Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Read online

  This was the moment you were made, said the voice of the mountain.

  There were two Belisarius Cawls. One heard the mountain speak, the other could not. Both experienced past events as if they happened for the first time.

  You are not who you claim to be, the mountain said. Curious.

  ‘Quicker than that,’ said Sedayne. ‘I do not have much time, but your friend has substantially less.’ Sedayne made a show of checking his pocket chronometer. ‘It is about ten minutes until Qvo bleeds out. At this rate, he will die.’

  Herminia stood between the beds. ‘In,’ she said, pointing her gun.

  ‘You swear you will save Friedisch?’ Cawl asked. ‘Give me your word.’

  ‘I give you my word,’ said Sedayne. ‘I never do so insincerely. If you allow this process to go ahead, I swear he will live. I have no wish for needless death.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Cawl. ‘For Friedisch.’ He meant what he said, though he was still feverishly trying to think his way out of the situation.

  Herminia stood to one side and gestured at the right hand bed. Cawl sat himself on it, then lay down.

  ‘I have to restrain you,’ she said. ‘Then insert the cortical probe. That will hurt.’

  ‘You enjoy this sort of thing too much. Can we dispose of her, when we are one?’ said Cawl. ‘She’s really not very pleasant.’

  Sedayne handed his weapon to one of his soldiers. The other kept his gun trained on Cawl. Sedayne lay himself down with a wince. The anti-agapics were wearing off.

  ‘Getting a little stiff, are we?’ said Cawl.

  ‘Enjoy yourself while you can,’ said Sedayne. ‘There may be some small vestige of you left once my psyche is transferred into your body, but there will not be much. Certainly not enough to engage in such pointless attempts at humour.’

  Herminia finished binding Cawl to the bed, then opened up his memcore cover. She set it carefully aside in a stainless steel bowl. She keyed a code sequence into an instrument panel nearby that called out a cranial probe from a port in the bed. Filaments wormed their way roughly into Cawl’s memcore.

  ‘Ow!’ he said.

  ‘I told you it would hurt,’ said the Altrix. ‘Are you ready, director?’

  He nodded. He crossed his hands across his chest. ‘Begin, please, Altrix.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. She removed a flap of synth skin from Sedayne’s head, exposing a memcore port similar to the one on Cawl’s own, ­unorthodox implant.

  ‘This is nothing personal, you understand,’ Sedayne said. He too winced as the probe interfaced with him. ‘The Emperor is gone. My knowledge must survive. I thank you, Belisarius Cawl. I promise to take good care of both of us.’

  ‘From where I am sitting, that is scant comfort,’ said Cawl.

  Sedayne’s face hardened. ‘You could be a little more gracious. With me, you will live for thousands of years. What would you have achieved on your own?’ His eyes became malevolent slits. ‘Nothing. You should be thankful.’

  Cawl watched the Altrix. Despite the peril he was in, he found being surrounded by machines and being hooked up to them comforting. He was calm, and not afraid in the least.

  ‘We’ll see who’s thaaaannnnnnn…’ His voice stuck on his last syllable like a malfunctioning voxcorder.

  ‘Begin,’ said Sedayne tersely.

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  There were thousands of children in the line, of which Belisarius Cawl was only one. To all intents and purposes they were identical, male and female alike; slight, pale, their heads shaved and their spare frames hung with robes folded from a single piece of pleated cloth. Each had a numerical tattoo across the outside of their left wrist. The numbers there were different. That was as much individuality as they were allowed.

  Trapped in a deep trench, watched over by buzzing cyborg menials pacing the steel lip, the children stood in a single file that stretched dead straight all the way back to the birthing chambers, now many, many miles away. When Cawl turned back, he could see a row of bald heads disappearing into the distance. Cawl turned forwards, and the same line continued on a short distance before being abruptly cut off by a wall in which were set three doors.

