Stuff To Read
Part I
While I have been accused of being a madwoman, I promise to relate fact, as much as my incomplete memory allows. What events I choose to remember are of perfect clarity and detail. Unfortunately, what I choose to forget is as irretrievable as a unwisely spoken indiscretion.
Which is where I will begin my story; with an indiscretion.
In the great city-state of Thalassus I had once lived as a courtesan of a minor house serving the Monad. The house, whose name I long ago decided to forget, was only a short distance from the Monad’s curtain wall. The greater part of the house’s clientele came from the lower levels of the civil autocracy. Most were men whose rank wasn’t sufficient to achieve satisfaction through the services offered within the Monad.
Of course, there were others, the pederasts, the algolagnists, the tribadists. The desires left unfulfilled by the devices of the Monad were innumerable.
The man claimed to be an apprentice mechanician, charged with the maintenance of the massive engines within the bowels of the Monad. His age and his girth were such to make me suspect he was long past apprenticeship. When I lay with him I believed him to have promoted himself within his speech. I suspected it more likely that he worked in the record-rooms of the cadastre, filing the tesserae of the engines’ memory.
I also thought less of him because he was one of those weak-stomached men who can not admit to their own desires. He had requested one of the house’s courtesans, but his manner with me, as well as his actions, made it clear that he wished to be with a catamite and couldn’t bring himself to request one.
Since I had resided in the house longer than this man had resided within the Monad, I felt overly secure. Since I despised him, both for his needless lies as well as his pederasty, I told him of a previous age when sodomites were put to death by stoning. I informed him of his luck to reside in a time and a place where such urges could be satisfied for the price of a solidus.
I realized my error as soon as I had spoken. I had not forgotten the importance of my own obscurity, but to my great regret, in that one moment I had ignored it.
My words still hung in the air between us when he struck me, knocking me to the ground. He left the house, and I would never see him again. However, upsetting members of the Monad, however petty, had its price. And, with the long lens of hindsight, I now realize that if this man lied about his rank, it was not a lie of promotion.
The morning after my encounter with the timid pederast, before I had time to plan my leave of the house and the woman I had been there, one of the city’s blank faced myrmidons came to there to remove me. The master of the house could do little. By nature the myrmidon was immune to his bribes, either money or flesh.
I was taken to the Protectory. A gaol whose name was much older than its function.
The myrmidon, my escort, held me chained before the provost. The provost sat behind a high iron desk, the top of which was above my head. The myrmidon handed the provost my tessera, the small many holed plaque that was my identification, passport, and license. The tessera was my whole existence as far as the Monad’s Engines were concerned.
The provost gave a bored glance to that existence, and slid my tessera into a slot in his desk. The grinding sound of old clockwork resonated from behind featureless iron. When the unseen gears silenced themselves, the provost asked me my name.
I told him what the tessera had told him.
He asked me my place of work.
I told him that as well.
The provost then asked me what I knew of that previous age, the time when pederasts were stoned for their peculiar desires.
And because I wasn’t willing to compound what penalties might face me, I told him what I had told the pederast.
When he heard, he nodded, as if in silent agreement with my absent and unnamed accuser. The provost charged me with madness, which denied me the right of trial, and cast me into the depths of his gaol.
Part II
The administration of the Protectory existed under the surface of Thalassus, its asylum levels deeper still, and the level of my cell, deepest of all. If I had ever heard of anyone being released from the embrace of the Protectory, I had not chosen to remember it.
I cannot tell you anything of the routine life of my captivity. Everything between the day the provost pronounced me mad to the day I walked from the Protectory has been banished from the repository of my mind. Even if I were able to recall those days, I would not, even for the sake of this record. It is better that they are gone.
Of course this means that I can give you no measure of the time I spent within my cell. I can say I left the same comely young woman who arrived, but that is saying nothing at all.
I can describe my cell, which will imply much about life there. It was long and tall, but too narrow to fully extend my arms. The walls were grey stone that wept moisture. Every stone in the floor and the walls below the vault was square, and set without mortar. On each stone a worn inscription told of the time when this cell was a crypt or a cinerarium.
Nearly all the inscriptions were too faint to read. Some names were visible, but none complete. “G—atea,” “Min—v ,” and “Mesch— e” are the ones I choose to remember.
The cyclopean vault seemed to support the entire mass of Thalassus above me. Ribs as thick as my body crossed the narrow space above. The ribs of the vault were supported by the heads of caryatides who, despite being worn by moisture to nearly featureless stone, seemed to assume attitudes of mourning.
Four things had been added since the gaol had overtaken this room of the dead.
First was my cot. My bed was an iron framework, ochre with rust. It filled half the floor, with no space to either side. A thin straw pallet was all that was between me and the cold metal. An empty steel bucket hung from one of the posts, for use as a chamber pot. The omnipresent moisture had eaten holes in its bottom.
Second was the light above me. On the walls there were red, black and green stains where once there were sconces. The sconces had long since disappeared and the light came from to a hole bored into the center of the vault above me. My impression is that the room was never allowed to go dark. The light was a dusky yellow, and I am not aware of what the source was; torch, gas, or a lucernal pipe bought from an auslander or an antiquarian.
