Adrift in the Noösphere. Damien Broderick

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СКАЧАТЬ the middle of the air and rushed forward down the infinite corridor, the wind of their motion somehow almost wholly held in abeyance. If it were not for that breeze, they might have been suspended motionless. Yet somehow, through her terror, she sensed tremendous velocity. “Don’t drop the milk.” He added, at her scowl, “Embee—the MBrain. The M-Brane. Not to be confused with the Mem-brain.”

      “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

      “Oh, never mind.”

      She puzzled it out, as they fled into an endlessness of the same. “You’re saying that the Skyfallen Heights did not fall? That it was built?”

      “Oh, it was built, all right, and it fell from the sky. Father Time broke up another moon and rained it down like silt in a strip around the equator. Compiled the accelerator, you might say.” The cat, afloat in the air, gave her a feline grin. “Two thirds of it has worn away by now. It was a long time ago. But it can still get you from here to there in a hurry.”

      The breeze was gone. They had stopped, or paused. The cat lifted his head. A vast rumbling above them; something was opening. They rose, flung upward like bubbles in a flute, and then moved fast in the great darkness, yet still breathing without effort, warm enough, the curving contusion of the Skydark to one side—the Embee, the cat had named it, if that is what he had meant—the smaller ring-cradled sphere on the other, and, directly above, something like a dull ruby the size of a palace falling to crush them, or rather they fell upward into it. And were inside its embrace, light blossoming to dazzle her eyes, so that she cried out and did in fact drop the jug, which shattered on a surface like rippled marble, spilling milk in a spray that caught the cat’s left ear and whiskers. He turned in fury, raised one clawed paw, made to strike, held his blow at the last instant from scratching a welt in her flesh.

      “Clumsy! Oh well.” He visibly forced himself to sink down on all four limbs, slitting his eyes, then rose again. “Come and meet your parents, you lump.”

      §

      Her mother was dead and ceremonially returned to Cycling. Bonida knew this with bitter regret, for she had stood by the open casket and pressed the cold pale hand, speaking aloud in her grief, hopelessly, the cantrip of renewal. Was there a trembling of the virtue? She could not be sure. Imagination, then. Nothing, nothing. They swiftly closed the casket and whisked it away. But no, here she was after all, at first solemn and then breaking into a smile to see her daughter running in tears to catch up her hands and kiss them, Bonida on her knees, shaking her head in disbelief, eyes swimming.

      “Mother Elisetta!”

      “Darling girl! And Meister Marmalade.” She curtsied to the cat.

      “Hi, toots.”

      “Now allow me to introduce you to your sire.”

      A presence made itself known to them.

      “Welcome, my daughter. I am Ouranos. We have a task for you to fulfill, child. For the Sodality. For the world.”

      The beancounter recoiled, releasing her mother’s hands. She stared wildly about her.

      “This is a machine,” she cried in revulsion.

      From the corner of her eye she seemed to see a form like a man.

      The cat said, “Enough sniffling and jumping at shadows. We have work to do.”

      “How can I be the daughter of a machine?” Bonita remained on her knees, closed in upon herself, whimpering. “This is deceit! All of it! My mother is dead, this isn’t her. Take me away, you wretched animal. Return me home and then stay the hell away from me.”

      “No deception in this, my darling.” Her mother touched the crown of her head in a gesture Bonida had known from infancy, bringing fresh tears. “You are upset, and we understand why. It was cruel to allow you to think I had been taken into death, but a necessary cruelty. We had the most pressing and urgent reasons, dear child. We had tasks to perform which brooked no interference. The night has a thousand thousand eyes. Now it is your turn to embrace your destiny. Come, stand up beside me, the hour grows late.”

      The presence she could not quite see, no matter how swiftly she turned her eyes, said in its deep beautiful voice, “The light of the bright world dies with the dying Sun.”

      “What is the ‘Sun’?” asked the beancounter.

      §

      Elisetta, High Governor of the Sodality of Righteous Knowledge, formerly dead, now brow-furrowed and certainly alive, gestured fore and aft. “Open.”

      Bow and stern of the ruby clarified and were gone: blackness ahead, spattered at random with pinpricks of sharp light, save for the ringed globe that was now as broad as a hand near one’s face, faintly luminous; the great contusion behind, glowing faintly with a dim crimson so deep it tricked the eye to suppose it was darkness, a large round spot upon its countenance that dwindled as she watched. The spot was, she realized with a jolt, her world entire. In the starlight, it seemed that one half of the spot was faintly lighter than the other.

      “That great dimness conceals the Sun,” her mother said, with a sweeping motion of her arm. “Hidden within the hundred veils of genius we call the Skydark. You have heard this story a dozen times from my own lips, Bonida, since you were a child at my breast, veiled like the Sun in allegory.”

      Silent, astonished, rueful, the beancounter regarded immensity, the dwindling piebald spot. “That is our world, falling away behind us,” she ventured.

      “Iapetus, yes,” the cat said. “A world like a walnut, with a raised welt at its waist.”

      “And what is a wal—” There was no point. This terminology, she divined, was not meant to tease nor torment her; it was a lexicon written to account for a universe larger than her own. She’d heard this term “Iapetus” before, from the cat’s mouth. So the world had a name, like a woman or a cat; not just the World. “All right, enough of that. Where are we going? To that other...world, ahead?” It pleased her, stiffened her spine, that she had said Where are we going and not Where are you taking me.

      “To Father Time, yes, for an audience. Saturn, as your ancient forebears called him. Father of us all, in some ways.” That was the unseeable presence speaking. She nearly wrenched her neck trying to trap him, but he was off again in some moving blind place, evading her. A machine, she told herself. Rebuked herself, rather. Not a man. How could a thing like that claim affinity, let alone paternity? Yet was there not affinity between humans and machines, in the utterance of a cantrip, the invocation of power? If water boiled and steamed in her bucket, that was no doing of hers. She had acknowledged that, and yet daily forgot the fact, since she was a child, learning the runes and sigils and codes of action. When she rotted the flesh from some hapless infractor, or brought some dead thing back to life and growth, that was again the machines, operating her like a machine, perhaps, making her own flesh their tool. It was a horrifying reflection. Little wonder, she told herself, that we turn our faces from its recognition.

      “Why?” A touch of iciness entered her tone. “And why have you and this appalling animal abducted me?”

      The cat regarded her with equal coldness, turned and stalked off to the farthest end of the craft, which was not far, and gazed studiously back at the Skydark. Her mother said, “Bonida, you are unkind. But no doubt you have a right to your...impatience.”

      “My СКАЧАТЬ