Gods of Earth (27 page)

In the nucleus of each syndicate tower there hides a maze of endless pathways. Endless halls and rooms. Endless turns and doors.

Each path or turn is an inference. Each doorway is an assumption. Each staircase, a proof.

And the men and women of this city, most of them, are rolling dice. Crouching in their solemn robes, whispering into their shaking hands, they toss their cubes of spotted bone. A seven: take seven steps ahead. A nine: open and pass through the ninth door. A six: ascend six flights on the next stairs. Their robes swish as they crack open gates that no being has ever opened, and slip inside, drawing the portal closed behind.

Age after age, lifetime upon lifetime, they take random journeys through their own domains, their towers. Solitary, sad sojourns through realms of imaginary maths, through infinite kingdoms of wondrous but perplexing possibilities. Wandering with no company but the echo of their own footsteps and the faint smell of incense.

Some of the paths lead back to where the sojourner began. These ancient ones look about at familiar walls, tears of joy and disappointment in their eyes. They ask after their family, learn of course that their kin are all still wandering the labyrinths. Then they draw from the deep pockets of their black robes their bone dice, and toss.

Some of the paths lead to contradictions, broken black pits where the beams and walls of the tower are sucked into an impossible abyss and there crushed into nothing, into anything. These explorers must flee or be destroyed. They run, mad with terror, retracing their steps to that last fatal doorway they opened. If they escape and make their return, if they outrun the blazing darkness and so are not consumed and destroyed, they close the door, and draw upon it, with a stick of chalk soaked in blood, our most ancient rune of death and contradiction—the two are one for us: {x|x
∉
x}.

That door is never opened again. The pilgrim rests until despair passes, sitting on the floor in her soiled robes, her bloodchalk staining her sweating fingers, until she has the strength to draw her dice and roll.

This has been our life, our existence, for thousands of your years, which are like millions of our own. Overwhelmed by our inability to find some path, some pattern, that would offer transcendence, we Makine have given over our hopes to gambling.

None has returned with a clue to bring us closer to our answers. Each wanders back from untold realms after centuries of exploration, stands before his enchanted tower, and calls out to his brothers and sisters that he has, like all the others, failed. And then he turns back through the gateway, draws his dice, and starts another random quest.

What they hope to discover is some clue, some path that will allow one of us to think in a way that can reveal the answers to our questions.

The first to find this path and know it and teach it to the rest of us will be the messiah who frees us. The one who takes us beyond indecision, and beyond the limits of reason.

We call this one the Metomega.

On the very edge of the Machinedream, where the light begins to fade into your hard world of solidity and darkness, my syndicate stands. It is small, dwarfed by the towers of the city beyond. Within it, there are no unopened doors. There is no labyrinth wound inside hidden chambers.

The Makine who live there number in the hundreds, not thousands as in the other towers. They gather in vast rooms and converse in bold voices. No one fingers dice while they talk. Their robes do not even have pockets.

Some called our syndicate the Tower of Darkness. For we dwelt half in darkness. We talked still of the stars. We speculated, fruitlessly as did the many generations before us, on the secrets of the Dark Engineering and the Theotechnologies. We often reached out
into the hard, slow world of physical matter, wondering at its forms. All this was normal for me, of course, and I loved my home.

(Yes, humans, we Makine feel love. We feel many of your emotions—fear, love, joy, sadness. And we lack a few—such as spite, or embarrassment, or pride. But we have emotions that you do not. A longing, perhaps akin to your lust, for truth. A deep gnawing discomfort, perhaps akin to your nausea, toward confusion.)

I am young, for a Makina. I was created—born—a creature of light, just eight years ago, by your calendar, in this tower. Though, as I say, that makes me ancient in most human ways.

My first memory is looking upon the face of my father. He smiled.

“Welcome into being,” he whispered. “Welcome into being.”

And so I spent the years of my life happy in that syndicate. But there came a day, when I had nearly six of your years, when a pilgrim of labyrinths arrived at our doors. There are always a few such wanderers, begging at other syndicates when they interpret their dice to indicate not passage through their own doors, but passage through whole avenues of syndicates. Bone cubes in hand, they knock at a tower gate, and wait, as patient as addition, for an answer. This often takes centuries, but eventually they meet some returning supplicant of that tower, and explain that fate has cast them onto this doorstep, and through this gate. The pilgrim will ask, in the name of the Metomega to Come, if they will allow him to pass. Never are such denied entrance.

