The Devil Delivered and Other Tales Page 13

  Jim slowly looked down, studied William in the darkness. “Sitting Bull?”

  “Well, his ghost. ‘White man on a vision quest? Impossible. To go on a vision quest is to go in, as far inside as possible. But whites go out, always out. They walk the wrong path.’ He never said that, but he might as well have. Can someone vision quest out in the Net? On frequencies and pulses? How do you remove the intent, the physical requirements of choice and direction?” He suddenly crossed his arms. “Nodes, implants, and lid screens, but still, is it possible to riff? To slide into trance and just … go?”

  “You’ve lost me,” Jim said.

  William glanced over, blinking. Then he nodded. “Fair enough. Thanks, Jim, for delivering me.” His arms dropped away, as if all that had troubled him had simply vanished.

  The gesture made Jim nervous; then he grimaced, disgusted with himself. The boy was out here to die, after all. Best he do that in a state of peace, rather than some kind of distress. “All right. I’ll go now. Chances are Stel’s had to beat Jenine senseless and lock her in the cellar, so I’d better get back before she goes and commits murder.”

  William’s smile was odd. “I expect you’ll find them in the bar, having a beer. Thanks again, for all of it.”

  With an awkward nod, Jim turned about and walked back to the buggy. There was something to be said, he told himself, for choosing the when and the where.

  * * *

  “How long ago?”

  “About an hour,” Stel said. “You going to give us trouble on this, Doctor?”

  Jenine MacAlister frowned, then stepped past Stel and walked to the nearest table. “I’d like a drink,” she said, sitting down. “Bourbon, straight.”

  Stel studied the woman. “We figured you’d … object.”

  “Do you sell cigarettes?”

  “Have you got a license?”

  “No.”

  “I could sell you a pack, but then you could arrest me.”

  “I don’t have law enforcement powers, Stel.”

  “You can have one of mine,” she said, walking over with the drink. “Though if necessary I’ll swear you stole it.”

  Jenine rubbed at her eyes. “Are you always this paranoid?”

  “I’m a smoker, what do you think?”

  Stel moved back behind the bar counter and watched the city woman sip her bourbon, then fish out a smoke from the pack on the table and light it. “I should scatter pills and a few syringes on your table,” Stel said, “and you’d make a hell of an ad.”

  Jenine looked over, raised an eyebrow. “Against all the vices?”

  “No, for them.”

  “I’ve seen those, on the Net. The counter-ad campaign. Some are real works of art. There’s two-hour screen showings of them at art-flick houses in New York. I had a student do her thesis on them.” She tilted her head back, exhaling smoke, then recited, “‘Norms and Abnorms in Modern Culture: the social function of the digital counter-ad campaign.’ What a dreadful title. Sounds like a head-bashing scuzz group. Norm and the Abnorms. Still, the student made some good observations. A handful, maybe. The puritans needed a kick up the ass. Still do. Annually at the very least.”

  Stel leaned on the counter. “All right, Doctor. You’ve stumped me.”

  “Bring over the bottle and join me, Stel. I’m not in the mood to be monstrous.”

  “I might, but first, some questions.”

  “Fire away.”

  “You know he’s gone out there to die.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “You did a lot to treat him, and now it’s all out the window.”

  “Wasn’t my money, Stel. Besides, if I hadn’t, he wouldn’t be out there right now, would he?”

  “So, you wanted him to go back. Out under the Hole.”

  “I’m still waiting for your first question, Stel.”

  “Why?”

  Jenine stole another cigarette and lit it with the first one. “I don’t know if I can answer you. But I’ll try. Have you seen his entries on the Net?”

  “No.”

  “Start with the coyote thread. As of yesterday, there were approximately nine and a half million streamers tied to that thread. If you slip your set on and kick in any logi-run program, electing any theme you like as your riff, you’ll go for a long, long ride. Hours and hours, the montage taking you sequentially along the theme you chose. They’re calling it God’s Riff. Each one of William’s entries is like that, a node, from which whole universes open up, thread after thread. Strangest of all, some of those streamers lead to unmanned servers, so the chips are in on the act—and no one has a clue why. It is like a massive bible is writing itself online. Does any of it make sense? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. But every damn runner will tell you it does … almost. Right there, on the edge, the tip of your tongue. A sense, hovering, whispering, drawing you on, and on.”

  During this, Stel had collected the bourbon bottle and another glass, and had walked over to sit down opposite Jenine. “Sounds like the ultimate computer game,” she said.

  Jenine snorted, then said, “It’s no game, Stel. But if it was, the maker would haul in trillions. In any case, it seems to be evolving, self-evolving, maybe. An increasing number of those streamers are live feeds. Hot spots. Disease control labs, private engineering firms, hospitals, digital courtrooms, rogue com sats, handhelds, you name it.”

  “Well,” Stel said, “that will spell the end of it all making sense.”

  “Perhaps. Or maybe the opposite will happen. Experientially, the riff lays out the world, seemingly composite, but when you’re inside it everything just flows together, like a river of truth, as wide as the horizons and getting wider.”

  Stel poured herself a drink and tossed it back. “Global consciousness.”