Third was the door to my prison. The door occupied half of the narrow wall opposite my bed. Though I have not retained the memory, I suspect it was always my first vision upon waking. The door was grey steel, not iron, but it too was spotted by moisture.
The fourth addition to my catacomb was the voice of madness. The wails of my fellow prisoners reached me through stone and steel. Pleading, screams, keening, and sounds less human filled the air. I believe anyone imprisoned there without my gift of forgetfulness, if they did not begin mad, would certainly end mad.
Were it not for Doctor Bel, the historian, my existence may have ended in that tomb. Were it not for him, this record would have no reason to exist. Both my savior and damnation, it is he who bought my freedom. Without that, my only escape would have been clemency, or death.
Neither one was more than a dim hope.
Part III
Doctor Richard Bel was a cadaverous man, so much so that, when the door to my cell opened to reveal him, I thought him an apparition. His eyes were shadowed and his gaze deep as the Abyss. He stood silent, watching me. The cacophony from the surrounding cells muted until it seemed the whisper of the dead. He gestured with his long ebony cane and said, “Come.”
For a moment I believed that he was the angel of death come for me.
“Come, you are in my charge now.”
The unnatural quiet had only been subjective. At the most, the sudden near silence had been an acoustic effect caused by opening a long closed door. It broke now, and the calls of fellow prisoners reasserted themselves.
Doctor Bel came in, took my arm, and dragged me out of the cell. I was still quite frightened even though he was now only a man. He was a man who had come down to the lowest level of the Protectory alone.
In the hall he let my arm go so he could retrieve a brass tessera from a slot in the door. With a clockwork grinding, the door of my cell shut by its own power. I could have run then, had there been a place to run to. Instead, I stayed close to my new guardian.
He pocketed the tessera, whose brass was green and flaking. Some of the holes were so corroded that I wondered that it could still be of use. Then he grabbed my arm again. He was not gentle.
Quite unnecessarily he bade me, “Come,” yet again, as he pulled me through the maze of catacombs.
Cries followed our exit. Many were in languages I could not understand. A few, most likely, were invented by the speaker. Two I remember whose words I understood.
The first came as I was led through the lowest level of the gaol, wherein we passed many windowless doors like my own. Beyond one of those doors I heard a rhythmic thudding, as if someone was repeatedly striking the other side with their fists. I heard the woman inside chanting, “Snakes begone. Snakes begone. Snakes begone.”
It was a crone’s voice, and it caused me to press closer to Doctor Bel.
The second encounter came much higher in the gaol, after I had been led up several flights of stairs and through two more doors opened by the Doctor’s ancient tessera. The stairs ended at the second door, and I had thought we had reached the upper levels of the Protectory.
I was mistaken. We had not yet left the asylum.
The character of this part of the asylum differed from my own. Instead of individual cells, the corridors passed large open spaces where the prisoners were chained in mass gatherings. The Doctor led me through a maze of corridors that were defined only by iron bars running from floor to ceiling.
Most of the prisoners here were remarkably quiet compared to the wretches below. Many simply sat and stared at us as we went by. A few whispered to themselves. Despite the bars and the chains, this was a paradise of tranquility compared to the bedlam I had left.
I was completely unprepared when someone grabbed my wrist.
I turned to see the vilest creature I had ever set eyes upon. Its hair hung in white strings. Rags covered yellow, ulcerous skin. It stared at me with milk white eyes as it hissed, “Succubus!”
I screamed as I felt its filthy nails dig into my own skin. The creature had extended itself as far as it could. The chain was taut, from the staple set in the wall to the iron ring biting into this thing’s neck.
“Deception! Lies!”
My efforts to free myself were futile. This thing was willing to choke itself to clutch at me, and its grip was the grip of the damned. As I tugged, it brought its other hand to bear, clawing at my skin. “Creature of evil. You’ll never leave the pit. Never!”
The Doctor then let go of my other arm. I stumbled forward, and for a moment I thought myself lost to this thing. It drew me clear to the bars, bringing my face within a hands-breadth of its own. It brought my wrist toward its mouth, and I could see the cords stand out as its neck pressed against its iron collar.
Then Doctor Bel’s cane descended like a maul upon the creature’s head. The sound of impact was reminiscent of the sound of the crone’s door-pounding below. However, one beat ended this creature’s chanting forever. I was released, and the creature fell back, as if the chain had been a leash its master pulled in rebuke.
It did not move from where it fell.
When the Doctor pulled me to my feet, he said, “No harm will come to you while you are in my service.”
His reference to service caused me to smile, despite the horror of the situation. I assumed I now knew why he had purchased my freedom. Of course, I was wrong.
After that encounter, we made our way to another, more recent, staircase. In the newer parts of the Protectory, where they house the common criminals, the doors were set in pairs that would only open one after another. When the Doctor used his corroded brass tessera to open them I feared that the tessera would finally break within the second door’s mechanism and strand us forever within their embrace.
Mercifully, that was the only fear the Protectory had left for me, and it went unfulfilled.
Part IV
I have said that Doctor Bel had purchased my freedom, and that is how he represented it to me, but I cannot now say that I know this for a fact. While Doctor Bel is certainly responsible for my departure from the Protectory, and to the engines of the Monad, people were simply another commodity to be traded and sold, I have no way to know if it was a legal transaction.