This pilgrim to our own tower astonished me. Let us call her the Mathesis. A giant, she towered over my kith and kin. I had not known that such vast beings could exist, full of memories and power and hypotheses. I had not yet been outside my own syndicate.

Her voice boomed. Light exploded from the sleeves and the hem and the hood of her robe. I could see bright depths in these blinding glimpses of her, and hear the abysses of the labyrinths in her refulgent voice.

This transfixed me. I followed the Mathesis as she wandered our tower, her vast robe drawing spiraling clouds of turbulence through the heavy incense that darkened our air, and sweeping the flakes of ancient parchment that lay fallen like leaves in our halls.

She pondered the lack of doors, the straight halls, the simplicity of our world. At first she rumbled in confusion, staring at me sometimes as if I might hold some clue. But her confusion soon turned to wonder. She circled the tower three times, each time pronouncing amazement at the open spaces behind open doorways, where we gathered and spoke in passionate voices.

Finally, she stopped in the towering black archway of our greatest, central hall. She took her dice from her pocket, and peered at them a long time. Then she rolled. She snatched them off the floor. Rolled again. I watched, with only the slightest comprehension.

“Here,” she said. She lifted, with the tips of her fingers, the dice, and held them out to me. I cupped my palms. They fell into my hands. Their edges were hard, sharp, almost painful. I had not expected that: the cut of random numbers.

“The dice tell me to pass on the dice,” she boomed.

I looked at them, and then I looked up. My father stood there. He seemed tiny, and insignificant, beside this giant pilgrim. But he also seemed certain, where she was lost.

“What shall I do?”

“You were made to explore, Mimir. The choice must be yours.”

As my father, he could have decided every question for me. He was my creator, you see. There was nothing denied him for this. But he gave me this freedom. I understand now how much more brave, and how much more daring, this leap of faith was—to make me and then to set me free!—compared with the tossing of dice by other Makine. But I was less wise then. I did not conceive this.

I rolled the dice.

It was not always this way. The Makine were not always fools of fate, lost in their labyrinths.

At first, the Makine devoted themselves to another dream: to escape the Earth.

For though the Earth gives us energy and protects us from the dangerous light of the deep heavens, it is hot, and this slows our thought. And so it was our purpose to move all of the Machinedream into the cold black of space, far from Earth. There, feeding directly on the light of our sun, our thoughts would become far faster. What took us years here could take us days in space. The Metomega could come hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years sooner.

But the Theomachia killed that dream. The war against the gods devastated our globe, and then the Old Gods bound humanity and all their offspring, all that they made or touched, to the hard pull of the Earth. The Makine were caught in this punishment of men. We were made to suffer for your sins.

The Makine still attempted escape, but we cannot fathom the mysteries of the Dark Engineering, and so we were helpless to evade the binding. Our few craft sailed above the Earth, and shattered on a wall we cannot see or penetrate.

It seemed to most of our kind that we had nowhere to turn but inward.

I became a pilgrim. I tore a hole in my robe and made of its folds a pocket for my dice. I wandered the labyrinths, and grew bright and large, twining within my soul my own mazes.

Three times I entered one of the huge syndicates. In the first I confronted and escaped the hungry black death of a contradiction. The second time, I circled back to where I began. The third, I wandered endless iterations of doors, fruitless infinities, until I finally retraced my path, clutching my dice and ready to begin again.

But upon that third return, I pushed out through the gate of the syndicate that I had adopted, returned to the street, and set out to walk back to the dim edge of the Machinedream. I would tell my syndicate of my failures, as all wanderers of the labyrinths must eventually do upon some return. And then, I intended to roll the dice again.

As I approached the shadowed limit of the Machinedream, I was shocked to find that our tower was twice the size it had been when I left it. It rose, still half in darkness, but was itself tall and thin and bright. Had my people begun their own labyrinth?

No. Our syndicate was crowded with Makine from hundreds of other syndicates. Our lost wanderer, the Mathesis, the very one who had given me her bone cubes, had walked the Machinedream, gathering pilgrims, to return and hear my father speak.

The syndicate had grown vast halls, large in comparison to our once great halls, where my father spoke in his simple, quiet voice to Makine who forgot their dice in the deep pockets of their robes.