IGMS Issue 39 Read online

  Later, but before the end, sitting one breeze-flushed evening under a profusion of soft stars beside logic-hacking Shaun, she'd had to explain her little name games. Because he insisted; she took it for granted that the matter was self-evident. "There were these monkeys, Shaun, who had no parents. Poor little things." I don't think she actually dabbed at her eyes with a lace hanky but I wouldn't put it past her. Yackety-yack, soft surrogate mothers for comfort, nobbly hard-edged surrogates for milk, all the poor little things rushing to barren soft mummy for comfort when nasty white-coated lab monsters went boo. "Let me get this straight," insisted boisterous, heavy handed Shaun, all stunning and virile in muscles and platinum thread, "the infants preferred the pretence of affection rather than the reality of food? But perhaps they weren't terribly hungry if they'd just had a fright."

  Mahala, a wee bit stroppy, itemized the elements of her jest. "You're so clever, my lord. And the cybersystem was wire, too, in a way, and hard in another," intercepting his arm unkindly with her ribcage angled so, "being masculine and possessive as well. Ah!" She sighed, having put her Electra epoch behind her but poignant with its memories.

  We came down without much noise but with fine star-bursts of fiery light to the Versailles they'd made of temperate Earth. They'd forgotten about us, as predicted, having long since shed interest in the rest of the universe. There's no game to compete in drawing power with immersion in the archetypes. I ferreted out the way of it and congratulated myself on my forethought in having prepared my pretty spanner to throw into their stock repertoire of byzantine elaboration. Then I shot back up to orbit without opening the front door -- while Mahala blinked in surprise at her mirror, getting her hair ready -- and there I mused for a while.

  "We'll nip in the back way."

  "All right," she nodded without complaint, trusting me. She was a generous, utterly beautiful young woman, and I loved her far too much to toss her into the lap of some whirligig god-prince. (Shaun was ruling at that time, but I didn't much like the looks of Shem either.)

  I decided to give a wide berth to all their crystal towers and grandiose pleasure domes and deer-browsed ecological pastures -- the chocolate-box stuff. On the other hand I wasn't just being perverse; there was no percentage in squatting down on the Gobi Desert (they'd left it alone) and twiddling our thumbs. I needed a place with a measure of natural hostility but not wholly denuded of people.

  This time we snuck in over the new South Pole and I dropped us inconspicuously in a mess of crowberries and bilberries on the basalt crags of Heimaey Island, near the remains of the Whorled City of Vestmannaeyjar. The big magnetic polarity flip-flop had been in the offing when I'd left Earth, and the massive soft-iron spirals of Vestmannaeyjar were nearing completion. Obviously it hadn't worked. I guessed that those gritty, argumentative utopians who'd built my vessel had been zilched when the ozone layer blew off.

  It was crazy cold, just the same. Plate spread had ripped Iceland up somewhat, and the geysers boiled heartily in new locations, but snow was in the air and ice on the ground. We'd frightened a mob of reindeer and there was quite an amount of filthy, exhausted complaint coming from the filthy, exhausted locals who'd been herding them into a sort of rudimentary corral outside a mean little village whose construction might well have antedated the Vikings. There was a coarse lilt to their obscenity, as befitted poets and scientists down on their luck, and I knew I'd come to the right place. I bundled my dear pet up in thermal undies and synthetic furs and sent her out to find true love.

  Mahala hesitated on the top step and looked doubtfully back at my warm, food-scented interior.

  "Last stop, sweetheart," I told her. "All out." It broke my heart, but you have to see these things in perspective. I induced a warm current in her coffee-brown cheek, for a parting kiss, and wrapped her in a long tight pulse for a hug. "Good luck, my darling. Now don't fret," for her lashes shone with tears, "I'll keep watch. Off you go, Mahala. The real people are waiting for you." They were, too, shin-deep in slush, gawping and gaping and muttering scornful couplets to one another to keep their nerve up.

  "Whom shall I ask for?" she said in a small appalled voice, staring down at their red-tipped faces.

  "It's simple, honeybun. You must look for your beloved, the most miserable of men."

