Quibble, 86. Dystopia
Quibble meets a marooned Infinite, and the history of her world becomes clear.
86. Dystopia @Lurah
The Djer walked away. Quibble did not wail as she had been doing. She sank to the floor and sat quietly sobbing and staring at the unlit glasses in her hands. Alnasl did not look back at her as he left the temple.
For a while – since Quibble admonished him at Asreh’s council – I had wondered what difference there was between Alnasl the Djer and Nuah the Far. Now it seemed to me there was little. Both were men of secrets, evasions, lies. Both were a mixture of courage and cowardice. Both knew how to fight and did not shy from it, but both were blind to some ways in which they should fight. Whatever passed between the Djer and Ayzhed, whatever circumstances had led them to this moment, Alnasl should not have left Quibble alone.
So I did not. I sat with her, held her hands, hugged her while she wept for a loss which in her eyes was her own fault. I knew such loss well enough to realize no words of mine could obviate it, so I offered none.
“At least I got the truth at last,” Quibble finally said.
For the briefest moment, I wavered in perplexity. Then, without quite knowing why or whether it was wise, I said, “Hang the truth!”
“What?” Quibble pulled away from me. “Hang it?”
“Yes, hang it! This is true, that is false, the other thing is both!” I was making no sense even to myself. I huffed and collected a semblance of the thoughts swirling in my head. “Qeht, beloved Quibble, think of what you have done! The god of the Uhn-far, your Unity, indoctrinated you with a truth: ‘Without is annihilation.’ Did you heed it? No. You asked a Djer to take you Without. You risked—”
“I didn’t know what I was doing!” Quibble cried.
“None of us do! That is just my point. Do you think we all live and die by truth? By only truth? What we know right now to be true?”
“What else is there?”
“This,” I intoned, seizing her hands and squeezing them fiercely. “This. We have im, and we walk in it. We live and die by that.”
“It’s only a notion, Lurah. Im is only an idea.”
“If it is an idea, Quibble, it is the best idea we have. I do not know, for I cannot know, what it means to walk in your steps. So I can only rely on im and let you tell me what it means. And how can I know it to be true? I cannot. I cannot know it to be false, either. Your people, Qeht-uhn-far-jah-im-li-djer, believe life is reducible to a single truth. It is not. Life is too complex to be bound by one truth. It is too large for one truth. I know you hunger for truth. That is no worthless thing, for it makes you keen to learn who people really are, and knowing who we are is knowing how to love us. But you must let go of believing one truth about us answers for all. Let go, Quibble, and live!”
Nothing in the gaze of Quibble’s oddly colored eyes said she either understood or misunderstood my diatribe, but she stiffly rose to her feet and pulled me to mine. She pocketed the blue glass and led me by the hand betwixt the glass statues of the Ahnk-far and out of their desecrated temple. We stood on the steps before it and surveyed the moonlit park. Quibble held forth the amber glass. It lightened, darkened. She pointed at the fractured obelisk. “He’s there,” she said. “Come on.”
Between the temple and the obelisk lay a flat, elongated surface of the gossamer-glass on which no statues stood. It was a vast, shallow basin. I could see no reason for its existence: Ahnk-far kept no livestock, no animals at all but the occasional dog or cat. We hurried down the temple’s steps and across this basin towards the obelisk. Alnasl sat by the fallen pinnacle, looking upon us with his fathomless eyes of uhn-qah as we approached. He gesticulated with both hands as if at everything in sight.
“No night-door here!” he said, then waved vaguely south at the roofless ruins of a low structure of red sandstone with narrow windows in the midst of which, surviving the ruination, an octagonal spire rose like the last turret standing in a siege. “Maybe it’s over there. I haven’t a clue.”
“I’d guess there,” Quibble replied, pointing east to the other temple at the far end of the park. We followed her lead. Shortly after leaving the sandstone fortress behind on our right, she looked again with the amber glass and espied a more likely candidate on our left, an enormous cube of a building set behind two others. “Or if it’s not there,” she said, “at least we’re bound to learn something.”
“How do you know that?” I inquired.
“Archives,” Quibble read, her finger indicating ancient scripture, the lone word remaining of others chiseled away like the headless giant’s words were, on the frieze topping the building’s portico, just beneath a carving of naked and half-clad figures in high relief at the center of whom sat a bearded, bare-chested man with an open book on his lap. Eight files of fluted columns held up the portico’s roof. Beyond them, we met an obstacle: large double doors, cased in glass. Quibble withdrew and brightened her blue glass, stared at the doors intensely. Nothing of significance happened.
