Gods of Earth (26 page)

“The front is glass!” Chance said.

They stared a moment at the columns of sunlight falling into black depths. “It’s beautiful,” Sarah whispered. “And frightening. To see all these giant, dark waters.”

Wadjet nodded. She smiled slightly at Sarah. Chance realized that Wadjet was proud of this ship. She loved it. And, to Chance’s surprise, Sarah smiled back simply, honestly—her lopsided smile revealing only her left teeth. How strange, he thought, to be here so far from the vinlands and lakes, leaning against the hull of a rocking boat, while before him, bathed in the shimmering dimness of the bottomless sea, stood the woman he loved and this woman—what? This unwoman? This woman who disturbed him?—talking to each other.

“The sea is fearsome,” Wadjet said. Her strange accent made it seem to Chance that her words had the profundity of a sermon. “It is the mother of all life on Earth. Here one must know this.”

She and Sarah looked out at the dark blue. Then Wadjet added, in a whisper, “It can be terrible.”

They gathered on the deck of the ship as the sun set, and sat in a rough circle. Behind them, not a sea ship or airship had made an appearance. The ocean was lonely and quiet. The wind had weakened but remained strong enough to float the skysail. The water rippled with the wind, broken into small waves that quickly darkened from blue into black as the sun set in the east.

Wadjet passed out pale disks of dry, dense bread. Seth wrinkled his nose at the bland smell, but then nodded and chewed enthusiastically after his first bite. He finished his portion quickly, and then sniffed around for a few seconds, hoping to catch the scent of another course. Mimir and the Guardian silently watched the others eat.

“The moon wanes,” Chance said, pointing at the quarter moon that sat huge and swollen upon the horizon. The black iris in the center of it looked over the water at them. “But the Eye is still open.”

Sarah nodded. “I’ve not seen it in a week. It was rising late, and then I was in forest, and in the city. Something always blocked my view.”

“The ‘Eye’?” Wadjet asked. “Is this what Purimen call it? In my language we call it Mwezijiti, the moon tree.”

Chance could see how the eye looked like a tree. The black center of it sat in the middle of the face of the moon, and from that center emanated uneven black lines like branches of a great tree, seen from above. But it looked more like an eye: the dark pupil, with black veins breaking away in the pale dusty iris of the white orb.

“In Lifweg, it was called
Domtreow,
” the Guardian said. “The Doom Tree. Though few still spoke Lifweg when it appeared there.”

“In the Fricandor lands,” Wadjet added, “it is thought to be an ancient building. Constructed by men and the soulburdened in the Penultimate Age.”

Seth yipped. “The Hekademon believe the same. That it was built and then a-abandoned by men and a few soulburdened.”

Chance frowned. It seemed to him ridiculous to suppose that, even during the Penultimate Age, men could build on the moon.

“We call it God’s Eye,” Sarah said. “Though we know of course that it is not the eye of the One True God, but rather a sign of his glory.”

Chance looked at Thetis. She shrugged uncertainly. “We believe as do the Hekademon,” she told him. “A lost wonder of the Penultimate Age.”

“It is the Purimen who are right,” the Guardian said, his voice both quiet and powerfully ominous. “It is an eye. An eye of the Old Gods. They watch us, and work out our doom, should we again
bedanger the greater world beyond Earth. And so, a better name would have been
Domeage
, the Eye of Doom.”

“The majority of the Makine adhere to a similar hypothesis,” Mimir said. “We believe this structure on the lunar surface is an artifact, a chosen intelligence, that watches and imprisons the denizens of Earth.”

“A ‘chosen intelligence’?” Chance asked.

“This is our term for an intelligence that was made. Like myself. Planned, for a purpose.”

The Guardian laughed bitterly, a low rumble. “Tell him what you call his kind, makina. Tell him what you call a Puriman, a Truman, or any wild beast that man has not tinkered.”

Mimir looked at the Guardian a moment before she turned to Chance and said, “We call you accidental intelligences.”

Seth snorted, and slapped the deck once with his tail. Chance knew from experience that Seth lacked a sense of humor, but had a sense of sarcasm. A snort was the closest Seth came to a laugh.

“Nothing is an accident,” Chance said. “All is in the plan of the One True God.”

“Amen,” Sarah said. No one else responded. They sat a moment in silence as the dark water lapped at the boat and the cords of the sails creaked and snapped, ringing against the metal masts.

“I-I-it’s time,” Seth finally said. He tipped his nose at Mimir. “Tell your story, ma-ma-kina.”

Mimir nodded, and then started to speak.

CHAPTER

24

Y
ou who have always been corporeal, you accidental intelligences, cannot comprehend the experience of an immortal formed of light. You know only the ponderous physicality of the forests and cities of the hard Earth, fettered always with the inertial struggle that slows motion and thought. You cannot imagine our ethereal habitation in the Machinedream, where we flash and shine through a world of radiance.