  I thought she was going to bolt back in but she just stood there for a time blinking slowly, her throat moving in the shadow of the furs. Then, "Oh, shit," she said, and went gracefully down the icy steps to meet the outcasts.

  Did Mahala believe I'd be able to keep her under observation wherever she went? I don't know. She had trust in me, of that I'm certain. But I had never told her about the hefty cloned neural net I kept fed and watered, welded behind a bulkhead, flesh of her flesh, supine and mindless but resonating to her awareness and consciousness. My own sensory electrodes were anchored all through the net, so I was able to monitor Mahala (and, though for ethical motives I'd never done it, evoke ideas in her brain) at any distance on the planet's surface. So I pursued many billion thises and thats while she slogged through the snow to their rocky shacks and kept a small but sufficient part of myself tuned to her adventures. If anyone were brutish enough to lay a finger on my baby without her permission I'd zap him hard enough to fry his balls.

  As it happened, the only animosity Mahala met was sour and envious looks from some of the outcast women, but she had even them charmed fast enough. She seemed so fragile, and was demure with the men, and the information she offered freely was meat and drink to this community. None of them had been as far off-planet as the Moon. Mahala herself, of course, had not been with me to the edge of the universe but I'd provided her with a liberal education.

  "Actually I've just eaten lunch," she told them, but they seemed so disappointed that she smiled nicely and ate their reindeer milk curd with glistening bilberries and mango from the greenhouse.

  The folk whose beasts we'd put the wind up sat with her at the long bench and chewed with gusto on steaks, tossing bones to gigantic gentle dogs with far more hair than manners. Mahala declined the meat.

  "The quasars are intelligent?" asked a biologist, a gaunt, lined woman with intent eyes.

  "Much more than that," Mahala said, putting her empty bowl aside. "They're wise."

  Triumphantly smiling, the biologist cried: "I knew it! For centuries I've been telling that ass Kerala --"

  There was hubbub; one of the herders seized Mahala's wrist with unreflective eagerness. (I did not kill him. My jealousy is under perfect rational control.) "You communicated with them? What did they tell you?"

  For a moment she allowed his grip, before drawing her hand away. I detected the ambivalent shock of alternating current. Never before had she known a human touch.

  "Of course I wasn't born then. But they spoke to the vessel, to the Holistic Cybersystem Executive. I don't think hesh wanted to come home after that, but They told shim it was sher duty."

  Wind whined about the broken walls. The herder cracked his knuckles, looking at the rough grain of the table. He said: "Child, what did They convey to the cybersystem?"

  "Well, the main thing, I guess, was the secret of creation."

  Everyone stared at her, and I could sense the ion balance tremble in the room. They had all been exiled here from the courts and great places of the world because asking questions about large enigmas had gone out of fashion when Shem was deposed. The air shivered with intellectual greed.

  "Tell us," a faint shriek. So she did. Arctic twilight (or was it now Antarctic?) draped the windows, and logs fed the fire. A dog nosed closer to the hearth and began to snore. People sighed as she spoke, and snorted in angry disbelief when treasured hypotheses tumbled with the logs into the flames, and were shushed by their fellows. Mead and spirits went into glasses and down throats, and I had to make some minor adjustments to Mahala's hypothalamus to prevent her getting completely sloshed. She loved the attention from this lot, grotty as they were; there might be no princes among them but they all had
brains like razors (even the poets) and Mahala had always been a bright kid.

  When she finished, a young, pregnant mathematician heaved herself up from her cushions near the heat and eased in next to my own baby. "You're saying that the entire universe is a single particle, weaving backwards and forwards from one singularity to the other? One elementary particle only?"

  Mahala nodded, and sipped at her mead. "Exactly, Belina. The state vector collapsed, specifying this particular reality, when It sort of opened Its eye and, well, regarded Itself with approval. Do you mind if I ask a question now?"

  "My god. My god." Belina closed her eyes and placed her hands on her bulging uterus. "Mahala, what can we possibly tell you?"

  My baby glanced around the rapt table, at all of them, shyly, and said: "How can I find the most miserable man in the world?"

  In the incredulous interval, Nigel's serrated laugh caused her to jump. He was one of the poets, dissolute and haggard, with irises the color of the polar sky at noon. "We can tell you where the bastard is, my lovely, but not how to find him."

