The Cone
Three Stories
by Kenneth Burstall
Copyright 2012, Kenneth Burstall
fallslikesnow Press
Smashwords Edition
Contents
The Cone
It's a forgotten war. Spiraling burns, strange cancers, shrunken hard torsos like fragments of bleached rock.
I've heard it's like that over there – whining assholes complaining about the changes pulling out cost. Pulling out always costs -- people hanging from helicopters or eyes of garnets. You choose.
We all remember the Stone Field. Impossibly high horizon, low, stained denim sky. It's a work of art that place. Chunks of dirty sandstone scattered across a striated limestone pavement. The sandstone draws the eye, something about the delicately colored lichen painted across the russet and gray rock. The lichens are gray and gray-pink and gray-blue and so on. A world of very pale grayed out pastels. Some lichen are like paint spills, others are little sharp florets.
Look too closely and time begins to slow, to pass in a slurping stream like hair clots in molasses.
Now you have a choice. Go back and take the changes with you; stay and become other or move on, imperfectly changed, and face the Light Chairs, if the Field even lets you get that far.
Choose change. Trust me. Drawn out lichen sex can be yours.
Anyway, more change is available if you want it.
It's up-slope from here though.
Always and forever up-slope
***
Turn back and command will take a dim view of a marine returning ten years late and so horribly transformed. Especially after so many others returned in individually varied, but fundamentally the same, forms.
That beach in the Florida Keys is a bitch isn't it?
***
I fly into the Tractrix, a bar fairly close to the Near Vertical Curve. My current, and favorite, form likes sugared water, can't carry money, has good credit.
My credit score was shit over the mist. Shit!
“My best gossip buddy!” says the barman, a jello toad called Clyde.
He passes me a saucer of sugar water flavored with rose. I don't know where he gets rose water this far away from the mist.
I slurp contentedly.
“Anything new?” he asks. Part of him slithers onto the bar in anticipation.
“Not really. Just been flitting around the Stone Field looking at our latest invaders,”
“They look like they'll stay?”
We both pretend I could patrol even an infinitesimal fraction of the field. Gossip always assumes a dangerous omniscience.
“A couple, maybe. The rest are going home in very sturdy body-bags or are going to be shredded by light for the next million years.
“Thin pickings my friend,” he says.
“They had these neat particle beam weapons. Some sort of stabilized selectron stream that decays into a cloud of nasty things in the target. No idea where they picked those up.”
“Here we had a visit from near royalty. Way, way up the cliff, near humaniform. Just the quicksilver hands gave them away. Plus whatever was under their robes of course. Poor bastards. They breed so close but they always have those florets between their legs.”
With that Clyde rushes of to milk another customer. Literally. Some forms get off on that.
I watch and drink. He never asked how those weapons still existed, let alone worked, in the Fields.
He never asked how a housefly carved out of coral could test them either.
Just as well. I don't know.
***
Move on FUBARed, but not FUBARed enough, and you are in a world of pain.
The Fields will try and snare you, but if you resist, then Light Chairs will pull you into a sky like a cathedral of stained glass, with panes of rose and red and blue and yellow and all the colors available to a medieval glass maker.
Tasteful, begging for the fist. So you do it. And the panes will pull apart, shatter and dance like a storm of leaves. And they will twist into you, and they will twist and re-twist and pull out slightly for that brief, unbearable moment of relief before slicing again.
I don't know of anyone ever released by the Chairs.
Good thing too. Damm wimps. We have a war to fight. Don't need 'em.
Do the wise thing and surrender. Spend a subjective century in slow, drawn out, lichenaceous bliss. Then, if you can bear it, the field will re-birth you in a new form. You will move up-slope looking at the world afresh through new, ink-drawn, eyes.
***
I'm nudged by a pale cream creature shaped like a fist holding dragonfly wings, slightly parted. Inexplicably the gap between the wings is filled by a glass of gin and tonic.
I hate arms dealers and this bastard is one of the worst. I dread to think how much blood is on those wings
“So, Lieutenant. Just heard you discuss some interesting new devices. Care to trade one or two for some of my party favors?”
Nigel, the wings' name, is a Brit. Brits will screw you over is my experience. Also, Nigel deals mostly in up-slope munitions. Objects and processes that look like reading glasses, scree slopes or sunrises. Not much use to me.
I need IEDs, RPGs, AK47s.
“What you got?”
“Phased Tokomak Output Device -– truck based of course. 4D grenade -– explodes backwards in time, intensity dropping in half every 47 seconds. Borderline Personality Disorder virus -- slow acting but devastating.”
I'm impressed. Why he, up-slope and up-scale purveyor of weapons of ambiguous destruction, should possess such esoteric but Stone Field usable tech worries me.
“Where'd you get them?”
The dragonfly wings, now empty of glass, shimmer a little.
“An out of business sale at a museum 2.3Ym up-slope. Had some things from over the mist, just in baseline future. They also had a small number of objects you will not get from me. Space-time fault device; induced neutron decay weapon and some others.
I ignore his last words, still dripping rose water from my proboscis in anticipation. Only my first spore release was better than this and that not by much.
I want that PTOD! I already have emplacements in mind for it
“How many do you want?” referring to my particle beam weapons.
“All you have. I want them off the market and out of the field. I have my reasons. I'll give you three PTODs, four dozen grenades and you can have the virus for free. Let me know how the virus works out. It should be funny.”
“Done. Where do you want to do the swap?”
“The Stone Fields of course. I can survive there in this form for a few hours.”
I decide not to mention that I only have two particle beam weapons and that one has half converted to sandstone.
***
You can drift after the change. You'll probably have been formed as a piece of paper, wet at the edges, covered with tiny incomprehensible print made up of tiny incomprehensible print made up of - you get the idea.