“I can’t,” she admitted at last, dimming the glass. “I don’t know just what needs to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Try popping through,” Alnasl proposed.
“No!” Quibble said. “Remember the shadow in the glass? A Zero popped there. The city’s gossamer-glass is like a vast orb. It distorts glasses. It amplifies one thing and reduces another. I can’t even maintain negativity when I espy. I have the yinman’s full potency, but that seems to be all.”
We descended the steps again. As we circled the building, the Far-nah smiled on us: we discovered another entrance to the west of the steps, a small door a woman had been holding open for a crowd of people at the moment of the cataclysm which claimed them. Only her statue, shadowed by the building’s interior, yet held remains – her skull and spinal column. We hurried past her. Gossamer-glass went deep into the building but fortunately gave out with no further obstacle. Darkness engulfed us. By the light of Quibble’s amber, we crossed a wide space to a gallery where we saw displays depicting a brutal, often militant history – this, the Qeht told me, narrated the Ahnk-far’s struggle for their human rights. They had apparently been hard-won.
“Then the Ahnk-far must not have believed in im,” I ventured.
“They knew about im,” Quibble said, “but as you said, sah, they had another truth they couldn’t see past. Self.”
We climbed stairs to the portico’s level, a maze of rooms and galleries. A bronze gateway opened into a rotunda in the maze’s midst, a semicircular room of marble with a high domed ceiling and accents of pink and gold. Ringing the room were glass cases containing large rectangles of paper or parchment or perhaps vellum – open scrolls the Ahnk-far had preserved. Whatever the scrolls said was now lost. Only the faintest trace of text still showed on the pages.
“Artifacts predating Unity!” Alnasl exclaimed. “What a resurrection—”
Blue light suffused the rotunda, silencing the Djer and making us jump in alarm. From the floor in the room’s center had arisen a transparent wall of light, some six feet wide. In this wall appeared text in the ancient alphabet, glowing whitely if a bit fuzzily at eye level. Below the text was painted a simple drawing of a small dog leaping over a larger one, which lay with its head on its paws.
“A riddle?” Alnasl asked.
“No, wait a second,” Quibble enjoined him, staring at the message. She chuckled. “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.”
The wall’s message blinked out of being. A new line of text appeared, this above a drawing of a lion with the head of a man, seen in profile and seated on his haunches. Quibble cackled, delighted at this depiction, and Alnasl said, “You’re right, Quibble, it’s taking a voiceprint. Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!”
“Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow?” I repeated, baffled at the game. “What in all Ayn-qesh is a sphinx?”
“Thank you!” a voice said, echoing slightly in the large room. “Welcome to the Archives of Singularity!”
Now, defying my belief at what I saw, the form of a young woman stepped out of the wall of light. She too was blue. She took a few paces towards us. I whipped my sword out of its sheath, but Alnasl and Quibble only laughed.
“It’s all right,” the Djer said. “Think of it as a dream, sah. It frightens, but it can’t hurt you. It can’t do anything to you. It’s only light.”
“It is human!” I retorted as I assumed a fighting stance. “It is uhn-qah!”
“No,” said Alnasl, “it’s a hologram. It’s immaterial. Once again, sah, your sword is useless. Slash it in half! You won’t harm it.”
The blue being stood still, smiling affably at me. I sighed, relaxed, and sheathed my sword, keeping my eyes on her all the while. She made no move or gesture. The text and drawing on the wall behind her vanished, replaced now by two lines of text and a depiction of a hand holding a rectangle, one of the thin glass devices so treasured by the Ahnk-far.
“Oh!” Quibble breathed, then read aloud: “Virtual Touch. A gift of the Infinite.” She gazed at Alnasl. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
The Djer hummed in agreement.
“My name is Community,” the hologram announced. “Come with me now on a fascinating tour through the history of Singularity! You can follow the tour and learn more on your Virtual Touch. To your right—” Community strode to stand beside one of the glass cases. “—you may see one of the surviving Charters of Freedom. Though it is now illegible, we know that in this charter the Singular of a bygone time swore fealty to a magnanimous Infinite called King. This is your heritage, Singular, and what a proud heritage! Above their solemn declaration of allegiance to King, you can see the Singular who signed it.”
