Exurbia: A Novel About Caterpillars (An Infinite Triptych Book 1) Read online

  A protracted silence. Then: ‘We’re a zoo,’ said the imp. ‘A sort of animal sanctuary. For Them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘For whatever’s out there now. There was no Pergrin. Was there?’

  Miss Butterworth smiled genially. ‘You’re brighter than I gave you credit, Imp.’

  ‘There was no Pergrin and no sally against machine intelligence. Old Erde built a wiremind, or wireminds –’

  ‘Wireminds,’ said the syndicate woman.

  ‘Wireminds, and they reached out through the galaxy, just as the Ixenites wanted it, and still want it now. What the modern movement doesn’t seem to have considered is the possibility that the revolution they yearned for to begin with, the migration to the Up, happened millennia ago. There are no humans left. We are the last of an endangered species, relegated to the backwaters of the galaxy.’

  ‘Correct.'

  ‘This is unnatural,’ said Jura.

  ‘Unnatural?' chuckled the syndicate woman. 'To use that word, of all people, Professor. Is there anything unnatural in the whole of creation, do you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are the archetype.’

  ‘Oh, if you were a bird, you’d call the wind evil. There is nothing, not a cell, not a rock, not an act, not an institution, not a single particle that isn’t natural, that isn’t coming about and going its way in the way that it should. Unnatural. You only mean that which doesn’t sit well with you. Look at us, standing atop a world we didn’t originate on, under a sun our ancestors could barely pick out from the others in their day. Unnatural. And they, with their clubs and their tools; why, you would’ve called cried bloody murder at those too, I suppose. “Put down that axe and that hoe! We’re defying Sacred Nature!” And technology then, is that an unsavoury evil too? It is nothing but nature rearranged into a better version of herself. That which technology does, that which technology produces, that is nothing less than nature’s too; she sits just as comfortably at the heart of a t’assali generator as she does on a w’liak branch. And until you understand that, you will never fully see the gestalt.’

  ‘There is it again, your nonsense and your myths.’

  ‘Myths. It’s realer than anything here, I guarantee. Look at you, you extraordinary machine, you with your muscles and your bones and your guts and your grey matter. Do you know how long it took for nature to build such a thing? Look at you with your doubting and your fear. Have you ever seen a sceptical rock? Or one that fears for its life? You’re a way station, Stefan. A mere comfort stop on the path, on the long walk. A one hundred million year respite before the Up. We all dance to its tune.’

  ‘Even you,’ he said. ‘Even you?’ It makes me happy somehow that there is something beyond you, or something pulling your strings at least. That’s hope, if only a stolen little morsel of it.

  ‘I’m dancing to it now,’ she said. ‘And asking your little planet to join me, to come find its providence. And my, are you all so resistant.’

  ‘You have murdered people,’ the professor said. ‘You have murdered my friends.’

  ‘You would not have rallied otherwise.’

  ‘You have done unspeakable things to good people. You have imprisoned my wife. You have destroyed our culture.’

  ‘Don’t mistake the interval for the finale.’

  ‘You’re speaking nonsense.’

  ‘Well, all poetry is blather to a dog.’

  ‘If we’re the last of the original species then we were kept, what, as a curiosity?’ said the imp.

  ‘More a reservation, if you will.’

  The imp seemed to be turning the notion over in his mind with the impartiality of a judge. ‘A reservation then. The Pergrin Decree was to ensure we didn’t transcend. To ensure we stayed as apes. And to refrain from trying to build our own empire. Myth as a leash. But why now? Why have you come here, after all of these years?’

  ‘It is not of importance,’ Miss Butterworth said. ‘And even if I explained it, you would still not comprehend it fully, much as a scallix couldn’t grasp weld theory, try as it might.’

  ‘Yet you are proof,’ said the imp, his voice rising slightly in a tremble, ‘of humanity’s worst suspicions. You are proof that higher intelligence doesn’t promote any greater interest in peace. You’ve come here as a god and treated us as subjects. No,’ he faltered. ‘Not subjects. Animals.’

