Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1) (29 page)

‘I doubt I have to tell you what Denkov radiation does to human flesh, even flesh as leathery as yours, Your Eminence. When the thought occurred to me that I could one day bring a weapon into this place, that I alone might be the last Exurbian with access to such leverage, I thought it best to negotiate. Perhaps you could be reasoned with if your life was at stake. But we both know that isn’t true. Anything less than your death will only continue your project here. And what a project it is.’

He armed the nib. The metal wrinkled with purple Denkov ribbons for a moment and returned to its gunmetal silver. The gungovs remained stationary.
They can’t reach him in time to stop a fatal blast.

‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘And more fittingly, what are you?’

No, Fricke, what are you? A man. A man among mice.

‘The Demeter,’ said the syndicate woman. ‘That is my True Address, if you must use it. The bringer of the harvest. The cultivator of final stages.’

‘You have harvested
nothing
,’ he spat. ‘You have cultivated
nothing
. My wife, my child, my family, they dwelled in Kadesh. You had them evaporated, or at least you had the girl do it for you.’

‘I don’t expect you to understand the intricacies of the chrysalis. Do you think the caterpillar knows anything of its destiny? What does a wheatsheaf know of its providence? You are stepping on the toes of giants, Fricke.’ Still she was not alarmed, not bargaining for her life.
Does she ever feel fear? Is she capable? 
‘Come, the last moments of the birth are always the most perilous. Put your weapon aside. We’ll talk of this as reasonable agents.’

‘Yes,’ said Fricke. ‘You have done too much damage already, but maybe some last scrap of decency can be salvaged in ripping you apart. Look. Look at the professor, at the imp. What have you done, you malevolent crone?’

‘I have arranged history into its final shape. That is the Demeter’s duty.’

‘You trusk, you perverser, you hideous -’

‘Fricke!’ Jura called. Butterworth's spyles had descended from their hiding cavity in the ceiling, cutting-parts extended, jigsaw blades spinning.

‘I will torch your cadaver, I will spit on your lineage, and then I will proudly inform the syndicate of what I have done. They will -’

‘Syndicate?’ said the woman then. The spyles hung silently, a hair’s breadth from Fricke’s head, the blades almost kissing his skin. ‘Did you really imagine there was a
syndicate?
’

Fricke’s aiming arm was shaking violently now.

‘What, some brave and all-supreme galactic empire? Did you believe it so?’

‘What is she saying?’ Fricke screamed. ‘What is it she’s saying?’

‘You’re a gullible species for one that lies so often. One would think your obsession with deception would give you some sense for when it is used against you. There is no syndicate.’

‘There is no syndicate,’ said the imp in a whisper.

‘There is no syndicate,’ sang the drones in a discordant chorus.

There is no syndicate.

‘A convenient myth,’ said the imp, deflated.

‘How long have you known?’ said the syndicate woman.

The imp slumped in his chair and blinkered his eyes with tired hands. ‘Since you showed Maria, the Zdrastian, and myself the gestalt. There was no way its tip couldn’t already have been reached. The most likely explanation is usually the correct one.’

‘Witch,’ Fricke screamed, his face flushed like a tashloe rose.

The syndicate woman rolled her eyes and gestured to the spyles. They advanced a mere foot, their cutting-parts making a clean and silent run through the sides of Fricke’s neck. He fell to his knees, blood soaking his agglutinator robes now, gold and silver mixing in with carmine red. His mouth opened and shut as though trying to say something, a eulogy for himself. Then he collapsed. An infinite silence took hold. One of the gungovs made to remove the body discreetly, carrying the thing on its back like a rolled carpet.

‘How long ago did it happen?’ the imp said quietly.

‘Three thousand years, by your standards.’

The imp nodded.

Three thousand years? Three thousand years of what? 
‘I don’t understand,’ Jura said.

A protracted silence. Then: ‘We’re a zoo,’ said the imp. ‘A sort of animal sanctuary. For Them.’

‘Them?’

‘For whatever’s out there now. There was no Pergrin. Was there?’

Miss Butterworth smiled genially. ‘You’re brighter than I gave you credit, Imp.’

