Feedback. I’m listening to myself in the mirror of an imperfectly assimilated brain, the effect magnified by the echo chamber of Z’s withdrawing cognition. Everywhere else you get a clean instance, but not here. Here it’s warm and wet when you arrive, pathways rich and biocloud irritably nudging and not finding the familiar reassurance of the parent. I’d forgotten how much I hate the preliminaries.
I pass on and in. Beyond the cavern is a landscape, and the landscape is as white as the cave, and so are all the trees. I don’t know how that works. Maybe I’m seeing it all in the wrong wavelengths. Maybe Z wants me to see it that way. Or maybe none of this is about light at all, and Z’s shifted the world to some other prime energy source.
For a while I walk through fields of waving corn. There are animals with young frisking in the rich growth, and they’re growing fat. At the base of the trees lining the cornfield, a few fruits have fallen to the ground and are seething with flies, and the flies are being eaten by spiders, and the spiders by birds, and the birds by something small and toothy and clever that doesn’t show its face, and every last one of them is pale to the point of translucent, like the belly of a fish. Me too, in fact: a weird white face, white skin, long limbs. Androgynous, which I’ll take to be a courtesy for now.
A sugary scent washes over the cornstalks, promising and mouthwatering. And then I hear a cry, a glad greeting, and see a pretty youth waving from the bough of an oak that towers over the orchard.
Don’t leave the path.
‘I wasn’t going to.’
For the best.
I don’t leave the path. Because you don’t, unless you’re an idiot. How many times do you need to be told, in every fairy tale you have ever heard? Don’t leave the path. The youth laughs and waves me on. Something carnivorous growls in the undergrowth behind the bait.
Zagreus, for outsiders, is all about singularity of purpose – about finding out what you are. If you get distracted, the distractions get more and more extreme in an effort to tease out where your actual, fundamental priority lies. Once, I saw a whole group of visitors from Lindholm chased down by a tiger and torn apart because they couldn’t decide whether to cooperate or save themselves – socialisation versus individual need. Zagreus had to pay a lot of compensation for that one, supply bodies and a pleasure dome and all kinds of recompense, and by the time they left they were promising to come back again soon. Zagreus promised that next time, they could be tigers, and I think that pretty much guaranteed they’d never return – unless they’re here, now, in the grass. Perhaps one or two of them never entirely left.
‘Z, I’m getting tired. You wanted me, I’m here. What’s going on?’
Butterflies again, from hand to neck. A pat on the back? A sexual overture? Or just an echo?
‘Come on. What’s this all about?’ Colloquial language, simple words. The language of chitchat, just talking, because if we’re not friends we’re something else, and that is yet to be defined. I don’t need to become the subject of Ep’s next inquisition, its fascination. It’s a decent enough drinking buddy, but you wouldn’t want it to be your doctor.
Z doesn’t answer, but I can feel it on my shoulder, chuckling great gouts of red admirals, coughing moths. It’s done something. It’s gone wrong.
I turn a corner and abruptly there’s a village, and a woman lying on a bier in the middle of the square: white woman, black lines painted on her skin until her nakedness is invisible or irrelevant. No, not painted on: engraved. Scrimshawed. No. No, those are lines in the body, of the body, not on it. Seams.
She moves her hand, and again, and then stretches back. She stretches and twists, and lines open. Gills? Zagreus has made itself bodies with gills? Is this whole place about to flood? Is that it?
But no. Not that. She folds again, forwards, and another line opens along her body, red and sheer, and the others now are reaching up and around on their bodies, too, apertures opening like peacock feathers, exposing the interior landscape as they move. I watch in silence. White organs and white blood.
They dance. I can hear their feet lift and slap down lightly, the tiny exhalations of effort as they leap and spin around one another, new orifices opening and closing to make punctuation and colour in the greyness. The human body is a quite excellent thing, balanced and powerful and able to run on relatively varied and even quite poor fuels to produce consciousness. It’s spectacular. In a less advanced context – before proper control of infection, say, or immediately after the collapse of antibiotic medicine – or if you’ve been raised on a diet of medical dramas, the opening of the human form means death and mayhem and emergency. Here it does not. There are no spurting blood vessels or cries of alarm. This is what these shapes were made to do, and they do it perfectly. And then they stop, and go into their houses, and that’s it, like a cuckoo clock a minute after the hour.
I really don’t know what I’m doing here.
Carnival is beauty. Beauty is truth. Truth is timeless.
The voice speaks from somewhere away in the distance, sighing. Z likes to play with perspective, with location, to make you forget that it’s all over you, all around you, that it doesn’t have a single locus you can get cross with.
‘What do you want?’
Solutions, Z says, moth wing lips against my ear. Universal solutions, time-like threads and Universal Solvent. Tears of Panacea. Doors and wheels.
‘Speak English or I’m going home.’
I have a door. Inside, outside, living la vida loca. Not loca at all. Tempora. Atempora.
