Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1) (13 page)

‘I don’t -’

‘The moment when she became procurable. Not like the Up though. Not like the wiremind race. It’s the perfect game, isn’t it? You might never get hold of it, you might never live to see a real one reach criticality. It could stay forever and perfectly out of your reach. I can make that happen if you like, Stefan. If you want me to, I can keep it forever impossible.’

He was speechless, sopping wet in his own sweat, his heart palpating. She was at his side then, whispering into his ear, the wet echoes of her mouth, the hot vapour of her breath. ‘Would you like that, Stefan?’

He tried to stand and could not. He went to summon the energy to push her away, but that was just as impossible. He could smell her breath then, sweet. Turning his head, he took her in. Her face was radiant, glowing at the edges, her hair so bright it was almost blinding, her mouth tucked up in a confident half-smile.

‘What a busy thing you’ve been,’ she said. ‘Collecting scraps and discards for your projects, saying whatever the tersh wanted to hear. What an industrious scandalmonger.’

‘What are you?’ he managed to croak, stupefied with horror.

‘A guest,’ she said. ‘And you shouldn’t ask guests direct questions like that. Maybe you won’t like the answers.’

‘Are…are you really syndicate?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you really here because of a possible Pergrin crisis?’

‘In a sense.’ 

But why? Gnesha, why?

‘Why indeed,’ she said. ‘Do you know the Old Erde butterfly?’

He nodded.

‘Well, they all begin as pathetic crawling insects, wingless. And they gorge themselves on leafs for a time until they’re full and then they crawl up into a chrysalis and dangle from a branch. Then the cocoon breaks and out comes this exquisite butterfly. But - curiously - if you break the chrysalis open when it’s only half done, do you know what you find inside?’

He shook his head.
Half a butterfly
, he thought.

‘Not half a butterfly, no. Just slop. Gelatinous slop, full of amino acids. Isn’t that strange? The caterpillar disappears in the chrysalis and is completely broken down. And then it’s
reborn,
Stefan.’

Out in the city, out beyond the great windows, the roof flares and spotlights were dancing like lazy diodes in the middle distance. All the light was streaking into itself now, blurring together in a hideous neon unison. An enormous purple butterfly descended suddenly over the Bureau of Substantiation, floating silently. The eyes seemed to look straight into Stefan.

‘Do you think a butterfly knows that it came from a caterpillar? That it dissolved into nebulous slop for a time? They’re myopic, for such beautiful creatures. They haven’t a clue what they are. But
we
understand. Don’t we, Professor?’

The butterfly began to move towards them, coming across the city lights, cutting straight through the transport pods and police capriglobes.

‘We understand the process entire. It’s what we do. The gestalt. Everything has been an attempt to understand the gestalt, to understand the True Process. It started with man’s realisation of his own mortality. Life wasn’t an infinite dream. Instead it was, as the Old Erde poet said, bookended by eternity. And then we understood the gestalt of the stars, their strange geometries. And it is my job, Professor, to understand humanity’s gestalt.’

There was no mistaking it, the butterfly was staring directly at him as it flew. He blinked frantically. The spectre persisted. Now the buildings were falling away into dark, replaced instead with stars and nebulas. The Bureau of Substantiation, the Civic Hall, the Stratigraphics Faculty, the Conglomeration of the Agglutinators, the Blueberry Projects, all of it diminishing into black; star fields taking their place.

‘Here we are at the true gestalt,' said Miss Butterworth. ‘I don’t show this to just
anybody
, you know.’

They were suspended above a whirling galaxy then, all signs of Exurbia gone. The butterfly had followed them into the vision, apparently.

‘The gestalt…’ Jura said.

‘The gestalt,’ said the butterfly in a deafening bass warble, its mouth adorned with slick tangles of spit.

‘The gestalt,’ Miss Butterworth said. ‘We were caterpillars for the longest time. The real question, question with a capital Q, is whether man is ready for the chrysalis.’

The butterfly was close then, still approaching.

‘We’re not a cul-de-sac,’ Jura managed. ‘We can’t be.’

