Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1) (25 page)

‘It was you, Professor, though I am hesitant to tell you so.
Gnesha knows your ego needs little more inflation
. Stratigraphics. You couldn’t help but grow impassioned when you spoke of Pergrin’s days on Old Erde. There was something about the age of wireminds that I knew, that I
knew
, intrigued you. And it intrigued me. I became obsessive, Pergrin, Cato, Erde, all of that. Do you know there was once supposedly seven simultaneous wireminds active on Old Erde? It’s right there in Pergrin’s Histories. If they’re so evil, how can that be so? Wouldn’t they have just eaten the planet, like Miss Butterworth and her Spool story?’

A pause, the engineers and gungovs still admiring the spinning rings. 

‘And do you know,’ he said then, his eyes suddenly wide, ‘that when t’assali coheres, it coheres across the entire time stream?’

‘I wouldn’t even know where to start with a sentence like that.’

‘It means,
Professor
, that a wiremind doesn’t just see into its own future, but lives there too. And it means, presumably, that all seven of those wireminds, and indeed any wiremind that has ever lived, has seen its future fate. Cato knew Pergrin would come for him. If the Spool story is true, then the machine
knew
the syndicate would destroy it. Why didn’t they save themselves?’

‘Perhaps there was nothing they could do…’ Jura murmured, though there was little sincerity behind the words. He felt a rush, small at first, then spreading up his back like dry leaves catching on fire.

‘Oh come. They’d be practically omnipotent. Or prescient at the least. Either our myths are fictitious, or they knew something we don’t.’

‘Well, perhaps it’s just too painful,’ Jura said.
I had not considered that before.
‘Godhood, I mean. Perhaps the weight of it is too much and they yearn to die. Just being human is maudlin enough at times. Imagine the entirety of creation in your head. And, if you’re right, the entirety of time too. Surely nothing can contain that and sit comfortably.’

Mcalister nodded to the rings. ‘When I’m finished,
that
will. You’ll see.’

Jura looked him over. There was a quiet assurance to the rogue he hadn’t noticed before; a passionate love for struggle and defiance.
Hell, he’s been here for, what, five weeks already? Alone, only the gungovs for company, doggedly tiring himself like a serf. Surely no one could withstand that. 

‘I admire your ambition, at least,’ Jura muttered.

There is something about the boy. I was like that once, full of an indomitable conviction that my work was important. Was I such a contrarian though?

‘It’s strange to be with you now, Professor. After all of these years. Here in your
mighty tower
. I don’t imagine it’s where either of us thought you were going.’

‘I don’t imagine either of us thought you would live in it with me.’

The boy took another sip of his wine and regarded Jura over the wine glass’s rim: ‘You look troubled, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘The weight of rule,’ Jura mumbled.

‘I think it's more than that. When this machine is finished, everything will change, won’t it? Not just on Exurbia, but in the syndicate. I’ve had a lot of time to think it over. If this really is the first wiremind in three thousand years since Cato, that’s -’ he searched the air for the right word, ‘considerable. Plus, the Old Erders never had the chance to use ambrosia. This monster will spread throughout the systems faster than they can stop it. I suppose Exurbia will be swallowed in seconds. And what of us then? I would expect you to be a little troubled, Professor. Faced with indeterminants like that.’

‘You’re a true Ixenite, aren’t you,’ Jura said. There was a pull in his chest. How long had it been, pretending for them all now? Forty years at least, denouncing the Ixers and their machines. Truly, he dreamed of an orange blaze on the horizon wider and brighter than any sunset could have produced: the dawn of the t’assali god.
I could tell him. I could tell him all of it. This may well be the last time we’re alone together.

‘I still don’t understand, you know,’ said the boy. ‘If Miss Butterworth follows the Pergrin Decree to the letter, why has she commissioned me to build just the kind of machine that flaunts it?’

‘She commissioned you?’

‘I consider being allowed to keep my life a form of payment in exchange for the service I’ve provided, yes.’

Jura ran a hand through his gunmetal grey curls and looked the boy over again.

‘You said yourself it’s an amplifier, not a wiremind. Such a machine might be permitted under the Pergrin Decree.’