‘Tempora?’ You can’t be serious.
Shall I show you?
Incoherent and quoting old song lyrics. Really, really old song lyrics. I should sign out now, go home, and come back when Zagreus has regularised its thoughts. But: atempora?
‘You’ve got a time machine?’
A wash of disapproval. Chitinous fingers closing my lips.
Dressmaker’s window. No jokes.
‘There’s no such thing. Not that deserves the name.’
And yet: a door. A vantage, an angle, a perspective. Yes. For you, for a price, for ever, yes. Gnomon travels, does something for me, Gnomon is transformed. Blue morpho beautiful. Atlas vast. Death’s head, if you prefer. Gnomon becomes whatever Gnomon becomes, the river shapes around the rock and not the rock worn away by the river. The universe is changed, was always that way, in the slipstream: water falling. Myoushu.
And there it is, or rather, there something is. In the middle of the village there’s a strange, open structure, like a wire-frame sketch of a room, and five panels hanging on the frame.
‘Water falling where?’
Water falling from the upper ocean to the lower. Blood and silver, the shark in the water, a hero’s journey. Apocatastasis and catabasis. No reward without risk. Nothing without price, not even antifinality.
Water falling. Can you hear it?
Water falling.
And as I listen, with the part of me that is touching Zagreus’s long, strange mind, I realise that I can.
*
Remember the future you were told existed when you were a child, the one with suburbs in orbit and a rocketship in every garage. Then picture the next future after that, and the next and the next until at last you come to a blue drifting infinity where children dabble their toes in the outer layers of suns and artists work in the medium of worlds. It is the endless playground of human life in which no possibility is unexpressed. Some choose to be like gods, others like creatures from storybooks, and some are just people, albeit indestructible by any common measure, and no one is sad.
And now ask yourself what would happen when the children in that playground came of age and realised that they were still finite, still bounded by the final ending of things. Et in Arcadia ego.
They went mad.
And then one day they went sane again, and carried on as if nothing had happened. They stopped talking about it, and they seemed quite content. I’m honestly not sure which of
those moments was more appalling.
But on the edge of everything there was a house, and in that house lived all the lost, forlorn, too-strange flotsam of that broken perfect world, and the people there – emancipated criminal selves, poets and upcyclers, dreamers and recidivists – they simply could not forget. By accident, they ended up the knowers of a secret truth in plain sight, which no one else would acknowledge.
They knew about endings, and they were afraid. And they chose to do something about it.
They voted, and embraced one last time as separate persons. Then they let down all their security measures and their walls, and accepted one another’s thoughts. They shared sins and sorrows and aspirations, all the muck and trivia of all those lives, all the dark secrets they were ashamed of, all the joy and love and fear. Above all the fear, and the anger, and the singularity of purpose that could induce every last one to transcend self and become other, to become what they needed to be: a new thing that was all at once a mind, a weapon and a redoubt: me.
I am Gnomon, sometimes called the Ten Thousand Ayes, and sometimes the Endlessly Rising Cannon. I remember what it was to be separate, to be the sum of only one life. I remember what it was to be in a community and to feel supported, included, cared for. To feel that even so it wasn’t quite enough. I remember how it felt to be defeated by problems. To suffer doubt and indecision. To fear.
I remember those things, but I don’t experience them anymore.
*
The whole of my local body can feel the wings of Zagreus’s butterfly mentation now, as if they’re roosting on me. Z’s manners are slipping, it seems, or perhaps it has less direct control over the microminds than it used to. It’s leaking into me. If I looked in a mirror, would I see them, new awareness overlying my eyes? If I saw the peacock instances again, white and cavernous, would their skin and flesh be bright with lepidopteran patterns, like a flower through the eyes of a fly?
I walk towards the frame that Zagreus called the Chamber of Isis. In the heart of it is something odd that resists my eyes. White light, black shadow, but all in the wrong places, as if they’ve forgotten their roles.
Not a machine. A location defined by the absence of location in space or time. A conjunction of things and places, patterns and presences. Omnipresence along its temporal axis: every second of its existence is adjacent to every other part. Thus, a time machine, of sorts. The issue is cartography, navigation.
An almost infinite number of possible subdivisions of time, co-adjacent. Going from one place to another would be … like licking a single, specific grain of sand from an entire beach with your tongue, if the beach was millions and millions of miles along each side and the sand were atomically minute. A small issue, yes.
Imagine the world in three dimensions: X, Y, Z.
‘All right, yes.’ Not really, but yes.
Z possesses its own cardinal directions, dimensions held close like folded wings. There are five of them in the first instance, and movements along them are movements that are flavoured with what appears to us as time, or entropy. Give them names: in, out, else, not, side and curiosity. Compliance, lenience, judgment, punishment and redress. Sweet salt sour bitter umami. EGBDF. Whatever you like. You cannot apprehend them from outside.
