetrated
any reserve he might
have. “Then do
you have hope, do you have weapons, strategies to defeat these
abominations?” he demanded. “Have you corrected the laws that
they have perverted?”
“No, I have none of these
things. Your people
imagined that the
Eaters were terrible predators, but ultimately only another kind of
animal on another kind of field. That is not the case at
all. You are hot, bright and fast creatures that were came and
gone in an hora and you can never understand what it means to have
lived for aeons. Defeat is written into the very firmament.”
“Then tell me this,
messenger, or whatever title-“
“She will live, in a way
that you cannot understand.”
The Sideromancer shook his
head, refusing to believe
either side of
despair or promise. Neither could be true at once.
The stranger leaned over
him, reached down to grab the
front of his
garment in his fist and lifted him up so that his toes barely brushed
the floor. He realised how tall the man was; he was lean as a
whip, but he must have been the descendent of heroes and he was strong
too. His black eyes bored into him. “She is safe in the
only way it was possible to be safe here. She has made herself
invisible to the Eaters by cloaking her soul in sleep. They are
persistent, they will sniff about the walls, scrape at the doors, but
she lets forth nothing: no scent, no sound. If she awakens here,
then they would have her, and all of you through her and all the worlds
you would touch. Hide her from them. Take her back to earth
and she will be safe. Her soul may escape them then and flower in
another body.”
The Sideromancer was
confused. “Safe?” He
felt assaulted,
he struggled, stoked his anger, careless of the reserve and dignity now
lost. “How could you know? Turn back? Now? Do
you know who she is, how I feel?” He twisted, but could not free
himself. The man deigned to release him.
“You think that you know the
Eaters?” the man
asked. “I and my
order watched them and much greater beasts for ages you could not
count. You will never defeat them. Your sole privilege is
to be present at the time when they learned of the existence of rich,
sweet earth. They will follow your trail now; they will follow
the trails of every castle. Your empire of stars is doomed, your
only hope - and mine - lies in the salvage of souls such as hers.”
“And why should you
care? I see your pride and it
seems like
colossal arrogance. You say that we could not go out to the
stars, but who were you to say this? Have you never known-?”
The man smiled grimly.
“Do you think that I do not
know who she
is? Do you think that I counsel cowardice and murder hope?”
He almost laughed, but his tone was bitter and hollow. “ Oh yes, I know
what it is to love and to fight and I even know what it is to make and
rule an empire - it is an empire of one world, but one that is still
vaster in time than all the histories of all the colonies that you have
seen. Space is closed to you by these abominations - but in
battling them, you will temper yourself to gain the vast fertile fields
of time and mind, and while the Ulterior rule this universe, we will
found portals to other spaces yet to come.”
Something in the man’s gaze
was too ancient and too
assured to be a
lie. Souls flowering anew, he said… “Who are you?
Who, when - ?”
“I am who you might be,” he
said quietly. “Be sure
that I
am.” With that he turned a corner that should not exist and was
gone.
The Sideromancer rushed to
the control station, not sure
if he intended
to obey, but not surprised to find that the decision had been made for
him already. The helm was set and programmed and no effort would
change it. The Castle was inverting itself: already the floor was
trembling as the bracelet-beads of the Castle rotated about their
lateral axes and the thrust of the engine turned now to what was had
been the zenith. The ark was set toward its only true harbour and
he could not alter its course.
Very well.
He renewed his vows.
He took her body, seemingly
dead, but only
seeming, and deposited her in a new cradle in the hibernaculum.
That cradle had been intended for him, but it was the only spare he had
left for her. When the Castle Lachesis berthed once more, his
sleeping companions would wake and find his dust across the floor.
And then on earth, the two
of them reborn in time.
Perhaps.
To say ‘perhaps’ was to
wish. That stranger was
strong, not
merely in his arm, but in his will. What he spoke of was not
perhaps; it was “what must be”, and so he strived and battled.
The battles he must have fought - would fight - occurred, occur when he
was wide awake in the night. This must be his inspiration and
solace in the years of the voyage to come.
He laid her body straight,
connected the necessary
supports and closed
the lid. And then he waited.
***********************************************
The Puppet Master and his Companion remained within the
stacks car for
several diphae while they explained in turn what it was they were there
to accomplish. The first thing they must do, he explained as he
stood over Io’s recovery cot, was to cease treating Io as the victim of
a disease, but the alternative that he proposed seemed hardly less
cruel.
Io, he explained, was not the daughter of a comatose
mother in the
conventional sense - insofar as such a thing could be
conventional. The woman in the sarcophagus was indeed dead, even
deeper in death than any body with a beating heart and an extinguished
mind could be. There was no hope for her revival - none at all.
“How could this be?” asked Medeis. “We had tested
most
exhaustively and monitored-“
“And you had failed, had you not?”
He admitted that this was so. “But-“ he began to
object before
the Puppet Master cut him off.
“Good. Now the question is, why?”
Medeis had no suggestion. “I imagine that you were
about to tell
me,” he said rather petulantly.
The man grimaced. The expression was not smug, but
severe.
“Yes, I am. Io is a Lighter, a seer. She was the guide and
the warrior aboard a Sky-Castle. The Io that lies here now was
not seeing the events of another soul’s incarnation, she was
remembering events that she was a part of herself.”
“That can’t be true,” Io wailed. “I don’t feel
old. I know
nothing about her earlier life, I don’t remember, I only see the
Castle, I only see!”
“That is because a part of you is still fighting that
battle in the
Castle, over and over again.”
“No!”
The man shrugged and passed a glance to his erstwhile
silent Companion.
In many ways, the sublime assurance of this tall, solid
woman was even
more overbearing that the Puppet Master’s arrogance. “Had you
wondered why I had never questioned you about your visions, Io?” she
asked.
Io cringed, dreading her meaning. “Because you…
see them too?”
“Yes.”
She moaned and covered her face in her hands. She
wanted to run,
but she was cornered before she could even take a step.
Medeis took a deep breath. “There were further
implications to
this,” he said quietly.
Io clenched her fists in her eye sockets and then
clapped her hands
over her ears. She did not want to hear what followed, but she
could not keep it out because every word was already obvious.
“The dragons were coming still,” Medeis said. “If
Io has escaped,
then they will escape in time also, and Io is…”
“The only one alive in this age who has the
ability to fight
them,” the woman finished.
© Brett
Davidson
21 Feb 2006
to Part 5 . .
Back to Night
Lands
|