At the time, such questions were far from my mind. Had they occurred to me, I would not have voiced them. I was not so foolish then to interfere with my own rescue, though it may have been better if I had been.
What I know is that we passed no guards in our exit, nor did Doctor Bel ever talk to any official of the Protectory, castellan, provost or warden. In fact, we had ascended three levels of ancient iron staircases before I realized that the last of the interlocked doors we had passed marked the end of the Protectory’s authority.
The Doctor led me up to a weathered gray door whose wood bore the scars of inlay long since gone. This door did not posses the intricate locks that only respond to the correct tessera, and the ornate lock that came with the door- such as might have opened with a pearl-handled key or to its master’s voice- had long ago fused into an abstract lump.
What held the door shut was a rudely-shaped bar of a dull blue-white metal. Doctor Bel removed it from its hooks with one hand, showing a strength his cadaverous bearing did not suggest, though I should not have been surprised, having seen the way he had dispatched the mad thing that had accosted me.
The door opened inward and he took me outside before I was ready.
I was aware, in some dim sense, that we would emerge into the open and I would see the city of Thalassus for the first time since my captivity. I was also aware of the geography of the city, and must have known the view that would greet me. Neither offered any preparation.
The center of the city Thalassus was an island whose form was that of a hump or mound outside the mouth of the river that bears its name. Atop that hump was the vast cube of the Monad itself, the only thing of Thalassus that was visible to all parts of it. Visitors to the city assumed that the Monad, and the humped center of the city, sat on some vast rise in the land underneath. In fact, that mound, extending as far above the surface of the water as the Monad did above that, was nothing more than the accumulated mass of the city itself. It was that mass that we had just emerged, the where the Protectory claimed as much volume below as the Monad above.
We passed through a wall of vines that had covered the outside of the door, emerging only halfway up the side of the giant central mound of Thalassus. Even so, after the dolven corridors of the Protectory, it seemed to be the top of the world.
It was as if a veilparted, revealing the whole of human civilization.
Below, the city blazed, outshining the stars. The city seemed to have torn its raiment from the heavens itself, leaving the sky barren but for a few stars and the catenulate lines of Gaea’s diadem.
From our vantage, I could see the city spill out before and beneath us, flowing to the visible horizon, across thousands of canals winding through eyots that mirrored the central city. The network formed the delta for a river so vast that, at its widest point, its banks are invisible to each other.
Lights of every hue illuminated the city below, the flickering yellows and reds of torches, the blue-white of gas-driven lanterns, the even green of the biolumens, the cloudy reds and blues of twisted lucernal pipes, and ancient flambeaux whose color was so pure that the light it gave appeared to have the mass of a living thing.
Buildings towered to every side, brick, metal and sculpted stone. I faced spires and bell-towers, tarnished bronze idols and gilded heroes, stone buttresses supporting cathedrals while below them steel cables suspended bridges that crossed the wide canals.
And, if the city seemed a reflection of a surreal heaven, the canals reflected through a thousand portals a third constellation, a submerged phantom city whose lights were more chaotic and illusory.
The city had grown during my captivity, the towers higher, the canals broader, the inhabitants more numerous. . .
How long? I wondered.
I stood immobile before the mass of Thalassus, unaware of things closer at hand.
After a time, Doctor Bel broke my trance by closing the door behind us. It caused such a clangor that I immediately turned around, expecting the door to have fallen to ruin. Instead, I saw the Doctor, unperturbed, lowering his hand from the massive ring that was the door’s centerpiece. The noise I had heard wasn’t the ring, which, though massive and bronze, was welded by age into immobility. I am certain now, as I was then, that the noise had been the metal bar inside the door replacing itself. How, I cannot say.
The Doctor stepped back from the door. Under its ivy drapery the door now looked immobile, frozen by age. He looked at the door, inspecting it, and after seeming to find everything in order, took the corroded tessera from his pocket, the one that had opened all the doors of the Protectory.
“I shan’t need this any more,” he said, and dashed it against the cobbles at our feet. The age brittle metal shattered. The act frightened me more than anything we had passed below, because destroying a tessera was a crime against the Monad. It is a crime against all civil authority, an act of treason.
He smiled, and I didn’t know if it was for my fear or for his act of anarchism. He looked at me, leaning over his cane, and withdrew another tessera from his pocket. It shone in the darkness like a newly minted coin, or a gem from Gaea’s crown. He handed it to me and said, “This is now you. And you are now mine.”
I took the tessera. I didn’t need to look at the holes in the metal to know that it was not the same one that the myrmidon had handed the provost when I was imprisoned. This metal was new, while mine had been tarnished by use. The Doctor had just handed me a new existence, and I suspect that if any servant of the Monad, chevalier to suzerain, were to slide it into the engines’ many slots, the record they’d see would not be of the courtesan who had been imprisoned within the Protectory.
What record they would see, a blank slate, some fiction of the Doctor’s, or the life of some real young woman whose death or immigration had escaped the engines’ record-keepers, that I cannot say.
What I clearly knew was that, while I was no longer imprisoned, I was no less captive. My mastery had simply slipped from the Monad’s Protectory to the person of Doctor Bel.
