“Hello,” he said calmly. “What day is it, if you please?”
The crown prince told him.
“Perfect,” said the chimera in his tiny cottage. “You’re right on time.”
“Are you a demon?” breathed Ispan.
“Are you a boy?”
“Well, of course I am!” spluttered the prince.
“Well, of course I am!” grinned the demon.
“What is your name?”
“I am Gremory, grand duke of Hell,” he grunted, pulling out the mouse’s heart and cutting it into four equal roasts, “with sixty and six legions at my command, or I will have, when I am released from my duty.”
Ispan controlled himself and did not clap his hands in delight. “What is your duty?”
Gremory put his scaled hand over his heart and intoned: “To enforce the laws of the king who summoned me for seven hundred years, in every cranny of his domain, and thereafter to protect his kingdom from invaders in perpetuity. Seven diabolists of seven schools put that doom upon me, and I shall be glad to be rid of it.”
“That seems like a good and noble deed,” the corpse prince said.
“I have made it wicked where I could,” the demon shrugged. “It is not easy work, but I am dedicated. And it is almost over now.” Gremory wiped his palms on his powerful draft horse legs. “There is just enough time to answer your wish, and then I will be home in my own black palace with my own full belly and ready to receive the great praise of my master.”
“I did not wish for anything!” cried Ispan. “And I will not give you my soul!”
“There is no need for that little melodrama, my lad. This is long paid for, by men you never knew. A demon’s bargain is cruel, yes, and seeks to snare, of course, but grace is Hell’s last gambit, and all I have ever done is give men just what they ask for, nothing more or less. They make enough of a hash of that to give me centuries of leisure. You are no diabolist. There is no shame in being unable to see the shape of a trick seven hundred times bigger than you.”
Gremory, grand duke of Hell, opened his camel’s mouth, and what emerged from it was Ispan’s own voice, whispering: I wish I were small enough to live inside you. And then he opened his left hand, and Vnuk’s voice came out of it: I wish I were big enough to be your home.
“Ispan!” came a terrible cry at the door of the granary. The dead prince leapt to his feet and toppled down the ladder as Vnuk collapsed in the doorway, a wound gouged in her head, wearing a maroon winter gown, the color of hopelessness. She bled onto his hands, nothing red or wet but candlelight, flowing as free as water. “They are coming,” she gasped. “I thought they would never come. I thought they were a dream. They rode under silk banners, Ispan, and God did not see them.”
The thunder that was not thunder was close now, and the lightning was not lightning but trebuchets, and the air was full of an awful yelling, grinding, screeching, for the army at the gates was now inside them, and their horses’ armor was wrought like feathered basilisks and the woman who led them was as beautiful as the sun. But try as he might, the crown prince of that vanished country could see no one else through the smoke, no familiar face, no mother or father or lord or lady, only the enemy, and too many of them.
Ispan held Vnuk tight and put his head to her heart, that glowed the color of turmeric, the color of an infinity of candles. He heard no beating, but birdsong, and before the next blast of cannonfire, he found that his face was no longer pressed to the bosom of beloved, but his feet were planted upon the balconies of her ribcage, and the world of her was vast and far as any he had ever seen.
The dead prince walked over Vnuk’s brick sternum, toward the nearest lancet window, and raised his hand to knock upon the stained glass.
Grave
They came two by two and three by three, nine by nine and one by one to the door of the world, the door that Finial the Beggar had been forbidden to open. They looked nothing like the inhabitants of Kettő or Öt or Nyolc or Kilenc, or Egy or Negy or Tíz or Hét or Tizenkét or Siks or Tizenegy. They had long hair and beards and skin the color of worms in the morning, and many of them had more or less than the usual two eyes, some had tails, some were not made of flesh at all. They were strangers, but in Tizenharóm, through the hole in the library wall, the voice of the gods had said to welcome them, and allow them to live in those great cities, and allow them to eat of the common table, and read the words of Chancel the Sophist and Cinquefoil the Rhymer, and marvel at the candles of Narthex the Lamplighter, and feast on the goods of the world, which some would call a tower, as St. Gremory taught them to do.
The newcomers looked out and up into the lands they would make their homes and saw the creatures that would be their neighbors, their lovers and their enemies and their rivals and their friends, and shyly gave their names to the million songbirds that were the people of the kingdom of Vnuk, who had spun through generations concealed behind the inner walls, raised cities on staircases and in galleries and cells, marveled at the autumn forests of her neurons and the candlelight of her blood, the aqueducts of her digestion and the sound of her gentle voice and the voices of her friends. The songbirds greeted them with stern, suspicious faces: sparrows, finches, thrushes, nightingales, and starlings, shrikes and robins, cardinals. The nations stared and stared and would not be the first to move, and ever after, this spot on the outskirts of the town of Egy would be marked with statues and flowers to remember this day. For then did the starlings Trefoil and Apse, the grandchildren of Chancel the Sophist, of whom we have spoken much, short and stout like all their people, reach out dark and speckled wings toward the eyeless queen of ————and welcome her when no one else would. As her wing grazed those long royal fingers, the terrible tiny flutter of an earthquake began, and in that moment no one needed to find their way to Tizenharóm to hear the voice of some kind god cry: Run, run, child, get out before they burn it to the ground!