People have captured these sentients and spent lifetimes looking deeper and deeper into the texts finding nothing comprehensible at all.
Pure cruelty I call it.
Those kids took the leap and earned their stripes. Piece of paper was just the first step of their careers and instead they get to spend millions of years (subjective) pinned under microscopes the size of mountains, electrons not really existing any distance from the mist.
I think I have recruits capable of weapons operation. I will instruct them to fire on any of these paper abusers I find.
***
Nigel is gone, Clyde distracted. I finish my rose water and leave the Tractrix, a very happy chunk of rose pink coral.
The street outside is deserted except for a group of obsidian knives, drunk on liquid nitrogen, aggressive and sharp and liable to shatter.
I'm a tough SoB but taking these guys on with anything less than a grenade launcher is beyond me.
I turn and head down-slope to my apartment. As I flit through the hatch I'm trapped in a bubble of chlorine. My polyps die and my rosy pink bleaches to ivory. As I die I feel my wings dissolve.
***
The world is a hyperbolic surface only approximately close in shape to a cone. Still, we call it the Cone.
The base is the Stone Fields, the boundary between our current anchor world (Earth) and the infinitely larger world we live on.
The base intersects the tide-line of a beach in Key Largo. Lots of weird shit along that beach. Us, mostly. And stealthed marines destined for lichen based transformation.
Above the base things get strange. The curve of the Cone gets hyperbolically steep, never quite achieving verticality.
That's how it looks from the outside and it's how we down-slope peons think of it. Hence lower vs. upper slopes, the Near Vertical Cliff, the Base Line etc.
From the inside it looks flat, it just gets bigger the further in you go. And there's an infinite in to go into.
Admittedly it does get more abstract, and hence weirder, the deeper you go. Entire nations becoming blue and moving south overnight because of a poorly received Lie Group. That kind of thing.
Infinity is there but it's all been claimed and you can't afford, or understand, any of it.
Hence Operation Boundary Conditions.
***
Amazed, I wake up alive. I assess my condition and surroundings. Both are poor.
I am in a bubble of liquid oxygen, my coral held together in some sort of very rigid field. My precious polyps are long gone. My resources are a chunk of limestone and some very expensive garnet eyes.
A voice comes from all around.
“Your new weapons will upset the power balance around the Anchor Zone. We are curious as to why you would wish this.”
I ignore the dark, authoritative, obviously synthetic voice. It's just setting the opening parameters for the subsequent interrogatory framework.
They don't care about guns.
I don't really give a shit what they do care about, I'm going to kill them.
The voice drones on, actually referring at one point to geopolitics, presumably in an attempt to get me to think of dear old Earth.
To hell with that misshapen ball of shit. Its ugly curved blue and white swirls; its toxic atmosphere and oceans; its unnecessary flora (repeat after me – rock+lichen, iterate); and fauna (sentients personal body designs always trump evolution); its' broken and weeping sentients who still don't realize that they could step into that mist on Key Largo and become other - they could dump that horrible proton sump (how the hell did those things catch on?) and gain infinity. Or the few bits not already claimed.
Of course, here “few” still means uncountably infinite.
Some of us want more. We want it more convenient at least. So, again, we get Operation Boundary Conditions.
***
I return to ignoring the voice after my spasm of rage.
Instead I start fiddling with my eyes. They are a very up-slope weapon I obtained from Nigel. He made me swear not to use them to detune any stars or move any black holes into bad places.
As if I care about any of that small scale stuff. My plans are infinitely greater, albeit currently served by a very localized accelerated decay field around each sproton in my interrogator. These are, almost immediately, stalled by timed stasis fields around each particle.
Every sproton in my interrogator is now a time-bomb.
Shit, these eyes are cool. See lots of those hateful color things also. Was fully color blind on the other side of the mist. Good times.
The voice crackles and rapidly rises in pitch. A far more recognizable voice then says, “Is this stuff reversible?”
“No. I don't do reversible. Plus, you killed me, so screw you.”
“Look,” says Clyde. “I do gossip. It's what I breathe. Sometimes I do high-end military gossip and my methods get more extreme. If I tell you who my clients are could we be friends again?”
“No. Your clients are my opponents, that's all I need to know.”
I put together a string of commands in fovea, the eye script language.
Roughly: remove field; remove liquid O2; rebuild body, polyps, wings; get me out of here before bubble stasis fields around each Clyde sproton fail; watch resulting bang in every sensory modality available.
I run the script.
There are explosions from tiny antimatter pearls being released from their containment fields. This allows channeling of energy to overload the holding field and boil the liquid O2 and release its' holding field. Shaped mirror fields, already emplaced, bounce an electromagnetic pulse in a very specifically focused way.
The staggering energy densities this produces cause a pair of small wormhole ends to open and be enlarged. One hole end is accelerated to a precise fraction of the speed of light and is punched through the other end producing a burst of subatomic particles of a type and velocity otherwise unachievable by any other method.
All this highly engineered mess comes together in the right way at the right time and sprotons, selectrons and sneutrons merge to produce a nice body, wings and polyps.
I fly over Clyde's' rigid, terrified body and away, a very great distance from the shack in the Stone Fields.
I turn around, and as the stasis fields collapse watch a deeply satisfying and colorful explosion.
I indulge myself in colors sometimes.
All this and the only downside is the loss of 30% of my anti-matter. I must talk to Nigel about a top-up. There's also an annoying change in my coral color to rose yellow.
In desperation, at the last minute, Nigel told me who my opponents are. It's barely believable but it's very, very satisfying.
***
I cross the Fields and, somewhat nervously, the Chairs. I drift around the low-slopes city that never seems to have got a name.
