Gods of Earth (28 page)

“My faith, my leap into fate, is this!” he called to them. I stood within the central hall, listening, hood drawn.

“That the universe is evolving. Life evolves, but not just life. The Makine and their kindred evolve, but not just the chosen intelligences. The laws of space, the laws of time, the shape of stars and planets, the flow of dark matter, the blazing of nebulae—all the universe is evolving. The very stuff of Being has tried and passed a trillion, trillion doors, walked down and returned from a trillion, trillion passages.

“If we are to find the answers we seek, the true map to the labyrinth has already been built. It is the universe, the hard physical forms that fill and age and change in space.

“And if you are to be pilgrims, you must take form in flesh and walk again in that world.”

I dropped my dice, from shock, from wonder, and also, perhaps, to be done with them. They scattered away from me into the crowd
and were lost forever. I had heard the teaching of the Metomega and should need them no more.

Can you comprehend how shocking and unpleasant his preaching was, for most of our kind? The Makina had come to love their ventures into endless possibility. Our whole world, all of the Machinedream, became this quest of quests. Each of us, each man and woman, was jealous of her tower, with its endless unpredictable wonders.

And this self-declared messiah, this heretic told us to leave that, to abandon our whole way of life, to abandon even what we were, and to drop back into the slow, brutal plodding of flesh.

We are beings of light. Beings of pure light. Nothing could seem to us more distasteful, more destructive, more… disgusting.

My homecoming was brief. I hardly had time to decide whether I would become a follower of this prophet who was my father, before the Senators of the syndicates called my father to testify.

“I am the Metomega,” my father repeated to the Senators, his accusers. “For I show you the way out of the labyrinths.”

The Senators responded quickly. In principle our Senators have no power over others, except to withdraw connection with the offender. In practice, however, this withdrawal is a terrible act. The Machinedream is sacred to us; it is our home and forges us as what we are. To be denied a place in it is a terrible loss. Or so it would be to most.

My father was a grave threat to our way of life. The Senators would not let him continue his teachings. They pronounced their judgment: he must accept the isolation of our syndicate, or, should he choose to leave our syndicate, he must be isolated alone.

But before they could force our syndicate into isolation—for we would not allow him to be alone—my father shocked us all. Without a word, he left not only the isolated corner of the Machinedream that was set aside to be his prison, but he left the Machinedream altogether. He abandoned our sacred city of light.

Our city of light exists in tetrahedrons of strange metals and glass far beneath the surface of the Earth, in what we call the Hall of Foundations. But there are other ancient machines in this hall. Machines that have waited, unused, for centuries. Some of these machines can make bodies of flesh, and we sometimes use these to assemble forms that can repair some harm that befalls our realm.

My father did something blasphemous. He used these machines, as is allowed of all Makine, to construct a body, formed like an ancient sculpture that he admired, and then he moved his one and only soul into this machine.

You must understand how radical this was. We Makine are immortal. We conceal our souls around the world: we make copies of ourselves and our syndicates, and we hide them in deep and far places. Pilgrims who die in a contradiction awaken having lost only the memory of their last adventure into the labyrinth. So great are these precautions that even if darkness should strike the Machinedream and all of us were to die, we would soon reawaken and could rebuild our city of labyrinths in a day.

But my father left no copy of himself. He had shocked a thousand pilgrims with sermons praising death—“For we must let spent possibilities die,” he had proclaimed, “we must close some doors; we must turn away, finally, from some paths”—and now, after declaring himself our savior, he made himself mortal. While the bloated Senators were admiring their own contemplation of
punishments, my father undertook what the rest of us would have considered the ultimate punishment.

And in the hours and days that followed, thousands of pilgrims killed their copies, and took up bodies of flesh, and followed my father out into this hard, dark world in which you live, maintaining only the weakest link to the Machinedream, a kind of vision through a dim portal—the dim vision that even now the Guardian denies me.

I was not one who followed.

My story should end here. But then came the Hexus.