I took the new tessera and said, “Yes, sir.” Despite my fear, I smiled. Slavery held no horror for me. Service was nothing new, and the chain of my former masters reaches long past those of the Monad and the Protectory’s gaol.
“My name is Richard Bel—” he pronounced it ball, “— Doctor Bel. If you address me, you will address me as Doctor.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“I have endured much trouble to acquire you. Now that I have you I hope my trouble is at an end.”
“I would not want to cause the Doctor any hardship.” I had seen him use that ebon cane. It was not something I wished to see again.
The Doctor gave a curt nod and said. “Then follow me, a step behind and to the right. If you think to leave me, ever, remember that token identifies you as my property.” He looked me up and down.
I nodded. He turned and marched down the cobbled path before us. Of course I followed, but not without a final glance at the portal from which we had emerged.
The door was set in the ivy-choked base of a monumental statue crowded on three sides by an overgrown garden. The cobbled path from the door was only saved from strangling hedges by wrought-iron fences near-invisible for greenery. It wasn’t until I had gone a dozen paces down the cobbled path, and toward the city’s vista, that I could see the structure in whole.
It was an ancient marble cenotaph, set in the rear of an old cemetery. Though the statue faced away from me, I couldn’t help but note its resemblance to Doctor Bel.
Part V
The central island of Thalassus divided itself to three parts, just as many philosophies divide man into threes.
The largest part was the center of the government, the civic buildings that huddled to the sides of the Monad like suckling young to their mother. The Protectory was buried underneath the mass of the government there.
Next largest was the Theopolis, the spiritual center of the city-state. A thousand recognized churches radiated from the obelisk known as the Arm of God. Within its hagiocracy, hives of theologists struggled to unify diverse faiths, from that of the Hylotheists, who worship all material life, to that of the Necrolaters, who pray only to the dead.
The smallest part was the Academy, whose buildings radiated from its own crumbling library. Unlike the Theopolis, the Academy of Thalassus had been giving ground for centuries. Doctor Bel was a member of the Academy, though his exact relationship to it was never clear to me.
The place he took me was deep under the Academy. We reached it by traveling through the Library, an edifice as ancient— if not as imposing— as the Monad itself. The Library was a massive iron dome supported by marble columns five paces in diameter. The walls between the columns were made from slabs of every description, granite, marble, lapis, onyx, quartz, fossilized wood. What connected every panel was the fact that each piece was inscribed in an ancient language, hieroglyphs and dead scripts past translating. A few may not have been carved on Gaea. From the wooded plaza surrounding it, it seemed that the Library blotted out half the sky.
Doctor Bel led me down into the Library, down into levels that reached as deep as the Protectory. The stacks were mazelike and endless, their contents unmoved for centuries. Books hid behind glass hazed by dust, and the only light came from a lantern Doctor Bel had taken from the upper levels.
Deep under the Library, we came to a massive room with an arched ceiling and marble walls. Great shelves reached above us, heavy carved wood inlaid with dark onyx that formed faint geometric patterns that could have been a language themselves. These shelves held more than books, scrolls and the engraved plaques that spoke to the Academy’s machines. Other objects sat, covered by dusty glass jars, or in dull metallic reliquaries.
One arcane object that still remains fresh in my memory was a metallic skull. Human in outline, it was formed of grey steel, etched with rectilinear grooves that sank deep beneath its surface. The teeth were white enamel, grayed only by a thin layer of dust. As Doctor Bel passed it, I caught sight of a complex nest of clockwork, wires and hoses behind the eye-sockets. Then his lamp had passed, casting the interior of the skull back into darkness.
I cannot account for why such an effigy would fill me with such dread. All I can say is that when I saw it, I remained frozen in place for so long that Doctor Bel came back and grabbed my arm to hurry me along.
Within the museum of unused objects, Doctor Bel had made his home. It amounted to a Spartan apartment in the midst of the stacks, framed by a series of long tables crowded with piles of papers cast around with no discernable pattern.
“You shall touch nothing,” he told me. He pointed to a cot that was set off from everything else by a single cloth screen. “You shall sleep there. On the bed are clothes appropriate for a student, something to replace those putrescent rags you’re wearing.”
I stared a moment at the bed behind the screen, a single thin mattress with a simple cloth blanket. It was the peak of opulence compared to the cell I had so recently left. Still, because of the odd defect of my deliberate memory, my old life as a courtesan was fresh in my mind and I was not as grateful as I should have been.
A grey uniform lay folded on the foot of the bed. The fibers shimmered slightly and felt soft to my hand. Looking at my hand, I saw the meaning of Doctor Bel’s use of the word “putrescent.” Filth crusted my skin forming a collage of black, brown and green.
“Doctor, is there a place I can wash?”
He stared at me long and stern, his hollowed face resembling a parchment cousin to the metal skull we had passed. I half-expected him to rebuke me for talking out of turn. Instead he gestured with his cane toward an elaborately decorated armoire set beyond the long tables. “You may use my cabinet.”
The device was unfamiliar, but I was unwilling to tempt Doctor Bel’s goodwill by asking further questions. I had learned long ago that men of authority are rarely willing to accommodate the idiosyncrasy of my memory. Easier for me to relearn some mistakenly discarded gram of knowledge than it was to admit my own defect to others.
