The Beauty of Destruction (18 page)

Cloud cover had been a blessing. It had prevented them from seeing what looked like entire countries on fire. Breaks in the cover had shown them smoking craters of glass where cities should have been. When they reached the Mediterranean they could see where it had overflowed, filling some of the craters. All the while du Bois felt the moments ticking away. He was struggling to come to terms with the scale of the destruction below. There had been a number of moments in his past when it had felt like the entire world was burning, but it had always been the changes in society, morals, which seemed to happen so quickly, that had bothered him the most.

In the seat behind him he heard Beth trying to stifle a sob. Her world had ceased to exist.

Du Bois wondered how much of what seemed to be cloud was actually ash.

‘Northern Iran?’ Beth asked. The modified Harrier had been losing altitude for some time now. ‘I guess it’s no more dangerous for us now than anywhere else.’

‘Less of a communications infrastructure, arguably safer,’ du Bois said.

‘Do you know who’s done this?’ Beth asked.

‘I think so.’ Du Bois was pretty sure it was over for him. Though he questioned their priorities at times like this. ‘I think you’ll be okay.’ The Harrier alerted them to the missile lock from a surface-to-air missile system. There was nothing they could do about it.

‘Mr du Bois, or do you prefer Sir Malcolm?’ the voice emanating from a speaker in the cockpit asked. It was deep, with an African accent, but even with the help of his neuralware he couldn’t pinpoint a region. He suspected that meant the speaker’s people no longer existed.

‘Mr du Bois is fine,’ du Bois said through gritted teeth.

‘Do we fight?’ Beth asked. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice.

‘I rather hope you won’t, Miss Luckwicke,’ the voice said. ‘We mean you no harm.’

‘And nothing says that like a missile lock,’ Beth pointed out.

‘You could probably still egress the vehicle if you so wished, we are hoping to discourage that. All we wish to do is talk.’

‘Then switch off the lock,’ du Bois suggested. The lock disappeared. It didn’t really matter. The point had been made. They were coming down in a dry, dusty, mountainous region. There seemed to be little sign of habitation in the area, although further away they could make out a few towns, smoke rising above them, the omnipresent pall of this new age.

The Harrier was dropping vertically now, turning on a horizontal axis as it did, giving them a full view of the surrounding snow-capped mountains. Beneath them they could see the ruins of an old castle, scaffolding covering a number of its walls. On the narrow ridgeline that led to the castle they saw the
SAM
emplacement that had been tracking them. Among the ruins a number of people carrying next generation assault weapons waited.

‘I think I preferred your castle,’ Beth muttered.

‘The weather’s nicer here,’ du Bois pointed out. The sun was shining through a break in the clouds.

‘I hope you understand that any resistance at the moment just amounts to wasting resources and ultimately ends in the conversation we had hoped for anyway,’ the voice said as the Harrier’s wheels touched down.

A gunman was waiting to help them out. His swarthy complexion suggested a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern origin. He had an old but serviceable looking tulwar strapped to his back.

‘Miss Luckwicke, Mr du Bois, if you would come with me, please.’ His English was accented but perfect. Other gunmen on the walls were either watching them or checking the surrounding area.

They weren’t ordered to relinquish their weapons, and didn’t offer.

The gunman led them into one of the partially destroyed buildings within the castle. It did not have a roof but offered a degree of privacy. Sitting on some exposed stone foundations were a pair of brass bottles with melted lead stoppers.

‘You must be joking,’ du Bois said. ‘I’m not opening my systems to you people.’

He had been hunting them, and had in turn been hunted by them, for more than eight hundred years. The Circle had been fighting them for over two thousand years.

‘This is much more of a security threat for us than it is for you,’ the gunman told du Bois.

‘What’s going on?’ Beth asked. ‘Who are these people? Terrorists?’

The gunman turned to look at her, irritation flickering across his face.

‘Yes,’ du Bois said unequivocally.

‘Should we fight?’ Beth asked. ‘What will get us out of this the quickest?’

