Debris of Shadows_Book II_The Forgotten Cathedral Page 6

  The girl cowered beneath her bed. She could barely squeeze underneath it anymore. She had grown too big, in more ways than one. She could hear Momma yelling at Daddy again, and Daddy yelling right back. She clutched Mister Blue to her chest. She sobbed, shaking, her tears soaking into his fur. Mister Blue was not precisely blue anymore, he had not been for many years. His ratty coat was more of a faded gray, with just a hint of turquoise. But that did not change his name. Not now, not ever.

  Something in the kitchen shattered, accompanied by a shriek. Did Daddy throw something at Momma, or did Momma throw something at Daddy? She squeezed Mister Blue tighter, her fingers digging into the rough stitch–work around his neck.

  Once, Daddy had gotten mad at her, angrier than she had ever seen. She did not remember why he had been so angry, just that he had towered over her, a coughing, sputtering monster. He hadn’t hurt her, he would never hurt her. Instead, he had yanked Mister Blue from her hands, and ripped his head off. He had thrown the pieces into the garbage can, and sent her to her room.

  She had never, ever defied Daddy before, but that time, she had had to. She waited until Momma had passed out in front of the TV, and, in the middle of the night, fished Mister Blue out of his stinky grave. She had crept to Momma’s forgotten sewing basket, took out a needle and thread, and sewed Mister Blue’s head back on. The stitches were huge and crisscrossed, and it had taken her at least fifteen minutes, full of frustration and tears, to figure out how to tie off the knot. But in the end, she had managed.

  After that, she had kept him hidden beneath her bed. Daddy and Momma never looked there. And ever since, whenever she was scared, she would squeeze in beneath the box–spring, alongside him and the growing army of dust–bunnies.

  Footsteps thundered on wood as one of her parents ran up the stairs. Which one was it? Was it Momma, or —

  Asher yanked his hand away from the scrolls. Tears streamed down his face. Careful, the voice inside him whispered, they are watching you right now. He whipped his head around. Could they tell how deep he went, how much he could see and feel? Were they just listening in, or was there a camera? Was there a hidden medi–scanner that could see into his brain, and observe how his cortex fired when he lived through the souls of his people? Or was it all a lie, just mind games to get him worked up?

  No matter how he looked at the abbot’s taunt, it made no sense. Mother Dinah might be judgmental and biased, but he did not think for a moment that she would ever want his city to fail. But if that were true, then why was she so petty? Why deliberately cultivate anxiety within him?

  He ran his fingertips along the parchment, searching for comfort. Surely there was one man or woman, somewhere, who was truly centered and at peace within their own skin. Someone who believed in themselves, who could give him the comfort, self–assurance, and resolve that he so badly needed. What was it Senator Abrams had said to the Commissar when the purges began? “What if you can find fifty patriotic citizens?” But all he could feel within the rough texture of the glyphs were mirrors of his own fear and anxiety, usually masked with antidepressants and alcohol.

  Asher shoved the scrolls away, and exhaled between his teeth. He was no longer in harmony with the city, not the way he had been yesterday. He stared into his light globe, concentrating on its soft glow as he breathed. Perhaps he would have more luck if he tried later.

  He checked his data pad. Must be up on current events, he thought, even if I’m not to mingle with the hoi polloi before I depart. He confirmed his identity, and scanned the library for more data on poisoned Sands.

  There were no entries.

  He blinked, and searched for Phoenix instead.

  No entry found.

  His fingers flew across the keypad. Boulder, Denver, Salt Lake City… Their entries had all been deleted, even though he had read them last night. No, not deleted, he thought, shadow–locked to the higher circles.

  “So much for monasteries being fonts of knowledge,” he muttered to himself. “I should have just kept my mouth shut.”

  He called up the assessment scores for the local members of his order. At least that information was still available to him. His was ninety–six percent. He looked up Brother Leo, and found that he was ranked at ninety–eight. Curiouser and curiouser. Mother Dinah’s records were unavailable, of course. He searched for Sister Theresa, and saw that her rating was at eighty–seven.