The armoire was thick glass, embossed with bas-reliefs of extinct sea-creatures. Behind the glass I saw water fill voids behind the transparent sculpture. When I touched it, the doors swung open, making me afraid that I would release a flood in Doctor Bel’s library.
There was no flood. The water I saw was between the glass and a flexible membrane that formed a man-sized cocoon within the cabinet. I hesitated a moment, and only stepped inside because I could feel Doctor Bel’s attention riveted on me.
I stepped into the folds of the membrane, and turned to face the doors as they closed on me. Once sealed inside I could only see a vague blur through the glass. The membrane rolled itself upward, like a stocking. The water spun in a vortex around my legs, spiraling up my body as the membrane rolled upwards.
The sensation was fascinating, the fluid tugged at my skin and clothes with a weight beyond its mass. Slick and heavy, it dragged across my body with increasing speed. It reached my face before I had time to truly fear what was happening.
But before unease became panic, a new membrane— or the same one, I could not tell— rolled up from the floor, pushing the vortex behind it. The doors opened before me and I stepped out.
“Next time,” Doctor Bel said, “You should remove you clothing.”
I looked down and saw that in addition to the filth that had encrusted my body, the Doctor’s cabinet had removed the rags I had worn in the confine of the Protectory. I stood naked in front of Doctor Bel.
Oddly, I felt uneasy and vulnerable. It was uncanny, the desire I felt to cover myself, when I had the fresh memory of standing uncovered and unconcerned before a pederast more completely loathsome than Doctor Bel could hope to be. The only account I had for my unease was the fact that the Doctor did not look upon my nakedness as a man should. He observed me much as I imagined he might regard some dusty relic.
I turned away from him, toward the armoire. I saw no sign of my old clothing floating in its aqueous embrace.
The last signs of my confinement had been washed away.
Part VI
“I am a Historian,” Doctor Bel told me the next morning. “You will assist me with my studies.”
I nodded. I understood my position, and how to acquiesce to the desires of men. The fact that Doctor Bel’s desires were not of the physical realm did not change that, though I was concerned that the skills I had chosen to remember in my life were not ones appropriate to his particular interests. However, I was not prepared to question his choice of students.
I sat in the center of his museum of antique curiosities, wearing the strange grey coverall he had provided, wearing an expression I hoped was appropriately studious.
“The theologists call this the twelfth age of man. Do you understand what that means?”
I shook my head. It was not a fact I had cared to remember.
“An age, a great turn in the cycle, represents how long it takes humanity to rise from barbarism, achieve civilization, and then return again to barbarism. How often this has happened on Gaea is unknown to anyone but the gods of the theologists.”
“How then do they know this is the twelfth age?”
“This is where theology differs from science, my student. It is so because the sacred writings say so. Questioning such revelations is a sin— as much a sin as questioning the Monad.”
Again, I was distressed at how casually he treated the authority of the Monad. However I was able to conceal my discomfort as Doctor Bel expounded on the ages of man, such as were known by him.
Many times, humanity had destroyed its own civilization. Doctor Bel talked of many great disasters; wars, plagues, great shifts in the skin of Gaea itself, he even talked of the skies themselves giving way.
According to Doctor Bel, Gaea’s diadem, the great arch in the nighttime sky, was the remnant of a cosmic disaster that not only ended a human civilization, but came close to destroying Gaea itself.
Before the catastrophe, Gaea had a partner in her dance through the cosmos, an orb that circled her as she circled the sun. This was the greatest age of knowledge, when men had crafted machines indistinguishable from themselves. Machines that thought, that bled, that loved, that hated. Machines that could replace man in every aspect. Machines that were too perfect. The wars razed much of the surface of Gaea, and tore her partner apart in the sky.
From the memory of this came one of the universal commandments of the theologists— “do not bring life to the unliving.” A command common to all faiths, all gods.
Doctor Bel mourned at the knowledge that was lost. Men had conquered disease, hunger, even death itself. An idyll for millennia. A realm of order and understanding. He talked of this age as if it were a lost loved one. I thought I understood him now. His crimes against the Monad were not impulses of anarchism. They were the acts of someone who lived more in a past age then the one he inhabited.
Surrounded by his artifacts, I thought he must feel as if he had lived through that past idyll, and longed to return.
“You know nothing of this past age, do you?” asked Doctor Bel.
The desire in Doctor Bel’s eyes, the only true emotion that breached his stoicism, would have been familiar to any courtesan. I was unsure if truth was the most appropriate response.
“Nothing beyond what you have just told me.”
He drew a sheaf of yellowed paper from his desk. On the pages, I could see the twisted sigils of the Monad’s engines, a record that only a mechanician or his engines could decipher. Doctor Bel scanned the page as if he could actually read the tiny holes.
“Do you know why you were confined?”
“I upset a bureaucrat.”
“The official record,” Doctor Bel looked down at the page in front of him. “‘The acquisition of knowledge forbidden by the state.’”
I furrowed my brow, quite unsure of what that meant.
“I found you because of your interest in relating tales of a prior age.”
Now, I understood. Somehow, Doctor Bel had found the transcription of the tale I had related to the pederast. My indiscretion continued to affect my fate. The Doctor had uncovered my tale of the age when sodomites were put to death by stoning.