He could see no other way out. The gunmen were probably as augmented as Beth and himself were, with the tech they needed to take them both down. It was an odd play, though. If they wanted him dead then there were easier ways to go about it. He knew they didn’t need him to betray the Circle, they had already done all the damage they needed to his possibly erstwhile employers. Part of it was resignation. It was only his need to destroy the
DAYP
that was keeping him going, really, and perhaps the faintest sense of hope. But there was curiosity as well. These people had been enemies of his since he had been mortal. He was intrigued to see how this played out. The gunman with the tulwar was watching him as he considered this, as was Beth.

‘Open the bottle,’ du Bois told the gunman finally.

The man let his assault rifle drop on its sling and slid the tulwar from the scabbard on his back. The curved sword’s blade cut through the neck of the bottle. Du Bois heard screaming, his own, then he started to shake as if he was having a fit standing up. Then he collapsed as his neuralware was overwhelmed.

It was easy to become jaded about the world when you had seen the technological wonders and terrors that he had seen. Du Bois was almost relieved that his sense of wonder could still be engaged. It was overwhelming. He had never thought it would seem so real. He could taste the breeze sweeping down from the mountains that surrounded the city; smell the flowers from the many gardens and orchards within, and the spices from the bazaars. Hear music on the air, which sounded like a fusion of traditional Arabic and African music mixed with the beat of modern electronic music. Despite his prejudices he had to admit that it sounded sublime.

In front of him was one of the city’s vast gates. It lay open. He found himself looking at the statue of a huge brass horseman. Du Bois assumed it was one of the city’s guardians. Beyond that he could see the rows of tombs. If the Circle’s intelligence had been correct then there were four hundred of them, all of them different, and all of them massive. They dwarfed the tombs of the pharaohs, each an external reflection of the mind resting – or imprisoned – inside. Some were grandiose and beautiful, some warped and hideous, others alien and difficult to look at. Du Bois knew that inside each of the tombs was an AI. Either one of those created by the alien Lloigor, their machines, or one created by human reverse engineering of L-tech.

Beyond the tombs were the spires, domes, and minarets of the city. Plants and trees grew on everything, water cascaded between the levels and everywhere he looked was life. It was more alive in many ways than the real world.

The walls stretched out on either side of them. Tall and metallic, a straight high wall above what looked like a curved buttress that ran the length of it. Interspersed along the wall were numerous huge gates, each the size of the one that du Bois was standing before now. Above each gate, in ancient Greek, were engraved the words:

Here was a people who, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion;

And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust.

Death hath destroyed them and disunited them, and in the dust they have lost what they amassed.

Du Bois assumed the inscription was here for his benefit. He heard stumbling steps behind him and someone sat down hard. He turned round to see Beth on the ground just behind him, staring at the city. It looked like she was trying to speak. Both of them had appeared unarmed, dressed in what they had been wearing.

‘I know what you said,’ she finally managed, wonder and panic warring in her voice. ‘But give me a minute here. A few weeks ago I was in a prison in the normal world, okay?’

Du Bois reached down to help her up. She was still staring at the city.

‘What is this place?’ she asked. Du Bois glanced behind him. There was a figure, minuscule against the huge gate, walking towards them.

‘This is a simulation,’ du Bois told her. ‘It’s not real.’

‘Like virtual reality?’ Beth asked. Du Bois nodded. ‘It seems so real; fantastical, but real.’

‘You experience the real world through your mind interpreting the information from your senses. All we have done is remove the requirement for senses. Experientially there is no difference,’ the figure said as he approached them. It was the same voice they had heard in the Harrier. The man was about six and a half feet tall, dark brown skin, obviously of African descent. The loose robe he wore covered the smooth dome of his belly. By his frame, he looked as though he had once been powerful but was now going to seed. His head was shorn of hair and he had strips of what looked like polished copper embedded in the skin. His eyes were the colour of mercury.

‘The mind knows the difference,’ du Bois said.

‘Have people become less deluded? Less prepared to believe what they are told just because it suits their worldview, regardless of the evidence?’ the man asked.

‘Kind of irrelevant now,’ Beth said.

There was a fleeting look of sadness on the man’s face but something about it seemed artificial.

‘The mind knows the lie,’ du Bois repeated stubbornly.

‘Which lie?’ the man asked. ‘I think you should taste my cooking before you rush to judgement on such a thing. But I am remiss. I am Azmodeus, a bound servant of Solomon, peace be upon him. Welcome to the City of Brass.’