But before she ran, one last man came to the great grey walnut door. He wore a face he had never worn before, a young, keen face with dark eyes and red hair, a face for passion and for awe. He looked up toward Vnuk’s face, a million miles away from him now, at the soft pale mountain of her jaw. He alone would not be surprised to meet the kingdom of birds within. Tears overflowed the eyes of Archfiend the Lesser as he asked his question once more, once more before escaping into the scion of King Blancmange’s house, which would be his house and all of theirs forever and ever.
“What is the name of the Devil, my child?”
Inside the tower of Vnuk, Ispan collapsed weeping into the soft, confused magpie wings of the Beggar Finial. “I’ll never see her again,” he wept. “I shall live in her body like a husband, but I will never see her eyes again.”
Vnuk’s great and monstrous hand, now as tall as a trebuchet, guided the diabolist through the door and locked it behind him.
“Love,” she said as she saved her kingdom. “The name of the Devil is love.”
The silver bell at her throat rang out, and Vnuk began to run.
If you go and search well for it, outside the borders of a walled country that is neither Poland nor Hungary nor Serbia nor Romania, you may find beneath a rowan tree a peculiar ruin, not much larger than a girl’s torso, of a tower of somewhat confused architecture and peculiarly beautiful black masonry. Beside it, long bones slowly turn to long grass, and above it, rooks have made a nest in the pale skull that hangs off the crumbling market cross at the top of the tower. I have heard it said that if you put your ear to the eighth lancet window on the eleventh floor, you can hear, ever so faintly, a hundred million voices singing forever.
Major
Tom
For my father
Scalpel, please.
The damage is much worse than we thought.
When I open my eyes I see blue. Blue everywhere. Blue beyond the dreams of Picasso. When I close my eyes I see everything.
Scalpel, please.
You can’t plan for something like this.
It’s far more difficult than the boys upstairs could ever anticipate.
I don’t know where that came from. That name. It means nothing to me. Picasso. Pic…ass…o. The blue is hex #2956B2. I don’t know what Picasso’s hex number is. The blue is everywhere. I am nowhere. I keep looking for my name, but I can only find Picasso, Picasso floating in all that blue.
Scalpel, please.
Patient vitals are slipping. Prep .5 cc’s of adrenaline.
There it is. Down there. Covered in blue like a fish. A name. My name. Jumping and leaping around below me. I cast for it, standing waist deep in a Michigan river with my grandfather, wearing a hat that’s too big for me, holding a pole too long for me, trying to make the line snap out as gracefully and perfectly as Grand-dad’s line.
Scalpel, please.
If he wakes up, pump him full of Ativan and hold on to your goddamned hat.
Something takes the bait. My heart feels like it’s going to catch on fire. I pull the name out of the water, dripping. It is my name. My name is Desmond Wright.
Scalpel, please.
The damage is much worse.
It’s far more difficult.
You can’t plan, please.
It’s much slipping.
If he wakes up, pump him full of goddamned hat.
.5 cc’s of vitals, please.
We thought patient. Hold on to anticipate. Prep the boys upstairs. Scalpel adrenaline.
Full consciousness during installation would cause a catastrophic shut-down of all systems.
How about you just let me do my job and make your little laws about it later?
None of that is really happening. It’s just background radiation. The noise of my own personal Big Bang still echoing around, bouncing off nothing. Static. Don’t listen to them, Desmond Wright. Focus on the blue. The blue is always happening.
This has all taken a lot of adjustment. I still wake up screaming and reach for my wife. I wake up screaming and reach out across a bed that doesn’t exist for a wife who is long gone. But I’m not really waking up, either. Not really screaming.
Oh! Picasso was a painter. The information looks like a child finger-painting, squishing blue paint between her little fists, crying for me:
Daddy, Daddy, look what I made!
Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, born 1881 Malaga, Spain, died 1973 in France. It must have been nice to be Picasso 1881 to 1973. To be finite.
I can access his life easily now, faster than cell mitosis. I am beginning to form permanent pathways through my neurotic geography. I understand this represents good progress. But it frightens me. My basic functions are depth-mined with memories ready to detonate. I can’t stop myself remembering, or predict when it will happen, or even understand it. All I know is that my mind is somehow sticky. I reach into my psyche for something—wife, name, blue, Picasso, scalpel—and when I pull it out some image, some memory is clinging to the fact I wanted. Like the fish in the Michigan river. Like the finger-paint oozing between tiny fingers.
I will copy my friend Pablo. This is how humans learn, by copying better humans. I am Desmond Patrick de Aspera Orbital Satellite de Registration 887D de la Boreal-Atherton Corporation y Wright. Born East Lansing, Michigan, 1988. Died…no. I don’t like died. Died is sticky. Died comes with sound and image files attached.
Yellow lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash. Like morse code.