A mural decorated the curved wall above the cases, but it was unprotected from the elements and now so faded with age I could discern little detail. Some figures stood together, apparently all men. Community pointed at the opposite wall.
“In high-holo to you left, the Embryonic Pact of 2407 is being ratified.”
I glanced left. A larger image, quite distinct, lit up the wall over another case. The image was not flat: it bulged towards us in three dimensions. In this iconography, rows of people with Virtual Touches clasped in their hands faced a man and woman of godly bearing, so shrouded in golden light their features were nigh indistinguishable. A faint blue glow tinged the image.
“The most extraordinary advancement in freedom,” Community enthused, “the Embryonic Pact granted the Singular, in exchange only for the Infinite’s right to patent genetic sequences, the promise of transcendence!”
The blue glow grew stronger.
“No longer,” Community said, “as in the barbaric days of flesh, of death by war, disease, and neglect, that tortured humanity, no longer are you the slaves of mortality! I’m sure, Singular, you appreciate the Infinite’s gift as you journey Within!”
“Within!” Quibble and Alnasl echoed in unison.
“Personhood!” Community exhorted.
“Personhood!” they said, just as forcefully.
“All are One. We are a consensus.”
As the Djer and Ayzhed repeated the words, the blue glow became its brightest, almost painful to look at, and only then did it dawn on me something was badly wrong. They did not sound like themselves. Their voices fell flat, lacking the least intonation, as if feeling was foreign to them. I grasped Quibble by the shoulders, shook her. Her eyes did not shine as in the temple, but they did not look into mine. She was tranced, carried away from herself. So was Alnasl. Aghast, furious, I turned back to Community, but the hologram was gone, just as if she was never there.
“Come out!” I demanded. “Return! Release them from this magic!”
“Unnumbered,” said the bodiless Community, now not affable but authoritative, “your rebellion, though a grave offense, is forgivable. Trust the gift, trust the dream, and you will be forgiven. Become One with us. It is quite easy. Just let it happen.”
On my guard, sword drawn, I scanned the rotunda. Community’s light wall dissipated at a blink, leaving only Quibble’s glass to illumine the floor around the three of us, a faint amber refuge in the encircling darkness. Recalling her story, I imagined us now in the abode of the Uhn-far, Within, trapped underground, the only vestige of a world above the glimmer of light let in through a tarry-not. I shuddered.
Nearby, unseen, something made a sound like a cicada’s quick clicking. I spun towards it, and the sound died. Then it resumed at my back, nearer. I spun again to find myself face to face with a humanlike creature, not clearly male or female, taller than me. I raised my blade for a hard cut at it, but its left hand shot out and gripped my arm on the down swing, locking me. In the same instant its body blazed with internal lightning, white light forking and branching from head to fingertips. I cried out in panic. Its right hand was rising and reaching for my throat, a long finger’s lit tip bearing a steel needle from which hung a drop of glistening liquid, when both Quibble and Alnasl caught the creature by the arm. It strove against their weight, slowly overpowering them, bringing the needle steadily towards me as I struggled in vain to pull away.
“Iso!” Alnasl barked. “Desist! A Zero commands it!”
At once, the creature stilled.
“Release her,” the Djer ordered, “and go home.”
The light coursing through the creature dimmed to low fire. It let me go, stepped back, bowed its head, and said, “We obey.” I was tempted to hack it to pieces anyway as it turned to leave, but Quibble gave me a stern look and shook her head. I rolled my eyes and muttered, “Your world is full of monsters!”
The wall of light suddenly reappeared, now red. It shone fiercely, brighter than the blue wall had, a crimson hell engulfing the room. Alnasl and I stumbled backwards, though I felt as if instead I was being pulled forward, drawn to the light. It seemed to be all there was. I glimpsed the yinman in Quibble’s outstretched hand, a blue anchorage in this sea of red, and with fresh clarity I clung to that, made myself focus on her light.
“Enough!” she yelled on the verge of rage. “You’ve had all the fun you’re going to have! Your kindness seduces the unwary, but now I know better. And your control? Fiddlesticks! I excel worse in my sleep. We’re looking for a night-door, a way out. Either help us or leave us alone!”