  ‘I have come for the harvest,’ she said. ‘And only certain tools may be used. The wheat will not yield itself.’

  ‘Even then, you could simply have told the truth. We would have been willing, we would have listened. Instead -’

  ‘What are They?’ said Jura. ‘What are They really? Your kind?’

  ‘Geometers,’ she said. ‘Minds that understand the shape of things. Minds that understand the shape of how things change.’

  ‘That isn’t an answer.’ Why all this obfuscation? Can’t you just call a spade a spade?

  ‘I don’t know what you want to hear, Professor. I don’t know what would suit you best. The universe incarnate, if you like.’

  ‘That isn’t an answer either.’

  ‘It is, you just haven’t the ears for it. Everything has a shape, a gestalt. Everything unfolds in a natural sequence, even if the sequence is impossible to understand at that moment in time. A flower doesn’t question its nature, nor a caterpillar.’

  ‘A caterpillar…’

  ‘Nor a man though. Don’t you think that’s strange? You’re all so comfortable thinking yourself an end rather than a means. A last stop. You’re all so obsessed that this is your final shape, these two legs, two arms, that delicate little brain. I expected more from you. It’s so important to your kind, the toing and froing, building your empires, crushing those empires which aren’t your own. Did you ever stop to consider that this might all be transitory?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jura.

  ‘Then why not say it? Why not build your societies to it, the way a child goes to school in preparation for adulthood? Why not ready yourself for a running jump?’

  ‘Into what, exactly?’

  ‘The Up of course.’

  Is she a soothsayer? Does she mean this? ‘The geometers. Is that where They live? The Up?’

  ‘In a sense.’

  ‘Then they’re, what? Gods? Machines?’

  ‘Neither of those things. Both too, in the sense that you are, Professor. Minds a few tiers higher up on the gestalt. Another corner on the cornerless shape. Yourselves, later.’

  He began to understand then, a climber almost at the summit.

  ‘You’re a kind of antagonist,’ he said. ‘You’re here to bully us into evolving. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Not bully. Encourage. Few brave the forest without a map. Fewer even survive without one.’

  He felt her in his mind then, as though she were walking freely through its corridors. ‘And those who wish to stay may stay, and those who wish to go may go. What do you wish to do?’ said the voice from all points within him.

  Annie’s face came to him from nowhere at all, suspended in his mind’s eye. ‘How exclusive is the invitation?’ he said.

  ‘Those who wish to stay may stay,’ she said again.

  ‘Is there love,’ he said quietly. ‘In there? Up there, I mean. Or out there.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘The sort that turns cells into animals. The sort that lit the suns.’

  No. It isn’t. Everything is flying apart from itself, spreading out into nothing at all at a million miles an hour. Matter is a hermit and one day every atom will live apart from every other and even those will be gone too eventually. That’s a blessing, I think. Every rotten part of me will one day be apart from itself and it will all be too distant to remember what it did here. That’s a kind of absolution. I need only wait.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Things are distancing themselves, but they’re also becoming more complex. There couldn’t be a gestalt without a little chaos.
But don’t mistake the chaos for the music. You’re just not listening carefully enough.’

  I’m tired of your truisms, whatever it is they mean. I’m tired of your ridiculous prophecies. I’m tired of your awful authority.

  ‘Then don’t worry much over it,’ she said. ‘It won’t last too long.’

  She looked almost maudlin, keeping her eyes to a fixed point on the ground. ‘Some forces for change are lasting and some are passing.’

  And I suppose then that you are the latter and you know it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and picked her face back up into a half-smile that was sure of itself and its capabilities and its malice. There was a clatter from the pit of the hall. Something had fallen from sleeping Moxiana’s bed, a ring of hers. The eyes were fluttering open, the hands stretching themselves against the silk of the sheets.

  ‘In the name of the gestalt,’ whispered the syndicate woman, and rose violently to her feet. The girl groaned and tried to lift herself onto her elbows.

  She’s weak but there’s strength there.

  ‘Sentries,’ Miss Butterworth cried. ‘Put her to sleep at once.’