Du Bois felt Beth looking at him. ‘These are your enemies?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ du Bois told her.

‘No,’ Azmodeus said. ‘Your enemy and ours are the same. You call him Mr Brown.’

‘He is a facilitator, nothing more. He handles operations.’

‘There is no Circle, he is the Circle, and I think you know that. The old woman knew, even though he had rewritten her mind, as he does to all his slaves. That was why she left.’

‘She did not join you, though, did she? A gilded cage is still a cage.’

Azmodeus smiled expansively and raised his arms, quicksilver eyes sparkling in the reflected sunlight. ‘How can you call this a prison?’ he cried. ‘Treat me as your enemy if you wish. Hamad always liked you, and I called him a friend. Come, let us walk on the walls.’ Azmodeus turned and led them to a platform in the shadow of the huge gate’s mighty mechanism. They stepped onto the reddish metal and the platform started to rise. Beth was staring at the city. The complex interplay of buildings, canals, gardens, entire urban fields and orchards played out in front of them. Flat, with no horizon, it looked like a continent-sized city.

‘I—’ du Bois started. ‘I respected Hamad. Under different circumstances …’

‘He helped you, you know? Helped you track down Silas Scab.’

Du Bois frowned. That was an old name he had not thought of in a while. ‘That was more than two hundred and fifty years ago.’ He remembered the chalet he had taken the torch to in the Swiss Alps.

‘Not the father, the son,’ Azmodeus said, but again there was something artificial about the sadness in his voice. ‘This was just over two weeks ago. It was another bloodline infused with the tech. A bad one.’

The missing time!
He had come to in a car park in Birmingham. He had lost six weeks.

The platform reached the top of the wall and they walked out onto battlements the width of a motorway that went on and on towards the distant mountains.

‘There’s no ugliness here,’ Beth said, looking at the city. Du Bois could make out birds and other larger winged creatures in the air over the city’s majestic spires. There were huge ornate pleasure barges on the canal.

‘Should there be?’ Azmodeus asked.

Beth turned to look up at him. ‘Yes, I think there has to be, sometimes. This is your way of surviving?’

Azmodeus just nodded.

‘Hiding,’ du Bois said.

‘If it was as simple as one of you looking for an answer in the real world, and the other in here, why did you have to fight?’ Beth asked.

‘What an excellent question,’ du Bois muttered. Again there was sadness on Azmodeus’s face as he turned and looked out over the city.

‘We have tried to save as much of it as we can. The knowledge of humanity. Your knowledge,’ he pointed out. ‘Before they were destroyed we recorded the library at Alexandria, at Alamut as well, and many others …’

‘We took two different approaches. We could have co-operated,’ du Bois said. ‘These are the people that poisoned the crèches, burned the information we needed for the evacuation,’ he told Beth.

‘Religion, philosophy, capitalism, all of them, at some level, start as systems designed to help their adherents, tools for you to use. How quickly they become divisive, turn against you, or rather you turn them against yourselves.’

‘I’m not in the mood for a philosophical discussion,’ du Bois spat.

‘Is he telling the truth? You’ve doomed us?’ Beth asked. ‘Why?’

‘This is humanity’s ark,’ Azmodeus told them.

‘This is a recording,’ Beth said.

‘What is more important? What is human? The animal or the emergent consciousness?’

‘Both,’ Beth and du Bois said.

‘Obviously we disagree,’ Azmodeus said.

‘But then why not just disagree, why fuck up this evacuation?’ Beth demanded. ‘This is just the powerful making decisions for the rest of us based on their own messed up … fucking ideas!’

‘It was not an evacuation, it was the spreading of a disease.’ Again there was sadness in his voice.

‘In your opinion!’ Beth snapped, but Azmodeus shook his head ponderously.

‘You’ve known there was something wrong for some time haven’t you?’ he asked du Bois and yes, he had felt it, a kind of ache, a sickening realisation. So many signs that he had tried to ignore for so long, even before Hawksmoor’s experiments. He saw the serpent’s face, Hamad, the old woman. All of them had tried to tell him. Mr Brown’s features swam in his memory, always indistinct, hard to remember, a shade. ‘Loyalty is a virtue but it is not required when all of you have been betrayed.’ Azmodeus was reaching for him.