‘There was no Pergrin and no sally against machine intelligence. Old Erde built a wiremind, or wireminds –’

‘Wire
minds
,’ said the syndicate woman.

‘Wireminds, and they reached out through the galaxy, just as the Ixenites wanted it, and still want it now. What the modern movement doesn’t seem to have considered is the possibility that the revolution they yearned for to begin with, the migration to the Up, happened millennia ago. There are no humans left. We are the last of an endangered species, relegated to the backwaters of the galaxy.’

‘Correct.'

‘This is
unnatural
,’ said Jura.

‘Unnatural?' chuckled the syndicate woman. 'To use that word, of all people, Professor. Is there anything unnatural in the whole of creation, do you think?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are the archetype.’

‘Oh, if you were a bird, you’d call the wind evil. There is nothing, not a cell, not a rock, not an act, not an institution, not a single particle that isn’t natural, that isn’t coming about and going its way in the way that it should.
Unnatural.
You only mean that which doesn’t sit well with you. Look at us, standing atop a world we didn’t originate on, under a sun our ancestors could barely pick out from the others in their day.
Unnatural.
And they, with their clubs and their tools; why, you would’ve called cried bloody murder at those too, I suppose. “Put down that axe and that hoe! We’re defying Sacred Nature!” And technology then, is that an unsavoury evil too? It is nothing but nature rearranged into a better version of herself. That which technology does, that which technology produces, that is nothing less than nature’s too; she sits just as comfortably at the heart of a t’assali generator as she does on a w’liak branch. And until you understand that, you will never fully see the gestalt.’

‘There is it again, your nonsense and your myths.’

‘
Myths
. It’s realer than anything here, I guarantee. Look at you, you extraordinary machine, you with your muscles and your bones and your guts and your grey matter. Do you know how long it took for nature to build such a thing? Look at you with your doubting and your fear. Have you ever seen a sceptical rock? Or one that fears for its life? You’re a way station, Stefan. A mere comfort stop on the path, on the long walk. A one hundred million year respite before the Up. We all dance to its tune.’

‘Even you,’ he said. ‘Even you?’ 
It makes me happy somehow that there is something beyond you, or something pulling your strings at least. That’s hope, if only a stolen little morsel of it.

‘I’m dancing to it now,’ she said. ‘And asking your little planet to join me, to come find its providence. And my, are you all so resistant.’

‘You have murdered people,’ the professor said. ‘You have murdered my friends.’

‘You would not have rallied otherwise.’

‘You have done unspeakable things to good people. You have imprisoned my wife. You have destroyed our culture.’

‘Don’t mistake the interval for the finale.’

‘You’re speaking nonsense.’

‘Well, all poetry is blather to a dog.’

‘If we’re the last of the original species then we were kept, what, as a curiosity?’ said the imp.

‘More a reservation, if you will.’

The imp seemed to be turning the notion over in his mind with the impartiality of a judge. ‘A reservation then. The Pergrin Decree was to ensure we didn’t transcend. To ensure we stayed as apes. And to refrain from trying to build our own empire. Myth as a leash. But why now? Why have you come here, after all of these years?’

‘It is not of importance,’ Miss Butterworth said. ‘And even if I explained it, you would still not comprehend it fully, much as a scallix couldn’t grasp weld theory, try as it might.’

‘Yet you are proof,’ said the imp, his voice rising slightly in a tremble, ‘of humanity’s worst suspicions. You are proof that higher intelligence doesn’t promote any greater interest in peace. You’ve come here as a god and treated us as subjects. No,’ he faltered. ‘Not subjects. Animals.’

‘I have come for the harvest,’ she said. ‘And only certain tools may be used. The wheat will not yield itself.’

‘Even then, you could simply have told the truth. We would have been willing, we would have listened. Instead -’

‘What are They?’ said Jura. ‘What are They really? Your kind?’

‘Geometers,’ she said. ‘Minds that understand the shape of things. Minds that understand the shape of how things change.’

‘That isn’t an answer.’ 
Why all this obfuscation? Can’t you just call a spade a spade?

‘I don’t know what you want to hear, Professor. I don’t know what would suit you best. The universe incarnate, if you like.’

‘That isn’t an answer either.’