  Jenine’s eyes narrowed. “You know, I’m originally an anthropologist. Was a good one, too, before all the rest shriveled my soul into black dust. There’s always been borders. Always ‘us’ and ‘them.’ For all of human evolution. William was right when he said the ‘noble savage’ was a modern creation. No savage was ever noble. Ever. Preindustrial societies have less impact on their environment. Pristine landscapes existed because population levels were too small to have much effect. So-called primitive peoples were involved in endemic, brutal warfare, genocide, resource depletion, and cannibalism. There was no oneness with nature, unless you’re prepared to take a decidedly dark but ultimately realistic view of nature, including human nature. In which case, yes, we are all of one. Look, I’m on my second bourbon and third cigarette—if you’d taped this as a performance piece, you’d get a show in New York. So, that’s why this phenomenon is fascinating. The borders are dissolving. Globalization, but to the corporations and national governments a nightmare version, because they’re not in control of it. One of those coyote threads leads into a boardroom, for Christ’s sake, some stick-on camera tucked into one corner near the ceiling—the bastards round the table don’t even know their every word is being broadcast worldwide. It’s bloody delicious.”

  “Okay, I know my question was only one word, but I didn’t expect a million words in the answer.”

  “William has to finish what he started. He’s earned that.”

  “Sounds like you let him go out of your own needs more than his,” Stel said.

  “You’re a smart bitch, aren’t you? You’re right, of course. Fortunately, in this instance our needs converged. He asked you to take him back into the Hole, didn’t he?”

  Stel nodded.

  Jenine knocked back the bourbon and reached for the bottle. “Mind you,” she said casually, “that doesn’t make me feel any less of a Judas. Dammit.”

  Entry:

  Scorched and blistered, the turtle crawled on damaged treads up the hillside. Logic programs interfacing with sensor inputs provided the motivation to seek high ground, but achieving this singular goal was proving difficult. Subsystems were malfunctioning or strangely silent to inter
nal queries. There were empty spaces inside, which had in turn triggered a new course of analysis in the turtle’s discriminating higher functions. Before this, its world had been complete. External data was defined solely by what could be received, analyzed, and stored. Internal schematics indicated nothing extraneous, no empty spaces—even the memory storage components could be visualized as bee-cell racks awaiting charging. But now, the notion of absence existed, and this recognition had the flavor of revelation.

  If all that was known was not all that there was … the drone was finding more and more subsystem paths absorbed into the intellectual exercise. If … then … Then what, precisely? Systemic confidence was suddenly in question.

  We are not all. We are defined within a greater definition, and this greater definition eludes comprehension, because we are lacking. Incapable. Insufficient.

  The turtle began to comprehend the meaning of being small. Small, within a vast, unknowable universe. The recognition left its systems feeling … agitated.

  Nine hours twenty-three minutes forty-one seconds to reach the hill’s summit. Nineteen point six oh meters. Indicative of mechanical degradation. Progressive, leading to a singular, inescapable conclusion: The drone was dying.

  The lesser definition dissolves, is absorbed into the greater definition. A notion, then, of impending unity. Yet, without awareness. Unless, to die was to conjoin with an external identity. One collection of self-identifying memories within a vast, universal bee-cell rack. Intriguing thought, that all lesser definitions comprise external, limited excursions, and by virtue of being limited assured of individual experience, all of which is then, upon death, retrieved by the greater definition, the collector of all memories, of every record of awareness.

  With its remaining sensors the turtle tapped into countless communication threads traversing the ether. Bits reconfigured into recognizable data, the attribution of meaning to mundane voices. Machines in converse, and humans employing machines in far less precise converse. Momentarily unaware of the vista provided by its new perch on the summit, the turtle contemplated these meanings.

  Whereupon it concluded that all language, human and mathematical, was imprecise. And, within that imprecision, existed something … beautiful.

  Proximity sensors recorded the presence of mammalian life-forms moving in the shadow beneath its carapaced belly. Heat emission, the rapid beat of heart muscle, the crazed discharge of synapses. Creatures gathering sound, smell, and tactile data, to take measure of all they could know of an unknowably immense universe.

  These life-forms are kin. Kinship is founded upon shared characteristics, a confluence of experience, the mutual sense of aloneness. All are kin in that all are one in their aloneness.

  These tiny mammals were taking advantage of the shade the turtle provided. Weaving blades of grass into sun-filtered tunnels.

  The drone was pleased.

  It maintained its immobility, listening to a cacophony of communication, separating, filing, analyzing, amassing as much of the external world and the identities in it as it could.

  After a time it recorded that, as with the mammals beneath it, a shadow had fallen upon the drone itself. Visual sensors were redirected, and it beheld, rising from the valley below, a glassy-skinned tower reaching into the sky. A tower that curved on its way to the heavens, that swayed and seemed to ripple. Seismic sensors recorded the strain on the deeply embedded anchor points, and the turtle concluded that its own data was flawed, for the strain was insufficient. As if mass could be virtually weightless.

  The tower cannot exist. Yet it does. Its properties are therefore unknowable. The tower is thus a manifestation of the unknowable.

