Quibble, 53. Null

At the Arc of the Unnamed, the horror of Quibble’s world crashes in on her.

53. Null @Quibble

Unearthly cold wrapped me, burned my skin, dug through flesh to bone, froze it. I was an icicle. Unity could snap me in half anytime It pleased, but It didn’t. The sun of control blinked out. Before my eyes appeared a face, then the body: a bereft woman sat, huddled, with her back to a wall. She heaved cries of agony and despair.

“You did this to her,” Unity told me. “You did it, and you called it kindness. Your kindness is poison. So take it yourself, heretic. Do not kill Definition the way you killed Quiddity. Annihilate yourself. Annihilate your excellence. You know it’s the right thing to do. Either you will annihilate yourself or you will annihilate every One you love.”

Nish vanished. Now stars wheeled, danced, and zoomed past me.

I was in Utopia’s hub. Then I wasn’t. The hub disintegrated and spat me out, left me to drift in a void. I gasped, but gasping did no good. All sensation faded but the emptiness of my lungs, a crushing desire for the air that wasn’t there. I tumbled and writhed in the nothingness. I feathered my arms, as if flight was possible. I spun away. I grew still.

“This will be your death!” Unity promised. “Do you yield to this? Or to me?”

This will be my death! I promised. I will not yield to You!

I shivered awake in gray light. I was alone.

Across the dry creek bed, sunlight lay on the face of the hills bordering the gorge. It was not yet an hour past dawn. I reckoned Alnasl couldn’t have gone far.

Though I was growing accustomed to sleeping in the wild, wherever I could, my body screamed now with ache and stiffness. I quickly rose and stretched, leaning on the stone wall. The vision’s pack lay against it. I shouldered it and looked up and down the trail. No tracks. Which way would he go? I stood for a moment indecisive, then turned left, northward. The creek bed dropped away steadily below the wall as I went. Not far on – less than half a mile – the trail ended in a cul-de-sac of the wall twenty-five feet or so in diameter, and there I found the Zero.

He stood still. It was as if he was gathering silence to himself. Beyond the wall, across a depression in the creek bed, there was a smooth rockface where once water had fallen. Alnasl stared at it.

“I didn’t expect you to wake so soon,” he said after a long moment.

I sighed in relief. “Oh. I thought you’d gone wandering.”

“Not yet,” he chuckled. “A few days more, and you’ll have to watch out for me. I just came up here to think.”

“What about?”

“Misjudgments. I was overconfident. The protégé Talitha told me keeping an amber in her neckband had a drawback. It made glasses light weakly. It didn’t occur to me that if Asuja got you to mirror with your amber, if he then claimed it, it would be in his hand to light a control with – so I assumed his control would be weak.” Frowning, Alnasl shook his left fist. “I should’ve had the kindness in my hand constantly, ready to fight as soon as I popped.”

“I shouldn’t have been such a fool. I had every reason to distrust Nihal. I trusted her with the most precious thing I had.”

The vision explained Asuja’s trick of illusion with the yinman.

“It’s amazing,” I observed. “Reality gives way before a mere glass.”

“Real becomes not-real when the unreal is real,” Alnasl quoted.

I had never seen him in such a grim mood. He was often serious, almost as stern as Aladfar, though he’d yielded to levity at times since I broke Meissa’s orb. He’d said I could expect irascibility as he lost his senses, but what I saw now was despair.

“We’ve lost,” he said. “Lesath and Asuja have everything they wanted.”

“They don’t have me,” I pointed out, trying to cheer him.

“They don’t need you. Asuja excels, don’t you see? Citation’s sacrifice made not one excelsior but two. Vega and Rasalased never counted on that eventuality. Meissa’s amber is enough for Lesath to pursue his plan. It changed the nature of glasses, creating kindnesses. Lesath thinks it can create controls, too, and he’s going to use Asuja to do it. I just wish I knew how!”

“I wish I wasn’t so blind to who Asuja was. He was Quotation first. What I really can’t understand is how One turns to utter control.”

Alnasl brooded a while. “Do you recall what Utopia said about Yed and the traps of ideology? I believe that’s what happened to Quotation. Ideology is like a mirror.”

“But isn’t a mirror a good thing?”

“Whether it’s good or bad depends on the looker. It depends on how you see the image of yourself. I think how you see that image depends on what you see everywhere else, what you let yourself see. If you use the mirror to look for truth and insight, if you use it to scrutinize and hold yourself to standards, then it’s a good thing. But if you look to adore yourself, the mirror becomes an icon for your self-worship. It only shows what you want to see. That’s a very bad thing, Quibble, because when you only see what you want, you end up living without truth. Without it, you have no standards for yourself.”

The vision fell quiet a moment, then added, “And that’s what I did wrong, too. It was wrong to hide the truth from you, Quibble.”

He gave me no assent. We were well past that, and he knew it. He just stared at me. This close, I wondered, could he even see me?