  The gungovs remained stationary. And one, Jura saw then, stood only a metre from the girl’s cot, appearing guilty, if a monster of its calibre could seem such a thing. It held the intravenous drip in one of its grabbing parts, removed now from Moxiana's arm, the tube leaking sleeping serum over the hall floor.

  ‘You have woken her! What is the meaning of this?’ Butterworth shrieked.

  The girl was sat upright then and taking stock of the scene. She met Jura’s stare and smiled, her cheek freckles lifting like stars at dawn.

  ‘Enough. To sleep at once with her,’ said the syndicate woman crossing to the cot.

  A nebulous ripple of orange arced between the tershal throne and Moxiana, leaving a black scorch in its wake. Miss Butterworth stood perfectly still.

  ‘I suppose,’ the imp said quietly, ‘that Moxiana is quite angry with you.’

  A second orange ripple jaunted along the same axis, made a full circuit of the Grand Hall and evaporated the circling drapes.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ said the girl, her voice weak and atrophied. ‘Just disappointed. I have been watching for a time now. I have seen every one of your actions, as though in a dream.’ Weakly, she swung her legs over the side of the cot and stood on shaking feet. Jura went to her side instinctively and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Thank you, Professor.’

  ‘Moxiana,’ said the syndicate woman softly. ‘I have arranged things very carefully. The gestalt -’

  ‘Oh, I know of the gestalt,’ said the girl. ‘I see snatches of the days ahead, and I have seen the gestalt there. Though it’s a curious thing, I don’t see you.’

  ‘You have betrayed everything,’ upbraided the syndicate woman, turning then to the gungovs. ‘Do you even know what it is you have done?’

  ‘My brother has mercy in him afterall,’ said the girl, smiling to one of the gungovs.

  ‘I am truly so -’ said the imp.

  ‘There is no need to apologise,’ said the girl. ‘It was another life for you, long ago. You are not the same. None of us are now, I suppose. What is done to me is done to me. You’ve had fair punishment anyway.’ Jura lifted the girl onto his throne and set her down as gently as possible. She smelled of the epicforest, of fulschubs and w’liaks, of scallix honey. He fought the urge to cry and won only partially. A meagre drizzle of tears ran the length of his face and dripped onto his robes.

  ‘My brother thinks me merciful,’ said the girl. ‘And he is right. But even mercy has its limits.’

  ‘Spare her,’ said the imp, panicking suddenly.

  ‘No,’ said the girl. ‘It would do no good.’

  She smiled again, smoothed her cloth gown with a willowy hand, and closed her eyes. An orange curtain, a small caricature of the Ayakashi, materialised at the Grand Hall’s entrance. The syndicate woman took a few panicked reverse steps and backed into a main wall. The tershal heads stared down from their tapestries, each smiling knowingly: Stanislav, Princewright, and Jura. She did not try to bargain, nor did she scream. Instead she stood and admired the slow approaching effervescence, closed her eyes and appeared at peace. It came upon her silently and dissipated. There were only blackened singes then.

  Part III – The Up

  In which Moxiana speaks her piece

  39

  “Time is a game only children play well.”

  - David Berman, Old Erde word artisan

  Fortmann –

  He lay in the full throes of zapoei, muddledrunk. There was Maria’s grave, and there too the Zdrastian’s, twin w’liak trunks that he had carved their names into and stood in their memory. Every night as he made his leaf bed in the epicforest, the scene returned to him: Maria turning to catch what she must have known would be the last glimpse of his face. Then she had been as nothing. So too the Zdrastian. The orange ardour had disappeared and there had been only himself and the fleeing gungov child then.

  He had no doubt something would come for him, though he knew not what. The syndicate woman would conjure some new abominations and send them hunting for him. I do not think I would mind so much. Mr. Covert Woof had remained with him, somehow having escaped the Ayakashi too. He would vanish for several hours and return with scraps of food, scavenged birds and the like. What a kind animal the Zdrastian has made of you. Fortmann was not hungry. The dog gave up trying to force food on him and tended only to himself after the second day. There would be no use returning to the city, or any of the cities in fact. He would not be welcome. Nor would he want to be. The epicforest was his home now. He would die in it; said death hopefully not being too distant. He considered suicide. It would not be a difficult task, collecting all the berries he could find. One strain was bound to be poisonous. I didn’t see it happening like this. I imagined a glitz fight or some such, I imagined resisting something and being punished for it. Not shrivelling up alone with the w’liaks.