‘Oh
really
?’ said the boy. ‘They fear a wiremind because they know what it could do, what it
would
do. Disseminate consciousness throughout the cosmos, faster than they could keep up with, faster than they could stop it. And, do you know something, Professor? I think the whole process is as natural as a fulshrub. And I know, by Gnesha’s girdle, that you know it too. This is what universes do, isn’t it? They turn from dead lifelessness into living objects. They
rouse
. It doesn’t matter if you never launch this monster here. One will get through, some day. And one is all that needs to. There’s an archaic word, Old Erdish. Gestalt. Do you know it?’

Jura’s blood ran glacial. ‘No,’ he said carefully.

‘Well, the Ixenites of Pergrin’s day thought this was all part of a natural process too. And they thought the entire process should have a name, and that’s the name they gave it. Cato and the wireminds weren’t technological curiosities to them. They were the next logical step in a cosmic process. They were waypoints on Jacob’s ladder. How about it, Professor. Shall we have a look up evolution’s skirt?’

Jura smiled; the feeling of river ice cracking after a long and lasting winter. ‘I would very much like that.’

‘Charon,’ the boy said.

‘What?’

‘Charon,’ the boy said again. ‘Old Erde myth, the ferryman who carried the souls of the living to the world of the dead. It seems an apt name for our machine here, doesn’t it?’

‘I hope we aren’t destined for the world of the dead, of all places.’

‘I think it will be a little like death though. I’m sure something of you will survive the trip, but not what I’m talking to now. The world of the dead is fitting. Besides, every great transition brings death with it in tow. Almost all original life on Old Erde must be long dead by now, but here we are, an empire. It’s a kind of cosmic bargain.’

‘You’re a very strange boy,’ Jura said and noticed the urge in himself to reach out and tussle Mcalister’s hair.

‘From you Professor, a compliment.’

They finished their glasses in silence and Jura straightened his robes.

‘Charon it is. Though, it’ll be our secret, how about it?’ he said.

The boy smiled.

Gnesha,
thought Jura then,
please, keep him from harm.

34

"Gnesha" -
Colloquial:
Originally used to refer to Gneshathane, a Shivan goddess. Corrupted over centuries to signify little more than a curse, or intensifier.

     - Standard Exurbic Colloquial Dictionary, 17th Edition  

261 -

‘Come,’ said the syndicate woman, beckoning with a finger. ‘Come see your legacy. Few men have the good fortune to live long enough for such a privilege, and you have already had two lifetimes. Come.’

At the centre of the Grand Hall on a medical bed lay a girl, late in her adolescence. The eyes were shut, the breathing slow. Someone had spent many hours braiding her black hair into fine helices. 261 approached slowly. Behind the syndicate woman sat Jura on the tershal chair, his head held resignedly in his hands, the eyes desperate but impotent.

‘She only wields the power when she sleeps, in her subconscious you see,’ Miss Butterworth said to the imp. ‘Under your rule, a Governance scientist engineered a serum to boost suggestive states. We have of course dosed her heavily with the stuff. She will not remember any of what happens here. Let me show what you’ve done, Tersh Stanislav.’

She bent to the girl’s ear and began to whisper concertedly. The girl didn’t move, didn’t rouse in the slightest. A gungov activated the hall’s omnicast and a stereopticon representation of a city appeared above their heads, turned upside down so the spires and steeples reached from the ceiling.

‘Kadesh,’ 261 whispered.

‘Of course. Is it dear to you?

I do not know.

‘It should be. You were raised there, out among the kersher farms and the epicforest. Quandary one. Stanislav is bound by the vow he took on becoming the grand tersh. Stanislav forgot his identity for a time but has regained it. Is Stanislav still bound by his vows? I can’t offer you quandary globes, you’ll have to solve this conundrum by yourself, I’m afraid.’

Two enormous objects collided in him: 
I am what. What am I. 

‘This is an elaborate deception,’ said 261. ‘Nothing more.’

‘If the alteration was so consistent that it was really expunged from your memory, then so be it. But we both know that isn’t the case.’