  He had seen little of the world. Though he appeared to be about ten years of age, he was only hours old, fast-grown in the Xanthe Terra flesh vats of Magos Biologis Hammareth. There were children born on Mars in the time-honoured way – that was, after all, the initial design the Machine-God had chosen for mankind – but the higher tech-priests had no time to waste on something so trivial as procreation. The Machine-God had created man so that he might improve himself.

  This information and more had been inloaded during Cawl’s gestation, but his direct experience of life was confined to ejection from the tube, the unpleasant aftermath of that, the trench, the line and the stripe of sky framed by metal walls. The sky was burnt orange, full of enormous shapes and moving machines half obscured by clouds of drifting smog.

  The air tasted of thousands of years of industry. Metallic, chemical smells burned his throat. It was wholly unpleasant, and he wished he did not have to experience it. Already he knew there were ways to remove that sensation, if he chose.

  Built out from the side of the trench in front of the doors was a pulpit occupied by something that had once been a man. A mountain of cable-infested flesh, graced with many arms, the man wore a tall, pointed hat, beneath which three lenses framed in brass evaluated each child in turn. A tube went from his mouth into the workings of his pulpit. The lenses and the tube were his sole facial features. Thin scraps of oil-seamed skin held them together.

  Pistons forced open the rightmost gate and a child stepped through. The man made a note in a ledger on the lectern of his pulpit, then turned his attention to the next child.

  The children stepped one at a time to stand beneath his quivering bulk. Multiple mechanical arms shot out from all sides and prodded and probed the child, dusting them with tell-tale chemicals, sampling blood and spittle, testing eye pressure, blood pressure, heart rate, digestive efficiency and more. Light rays visible and invisible fanned out and swept down their skin. Sonar pulses vibrated bones. Magnetism stirred tides in their humours. X-rays flashed the silhouettes of their skeletons into datastores that would never be looked at.

  Buzz, clank, hiss, bang! The machines sang.

  ‘Next supplicant,’ the man said.

  Buzz, clank, hiss, bang!

  One of the three gates opened, representing, Cawl already knew, the three-fold nature of his god: Machine-God, Omnissiah, and the Motive Force.

  Buzz, clank, hiss, bang!

  ‘Next supplicant!’

  The left gate opened, the right gate opened, funnelling off children to their algorithmically determined fates. Rarely did the centre gate part. When it did, the man wrote a little more in his book.

  ‘Next supplicant.’

  Buzz, clank, hiss, bang!

  The right gate opened, the child stepped wordlessly through.

  It was Cawl’s turn.

  ‘Next supplicant.’

  Cawl stepped forwards. The machines on arms whisked around him on their mysterious errands.

  ‘Who are you?’ Cawl asked.

  The man leaned forwards to peer down at him over the edge of his ledger. ‘You speak?’

  ‘I speak. Language has been force-implanted in my mind.’

  ‘The others do not speak,’ said the man, in equal parts query, challenge and demand that Cawl be silent.

  ‘My given designation is Belisarius Cawl,’ he said.

  ‘The others do not speak. They are not ready to speak. Observe.’

  One of the man’s many supplemental limbs lifted. The child behind Cawl went rigid. A stream of nonsense babbled from their mouth.

  ‘Binharic, of the fourth formation,’ Cawl said. ‘They do not hav
e the correct machinery to emit it correctly. Only this.’ He rubbed his throat with the blade of his hand. ‘This is not sufficient. Upgrade is required. I suppose it will do for now.’

  Emotionless red lenses peered at him for a long time. The man made a noise in his throat that hummed in the tube plugging his mouth. ‘You are precocious, aren’t you?’ his voxmitter rumbled.

  ‘You are a manifestation of the Machine-God, but you are not He. Where is He? Where is my father?’

  The arms froze, then retracted a little.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the man.

  The centre doors clashed open. Cawl looked at them, then at the man. He did not move.

  ‘Proceed or die,’ the man said.

  Cawl stepped through.

  ‘Next supplicant,’ the tech-priest said, settling a little into his throne.

  There was no one ahead of Cawl in the middle channel.

  The gates shut hard.

  BANG!

