Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1) (31 page)

‘And I will reconstitute them,’ said the girl, as though he’d spoken aloud. ‘I have that ability. She knew I could.’

‘Then Maria -’

‘And the Zdrastian, the turncoat gungovs, Xianxi, Kadesh, all of them, yes. I will reconstitute them. Nothing is lost. I promise you.’

In his mind he saw the twin tree trunks, laid on the soil and bearing Maria and the Zdrastian's dates of death.
Was it all really so fickle?

‘You’re thinking of the Up. You’re curious?’ said the girl.

Fortmann nodded.

‘It is a challenge to explain. I have only seen a glimmer. But believe me, it is, as the syndicate woman put it, our providence. I suppose I would say that it is the place all things go when they grow enough, where all life tends to eventually, whichever trajectory it takes. Understand that, as the syndicate woman told you, all poetry is blather to a dog. We haven't the senses or faculties to conceive of just what is waiting in the Up, but we can be sure that it isn't malicious. That is honestly the most I can tell you. Those who wish to stay may stay. And those who wish to come may come. We have been issued an impossible invitation. They would not have made the offer had They not been sure.’

'Sure of what?' Fortmann said.

'Our maturity. If Exurbia has been a sanctuary for the last of us, then Miss Butterworth came to open the gates and reuinte us with the rest of our kind.'

'But They're not
our
kind.'

'They sought to preserve us as a remnant I suppose, a biological souvenir to a former stage in their evolutionary history, before the absence of division and decline and death, before we found our way. We share a common lineage, doubtless. They were us once. Much as we domesticate our distant animal cousins, They domesticated theirs. Had the Pergrin Decree not been in place, an Exurbic wiremind would long ago have been activated, and ushered us partially into the Up. But not entirely. It requires a human element, a catalyst.'

'What is life's history,' the girl continued, 'if not a slow and agonising conquest of dimensions? From bacteria to standing armies. From primates to the heavens. There is nothing more divine about the men of old Erde, of our kind, than of the all life which came before it. Nor is there anything more divine about the life which came after. They have their own disputes and limitations in the Up, I'm sure. Quarrels we cannot possibly begin to imagine. There is no foolishness to ignoring their invitation. Many will find the idea distasteful and choose to remain in their current condition, eventually succumbing to the fate of all temporary creatures. Such is their right. Most will not though, that much I can see.' 

There was a small commotion at the chamber’s entrance. Evidently the gungovs had released the Ixenite captives from their cells on the lower levels. Now they stood silently at the Grand Hall’s threshold.

‘Come,’ said the girl, smiling. ‘Come in, all of you.’ Sit, please.'

They entered tentatively. Many, Fortmann realised, were men and women of his own chapter. Jura stood to his feet slowly, eyes fixed on a woman at the back of the rabble. She padded to him across the cold marble tier, affecting a prisoner’s robe, her hair in matted blonde swathes. The tersh bent to whisper something. She paused, her expression neutral for a moment, then fell apart into desperate sobs.

‘Annie,’ he whispered. ‘
Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie.’

The girl brought the entire banquet contents over to the middle of the hall and laid it out in concentric circles. The Ixenites sat and ate, ravished. And Mcalister too, emerging from the crowd as they swamped the hall, made for the four of them.

‘I hear you need a pilot,’ he said to the tersh.

‘He won’t be making the journey,’ said the girl. ‘That is my duty, as well as another’s.’

The imp smiled, understanding. ‘We go together,’ he said. ‘You and I.’

The girl nodded. ‘I will use my energies to spread the imp’s volition across the Up. My abilities and his clarity of mind make for the perfect fusion. You will steer us, Mcalister. To the best of your abilities. Can you do that?’

‘I can.’

‘Then eat, all of you, drink, gain vitality. This evening we will open the gates to the Up.’

40

“Words are little more than batteries for storing the charge of our meanings. They cannot accomodate for Real Truths anymore than a flask could hold an ocean.”