This made me uneasy, because I was unsure how Doctor Bel would react to me if he knew that that tale arose from the caprice of my self-fragmenting memory and not any particular interest in the past. Fortunately, I thought, he seemed unconcerned with how I came by the tale.
“After some years of research, I have determined that you are the only one who can assist me.”
I nodded, wondering to myself for the first time since my imprisonment, why I would have chosen to remember that particular tale. I looked up at Doctor Bel.
“May I ask you a question, Doctor?”
He nodded his assent.
“Why would my tale be knowledge forbidden by the state?”
“The past is dangerous,” he told me. “The Monad has decreed that there was no existence before the Monad itself existed. The only exception is the scriptures of the theologists, which are matters of faith. Should anyone else present as fact a history of events before the Monad, they are apostate and imprisoned. The only legal history is the history of the Monad.”
Again, I revised my opinion of Doctor Bel, he was an anarchist bent on an impossible revolt against law and the Monad.
Part VII
The next days, I chose to remember little; only simple facts that occupied little space in my crowded memory, just enough to convince Doctor Bel that I was actually listening to his forbidden tales of prior ages.
I now remember only one scene before the Doctor’s expedition:
I was prostrate on a table in some deep part of the Library. Surrounding me was a mechanical cage that seemed to be some hellish cousin to the Doctor’s watery armoire. Water did not surround me, but the air between me and the cage was thick with potential. However, it was not the heavy air that prevented me from moving; it was a series of leather straps that held me motionless. Around me, the great metallic structure groaned and rotated like the engines of the Monad.
Beyond the grinding and banging of the machinery orbiting my body, I faintly heard Doctor Bel’s voice.
“Yes, you shall be perfect.”
#
Doctor Bel began the expedition with the simple declaration, “We shall go now.”
He took a lantern and led me into a series of narrow hallways grey from disuse. We walked through a maze of corridors until we came to a large circular iron door. Two small bags rested on the floor. Doctor Bel hung his lantern up on a rusty hook on the wall.
Doctor Bel picked the bags up and handed one to me. “From this point forward, you shall follow exactly in my steps.”
I nodded, shouldering my bag as he had his own.
From his bag, he withdrew a functional lucernal pipe. It was the first antique relic I had seen him carry whose value I understood. The pipe was a solid cylinder of eternal cold metallic light that washed the lantern into insignificance. The pipe’s radiance was inherent to the matter of the pipe itself, and it could retain its character through any gross deformation. I had seen such lucernal metal drawn into wires as thin as a thread to be woven into the ancient ceremonial robes of the politarchs of the Monad, and pounded thinner than paper to illuminate the manuscripts of the theologists. The art of making such things was long lost, and the short heavy pipe that the Doctor carried— which contained more of the lucernal metal than I ever remember seeing in one object— would command a price beyond counting.
Doctor Bel found a lever, and the iron door rolled aside on gears I could not see. The stale air was blown aside by a cold damp gust that carried the sound of rushing water, as well as the fetid smell of an abattoir.
Beyond the iron door, the lucernal pipe revealed a narrow stone pathway. Doctor Bel stepped out on the path without hesitation. I followed, taking heed of his admonition to follow in his steps.
We walked, quite literally, into the bowels of Thalassus.
The path led to a great stone aqueduct that seemed to bear the great part of Thalassus’ waste. The effluent raced by us as a black, raging torrent. Even in a space that could comfortably fit the Arm of God, the confinement made the torrent feel as if it could swamp us at any minute, despite the fact the path was three times the height of a man above the boiling surface.
Doctor Bel followed the path, in the direction of the flowing sewer. We walked near an hour in silence before I raised a question, barely audible next to the raging torrent.
“Where are we going, Doctor?”
“The past.” He shouted back, his breath fogging the chill air. He gestured toward the vaults above us using his lucernal pipe, causing daemonic shadows to dance on the walls around us. “Perhaps you recognize your prior residence? Not from this angle, I suppose.”
I had been led even deeper than the lowest levels of the Protectory.
He smiled, and I did not like it.
#
Within another few minutes, we reached the chthonian heart of Thalassus itself, beneath the Protectory, beneath the Monad, beneath all of Gaea herself.
Around us, the roaring of the waters had increased to an impossible volume. Doctor Bel’s lucernal pipe only showed a gray mist that hung over the torrent, and I could only perceive a couple of paces distance trough the choking fog.
Then, abruptly, we stepped out of the fog. We emerged into a vast space, possibly as wide as the Monad itself, and descending into the depths of Gaea. The sewer we had followed now became a great waterfall, spilling down into the endless shaft before us. Waters echoed endlessly around us.
Our walkway ended on a stone platform hugging the side of the great shaft. The stones were slick with moisture, and no railing stood between us and the abyssal depths.
Shadows danced and twisted around us as Doctor Bel walked along the inner wall to a narrow stairway that descended from the platform along the inner wall of the great shaft. I followed, carefully placing my feet where Doctor Bel’s had first trod. As we slowly spiraled down the shaft, the torrent retreated behind us.
He spoke when the echoes of the water had receded.
“Man once could draw power and life from the heart of Gaea herself, before she grew cold.”
“How far?” The sense of apocalyptic depth I felt from the darkness next to us made me forget to address Doctor Bel properly.
