It doesn't matter. Let us help them to kill Centrum.
But then we will all die! Die forever!
Perhaps. But at least God will go down into the darknesswith us. We will not die alone. To me, that is a satisfactory end to it all.
So be it, whispered all the Seedees together, relishing their potential revenge.
John stood wearily. The others were seated on an inner rampart of one of the higher parapets, huddled in couples as if to hold off the next attack by ignoring the world around them and concentrating on what was happening behind their closed eyes. For the first time he noticed that a strong bond seemed to have been formed between Temujin and Aksinia, the latter cuddled in the bearded man's bulky grip. Strange, he thought. He scanned, once again, the flat, broken wall before him, the huge tower reaching upward into the night-circle, which now sported six stars, bloated and red like Betelgeuse, in a random constellation. He shook his head. What is this? How the fuck are we supposed to deal with a world in which their are no bases for understanding, in which the rules of the game are unreadable? OK . . . OK .
. . even if logic is not totally applicable here, this that seems is strongly tied to the premises of the Bright Illimit program. Something is not quite what it appears . . . no, that's wrong, nothing is quite what it appears.
"Well," he said, looking at the others, "should we proceed?" There was no dissent. They moved. Through barren halls that were nothing at all, John walked automatically, barely feeling the scraping of his feet on the hard rock. He had begun to feel that he would not be involved in the process of reliving memories, but, unexpectedly, it was not so.
There were endless hours of building data montages, pasting consonant intervals through the purely mathematical central motif. The music leading to the break before the rush into the coda was coming along, coming along. It would be finished, perhaps, today.
He looked through the complex notation, rather like a color abstraction of a city skyline viewed through a screen and window splattered with raindrops, to the real window that his desk faced. The computer feed dimmed anddisappeared, and the mountains of Backbone Range, snowy bleak and rimmed with halos of blowing ice, looked back at him. January was lord of Canada and he was warm and cozy in the sconce of his mother's cabin. Removed from the interface with his machine, the raw ache of his restored leg returned like a claw bite. He looked down at the cloth within which his cold, pale leg was regenerating its nerve tissue, and remembered the fall.
And yet, despite it all, it had been good. Here he was, idea tumbling on to idea, building the complexity of Reflection Counterpoint from the well of experiences that had brought him to this place. Sometimes he would marvel at how the pain had helped fuse the earlier idea of complex structures analogous to music in direct data throughput into something real and within his grasp to produce. It was a wonder—one of those things that are unbelievable until they occur. And, for the first time in his life, he was about to know the feeling of absolute triumph.
He brought the program overlay back into his field of vision and began to manipulate the loopy half scales of numbers that provided the background, interposing passing tones flanking the pivot chords a hundred deep. This, when played back, amazingly, had just the effect he had desired, and no more tinkering was necessary. The penultimate passage was finished. He linked in the preliminary coda file and looked at it again in the context of the finished climax. Ho! he thought. That's closer to the final version than I suspected.
A sequence of commands fleshed out the coda with the color-chords he had already made, holding the additions in his mind for a moment to twist them this way and that, catching overly legato numbers and popping them slightly. A little inversion put just the hint of a reference to Bach's " Heut ' triumphieret Gottes Sohn ," followed by the barest chuckle, and, yes! it was finished. He had done it!
John shut the interface off with a mental click and sat back. He was laughing, knowing for once that what he had done was right. Perfect. He had captured the essence that brimmed within him, and, perhaps, created a new art form in theprocess. He slapped his leg and smiled at the pain, and returned to the present.
The eight crept forward out of the darkness, slowly feeling their way into the unknown circuitry. The dim world about them stayed artificialized, moldering stone walls glowing with a dim, greenish phosphorescence, redolent of damp, ancient life. They stopped, hiding behind a low wall that had somehow come into existence, and peered into an enormous chamber. Lit by flickering red torchlight, its walls were of pale, translucent marble in which varihued whorls of color were faintly visible. The ceiling was a vaulted arch, the inside of a blank, high dome. Windows suddenly appeared, as if an afterthought, tall, thin slits that admitted dim vermilion twilight and faint breezes, drafts of cool, dry air that stirred the flames and made shadows dance upon the walls. The strong, incongruous smell of jasmine tea began to fill their nostrils.
Things floated above the floor. For a brief moment they saw the familiar hard-squid shapes of the Seedees hanging there. They were linked together in pairs, connected at their anchorelles, and the couplets were joined together in a double row, like a string of firecrackers waiting to be touched off. The forms began to change. They writhed and their outlines began to blur, shifting away into a melting softness, like oil-based clay thrown into a kiln.
"What's going on?" asked Vana, turning to look at the others. Tem shook his head, pale face beaded with droplets of cold sweat. "I think Bright Illimit's routines are looking for some image we can deal with."
"Yes," said Ariane. "It's trying to find an average for all of us. . . ." They fell silent and watched. The shapes before them coalesced, forming into a huddled, glowing mass, an insensate pool of light gathered in the middle of the soft, padded floor. Things began to appear in the light, vaguely humanoid images that spilled onto one another, mixing together as a mass of indistinct limbs and bodies. They shifted and changed rapidly as the program picked up imagery, first from one controlling mind, then another. Abruptly, the picture sharpened into focus, jumping out at them like a dense holograph. There were a hundred human beings jumbled together motionless on the floor. They were huddled in endless arrays of sexual poses, every conceivable posture and position, like some alien Karnak wrought in three-dimensional, fleshlike stone. They remained still, for the moment showing no sign of life; then the first one moved.
A being from the center of the group stirred and, with his motion, the others breathed, a sudden sighing from a hundred manlike throats. The man, for he was clearly male, arose and stretched. Separated from the generalized mass of the group, posing before them, they could see him clearly now. The shape was generally humanoid, all of the parts were more or less present, but there seemed to be a lack of fine detail. The skins were pallid, the dull bone white of institutional walls, and everywhere there was a lack of flexion lines. The fingers were smooth; likewise the elbows and knees. His brow was empty of feature and his face was without the character lines that help distinguish human beings. Their hair, also white, was undifferentiated, a shapeless mass meant to indicate where hair would go. They were cartoons brought to life. A female Seedee arose to stand beside the man and they could see that she too was crude, as if adapted from a paleolithic statuette.
Their eyes opened, reddish orange, dully glowing coals.
"A touch of humanity," murmured Demogorgon, "and a strong flavor of alienness. Good work." The two Seedees walked slowly forward to stand before them while the others hung back and watched, motionless and silent. The two groups examined one another for a drawn-out moment; then the male being spoke. "I am called Seven Red Anchorelles," he said. "You are the aliens?" Krzakwa smiled softly. "I guess we are," he said.