*
Chapter 34
The room was like nothing Lil had ever seen before; massive, soaring, perfectly circular, and yet completely bare save for a single chair, in which a woman was seated. An impossibly beautiful woman, with luxuriantly flowing jet-black hair.
When Lil, Sis and Milton were politely shown into the room, the woman rose only briefly from her chair to offer them a warm greeting.
‘Welcome to you both, girls: I am indeed especially privileged to have Earth’s daughter as my guest.’
She didn’t extend a hand as part of that welcoming however, instead slipping back into her chair, using a hand movement only to invite the three of them to take one of three chairs that rose from the floor before her in a partial semi-circle.
‘I take it you don’t mind my son being here?’ she asked, indicating the far older looking Milton with a slight movement of her head.
She crossed her legs as she clasped her hands before her in a thoughtful gesture.
‘I sent him to you,’ she continued, yet looking now purely towards Sis, ‘once I had raised him: for I had seen – for I have many eyes around my complex, while I learned much about you as you lay within the chamber – that you sought greater knowledge about us. And naturally, I appreciated your quest, for I too wished to learn more about you: and so I ensured that you were returned to your mother, so she could breathe life back into you.’
‘Thank you,’ Sis replied with a grateful bowing of her head. ‘I suppose then, in a way, that I owe you my life.’
‘Indeed you do,’ the woman replied bluntly with only the merest hint of a smile. ‘But how could I turn down this opportunity to learn more of what I had witnessed for myself in so many great minds that I had briefly brought back to life: a belief than man should embrace, become a part of nature, rather than relentlessly pitching himself forever against it!’
‘Briefly back to life?’
Lil glanced worriedly towards Milton, who responded only with a resigned shrug.
‘Of course,’ the woman replied starkly. ‘My role is only to accumulate the wisdom of the ancients; not to grant them a new life they are in no way entitled to! We we’re challenging god’s order enough here without completely bringing back to life those whose had lived long ago.’
‘And yet: all these clones, of this same man,’ Sis retorted. ‘You’ve given him a multiple array of new lives!’
The woman shrugged off the accusations nonchalantly.
‘As the men who serviced me died, I needed someone to help me maintain my purpose, my role in life: and so I used my capabilities to create someone who I knew would also be able to rally the remaining humans to support me and understand why their embracement of nature must be made. And even the wisest amongst men were telling me they had adhered to a belief in this ever-risen god!’
‘Yet he’s not a god, is he?’ Sis declared with a stern glare.
On the way to this room, to this place somehow dominated by this impossibly placid woman, Milton had explained that the raising of the hybrid god wasn’t – as they might expect – achieved by the simple replacement of another clone.
The man they saw tortured and crucified had indeed died, had indeed being lacerated to a point where his skin wept blood: and this was all so that when he was placed in the cloning chamber with a carefully selected strand of animal DNA, he would be re-cloned as this animal god.
And the clone’s reward for undergoing all this? The fulfilment of the animalistic urge to have a mate, granted to him when he was later allowed to mingle amongst the ‘servants of the gods’.
The woman waved protestation aside as if it mattered not a jot to her that this man was no real god.
‘Naturally, despite the truly remarkable achievements of these collectors of ancient DNA, this one remained beyond even their capabilities: and so I resorted instead to utilising this god’s appointed representative on Earth.’
With a wave of a hand, a section of the wall appeared to vanish and reveal the raising of the tortured man once more; and yet, Lil suddenly realised, it wasn’t a natural view of the scene after all, for the viewpoint kept changing, so that at one point she felt that she was looking down upon the soldiers from the cross itself.
‘A man who’s re-enactment of the god’s passion was captured in what was then called a movie – one shown and believed throughout the world,’ the woman continued, noting Lil’s amazement at what she was seeing, inviting her to step closer with yet another airy wave. ‘It gave me the basis for its own replication, using similar garments discovered in a building housing the most ancient of artefacts – and from which, in fact, we obtained my son’s clothes.’
She smiled at Milton, if a little grimly. Not that Lil noticed, for she was staring intently at the wall, finding it hard to believe that what she was seeing there wasn’t real.
Then, suddenly, it was real.
A group of the soldiers both reached and stepped out from the wall, surrounding and grabbing hold of Lil in an instant.
A sharp blade was held at her throat: she couldn’t struggle free.
‘Ah, my own little innovation of an old technology,’ the woman smirked triumphantly.
*
Chapter 35
Sis’s hair snaked out across the room – only to whip uselessly through what was nothing more than an ultra-realistic image of the woman.
The woman wasn’t really there, Lil realised with dismay. It was just some technical version of a mirage.
‘Don’t worry, my dears,’ the woman chortled. ‘I don’t mean you any harm!’
Even Milton appeared shocked by everything that was happening. Yet as he moved as if to protest, he too was surrounded and firmly held by soldiers who stepped out of the wall of moving images.
The woman ignored his protestations that this wasn’t anything like he’d been led to believe would happen.
‘All I require of you is that you lie once more in one of my chambers,’ she said gently to Sis, ‘but this time while alive, naturally: allowing me full access to your particular knowledge of nature!’