‘It is your world that gets to decide,' she whispered, her mouth to his ear again.

‘Do you mean
him
?’ said a high-pitched voice from behind. One of Miss Butterworth’s spyles flew into view and scrutinised Jura with its stalk-lens.

‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Butterworth. ‘He seems as good as any other.’

‘But he’s scared. Look at him,’ said the second spyle coming into focus now, the voice a little higher in pitch than the first.

‘That isn’t for you to determine,’ said the butterfly, the voice so loud it was almost unbearable.

‘Who is the chrysalis?' said the first drone. ‘Who is the worm? Who gets eternity? Who gets the urn?’

Then the two of them in unison: ‘Who is the chrysalis? Who is the worm? Who gets eternity? Who gets the urn?
’

Miss Butterworth put up a silencing hand and studied Jura’s face.

‘Well, Stefan? What do you say, eternity or the urn?’

‘Is this real,’ he whispered. ‘And if so, how much of it?’

‘You see,’ said the spyle. ‘He doesn’t even understand.’

‘Are they…
wireminds?’
said Stefan.

One of the drones giggled.

‘You’re going to do me a favour,’ said Miss Butterworth. ‘And in return, I’m going to give you what you’ve always wanted. I only ask that you be bold.’

‘“Be bold,”’ moaned Jura, ‘“and mighty forces will come to your aid.”’

‘Old Erde poetry. Goethe, yes? Mighty forces
have
come to your aid, Professor. There’s going to be a redistribution of power. You’re going to be bold. No more of this petty deferring of responsibility. No more subversion in secret. No more setting Mrs. Peaches’ garden shed alight and letting the neighbours blame it on the Blueberry Project arsonists.’

How? How could you possibly know about that?

‘I know you, Jura. I know you well. And I know you’re capable of what I’m asking. There is one final thing I require.’

‘Our souls. All of our souls,’ he said.

The spyles both giggled.

‘No, not that. The t’assali satellite access strings.’

‘The tersh wouldn’t give them to me in ten billion years.’

‘We don’t need the tersh. Only your wife. Pardon my misspeak, your
ex-
wife.’

Annie, of course; her job at the Bureau of Celestials.

‘You’re meeting her soon anyway, aren’t you?’

There was no further point responding.

‘Get me the strings. Get me the strings, and I’ll give you what you want.’

I don’t want for anything,
he thought.
I don’t want a damn thing in the damn world, with the possible exception of getting you out of my mind. What do you want with
them
?

‘Something perfectly admirable. Do you know the Ayakashi?’

Of course.
And who could forget it, the streams showing video feeds every few weeks of those strange orange fingers tearing through some city or other. 

‘What do you think it is? In your academic opinion?’ she asked.

Malign inter-dimensional tomfoolery. Punishment from vengeful gods. I haven't the faintest idea.

‘I have. It’s a girl, black hair, pale little thing. And every night that she has a bad dream, those orange tendrils appear on the outskirts of a city or a village and rip it gutter from gutter. Get me the strings and I’ll bring her here, to Bucepalia. I’ll tame her. And I’ll give you a
very special gift in return
.’

Amid the starfield ahead of them, something took shape: girders coming together, locomotive mechanical parts, pistons, casings, vent assemblies.
My god. A rig.
The casings locked together, the optic contacts and logic gates coupled. The structure was enormous.

‘Larger than the Stratigraphics Faculty,’ she said. ‘When it’s finished.’

It hung in space for a moment. The rings began to gyrate, slowly at first, then looping back on each other, over and over, a light coming lit at the heart of the mechanism, an orb suspended at the centre, though not a t’assali orange. A shimming midnight blue. 
The ambrosia,
he thought.

‘Correct, Professor. More stable than t’assali, more efficient, and a critical threshold of seven pergrins.'

Aside from the improved design and the sheer size of the machine, there was a detail he didn’t recognise from the usual builds. A podium of some kind dangled from the belly of the mechanism, complete with a balcony.