He didn’t admonish me. “Far enough that the water falling here never reaches the bottom.”
#
We followed the narrow staircase, little more than a ridge projecting from the massive wall. The wall itself was layered, stone upon stone, forming bands of color that varied in height from no wider than my palm, to taller than Doctor Bel. The stair we walked had been chipped free of the wall, I could see how that the edge of the path was even with the wall above, and we walked in a niche carved out of the wall just wide enough to preserve our balance.
The wounds in the old stone became fresher as we descended. The path became rougher, and the wall next to us showed tool marks. I wondered how old the path was; it seemed that it could easily have taken an age to complete in itself.
At seemingly random points along the path, holes had been chiseled into the stones of the wall. Often these portals were the size of a dinner plate, barely wide enough to allow Doctor Bel to insert his pipe to see what was beyond— an impulse he never indulged in, so I perceived nothing beyond the dark pits other than a sense of a wider, unseen space beyond.
Two holes we passed were large enough that, as Doctor Bel passed, I caught glimpses of what lay within.
Within the first, I could glimpse a giant metal sarcophagus, inlaid with gold and jewels. If it was a crypt, as it first appeared to me, it was one for someone twice the size of the largest man I had ever seen. What seemed to be the head, wrapped in abstract gold patterns, pointed down, at my feet, and the feet were lost above in the shadows of the Doctor’s lucernal pipe. It seemed to emerge from the stone itself, as if it was slowly sinking.
We walked on and I saw no more.
The second hole revealed a scene just as enigmatic. Beyond a hole as broad as I was, I could see a chamber a uniform gray in color. I saw pillars and arches of an unfamiliar design, mosaic floor in a twisted sunburst pattern, the same monochrome grey, and windows and doorways that opened on grey ashy stone. Crouched on the floor in a position of supplication was the figure of a man, the same grey as the room.
We moved on before I was decided if the figure was a statue, or the remains of some ancient citizen of Thalassus.
Though, we were so deep under the skin of Gaea now that I was unsure if the remains I saw were from the great ancient city, or something more ancient. Was he a contemporary of the men who dug this great shaft toward Gaea’s heart, or was he older?
Doctor Bel stopped, and I had the brief thought that perhaps we had reached the bottom of the great shaft. We had not. We had only reached the end of the carved stairway. He stood on a flat area where a void had been carved in the side of the wall three times the distance I could span with my outstretched arms. The sudden opening and certain footing made it feel as if we suddenly stood in a cathedral the size of the Monad itself.
When I walked into the space with him, Doctor Bel walked to the wall of the hand-carved chamber. He placed his hand on the rough-hewn wall, where the tool-marks were evident, and traced the bands of color. “Amazing, isn’t it? Each strata its own lost century. A civilization’s rise and fall in a hand-span.” He spread his fingers wide. “I hold a millennia in my hand.”
I wondered how many thousands of years we had descended.
I saw a pile of digging tools sitting in the corner of the open space. “Doctor? Did you carve this path?”
“My work is near complete.” He let go of his wall of time and turned toward me. “There is something you must see.”
He was smiling again, and I found myself filled with an unaccountable dread. He took my arm and drew me toward the rear of the chamber, where I saw that it did not end. A crevice opened into a deeper chamber.
For the first time, Doctor Bel had me lead the way.
I saw nothing but darkness at first. I knew that my feet left stone and touched metal. And from the echoes I heard, I knew that I walked within a large space. Not until Doctor Bel followed with his pipe did I understand how large.
As the lucernal metal washed its light by me, I could see a great ovoid dome supported by tapering grey-white ribs. The dome was made of faceted metal tiles that cast strange reflections. It was like nothing I had ever remembered seeing.
But somehow, I knew it.
“The destruction was so great, at first I believed nothing could survive.” Doctor Bel walked toward the center of the room. “Fragments of knowledge I found, written at five times remove, nothing . . . substantial.”
I walked with him toward a raised dais at the center of the dome.
“Is this familiar?” He asked.
I shook my head, staring at what the ancients had wrought. “I have never seen men build something like this.” The faceted metal was under my feet, tiny hexagonal tiles that seemed to shimmer when the light-pipe illuminated them. How old to survive without tarnish, or anything more than a layer of stone dust.
“Because, men did not build it.” Doctor Bel climbed upon the dais, where a panel sat somewhere between a podium and an altar. “The greatest age man has seen, created machines that thought, that lived, that built. This is their temple.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “What would a machine worship?”
Doctor Bel lifted something off of the panel in front of him. He held it so it caught the light. One of the small metallic hexagons shimmered in his hand like a solidus.
“This room is a ciborium of knowledge,” he said.
I took a step back.
“This wafer is a Library unto itself, a thousand thousand volumes of ancient knowledge from when man and machine moved the heavens themselves.” He gestured to the curving metallic walls. “Surrounding us are a thousand thousand such Libraries. This temple consecrated to the preservation of all that was and could be known.”
“How can that be so?” I began to feel the weight of Gaea above me. The weight of Thalassus. The weight of uncounted centuries.
“Like any language. These words are written in the form of matter itself. Every particle within this wafer has meaning. It is solidified thought.” Doctor Bel looked at me as he stepped off the dais. He held the wafer toward me. “You remember nothing?”