  "But I must find him," cried Mahala in alarm. "He is my beloved!"

  There was a lot of confusion for a while, the scientists not having the faintest clue what was afoot and the poets seeing instantly and not liking it, each of them trying to shout the others down, and my dove bursting into pissed tears in the midst of it. Nigel muscled in at once and led her aside to the fire, speaking into her ear.

  "I don't know why you want him, when you could go to the high places and find your welcome in Shaun's plump bed -- or stay here with us, and share mine -- but I'll tell you where you have to go. And maybe your big metal friend up there on the hill can get you in to him." And he told her where the Prisoner was held: the whole world's most wretched creature, bitter in defeat, ancient in the cycle of victory and loss and now at the nadir of his fortunes: yes, the lord Shem, patron and betrayer of knowledge, incarcerated in his brother's fastness at the center of the world.

  I hadn't expected Mahala back on board quite so soon, if at all, if ever; the advice they'd given was heuristic, not a point-by-point flowchart. I'd shut the habitation environment down to standby. Shucking off her furs in my soft yellow light Mahala shivered, dazed by the booze, the wind belling outside, her expectation.

  "Come right in, darling," I said. "I'll make you a mug of hot chocolate." I nuzzled her broad nose and got a flowered filmy thing for her to wear and popped her into bed, and by the time she was asleep I'd lifted in a suborbital parabola, heading for daylight and old gloomypuss.

  As she slept I wrought that small miracle which I saw was necessary, touching her brimming ovaries and, releasing a single egg, prepared her womb for its nurturance. This much I had expected to come about in the course of nature; now I understood the urgency of our passage in Earth. And I was filled with a dread I put down to a parent's pre-nuptial jitters.

  We fell without sound across the lush grasslands of the drained Med, across the early spring thaw-brawling rivers plunging through that immense canyon, hovered finally above his place of bondage: Elba, a fist thrust from the ancient seabed. I settled at the peak of Monte Capanne and gazed down with my magnified vision on the shabby roofs of his villa, old San Martino, once the summer home of Napoleon, restored a hundred times by the look of it and a hundred times gone again into decay. In the ample grounds male birds of paradise scratched and strutted, wing plumes like segments shaved from the golden apples of the sun, their chubby bodies emerald in the morning light. Drab females scurried in the long shadows of heraldic topiary wild with seed, dragons bristling beards, cancerous lions, the slower shrubs still brown and scrawny. Nobody cared. I waited until Mahala had woken, draped her this time for the milder air and the breathless hope of her love in cloth insubstantial and translucent as ectoplasm, tucked tight beneath her lovely breasts and flowing like a comet's veil behind, and I gave her a glass of milk and sent her off down a path I cleared through the dead vines and brambles to the villa.

  She passed through the dusty portrait-hung hallways without hindrance, her heart pumping fast, me interposing between the dreadful tools of mayhem his captors had contrived. Charges shorted like rainbows. I'm swift and I'm powerful and I know more than they did (for they had never hung enraptured under the torrential glory of Those Who watch from the rim of the universe), so she was safe from the inanimate, no matter how terrible.

  Entering the final sanctum, the air itself tugged at her like the surface of a fluid, a meniscus. Her garments floated, pressed the firm shape of her body for an instant like wet clinging muslin, floated again. Shem stared at her with constricted eyes from his escritoire at the center of a room of spiteful mirrors (every surface hard, curved, brilliant as mercury, throwing his infinite images and, now, hers) his left hand slowly lowering a quill cut from a pinion of the dazzling birds outdoors, his right hidden at his lap. With a voice like some old industrial mechanism he told her: "It is too soon. Nobody is here. Go away." But his hidden hand jerked in a spasm.

  "I'm Mahala," she said, poised on one foot, baffled by the repetitions of light and the million dark retreating icons, and then, focusing: "Oh! Oh you poor man, what have they done to you?"

  Shem, black as obsidian (obverse, yes, of his absent marmoreal twin), rose to his shackled feet and leaned towards her across the polished desk. His strong left fingers crushed the pen; his withered right arm flopped. The skew of his spine was not deformity but adjustment to the ruined spindle that was his left leg below the knee. Beneath his flaring nostrils (broader than hers, and flatter) the notched, botched curve of his harelip writhed.