‘That basket is your prize, Professor. If you are to be
bold,
those mighty forces will come to your aid when you step into that basket. Don’t you think the wiremind race is a strange one? Here you all are trying to build a god with no thought for yourselves. What about
your
volition? What about
your
will to power? I won’t give you a god, Stefan. I’ll make you one.’

A projector,
he thought.
The damn thing’s a projector, an amplifier for consciousness. Why would you do this? Why would you do any of this?

‘The same reason you beaver away in secret. The same reason the Ixenites give their lives. For the gestalt, Professor,’ she said, leaning into him then, kissing his cheek, breathing hot air into his ear. ‘All of it for the gestalt.’

17

“We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday.”

- F.T. Marinetti of Old Erde, exponent of futurism

The Crone -

The crone had been young once, a nomad in the epicforests. Her rabble had trekked from village to village bringing songs of Old Erde, shanties and the like, to curious ears, rarely staying more than a day in any one place. Sometimes they were chased to the village limits, but more often than not they were given food and bedding for the night on account of their novelty. Few knew much of Old Erde, and to have it sung to them,
Macbeth, Beowulf, Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,
was a welcome distraction from the banalities of life on the farms and in the t’assali pits.

The crone had not taken a husband. She was far from ugly then, the opportunity simply hadn’t presented itself. It was no matter. The old myths and old songs kept her company enough; Theseus in his labyrinth, Steven Daedalus in his schoolroom. Occasionally a Governance patrol passed through a village and chased them out. She’d been arrested twice, but it hadn’t been of any consequence. Word was that the existence of Exurbia’s nomads had been put to the moralising imp, and he had deemed that they were well within their rights to continue their lifestyle as it stood.

She had seen the Ayakashi twice before she met the girl. She had stood at the borders of Kadesh and watched the first ever attack, ripping through the town like a lace of angry sunlight. The Ayakashi had
something
to do with t’assali, that much was clear. Its orange gleam was unmistakable. But what was it doing outside of a generator, naked like that? It was the second attack that had stayed with her. Sometime around the Year of the Flippant Star, the rabble had made camp a few miles from New Coventry, and played ballads long into the night, the crone on the two-fiddle. They had heard it first; a screaming chorus beyond the epicforest. As they approached the city they discerned orange fingers peeking through the trees. The crone said a prayer to any god that might be listening: 
Alter this day in the most peaceful direction.

Only New Coventry hadn’t been entirely destroyed like the cities before it. There were the typical scorch patterns, the smoking ash where houses and civil buildings had been, where the Ayakashi had spread its fire, but a single wooden structure stood unharmed near the central district. The rabble approached cautiously. The house was perfectly intact and unblemished.

‘Rather not be proddin’ bee hives today,’ said one of the rabble women. ‘Let’s just go about the day and say nothin’ of it. Boston Falls ain’t a far hike.’

A few murmured in agreement. The crone advanced towards the house.

‘Ain’t nothing in there we want to be wrapped up in,’ said the rabble woman.

‘Go then,’ said the crone. The crowd stood rooted to the spot uncertainly.

What weirdness has been at work here?
All was intact inside: a row of shoes laid neatly by the front door, coats hung on pegs. A cup of something sat steaming on the dining table. Upstairs was the same. The beds were neatly made, the books were alphabetised on their shelves. And out beyond the bay windows, she saw, was a scorched and flattened black plain of death that extended all the way to the lip of the epicforest. She checked the windows on the opposite side. The black plain reached just as far in that direction too.
We’re standing in the eye of the storm.
Then, a sound that returned to her often in the subsequent years: a quiet rasp at first, followed by a full-blown sobbing coming from one of the other bedrooms. The crone pushed the door back. A girl of perhaps two lay wrapped in bedsheets, hands pressed to her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Is this an apparition?

‘Come,’ said the crone. ‘Why waste good salt and water?’

The girl stopped for a moment and looked up.

‘Where is your mama? Is your mama here?’

Then more crying. Without caution, the crone took the child in her arms and coddled her, hot tears soaking into her rags and scarf.

‘If we can’t find your mama,’ said the crone, ‘you can come with me, that’s fine.’