The regal purples of the swirling helix banners, the vaulted ceiling, the gungovs and their unwavering stares.
Did I sit here once? Did I look on these things? 
An orange glimmer appeared on the outskirts of Kadesh, high above them in the stereopticon projection. The syndicate woman continued whispering into the girl's ear, manipulating the Ayakashi through her.

‘Stop,’ said 261.

‘You are Exurbia’s highest subject. Exurbia is a subject of the syndicate. You are a syndicate subject, then. And I, 261, am the syndicate.’

‘But stop,’ he said again.

‘This is
lunacy
,’ Jura said, jumping then to his feet.

The t’assali ribbon danced idly for a moment, sighted the outcastles of the city, and lurched viperous towards them.

‘For what is this for?’ said 261. ‘For what purpose could this possibly be for?’

‘To demonstrate what a mistake it was to assist the Ixenites,’ said Miss Butterworth.

‘Assist? I came to you, didn’t I? I have given myself up.’

‘Insult the professor’s intelligence by all means, but not mine. You’ve done nothing of the sort. You came for young Moxiana here, to free her and utilise her as a weapon. It’s remarkable, a single creature with this kind of influence; the idea that a human could be such a conduit for fire.’

The projection was a mess of raging orange, the Ayakashi having covered almost the entirety of the city. A notion came to the imp: 
I knew one once who lived there
.

‘Your mother and father, I believe. They grew up in the city, and now of course they will die in it. A certain poetry to that, no?’

Whatever she says I must remain absolutely calm.

‘Liege,’ he said soberly to one of the gungovs. ‘You said you would come to the aid of those with power. Come to my aid and I will grant you all the power you could possibly want. I will give you the entire tershal institution if you only stop this woman.’

Miss Butterworth was staring at him then with what looked like pity. The gungovs remained in their positions.

‘Liege,’ he shouted. ‘She will use the girl for more than just the evaporation of cities. Soon she will banish the gungovs from the tower and use the Ayakashi to evaporate
your
home. There’s no fairness about her. It is extremely likely that -’

‘There is no justice,’ said the gungov in rasping warble-tones. Even the syndicate woman appeared surprised. ‘Only the powerful and the powerless.’

‘Then you won’t help? You’ll only stand and watch?’

It did not speak further. Pause. A tickle of rage in him. 
I will make a corpse of her then. 
261 lurched, screaming like a tribesman, his eyes wide, running for the syndicate woman, running for her neck where he would wrap his hands about it and make sure not a single snatch of air could pass through it again. Time relaxed to an idling coast. She did not move as he ran, did not leave the girl’s side. 
I will kill you dead with my hands. I will take all of the life from you.

The moments seemed to pass as years, the gungovs watching stoically, Jura’s face set in a desperate stare. Then, a voice in 261's mind that was not his own, silken, each syllable given careful ministration: ‘You have seen the gestalt. That night the butterfly approached, I know you have seen it. I showed it to you after all. Do you not see how this contributes? Do you not understand the pattern?’

Get out,
he tried to scream.
You’re a killer, a menace.

‘No,’ she said, the voice snuffing his thoughts. ‘I am the Demeter.’

He halted, fell to his knees, allowed the fullness of it to wash over him.

‘I am here for the harvest.’

He tried to keep his tears at bay, but there was little use now. They appeared like beetles from old wood, troops of them.

Do you speak the truth?
he said in his mind.

‘I speak the truth,’ came the reply.

Kadesh was almost gone now, swallowed by the Ayakashi. Still the girl lay unconscious, neither glad nor lour, only sleeping. The professor was stood in panic. 

Can Jura hear this congress between us?

‘It is just you and I, 261. There are dimensions to this only you, and you alone, would understand. Do you know what I have come here to beget?’

I can imagine
, he thought.
I found a story in the deep streams once, buried as far down as it could be. It spoke of the Demeter. It spoke of her coming and it spoke of the harvest. I thought it nothing more than an Erde myth. But the Pergrin Decree, it makes no sense to me. None of this makes any sense to me.

‘But you know what it is I have come to do and why it must be done in this fashion.’

I have half an idea. Though why have You waited this long? So many have died already.