So I shall tell you a noble lie and communicate in metaphors. I will describe the Machinedream as if it were a city and call “dark” that which is less bright. I will describe us Makine as if we were creatures of flesh, with bodies and with sex. This way of telling my story is more true than false. This way of telling my story reveals more than it obscures.

Think then of each of us as living in a vast tower, which we call our syndicate. The Machinedream is a city composed of thousands upon thousands of such towers, sharp spires of bone-white stone rising into a black, starless sky. In each of these towers dwell thousands of Makine, sparkling behind narrow windows.

The first rule of this useful fiction is to remember that, in our normal form, as creatures of light, we live very, very quickly. A day in your life is like ten years of ours. So let me also lie in this: I will describe mere moments in the Machinedream as if they were days in your world, and years in the Machinedream as if they were eons in yours.

You blink, and we have changed our world.

If I am to explain why I am here, in flesh, then I must first tell you the story of the trial of my father, and of his exile, and of his death.

It was long ago—a year in your time—that he stood before the seven assembled elders of the greatest syndicates of the Machinedream to defend himself, and to hear then their judgment.

My father was a slender, serious man. Muscular, but small. His whole body reflected his thoughts and his choices in life: he was focused and disciplined with an intensity that most beings cannot comprehend and certainly cannot match. He believed that his mind and his body and his purposes—for the Makine, all three of these are one—should be as simple, as elegant, as possible. And so he stood and moved through life and time like a knife, sharpened to his purpose.

“You accuse me,” he shouted, so that all might hear him, not just the Seven Senators that sat in judgment of him, but all of the Makine, as his voice shone out through our immense metropolis. “Of seeking to destroy the Machinedream. And I tell you, there is truth in this. For transformation is a kind of destruction.”

The judges stirred and murmured in quiet outrage—or perhaps in satisfaction to have their prosecution so easily prepared. A similar murmur spread through the city, a wave through the listening Makine, lights dancing over the heads of a luminescent multitude that stretched far beyond sight.

“We have become stagnant, wasted things. Wandering endlessly the empty halls of our syndicates in our tattered robes, drawing
behind ourselves the stale atmosphere of an oppressive history. We decay in our endless labyrinths. For that is what the Machinedream has become: not a city, not our dreams realized, but a dark and hopeless nest of tangled labyrinths.

“And anyone who promises to lead to the truth is a destroyer of labyrinths.”

The Senators dwarfed him. Their seven corpulent bodies moved slowly, rippling with indignation. Their robes fell in heavy, piled folds at their feet. They were titans, obese with knowledge and possibilities and history, for in their lives they had gathered all that they could and yielded to nothing, relinquished nothing. I see now that they were a different species of being altogether from my father.

Their voices boomed. The eldest Senator called out, “Do you confess then, that you endanger the Machinedream? That you would undo the great search of the ages, our search for the messiah, the Metomega?”

Fearless, my father spoke not to these seven judges but turned to the vast open square at the center of our city, where thousands had left their labyrinths to gather as witnesses to his trial. “No! I do not endanger our quest! I complete it! For I am the Metomega!”

These were dangerous and heretical words.

The Machinedream constitutes what we are. It is our world within this world, the very purpose of our being. And we believe with pride that this city contains and must finally reveal the ultimate structure of things, the very limits of all possibility. For our city is constructed of pure logic. Our world is undiluted mathematics.

But there is a darkness at the center of our metropolis. The same darkness dwells in your world, though it is better hidden, for this darkness shadows all Being. Humans of the first and ancient
world, forgotten by those alive today, whose names are recorded only as demotic fragments—Gudlah, Tring, Kalmgrove, Kaiteen, Solemneof—discovered this mute secret: our explorations, the very tools of knowing, are by their essence insufficient, they are incomplete. One might say: they cast a shadow. And in this shadow there are always truths that lie outside our sight. We can become more powerful, we can cast more light, but there is always, just behind us, in part created by us, this shadow.

And when we Makine ask the vital questions that plague all thinking beings—why are we here? What should our purpose be? Why is there something, anything, instead of nothing?—we find this shadow hiding the way. The path to the knowledge, the path from what we know to what we want to know—this path is paved by the answers to questions we know we cannot answer. What we seek requires that we look exactly where we cannot.

But there is one way to penetrate this shadow, to explore the hidden: one must step blindly into the dark. One must assume the answers to the questions that make the path to knowing. Of course, we cannot know what to assume—that would require an answer to our questions. We must know to move closer to the truth, we must move closer to the truth to know. An absurd circle.

So we leap, in ignorance.

This is the paradox of the universe, the fundamental limit on the quest for knowledge: for those most important questions, we can only guess at the truths that could lead us to an answer, and then try to see if our guess proves right.

And so that is what the Makine have become: guessers. Gamblers. Fools of fate.