‘No, Sis!’
Lil fruitlessly squirmed within the tight hold of the soldiers.
‘We know that once she’s absorbed all the knowledge she needs, she’s done with the person!’
‘You told me you simply wanted to promise her that you’d limit the drilling!’ Milton insisted, as if in some way agreeing that Sis was placing herself in danger if she acquiesced to the woman’s demands. ‘That you were only accessing the energy of the movements of the earth’s plates!’
‘I was drilling to find out more about this earth, about nature!’ the woman spat back scornfully. ‘But now I have her daughter here, I don’t need to drill so deeply anymore: so I wasn’t lying!’
Sis had also been enveloped by a large force of heavily armed soldiers, but these held back edgily, wary of approaching her too closely.
With a forlorn nod, Sis acquiesced to the woman’s demands; and at last the soldiers drew closer, taking her firmly by the arms.
‘No Sis, no!’ Lil wailed, struggling uselessly once more in the firm hold of her own guardians. ‘Why are you giving in so easily?’
‘Don’t you understand, dear?’ the woman sneered at the distraught Lil as Sis was led away. ‘You’ve tamed her.’
*
The image of the woman vanished.
‘All trickery, Milton moaned as the guards left the room, locking the door behind them. ‘And I helped her entrap you here!’
Sis shook her head miserably.
‘No, no: it’s not your fault – it’s mine! Didn’t you hear her? She’s right: I have calmed Sis – made her useless!’
Approaching her, his face strained, Milton placed a consoling arm around her shoulder.
‘How can you have possibly made her useless? It’s completely the other way around: she was nothing as long as she was free of emotion. Without our emotions, we’re nothing – how can we respond adequately
and correctly to our fellows if we have no feelings, no empathy, for them? They become nothing but objects in our eyes: and we ourselves are thereby lessened.’
He suddenly, surprisingly, stood back from Lil, as if jerking back in shock. He raised his arm a little, observing it as if expecting it to have changed into something unexpected, unwanted.
He glanced back at Lil, his eyes wide with disbelief, his mouth almost gawping wide.
‘But you’re…’
‘You’re what?’ Lil repeated nervously.
‘You…can your remember your parents?’
Lil frowned irritably: it was such an unusual question to ask in such hopeless circumstances.
‘Why, no; not really,’ she nonetheless admitted. ‘It’s so so long ago – I’m not sure if they’re still alive or not.’
‘But your birth…I sensed it then, when I embraced you…’
‘Sensed my birth? How could you possibly do that?’ Lil snapped more aggressively than she’d intended.
She could remember how Milton had also somehow been able to recall Sis’s birth (from a helpless seed of all things!); maybe this was some special attribute he’d been gifted by this odious ‘mother’ of his. She seemed more than capable of granting powers beyond any normal human understanding.
‘It was a rush of waves,’ Milton explained, ‘wave after powerful wave, foaming in their strength: casting you ashore.’
Lil chuckled nervously.
‘No, no; I can assure you, I’m nothing to do with nature!’
‘Oh, but aren’t you?’ Milton replied mysteriously. ‘The nature of man,’ he added. ‘For these weren’t waves of water, but of something far, far stronger; for they were waves of emotion!’
*
Chapter 36
‘This is crazy!’ Lil exclaimed angrily. ‘How can I be formed from waves of emotions? It’s impossible!’
‘No no; it’s not so ridiculous at all!’ Milton assured her. ‘You see Mother – sorry, I can’t really think of any other way to describe someone who has given me life once more – she’s been accumulating all this wisdom, all this reason; but the emotions of all these people, she’s just seen as being redundant, discardable!’
‘You can’t even discard something that doesn’t really exist!’
‘How can you say it doesn’t exist? Think of the love a mother has for a child: how more powerful than even reason is that link between them? Yes, yes – I admit it seems in all other ways intangible to us: but then, isn’t reason, isn’t wisdom?’
‘But reason, wisdom; they’re completely different things!’
‘Are they? Yet if we don’t care for others, they’re meaningless to us – they might as well not exist! It’s the emotions that are the real existence! And just as Earth fought back with the creation of her daughter Memesis, man fought back with your creation: the emotions Memesis needed to calm her!’
Frustrated, confused, Lil tried to bring Milton back to a more reasonable way of thinking by attempting to calm him.
‘Look, look – even if any of all this is even halfway true; what good does it do us?’
‘Mother has it all wrong! That’s how it helps us! How can she say she knows everything – that she’s a newly arisen god, which I now realise she’s striving for – if she has no knowledge of emotions, the prime basis of human nature!’
There suddenly came from everywhere about them a sound of rapid tapping. It was a regular rhythm, one that was swiftly growing in both intensity and the number of overlapping beats.
Clapping; it was the sound of a swiftly multiplying crowd clapping. As if Lil and Milton were being unnervingly watched by a vast, ethereal audience.
It was now raucous clapping, quickly becoming evermore painful to listen to. First Milton and then Lil covered their ears with their hands, grimacing in agony as this failed to stem the now thunderous drumming from penetrating so deeply into them.