  "It is my own doing," he said. "It is the punishment I inflict upon myself, in failure." His speech appalled her. Tenderness opened within her heart. "Our specialists diagnose a carnifying psychosomatic conversion. They cannot decide if it is precipitated by shame or by guilt." He laughed horribly. "Bone and nervous tissue melt into flesh. It'll get worse before it gets better. I can live in the knowledge that when his thousand years is up my father Shaun shall sit here witnessing his body rot." He strained toward her, muscles bunching uselessly against the shackles at his feet, hands scattering the sheets of vellum. In puzzlement he glared at her. "Or do I mean my brother Shaun? My son?" He lifted the escritoire and slammed it shatteringly against the mirrored floor; the floor failed to shatter. "Are you really here, then, girl? Come closer, let me touch you. It is -- not --" he ground in agony, palatals blurred and lost, "--time."

  Tremulously, she crossed the blinding floor and caressed his maimed face. He shuddered, right claw contracting.

  "I seek the most miserable man in the world, for he is promised to me as my beloved."

  "Shem turned his dark cheek into the curve of her hand. "You've come to the right place."

  "Your poor feet!" Mahala cried, stooping, her breasts falling forward to his voracious gaze. With the knowledge I had given her she touched the shackles here and here and they fell from Shem's feet. He reeled, crashed, tore then like an animal at her garments and his own, while she looked up in pain and absolute incomprehension into his grotesque mad face, her love turning back like a poisoned barb to enter her body and burst her heart, and his seed gushing like flame into her womb. Mahala, my baby, my gift to those who had made me, did not cry out. In her shock and betrayal she convulsed like a deer slain for sport, while his seed coursed within her secret places to the ripe, waiting egg, and the breath blocked in her throat like ice.

  I watched her ravishment in a rage violent as madness. I stormed within my metal prison. For ten million millionths of a second the Earth hung at the balance of oblivion. In my grief I activated the collapsicle fields; the ship, for a nanosecond, crashed into infinite density and sucked at the world. For that period the world convulsed with Mahala's hurt. Monuments shivered and broke. The pleasure domes of the high places split, cracked, yawned. Oceans heaved; birds fell stunned from opaque air. Then my grief attained perspective. I shut off the fields and took the walls of the villa San Marti
no in my grasp and hammered them to a vibration of titanic speech.

  "Shem, once lord of this Earth, what has thou done? For thy foul work this day, man, thou art curst. Stand back from the woman Mahala lest I smite thee into unending agonies."

  My baby got to her feet as the man drew back to his knees, to his hands. All her lovely things were torn and smeared; she pulled them about her. Great sobs broke within Shem's chest, tears flooded from his eyes. He rose, staring at his healed multiple selves, wiping the tears away as they fell with his perfect right hand, standing straight on his straight legs, opening without cry or whimper his curved, sculpted lips. He could not elude her image in the silver walls. Sinking to the elegant chair he allowed his beautiful face to drop onto folded arms, and there Mahala left him to his remorse as she walked painfully away from that place and stumbled up the hill to my useless, bitter ministrations.

  She did not tell Shaun that she was pregnant, and nobody in that lustrous, sterile city asked. The handsome people took her up as a bauble, the season's premier diversion. Masques, balls, prodigies of cloud-sculpture in her honor enzymatically illuminated: you name it. Her misery was deemed decorous. Remorseless in their appetite for frivolous titbits from my voyage across the universe in an optional black hole, they expressed a marked indifference for anything of substance. The lord Shaun was not himself stupid, precisely, yet he saw himself as a practical man, in love with mighty engines whose gizzards he delegated to underlings, a man born for conquest (but so too had Shem viewed himself, and would again), manfully dedicated to gaming and hunting. So predictable; I hung in that lonely orbit to which I'd removed myself and seethed with boredom. I knitted booties until I was sick of the sight of them. Then I raged anew and vowed vengeance. Mahala, meanwhile, ate lightly of their pastries but put on weight. She maintained her reserve and her chastity, to the veiled derision (and covert gratitude) of the court's ladies.