     -The Book of Truisms

261 and Fortmann -

They spent the evening reacquainting themselves, the Ixenites in good humour. Moxiana conjured starfire t’assali spectres; scallixes and former tershes and butterflies, all dancing across the Grand Hall’s canopy. At the apogee of the moons, when the crowd were well fed and watered and drunk, they moved without comment into the workshop where the machine lay; the blue ambrosia heart beating silently at its centre.

‘Some of you will stay,’ she said, turning to address the rabble. ‘And that is a fine thing. It means there will at least be a few biological ancestors left in the galaxy. Perhaps you will find the Up in your own way too, one day. There is no great shame in remaining behind. In a sense, you’re the preservation of a long legacy.’ She offered a hand to the imp. He took it. ‘Many of you imagined machine intelligence would herald the next stage of cosmic ascendance. You are correct in a sense, but not in another.
Intelligence
is the next stage of cosmic ascendance. The cosmos has a secret history; one of coming awake. And today we rouse it a little more. 261 and myself will open eleven gates to the Up across the planet. You need only walk through them if you so wish join us. There is no great obligation. However, I’m also at a loss to fully explain what will be on the other side. It is not something that fits comfortably into words. Such is the work one can do with only blunt tools. Mcalister, please.’

The boy sat at the controls, unwavering. The machine’s rings began to spin slowly, the ambrosia growing doubly, then triply illuminated; ultramarine and indigo bluefire dancing in reflections on the faces of the rabble
.
261’s heart began to palpate, the sensation a familiar one now.

‘Time is a kind of landscape and until now we have been forced to walk it always at the same pace, and always without being able to double back on ourselves or cross to some distant point.’

‘It’s simultaneous,’ the imp murmured. ‘Through the gates? In the Up?’

‘Not entirely, but something like that, yes. There are no great divisions where we’re going.’

The ambrosia began to spark and warp in its cavern, blue embers shooting from the machine. The rings must have been reaching criticality, spinning just at eyesight’s threshold. The entire workshop’s expanse was bathed in blue light then. Moxiana led 261 into the basket.

‘You will bring them back?’ Fortmann shouted from the crowd. ‘Maria? The Zdrastian?’

‘Of course,’ said the girl. ‘And they may join us too if they like.’

‘And Kadesh? Xianxi?’

‘Everything. All of it.’

He saw the twin tree stumps in his mind, bearing epitaphs.
Maria…

‘I am scared,’ whispered the imp, making careful that only the girl heard.

‘I swear to you, on everything that counts in this world,’ said the girl, ‘that there is no reason to be.’

She linked their fingers together. ‘This isn’t dying.’

‘Then what can we take with us? Of…ourselves?’

She tapped her head with a sincere finger. ‘The only part of significance.’ 

What matters? My time as tersh? I should not like that to follow me in, or up, or out. I should not like that with me. 
261 picked out Jura in the crowd, Annie’s hand in his, the two of them disheveled and spent but watching with calm expressions.
They know the worst is over now.
The professor smiled to him.

‘Be well, Stanislav,’ he called out.

‘And you also,’ shouted the imp.

Already he began to feel bizarre, his thoughts running into one undulating stream.

‘“The Tersh will be eternal,”’ said the girl. ‘I always wondered what that signified.’

She looked the imp over as though for the final time and stroked his face. ‘Now it’s inescapably clear.’

‘Everything tends towards coherence,’ said the imp dazedly, beginning to understand now. The girl nodded and admired the mad throng of gyrating rings above them.

‘Quite right, 261.’

The moons were glistening through the overdome, almost upon one another. Beyond them, he saw, the constellations were at the tip of their flight for the evening.
Is that where we will bide?

‘What do I do?’ whispered the imp, trying not to shake but shaking all the same then.

‘Just wait,’ said the girl, loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the spinning rings and the ambrosia and the dancing plaits of cerulean light. ‘It shan’t be long now.’

41

“As the adage goes, a herd of buffalo may only move as fast as the slowlest buffalo among them. So too with man, if he is to behave ethically.”

   - Cato the Wiremind of Old Erde

Jura -

‘Do we have enough timber,’ Annie said. ‘For the night, I mean?’ Jura nodded.