The wall’s crimson light diminished by degrees. I dropped my sword and fell to my hands and knees, gasping, feeling like I might retch again. Quibble had told me what the Uhn-far’s dreaming did, how One succumbed to it, how it felt. Between her description’s ideas and a dream’s reality, however, fell a shadow of vast confusion and terror, a realm of unknowing, a madness deeper than the sands of Ayn-qesh. Was this her life? Her recurring nightmare? How could she bear it?
Yet I recovered quickly. Getting to my feet, I found we faced another hologram, this an old man. Dressed in a robe of red light, he leaned on a staff taller than he was. With a sly smile that spread to the wrinkles around his eyes, he said in a bass voice, “A door of night set amid the stars?”
“Yes!” said Quibble.
“Rpophessagr,” whispered Alnasl.
“Grasshopper,” the old man made of light replied. “No, Zero, I’m not a Utopian machine. That avatar was my invention. I’m the original. 2528 DYS. You may forgo the joke, I’ve heard it – DYS as in Dystopia. It’s wearing thin by now, I declare!”
“What’s with the games?” said Alnasl. “Why did you attack us?”
“I wanted to know about you,” said 2528 DYS, as if that excuse sufficed.
“You tried to make me One!” I shouted at him.
“A placebo.” 2528 DYS nodded his head at the Qeht. “I guessed the young lady to be One, but she wields glasses. The Zero does not. Most unusual. One and Zero traveling with a Far, their natural enemy? It all seemed very fishy, so I thought a few tests were in order. Forgive me the cold reception. I see why the One wields glasses. You’re a strange company, but I’m glad you came. You took long enough getting here!”
“Took long enough?” Quibble said. “How did you know we were coming?”
“One like you was bound to come.”
“Like me? An excelsior?”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” 2528 DYS chuckled. “A bit grandiose, don’t you think? But it’s an auspicious meeting, excelsior. I’ve awaited some One’s arrival almost forty-seven thousand years, though only in the last two millennia have I had any hope. Faint hope, but at least some, for which I believe I should thank your people.”
To my surprise, the old man flashed his eyes at me.
“The Far?” I said.
“We called you Unnumbered. Another bad joke, if you ask me. Plainly someone got my message out, and it survived. Forgive my taking the liberty of a bit of wordplay, but once I’d had a few visits from the Far and I began to work out your language and culture, I needed something memorable, something that would last in your lore. Night-door, a door of night – poetic license, but virtually the same.”
“And the stars it’s set amid?” Quibble asked.
2528 DYS frowned. “The stars are surely metaphorical. They’re in the Library of the Commons, beyond the wall dividing the city. But I’m afraid I can tell you nothing more about them. I was never privy to that secret – nor many another, or things might never have come to this pass. But to business. Have a look.”
In the light wall appeared a map of the heart of Ahnk-nuh-qah-say as seen from the buzzard’s flight. Next to it, rendered in great verisimilitude, was a picture of a large building in the style of the Archives but even grander. Before this building, marvelous statues protruded towards us: two naked women astride horses, between them a pair of naked men with their lips to the ends of giant seashells, and between them, seated atop a rock, another man with a great beard. His muscles reminded me of Luht’s.
“From here,” 2528 DYS directed, “go east by southeast, following the avenue to the Great Dome of the Commons. The old court and library face the Great Dome on the other side of the wall. The library is the building to the south. Note its unique fountain, the only one of its kind in this city.”
“But how do we get past the wall?” I said. “Are there gates?”
“You’re on your own there,” 2528 DYS told us. “We needed no gates. We could teleport over the wall. I don’t recommend it now. You see, all the gossamer-glass—”
“I know,” Quibble interrupted. “You said ‘we’ – ‘we called you Unnumbered, we could teleport.’ You’re Infinite, aren’t you?”
2528 DYS straightened his shoulders, raised his staff, and brought its foot down to strike the floor. The blow made no sound.
“We are sorry,” he said solemnly. “We could not manage transcendence for all the Singular. There is too little Within. It was impossible. The exodus had to proceed in spite of certain losses. We are the Infinite. Time will make you Infinite as well. So do not grieve what cannot be changed. Its necessity will be plain to you before long.”
Relaxing his posture, 2528 DYS gave Quibble a cold stare. For a moment, Quibble said nothing. Then she said, horrified, “Gossamer-glass! You killed them all! You filled Within with the Singular, then killed the rest of them!”