  Circa 11,000 years ago

  The last sign of human life Ezekiel Sedayne encountered nearly killed him. A cracking in the air far away, the whine of a bullet, the screech of ricochet. He threw himself into the grit at the sound of the gunshot. It rumbled around the stony desolation of the valley, before taking flight to disappear over the mountains.

  He lay there some time. No other shot came.

  He rose only when the sky began to dim and the temperature drop.

  Glancing nervously over his shoulder, he scrambled up the loose rock. Darkness fell quickly that time of year. By the time he had found a path, it was pitch black, and the cold began to bite. Men died in the mountains in autumn, succumbing to the chill more often than to the hill clans who dwelled in the hollow ruins of arcologies found all through the peaks. In the square caves of old rooms fires burned, but none were close to Sedayne, so he struggled on through the night. The way was perilous. He nearly lost his footing twice, but he dared not risk a light.

  Night passed slowly. Stars wheeled overhead. The arcologies fell behind him, until by morning he was walking through glens of bare rock surrounded by the bald, wrinkled heads of the Alapi. Ancient roads went nowhere. Time-worn stones marked the graves of buildings. There were no signs of human life more recent than these.

  Nothing and no one lived in the blasted wasteland, only the Master of the Lines.

  What Sedayne attempted was an incredible risk. The Master of the Lines came to the people. The people did not go to him. Not if they wanted to live.

  The sun came up on a landscape glittering with frost. Sedayne could not feel his feet or his fingers. His rags were scant protection against mountain cold.

  He breakfasted on a mouthful of brackish water. He swilled his canteen around. It sloshed loudly. There was more air than water within.

  The sun rose, pitilessly bright, piteously cold. The protective layers of the upper atmosphere were thin so far north, and he felt his skin begin to blister. He adjusted the ragged hood he wore, pulling it to shade more of his face, then pushed on.

  A mountain rose above him. Each step he took raised it higher, it seemed to Sedayne, so that in no time it barred his path completely, walling off the glen with crags of rock that resembled angry faces. Bare stone reflected weak, poisonous sunlight upon him, dazzling his eyes and burning his cheeks. He raised his canteen to his lips, the metal edge finding cracked, painful skin there, and drank down the last of his water. There was nowhere to get more. He was too far on to turn back. He must either complete his journey, or die.

  Resolutely, he began his ascent.

  Up the mountain went, up too went Sedayne. The air thinned. Each breath brought less oxygen to his body, no matter how deep he gulped it in.

  He knew before he got halfway up that he was running out of time. He tasted blood in his mouth with every breath. His tongue was a parched scrap of leather. His lips stung. His cheeks burned. The mountain was taking everything from him, and still it towered overhead, featureless, grey and deadly.

  He rounded a boulder that forced his path into a brittle ribbon of stone. It got narrower and narrower, so that his toes stubbed on solid rock and his heels hung over empty space. The boulder was fat-bellied, swelling as the path thinned. He was forced to lean back, clinging to the boulder with fingertips rubbed raw and to the path with toes numb with pressure. His strength was giving out. He was on the verge of falling backwards, into the open air and to certain death on the tumbled stones below, when the path suddenly swung into the body of the mountain again, and the boulder’s swelling blended itself back into the cliff.

  He staggered towards a shadow, arms outstretched to brace himself against the wall and rest, but found himself instead falling forwards, for the shadow was not a shadow after all, but a cave cracked into the mountain’s flank. It took a steep turn downwards. His feet found no purchase, forcing him into an ungainly rush to keep pace with his toppling body.

  His hand hit cold stone, bending it painfully. His elbow folded and his shoulder connected with hard rock. He stumbled sideways with the twist in the passage. Blackness shrank back to small refuges. Orange light danced on the angles of the stone.

  The tunnel became a cavern. A fire burned in its centre. An old man squatted at the side, dangerously close, peering into the flames so intensely his beard and eyebrows were at risk of ignition. Despite the cold of the stone and the heat of the fire, the old man was practically naked, with only worn sandals on his feet and a cloth about his waist. There was a stone trough full of water to the side. Sedayne took a moment to refill his canteen. He drank some, washing the dust from his throat so he could speak.