‘It is, you just haven’t the ears for it. Everything has a shape, a gestalt. Everything unfolds in a natural sequence, even if the sequence is impossible to understand at that moment in time. A flower doesn’t question its nature, nor a caterpillar.’

‘A
caterpillar…
’

‘Nor a man though. Don’t you think that’s strange? You’re all so comfortable thinking yourself an end rather than a means. A last stop. You’re all so obsessed that this is your final shape, these two legs, two arms, that
delicate little brain
. I expected more from you. It’s so important to your kind, the toing and froing, building your empires, crushing those empires which aren’t your own. Did you ever stop to consider that this might all be transitory?’

‘Yes,’ said Jura.

‘Then why not say it? Why not build your societies to it, the way a child goes to school in preparation for adulthood? Why not ready yourself for a running jump?’

‘Into what, exactly?’

‘The Up of course.’

Is she a soothsayer? Does she mean this? ‘
The geometers. Is that where They live? The Up?’

‘In a sense.’

‘Then they’re, what? Gods? Machines?’

‘Neither of those things. Both too, in the sense that you are, Professor. Minds a few tiers higher up on the gestalt. Another corner on the cornerless shape. Yourselves, later.’

He began to understand then, a climber almost at the summit.

‘You’re a kind of antagonist,’ he said. ‘You’re here to bully us into evolving. Aren’t you?’

‘Not bully. Encourage. Few brave the forest without a map. Fewer even survive without one.’

He felt her in his mind then, as though she were walking freely through its corridors. 
‘And those who wish to stay may stay, and those who wish to go may go. What do you wish to do?’
said the voice from all points within him.

Annie’s face came to him from nowhere at all, suspended in his mind’s eye. ‘How exclusive is the invitation?’ he said.

‘Those who wish to stay may stay,’ she said again.

‘Is there love,’ he said quietly. ‘In there? Up there, I mean. Or out there.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What kind?’

‘The sort that turns cells into animals. The sort that lit the suns.’

No. It isn’t. Everything is flying apart from itself, spreading out into nothing at all at a million miles an hour. Matter is a hermit and one day every atom will live apart from every other and even those will be gone too eventually. That’s a blessing, I think. Every rotten part of me will one day be apart from itself and it will all be too distant to remember what it did here. That’s a kind of absolution. I need only wait.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Things are distancing themselves, but they’re also becoming more complex. There couldn’t be a gestalt without a little chaos. But don’t mistake the chaos for the music. You’re just not listening carefully enough.’

I’m tired of your truisms, whatever it is they mean. I’m tired of your ridiculous prophecies. I’m tired of your awful authority.

‘Then don’t worry much over it,’ she said. ‘It won’t last too long.’

She looked almost maudlin, keeping her eyes to a fixed point on the ground. ‘Some forces for change are lasting and some are passing.’

And I suppose then that you are the latter and you know it.

‘Yes,’ she said and picked her face back up into a half-smile that was sure of itself and its capabilities and its malice. There was a clatter from the pit of the hall. Something had fallen from sleeping Moxiana’s bed, a ring of hers. The eyes were fluttering open, the hands stretching themselves against the silk of the sheets.

‘In the name of the gestalt,’ whispered the syndicate woman, and rose violently to her feet. The girl groaned and tried to lift herself onto her elbows.

She’s weak but there’s strength there.

‘Sentries,’ Miss Butterworth cried. ‘Put her to sleep at once.’

The gungovs remained stationary. And one, Jura saw then, stood only a metre from the girl’s cot, appearing guilty, if a monster of its calibre could seem such a thing. It held the intravenous drip in one of its grabbing parts, removed now from Moxiana's arm, the tube leaking sleeping serum over the hall floor.

‘You have woken her! What is the meaning of this?’ Butterworth shrieked.

The girl was sat upright then and taking stock of the scene. She met Jura’s stare and smiled, her cheek freckles lifting like stars at dawn.

‘Enough. To sleep at once with her,’ said the syndicate woman crossing to the cot.

A nebulous ripple of orange arced between the tershal throne and Moxiana, leaving a black scorch in its wake. Miss Butterworth stood perfectly still.

‘I suppose,’ the imp said quietly, ‘that Moxiana is quite angry with you.’