I love its dusty, dark, winter streets fronted on either side by tall townhouses. Stores are simply the ground floors of adapted houses with the houses on either side of an offal merchant going cheap.
At the rear of the townhouses are canals, some water, some fluidized beds of dust. Linear explosions along the dust canals are common each summer. We keep them because they are so beautiful.
In the summer the sun glances off loops and swirls of shimmering colored sand. Children of capable forms play and swim in the canal, come out scoured clean and sprinkled with dust that sparkles in the sun.
There are dots of garnet in there, but mostly there is a strange shade of blue-red-black. Look at the right angle and you see distant red stars in clouds and nebulae of that dark purple.
It's a color that verges on black and I've seen it elsewhere.
Clouds and stars and deep dark colors. All available if you dip an appendage in the spirals and swirls of a dust canal.
For most of us it's disgusting.
We love our canals but we nearly drained them over this, thus removing a reminder of the universe we left behind. The sentient pile of leaves that originally pointed it out was sent to the Chairs.
***
I go to the Tessellation, a theme restaurant based around the Very Far Up-Slope. Since we can't eat the ten to one hundredth prime it seems an odd theme. Still the S(0) rotting pear rocks. When I'm done eating I search out Hieronymous Dax for some information.
He's in his usual dark corner with his usual shady entourage. I swear, the whole ensemble is the same wherever he eats. Probably bought the whole thing online and has it shipped around as he moves from place to place.
And yes, we have “online” and it's a hell of a lot better than yours. Infinite space, infinite bandwidth, infinite transmission speeds. I could chat over it with entities indistinguishable from gods right now if I wanted to.
I don't. They're boring.
***
Dax is silent as I land on his table, but a saucer of piss- like rose water appears. Already I miss Clyde.
“I need to know where my recruits are Dax.”
“Very well. The second half of the price is due now,” he says, his high-pitched voice somehow generated by his gills.
I whisper in a waiter's ear and use credit previously built to pay Dax.
Dax is an honest memory, a pretty straightforward service and one more places should use.
Using his proboscis He pushes across the table a piece of folded black felt and unfolds it with a flap of his wings, revealing snowflakes by the million on the black cloth. They begin to melt and to my horror I realize that they are stars majestically departing the main sequence and the history of the universe.
That universe.
I can't have chosen this as my mnemonic key. But it seems I did.
“Choose the right one,” says Dax and without thinking my proboscis touches a small flake. It dissolves.
“This was your choice of key, Lieutenant. Remember that.”
I realize that the felt isn't just a representation, it's tied to reality, and I just killed a star.
Or rather, I'm about to.
My eyes power up and they are now out of my conscious control.
A controlled anti-matter release and associated explosion propels a pre-formed molecular scale starship. The cargo is a very few complex molecules wrapped in bucky balls.
The wisp is swiftly accelerated to 99% of the speed of light and punches through the roof towards the Stone Fields. It will cross the mist and power out of Earth's atmosphere spending hundreds of thousands of years reaching the target star, building, repairing, replicating as it goes.
At the target it will slow, make orbit and it will build a huge ring of magnets around the stars poles. It will precisely pulse these magnets against the stars fields and it will tear the star apart in a graceful ballet of snowflake white light, gentle loving gravity and wailing, petulant magnetic fields.
And I will have detuned a star.
One less of the hateful things.
I could sell tickets to this.
“Nice choice of lock and key Lieutenant. I wish more clients were so creative. Most enjoyable,”
I node pleasantly to Dax (an ammonia ice Opabinia) and leave the Tessellation.
I now know where and who my troops are and I am amazed.
My anti-matter is down to 0% and I realize I'll need to visit Nigel to replenish it. And I'll have to explain what I used it for. Awkward.
***
I fly to the Cold Pools.
Everyone goes there, they're in the middle of the Non-Abelian Park after all. When you go, however, you are always alone.
You can fly across smooth, slick, blackish green rocks. The air is freezing, the lake on the verge of solidifying. The temperature keeps it viscous, greasy. Only the presence of complex salts keeps it from solidifying completely. There are slow slicks on it, like burnt cooking oil on piss under an old street light.
I want to do something here that I hate doing.
I want to think about the past.
***
From basic training to West Point the Rule is “Follow Orders”.
This amazed me when I was first introduced to it as a kid straight off the streets of East Austin. How could I do this and retain enough of myself to deal with unexpected situations? I was told to shut up and clean the latrine.
West Point, that majestic, world class in all departments institution, squared the circle for a while. I learned many things there.
I received not just a military education but a liberal arts and scientific and technical one. If I had left the Corps after graduation I would have been better educated than 99% of the western world.
On top of that, however, I had learned to negotiate the gap between orders and execution.
I learned to learn because orders cannot be executed if they cannot be understood. The lowliest marine learns more stuff every year than the average factory worker does in a decade. He or she learns to learn or sinks.
I learned to walk up and down the hierarchy. On occasion I have ordered generals and on others begged sergeants. I didn't delegate orders, I integrated then and then I worked in the gaps.
I learned that fear, violence and hate are poor ways of communicating. Wars are band-width problems. Respect, empathy and, yes, love actually work. They solve.
These things together showed how “follow orders” could work and this helped me for many years.
Then came the beach, then the mist, then the Field.
Even then, even in the darkest days as a wet piece of paper, I followed my orders. And to do that I have done all I said I learned above, and now I am able to follow those orders in the broadest sense. And I have to wonder if the cost I expect others to pay is too great.
The wind blows across the Cold Pools.
And I remember that we have no bandwidth problems. We don't have to choose between fear and respect, between violence and empathy, between love and hate. We can have them all and still choose war. And still I can follow my orders.
All this world demands of us is that we choose change.