  Still panting with the altitude, Sedayne approached the fire.

  ‘I have come far,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want?’ said the old man. He kept his eyes on the flames, and did not blink.

  ‘You are the one that purifies the blood of the lines?’

  ‘I am not,’ said the man. ‘Is that why you are here, to plead for genomancy so your line runs true? You are young to seek to birth a child, and the next purity fair is not for six months. Go back down the mountain. Choose your mate. Wait. Come to the Master at the fair.’ His eyes flicked up. ‘If you survive.’ He went back to looking at the fire.

  ‘I do not wish to mate. I do not come to plead for purity of my line.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the man. ‘Then tell me, why are you here?’

  ‘To learn.’ Sedayne knelt down to face the man. ‘Teach me.’

  ‘Teach you.’

  ‘I want to be like you. I want to learn the old sciences.’

  ‘The old sciences are not for learning, not for the likes of you,’ said the old man. ‘Begone.’

  ‘I will die. Have mercy. I have searched for lost knowledge. I have learned much. I can learn more.’

  ‘Feeble pleas for deaf ears,’ said the old man. ‘I shall not let you pass. The Master will not see you.’

  ‘The world is broken. There is knowledge that can help. I’m no fool. Life hasn’t always been this way. There are stories, of the old world, and of the empire of stars.’

  ‘There are. They are stories.’

  ‘They are true!’ said Sedayne through gritted teeth.

  ‘Are they?’ said the old man. ‘Maybe they are. That does not make your case any more compelling. You will leave now or perish. Take your chances on the mountain.’

  ‘I want to help people!’

  Sedayne moved closer. He was a big man, and he loomed over the sentinel.

  The man produced a small gun from a pool of shadow on the floor. It was better made than any Sedayne had ever seen. He looked up at Sedayne. ‘Healing was only one of the masteries of the old world. Death they also perfected. Go, or you will learn but one, final lesson.’

  ‘Selfishness is why the human race is dying,’ he said. ‘I sought wisdom here. It appears I was mistaken.�
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  The old man returned his attention to the fire.

  ‘Damn you by the old gods of all the ages of men,’ said Sedayne.

  ‘To make it this far you must have a measure of wisdom already,’ the old man said. ‘Use it well.’

  Sedayne felt his way away from the fire and back up the tunnel. Another freezing night awaited him. He emerged into darkness, glanced back, and headed for the boulder, unsure if he had the energy to make it around to the other side safely.

  Wait.+ A voice spoke, a voice he heard in his mind.

  He turned rapidly, almost losing balance. The path continued past the cave crack, perhaps a way worn into the stone by animals long extinct, certainly nothing more than that, but on it stood a man in rich clothes. He had long, clean, brown hair, a face that was at once youthful and old, and eyes of placid brown deeper than time. It was past twilight, and yet Sedayne saw him clearly, as if he stood in a patch of noon special to him alone.

  ‘Wait,’ said the man again, aloud this time.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Sedayne in wonder. For some ridiculous reason, he felt the urge to kneel.

  ‘I am the one you call the Master of the Lines, he who ensures purity of blood and genes among the peoples of this region.’

  ‘You do not look like him.’

  ‘I look different, if the need arises.’

  ‘Is deception necessary?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. But I show myself to you truthfully.’

  ‘That is not all you are, I think.’ Sedayne had never been surer of anything in his life.

  ‘I am not. I am more.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Someone who wants to help people, like you, Ezekiel Sedayne. You were sincere when you said those same words in the cave. Do you sense the same sincerity in me?’

  He did. He didn’t know how, but he did. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Then will you serve me? I will teach you what you wish to learn. You will be of great value to me, many times over, if you accept. You will be of great value to humanity.’

  ‘Tell me who you are first. I cannot serve a man who hides his identity, not unless there is good reason.’