  She was a tiny, quiet woman in her mid–thirties, withdrawn, and self–contained. The general consensus was that she would surely ascend to the higher circles. Asher did not know her at all, but he had to admit that he had never made the effort. But eighty–seven percent…

  He checked through her history. She had performed two resurrections, each of them roughly nine hundred thousand souls. Both cities had gone off without a hitch. She was competent, a proven and studious woman. Asher could not help feeling respect. When he had been brought in from the outside and given such a prestigious assignment above her, she had responded with nothing but grace.

  But eighty–seven percent was just below capacity for a city the size of San Domenico. If she had been a ninety, or maybe even an eighty–nine, Asher was sure that she would have gotten the city instead of him. However, she was simply not able. Perhaps that was why she was able to accept being turned down by the cardinals. He had to admit that in her place, he would have been furious.

  Or maybe personal glory did not matter to her.

  The thought filled him with an unexpected flush of shame. Perhaps she truly embodied everything a resurrector was supposed to be. Abbot Dinah was a petty, power–hungry sham. Brother Leo was a bitter, hate–filled has–been. But clergy like Jacob and Theresa… maybe they were real. Maybe they truly sought the glory of the Ophanim instead of their own.

  The steeple bell tolled. It was time for dinner. He lay the data pad on his cot. Soon, Kish would bring him his yummy bread and water, the acolyte’s pimply face all wide and full of innocence. He was another one, a true believer. Maybe he could slip the kid something to bring him some real food. Of course, he had no worldly possessions, but he could think of something if he tried.

  He caressed the border of the scrolls, enjoying the feel of their soft parchment beneath his fingertips. Soon, he thought. He knew everything about the city, her secrets long committed to memory. Though the glyphs contained San Domenico’s essence in its purest form, her souls and buildings were a part of him now.

  Someone knocked on the door. Asher sighed. All he could hope for was that it was some good bread, something nutty and grainy, and not just leftover toast crusts. Perhaps he could ask for a variety. Whole wheat for breakfast, pumpernickel for lunch, oat bran for dinner. He had to laugh at the way the human brain worked. Make something that you took for granted a privilege, and the mere taste of it became a luxury. Praise the Ophanim that it would only be for a few days, because his insides were going to be painfully blocked. That was the idea of course, to ensure that his children would have plenty of nutrients to suckle after their birth. He opened the door.

  A searing needle of light sliced through his eyes and into his brain. He felt as if his mind were separate from his body, felt it tumble through the air to smack against the stone floor. His face landed on the scrolls. For a moment, he could hear every soul within their glyphs, their overlapping voices screaming with gibberish.

  Then the light struck him again, its energy seizing his muscles and nerves. The gargantuan chorus of nonsense overloaded his senses, and he slipped into unconsciousness.

  Matthew opened his eyes. He could not breathe, nor did his heart beat. He could move his limbs, though they just slid from side to side. It was as if his body were fluid, crushed between two frames of glass, like an amoeba caught in a slide.

  Like paint on a canvas.

  Terror gripped him, but what was terror, or fear, for that matter? Fear was a construct of the body. It was a tightening in the chest, a rush of hormones that made rational thought impossible. It made the body
fight, run, or freeze like a rabbit when staring into the eyes of a wolf. If he was just a painting once again, then he had no body. Therefore, emotions were pointless, and could not help him. They were merely false sensations created by the nanomachines that made up his psyche. He acknowledged his crushing anxiety, his omnipresent sense of dread. He let it wash over him. It could not harm him, not really, just make him feel uncomfortable. He could stand it. He had withstood much worse.

  He had been removed from the Sage.

  The microscopic robots within his left shoulder prickled and squirmed. He turned his attention to them. A milky glop had congealed across their pigments, as if someone had dripped glue over his joint. Joining him could not have been that simple, could it? If it were, the general would have done so when he was a child.

  He gazed “out” from the painting.