***
Once again I choose change and I turn away from the pools and go to set the wheels turning. I arrange a meeting with my allies
Before that, however, I go to the opera
Move downtown and the buildings become taller and older. It's the invariant core around which the rest of the city accretes and erodes. The buildings are sandstone, black with lichen and smoke stains, raked back from the narrow streets so as to disguise their great heights.
At ground level are the usual collections of jewelers, high fashion boutiques and small, expensive restaurants. Ignore the fact that the jewelers will likely be selling small flames on necklaces of plutonium, the boutique will carry satin outfits for four digit primes and the restaurants will be selling liquid bromine for houseflies made of coral.
Ignore these things and the layout will be familiar to anyone from over the mist.
Higher up and the story is the same. Head-offices of banks with only one customer, shadowy import/export businesses like mine, political consultants lobbying the only elected officials we have here – imaginary ones.
The cobbled streets are perpetually wet with rain water that runs from the highest, mountainous roofs down funnels (carved and eroded); along artificial stream beds; across large, gently sloping, stone fields, all boulders, slates, eroded Light Chair sculptures; through the mouths of gargoyles, some artificial; down gutters of brilliant white quartzite into pipes carved into black basalt; down channels of dark red brick a hand-width deep from erosion, picking up the golden light of the store windows on either side.
Water, taking on the deep red black and flecked with gold, spills across the sidewalk and into the street where it enthusiastically washes away horse-shit.
I prefer the modest aridity of my adopted arrondissement but there is no-where else on this cone latitude for getting business in comfort.
I eat at the Diagonal Slash, a restaurant I know to be Nigel's' favorite.
As he comes in he sees me at my table and flits over. The Slash flatters him as the gold lighting highlights his iridescent wings, the antique mirrors show off the artful turns of his holding fist.
“Lieutenant, what a pleasant surprise! May I?”
I nod him to the other side of the table and, as a waiter comes over we both order. I, a slice of rotting slice of beef over crushed limestone, he a brown liquid presumably as complex as his strange metabolism requires.
I ask him how he can reconcile the needs of such a disparate form with his desires as an aesthete. He launches into a genuinely interesting monologue on how, given similar sensory modalities, similar pleasures will result. It's only a case of discovering, or re-discovering, the correct triggers.
During this peroration his fist relaxes showing the deep purple black skin within.
“You know all this anyway, lieutenant,” he says, gently.
“I need an AM refill,” I say, to bring myself back under control.
The squeal of rage he makes when I tell him where the AM went clears my head completely.
“No detuning stars I said! How many potential anchors will we have if arseholes like you go blowing up their stars? There are only a finite number of the things after all.”
“It was the key to unlock my knowledge of my troops. You knew that didn't you?”
“Ah. Under the circumstances a stellar death is acceptable. Not as if it wasn't going to happen soon anyway. Stop by my warehouse for some more AM”
I know he's being evasive, even if his wings are so hard to read.
I slurp loudly at my saucer of plain sugar water.
“Alright. I knew about your troops. An absolutely inspired idea. You couldn't afford to know about to know about them in advance of course. Some things supersede following orders after all and if you knew about your troops you might have hesitated.”
I nod. He's wrong of course. I decided at the Cold Pools that “following orders” supersedes everything.
I explain this to Nigel. It seems to make him sad.
“So the plan goes ahead?”
I nod.
“You won't want the weapons I offered any more I take it.”
I agree. Much as I want a PTOD, a selectron beam rifle that functions on both sides of the mist is far more useful.
“I have twenty-three others I bought up when I thought you wouldn't be going through with the plan. Will you need them?”
“I'll take them if I can afford them. They'll have been field tested after all.”
“You can have then for nothing. They rot everything around them, people included. Not for your allies I imagine though.”
His tone is uncharacteristically harsh.
To pacify him I tell him who our opponents are and how phase one of Operation Boundary Conditions will go down. His laughter is long and genuine, but it mixes horror with delight. There's an ambiguity in how his wings regard me now.
The more we despise what is still human in us the tighter we hold onto it.
Nigel, a professional arms dealer of all people, finally recognizes that I have let go.
“Want to go to the opera? It's 'Einstein on the Beach'. I got tickets for centre, one third of the way back. That's the best, isn't it?” I ask when we're done discussing the plan
“It is indeed. If we fly we'll be there in good time.”
Street traffic in the city is mostly horse and horse analogue drawn with a sprinkling of methanol engined monstrosities. It's always quicker to fly over that deal with the cluster of traffic planning failures below. From above you can see why this state of affairs arose. Seven thousand years of slow building street layouts froze into deadlock one thousand years ago. The streets seem almost spiteful in their lack of regularity, braiding and shifting in ways more appropriate to mountain streams than dark city streets.
The opera house is at a Y-junction – a single stream breaks against an impervious rock and splits in two.
The house itself is the rock, or rather the non-opera services that build around such establishments are. Ticket sales, sponsorship procurement, gift shops and art galleries.
As we are whisked to the front of the line, courtesy of Nigel's' “frequent flier” card, I note a small Breughel exhibition I want to see. I'd point it out to Nigel only his tastes are for nothing before Klimt. Or after for that matter.
We enter the auditorium, a huge platform open on all sides, suspended over the streets below by pylons, cantilevers and a huge pantograph.
Drinks in fields/wings we take our seats and wait for the action to begin.
Soon enough, once the sets are filled, the bridges are pulled and, in a thrilled silence from the audience, the cantilevers and pylons are disconnected. Then, with a terrifying rusty grinding, the pantograph contracts and rises, raising the theater with it.
As it rises, overlapping sound and light suppression fields unfold. Outside sounds totally vanish but some light is allowed through. The faint misty reds and blues and whites add mystery.