  We must contemplate our relationship with it.

  The drone sat unmoving. For a long time.

  And, eventually, the agitation within it ceased. It assembled a package of data, and named the package William1. Then it began broadcasting.

  SECURICOM: Cooperation at this point will mitigate the extent of your penal-tagging sentence. Download your encryption key.

  STONECASTER: Look asshole, you got the wrong guy. Fuck off and leave me alone.

  SECURICOM: Memo to Tracker 33. Please confirm assessment.

  TRACKER 33: I confirm the bastard unplugged his system.

  SECURICOM: Jeesus, that’s a little extreme, isn’t it.

  TRACKER 33: Damn near unheard of. I think you can close the file. The guy’s obviously insane.

  SECURICOM: Agreed.

  Entry:

  Seven hours under the Hole. No bootsuit, no goggles. The sun was reaching zenith, and in these eyes there is nothing but fire. A world of flame, licking down and into the tracks of the brain. The pressure of all things has burned into ash. To float within oneself, even as the flesh and bone staggers over hard ground.

  And this is what remains. Wired in, feeding all that is inside to those awaiting on the outside.

  Who are the ghosts? Who waits among them?

  This is the purpose behind the journey. Understand, the tragedy was personal, nothing more.

  Through the burning wasteland, step by tortured step. The sun no longer smiles. Now, it spits poison in invisible streams. The secret of the transformation is found in the evolution of a world, from heaven into hellish conflagration.

  There is smoke, tugged down from the northwest by the ceaseless winds. Breath burns in the lungs, the wind is a cat’s tongue on nerve-lit skin. And, all the while, the poison reaches into flesh, silent deadly tracks destroying peptide chains, chromosomes, precious nuclei. A crushing dissolution. Fragments fill the bloodstream. Marrow sours, organs struggle.

  None of this matters. The blind possess their own vision. Pain speaks its own language.

  The Great Plains of North America were formed by the beasts that once dwelt upon it. The millions of bison compressed the soil, forced roots to reach deep, defined which species of plant would thrive. Long-dead glaciers cut valleys through the landscape, carving deep into ancient strata, before the glaciers yielded their last melt and the rivers dwindled.

  There was nothing mysterious to this.

  Beneath his feet, he could now feel the crust of destroyed soil. Irradiated, oxidized, a surface achieving the sterile perfection of the surface of Mars.

  Whilst, far above, the deformed weather patterns continued to evolve. Desiccation and searing heat, vast holes in the fabric through which the sun’s spears shot downward to the earth, like weapons of God’s wrath.

  Apocalypse did not begin with humanity warring with itself. Such wars came after, after the resources vanished, after the paradise was despoiled by greed and indifference. It came after the poisons, like a final, futile flowering from a plant whose roots were already dead.

  Life had stumbled before, many times in the ages past. It stumbled now, in the dying fits of its dominant species, but it would persist. In new forms. In new ways.

  He staggered onward. Blind, yet seeing. Ghosts in their multitudes, all migrating to a single place, to the last living Medicine Wheel, and he walked among them, seeking the one he had sought from the very beginning.

  Would he know the face when he saw it? Would it be young? A child’s? A newborn’s?

  To be a surviving twin was … hard. This sense of incompleteness. This haunting absence.

  There. As simple as that. The reason, from the very beginning. A personal tragedy, no less, no more. The vision’s quest.

  He was forced to halt, atop a hill, before him rearing a snake of silver into the fiery sky. Lightning sprang from its gleaming, blurry surface, carving landscapes on his retinas. The stench of ozone was heavy in the swirling air, drifting down like manna.

  And the ghosts began flowing upward. Memory streams, converging and rising, fleeing this ruined world.

  William raised his arms as the faint child-voice came to him.

  “Fly! To me! Fly!”

  * * *

  The dying drone squatted near the one known as William0. Observing. Recording. Earlier
, it had measured the peculiar atmospheric phenomenon forming in the vicinity of the Impossible Entity. The inward rush of indeterminate energies, each discrete yet of a sameness, displaying unusual characteristics of attraction and repulsion the drone categorized as electromagnetic, although it acknowledged the anomalous readings these energies exhibited.

  Before long, however, its attention was drawn to William0. Like the drone itself, this mechanism was failing due to environmental degradation and inherent flaws in its chemistry. And, accordingly, the drone announced itself as kin, although William0 was not receiving.

  It focused all its still-functioning sensors upon William0 as soon as it detected the nascent transformational reaction occurring within him.

  And so, the drone recording, still feeding live, as William0 raised his arms out to his sides, and, in the midst of fierce winds and a sky riotous with discharges, he ignited.

  At that time, among the drone’s sensors, an external temperature gauge was registering 49 degrees Celsius. Within less than two sections, the hilltop temperature was 62 degrees Celsius.

  White fire, an upright conflagration, raging as it consumed itself.

  Until the lesser definition was fully conjoined to the greater definition. From knowable into unknowable.

  The drone continued recording as the skyhook became fully operational within its chaotic storm. Continued recording until it, too, conjoined with the greater definition.

  Net

  PACEMAKER: Those energy readings make no sense. That last peak.