“I?!” protested 2528 DYS. “Why do you think they left me behind? And why here of all places, where it was inconceivable One would ever hear their apology? The shame of it! I was the dissenting voice, the conscientious objector, the thorn in their side. Who wants an eternity among the stars listening to that accusing voice, that harangue?”
“What happened?” Quibble demanded to know. “Tell me the whole story.”
“The whole story? You haven’t the time to hear it all. Now, that is funny, because I’ve had all this time to think about telling it. Here’s the brief version. It was not a clever genocidal plot. The Infinite intended nothing like that, at first. We had no need for such duplicity. You see, the Singular were perfectly willing to give us all we desired – power, wealth, resources, more and more, ever more. They wanted nothing more than to be us, Infinite, and promising to make them Infinite bought everything we wanted. Thus, the Embryonic Pact. As that sycophant Community said, or rather almost said, it granted us an exclusive legal monopoly on genetic sequencing – our only obvious power grab.”
“The monopoly doesn’t seem like so much,” Alnasl observed.
“Does it not?” said 2528 DYS with a smirk I found chilling. “I suppose it seemed little enough to the Singular, too, at first glance. It was a power over life and death. But if we guaranteed them transcendence when they died, what were they really giving up? The power over longevity. They probably thought it a bargain. For us, it was a means of control, cementing our domination. The Infinite had already gone Within, been Within for well over a century, so our transcendence was well underway.”
“You were ahead in the longevity race?” Quibble said.
“Well ahead,” 2528 DYS confirmed. “Lifespans were getting longer all the while. That was my work. I was a geneticist. That’s why I felt so personally responsible for the problem, once it reared its head.”
“Yes, get to that,” Quibble prompted. “The problem.”
“The pact guaranteed the Singular a right of transcendence. They would have to come Within, there to spend the rest of their biological lives. But it did not require them to come Within by any specific age or date. To forestall suspicion, it left that question in their hands. We assumed they’d all hurry Within as fast as we made room for them. The pact’s political theory depended on this assumption, paired with a Utopian calculation. Due to a warming global climate and the over-exploitation of resources, the worldwide human population had been declining from its peak quite a long time. As Singular came Within, it would keep declining. Or at the very least, Utopia figured, populations would stabilize as Unnumbered filled the vacuum – but we were leaving them, a lost cause, so who cared? According to the pact, a few Embryos and their Infinite could depart early, but the rest of us had to wait for all the Singular to gather Within and transcend. Utopia estimated this would take between three and five centuries, most likely just under four. But Utopia failed to account – well, the Infinite did, too, we were so keen to get going – we failed to account for what the Singular would calculate, for their new idea.”
2528 DYS paused his recitation to look at us, one by one.
“Oh!” Alnasl cried. “They stayed Without as long as they could!”
“Of course,” 2528 DYS said with some bitterness, “because if you give people a fabulously long and healthy lifespan, why would they waste it wandering around in the dark underground? To adapt to Within, live there, learn the disembodiment it teaches, and thus transcend, the Singular needed longevity. Once we’d gotten what we wanted from them, why, of course we were magnanimous – we gave them plenty of longevity, much more than they needed. But this wasn’t the whole problem. Their reluctance to come Within only foreshadowed worse to come.”
Again 2528 DYS paused. When no one spoke, he lifted his brows and said, “Prior religions, before Infinitude, told people they’d reunite with their deceased loved ones in a heaven. But promise people transcendence to a new digital heaven? Not an imaginary heaven they must have faith in but a real one they know they’re going to?”
“For kindness’ sake!” Quibble said. “They didn’t just stay Without too long, did they? They had a lot of children, too, and their children were as long-lived as they were. Not a population decline! A boom!”
“And all of them Singular, all of them given a promise as sacred to them as their personhood, indeed the very basis for their personhood under the Embryonic Pact,” the old man continued. “By 2528, the year I transcended, it was clear we were in a trap of our own making, a trap getting worse all the time. Within was packed beyond carrying capacity. Life there was miserable, which only made transcendence harder to achieve. Building the spirals and Eggs had nearly exhausted Earth’s natural resources. We did manage to build a few more spirals, not in the best places, but then we were up against a wall. Too many Singular, not enough Within. And with so large a population, both Within and Without, just feeding people was becoming an economic nightmare. We’d erred, too, in leaving the Unnumbered entirely out of the pact. They’d gotten the worst end of the bargain, so of course they began mounting revolts, sabotaging the system. It was all quickly escaping our control. Now, privately, the Infinite spoke of abandoning the pact, just taking off in our Eggs, never mind waiting for them to become embryonic. I joined the voices arguing against that. We were outnumbered, though. Our opponents needed only time to achieve consensus. So I took other steps.”