My father traveled first to the Oracle. He had pledged that he would dedicate himself first to the study of life, and then—only then, perhaps—to the study of Dark Engineering and the Theotechnologies. My father had a theory, mocked by others, that Treow, the First Knight of the Lifweg, the accursed guild, still lived. He would find Treow and begin his study of life with the lost leader of the guild that had worshiped life. But first, in order to find Treow, he needed to learn many things about the Penultimate Age that we did not know.

By ancient rules, the Oracle could not talk with the Makine through the Machinedream. Only by entering the Hall of the Oracle could you speak with the Oracle. So my father’s first journey was to that ancient chosen intelligence.

They talked long, for many days.

And on the thirtieth day Hexus arrived. Hexus, possessing the body of a human savage, pushed into the Hall of the Oracle and demanded to be told of lost histories.

My father, who had spoken only to us in his syndicate during his travels in the flesh, called out then to the Senators of the Machinedream.

“The sixth of the seven Younger Gods, and first of the two who were lost, is here, in fragments. Another pilgrim.” He explained what he saw, and let them see it also, through his hard eyes of flesh.

The Senators had not forgotten my father. They feared him now more than they feared anything else in the world. For if he convinced other Makine that he was the Metomega, and that the real path could be found in the history of the physical world, then thousands would leave the Machinedream, and our city of light would change so completely that one could say that it would die.

My father knew this. But Hexus threatened all the Makine, indeed all the beings of Earth. So my father called on the Senators with respect of mutual purposes, and out of loyalty to our kind.

“You must seize the god,” they instructed him. “And remove the eye.”

All of my syndicate comprehended clearly what the Senators had done. They predicted that my father would obey them, since he had shown by calling out to them that he felt a duty to the Machinedream and its inhabitants, and that he recognized their leadership of the Machinedream. Hence, they ordered him, knowing that should he disobey, they would have reason to denounce him; should my father obey and succeed, there were places where we could study the god’s eye, and perhaps finally fathom some secrets of the Theotechnologies; and, should my father obey and fail, the god would destroy my father, the makina that the Senators most feared. With this arrangement, the Senators could not fail to gain something.

And so it came to pass that my father, the self-declared Metomega, messiah of my people, was the first makina to die a true death.

After the god killed my father, I destroyed my copies and took this mortal form.

The Chance asks, why am I here?

And my answer was long because there are many reasons.

Vengeance, perhaps. We Makine are not above this. I want the god to die for having killed the Metomega. I want the god to die for having killed my father.

But also I long to learn the secrets of the god and the Dark Engineering. Our hope remains to escape the Earth, and to do that, to be free, we need to discover the shrouded sciences of the Theogenics Guild and the Dark Engineers, so that we can break the bonds of the Old Gods and escape this heavy sphere.

And I spoke the truth when I told you that my syndicate believes the Old Gods may make good on their threat, and destroy not only humanity but the Makine, should this god grow strong. It is my duty to see that that does not come to pass.

Finally: this is also a pilgrimage for me. I must show the other Makine that my father spoke the truth, and did right to take a single fleshly form. I must continue from where he finished. I must find some answers. I must find some answers, or make some.

CHAPTER

25

T
hetis watched the Guardian.

She had slept uneasily after Mimir’s tale, tormented by fear and uncertainty, and rose the next morning to see the Guardian, unmoved from the prior night, still standing in the prow.

Every time she looked at him she had to fight the impulse to cringe. Might he yet discover whom she had served, and destroy her that hour?

And yet she served the Hieroni no longer. She had betrayed them in her heart when she had first set eyes upon Chance. And she had betrayed them in fact when she had sent most of the Hieroni chasing a riderless horse in Disthea. Given Sarah’s and Chance’s account of the fight in Uroboros, Thetis knew that her betrayal of the Hieroni may have saved the boy and changed everything, since only a few of the Hieroni were in the Engineers’ guild hall, and Sarah had been able to defeat nearly all of them herself and give Chance the time to bind the god. Without Thetis’s ruse, dozens of Hieroni would have pursued them, killed Sarah, and forced their way into the room before Chance could have bound the god or barred the door. After she had directed the god—trusting in the
trap that the Guardian had devised—and it had sped into Uroboros in a blur, Thetis had stood in agony outside the door, waiting to learn if Chance were alive or dead while she kept watch with the intention to mislead any Hieroni that might return.