As usual the opera itself is a disappointment, the gimmicky surroundings overwhelming a lackluster performance.
As we leave, flying over the heterogeneous opera audience, I mention the meeting I'd arranged beforehand.
“Be careful. Remember, you have no AM. Do you have time to drop by the warehouse for some?” Nigel asks.
“No. I'm due in the Field in an hour. I picked up some null-fielded H-bomb fragments along the way. Set for two hours from now. Nano-second second thoughts fields built in.”
“They still make those? Unbelievably dangerous! How the hell do you plan to survive their use?”
“Timing.”
“What do you expect to achieve?”
“Some fear on their part. They'll be useful over the next few days.”
I can't tell Nigel this part of the plan. My slight suspicion that he's a spy makes it impossible.
***
I fly directly to the designated rock in the Stone Fields.
Sure enough, they are there already. Two baseline humans, each with armor consisting of overlapping white plates. The armor fizzes with exotic particles and I realize it is repelling the change inducing fields. This tech should make things interesting.
The marines can, this way, survive this side of the mist unchanged, as can their weapons.
One turns his blank helmet towards me, passive and active sensor arrays above and below his faceplate interrogate me in ways I find distasteful. I use power generated by small, shielded pieces of plutonium in my eyes to run small but highly powerful laser. Low-end stuff compared to that available when I have AM, but good enough.
The laser burns out every one of the Marines sensors.
“You son of a bitch!” he says as he raises his weapon. I simply buzz around and around his head like my model would.
“That was a warning. Mess with me again and I'll turn your heads into suns. Your superior officers will have told you who I am. You will call me lieutenant and there will be no use of sensors on me.”
“Screw you. We know who you are, traitor!” He raises his rifle, set to spray.
These two are useless. I have forty minutes before the H-bomb pearls unveil. I punch all four into the marines' skulls and they collapse in pain.
“You should be grateful. My guess is that your fancy armor only protects you from 99% of the lichenification field. By the time you got back over the mist that 1% would have started work. Earth is no place to be a lichen encrusted rock."
They can't hear me. I take the opportunity to send a message threatening a mass incursion from Cone to Earth to their command post via their landline.
A great distance away, thirty minutes later, I see my second explosion of the day. This one, a pure white, is far preferable chromatically to the first.
My opponents, soon to be my allies, will have surely seen something going on.
My allies, my enemies for sure now, will be shaken by my actions.
I now have a war in the making.
***
“Enter and secure a bridgehead in the anomalous area.”
Those were my orders. They seemed simple back then. In the aftermath of the missile crisis everything in that part of the world was assumed to be part of a Cuban/Russian plot. Even the mist and the Stone Fields.
We went in under-equipped and under-informed. Not that being better equipped and better informed would have helped, but it would have been nice to have had something more sturdy to hold as space turned to glass. It would have lessened the terror if we'd known a little of what was going on as the rocks embraced us.
I could have dropped my orders at any time. I did not. I, perhaps, should drop them before the carnage among my fellow marines begins. I will not.
I'll give them their bridgehead in the Stone Fields and in the process I will achieve the aims of Operation Boundary Conditions. After it's over I will return, with a clear conscience, to my new life.
No more trips to the Cold Pools to agonize over the past. I will have fulfilled my orders.
***
I return to Nigel's' warehouse for an AM refill. I explain about the marines and the message I sent.
“I worry that this plan attempts to do too much. It also seems to be costing you too much personally. How many shifts of allegiance can you take?”
I look at him in disgust. Changes of allegiance are all that we have on the Cone.
There is endless change and, for me, changeless orders. The latter have been my straitjacket but soon only change will remain.
Floating, surrounded by objects that are weapons only in some appallingly distant level of abstraction, he points his wings full-on at me and says, “Our tattered humanity holds us together. You threw away those tatters today and you say that all you have is change.” He comes close enough to almost touch my antennae.
“It's not enough lieutenant. Do you have anything else?”
An alarm goes off in my eyes.
“It's my Stone Field sensors. The invasion has begun.”
***
It's the kind of invasion that looks more like a kind of syncopated stroll at first. The marines, in their strange white armor, run from rock to rock. Their sensor arrays, plus clouds of short-lived smart dust, give them a composite, full spectrum, image of this part of the field.
It's easily detailed enough for them to see Nigel and I, so it's just as well we're hiding in one of Nigel's' space/time camouflage loops.
My sensors, not so lucky, die but I do have live sensors over the mist. They show me an invasion force measured in the tens of thousands.
I refuse to believe it.
“My sources in the Pentagon have told me for some time that we're being marked out as the next Al Quaeda. Looks like we're about to be pacified,” says Nigel.
I scarcely register the reference to “sources in the Pentagon”. I'm too busy being elated by and mourning the deaths to come. If I'm right.
Behind them the marines trail shielded fiber optic cables and some white plastic ribbon. As the ribbon hits the ground it fizzes with blue sparks. I realize suddenly that the ribbon uses the same technology as the marines' armor. The net they are weaving is shorting out the local fields and is stabilizing the limestone pavement to Earth normal.
This is perfect.
Then the sun goes out.
The sun has always been a somewhat peculiar object. What is it made of? What does it orbit? Do we orbit it and if so, given our infinite mass, how? Seasons, how? Even so, for it to suddenly go out is a shock.
After a second the field lights up with marines helmet lights, their trailing cables with a gentle bluish white luminosity; a darkish red glow from the sandstones and a bright yellow glow from the paint spatter lichens.
The florets burn like stars.
Then the counter-attack begins. At first only clouds of fleas eating through armor joints and then into flesh. They cause a terrible itching all the way to the bone.