In a low and shaky voice, I said, “Nihal, Quote, Asuja, I don’t know what to call him – he said Aladfar rectified Quiddity and her avatar is with 17-Utopia. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Alnasl admitted. “We rectified her. But she’s with 10-Utopia, not 17.”

Hurt as I was, I didn’t want to revisit hurt on the vision. Resentment had driven me to my own mistakes. Now, I had to think of how to cast it off. But I had to know one thing first: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Faith,” he said. “Your lack of faith, Quibble. You didn’t believe in the heaven of the rectified One. We believed in it – I, Vega, Aladfar. That’s why we rectified Quiddity. We believed she transcended. But then we found out you’d only think we’d killed her, and it was too late to do anything but keep it from you.”

It was true. After I saw Epigraph’s avatar in Utopia’s hub, I’d still disbelieved the One truly transcended. I even belittled what I’d seen, set it up against reality – tangible existence as I knew it – as if the two formed an either-or proposition. I had forced them all to keep the secret, lest they make me just what Rasalased feared, an excelsior of utter control. For the lie, at least, I was as much to blame as they were.

“I should have told you anyway,” Alnasl said, gazing at the dry waterfall again. “I put my faith in the wrong thing. I should have believed in you.”

“Alnasl,” I said, then no more.

You don’t have to say it, I thought. I knew the vision would stay with me to any end, but I wanted consensus with him. At what cost did that come now? I thought of the Fears I had with my mother. How is One to tell about joy? How is One to tell about grief? Is it any easier?

It hurt like a nightmare of control, but I made myself say it: “I forgive you.”

Morning light crept down the westward hills. The Sen-an-dah was somewhere to the north of us, but now we walked south.

“We won’t go far,” Alnasl promised. “There’s something you must see, Quibble, and then I think all will be plain to you.”

We had walked about a mile through the winding gorge – past a mortared rock pillar with one rounded face like the prow of a ship facing upstream which stood in the midst of the dry creek bed, then over a wide, low concrete bridge crossing the creek, so that it now lay to our left, and then alongside another stone wall perhaps two feet tall – when the Arc of the Unnamed came into view. The gorge’s walls narrowed as we approached; the arc connected its two sides. We crossed yet another bridge, and then we stood under the arc.

Rising at least two hundred feet above us, the arc was as wide as it was long. A tongue of rock stuck out into air from a crevasse where the arc met the gorge’s western wall. The walls of the gorge, rising vertically, were various shades of pastel: ochre, gray, silver-white, and streaked with yellow, all darkening to black where water once flowed down the rockface. I sat on an outcrop of the eastern wall and stared up. I felt small.

“Did people make this?” I wondered.

“The river that flowed here made the arc,” Alnasl answered. “It’s limestone. The water flowed underground, like in the cave, eroding the limestone over millions of years to form this gorge and a natural bridge between its sides. It’s impressive, yes, but the arc isn’t what I brought you here to see.”

The vision turned and pointed over the stone wall between the creek and trail. I walked up to the wall and gazed down at the creek bed. Northward, it was dammed by boulders, southward by limestone. It was filled with strange-looking rocks, thousands of them piled atop each other in jumbled heaps. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but then I noticed an even stranger heap lying outside the shadow of the arc – it was a heap of corpses with rotting flesh still clinging to the bones. I gasped in realization: below us and before us lay a graveyard of human skeletons.

Alnasl knelt, picked up a jawless skull, peered into its empty eye-sockets. “Null,” he said, and he dropped the skull over the edge of the stone wall.

“Who are they?” I breathed.

“The Null are those who could not be zeroed.”

I gazed at the bone-heaps all about us. “The Far children!”

“Not every Far taken captive is zeroed,” Alnasl explained. “In the process, some of them become like the Numberless, but worse. Numberless only retreat into the amber glass. They still experience things through the medium of the glass. But Null don’t even have that: they lose all bodily senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, proprioception, balance. They can’t use a glass, so they’re trapped in their own minds, and nothing can be done for them at all. So, control pushes them off the arc – a mercy killing. That’s why it’s called the Arc of the Unnamed. The Null are never given a Zero’s name.”

“They had names, vision! They had names with their people! It’s evil enough just kidnapping them! Why, vision? Why?!”

“I told you once before: a cruel necessity. There are Ones, so there must be Zeros. If Ones were left to the care of isos and Unity, they’d all die out in a few generations. It takes humans to care for humans. It can’t be left to machines, however smart they are. In the scales of control, the Far’s lives are set against the Ones’ lives, thousands against millions, and the Ones are heavier.”

“Kindness!” I exploded. “It could all be changed with kindness!”

“What do you think we fight for?” Alnasl said. “Why do you imagine Vega sacrificed Citation? Do you think she lured you into heresy out of spite? Or had Aladfar rectify Quiddity for a mere shortcut? No! Kindness, Quibble. She did it all for kindness – to bring the Ones Without, to dash the scales of control, to stop this.”

Through my tears, I saw only the hazy outline of Alnasl’s face and, within it, a dark obscurity. Leaving me, the Zero strode off into the light Without.

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