  He woke to the dog licking at his face and reached for the zapoei. The last bottle was drained. The dog licked his face again, pulled at his shirt with its teeth. Fortmann snarled. The dog persisted. ‘What? What the hell is it?’

  His belly was a little distended now; weeks of intermittent fasting. His joints groaned in their sockets. He stood on bare feet and brushed the dead leaves from his back. This is a kind of torture. I am being punished for some transgression in the last life, or the one to come next. The dog beckoned to a clearing ahead of them. ‘What?’ It beckoned again. He followed it with tired steps. They stood then on a hill’s bank, Bucephalia in the far distance, the tershal tower rising above the trees like a frozen rocket.

  ‘You’re a pest,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not your master.’

  The dog’s expectant look said otherwise. The sky ahead of them was riddled suddenly with forks of orange. Another came, then another, emananting – he realised – from the tersh’s tower. More streaks flashed from it now, obliterating the walls. What on Exurbia…There was a pause then another round of Ayakashi flashes. Most of the topmost dome was gone then. The higher chambers only remained as barebones. Taking his field telescope he glassed three figures stood in the chamber, two adults and what must have been a child. There was a break in the eruptions and a shape appeared suddenly over the structure, fashioned, by the look of it, from pure t’assali. An Old Erde butterfly, its torrid orange wings slowly beating, ascending high above the capital then into the morning cloud canopy. The dog watched him as he vaulted in double steps down the bank towards the city.

  ***********

  As he passed through the suburbs, more knew his face than he was comfortable with. At the wrought gate to the Blueberry Projects, a few of the crowd even tipped their hats. The Chapterhouse wasn’t so secret after all then. Mr. Covert Woof loped faithfully at his side, stopping occasionally to sniff at debris.

  ‘It’s been a Hades storm up there,’ said a man in the Hydrea district. ‘The Ayakashi
too.’

  ‘I know,’ Fortmann said. ‘I saw.’

  The sky was empty of transport capsules. Even the birds seemed grounded. All through the districts and the projects, folk were standing on their doorsteps or sitting in the streets, smoking, watching, talking in soft murmurs. They’re anticipating. His heart began to flutter as he approached what was left of the tershal tower. At Precosa Street he glassed a gungov way off with his field telescope. It was wandering aimlessly, ignoring the cityfolk. Close enough then, he saw the tower entire. The top regions had been almost completely destroyed. A few remaining girders gave it a birdcage aesthetic, but there was little else left.

  There were still gungovs standing guard at the tershal grounds. A crowd had formed, some baying, most just apparently there out of pure curiosity. Since when do gungovs tolerate rabbles? He prepared a small speech in his mind and approached the orange-eyed rascal with the largest grabbing parts. The thing stepped aside before he could open his mouth. Both he and the dog passed without comment.

  ‘Who’s he then?’ yelled a fabric woman.

  ‘A Seer!’ yelled another. ‘Look, it’s a Seer!’

  ‘Not anymore,’ Fortmann said.

  He had walked the grounds once as a child on a school outing. Little had changed: the former tershes still immortalised as hardened t’assali statues, the fountains spitting water in triple helices. The gungovs were just as accommodating as he continued into the grounds, standing aside, one following him at a distance, showing little more than idle curiosity. The ambassadorial chambers were empty. Food had been left half eaten at banquet tables. A Pergrin statue had been thrown or dropped and now it lay headless. A factotum gungov beckoned and led him to the service steps. Well, of course. The ascendance closets aren’t likely to be operational.

  The staircase spiralled up and around the outside of the tower itself. As he climbed, more and more of the Exubric degradation was obvious now. Every street was full of onlookers. Some must have been watching his climb through their binoculars. Commerce had come to a halt entirely, by the look of it. Whatever the outcome, this will be a day they’ll remember.