Many die like this but the rest use spherical, low intensity, fields to kill the insects
The marines keep increasing in numbers. The crude tactics (a spearhead backed by a tremendous force) show contempt for the cone military but the size of the force argues the opposite.
It doesn't matter how many they send. Our resources are literally infinite.
I am relying on the contempt they feel. I want it to be so intense it triggers a disproportionate response.
It hasn't so far. So far we're just getting the predictable bloodbath.
In the strange light the rocks cast petal-like shadows and in between lie hundreds of dead, slaughtered by nightmares of obsidian flecks tied together with dripping gristle. They flail at their victims, armor crumbling with each blow.
Others die in highly directional A-bomb blasts, planes of raw energy slicing in sheets across thousands of kilometers.
Some are decapitated by huge hawk analogues dropping on field wings from 10Mm at head height at 50Mm/hr.
Some die in selectron beam fire from my guns.
Most die by simply being overwhelmed by technologically inferior, numerically vastly superior foes.
I could take out all 60,000 of them with a squint. So could many others on the Field. We don't because this massacre is funny. I have another reason, however. I want them to escalate.
Sure enough, their heavily encrypted, line of sight comms (intercepted by nano, bounced up-slope to a god, decrypt sent back to us in microseconds) tell their troops to fall back over the mist. They're going to nuke us.
They fall back, running and banging into each other, their alien desensitization training overcome by the horrors falling on them.
We all know that the big ones are coming. Dirty Giga-tonne H-bombs designed to make this section of the Fields a molten radioactive mass, down to the local mantle-analogue.
There is a beautiful silence over the Fields, a complement to the steady luminosity of rocks and lichen. There are flickers of light on the horizon, stained glass colors bleeding upwards. They grow brighter, higher as their sources get closer.
The Light Chairs are moving. My opponents have become my unwitting allies in Operation Boundary Conditions. They have decided to make a definitive point and change things forever.
***
They can appear anything from one hundred meters to a light year high.
Four blindingly white uprights with, between them, vast abstract sheets of stained glass-like colors flowing like water. Connecting the uprights at the top are planes of pure darkness. On that darkness are the bodies of those the Chairs take.
There is always one more Chair than you think you can see and they never, ever move.
They mark the edge of the Fields and are roach traps for the failed. Now, however, they glide over the Stone Fields, effortlessly absorbing the nukes from over the mist.
***
I know a secret.
The Chairs don't mark the up-slope edge of the Stone Fields. They define it.
By moving down-slope they have moved the whole of the Stone Field out through the mist, making the intersection with Earth vastly larger.
More significant still, from my point of view, is the fact that the infinite area behind the Chairs, the area that used to be Stone Field, is now available. It is empty and covered with building materials. My un-named city can expand as far and as fast as it wishes.
Operation Boundary Conditions is complete.
***
The new mist zone covers most of the Gulf coast round to the Yucatan. Millions have crossed and whole rock fields are slathered in lichen. In a century or so we will be over-run by pieces of damp paper. It will be a blessed time.
On the Earth side many politicians and military leaders have been lynched or sent across the mist themselves.
Here, my city is growing, refugees from the incomprehensibility's up-slope pouring in. Dust canal construction has reached new peaks. Huge townhouses appear overnight.
In the Fields the Chairs remain where they were when they absorbed the nukes. They seem taller, angrier. Their panel colors are darker: blood red; dark gray blue; a deep dark purple black.
Each Chair has many more dots on its obsidian flat surface.
There are many memorials on the Earth side. Some to the lost, some to the retrieved dead, some to those who walked out and then changed on TV.
They were hung out to dry by their senior command who have known what's here since at least the early sixties.
They were hung out to dry by a warmongering public. They will war-monger no more, the whole of Operation I Want to Believe having been shown on live TV, courtesy of us and our co-opting of their fiber-optic network.
I hung them out to dry. I followed my orders and gave them their bridgehead. Not my fault they couldn't hold it.
***
I have to leave. The Chairs are filled with rage over being used. Already agents of their escalating terror campaign against me have been seen in my dusty neighborhood.
They are going to make my ascension to the horizontal obsidian plane as slow and public as possible.
I'll run up-slope as fast and far as I can, just like Nigel (my unknown ally) did. Perhaps the Chairs will forget me when I'm 10Ym up the Vertical Slope.
I won't be able to keep my beautiful coral form when I run.
Change will come up-slope whether I want it or not.
Forever, always and forever, up-slope .
Disguise the Secret
The lapwing's poetic meaning is 'Disguise the Secret' and it is her extraordinary discretion which gives her the claim for sanctity.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess
Ana carried the basket, dry reeds woven together into lines and loops, filled with mushrooms. A basket, she sometimes thought when in one of her down moods, that was sturdy enough to carry her head should one of her frequent migraines cause it to fall off.
As always she stopped at the Tall Stone, the prone Lesser Stones scattered around it, paying obeisance. and she put down the basket and walked up to the tall, misshapen spear of rock, bowing a little, respectful of the power in this place. At the height of her head there were carvings, almost invisible after centuries of erosion, covered with lichen.
Above there were three spirals in a rough triangle. They were perfect, as though measured out with ruler and string. Their edges were sharp and they were deeply incised, as if with an inconceivably hot knife -- were it not for the lichen they would look as fresh as the day they were cut.
The inscription immediately below the spirals was different. Faint almost to the point of invisibility with lines that were at times almost just scratches in the rock, it showed what was widely agreed to be the profile of a bird.
Its head was held high and its tail, long feathers sticking out and up, was just as perky. The only peculiarity was that the visible wing drooped at an angle which seemed wrong, as though it were broken.