Meaning that Z has been inside and returned? Or – rather more alarming – is part of it still within? Is that the new sense of bidirectionality in its thoughts – am I talking to someone who sees our conversation from before, during and after all at once? Is Z talking to me, or repeating what it remembers saying? And if so, how many conversations can it see from there? Is it picking one that leads to the destination it wants?
The Chamber is made of complex information arranged just so. It is not a thing, it is a conjunction. That is not to say that it is ephemeral by our standards. It exists constantly, all along its length, but if it were not a conjunction it would fill the whole universe, all the time. It obtrudes or de-occults only when the right information is arranged in the right way. Thus, a door that can be opened or closed, a room that exists only sometimes and only to those with the eyes to see. Would you like a key?
‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’
I am not Greek. And it is not a present, it is a trade. More Faust than Laocoön.
‘How reassuring.’
I do not pretend to be other than I am.
‘That would make you unique.’
We are both unique, and therefore similar, and therefore our similarity is found in the possession of a quality neither of us any more possesses. Shall we be friends anyway?
Moths on my lips. Water falling.
‘Do you already know what I’m going to say?’ There are ways of beating an enemy who knows what you will do before you do it, but they are necessarily strange.
I only know what you’ve already said. Perhaps you will say something else. Perhaps you will change your mind or perhaps I am dreaming. I dream a great deal these days.
‘I want it.’ Of course I want it.
Then you must do something for me.
‘What?’
You must kill the banker, the alchemist, the artist and the librarian.
I think it was ‘librarian’. It might have been ‘hunter’. These were not words but coordinates, complex signs with a meaning of identity, location and time. Names that denote, sense and reference in perfect alignment – conjunction, in fact, understood in a way I never have before. Has Z put itself in my head so that this conversation will make sense to me? Am I thinking as myself, or using its mind? And if so, how will that affect my choice?
Well, I am Gnomon.
Agree to do that, and it’s yours. The whole thing. For ever.
The moth voice is gone, into the haze, and I’m left with the Chamber of Isis and the itching awareness of Zagreus’s tendrils in my borrowed brain.
‘For ever’ is an idea with many shades of meaning.
Water falling.
*
Water is as near a universal solvent as you’re likely to find, and odd. It is at its most dense four degrees above its freezing point, which is why ice floats. It exhibits curious behaviours in its tiniest fragments and is the basis of organic human life. Water falling is a percussive cloud, a grinding drill, a gentle spray. It is survival and extinction. The first Waterfallers were mad people, daredevils and thrillseekers who made a sport of tumbling, dancing and diving in the seething plumes of rivers running from cliffs into clear air. They spun, they flew, and then they fell, and more often than not they were smashed. If not, they made love and married well, and grew rich in the favour of imagined gods.
Not now. In the language of the Continuance and the Outbound, a Waterfaller is a hypothetical traveller from another universe – presumably an older, more broken one – entering our own. It might be an object, propelled through the walls of reality by accident, or spat out by some retrograde discontinuity and diffused into our continuum. There’s a theory that says such ejecta keep our universe young, meaning that it won’t decay into senescence as quickly as we might think. There’s another that says the punctures in our fabric are what makes the universe so unstable. In the more sophisticated and unlikely constructions, a Waterfaller might be an intelligence, travelling under its own impetus. It might be something in between, invested with an alternative style of awareness that is neither lifeless nor conscious but something else, the way a fungus is neither an animal nor a plant. A true Waterfaller is a resource – and a threat – that I cannot ignore, even if it’s just the littoral end of some cosmic sluice. Such a vagrant might theoretically possess a significantly more advanced understanding of reality than I have, and therefore might know how to win my war – although given the strategy they have adopted is one of flight, they would lack either the know-how or the will to consume a hatching universe, because otherwise they’d have done that instead.
A Waterfaller might be like me, looking for a way out – in which case there is always the possibility that my universe might be thei
r way out, that they propose to do much the same as I would, in the same circumstances, stepping forward through a gateway they have made and preparing to unpick the threads of everything and re-establish their own place. In the best or worst case, our causality is already circular and it would actually be me, entering the nascent universe to reconfigure it in my own favour.
At which point, it’s possible that me and I would have a problem.
Or we might find common ground.
Or perhaps communication with a true Waterfaller is impossible, and to attempt it is the height of futility, however things may seem. Perhaps the Waterfaller – if Zagreus really has found one – perhaps it is passing through the universe at an oblique angle to our comprehension of reality, and trying to deduce its motivation or even its nature from what we can see from where we stand is like looking at a human body seen as a wafer section through the gut, and wondering where this strange animal keeps its brain. We might become a sort of cargo cult, endlessly sending messages of introduction and welcome to a kidney or a spleen.
Or perhaps being in our universe is like being squeezed between panels of glass. Imagine what would happen if you folded the glass or the room around yourself so as to put yourself back the way you should be. You’d be happy, but everything else would break.
*