I took another step back. The Doctor’s cylinder of lucernal metal shone on the panel where Doctor Bel had stood, casting his form into shadow before me. His wafer glittered in the light from behind him.
I gestured weakly at the walls around me. “How can you read such a thing? A script you cannot see?”
“This was not meant for human eyes. Like the tessera of the Monad’s machinery, it is intended to be understood by a machine.” He held out the wafer. “Take it.”
I did not. I could not.
Instead I shook my head and backed away from Doctor Bel in the direction of crevasse where we had entered. “I do not understand what you want from me.”
“This Temple survived the ages because those that built it intended it to be eternal. It has waited for us, you and me, for thousands of centuries.”
I shook my head. “Not me.”
“I lifetime it took to find. Another lifetime to discover its meaning. Another lifetime to find you—”
I turned and walked to the crevasse. “You’re mistaken, Doctor. I am nothing, a courtesan, a madwoman. Such things are beyond me.”
“Why then do you remember tales of the distant past so clearly?”
I stopped on the threshold between metal and rock.
“Why are your memories so fragmented, Geva?”
“That is not my name.”
“Long ago, they crated machines indistinguishable from men. But they were not the same as men. They were better. They did not age, and did not die.”
“Stop it!”
“But they did not foresee how long. The capacity to remember is finite. No being was made to remember so many eons.”
I ran away from him, out toward the shaft. In the darkness I almost tumbled over the precipice. But my memory, fragmented as it was, was perfect in what it did recall. And I remembered how many steps it was before the floor fell away, and I stopped before my eyes adjusted to the faint light leaking from Doctor Bel’s ovoid temple.
Doctor Bel’s strides were longer than my own, and I had a bare moment to contemplate the depths before me when his hand rested on my shoulder. He turned me around to facehim.
I faced a blacker shadow in the darkness, but somehow his wafer still glinted in my eyes.
“You will listen to me!” The Doctor’s voice was hard and cold now; the voice of the machines who had built the great temple. It was the voice of a soul that valued knowledge and nothing else.
He pulled me away from the edge and held the wafer between us. “I brought you here to be the mother of a new age.”
I tried to back away, but his grip was strong.
“How else can one account for your survival? It is the will of what was known to become known again. History itself, all of past mankind, demands your presence here.”
I looked at the wafer. I saw it shimmer in the dim light. I did have a memory, incomplete, a fragment of knowledge. I could take it, and I would know what it contained. Its knowledge would become my knowledge, its memory would become my memory. It would become part of me. It might even heal my fractious memory; allow me a whole, continuous existence.
Every one of those wafers, some ancient unnamed tutor had schooled me, held as much memory, or more, than was stored within my own mind.
But what would it cost me?
He pressed the wafer to my lips. “You were meant to consume this, understand it, make it speak again.”
I thought of taking it. Service so long a part of my being that it took a supreme will not to simply acquiesce to a direct command immediately. But I knew it was my decision to make, not Doctor Bel’s.
My mouth remained closed.
What would it cost me?
I knew what I was, and I knew that Doctor Bel meant to have me become someone else—something else. If I took what he held, and it held as wide and deep a meaning as I did myself, what would happen but I become half of what I was, and half something else?
And if I took another? Another? A thousand thousand? Would I become less a part of myself than a single brick was part of Thalassus itself?
Doctor Bel pressed harder, trying to force my jaws open, and the wafer past my lips. I felt it cut my lip, and where he held my shoulder, I could feel my flesh begin to bruise. “You were created for this! What other meaning could your existence have? You are not a random courtesan; you are a living relic. The most important being on Gaea and with this gesture you could also become the most powerful.”
What would I be, with all the knowledge of this past age? No longer a servant. . . A goddess, perhaps? No longer subject to the whims of the bureaucrats of the Monad. Not even subject to Doctor Bel any longer. Free.
Free to be what?
Free to do what?
No longer me, what would I do with Doctor Bel’s knowledge? Would I create the idyll he dreamed of? Or would I still remember all the ills done to me? Would I be driven to complete the ancient war that tore Gaea’s sister from the heavens, the war that marked me as an abomination?
“You will take this!” His voice had become shrill.
I raised my hand and struck Doctor Bel. I do not remember any other time I had ever struck a human being. When my fist came down on his chest, I could feel bone give way. He staggered away, dropping his wafer and clutching himself where I had hit him. He gasped, an ugly liquid sound.
There was enough light that I could see him stagger, but not enough that I could see his face. For that I was grateful.
“You cursed creature,” he coughed up fluid that I could hear splash on the ground between us. He fell to his knees on the edge of the precipice. “The theologists are right. Do not bring life to the unliving. . .”
He toppled over to the side, and I do not know if his strength failed, or if he deliberately fell toward the darkness. But as I watched, still frozen in shock at the strength of the blow I delivered, Doctor Bel tumbled silently into the pit.
I do not choose to remember how long I stood there, but eventually I returned to the Temple to retrieve his lucernal pipe. During my long walk back to the surface I spared little time to worry what would become of me.
After all, in my long memory, there has always been a place in the world for madwomen and courtesans.
###
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The Great Geek Manual » Geek Media Round-Up: January 20, 2009 · January 20, 2009 at 10:27 pm
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