On an impulse she leaned forward and kissed the bird. It tasted of flint and salt and she was about to raise her head from the stone, strangely disappointed, when she felt an intense.burning on her forehead. Gasping she fell away from the tall stone and fell to the ground, almost blinded by the agony.
When she came to she had no idea how much time had passed. The sky was darker, but that could mean a storm was coming.
Still in pain from whatever had happened to her forehead she picked up her basket and continued on her way home. As she walked she tried to convince herself that there was a rational explanation for what had happened. Most likely she had had some kind of fit and, as she passed out, she'd bashed her head against the rock. Perhaps the fit had been brought on as a punishment for kissing the bird, or more likely there had been something in the salt on the rock that caused a moment’s unconsciousness.
***
She reached home only a few minutes later. The small cottage with a thatched roof and wattle and daub walls was cozy but nowhere big enough for parents and grown up children. Even when married they needed permission from the headman to stake out some land and build a home of their own.
She pushed her way through the chickens inside the crude wooden fence and walked in to the start of the evening meal. Normally only one or two of her brothers and sisters would acknowledge her entrance. This time, however, there was a gradual dying off in the volume of the chatter as each person looked at her.
"Oh child, what have you done?" said her mother, rushing across the room to her.
Mother had a mirror, a treasured plate of polished silver that she had used when younger to make sure her hair was right. Now she was older and cared less about what people thought but she kept the mirror to remind her of the past while her daughters schemed to be the one to receive it after her death.
In it Ana could see her face. The angular but pretty features were still there as were the storm-cloud grey eyes, slightly too far apart but made up for by their size.
The horror, however, was on her forehead. Three spirals in an equilateral triangle lay there.
"It's not a burn, it's a tattoo. Look at how blue it is. A burn might heal but this is there for life." said her mother.
"But what do I do? I can't go about like this!"
"You could try going back to the stones. Don't look at me like that, it's obvious where you must have got these marks. The only person I can think of to ask is Theodore. He has spies everywhere and I remember that when he was young he spent a lot of time at the stones. Maybe he will know."
Mother sounded dubious but Ana grasped onto this as the only piece of good news she'd received this evening.
Her mother looked up at her. She always wore drab brown and was almost spherical these days. She seemed to have somehow given up on appearances after father died. All the same some faded glamour and a hint of her past beauty (not enough beauty to drive men and woman away, but just enough to attract them) remained. One didn't have to try too hard to see who she had been and by extension what she had done.
"Be careful Ana. That mark will bring certain kinds of people to you. They will want to take something from you and give nothing in return. The flesh-in-ice gets closer each year and people grow desperate. Someone with your talent could be very interesting to those expert in science."
With that last warning mother bustled Ana out into the night to go to the meeting hall.
***
Into the meeting hall came Theodore, the headman. He was surprisingly small and slender. His eyes, perpetually wide and a deep clear blue, were notoriously poor at seeing, a fact that many miscreant children had taken advantage of. Apart from the eyes he was dark with black hair and skin that looked tanned all the time.
He walked off center, a syncopated lurch that was the result of something breaking in his brain some years before. Even his many enemies refrained from mentioning his ailment, partly through compassion, but mainly to avoid the explosive rage he exhibited whenever it was brought up.
No matter the clothes he wore he always had his grandfather's belt around his waist. A thick strip of leather held in place by leather thongs through holes. Hanging from it, all the way around, were a score or more glossy black feathers and it was this that caused awe in those open to the emotion. Having seen a bird was singular enough. To kill and eat one, to absorb its power, was both wonderful and appalling at the same time.
His family had relied on this awe to maintain their grip on the village for three generations. Whether the bird feathers carried any science was an open question.
"So here is our precious waking dreamer and her latest piece of adornment. Are those spirals what all the young ladies wearing nowadays? I admire the extreme dedication to beauty those tattoos represent but why not use henna, as is more usual for this kind of thing?"
"I need help sir. Please tell me what I can do to rid myself of these marks."
He turned away slightly and in the flickering firelight seemed to be snarling. Then he turned back to me with a full smile on his face.
"You messed with the bird didn't you? The loops don't like that. They'll push you away from the bird but not before teaching you a lesson. You're lucky they didn't give you a taste of the land of screaming birds. They did that to me and look what happened."
Then Theodore, who refused to allow those around him to even allude to his malady. astonishingly pirouetted, almost stumbling as he dragged his paralyzed left leg around.
No-one said a word. Other than the crackle of the fire the hall was completely silent.
"There's an old man with the refugees who's supposed to know about these things. Ask him."
"And how shall I find him sir?"
"My spies tell me he's known as Actor."
Then Theodore turned and walked away through his private door.
***
Forehead still pulsing with pain Ana made her way to the camp.
A couple of hundred refugees from the now frozen edges of the world had congregated here, instinctively sensing that while the villagers felt sympathy for them, this sympathy didn't go so far as to wanting to live next to them.
Out of guilt, perhaps, the village had given the refugees one of their three cornucopia rings, a loop of dull metal that, fed with raw material one side, produced a bland but nutritious paste from the other.
To feed themselves the refugees fed the ring night and day, the resulting devastation in the meadows and forest becoming a growing source of conflict between village and camp.
The camp sprawled, seeming far larger than it really was. The tents and shelters were varied in material and form. Some were made of oiled fabric; others from sewed furs; others again from glued flame leaves. The sturdiest were carts, covered in planks of wood.
There was a smell of cooked spices in the air, mainly ochre root, thick, heavy, resinous. Over this drifted the smells of paprika, coriander and garlic but the food of the camp looked strange to Ana -- bubbling pots of green lentils with the ubiquitous blue stuff from the cornucopia ring.
Everywhere there were tiny oil lights. Rather than having one large light for each tent the camp residents had chosen to use many small lamps and as a result there was a magical flickering that seemed to have no source but filled the camp with a gentle glow that came from everywhere.