Quibble nodded. “And that’s why you’ve waited for us, for me, all this time. You aren’t just delivering the Infinite’s shameful message.”
“Indeed not,” said 2528 DYS. “I suppose glassing all the ways Within solved the immediate problem, but I never imagined my people would do something so barbaric, so cruel. Instead, I believed humanity was heading for a mass die-off from famine, and I doubted Ones Within would be spared. What did that mean? Longer and longer waits before Eggs became Embryos, before their transcended Ones joined the exodus. Perhaps thousands of years. I thought that was a cruel fate in itself. Within was only ever meant to be a staging area, not a permanent home for countless generations of Ones. Within is a world interpreted for Ones by orbs which only give them the dreams of others. If such a long time passed, finally Within would only give them the memories of the long dead. A degraded, untrue world. A scrivener I love once wrote, ‘An interpreted world is not a home.’ Ones needed a way Without, so I engineered it. I’ve waited to see it work.”
“Excelsiors,” Alnasl posited. “You engineered a potential for Ones to excel orbs.”
“I really don’t know why you call it that,” 2528 DYS remarked. “I only designed precursor genes and sneaked them into the engineering of some Singular going Within. They had to go undetected, so I had to be very careful. They’d need several generations of reproduction at least before any Ones would exhibit the adaptation. In the meantime, I had no idea what adaptations Within might do to halt or delay or transform my work. So, ironically, I’m in the dark here. But if I were One Within experiencing it, ‘excelling’ is the last thing I’d call it! Tell me, excelsior, how long were you ill? And how long did it take before the orbs couldn’t trance you anymore?”
“Ill? I’ve only been ill with appendicitis, and the orbs never—” Quibble stopped short. “You’re not talking about excellence! You mean Connotation’s syndrome!”
“Ah,” the robed elder sighed. “Syndrome, yes, that’s more like it! The syndrome would present as a cluster of neurological symptoms, interfering with One’s dreaming until that One must go Without. And then, if I’m right, if nothing’s gone wrong, all the symptoms just vanish. Correct?”
“Just vanish?” echoed Alnasl, waving his hands in the air. “All of a sudden?”
“They don’t?” said 2528 DYS, his voice edged with self-doubt. “They linger?”
“It’s a very long, painful, disorienting illness!” said Quibble. “I’ve never had it, but my adroitness did. She spent months in agony before she could even leave the Egg. And then—”
“The Egg?!” 2528 DYS exploded in turn. “What are you fools doing? Why even take the One to an Egg?”
“Medical facilities?” said Quibble in a tone suggesting she thought 2528 DYS was the true fool.
“Without!” the Infinite shot back. “That doesn’t just mean ‘not Within’ – it means ‘out in the sun.’ Natural sunlight cures the syndrome!”
“Well, it’s a hell of a cure for folks with albinism afraid to go Without!” Quibble countered. “Look at me. I’m sunburned head to foot!”
“I expected albinism would arise, but it couldn’t be helped,” 2528 DYS answered, checking his anger. “It had to be a simple, durable, natural cure I could count on being there for you. What’s more durable and natural than sunlight? And what’s simpler than going out in it? Months? It would take days. The worst symptoms would vanish in mere hours, as long as the One isn’t subjected to orb-dream. Wait. Tell me your doctors aren’t using orbs! Please tell me they’re not protracting the syndrome!”
Alnasl looked sheepish but gazed steadily at the Infinite and said, “They’re only doing what’s natural, assuming the One must return Within. Ones are mortally terrified of Without. Confession has made it their hell.”
“Confession?” said 2528 DYS, confused.
“Edict,” Alnasl explained.
“Edict? What edict?! The Infinite never gave you any—”
“Without is annihilation!” Quibble declared.
“Nonsense! It’s the Singular’s primordial environment! Without—”
“—prevents transcendence,” Alnasl pointed out, “so for Ones it is annihilation.”