Abruptly, the enveloping walls burst into life and colour, revealing a gigantic, possibly endless crowd.
And every one of them was Mother.
*
The clapping was now storm-like in its intensity.
Both Milton and Lil collapsed to the floor, vainly attempting to mute the noise by clasping their hands ever tighter about their ears.
From the audience, first a much larger then a rapidly looming figure of Mother appeared, looking down on them as if they were little more than obnoxious insects.
‘I’m glad I resurrected you, Milton!’ she boomed. ‘It’s gratifying to see that even a human mind can sometimes grasp the unbelievable and realise its truth. But now; you’re time is over.
She clicked a pair of gigantic fingers, the vibrations reverberating around the room as if they had set in motion a hurricane.
Milton shook, shrieked in utmost pain.
Then, with a petrified upturning of his eyes, he rolled over and died.
*
Chapter 37
Despite the rolling thunder of endless clapping, Lil rushed to Milton’s side, clinging on to the vain hope that he might not yet be dead.
But even as she knelt down beside him, she recognised that there was no hope for him. He was dead, dead once more.
She was weeping still as, at last, the tumultuous clapping came to an abrupt end. With its disappearance, the gloating image of Mother also instantaneously vanished.
Without any need for the opening of any door, one of the more life-size images of Mother stepped out from the wall. Striding across the room towards the crouched Lil, her walk was controlled and precise, well practised, even surprisingly stilted.
‘There there, my dear;’ she declared in a manner lacking any true emotion. ‘We both know he was lucky to have this chance, however brief, of resurrection.’
‘Why did you kill him?’ Lil demanded furiously, glaring up at the arrogant woman so coolly observing her.
‘I brought him into life,’ Mother declared casually. ‘I sent him back.’
‘And this is what you intend for Sis?’ Lil snorted accusingly. ‘Once you have what you want from her, once you’re a “god”?’
‘Your friend’s disposable will require a little more ingenuity, I’m sure: my own creations, the one whose cells I set vibrating with life once more – well, all I have to do with those is change the vibrations.’
‘You can’t be a god without being aware of man’s emotions; didn’t you hear Milton say that?’
She nodded sagely.
‘He was wise, very wise: and, naturally, perfectly accurate in his estimation of what constitutes godliness.’
Lil unsteadily rose to her feet.
‘Then…’ she began hesitantly, ‘you admit you’ve failed? That you can’t be god, that you can’t create a whole new breed of man if you don’t understand their emotions? We’re nothing, he said, if we have no emotions!’
Mother appeared shocked, yet it was an expression so exaggerated that it was almost theatrical.
‘No emotions?’ she said, her voice full of the very same enhanced theatricality. ‘But why, here you are, my dear! A veritable tsunami of emotions!’
‘That’s ridiculous! In that, the poor man made no sense at all!’
Mother placed a consoling arm around the angrily quivering Lil in exactly the same way that Milton had.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ Mother pouted, as if hurt. ‘I regard you as my very finest creation!’
*
Chapter 38
Lil stepped away from Mother, horrified.
‘Me? Your creation?’
She shook her head vehemently.
‘No, no, no! That’s madder than anything I’ve heard so far!’
She glared fiercely at Mother.
‘I don’t know you! I never even knew of this place till I arrived here!’
She gave an airily dismiss wave of her arm to indicate the towering room surrounding them.
Mother rewarded her with yet another hurt pout.
‘But of c
ourse you don’t recognise all this, dear! It was all rather a little too poetic for my personal tastes but – to give him his due – our dear, poor Milton was simply struggling for the right words to describe a science beyond his own limited understanding. But then, even within this erroneously called Golden Age, they struggled to understand that what they had termed Dark Matter – this intangible thing that made up so much of creation’s mass – was really the heaviness of emotion’s they all carried around endlessly within them.’
‘I came here with Sis!’ Lil persisted. ‘I helped her find…’
She faded to silence.
Yes, she had helped Sis arrive here, hadn’t she?
And wasn’t that what Mother had wanted? To entrap Sis, to gain her knowledge of nature?
What had Mother said earlier, too?
That Lil was responsible for Sis’s humility. For her weakening, her taming.
Mother grinned, seeing the light of understanding in Lil’s eyes.
‘When I heard all these tales of this Memesis,’ she said merrily, ‘I knew she had to be Earth’s daughter!’
Her smile vanished, her expression now both stern yet undeniably sad.
‘But now my dear, I suppose even your use is over.’
And as Mother clicked her fingers, Lil was rocked by the most powerful trembling she had ever experienced.
*
Chapter 39
The room itself was pulsating.
It’s walls were a blaze of fire, of explosions.
And, just as the soldiers had stepped forth from what had been moving images, pieces of those walls now crumbled, plummeting to the ground and shattering into even smaller chunks.
‘What’s happening?’
Lil would have like to scream that out herself. Yet it wasn’t her who had shrieked out in bewilderment; it was Mother.
Like Lil, she was gawping in confusion at this mass of terrible images decorating the walls.
Images of the entrance to the mines crumbling, the rocks falling upon the bestial guards, the slaves breaking free and running for their lives.