  A face stared at him, but to Matthew, it was like seeing a cross–section in an anatomy textbook. Being two–dimensional, he could only focus on one two–dimensional plane at a time. Although he could only see tiny slices of the surfaces around him, his nanomachines extrapolated the rest — sometimes with imaginative results. If he focused on an eye, he saw a pupil, a shining, blue iris, veins, snaking nerves, bones, and slices of brain. Did locks of long, white hair surround his observer’s head? He had only caught a glimpse of them for a fleeting second.

  Blue. Everything was blue. A certainty filled him. Whoever this person was, he or she was the owner of the luminescent eye that had stared down at him before.

  A cross–section of arm bones materialized in front of him. They ended abruptly, their edges jagged. He then saw five groups of metallic joints. He rotated the plane of his vision, and realized that he was looking at a prosthetic claw. Leads from its servomotors snaked into a stump of a wrist encased in muscle, fat, and skin.

  And cybernetics.

  White light shone down upon him. He could make out the bulbs that emitted its photons, constructed from glass tubes, electronics, and mercury vapor. They were surrounded by a grid of rough, stained tiles — a dropped ceiling.

  The nanomachines that made up his zhivoi–paint were powered by light. When there was none, he had no consciousness. Someone was periodically sealing him in darkness, possibly within a null–rad envelope. Was it the general? That was impossible. This was WesMec, on the other side of the shield.

  A sense of déjà vu washed over him. Had this happened before? He remembered seeing his mother, his grandfather, and others from the flatness of the painting before becoming one with the Sage. This was different.

  The cross–section of a skull rippled back into view. He caught a glimpse of silvery fibers branching through cauliflower–like folds.

  His captor had the brain of a Cyleb.

  Its lobes shone with an azure glow. It was not the same as General Jaeger’s amber brilliance, nor was it fueled by the third–generation’s micro–electronics. This brain’s cybernetics seemed to be composed of flowers. They blossomed, squirming over and into each other, devouring one another, and giving birth to new buds while simultaneously turning inside out. They formed a symbol in their unfolding. It reminded him of a scribbled numeral seven, or perhaps it was a sloppy letter S.

  He pulled his view back towards his canvas. By spinning his plane of observation, he could once again make out the cross–sections of the approaching claw. Its metallic fingers held something long and thin that was infused with electronics, and at its end —

  Its glistening bristles touched the gunk at his shoulder. His lips formed a silent scream as the stylus smeared his zhivoi–paint, blending the artificial intelligences of his body and arm together. What was once pink blended with yellow to become just slightly tinged with peach, and the peach–colored pigments stung like venom —

  Sarah’s face, framed by long, curly, red hair, flashed in front of him. He remembered her soft lips brushing his, tasting like honey, the way she looked at him with her green eyes, and said that their son would be waiting for him upon his —

  He tore at the newly blended streak, his fingers digging for purchase. The reformed paint sliced into his muscles as he tugged, as if he were extracting a sliver of glass. He grit his teeth, and pulled.

  The moment it was free, his mind cleared. Shards of his fractured memories returned. Sigma, her name had been Sigma. They had had no children, and her hair was thick, brown, and luxurious.

  The cross–sections of the claw and zhivoi–stylus jerked away. Sparks coursed along its gossamer bristles, and down the length of its handle. Wisps of smoke rose from the prosthetic’s joints where they touched the thin shaft, and it dropped the electronic brush from its twitching grasp. Matthew blinked. He remembered now. This was not the first time that this had happened —

  The light turned green, blazing with an intensity that burned. It raked across the nanomachines that made up his paint, filling him with the same sense of amnesia and confusion as before.

  Don’t forget this time, the voice inside him shouted. Don’t let them make you forget.

  Forget what? he wanted to ask. But the thread of light whipped faster than he could perceive, and devoured his thoughts.

  Chapter 4

  Bill sat at the motel room’s cheap particle–board desk, a model Blue Lance ‘59 convertible in his hands. A cold, hard weight in his pocket pressed against his thigh, but he ignored it. He concentrated on applying a flimsy decal to the hood. He sighed, and bit his lip. It had been twenty years since he had put a model together, and he had forgotten what a pain in the ass the decals could be.