"He's up the hill," the sullen child said, holding out his hand for a reward.
"But no-one goes up the hill!"
"He did. He's been up there for days. Reading the sky, he says."
From his tone and attitude it was clear that the child regarded this as a form of laziness.
Ana gave him a couple of copper pieces. He sneered and ran off into the camp.
***
She tried to shake off the inhibitions of a lifetime and set off towards the hill. She climbed it feeling fragile and ached everywhere and was intensely nervous, filled with thoughts of what she had been told about this mound. That witches gathered there each new moon; that the fairy folk, with their silver skins and strangely jointed limbs, lived beneath it; that it was the centre of the world and the protecting walls of cloud spun slowly around with the top of the hill as their pivot.
As she reached the top she saw a fire had been lit in the middle of a wide circle of flat stone slabs. On the other side of the fire from her sat the old man, unexpectedly tall with a face invisible under his thick dirty beard but with eyes a friendly, warm brown.
He said nothing, just looked at Ana as though sizing her up for some task. She felt like a free laborer being assessed by a potential client. He began to play on a small drum -- a simple repetitive beat that got inside Ana’s head.
She could see the sparks rising in a fountain of speckled light. The old man's eyes were black through the fire. Confused and a little frightened Ana considered leaving but from somewhere she found the strength to stay.
She could see the stars spinning, a sprinkling of snow against soft black felt. She remained silent.
She could see that which all the inhabitants of the land could see but always denied, sometimes with great force. She could see the flesh-in-ice itself.
She'd seen it once before, in a waking dream she'd had as a child.
Huge, mountain sized but without the solidity of a mountain, it drifted, somehow obscenely, over the ground, as light as feathers with a body that was roughly conical in shape, three sets of tentacles projecting from half way down. The tentacles tapered and coiled inwards, each set of coils wound around the body when not in use.
It moved on countless stubby, unarticulated legs and where each leg fell ants of ice, translucent blue, emerged. They hurried across the ground in stark contrast to the slow gait of their parent and they ate the ground, turning it to tiny lumps of ice which they piled up, producing ever growing spires, watchtowers of the cold they spread.
She'd run to tell her mother about the dream but mother hadn't listened to details, just laughed in joy that her little girl was becoming a woman. She'd been dragged before the council which called for a celebratory feast that night. Her waking dream was a form of prophecy, a rare skill and one that only came with puberty, hence her mother's delight.
At the end of this reminiscence the old man had stopped his hypnotic drumming and sang in a high fragile voice. Ana listened, almost drifting into a waking dream such was her concentration. She didn't understand but she felt as though something important was happening to her.
I once had a world in box
Speckled blue, the size of your fist
Resting on aromatic wood shavings
I can smell them now as I sit in my dark cell
I smashed it, I was only a child
I dropped it from a top floor window
It shattered and out came a drab brown bird
It flew high, then higher then disappeared
We all get one world and every world gets a bird
To warn other birds of a new predator
To be lured away from the speckled blue eggs
She was slowly understanding what the old man’s mission involved. He wanted to repair the world, he was just an old tinker repairing the bottom of a pan.
He stared into her eyes and, without breaking eye contact, reached to his neck and pulled over his head a small cloth bag.
He tossed it through the fire and to her surprise Ana was able to catch it. She loosened the drawstring at the top of the bag and poured out onto the stone in front of her a handful of pure white bones, slender white flutes.
At first she wondered if she was supposed to read some deep truth from the way the bone straws had fallen but then, looking up at the old man again, she realized that something stranger and more fundamental was expected of her.
Bones laid out on a stone in front of her she reached out to the fire, as did the old man she only knew from this clearing. Together they made a tear in the way things are and opened a way to the land of screaming birds.
Drums everywhere overlaid by the desolate screaming of birds. There was a terrible emptiness in her eyes. It was a world that was one giant blind spot -- the eye skid across it. The near gray (but really as far from gray as ice was from water) space defied the eye to look at it but defeated the eye every time.
There was only one set of directions to move in here, up or down, and nothing was moving up. Ana realized that this place had been constructed especially for one purpose -- to torture a bird, to take away its chance to move gloriously in all the directions available, to blind it and replace what it could usually see with its great acuity with this visual wasteland. Even in the short time she had been in the land of screaming birds she had found herself forgetting what the other directions were; what blue looked like; how there was an option other than to endlessly fall.
She couldn't see, the wrenching visual emptiness of the land prevented that, but she sensed a dot coming towards her from below, growing larger, clearer to whatever non-visual sense she was using. Somehow the ragged broken object was flying towards her. Then she realized it was a small bird, one that seemed to have been mangled then burned. How it was still alive, let alone flying in this terrible place, she didn't know. The bird landed in her arms.
"She's here because she let a man kill her and take her feathers. Or rather she's here because of what happened afterwards. He ate her eggs you see. She was supposed to protect them by luring predators away, pretending to have a broken wing. She'd be easy meat then you see? Easier than rooting around for some nest that might not even exist. She died and couldn't protect them. Or you.
"You will gain nothing here and will lose much."
She would have screamed at the unfairness of it, but every sound she tried to make simply became another layer of drums.
Then, winding its way through the rhythms, came the old man's wavering voice.
We own who we are
Always
We all live forever
Endless
We all have a home
Glowing
In birdscreamingland
Falling
Just one more black dot
Screaming
Reach out and take
The Lapwing
She held the bird, its heart strong despite its injuries, and turned in an impossible direction.
She was back on the hilltop, the world was complete again.
After gently putting the bird down on the stone slab she tried to wipe off the vomit she must have thrown up when she was in the Land of Screaming Birds.
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