‘And rice?’

‘Enough of that too.’

She let the wheelbarrow go at her feet. ‘Then I’ll open the wine.’

‘Do that,’ he said. ‘And then come and sit.’ He cleared a patch of grass and set himself down. She appeared not long after with a bottle and two glasses. One of the gates was hanging fantasmic in the middle distance, shimmering, all blues and purples.
What is it, at least thirty feet high?

‘Quite a sight,’ she said.

‘It is.’ 

He waited for the inevitable question. It didn’t come this time.
Perhaps she’s grown bored of asking already. 
‘I don’t want to,’ he said, anticipating. The gate warped slightly and settled again.

‘Well, I think you’ll change your mind,’ she said.

‘Damnit, I’m not going. If you want to, just do it.’

‘I just find it strange, that's all.’

‘What?
’

‘You spend your whole life busying away in secret, writing about it, dreaming about it, building
machines
for it no less, risking your life. And when it comes, when it appears there right at your doorstep -’

‘I have what I need,’ he said.

Right at my doorstep. She isn’t wrong.
Any moment now he could walk the lip of their mountain, down into the valley, and pass straight through the gate. He had seen others doing it, whole families crossing the threshold. Millions of them, all across the planet, everyday. Evolutionary migrants.

‘And what do you need, Tersh?’ she said.

He went to chastise her but saw she was smiling.
No purple robes now, Annie.
His toga barely deserved the name; more of a glorified vegetable sack he’d taken from a disused washing line. The original owners had probably walked through one of the gates weeks before anyway.

‘You know what I need,’ he said.

A long silence. She sipped at her wine.  

Fortmann had promised he’d send a sign back, however small but that had been weeks ago. Both he and Maria had walked unwaveringly into the blue shimmer, their hands entwined, and vanished entirely.
Where are they now? Hell, when?
Jura remembered another professor from the faculty years before, Jurgen. Jura had visited the man on his deathbed and watched him writhing in agony from the cancerous lumps in his belly. But Jurgen had been in good spirits, had joked and teased even, had promised to send Jura a sign, proving that there was a world waiting beyond the grave. After Jurgen's death Jura had looked for signs of his message in the most unlikely of places: rain drops on a window that might spell out a simple word, strange cloud formations, even voices inside his own mind. But after three months of waiting for his friend's sign he called off the search. They were merely drops on a window, merely rainclouds. One could go mad trying to find meaning in things like that. He begrudged Jurgen's silence for several years afterwards but came around eventually.
Even if he had survived the crossing into death's country, what need would he have to communicate with me? I have never found the urge in me to send notes back into my mother's womb to confirm that I survived the exit.
 So too had Fortmann and Maria lost interest in Exurbia now, perhaps. Considering the fragments Moxiana had told him of the Up, it was surely a place all other places paled in comparison to. 

‘I’m too old to give you children,’ Annie said quietly.

‘I’m too old to want them.’

She took his hand and kept her eyes on the gate to the Up.

‘But I could grow older yet,’ he said. ‘And I would like to do it with you. If you want to, I mean. I don’t know, we could walk to one of the cities, take us an abandoned house. There must be thousands of them now.’

‘A big one? With a fireplace and a library?’

‘With a fireplace and a library,’ he said.

‘And a wine cellar.’

‘And a wine cellar,’ he agreed.

She put her head on his lap. He admired her pale face, her freckles; took in her perfume. 
Could we do this? Live together at the end of history? 

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘But I’m still sorry.’

‘Your head’s too big for your heart. Really, none of it matters now.’

He didn’t want to say it but couldn’t help himself. ‘Your husband, Annie -’

‘Is sat just here,’ she said.

He ran a hand through her hair and thought of nothing in particular then. The scallixes were coming out, dancing up from the w’liaks in lazy spirals. The abandoned cities lay in the distance, the chimneys inert now, the skylights all dark. It was no matter. The moons would be up soon.

 Contents

Introduction

A Cursory Syndicate Galactica Timeline of Migration to Stellar Phase Living

Prologue

Part I - Miss Butterworth