  His parents had named him William, but everyone called him Bill. He liked William better. He was a sanitation worker. Not a garbage man, but a sanitation worker. At first he had corrected his coworkers about his name, but they all insisted that he thought that he was better than them. So he had just accepted being Bill, and the name had stuck.

  Aside from assembling models, William’s first passion had been the cinema. There was a time when all he had dreamed of was making stories come to life in front of a camera, but he didn’t have the money for film school, or the grades for a scholarship. So instead, he had joined the Navy. He had met the true love of his life there. She hadn’t just been his girlfriend, she had also been his best friend. She would assemble model cars with him, because it was something that made him happy, and she had wanted to share it. That was the kind of person she was. But the armed forces couldn’t care less about love, and sent them to different sides of the Earth. They promised to wait for each other, but of course, they drifted apart. That was military life. Eventually, he heard through the grapevine that she had gotten engaged. After that moment, until now, he had never made another model. He would bet good money that neither had she.

  A few years after that, his enlistment period ended. Times were bad, and the only job he could find was at a pizzeria. He wound up dating a waitress there named Cara. He knocked her up, and they got married. He wasn’t unhappy, he loved both Cara and their son. Besides, he was only in his twenties. There would be plenty of time for dreams later.

  His brother–in–law got him into the sanitation workers’ union, and ever since, he had been Bill the not–a–garbage–man. It wasn’t a bad job, it just was never what he had wanted. And now he was pushing fifty, and the kid was seventeen, had a nose ring, and didn’t want to do anything, didn’t have any dreams, and all Bill had were broken dreams, no advice to give him, and no way to help.

  Bill didn’t shave every day anymore, and sported a giant gut that flopped over his waistline whenever he sat down. Who cared when you were a sanitation worker? Petty Officer Third Class William Downey was the one who had been clean–shaven, and had taken pride in his body. Bill was just a guy who came home at the end of every grueling day to his grimy, two–bedroom ranch. Cara never wanted to spend any time with him, the kid barely gave him the time of day, and after years of invisibility he figured what the hell, he should just take the bus to a flea–trap far away, and make everything better.
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  The kid owned a video game Cara hated where you went around stealing cars, and beating up hookers. To be honest, it was fun. There were people in the game who just wandered around its city on a loop. The kid called them Non Playable Characters, or NPCs. They were just robots who moved on a track planned out by some programmer in a cubicle sweatshop. You could kill them for easy money, or if you bumped into them, they would curse you out. But as far as the actual game went, they didn’t matter.

  That was Bill.

  His program put him on the bus to his job every morning. Under its direction he drank a cup of coffee, clocked in, and went to work at not being a garbage man. At the end of the day he clocked out, went home, took a shower, ate dinner, watched some TV, and went to bed. Meanwhile, Cara and the kid ignored him. William had mattered. Bill was an NPC. It was his brain’s fault. Despite its reputation as his body’s most important organ, it hadn’t done anything to make his life better. All it did these days was remind him of how unhappy and alone he felt. It was kind of a shitty program, once you really thought about it, but it was probably just par for the course for an NPC.

  He smoothed out the last decal with his thumb, and placed the car on the desk. After a moment, he repositioned it so that it faced the window. He pulled the cold, oily weight out of his pocket, and put it in his mouth. It was simple, really. All he had to do was blow the worthless brain out of his skull, and everything would be —

  Asher’s eyes fluttered open. His breath came in heavy pants. It had felt so real, being Bill. The citizens of San Domenico were buried within the silt of his subconscious. He could feel them in his dreams, even without touching the scrolls. They ached to be free. They longed for him to sing them back to life.

  He blinked, his eyelids rubbing against cloth. Something covered them. His muscles stung with pins and needles. He lay on what felt like a vibrating couch. A mechanical hum came from somewhere beneath him. He tried to move, but his hands were bound together behind his back around something that refused to give. His feet were fastened as well, and would not budge.