2528 DYS dropped his jaw. The Djer and Ayzhed stared at him in silence. At last breaking mine, I put in: “Infinite, you spoke of prior religions and promises they made to people before your time. Did it never occur to you there would be another religion in the future? That, no longer worshiping the Infinite, people would worship other gods? The Uhn-far, whom you call Ones, have a god. Unity. It is only their collective will, but if we are honest, so are all gods to all peoples. Ones still transcend, that has not changed, but now their lives center on more than that. They have a culture Within, a way of life. With any way of life comes taboos. Your cure is their taboo.”
The Infinite blinked at me, and as when I first saw him leaning on his tall staff, I wondered how he kept all the habits of a real body without one. And though transfixed in time, now he looked somehow older than he had only minutes ago. How could that be? Did he, in fact, age?
“You mentioned the year of your transcendence,” Alnasl said. “By that calendar, what year is this?”
“49371.”
“I’m sorry,” Quibble said.
“For what?”
“For your people putting you here, imprisoning you. I know a Zero who suffered that fate. It was unspeakably cruel.” The amber glass in the Qeht’s right hand flickered briefly alight. “It was a pit of living death, of loneliness and despair,” she added.
2528 DYS laughed wryly.
“I’ve had plenty of company: nanos and isos, and besides them, a city of Singular relics. Their Virtual Touches, you see, kept something of them. And I’ve had something to look forward to. I pity my people, really. They banished my voice, but they can never banish their guilt. To traverse the universe endlessly, knowing what it cost – I’d reckon that is really hell. This hasn’t been too bad, just a bit boring. But now that you’ve found me at last, I’d certainly appreciate a ride out of here. A piggyback ride like you’re giving the others. Please bring your glass to the high-holo wall.”
“Sure,” Quibble agreed, stepping forward and raising the amber.
“No, not that glass. The other, the blue one.”
“Oh, you can’t ride that one!” said Quibble. “It doesn’t hold relics. It’s just a—”
“Don’t you know what it holds?” said 2528 DYS, regarding her with amazement. “When you used it to fight my dream, I saw.”
“What? You saw what?”
“Infinite! Excelsior, your potent glass carries transcended Ones, almost a million of them! The manifest of an Egg!”
Quibble stared at the yinman glass in disbelief.
“Two souls shine especially bright,” 2528 DYS told her. “Whoever they are, they couldn’t speak to me, but I knew they were there. They are there. They’re helping you. Now you must return them – and all the souls in that glass – to an Egg.”
“But how do you know,” asked Alnasl, “these voiceless souls are helping her?”
“They love her. That much is beyond doubt.”
I feared, as overwrought as Quibble had been only a few hours ago, learning this would precipitate a fresh flood of tears, but she only trembled a bit as she held out the yinman, lit, and let the crimson light of the Dystopian wall pour over it and penetrate it. She glanced at 2528 DYS, who stood smiling at her. He seemed younger, less careworn, though his face was no less wrinkled. I guessed his apparent age must reflect his mood. Now he was jovial.
“The sun is rising,” he informed us with a laugh. “Isn’t that funny?”
“I hesitate to hazard what you find funny,” Alnasl quipped.
“People rush off for the stars, but we have a star here,” 2528 DYS said. “Do not leave this room until nightfall. The light here is forever dim to preserve the charters, so you’ll be safe. The gossamer-glass is its thickest where you’re going. Don’t wait for it to cool. The wall must be crossed somehow, and getting there isn’t as easy as you’d think. Your time is too short for delay. Remember, I’m trusting you.”
“If we’re staying here all day, why don’t you stay to talk?” Quibble suggested. “Maybe you don’t know about excellence, but I wish you’d help me figure it out.”
“You’ll figure it out,” the Infinite promised. “And I’d love nothing more than a long talk, but with your passengers, my newfound kin. Farewell!”
2528 DYS strode into the wall of light. It absorbed him. Then its color changed: it was neither red nor blue nor any single color at all but a profusion of all colors possible, a chaotic spectrum, briefly and blindingly blazing. Then it vanished and the rotunda fell into a twilight dark lit only by a soft illumination like candlelight. Quibble did not light her amber. She only gazed at the yinman glass in her left hand.
“Dystopia?” she called.
A rainbow sheen passed over the surface of the glass and was gone.
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