Richmond, Virginia: 67 miles
A woman’s voice shaped like the fireplace inside a white clapboard cottage by the sea: I thought maybe we’d go up to Maine for the summer next year. Like we used to do when the kids were little. What do you think, Dez?
Sounds from some industrial hell: screeching, crunching, thudding, snapping, grinding, and the slow drip of everything into the storm drains. Blood, petroleum, rain. The sound of died.
Scalpel, please.
The damage is much worse than we thought.
I drown every day in a sea of random access memory. It really eats into my productivity.
It’s a win-win, Desmond. And if you do end up fulfilling your end of the contract, you’ll be far past caring about the details.
My world is very orderly. When I close my eyes, I see the clock turn over 0700. I do what any man does, the same routine I’ve been running for the last twenty years. Throw on a bathrobe, have a good morning piss, wash my face, stumble downstairs, make coffee, pour myself a bowl of my son’s cereal, read a book while I eat so I don’t have to listen to the newscasts blaring through my kitchen windows, my refrigerator door, my bathroom mirror, anything with a screen. I’ve been working on Kafka. Real cheerful guy. Sometimes I get the idea that turning into a cockroach is his idea of a happy ending.
When I open my eyes, I see the clock turn over 0700. I activate my dormant systems, run a self-diagnostic, clear any buggy code, dispatch drones to repair any equipment malfunction (and there is always an equipment malfunction), scan the passive surveillance archive for any anomalies, run active surveillance programs, access darkweb listen-in protocols, and attempt contact with ground control.
But God, it feels like throwing on a bathrobe, having a good morning piss, washing my face, stumbling downstairs, making coffee, pouring myself a bowl of my son’s cereal, reading a book while I eat, not listing to the window/door/mirror newscasts. Peering at Kafka over my glasses. I can see the coffee mug in my hand as I switch over to active surveillance sequence 1139. The mug says You’re My MAINE Squeeze! on it. The handle is chipped. I don’t have a bathrobe. I don’t even have shoulders to throw it over anymore. But it’s there when I start combing through code lines. On my skin. The sash around my waist, under a belly that’s a little too big for a fifty-year-old guy to be proud of. But I don’t have a belly. Even a little one. Desmond Wright doesn’t have a body anymore. I don’t have a face to wash or a downstairs or a coffee pot or cereal or a son. But I hear his voice humming through the quiet corridors of the darkweb.
Daddy, Charlotte won’t share her paint! She’s hogging it ALL!
I say: Charlotte, share with your brother. It’s an autonomic reflex, like breathing or adjusting a solar panel to match low Earth orbit.
Somewhere, in an underground radio room, a computer screen flashes text: Charlotte, share with your brother.
My daughter’s name is Charlotte. And knotted to the name Charlotte like a magician’s trick scarf come other names, other images, one after the other:
My daughter’s name is Charlotte.
My son’s name is Lukas.
My wife’s name is Eliza.
White lights. Silver knives. Masks.
I was a doctor. A neurosurgeon. Before Richmond, Virginia: 67 miles. I was good at it. At brains. At minds.
Scalpel, please.
If he wakes up, pump him full of Ativan and hold on to your goddamned hat.
I see my hands on people’s bodies. Broken bodies. Patched-up bodies. Comatose bodies. Eliza’s beautiful, familiar, warm body. My own well-worn body. My children’s slippery bodies in a blue tile bath-tub. In the emptiness of space I smell the strawberries-and-cream bubble bath. I feel the foam. I am so hungry for myself. For them. I search my data reservoir for Dr. Desmond Patrick Wright, employee, Boreal-Atherton Labs.
The white clapboard cottage by the sea. The fireplace inside it. An unfinished poker game played for pennies and mint candies left out on the dining room table. Summer storm clouds drifting in from the Atlantic, battering the windows with rain. A cross-stitch sampler on the wall reads:
Desmond Patrick Wright, M.D. Ph.D., born East Lansing, Michigan, 1988. Died Richmond, Virginia 2042.
Yellow lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash.
Why don’t I remember?
A yellow note on the refrigerator in Eliza’s endearingly messy handwriting: Volunteer, Aspera Project. After a night of anxious dreams, woke to find himself transformed into a cockroach.
It’s a win
-win, Desmond. And if you do end up fulfilling your end of the contract, you’ll be far past caring about the details.
A prime-level internal protocol overrides the cottage by the sea, the note, the summer storm. The images burst and scatter. This particular alarm feels as though I’m rinsing out my coffee mug in the sink and lifting up the cushion on the old green couch to find the car keys Lukas can’t resist hiding. He hopes one day I’ll give up and stop going to work. But I never do.
The blue beneath me wheels slowly. North America comes into view. Time to go to work.
Somewhere, in an underground radio room in Colorado, a computer screen flashes text: Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0915 22.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate System Pingback.
Initiating…
Pingback Sent.
Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1A. Do you copy?
Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0917 22.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1B. Do you copy?
Initiate Terrestrial Radioband Scan.
Initiating…
Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0919 22.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1C. Do you copy?
Terrestrial Radioband Scan complete.
Results: None.
Ground Control.
Ground Control.
Ground Control.